Auden and Britten’s Paul Bunyan and the Frontiers of Opera

Although W.H. Auden abandoned playwriting when he left England in 1939, he did not, as some have claimed, stop seeking a theatrically viable role for his verse. Ultimately, he would find a satisfying outlet for his unique poetic talents as well as lasting solutions to his dramaturgical problems by writing opera librettos. But even before he began to espouse opera proper, his dramatic writings, which increasingly relied on the musical contributions of Benjamin Britten, inclined toward the operatic. Shortly after arriving in America, he began writing his first libretto for Britten’s operetta Paul Bunyan, a work that marks both the culmination of Auden’s earlier dramatic efforts and a pivotal transition in his career from verse drama to opera. The Paul Bunyan libretto, one of the few dramatic texts Auden wrote without a collaborator, characteristically combines popular forms with quasi-religious ritual in its attempt to fashion a distinctively American myth. The final scene, in particular, achieves Auden’s goal of representing a collective ritual action on the stage; however, the operetta’s eclectic mix of musical theatrical genres led to a poorly received premiere in 1941. The initial failure of Paul Bunyan was partly responsible for the dissolution of the Auden-Britten collaboration, but librettist and composer would soon separately find, in the paradoxically liberating constraints of the operatic tradition, an ideal medium for their respective dramatic projects.