The structure of the paper used by a composer also had serious implications for the transmission of his work. Music paper was not supplied to composers in individual leaves, but rather in the form of gatherings of bifolios (each bifolio having two attached leaves or four pages: see example 2.1). Composers such as Rossini, Bellini, or Donizetti, who did not make extensive sketches in advance, tended to employ either a string of single bifolios or, at most, small gatherings of two bifolios. Verdi, whose previous sketching allowed him to anticipate quite precisely the length of each musical number in an opera, used much larger gatherings, of five, six, or as many as ten or twelve nested bifolios (i.e., one inside the other). That he used these large gatherings even for operas preceding Luisa Miller, the first opera for which we have reason to believe that complete sketches exist in the family home at Sant’Agata, suggests that he employed sketches throughout the 1840s.52 Taking the process a step further, copyists, who knew in advance the precise length of every piece in an opera, tried to use single gatherings for each of them wherever possible.
EXAMPLE 2.1. A BIFOLIO OF OBLONG PAPER.
It is not difficult to intuit the reasons behind these choices. Composers or copyists who could anticipate the length of a piece used a structure in large gatherings that simplified the task of organizing and binding the manuscript: it is manifestly more difficult to keep track of ten consecutive bifolios than of a single gathering of ten nested bifolios. Yet composers working out the exact dimensions of a composition directly in their autograph manuscripts, rather than in independent continuity drafts, had every reason to employ single bifolios or gatherings of two bifolios. Not only were they uncertain about the length of each piece, they were much more likely to change their mind about a passage as they drafted it. Removing a single bifolio containing music that was not going well was much easier than dismantling a larger gathering. In the autograph of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, for example, the composer used the convenience of the structure in single bifolios to introduce various modifications during the course of composition. He drafted a theme to serve as the conclusion to the first act (“Vado, corro al gran cimento”), then decided to change it altogether, by adding new bifolios as needed. Under normal circumstances, he would have removed the bifolios that no longer contained music pertaining to the revised version. In this case, however, he was to change his mind again, and ultimately developed the definitive version of the passage by combining and adapting elements from both of the earlier versions. All his manipulations can be followed in detail, since nothing was removed from the manuscript during his process of revision.53 His alternative would have been to write the entire cabaletta out from scratch, but it was not the solution he chose.
For purposes of binding and preservation, of course, single bifolios or small gatherings also presented significantly greater risks than larger gatherings. In the Bellini autographs individual bifolios from the composer’s original score are frequently missing; some have been replaced by a copy, some have just disappeared. It is not always certain whether the absences are the workings of accident or actual cuts desired by the composer. When the operas are those of Bellini, who was ever ready to introduce revisions for a new set of singers or a new theater, the resulting problems can be maddening, and the issues can be far from trivial. The concluding A major section in the “Guerra, guerra” chorus in Norma, for example, is missing in Bellini’s autograph, but its absence may or may not be related to a composer-sanctioned cut.54 On other occasions a series of single bifolios can become hopelessly muddled. Cataloguing of the incomplete autograph manuscript of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims at the Library of the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome was made more difficult because of the baffling order in which its bifolios had been transmitted.
WRITING DOWN THE OPERA: “SKELETON SCORES” AND PARTICELLE
With the paper on which he was going to write his autograph manuscript before him, where did the composer begin? He could normally expect a rehearsal period of three weeks, barring unforeseen events that might expand the time available (the illness of a singer) or shrink it (the failure of a preceding opera in the season). During that time, singers had to learn the parts of a new work, staging—however elementary—had to be worked out, orchestral materials prepared and rehearsed, sets painted and assembled, and the entire opera realized as a music drama. Working toward such a close and specific deadline, the composer kept firmly in mind the priorities of composition and of production, at least on those occasions when he was not being fed the libretto piecemeal, at the last moment.
Composers were sensitive to the particular needs of preparing the chorus. Even if choral interventions were relatively simple and the requirements for stage movement minimal, choristers tended to be poorly trained and even musically illiterate. Thus, preparing numbers in which the chorus appeared demanded a certain priority.55 But getting music into the hands of the principal soloists was equally important. Working within a relatively stable group of conventions, most singers were able to commit music quickly to their voices and memories. While composers did what they could to assist the process, soloists were not necessarily given their major numbers first. After all, if a composer was unfamiliar with the abilities of a certain prima donna or feared that time may have ravaged a once glorious instrument, he might prefer to prepare first the ensembles in which she would appear, finalizing her solo music only after the rehearsal period had begun.
We may marvel at the prodigious feats of memory of nineteenth-century singers, but experience in the modern opera house helps redimension our wonderment. During the summer of 1996 the Rossini Opera Festival was scheduled to perform for the first time the new critical edition of the composer’s Matilde di Shabran, an opera semiseria of monumental size and complexity. When the tenor scheduled to sing the principal tenor role of Corradino fell ill less than three weeks before opening night, no other singer in the world knew the role or had even seen the complete score. Yet the young Juan Diego Flórez, who had been hired for a smaller part in another opera, learned the principal aria by memory overnight, auditioned with it, and was engaged to assume the role of Corradino. He sang the part without a hitch, and with these performances launched what is proving to be an impressive career. Eight years later, a fully mature artist, he triumphantly returned to his debut role during the summer of 2004 in one of the most impressive productions of the festival in recent years, directed by Mario Martone and conducted by Riccardo Frizza.
Least urgent was the overture, of course, for which no stage rehearsals were needed (contemporary stage directors to the contrary). It is no wonder that throughout operatic history, overtures were invariably the last compositions prepared, and stories of composers arriving the night of the premiere with the ink still wet on the orchestral parts of their unrehearsed overture are legion. It is also no wonder that on occasion Donizetti or Rossini would borrow an overture from an earlier, unsuccessful work. Indeed, as the century progressed, many composers were happy to leave their operas without overtures altogether. Most of the famous Rossini overtures introduce his earlier operas: for his seven last Neapolitan opere serie, written between 1817 and 1822, he prepared only one full-fledged overture, for Ermione (with its unusual chorus of Trojan prisoners singing from behind the lowered curtain, as we have seen).56 Verdi added an overture to Alzira in 1845 only at the insistence of the Neapolitan management, and he demanded extra payment for it.57
Although for every musical number or recitative the composer would plan the layout of the entire score, indicating which instruments would be playing and normally allotting a staff for each of them, he would begin by writing only a skeleton score, as described above. From a compositional point of view, this procedure makes perfect sense. The vocal parts, bass, and principal melodic lines, representing the main musical ideas and determining their melodic and harmonic development, had to be devised before the music was orchestrated, and that remained true whether they had first been written down elsewhere (in a continuity draft) and cop
ied into the autograph manuscript (Verdi) or were written down for the first time directly into the autograph manuscript (Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti). The procedure also made practical sense. Vocal lines, whether for soloists or chorus, were required immediately for rehearsals: they had to be learned and memorized. Orchestral rehearsals tended to begin only a few days before the premiere of an opera. Filling in the staves left blank in the skeleton score and preparing parts for the orchestral musicians, then, was less urgent.
Several important manuscripts from this period, operas projected and pursued extensively before being abandoned, provide eloquent testimony to the way composers worked. Bellini began an opera based on Hugo’s Hernani, to a libretto by Romani, during the autumn of 1830, just a few months after the first performance of the play caused a political and artistic uproar in Paris. Intended to serve as the second new opera in the carnival season at Milan’s Teatro Carcano of 1830–31, which opened with Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, this Ernani soon ran into significant difficulties with the Austrian censors. Rather than disfigure their text, Romani and Bellini substituted a new opera in a different genre, La sonnambula. Many pages from Ernani exist, including melodic sketches and some completed pages but mostly sections in skeleton score.58 (Significantly, the part of Ernani was to be written for a female singer en travesti, Giuditta Pasta, precisely the vocal casting Verdi was to refuse in 1844.)
In a similar state is most of the third and fourth acts of the almost completed Le Duc d’Albe by Donizetti. Intended by the composer for performance in 1840 as his second work for the Opéra in Paris (after Les Martyrs, itself an adaptation of his Neapolitan Poliuto), this was a major effort for Donizetti—his first entirely new work in French. It was written to a libretto by the most important French librettist, Eugène Scribe, and a colleague, Charles Duveyrier; Scribe later developed from it a libretto for Verdi, Les Vêpres siciliennes.59 Unfortunately, the director of the Opéra, Léon Pillet, was not prepared to mount any work without a central role for his mistress, the mezzo-soprano Rosine Stolz. And so Donizetti left Le Duc d’Albe with its first two acts basically complete and its third and fourth acts in skeleton score. Instead, he turned to another work that had gone unperformed, his L’Ange de Nisida, written for a theater that had gone bankrupt, the Théâtre de la Renaissance, and from it he constructed one of his very finest operas, La Favorite, with the superb role of Léonor perfectly adapted to the talents of Pillet’s own “Favorite,” la Stolz.60
Rossini left an entire work in this form, his setting of choruses from Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus in the Italian translation (Edipo Coloneo) prepared by the Bolognese poet Giambattista Giusti. It was probably in 1815 that Giusti asked the composer to write music for these choruses. Although no specific performance appears to have been planned, Rossini acquiesced and prepared a complete skeleton score. He wrote the vocal lines (a part for the chorus leader and the male chorus—without always including the lower choral parts), some of the bass line (particularly where there were significant modulations), and important instrumental solos. In a few cases, such as the brief sinfonia, he entered a fuller complement of instruments. In this state Rossini offered the manuscript to Giusti.
Giusti, who cared a great deal about these choruses, was deeply offended. In notes to the printed edition of his translation (Parma, 1817), he explained that he had employed a special poetic style for them, so that (as in the Greek theater) they could be sung:61
To us it therefore seemed praiseworthy to try this experiment, and we wanted our choruses to be set to music. Meanwhile, while we await a favorable occasion to have the work performed on stage, we have wanted to make this translation public, from the style of which, and in particular from that of the choruses, the impartial reader will judge the effect that sung choruses might produce. That effect will be further clarified by experience, when that becomes possible.
In an explanatory note, Giusti added:
A famous Maestro di Cappella set my choruses to music and was generously paid by me. Shortly after I realized that on many pages the accompaniments were lacking. I went back to him, and returned the pages. For a year since that time, and despite the numerous requests I have made, I have been unable to get them back. His friends say that this is his way of playing a joke on me; but jokes of that kind resemble those of a certain famous jester who, during the celebration of a feast and in the presence of a King (who enjoyed the action), plucked with admirable dexterity the gold boxes from the pockets of the astonished courtiers.
It is unlikely that Rossini intended to play a joke on Giusti. Rather, he behaved as did all composers of Italian opera during the first half of the nineteenth century. For Rossini the main creative work was done, and he would have been prepared to complete the orchestration when a performance was to take place. In this case, however, Rossini never did return to the score, nor do we know whether Giusti got his fee back.
The manuscript surfaced again in the early 1840s, when it was offered for sale in Paris by the Bolognese composer Vincenzo Gabussi, a good friend of Rossini’s. It is at least possible that Rossini presented the manuscript to Gabussi as a gift. Edipo Coloneo was ultimately acquired by the French publisher Troupenas, who derived from it an “aria” for Oedipus (actually an introductory section of one of the choruses, set by Rossini as a solo for the choregus) and two female choruses (which he entitled “Faith” and “Hope”). To these two choruses Troupenas persuaded the composer to add a third, leading to the publication in 1844 of what became Three Religious Choruses: Faith, Hope, and Charity. But the manuscript that turned up in Paris and now, after various international journeys, resides in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York is fully orchestrated. Another composer (probably the same person who composed the aria for Duglas in La donna del lago) “filled in the blanks,” i.e., completed the orchestration. Because the layers are in different hands, we can identify precisely what was in Rossini’s skeleton score. Although we cannot usually separate the layers so precisely, it is perfectly clear that this is how all Rossini’s autograph manuscripts were prepared. To exemplify in this unusual case just what a skeleton score looked like, the critical edition of Edipo Coloneo printed the added orchestration over a grey background, so that the compositional stages are immediately evident.
Verdi worked the same way, and sometimes we can follow his steps. From his home at Sant’Agata he sent to Venice on 5 February 1851 the skeleton score of act 1 of Rigoletto, not including the prelude, and of act 2 except for the final duet. From these manuscripts, which included vocal lines and only some of the orchestral accompaniment, Verdi instructed the Venetian copyist to extract vocal parts and consign them to the appropriate singers. He added, “I will bring the rest of the opera with me and I will orchestrate the score during the rehearsals.”62 Verdi actually arrived in Venice on 19 February: there is no reason to think that the singers had yet seen any of act 2 or the final duet. The first performance of Rigoletto took place on 11 March. In those three weeks, then, Verdi orchestrated most of the opera, while the singers were learning their parts and the entire work was staged. When Verdi completed his orchestration, orchestral parts were prepared and the orchestra was rehearsed and integrated into the performance.
Working to such a tight schedule, it is hardly surprising that composers proceeded in this manner; they needed to get vocal parts in the hands of singers as soon as possible. For most operas written in Italy we lack these original singers’ parts, particelle as they were often called. They have fallen victim to the ravages of time, the social system that put opera seasons under the control of a series of changing impresarios, or the destructive powers of fire or housecleaning. But some original parts do exist, such as those for Semiramide at the La Fenice. (These parts had been transferred to the Fondazione Levi of Venice before the theater was again destroyed by fire in 1996.) We are more fortunate with works written for the Parisian theaters. At the Opéra, a vast number of individual parts prepared for singers exists, sometimes with annotatio
ns in the hands of the composers. Even from the archives of the Théâtre Italien, the Parisian theater that played such an important role in the spread of this repertory in northern Europe, the theater through which French writers and artists (Delacroix, Balzac, Stendhal) came to know Italian opera, many particelle are extant. Those pertaining to Il viaggio a Reims are crucial sources. All surviving parts for individual singers present the same picture: the solo vocal line for a number or an act, together with vocal lines pertaining to one or more other characters in ensembles, with occasional vocal cues from other parts. Of the orchestral music, only the bass line is present (and rarely complete), together with a few significant instrumental cues to assist the vocalist. Such particelle could easily have been prepared from a skeleton score, and for the first performances of an opera they surely were. In the case of Verdi’s Macbeth, the publisher Ricordi certainly had choral parts for the opera engraved in 1847 directly from the composer’s skeleton score.63
ORCHESTRATING THE OPERA
With the singers in possession of their music, copyists returned the autograph manuscripts, still in skeleton score, to the composers. In their letters, Donizetti and Verdi state repeatedly that orchestration took place while they were rehearsing an opera with the singers. We do not have analogous Rossini letters, but the manuscripts themselves, with their different shades of ink, suggest a similar procedure. During breaks from rehearsals, composers would complete the orchestral lines; for those large ensembles where all instruments could not fit on the regular manuscript paper, they added the requisite spartitini.
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