SOURCE: Driver, Paul. “Upstaging.” London Review of Books 15, no. 16 (19 August 1993): 22-3.

In the following review, Driver discusses the modern tradition of libretto collaborations and offers a favorable assessment of Muldoon's verse in Shining Brow.

Architects may come and Architects may go and Never change your point of view Paul Simon, ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’ 

Although W. H. Auden, who ranks with Hugo von Hofmannsthal among the master librettists of the age, thought that the meaning of a libretto's words were its least important component (at any rate, so far as the audience is concerned), and that a libretto is ‘really a private letter to the composer,’ he also found that ‘as an art-form involving words, opera is the last refuge of the High Style.’ The syllables are the main thing, the singability. The poet-librettist's verses ‘have their moment of glory,’ the moment in which they suggest ‘a...