It is thus not difficult to imagine the public reaction to the idea that Verdi’s scores had been so severely misrepresented that there were twenty-seven thousand discrepancies between the composer’s autograph of Falstaff and the opera’s printed edition. In journalistic circles “discrepancies” quickly became “errors,” and heated letters and denunciations circulated throughout the European press. Vaughan produced letters of support from many musicians and conductors, while others—led by Gianandrea Gavazzeni—ridiculed his examples. At a special concert/debate in Milan, the public was asked to compare passages performed according to the “traditional” versions of the printed scores with the same passages as sanctioned by Vaughan.3 Parliamentary debates were held in Rome, leading to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani of Parma, one of the primary tasks of which was supposed to be the preparation of a critical edition of the composer’s works.4 And yet, despite the transmission problems discussed in chapter 3, with their profound implications for the worth of current printed scores, Vaughan’s campaign for new editions fizzled out. There were several reasons, some tactical, some substantive. By mounting a publicity barrage about his “discoveries” and claiming to identify astronomical numbers of “discrepancies,” Vaughan offended Italian national honor. Worse, he emphasized time and again the brilliance of Sir Thomas Beecham and the parallels between Beecham’s approach and what Vaughan thought he saw in the Verdi autographs, while explicitly criticizing the scores in use in Italy and implicitly claiming that the interpretations of Italian conductors lacked the inner life that only the great English conductor had been able to achieve. In response, Gavazzeni wrote:
After the cataloguing of all that has allegedly been neglected in Verdi and altered in Puccini to the detriment of the composers’ original inspiration and its expression in manuscript, what is Vaughan and with him the school for textual criticism and orchestral conducting of Sir Thomas Beecham trying to prove? Obviously that Toscanini, and the other Italians after him who devoted their interpretive powers to the study of Verdi and Puccini, mutilated the scores and betrayed the composers in their performances.5
This chauvinistic defense inevitably damaged Vaughan’s credibility.
But three substantive problems were more significant: the terrain on which Vaughan joined battle, the logic of his argument, and his reading of the sources. We know for certain that Puccini, another subject of Vaughan’s polemic, played a significant role in the printing of his own operas, and his autograph manuscripts do not always reflect the changes he made over time. Often he introduced or permitted significant changes in his music, and these were reflected in the printed editions made available to the public, even when they were not definitively notated in his autograph manuscripts. Was Puccini wrong to have abandoned the original, two-act version of Madama Butterfly? Should he not have depended on Toscanini to edit the dynamics and articulation in the printed full score of Manon Lescaut or to improve the orchestration of many passages in La fanciulla del West?6 And was he misguided when he omitted the “canzone dei fiori” in Suor Angelica?7 However one may answer these and a host of similar questions, there is no evidence that this composer, who followed every stage in the dissemination of his works, really wanted musicians to return to the readings of his original autograph manuscripts and mistakenly allowed flawed printed editions to circulate. Thus Puccini’s manuscripts, important as they are for an understanding of his operas, cannot be considered a court of last resort when editing his music. For Verdi the situation is more equivocal. Early in his career he played largely a supervisory role in the publishing of his works, but by the 1880s he was much more intimately involved. Vaughn, by examining works for which Verdi is known to have participated in the editorial process, chose distinctly inhospitable terrain. In the 1950s nobody could accurately assess the extent of Verdi’s participation in the editorial process for Otello or Falstaff, and the matter remains unresolved even today.8
The logic of Vaughan’s argument was equally problematic. From the generally true proposition that we should give great weight to signs actually written by Verdi in his manuscripts, Vaughan assumed that the absence of signs meant that the composer did not want them. This doesn’t follow logically; nor does it reflect what we know about the preparation of autograph manuscripts by nineteenth-century Italian composers. Vaughan paid lip service to an alternative possibility, but quickly dismissed it:
Objectively one must, however, recognize that even in the original Verdian scores one encounters some lacunae. But these lacunae are easily identifiable only with study and with the direct experience acquired by faithfully and assiduously copying out these same complete autographs. For in this way one enters directly into Verdi’s “forma mentis.”9
It’s one thing to assert that it can be useful to write out sections of a score to get a feeling for the rhythm of its writing; quite another to believe that lacunae can be identified only by copying out an entire manuscript.
And Vaughan proved to be an inaccurate literalist in his reading of Verdi’s autographs. He wrote, for example, “On this first page [of Falstaff ] there are 125 discrepancies. On the first chord the ff is only for the oboes, bassoons, trumpets, and timpani, the first and second violins and the violas. The others are f.”10 To which Gavazzeni responded, in the essay cited above, “Nothing and nobody will ever convince me that Verdi intended in the first bar to differentiate, f from ff, instrumental sections and instruments belonging to the same section.” Quite apart from whether Gavazzeni could ever be convinced (and it is difficult not to agree with his musical instincts), Vaughan’s list does not faithfully reproduce the readings of Verdi’s autograph, which has an unmistakable ff for cellos.11 Many instruments have no signs, and since when does the absence of a sign signify f?
EXAMPLE 4.1. GIUSEPPE VERDI, MESSA DA REQUIEM, “DIES IRÆ” (N. 2), AT THE “LACRYMOSA DIES ILLA,” MM. 625–629.
The argument between Vaughan and Gavazzeni on the subject of slurs for one of the most beautiful phrases in the Messa da Requiem, the “Lacrymosa dies illa,” is of breathtaking silliness. The melody, as sung originally by the mezzo-soprano at mm. 625–629 of the “Dies iræ” movement, with the articulation as specified in the critical edition, is shown in example 4.1.12 Here is Vaughan’s description of a later reappearance of the melody:
Double phrasing; the melody is slurred in one part while the notes are separately articulated in the other. While the first bassoon, the solo tenor, the tenors of the chorus and the cellos, together with the third horn, have a singing legato, the third bassoon, the solo bass, and the basses of the chorus articulate the phrase. Verdi frequently uses this procedure, which was then copied also by Puccini. Thus, it is not an oversight of Verdi’s.13
To which Gavazzeni retorted, “Just try humming the ‘Lacrimosa’ staccato without slurring and then sing praises to the fetish of ‘double phrasing.’”
Years later, Vaughan returned to the fray and tried to provide a “musical” explanation for Verdi’s notation, arguing that Verdi provided longer slurs for upper instruments or voices, shorter slurs for lower ones. In this way, he “was trying to ensure that the phrase was sung cantabile, but without turgidity: by avoiding the uniform slur over the entire phrase, he has created an inner articulation which gives the whole statement an extra rhythmic vitality.”14 The ghost of Sir Thomas Beecham is still hovering in the wings.
In fact, neither Vaughan nor Gavazzeni looked carefully at either the musical situation or the musical sources. Vaughan’s description of Verdi’s crowded autograph is an idealization: apart from his frequent misreadings, “slurs” are often groups of slur fragments, and a change of manuscript page in the middle of the melody confuses the issue further.15 His explanation, too, lacks common sense: although Vaughan treats the first bassoon as an “upper” instrument and the third bassoon as a “lower” one, these identical instruments are playing in unison. The presence or absence of slurs in Verdi’s autograph is actually a function of availabl
e physical space: there was ample space for a full slur for the choral tenors, and so Verdi wrote it; there was no room for a slur for the choral basses, and so he omitted it. Above the staff for the first bassoon Verdi easily wrote a slur (actually two slur fragments, meeting in the middle of a held note); above the staff for the third bassoon there was simply no room, although Verdi did manage to include a partial slur under the first four notes of the melody, between the parts of the third and fourth bassoon (which are written on a single staff).
Gavazzeni’s sneer was no more justified. What neither realized was that the slurring of the “Lacrymosa dies illa” melody in all Ricordi editions of the Messa da Requiem through the mid-1980s had been dead wrong. It is slurred in multiple ways in its various appearances, but the diversities are determined by page turns in the autograph manuscript and the division of the music into pages and systems in printed editions. No conductor with any musical sense ever paid attention to those printed signs, and performers instinctively treated the melody as a legato phrase. Blinded by his theories, Vaughan failed to understand the nature of the problem; and Gavazzeni, accustomed to hearing the melody as a legato phrase, failed to realize that the printed edition was faulty.
Twenty-seven thousand errors like this? Not only did Italian musicians turn their collective back on Vaughan’s claims; they conveniently identified musical scholarship or “philology” and calls for “critical editions” with his ideas: if this is what scholars mean when they demand “critical editions,” they implied, let us return to our vaunted “tradition,” as printed in the old editions. A chorus of relieved conductors could thus sing in unison, “If it was good enough for Toscanini, it’s good enough for me.” Vaughan’s challenge had been met and dismissed, and one could believe again that commercially available scores of nineteenth-century Italian operas were trustworthy. As Giuseppe Patané put it in a note to his recording of Il barbiere di Siviglia as late as 1989, “Truth, in my opinion, is only reflected in a certain tradition which we cannot forget. Should this tradition disappear, operas as an art form would suffer as a whole and we would gradually see the disappearance of the works themselves.”16
There matters rested during the first part of the 1960s. Casa Ricordi, honestly believing that Vaughan’s claims were without merit, found no pressing commercial reason to replace its editions, although the publisher did employ a local musician, Mario Parenti, to correct obvious errors in the more popular operas. But meetings to establish a national edition of the works of Verdi led nowhere, because nobody knew where to begin. There were valuable biographical and critical studies pertaining to the composer, but no one had looked carefully at the manuscript sources or the printed editions, no one had analyzed Verdi’s compositional process or his involvement in the performance history of his works, no one had fully investigated his collaborations with his librettists.17 With the exception of the autograph manuscripts owned by Casa Ricordi, no one even knew which sources had survived or where they were located. Under such circumstances, discussions of “critical editions” seemed decidedly premature.
Many people in the music world believe that during this period Casa Ricordi, anxious to avoid further scandals, grew selective about whom it permitted to examine its archives. The belief is so widespread that it is unlikely to be totally baseless, but it is unsupported by my own experience. When I arrived in Milan in the fall of 1966, a fresh-faced graduate student working on a doctoral dissertation, I was given access to the collection, and the personnel of Casa Ricordi never ceased to be helpful and interested far beyond what courtesy would require. And I was not alone. Intrigued by the Vaughan affair and nourished by a love for Italian opera, several young musicologists were patiently examining the sources of nineteenth-century Italian opera. They came from Italy, the United States, Britain, Germany, and New Zealand. They knew the impressive textual work being done on the new complete editions of the works of Bach and Mozart; they observed the Berlioz research in England, under the direction of Hugh Macdonald. Without crying scandal, these scholars began to turn their musicological training to Italian opera.
In the light of the transformation in our knowledge over the past forty years, it is difficult to imagine the spirit with which we began our work. I remember sitting in the reading room of the Music Department at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in the autumn of 1965, studying for the first time a complete score of Rossini’s Maometto II. What an extraordinary work, I thought—and what a shame that I will never hear it, let alone see it on stage. I can imagine a Donizetti scholar, such as William Ashbrook, having a similar experience.18 And there were young Verdians, such as David Lawton and David Rosen, who became aware that Verdi left far more music for his operas (suppressed scenes, revisions, alternative arias) than printed editions contained.19 This scholarly work was beginning to constitute a foundation over which the question of critical editions of Italian opera could again be raised when the time grew ripe.
IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA
We honor artists of the past by celebrating the centennials and other anniversaries of their births and deaths. The major celebration relating to Italian opera during the 1960s was the hundreth anniversary of the death of Rossini. In 1968, Rossini was a one-opera composer. To be sure, everyone knew he had written some forty operas, and there had been occasional twentieth-century revivals under Vittorio Gui. The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in the early 1950s gave hearings to Armida (for Maria Callas), Tancredi, and La donna del lago; Gavazzeni directed a Turco in Italia (with Callas). But in the minds of the public, Rossini was Il barbiere di Siviglia.
When plans were laid for celebrating the centennial of the composer’s death, it was to that opera that almost everyone turned. A young Italian conductor named Alberto Zedda was called upon to lead one of those revivals. During an earlier stay in America (as a conductor at the New York City Opera and a faculty member at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music), he had directed a number of performances of Il barbiere. Several American wind players complained about peculiar readings in their parts, awkward melodic lines, unlikely rhythms. Since the Ricordi archives had no manuscript of the opera, Zedda—unaware of the earlier activities of Vittorio Gui20—decided to check these readings directly with Rossini’s autograph manuscript, which is preserved at the Bologna Conservatory.
Seeking neither scandal nor publicity (the Vaughan fiasco was still smoldering), Zedda carried his score of the opera from Milan to Bologna, together with instrumental parts rented from Ricordi, on both of which he planned to enter his emendations. Having never before examined an autograph by Rossini (or any other composer), he had no points of comparison. Unable to identify securely Rossini’s hand, he believed the secco recitative in Il barbiere to be by Rossini, whereas those pages are actually composing scores in other hands. He did not know that Rossini had later prepared additional music for his work; nor was he aware of several Rossini manuscripts containing cadenzas and variations.21 Faced with serious textual problems, he was thrown back upon his own resources, those of an intelligent musician with limited knowlege of Rossini’s other works.
But there was so much to see that quibbles over details faded away. The Ricordi edition was fundamentally different from Rossini’s manuscript. Melodic lines were changed, rhythms modified, harmonies altered, orchestration transformed. Extra brass and percussion had been added. Where Rossini called for a piccolo, the edition substituted a flute. Signs of articulation (slurs, staccatos, accents) were unrecognizable. It is not that Rossini’s manuscript was structurally different from the printed edition. Often as the opera may have been performed with disfiguring cuts, the printed edition was essentially complete. The differences, rather, were in the tissues and sinews of the opera. Perplexed, disbelieving, Zedda entered into his score and parts as many modifications as possible, performed his corrected version of the opera, and returned the rented materials to the publisher.
Since a publisher rents the same set of orchestral parts to various conductors and opera houses, c
ontracts specify that materials must be returned in good condition. Zedda’s parts were so heavily marked up that no other conductor could have used them, and so Ricordi did what any self-respecting publishing house would have done—it billed Zedda for the cost of the materials he had rendered useless. Zedda protested: the Ricordi materials were not Il barbiere di Siviglia, but a deformation of it. From an Australian conductor concerned with contradictory slurs, such charges might be rejected; but here was an Italian conductor demonstrating the problems on page after page of the score in the privacy of Ricordi’s Milan offices.
Unbeknownst to Zedda and Ricordi, not to mention Gui, many scholars were fully aware of these problems. In 1864 a Florentine publisher, Giovanni Guidi, had issued a full score of the opera based strictly (even too strictly) on the autograph manuscript, which—as we have seen in chapter 3—had been given to the library of the Bologna Conservatory in 1862. Guidi’s score, in turn, was reissued several times, including a version by a New York publisher, Broude Brothers, which further corrected the score on the basis of a good manuscript of the first act of the opera in the New York Public Library (believed, erroneously, to have annotations in Rossini’s hand). 22 Side by side with these scores, however, there circulated the Ricordi edition—the version considered “traditional,” the one adopted by most theaters, the one Zedda had corrected. Whence did this score derive? How could these two versions of Il barbiere be reconciled? Since no one had a response, it was simpler for Ricordi to continue shipping its materials around the world.
Finally convinced that a problem did exist, and confident that Zedda could produce a score both faithful to Rossini’s autograph and acceptable to performers, Ricordi entrusted him with preparing a critical edition of Il barbiere. Published at the end of 1969, Ricordi’s belated contribution to the Rossini centennial, it was the first critical edition of a nineteenth-century Italian opera.23 Whatever its deficiencies, Zedda’s Barbiere had the merit of having tackled a difficult, even intractable task. In particular, Zedda was able to show that contemporary manuscripts and printed editions of the opera followed almost without exception the basic outlines of Rossini’s original score. There were lacunae, pieces often cut in performance (such as the Count’s second-act aria, “Cessa di più resistere”). There were rare substitutions: Bartolo’s hilarious aria “Ad un dottor della mia sorte” was sometimes replaced by the simpler (and musically inferior) “Manca un foglio,” written in 1816 by Pietro Romani for a revival of the opera in Florence. Also there were small changes in the orchestration: pizzicato cellos accompanied the Count’s “Ecco ridente in cielo” in a few manuscripts, reflecting the practice of theaters with no access to a guitar. And Rossini’s articulation was copied incompletely and inaccurately, while his rhythms were invariably simplified, eloquent testimony that contemporary copyists made fewer strokes of the pen wherever possible. Still, contemporary manuscripts and printed editions otherwise reflect the text of the opera as the composer notated it in his autograph manuscript.
Divas and Scholars Page 17