CASA RICORDI, TRANSMISSION, AND PERFORMING TRADITIONS
Ricordi’s rental service originally consisted only of manuscript full scores and parts, prepared in his copisteria. By midcentury he realized the financial advantages of printing string and choral parts, for which multiple copies were needed, thereby guaranteeing uniformity. Thus, when an opera was likely to be successful, Ricordi quickly printed string and choral parts; for the winds, brass, and percussion, where only a single part was required, he continued at first to provide manuscripts. That was the fate of Ernani, Macbeth, and Luisa Miller. Only when Verdi’s operas began to gain rapid and widespread distribution in the 1850s did Ricordi begin to print all the orchestral parts for Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata.67 During the 1880s and 1890s the company finally printed wind, brass, and percussion parts for some earlier operas that still held the stage. Clearly we need to think differently about parts prepared during a period in which the composer was actively involved in productions (even though he had little role in the editorial process), and wind parts prepared later when the composer took no interest in the process and was not involved in productions in which the parts were used.
Once he acquired rights to a work, Ricordi made it his business to create a market for that work. From the 1830s, he published vocal scores of operas that had some hope of success, using them to generate public interest and to serve singers. How seriously did composers take these publications? It is difficult to say. Preparing a vocal score, with a reduction of the orchestral fabric for piano, was considered a mechanical job, often assigned to students or young composers. It is one of music history’s most delicious ironies that the vocal score of Donizetti’s La Favorite was prepared by a young German musician of apparently limited promise, who was trying desperately to gain entrée into Parisian musical circles during the 1840s, one Richard Wagner.
Vocal scores of some early Verdi operas were made by his student Emanuele Muzio, but Verdi did not supervise the work closely. To Antonio Barezzi, the father of Verdi’s first wife and the man most responsible for providing Verdi the opportunity to pursue musical studies in Milan during the 1830s, Muzio reported that Ricordi was angry with him because there were errors in the vocal score of Macbeth, and “it was my responsibility, having done the reduction, to assist with the printing.” No one said that Verdi bore any responsibility. When Muzio prepared a reduction for four hands, he managed to get Verdi to play through the first act with him, and he told Barezzi that “it seemed to have the effect of an orchestra.”68 Exceptionally Verdi might become involved, as with the sinfonia to Alzira. Prevailed upon by the Neapolitan impresario to add a sinfonia to an opera that originally lacked one, Verdi himself prepared the piano reduction. Engravers’ marks on his autograph, preserved in the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, demonstrate that this manuscript was used by Ricordi to produce the edition of the sinfonia in the vocal score of Alzira.69 But such occasions were rare.
After an opera was published, however, Verdi was quick to complain if the score came out badly or if he noticed errors. In 1855, in a fit of anger (and as a bargaining point in negotiations about fees), Verdi wrote angrily to the company in words that have long echoed to its embarassment, “I complain bitterly of the editions of my last operas, made with such little care, and filled with an infinite number of errors.”70 Of course, Verdi’s anger might have been better directed at himself: for a composer to pay such scant attention to the publication of his music encouraged the proliferation of errors. The autograph manuscripts, while relatively clear, are not always unequivocal. In later years, freed from the pressures of the “galleys,” as he called the life of an iterant composer,71 he paid closer attention to publications. For the Messa da Requiem there exist in New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library a few proof sheets from the first edition of the vocal score, with corrections by Verdi. They demonstrate that the composer cared about the score; they also demonstrate that he was a lousy proofreader, as Verdi himself was fully aware.72
It would be as inaccurate to suggest that composers had no involvement in these publications as to pretend that they examined them closely. Donizetti’s correspondence is filled with fascinating details. In 1833, for example, he sent Ricordi the vocal score of Il furioso all’isola di Santo Domingo, “ready to be copied and printed.”73 A copyist had laid out the vocal lines, and Donizetti himself probably supplied the piano accompaniment (the terms of the letter are ambiguous, but this interpretation seems most likely). This transaction turned out badly, since the impresario of the theater and other publishers became embroiled in complex negotiations. Other cases were clearer. On 1 August 1833, Donizetti sent Ricordi corrections for Parisina, one passage of which “seemed like a church cadence” and needed to be replaced.74 In 1839, from Paris, he reassured Ricordi concerning the latter’s rights to Roberto Devereux:
I sold my opera Roberto Devereux to Barbaja [the Neapolitan impresario], ceding to him all proprietary rights imaginable, and I also know for certain that Barbaja ceded and sold those same rights to Gennaro Fabbricatore, director of the copisteria. If you purchased my score of Roberto Devereux from him, you are the legitimate owner, through the legitimate transmission of rights from me to Barbaja, from the latter to Fabbricatore, and from Fabbricatore to you. I can’t see where any doubt might enter.75
But Donizetti’s relations with Ricordi were not always happy. In 1839 and 1840 there were bitter disagreements as to whether Donizetti had ceded Ricordi complete rights to certain operas or only the right to publish a vocal score; and for a few years Donizetti, like Verdi in the late 1840s, transferred his allegiance to a rival Milanese publisher, Francesco Lucca. To Lucca, Donizetti sold at least some rights to his opera Adelia, for which he himself prepared the piano reduction. On 7 March 1841 he wrote to Lucca, “I hope that you have already received Adelia, reduced by myself. Please ask our friend Mandanici to verify if there are errors, either by the copyists in the vocal lines or by me in the piano reduction.”76 He listed corrections that needed to be made in the score, but said nothing about further controls. Instead: “Keep a close watch so that the edition is really correct.” Donizetti could not have been very pleased with Lucca’s work, because by 1842 he was again doing business in Italy primarily with Ricordi.
By midcentury, then, Ricordi’s business consisted principally of renting orchestral materials (some printed, some manuscript) and full scores (normally in manuscript), and selling vocal scores, whose piano part was sometimes arranged by the composer, more often by others. Once these materials entered Ricordi’s control, composers never reviewed them systematically. When an opera house wanted to perform a work, they made arrangements through Ricordi, who would demand a fee, a percentage of which was shared with the composer. Here are the figures for Verdi’s Rigoletto. He sold the opera and all proprietary rights to Ricordi for 14,000 francs (700 napoleons), to be paid in precise installments. Ricordi also contracted to pay the composer 30 percent of income from rental agreements and 40 percent from sales (of the vocal scores, extracts, etc.) for ten years, after which all further income reverted to the publisher. In the Copialettere Verdi wrote out the terms of the contract and listed the dates on which he received payments. After the 700 napoleons were received, he crossed out the page and wrote “Paid.” On a separate page he marked down the sums received on sales and rentals, listing each performance over the first ten years of the opera’s life, together with the income received.77 Verdi was reasonably content with the system, as was Ricordi. Indeed, Verdi was quick to remind Ricordi, whenever their negotiations for a new work grew heated, that his operas were largely responsible for Ricordi’s financial success.
With Ricordi in control of most of the process, distribution became centralized; with the formation of the Italian nation, uniform copyright laws could be better enforced, although some thievery continued. But other problems were unchanged. Copies of the full score and printed or orchestral parts were prepared quickly. They had to be, since prompt fulfillment of bu
siness contracts depended on it. When gross errors existed in the model from which this material was prepared, Ricordi’s copyists made marks in the margin. Sometimes corrections were introduced by the composer, but most of the time copyists did their best to interpret the notation, glossing over lacunae or ambiguous signs. In theory, a manuscript score and parts would go off to a theater and come back to Ricordi unchanged; in practice, changes were regularly introduced, often by well-intentioned musicians of a later generation unable to understand or interpret properly what they had in front of them. Some changes were incorporated into later scores and parts, though not into the autograph manuscripts (which could be used for archival reference).
It soon became impossible to tell where a composer’s notation ended and a copyist’s or an orchestral musician’s began. Time pressures rarely allowed consultation of the autograph manuscript, for there were always new operas to process. Since full scores were sent around in manuscript, differences from one to another easily went unnoticed or uncorrected. Verdi’s fury at the state of the manuscript of La forza del destino he received in Madrid in 1863 is clear from the epigraph to this chapter, and in that case there was no intention whatsoever to falsify the original.78 While it was rare for large-scale alterations to be introduced into Verdi operas, those of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, victims of an earlier system of distribution, suffered innumerable distortions. If a conductor in 1860 wanted an extra trombone, it was added, and its origin was soon masked. Donizetti and Bellini were dead, and Rossini had been out of the fray for thirty years. By the end of the century, materials rented by Ricordi were frequently far removed from the composer’s original. Indeed, for L’Italiana in Algeri and La Cenerentola, as we have seen, Ricordi rented exclusively materials that had largely been reorchestrated.
There was no malicious intent to falsify, but the entire system encouraged a laissez-faire attitude. Contrast the situation in Germany or France, where composers controlled printed editions of their music, taking a direct interest and correcting proofs. Since most Ricordi materials were transitory manuscripts, copied, sent around, then destroyed, the composer could hardly control them. With few exceptions, Ricordi published no full orchestral scores of the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, or Verdi until the 1880s, when the orchestral score of Verdi’s Otello, composed in 1886–87, was engraved. That publication marked the beginning of the modern era in the transmission of Italian opera.
Before the end of the century, Ricordi prepared printed orchestral scores of all the operas by these four composers that still held the stage. Never intended for sale, these rental scores replaced the manuscript copies Ricordi had previously made available to theaters. Not only did the firm prepare the printed scores in a very short time, but it often had no autograph manuscripts available, especially for works by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Instead, it adopted whatever score was at hand. Even when the company possessed an autograph, such as Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri, it might prefer a version modified for late nineteenth-century taste. Most of the composers were long dead; Verdi had no role in this work (with the exception of the orchestral scores of Otello and Falstaff, where the nature of his participation remains to be fully understood). Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did Ricordi begin to sell printed orchestral scores of the most famous Verdi operas, of Il barbiere di Siviglia, of Lucia di Lammermoor. By that time, all the composers were dead, some for over fifty years, and contemporary taste had shifted fundamentally.
To speak of these printed editions—these scores prepared to satisfy proximate commercial needs at the end of the nineteenth century or during the first decades of the twentieth—as if they represented a continuous “performing tradition” is absurd. Yet these are the scores that were used in opera houses throughout the world until critical editions began to be prepared during the late 1960s. Apologists for the status quo, who claim that Italian opera should be performed according to “performing traditions” embodied in these scores, fail to understand that they were prepared at Casa Ricordi by functionaries who gave no thought to performing traditions. It is equally misguided to praise the obsession for accuracy in a Toscanini or a Muti who is using these scores. Accuracy to what? Certainly both conductors could and did ask Ricordi to verify ambiguous points in the editions they employed, since it was widely believed that the Ricordi scores accurately preserved in print the music of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. But when Vittorio Gui instigated a comparison of the score Ricordi had published as Il barbiere di Siviglia with Rossini’s autograph manuscript, he decided to prepare his own performing materials, which he used in performances in 1942 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and throughout the remainder of his career as a conductor.79
This discussion of the transmission of Italian opera has dealt with the actual musical materials used in theaters and printed by editors, especially Ricordi, not with performing traditions, which I described above as “changes introduced into the vocal line by singers, added cadenzas and high notes, cuts and interpolations, modifications in instrumentation made by contemporaries, etc.” About performing traditions and their validity there are legitimately differing viewpoints, to be considered in the second half of this book.80 About musical materials used in theaters around the world since the early twentieth century, long believed (and still believed by some) to reflect accurately the written form of a composer’s intentions and to embody a continuous performance tradition, there can be no equivocation: although prepared by relatively competent musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these scores do not reflect and never were the product of careful editorial work, nor do they embody performing traditions in any serious manner. The aim of present-day critical editions is to replace them at the earliest possible moment. Yet, like many worthwhile goals, it is simpler to formulate than to achieve. A consideration of events of the past forty years can help us understand why this should be the case.
4
SCANDAL AND SCHOLARSHIP
27,000 ERRORS
In July 1958, La Scala, an Italian periodical devoted to news of Italian opera and musical life, published a polemical article by a young Australian musician, Denis Vaughan.1 Having become an assistant conductor to Sir Thomas Beecham four years earlier, Vaughan had grown fascinated by the asymmetries of phrasing, the subtle gradations of color and dynamics, the non-uniform use of staccato articulation that he felt characterized Beecham’s interpretations and gave the music that passed under his baton an inner life of great power and variety. Largely ignorant of the social history of Italian opera and its implications for the editorial processes through which nineteenth-century works were distributed in print, Vaughan was astonished to discover that the autograph manuscripts of certain works by Verdi and Puccini were significantly different from printed editions in circulation during the 1950s. Whereas printed editions offered relatively homogenous dynamics, articulation, and phrasing, the autograph manuscripts—read literally—showed marked asymmetries in phrasing, diverse gradations of dynamics, a selective use of accents, and so on.
For an admirer of Beecham’s art, it seemed nothing short of a revelation. Convinced that his discoveries would prompt a reinterpretation of the art of these composers, Vaughan devoted his article to the Messa da Requiem and Falstaff, both of whose autograph manuscripts were available in excellent facsimiles. In his introduction Vaughan declared war on the Verdi interpretive tradition and also on Verdi’s editors at Casa Ricordi:
The purpose of this study, rigorously critical, conducted on some original autograph manuscripts of Verdi and on recent printed editions of these scores, is to underline the great importance of the musical signs written by Verdi himself, and therefore clearly felt and wanted by him, for all that concerns melody, harmony, tempos, dynamics, phrasing, accents, and articulation. Signs that, although perfectly evident in the original scores, strangely have not been reproduced in the printed editions of the operas in question.
I give below some exampl
es which will serve to demonstrate the enormous value that a critical edition of the works of Verdi might have, by following and reproducing with scrupulous observance the indications, quite precise, left by him. I need only point out that in the Messa da Requiem alone one can recognize as many as some 8,000 discrepancies between the original and the print, while in Falstaff these discrepancies mount up to 27,000.
Twenty-seven thousand discrepancies! Vaughan’s statements no sooner hit the press than an international furor erupted in the musical world.
Verdi, after all, was no ordinary mortal. For many years his picture graced the equivalent of the one-dollar bill in Italy, where he has served for a century and a half as a national icon. His most famous melodies are still in the air, hummed and whistled by members of every social sphere. Even if mass access to Verdi’s music today is largely through television commercials, the symbolic meaning of that music remains strong, and the hold over the popular imagination of a composition such as “Va pensiero sull’ale dorate,” the chorus of Hebrew slaves in Nabucco, extends well beyond its musical beauties.
Verdi’s carefully self-constructed public image cast him forward as a leading figure in the movement for national independence, and his operas from the 1840s are filled with moments whose potential relevance to contemporary political situations was not lost on his compatriots. During the revolutionary uprisings of 1848, the composer set a libretto of explicitly patriotic sentiments, La battaglia di Legnano, whose final act is titled “Morire per la patria.” And the chorus in Nabucco continued to resonate in the minds and spirits of the Italian people. When the Teatro alla Scala was reconstructed after the bombings of World War II, the first music that resounded through its halls, under the baton of Toscanini, was “Va, pensiero.”2
Divas and Scholars Page 16