Chester Kallman

Chester Simon Kallman (January 7, 1921 – January 18, 1975) was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for collaborating with W. H. Auden on opera librettos for Igor Stravinsky and other composers.

Life

Kallman was born in Brooklyn of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He received his B.A. at Brooklyn College and his M.A. at the University of Michigan. He published three collections of poems, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). He lived most of his adult life in New York, spending his summers in Italy from 1948 through 1957 and in Austria from 1958 through 1974.

In 1963 he moved his winter home from New York to Athens, Greece. He died there of a heart attack on January 18, 1975, eleven days after his 54th birthday. His funeral, in the third Jewish cemetery of Athens, was attended by some of his closest friends and colleagues, such as James Merrill, David Jackson, Tony Parigory, Nelly Liambey, Bernie Winebaum, Rachel Hadas and Alan Ansen. Kallman was the sole beneficiary of Auden's estate but died intestate himself, with the result that the Auden estate was inherited by Kallman's next-of-kin, his father, Edward (1892–1986), a New York dentist then in his eighties.

Career

Together with his lifelong friend (and sometime lover ) W. H. Auden, Kallman wrote the libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951). They also collaborated on two librettos for Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers (1961) and The Bassarids (1966), and on the libretto of Love's Labour's Lost (based on Shakespeare's play) for Nicolas Nabokov (1973). Additionally, they wrote the libretto "Delia, or, A Masque of Night" (1953), intended for Stravinsky but never set to music. They were commissioned to write the lyrics for Man of La Mancha, but Kallman did not work on the project, and the producers decided against using Auden's contributions.

Kallman was the sole author of the libretto of The Tuscan Players for Carlos Chávez (1953, first performed in 1957 as Panfilo and Lauretta).

He and Auden collaborated on a number of libretto translations, notably The Magic Flute (1956) and Don Giovanni (1961). Kallman also translated Verdi's Falstaff (1954), Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea (1954) and many other operas.