List of composers and their preferred lyricists

Most (classical) composers had one or a few lyricists with whom they preferred to work:

• Bach: Picander
• Mozart: Da Ponte, Schikaneder
• Sullivan: Gilbert
• Giuseppe Verdi: Arrigo Boito in his later works
• Isaac Albéniz: Francis Burdett Money-Coutts
• Richard Strauss: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• Puccini: Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa
• Satie: Contamine, Plato (when composing Socrate: Platon s'avère comme un collaborateur parfait, très doux, jamais importun - "Plato shows himself a perfect coworker, very soft, never out of line")
• Amadeo Vives: Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw
• Rodgers: Hammerstein
• Gershwin: Ira Gershwin
• Andrew Lloyd Webber: Tim Rice, followed by Don Black
• Bertold Hummel: Hermann Hesse
• Handel: Charles Jennens

Composers that preferred to write their own libretti

• Richard Wagner
• Arrigo Boito
• Modest Mussorgsky
• Leoš Janáček
• Olivier Messiaen
• Cole Porter
• Gian Carlo Menotti
• Irving Berlin
• Steven Sondheim