All of the above.

Probably, the most typical is, that they work together for the extended period of time. I love the example of Bellini and Romani, who tended to work at the same desk, or through correspondence, and they also became friends. The friendship was temporarily broken but resumed again, which makes the story all the more moving for me.

However, there was a time, when finished librettos were offered to the composers. I think the libretto of Nabucco was offered to Verdi in the finished form. Sometimes the composers picked from the pool of circulating finished ones, which occassionally resulted in sibling-like operas using the same libretti.

Writing a text to a completely finished score is unusual, I don't know an example which is exactly like that, but, I know about the instances of recycling. Bellini wrote an opera Zaira, which was a fiasco. So he moved most of the music, 9 numbers, to I Capuleti e i Montecchi, a very different plot. His librettist had to rewrite stuff. Also, Rossini wrote an opera for the coronation of the French king, Il Viaggio a Reims. He thought it would not be used again and forgotten, so he moved a lot of the music to Le Comte Ory. Note that rewriting libretti to bel canto operas was comparatively easy, because they had strict conventions about the structure of the operatic verses.

 

I should correct myself on one technicality. When Bellini moved the music of Zaira to a new opera, he was using an existing libretto (by Romani) about Romeo and Juliette, which was previously used by at least 2 other composers. The conventions about the structure of operatic verse made it doable. But, at the same time, this libretto was modified, to give audience the feel of something new. So we have sibling operas, which have some identical arias, text-wise, but differing plots. Tebaldo is killed in one version (opera by Vaccai), but survives in Bellini's. Giulietta has a chat with her parents before she dies in Vaccai's version, but not in Bellini's. Her mother does or doesn't exist :-D

On the top of this, Bellini's opera was such a success, that Vaccai made a new version of his version and added one aria from Bellini (text-wise) to his own.

On the top of the top of this, certain primadonna, Maria Malibran, liked better the finale from Vaccai, so she just took liberties and performed Bellini's opera with the part from Vaccai's opera implanted into it !

Even Riccordi printed it like this and people almost forgot what it is supposed to be like. Until another primadona took her chances and performed Bellini's opera complete and without any implant :-D

 

Exactly like how Wagner worked

 

For people who hope to understand this subject better, a response like this, which I presume is supposed to be found amusing by someone besides you, is the opposite of helpful.

 

I’ve spoken to a few composer colleagues about this, and it does vary from person to person. There’s typically a conversation at the start, and usually the composer starts work after some of the libretto is done. I can think of a couple of people I’ve spoken to, who wait until the libretto is fully finished before they begins working.

 

Is there an opera, where the complete score appeared first and the libretto was written afterwards ? There should be a few like that.

 

Pasticci are a bit like that. All the music existed before with different texts and someone wrote new ones.

 

In re-reading the Verdi-Boito Correspondence (possibly my favorite of all opera books), it seems that Verdi wrote the music after which Boito would send him words and they would discuss together how they would fit in with the music.
Carelessly perusing other collaborators, especially those in Broadway musicals,(ex. Comden/Green, Bernstein and Sondheim, and Lerner and Lowe) I think that it is a mixed bag as to who writes the lyrics first followed by the music.
An interesting case is that of Rodgers and Hammerstein -- who wrote the lyrics followed by music by Rodgers. Conversely, we also interestingly note that the very opposite is true with the Rodgers and Hart collaboration where Lorenz Hart wrote the lyrics second, after Rodgers' music (a la Verdi-Boito) so one never knows for sure.

 

In re-reading the Verdi-Boito Correspondence (possibly my favorite of all opera books), it seems that Verdi wrote the music after which Boito would send him words and they would discuss together how they would fit in with the music.

I'd like to see some citations about this. I don't doubt that Verdi had plenty of musical ideas before he had dialogue in front of him, but I don't believe that any composer can create a complex vocal/orchestral score without words to set. Boito's libretti for Otello and Falstaff are considered masterful, and Verdi's music illuminates words too perfectly to have been composed before he ever saw them. I imagine a constant exchange of ideas between the two men.

 

I’ve got somewhere a book of the Strauss / Hofmannsthal correspondance, well worth getting if you’re interested in this subject.

 

I’ve got somewhere a book of the Strauss / Hofmannsthal correspondence, well worth getting if you’re interested in this subject.

It was just one of those silly things I got curious about after hearing a couple of composers in the pub talking about their works and getting libretti together before the lockdowns.

I figured in the Baroque period collabs would mostly be local but as postal services, travel and the transportation and communications industries developed collabs could have taken place with more distant people up to current day Internet.

 

 

 

 

 

This book focuses on bel canto operas and I bought it because of Norma, obviously . Boito is mentioned only once, as someone who fulfilled Verdi's intuitive wishes to be liberated from the structures established in bel canto. Maybe Gossett did not know about their correspondence.