Speaking of the author of the opera, they usually call the composer. But any opera still has an author who wrote its literary text. Sometimes it happens that the composer writes the text himself, as A. Borodin did for his opera Prince Igor, but more often the composers entrust such work to poets.
Opera is sometimes called an elitist form of art, i.e. accessible only to a narrow circle of favorites. This, of course, is an exaggeration, but many people really find this genre too complicated for their understanding. Such listeners, in particular, complain that they cannot make out the words that are sung in the opera.
To some extent, modern opera singers are to blame for this, who have completely stopped paying attention to diction, in contrast to the "old school" singers. However, if a person is not used to perceiving the classical manner of singing, he may have problems with good diction of the singers. The matter is complicated by the fact that at present a tradition has come to Russia from the West - the operas of foreign composers are performed not in the Russian translation, but in the original language. Understanding the opera can be helped by a preliminary acquaintance with the libretto.
What is opera libretto
The word "libretto" is translated from Italian as "little book". That is the name of the literary text of the opera. Sometimes composers use independent literary works as libretto. So did, for example, S. Dargomyzhsky, writing an opera on the full text of the tragedy of AS Pushkin's “Stone Guest”. A.A.Rimsky-Korsakov did the same with another tragedy of A.S. Pushkin - "Mozart and Salieri". In such cases, it remains only to find the literary source of the opera and read it.
But still, such cases in composer practice are quite rare. Typically, the literary source of the opera is processed when writing the libretto. Sometimes, even the plot turns into its opposite, as happened with the story of A. Pushkin "The Queen of Spades" when creating the opera of the same name by P. Tchaikovsky. In this case, it is useless to get acquainted with the contents of the opera according to the literary source.
