About

Lyric Companion is a free tool that helps classical singers, voice students, coaches, and choral directors prepare vocal scores. It provides IPA transcriptions, word-by-word translations, and reference metadata for opera librettos in French, Italian, German, English, and Dutch.

Who it's for

• Voice students preparing arias and recitatives for lessons, auditions, and competitions
• Vocal coaches and accompanists who need quick IPA and translation references
• Choral directors programming opera excerpts or full productions
• Anyone studying the operatic repertoire

Data sources

Lyric Companion draws on several open-access data sources:

• Grove Dictionary of Opera — 2,940 entries from Volume 1 with voice types, role data, and cross-references
• opera-guide.ch — Libretto texts for hundreds of operas
• ipa-dict — Offline IPA pronunciation dictionaries
• Kaikki / Wiktionary — Word definitions and morphological data

How it works

Librettos are ingested from public sources, processed into structured blocks (dialogue, headings, stage directions), and enriched with IPA transcriptions from offline dictionaries. The reader interface lets you toggle IPA, translations, and character filtering on any libretto in the collection.

Credits

Built with Flask, vanilla JavaScript, and a lot of love for the operatic repertoire. Grove Dictionary data is used for educational and reference purposes under fair use.