“Medea” by Luigi Cherubini

Notes on the Libretto

In preparing the Italian–English side-by-side text, an interesting question arose concerning the name of Creon’s daughter. Readers of Hoffmann’s original French Médée will know her as Dircé, and that name still appears in modern reference works. The Italian libretto, however, consistently calls her Glauce. For the Italian–English presentation, Glauce was therefore retained throughout, rather than introducing a name belonging to another version of the opera.

The Golden Fleece presented another small editorial problem. The Italian text employs both vello d’oro and Toson for the famous prize of Jason and the Argonauts, while the English text was not always consistent in its capitalization. These references were standardized as Golden Fleece, while preserving the variations of the original Italian.

The textual history of Medea is itself unusually complex. Cherubini’s opera first appeared in Paris in 1797 as Médée, to a French libretto by François-Benoît Hoffmann and with spoken dialogue. The Italian text available on LibrettoArchive is Carlo Zangarini’s later translation of the version incorporating sung recitatives by Franz Lachner. It was in this Italian form that the opera achieved its celebrated twentieth-century revival, above all through the performances of Maria Callas.

LibrettoArchive presents Medea in Italian, French, German, and English, with any two of the four texts available for side-by-side reading. Preparing these versions together required a number of small decisions of spelling, naming, capitalization, and formatting, while keeping the individual character of each text intact.