Chester Kallman born 7 January 1921 (d. 1975)Chester Simon Kallman was an American poet, librettist, and translator, best known for his collaborations with longtime partner W H Auden and Igor Stravinsky.
Kallman was born in Brooklyn. He received his BA at Brooklyn College and his MA 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. He moved his winter home from New York to Athens in 1963.
Chester Kallman met W H Auden when the poet settled in New York and the confident young aspiring poet enchanted the much more reserved and older Auden. The relationship was to last for some 35 years, despite their apparent incompatability and Kallman's promiscuity. Together with Auden, Kallman wrote the libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951). They also collaborated on two librettos for 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). They also wrote a 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 no 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.
Kallman died in Athens, Greece in 1975.