List of opera librettists


This is an incomplete list of authors who have written libretti for operas. Only librettists with their own articles in Wikipedia are listed. The name of the composer of each opera is also given.

List of operas by librettist's last name

A

Giuseppe Adami
Jules Adenis
Franco Alfano
Louis Anseaume
George Antheil
Guillaume Apollinaire
W. H. Auden
Ingeborg Bachmann
Béla Balázs
Luigi Balocchi
Henri Auguste Barbier
Jules Barbier
Pierre Beaumarchais
Sem Benelli
Hector Berlioz
Giovanni Bertati
Thomas Betterton
Robin Blaser
Édouard Blau
Arrigo Boito
Jean-Nicolas Bouilly
Bertolt Brecht
Georg Büchner
Francis Burnand
Giovanni Francesco Busenello
Ferruccio Busoni
Massimo Cacciari
Louis de Cahusac
Henri Caïn
Italo Calvino
Ranieri de' Calzabigi
Salvadore Cammarano
Mark Campbell
Michel Carré
Nick Cave
Ernest Chausson
Helmina von Chézy
Henry Fothergill Chorley

Jean Cocteau
John M. Coetzee
Colette
Marco Coltellini
Jeremy Commons
William Congreve
Eugène Cormon
Thomas Corneille
Hector-Jonathan Crémieux
Michael Cristofer
Francis de Croisset
Eric Crozier
César Cui
Gabriele D'Annunzio
Lorenzo Da Ponte
William Davenant
Giovanni de Gamerra
Constance DeJong
Casimir Delavigne
Germain Delavigne
Frederick Delius
Philippe Néricault Destouches
Eduard Devrient
Gaetano Donizetti
John Dryden
Gottfried von Einem
Adolphe d'Ennery
Victor Erofeyev
Hanns Heinz Ewers
Mohammed Fairouz
Duncan Fallowell
Lorenzo Ferrero
Jacopo Ferretti
Ferdinando Fontana
E. M. Forster
Giovacchino Forzano
Frederick the Great
Christopher Fry
Kate Gale
Louis Gallet
John Gay
Richard Genée
Ira Gershwin
Antonio Ghislanzoni
Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
W. S. Gilbert
Philippe Gille
Alvise Giusti
Nikolai Gogol
Carlo Goldoni
Edmond Gondinet
Alice Goodman
Vincenzo Grimani
Sydney Grundy
Nicolas-François Guillard
Daron Hagen
Thomas Hales
Ludovic Halévy
Christopher Hampton
David Harsent
Georges Hartmann
Nicola Francesco Haym
Philip Hensher
DuBose Heyward
Ernest Hilbert
Paul Hindemith
Russell Hoban
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
François-Benoît Hoffman
Basil Hood
Victor Hugo
David Henry Hwang
Luigi Illica
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz
Leoš Janáček
Scott Joplin
Étienne de Jouy
Georg Kaiser
Chester Kallman see Auden
Johann Friedrich Kind
Kenneth Koch
Eliška Krásnohorská
Clemens Krauss
Antoine Houdar de la Motte
Ferdinand Lemaire
Kasi Lemmons
Ruggero Leoncavallo
Doris Lessing
Amin Maalouf
Daniel MacIvor
Maurice Maeterlinck
Andrea Maffei
Albéric Magnard
Jean-François Marmontel
Henri Meilhac
Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier de Mélesville
Guido Menasci
Catulle Mendès
Gian Carlo Menotti
Joseph Méry
Olivier Messiaen
Pietro Metastasio
Madeleine Milhaud
  • for Darius Milhaud: Médée, Bolivar, La mère coupable
Nicolò Minato
  • used by Francesco Cavalli: Orimonte
  • used by Francesco Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti and Giacomo Antonio Perti: Pompeo Magno
  • used by Francesco Cavalli, Giovanni Bononcini and George Frideric Handel: Xerse
  • used by Antonio Draghi: Leonida in Tegea, La tirannide abbatuta dalla virtù
  • used by Antonio Draghi and Marc'Antonio Ziani: Chilonida
  • used by Antonio Draghi and Georg Reutter/Antonio Caldara: La patienza di Socrate con due mogli
  • used by Antonio Sartorio, Antonio Draghi and Tomaso Albinoni: La prosperità di Elio Sejano
Paul Muldoon
  • for Daron Hagen: Shining Brow, Vera of Las Vegas, Bandanna, The Antient Concert
Modest Mussorgsky'
Émile de Najac
Charles Nuitter
Meredith Oakes
Marc Okrand
Martin Opitz
Francesco Maria Piave
Arthur Wing Pinero
Myfanwy Piper
James Robinson Planché
William Plomer
David Pountney
Alexander Preis
Sergei Prokofiev
Alexander Pushkin
Philippe Quinault
Jean Richepin
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Ottavio Rinuccini
Michael Symmons Roberts
Felice Romani
Giulio Rospigliosi
Gaetano Rossi
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Pierre-Charles Roy
Alphonse Royer
Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges
Emanuel Schikaneder
Arnold Schoenberg
Eugène Scribe
Sandra Seaton
Michel-Jean Sedaine
Peter Sellars
Elkanah Settle
Thomas Shadwell
William Shakespeare
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Renato Simoni
Montagu Slater
Temistocle Solera
Antonio Somma
Gertrude Stein
B. C. Stephenson
Cesare Sterbini
Richard Strauss
Igor Stravinsky
Alessandro Striggio
  • for Monteverdi: L'Orfeo
John Millington Synge'
Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti
Nahum Tate
Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Emmanuel Théaulon
Michael Tippett
Andrea Leone Tottola
Étienne Tréfeu

V

Albert Vanloo
Giambattista Varesco
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Royce Vavrek
Paul Verlaine
Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges – see above under S
Voltaire
Richard Wagner
Camillo Walzel pseudonym F Zell
Thornton Wilder
Albert Willemetz
Ernst von Wolzogen

Y

Arthur Yorinks

Franco Zeffirelli
Alexander von Zemlinsky
Apostolo Zeno
Julius Zeyer
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Peter Zinovieff
Émile Zola
Stefan Zweig