For once, the dramatic text gives way to the opera libretto, a literary form usually viewed with reluctance. Remember Salieri’s maxim: “First the music, then the words.” Or Gilles Tromp’s provocative statement: “A libretto wasn’t made to be read”. Well, we have selected a few librettos to give the lie to such notions. Common to all of them is the idea of renewing or defying established hierarchies and ideologies. In Ascensão e Queda de Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny], Bertolt Brecht applied the methods of his epic theatre to opera. Music, he said, must presuppose the text, emancipating it, rather than simply illustrating it. Amor de Perdição, written by António S. Ribeiro out of Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel, is a self-described “musical drama for singers, actors and musicians”, highlighting the performative quality of spoken and sung words. While Mahagonny lays bare the bourgeois world, O Ouro do Reno [The Rhinegold], the “prologue” of the tetralogy O Anel do Nibelungo [The Ring of the Nibelung], can be read as an allegory of capitalism. Richard Wagner did not resort solely to medieval German epics to “write” it, having also fed on Feuerbach’s “revolutionary” philosophy… In December, we will turn our attention to contemporary dramaturgy in Portuguese, by reading texts created at Laboratório END, one of the satellite initiatives of the END Festival. Then, we will give voice to a group of playwrights who have lately been creating an expanding multiform universe. We sound out a number of young and old, emerging and established, Portuguese, Brazilian, African-descendant authors. What can this language attain?