Miracles happen. During the course of her doctoral research at the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Bartlet was permitted in 1974 to examine a group of manuscripts at the Music Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—performance materials for operas given during the first half of the nineteenth century at the Théâtre Italien—that had not yet been catalogued. The library had long before accounted for all the manuscript copies of full operas or extracts in its possession, but it had set aside these orchestral and vocal parts for later consideration. While Bartlet was seeking materials from the years immediately following the French Revolution, she spotted a group of parts identified as Il viaggio a Reims or Andremo a Parigi? She knew that no musical sources for Rossini’s opera had previously been identified; she also knew that Andremo a Parigi? was an adaptation of Viaggio performed at the Théâtre Italien in 1848, without Rossini’s participation. In it, the travelers originally seeking to arrive in Rheims for the coronation of Charles X became travelers on their way to Paris to see the barricades. She wrote to me immediately about her discovery and, at my urgent request, arranged for a microfilm to be made of all the parts.
The manuscripts were indeed performance materials (orchestral parts, a few vocal and choral parts, and a short section of the prompter’s part) for many sections of Il viaggio a Reims and its adaptation as Andremo a Parigi? Wherever possible the 1848 adaptation used original 1825 parts, emended as appropriate; where the changes introduced in 1848 were too numerous, new parts were made. These Parisian parts were incomplete, however, and some passages were missing altogether (including the legendary 1825 finale, which brings together travelers from all over Europe to celebrate the new king, a scene irrelevant in 1848). The parts confirmed most of my hypothetical derivations in Le Comte Ory from Il viaggio a Reims.45 They also provided a first glimpse of some music Rossini wrote for Viaggio that had previously been unknown, especially the lengthy sextet, but the many lacunae in the vocal parts made it impossible to prepare a complete reconstruction. The Paris material was tantalizing, but did not alone offer sufficient information to bring Il viaggio a Reims back to life.
In 1976–77 I had a sabbatical leave in Rome from the University of Chicago, during which I prepared the critical edition of Tancredi. At various points during the year, I visited the library of the Rome Conservatory, “Santa Cecilia,” a collection I thought I knew well. During earlier stays in Rome, in fact, I had studied every Rossini item listed in the catalogue, most of the operatic sources there for the operas of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, and operas by a host of related composers. The staff knew me well and were aware of my interests. They even dreaded my appearances, which were sure to give them more work. One day toward the end of the spring of 1977, the librarian, Emilia Zanetti, appeared with a glint in her eye. “There’s something here,” she said, “that I think you might find interesting.” And a few moments later she reappeared with a pile of manuscript pages, on the cover of which was written in Rossini’s unmistakable script: “Alcuni Brani della Cantata Il Viaggio a Reims. Mio Autografo. G. Rossini” (Several pieces from the Cantata Il Viaggio a Reims. My autograph manuscript. G. Rossini). Below, Rossini’s widow had added: “Given to my friend the dear Doctor Vio Bonato, 1 March 1878, Olympe V.ve [Widow] Rossini.”46
The bifolios of the manuscript were largely out of order, and my first task was to reassemble them consecutively with the assistance of the printed libretto and a knowledge of the way Rossini prepared manuscripts. When I had finished, there before me lay Rossini’s autograph manuscript for practically all the music from Il viaggio a Reims that he had not reused in Le Comte Ory: almost all the secco recitative (which he wrote personally), the sextet, part of an aria for bass, a full-fledged duet for tenor and mezzo-soprano, and the finale. Yes, the finale about which I had read in Parisian reviews of 1825, with its series of national anthems and characteristic songs in praise of Charles X. Some were traditional, some newly invented, but all combined delicious musical detail with the faintly ironic touch that Balocchi and Rossini had sprinkled liberally over their entire concoction. The finale concluded with a superb set of variations on the French song “Vive Henri IV” (each statement masterfully reharmonized).
How do you describe the experience of reading through a score that no one had seen for more than 150 years, reproducing its melodies and its rich orchestral textures in your mind? No one knew at that time how the manuscript had come to the Biblioteca di Santa Cecilia, but it had been there for years.47 While Emilia Zanetti had included Il viaggio a Reims in the early 1950s in the very smallest of small print in a German musical encyclopedia (as part of a long list of sources in the library), the music had never figured in the library’s catalogues.48 Still, it was enough finally to know that we were ever so much closer to reconstructing Rossini’s lost opera. For the music not reused in Le Comte Ory, we had almost all of Rossini’s autograph manuscript; for the music reused in Ory, we had the full score of that opera printed by Rossini’s French publisher, Troupenas, surely derived from sections of the autograph manuscript of Viaggio, as modified for Le Comte Ory. Using the performance materials surviving in Paris, then, we could work our way back from Andremo a Parigi? and Le Comte Ory to the music as it probably existed in Il viaggio a Reims. Responsibility for the edition was placed in the hands of Janet Johnson, now professor of music at the University of Southern California.49
As Johnson began to assemble the score, we became ever more aware of its brilliance and wit. Many numbers reused in Le Comte Ory were actually more effective in their original home in Il viaggio a Reims: the strophic musical structure of Don Profondo’s catalogue aria, for example, in which he lists the possessions of each traveler, produced a more compelling marriage of words and music than when essentially the same music was used to underpin Raimbaud’s consecutive narrative in Le Comte Ory. But we also grew aware that there were significant lacunae. Even as we permitted the Rossini Opera Festival to program the first performances since 1825 for the summer of 1984, we were not sanguine. Then, in the spring of 1983, I visited Vienna on the occasion of those first performances of the critical edition of Verdi’s Rigoletto. During breaks from rehearsals, I spent time in the Österreichische National-bibliothek, which preserves an important collection of manuscripts associated with Viennese theaters. Many Rossini operas are included, mostly in German adaptations. As I reached the end of the card catalogue, my heart jumped: here was a composition entitled Il viaggio a Vienna. Now Rossini had never written an opera by that name, but I knew of another city...
What I had found in Vienna, as Janet Johnson later established, were performing parts for an adaptation of Rossini’s opera, made in 1854 by unknown hands for the wedding of Emperor Franz Joseph I to his “Sissy,” Elizabeth of Bavaria. The revisers must have had available to them earlier performing materials from both Il viaggio a Reims and Andremo a Parigi? In several cases, in fact, the Viennese materials help establish readings for Il viaggio a Reims that cannot be found in other sources.
With these materials in hand, it was possible for Johnson to complete a provisional critical edition of the score, which had its glorious first performance in Pesaro in 1984, under the direction of Claudio Abbado and with one of the most extraordinary bel canto casts ever assembled (including Katia Ricciarelli, Lucia Valentini-Terrani, Lella Cuberli, Cecilia Gasdia, Samuel Ramey, Ruggero Raimondi, Francisco Araiza, Leo Nucci, Bernadette Manca di Nissa, Enzo Dara, and William Matteuzzi). The inventive staging of Luca Ronconi, adored by Italian critics, loathed by Anglo-American ones, played with the idea of “rediscovery” by filling the stage with television monitors and turning the voyage of Rossini’s opera into a staged event in which the inside of the theater was linked to the city where the opera was being performed.50 As the king and his retinue processed through the real streets of the city, images of what was happening inside the theater were projected onto screens set up throughout the city, while images of what was happening in the streets were projected inside the theater.
It was one thing to do this in Pesaro, of course, a small city on the Adriatic, and quite another to bring it off in Milan and Vienna, but I can testify that the Milanese effort was a banner event in the life of that city. Normally the “king” was a handsome young extra, who appeared in the theater at the very end of the performance to take his place on stage as the ensemble sang “Viva la Francia e il prode regnator” (Long live France and its valiant ruler). But during the performances at Ferrara in 1992, marking the Rossini bicentennial, Abbado and the cast almost didn’t make it to the final curtain, when they discovered that the “extra” portraying the “king” had been replaced at the last moment by a singer who happened to be in Ferrara recording Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia with Abbado, one Placido Domingo.
At the time of the Pesaro performances in 1984, we were aware that there was still a missing composition. A chorus, “L’allegria è un sommo bene,”originally followed the dances that open the finale of Il viaggio a Reims; although its text was in the 1825 printed libretto, however, no source preserved any music. While the chorus may be dramaturgically expendable, the divertissement suffers from its absence. As I subsequently reexamined the one surviving Parisian performing part pertaining to the finale, I realized that there was something where the chorus should have been: a treble clef, a key signature (three sharps), a meter (3/8), and an indication of 381 (the correct number should actually be 379) blank measures. All textual scholars experience occasional moments of illumination, and in this case the lightbulb flashed on: I knew that piece. The only composition among the Rossini operas that came even close to sharing these characteristics was a women’s chorus from Maometto II that Rossini omitted from the 1826 Siège de Corinthe. Sure enough, the text of “L’allegria è un sommo bene” fit perfectly under the music of “È follia sul fior degli anni” from Maometto II: Rossini had reused the chorus, to a new text, in Il viaggio a Reims.
That explained, finally, why the autograph manuscript of this chorus was no longer together with the autograph materials for Maometto II, preserved in the collection of the Fondazione Rossini. The autograph of the chorus is now in the Music Division of the New York Public Library, purchased for the Library from the Swiss autograph dealer M. Slatkine & Fils in 1972 in memory of Rossini’s American biographer Herbert Weinstock.51 The chorus, with the words from Il viaggio a Reims, was included in concert performances of that opera at the Newport Festival during the summer of 1988, and finally was included within staged performances of the work in London, Pesaro, and Ferrara during the Rossini bicentennial. We are not certain that Rossini reworked the women’s chorus of Maometto II into a mixed chorus for Il viaggio a Reims, but the dramatic situation makes it more than likely. On the occasion of the first staged performance of the opera in New York during the autumn of 1999, at the New York City Opera, I prepared a version for mixed chorus.52 Whatever its relation to what Rossini may actually have prepared in 1825, my reconstruction seeks to capture the spirit of Il viaggio a Reims.
One never knows, of course, where another manuscript might appear: just around the corner, in another angle of yet another library, in another private collection or bank vault, or in the next auction catalogue from Sotheby’s. Somewhere the autograph manuscript of Le Comte Ory might appear, within which we would surely find the missing autograph material for Il viaggio a Reims. Given our present knowledge of the sources, which remains incomplete, Janet Johnson invented some inner parts in the unaccompanied passage for thirteen solo voices that opens the “Gran Pezzo Concertato” (transformed into an ensemble for seven soloists and chorus in Le Comte Ory); the vocal line in the section preparing the cabaletta of Don Profondo’s aria remains uncertain; and for one recitative (in which the company learns that no horses are available to take them to Reims), we prepared several dramatically crucial measures from scratch.53 But one cannot wait forever: Il viaggio a Reims is finally available in print, even as the search for additional sources continues.
Religion and Sex in Stiffelio
Censorship was a sore problem for Italian opera throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The instability caused by constantly shifting political winds created a climate in which periods of relative liberality were followed by periods of harsh governmental and ecclesiastical suppression. Although the operas of Donizetti were seriously affected by censorship, particularly during the 1830s in Naples, it was Verdi who had the most numerous and difficult confrontations with the censors. These became increasingly intense during the years immediately following the revolutionary uprisings that swept Europe in 1848, when expectations for a new social and political order were brusquely checked, and reigning governments became morbidly sensitive to signs of political or cultural liberalism.
Nineteenth-century censors had a significant role in the creation and transmission of many works still being performed today. In some cases their intervention took place late enough in the compositional process that it is possible to undo their nefarious work; in other cases it is more difficult. Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda and Poliuto, for example, were banned in Naples only after the composer had completed the operas. The sight of one queen calling another “vile bastard” on the stage of the Teatro San Carlo in Maria Stuarda was too much for the Neapolitan sensibility; and while Racine’s Polyeucte might have been an acceptable play in France, the court society surrounding the strongly religious Queen of Naples would not permit a theatrical spectacle dealing with the life of a saint. Maria Stuarda finally reached the stage in Naples as a heavily revised Buondelmonte; Poliuto was transformed by its composer into a French opera, Les Martyrs, and was first performed at the Paris Opéra. The survival of the autograph for Poliuto at the Ricordi Archives in Milan made it possible to edit and perform that work as Donizetti conceived it. The reappearance in the Nydahl collection in Stockholm of the autograph of Maria Stuarda (long believed to be lost) led to the publication of the opera as the first volume of the new critical edition of the works of Donizetti.54
Most censorial interventions in Verdi’s Rigoletto took effect before the composer completed his sketching. Returning Rigoletto from the court of the Duke of Mantua to Victor Hugo’s court of King François I of France, in short, would require rewriting passages without having any Verdian model. Editorial interventions of this magnitude could not be seriously proposed in a printed edition of the opera, critical or otherwise, although that does not mean that a modern director should not experiment with such a transformation for a particular production. Among surviving sources for Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, on the other hand, there is enough autograph material to permit the reconstruction of an earlier layer in the opera’s history, recapturing the Swedish ambiance of Gustavo III, rather than using the Boston setting Verdi ultimately accepted in order to have the work performed at all.55
For Verdi, however, the most difficult case has always been Stiffelio, the opera first performed at the Teatro Grande of Trieste on 16 November 1850. The total disappearance of this work beween the late 1850s and 1968 had never ceased to puzzle those intimately familiar with the Verdi canon. Was it possible that the opera immediately preceding Rigoletto, with a text by the same librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, could have so little interest? Although Ricordi did publish a vocal score before the end of 1852, this edition already incorporated changes demanded by the censors in Trieste, presumed necessary to permit the opera’s performance on the Italian peninsula. For a long time, however, it was widely believed that no orchestral manuscript of Stiffelio had survived. Not only was Verdi’s autograph per se not present in the Ricordi archives, but before 1968 no manuscript copy of the opera had been located. Only after copies were identified in Naples could the first modern revival be attempted, at the Teatro Regio of Parma in that same year. (Another, somewhat superior copy was found later, in Vienna.) But these surviving copies were all problematic. They presented either censored versions of the work or, in some cases, complete, unauthorized rewritings to an entirely different libretto (Guglielmo Wellingrode).56<
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It is not difficult to understand why censors could object to a plot that mixes sex and religion in a potent theatrical concoction. The protagonist of Stiffelio is a Protestant minister whose wife, Lina, has committed adultery before the curtain rises. During the course of the opera, Lina’s father, Stankar, kills the seducer of his daughter, Stiffelio forces his wife to agree to a divorce, and then—before his assembled congregation—he reads aloud the passage from the Gospel in which Christ speaks about the woman taken in adultery. The words of pardon (“He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone... And she arose pardoned”) are echoed by the congregation, and Lina’s pardon—at least before God—is assured. The power of the story resides precisely in the emotional travail of a religious leader, whose high moral precepts as a public figure do not sustain him when he is faced with an intense private drama. Still smarting from the treatment his beloved Giuseppina Strepponi received from provincial society—including his former father-in-law—when he brought her to Busseto, Verdi must have found Stiffelio irresistible.57
But the censors required a vast number of changes in the text (omission of all biblical references, removal of all religious imagery, changes even in the way Stiffelio is addressed—no longer a pastor [minister], but simply an orator [speaker]).58 Disgusted by these changes and convinced that there was little likelihood of the opera circulating as he had intended, Verdi soon withdrew the work from circulation. In 1857, he transformed many parts of Stiffelio into a new opera, Aroldo. Close study of the autograph manuscript of Aroldo in the Ricordi Archives, however, reveals that for music absorbed from Stiffelio Verdi simply used sections extracted from his previous manuscript of that opera, on which he made the necessary corrections. As in the case of Il viaggio a Reims, then, a complete autograph of Stiffelio no longer existed. But what happened to the passages from Stiffelio that Verdi did not reuse in Aroldo? Were they destroyed or lost?
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