This past Wednesday night, I attended a Houston Grand Opera performance of Jake Heggie’s new opera, Last Acts. It’s a touching chamber work about strained relations and between a famous actress (sung by famous mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade) and her grown children, an unhappily married daughter and a gay son whose lover is dying of AIDS (sung by newcomers Kristin Clayton and Keith Phares).

Usually, I don’t care much for contemporary music, but Heggie’s score is easy on the ear. There is a particularly lovely duet at the end of the first act. The grown children, brother and sister, are on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which was a special place for their parents. In a poignant scene, they search their memories for a few details about the father they lost when they were little more than babies. To their mutual anguish, they find that they can recall only fragments -- and even on these their recollections don’t agree. Their father is not even a shadow to them any longer.

Maestro Heggie is the friend of a friend of mine, so I was fortunate enough to meet him when he was in Houston a few years ago for the premiere of his earlier opera, The End of the Affair. He impressed me by his youth and his talent, and also by his graciousness and modesty. I noted that when talking about a scene in The End of the Affair he said, “the music is very strong there” –- not “my music is very strong there.” That kind of modesty about one’s own work is rare in any line of creative endeavor.

Heggie’s modesty was also evident in his program notes for the production of his latest opera. He lavished praise not only on his librettist, Gene Scheer, but also on his longtime collaborator Terrence McNally, who wrote the play on which the opera is based.

He even went so far as to praise librettists in general. “I cannot fathom,” he wrote, “why it is common practice in opera to leave the librettist’s name off the billing. Why is it only Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti and not Mozart and Da Ponte’s? Yes, music makes it an opera. But if the libretto isn’t strong, the opera will be flawed.”

That’s true enough, but in opera, strong tunes will often carry weak writing. Most of the great operas have undistinguished libretti. La Traviata, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, to name a few, were based on stage plays that were popular in their time. But had the plays not been set to music, they would all have all sunk to obscurity by now. (Several decades ago, in San Francisco, I saw a revival the original David Belasco play, The Girl of the Golden West. Despite the best efforts of some talented and attractive young actors, the play was a period piece that displayed only intermittent signs of life.)

To be sure, there have been some great librettists. In addition to Da Ponte, we can point to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who collaborated with Richard Strauss on six of the latter’s operas. (Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Die Rosenkavalier has proved interesting enough in its own right to be performed as a play, without Strauss’ music, at Vienna’s Burgtheater.) And there’s Arrigo Boito, who brilliantly adapted Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor for Verdi.

But after that, the pickings get slim. The poet W.H. Auden collaborated with Benjamin Britten on an operatic version of the Paul Bunyan story and, with the help of his partner Chester Kallman, produced a libretto for Igor Stravinsky’s opera, The Rake’s Progress. Gian Carlo Menotti wrote the libretti for his operas The Consul and The Saint of Bleeker Street, and won Pulitzer Prizes for both of them. And I suppose the list of great librettists should include Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote the libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Who else ranks as a great librettist?

Still, composers need libretti –- even libretti of indifferent quality -- to get them started and, for that reason alone, perhaps the writers’ names should be on the program, although in smaller type.

Jake Heggie said of the Terrence McNally play that inspired his latest opera, “It sang to me.”

Can any writer ask for higher praise than that? How many speechwriters can boast of having written a speech that “sang”?