A journey through the history of opera and the interplay between text and music - as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Rarely in the history of opera have there been happy partnerships between composers and their librettists. In Verdi's 27 opera scores, the names of fourteen librettists appear. The competition for the primacy of sound or word runs throughout the entire history of opera. In the 18th century, Pietro Metastasio exercised his undisputed dominance - Kesting calls him "the most influential opera poet in history." His librettos were set to music nearly a thousand times, even by Mozart, who actually believed that in opera, poetry should be "the obedient daughter of music," and found his unique librettist in Lorenzo Da Ponte. The 19th century produced librettists such as Eugène Scribe, Felice Romani, and Arrigo Boito.