By the end of the nineteenth century, despite its presence in three early seasons at the Metropolitan Opera (in 1892 with Adelina Patti and in 1894 and 1895 with Nellie Melba), Semiramide had largely disappeared from the stage. Most nineteenth-century performing materials were allowed to rot in theater basements or were trotted out for an occasional revival (such as the one led by Tullio Serafin at Florence’s Maggio musicale in 1940), and whatever once existed in the Ricordi archive in Milan, Italy’s most extensive collection of parts and scores, was destroyed by Allied bombardments in 1944.23 Thus, when Semiramide was given its first modern performances on 17 December 1962 at La Scala, which was looking for a vehicle especially suited to the talents of Joan Sutherland and Giulietta Simionato, it was necessary to prepare a new full score and parts. Photographic reproductions of nineteenth-century vocal scores were available and could be corrected to take account of decisions made in the new score.24 The 1962 full score, although unsigned, was prepared in a serious manner and appears to have been based on Rossini’s autograph at the Teatro La Fenice. Nonetheless, many problems remained. The edition reflected the needs of those particular performances at La Scala. It was based exclusively on musical sources known and available in 1962, before serious research on nineteenth-century Italian opera texts had begun. And it could not draw on the wealth of experience the new critical edition of Rossini’s works has provided, experience gained in preparing, among other things, editions of most of Rossini’s thirty-nine operas, twenty-eight of which are currently in print or in proof.
As best as I can tell, until the Metropolitan Opera’s 1990 production, the 1962 La Scala score, copies of it, and materials derived from it, served as the basis for modern revivals of Semiramide. (Since 1962, some seventy opera houses have included the work in one or more seasons.) During those years, however, theaters employing this material complained bitterly about its condition, for reasons we will examine below. Zedda made an effort to improve the situation by correcting the score and materials, but there were too many difficulties associated with the original product. I therefore agreed to prepare the critical edition so that it could be used for the first time as the basis for the performances at the Metropolitan Opera. There are four principal ways in which the new critical edition differs from the older score: (1) it is complete; (2) it uses autograph material unknown to previous editors; (3) it reconstructs the stage band Rossini employed in 1823; (4) it renders Rossini’s opera more accurately and provides a more idiomatic treatment of articulation, dynamics, and so forth. Each element deserves further consideration.
1. THE NEW CRITICAL EDITION IS COMPLETE. Semiramide is a very long opera, even by early nineteenth-century standards. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first significant twentieth-century effort to stage the work used a heavily abridged score. The decision to omit certain passages from Rossini’s Semiramide in the performances at La Scala in 1962, however, was made before the edition was prepared, and only the material that was to be included in the performance was actually edited. Thus, a great deal of music Rossini composed for the opera was lacking in the score. But not every subsequent opera house presenting Semiramide agreed with the La Scala cuts. For example, although the tenor, Idreno, has only limited dramatic importance, Rossini did write two arias for him. In 1962, when few tenors could sing Rossini’s florid opera seria arias, it was prudent to omit one aria altogether and to reduce the length of the other. When better prepared tenors assumed the role in later productions, they wanted to restore some of that music.25
In 1962, the art of vocal ornamentation in Rossini was poorly understood. Musical forms constructed to give singers an opportunity to decorate the repetition of a melodic line seemed superfluous, and many repetitions were omitted from the edition. Almost twenty years later, Samuel Ramey, a bass capable of electrifying an audience in this repertory, assumed the role of Assur for the first time. When he wished to follow Rossini by repeating (with added ornaments) the theme of the cabaletta in Assur’s aria, the missing bars had to be restored. In the 1962 La Scala production, particular attention was placed on Semiramide as a vehicle for soloists, and the quality of Rossini’s choruses went unrecognized. Until she performed the role of Arsace in 1990, in the production based on the critical edition, Marilyn Horne—as she told me during rehearsals—had never even heard the extraordinary chorus that opens Arsace’s scene in the second act, a particularly splendid passage.
As each new performance made different demands or produced different requirements, pages were added to (or omitted from) the La Scala score, and orchestral parts were cut up and pasted together in new configurations. Finding your way through the material seemed like negotiating a maze. Indeed, the situation was so bad that the Ricordi firm, which distributed the materials, was threatened with lawsuits demanding compensation for time lost in rehearsal, as I was told by more than one employee. The critical edition of Semiramide, for the first time, contains the complete opera Rossini wrote in 1823. While making no presumption that a theater should perform everything, it ensures that eventual cuts can be decided after performers know the entire opera and on the basis of the particular needs of a production.
“Complete,” nonetheless, remains a relative term: the new edition is as complete as it can be, given our current knowledge. There is strong evidence that Rossini revised the conclusion of the opera for the Théâtre Italien of Paris in 1825, adding additional recitative after Arsace (Ninius) strikes down Semiramide. The dialogue is an affecting moment of forgiveness and reconciliation between mother and son, before the curtain falls with what must have been a solemn chorus of grief. The words of this new finale are preserved in a libretto printed at the time, and the music of the recitative alone is found in a vocal score printed in Paris in 1825. But no orchestral score of this recitative is known, and no musical source heretofore identified gives the final chorus in any form whatsoever. The search for this alternative finale to Semiramide continues. Meanwhile, the critical edition has published the new recitative exactly as it is found in the Parisian vocal score. Perhaps one day soon we will suggest an orchestration so that a theater can more easily use it, should it so choose.
There are some things, however, that the critical edition does not contain. When Semiramide was revived for Joan Sutherland, her husband, the conductor and coach Richard Bonynge, manipulated the opera to favor the title role. The recording they made together in 1964 shows how the score was altered, with arias omitted, important choruses deleted, measures snipped away throughout. Most important, Bonynge invented—out of whole cloth—a conclusion in which the hero Arsace kills the villain Assur rather than his own mother, the queen Semiramide, as in Voltaire’s tragedy and Rossini’s opera. Thus, as the final curtain descended, Sutherland was on her feet, alive and well. Since this manipulation of Rossini’s opera had been incorporated into performing materials of the work, a number of revivals subsequently used it. The New York Times critic, reviewing the Metropolitan Opera production of Semiramide, talked about the Bonynge invention as if it were traceable to Rossini. I am emphatically not questioning Bonynge’s right to make such an adaptation for particular circumstances with which he was directly involved as a performer in the early 1960s. My objection is to seeing his version attain a textual status that it never claimed for itself nor deserves to have.
2. THE NEW CRITICAL EDITION USES MATERIAL UNKNOWN TO PREVIOUS EDITORS. Although the editors of the 1962 Semiramide had access to the Venetian autograph, other autograph materials were lacking. As we saw in chapter 2, Rossini composed his operas using paper in an oblong format rather than the vertical format that became typical later in the nineteenth century. Oblong paper allows a composer to write more measures per page, while sacrificing the number of staves available. When, in a large ensemble, everyone sings and plays at once, the opera composer using oblong paper is forced to resort to spartitini (little scores) to accommodate the overflow of instruments. These autograph spartitini, usually bound at the end of a manuscript, can
easily be misplaced. For Semiramide, they were all missing. Using secondary sources, the La Scala score filled in some missing instruments, but its compilers were often compelled to invent new horn, trumpet, and percussion parts.
Although the musical archives of the Teatro La Fenice contain the original performing materials for Semiramide, these materials had never been consulted in conjunction with the preparation of a modern edition of the opera. After much travail, a microfiche copy of the entire set of materials was obtained, and during the summer of 1989, two scholars working with the Rossini Foundation, Mauro Bucarelli and Patricia Brauner, indexed the more than four thousand manuscript pages. I remember the day when they came into my office looking particularly self-satisfied. “There’s something we think you should see,” they said. There, photographed between a part for trombone and a part for bass drum, they had found the complete autograph spartitini for Semiramide. The parts were a revelation in many ways, often quite different from spartitini preserved in other nineteenth-century sources of the opera. It seems likely that Rossini’s spartitini were mistakenly placed with performing materials during that very first season, limiting their role in the further transmission of the opera. Thus, the critical edition, for the first time since 1823, was able to include throughout the composer’s own wind, brass, and percussion parts for major ensembles.
One small lacuna remained. In the opera’s introduction, Rossini wrote a note in his main score signaling that parts for the third and fourth horns were to be found in a separate spartitino, but no such spartitino came to light. The La Scala score, based in part on the Ratti and Cencetti edition, seemed suspect: for long stretches the third and fourth horns doubled the bassoons, an orchestral technique foreign to Rossini’s style. Indeed, a close look at Rossini’s orchestration demonstrates that he had used here two bassoons and the first and second horns to produce an accompaniment in four-part harmony. This instrumental technique, which Rossini often adopted, requires bassoons and horns to play in a way that creates a unified, balanced sound, producing a more modulated sound in softer passages (such as the chorus “Di plausi qual clamor” within the Semiramide introduction) than chords played by four horns. Here, performing parts from La Fenice came to the rescue: from them we could reconstruct the missing third and fourth horn parts. They provide useful punctuations in the orchestral sound, but do not double work already being accomplished by the bassoons. Thus, the new critical edition could present the full orchestration of Semiramide as Rossini conceived it.
In another way the parts were of great importance. In the particella for the tenor Idreno, there were no marks at all in his first-act aria (and signs in the orchestral parts suggest that this aria was probably cut during the first season), but in the second-act aria a series of ornaments for the cabaletta were added to the particella. Although not in Rossini’s hand, they may reflect modifications introduced by the composer. Unusually, these ornaments, instead of decorating the theme when it is repeated, simplify the melody of the theme on its first appearance by substituting fewer notes with less difficult intervals between them, after which the transition and repetition of the theme were cut. Rossini’s Venetian Idreno, John Sinclair (whose name appears on the part), may have been incapable of singing the vocal lines Rossini had prepared. But given the highly florid and rhythmically complex theme, the markings in Sinclair’s part turn out to be aesthetically quite suggestive. Indeed, the tenor Rockwell Blake, the first to study this particella closely, often begins by singing the simplified version of the vocal line, so that the more florid setting composed by Rossini is heard as a “variation.” Whatever an individual singer may decide to do, the critical edition documents more fully Rossini’s thoughts about this aria.
3. THE NEW CRITICAL EDITION RECONSTRUCTS THE STAGE BAND ROSSINI EMPLOYED IN 1823. In three pieces, Semiramide requires a band of winds, brass, and percussion to play either in costume onstage (sul palco) or in the wings. Rossini was the first nineteenth-century Italian composer regularly to introduce a banda sul palco into his operas, but he did not normally prepare a complete score for that band: instead, he sketched the band music on one or two staves, expecting the local bandmaster to complete the orchestration using appropriate forces. (Verdi behaved in much the same way.) For operas that have a continuous tradition, such as Verdi’s Rigoletto, theaters tend to use a modified version based on nineteenth-century models, but with fewer instruments. For operas lacking such a tradition, modern theaters will either commission a new orchestration for the banda or else forego the use of a stage band altogether and rewrite the music so that it can be played by instruments in the orchestra.
After studying this problem thoroughly, the editors of the critical edition of Rossini’s works decided to include, in each opera for which Rossini requires the presence of a stage band, a separately bound volume containing the original, early nineteenth-century setting of the band music for that opera, edited on the basis of surviving materials. These original orchestrations of the band music often circulated together with manuscript copies of the opera. While theaters might modify the banda setting to accommodate local circumstances, they tended to use the original orchestration as a point of reference. In some cases the results are remarkable. In La donna del lago, as we have seen in chapter 2, the original band consisted of two separate ensembles: one is a normally constituted band of some twenty-five players using a variety of band instruments; the other is a special ensemble of nine trumpets, four trombones, and percussion, associated with Malcom and the military forces he leads within the first-act finale, where the special ensemble is used both as a separate entity and in counterpoint with the fuller band. All these players were placed directly onstage, as we know from descriptions of the first staging of La donna del lago under Rossini’s direction in Paris in 1824. However a modern theater may decide to proceed, anyone seeking to understand the effect of Rossini’s opera in the early nineteenth century must take into account the sound that emerged from the stage at the end of the first act.
Among the La Fenice performing materials for Semiramide, we found what must have been the original scoring for the banda sul palco, a scoring present in a number of other manuscripts of the opera. Twenty-two instruments were employed by the anonymous arranger—winds, brass, and percussion—and rehearsals for the 1990 production at the Metropolitan Opera with the stage band alone demonstrated the scoring to be fluent and effective.26 In theory, then, there should have been no reason for a modern theater not to use this music, and at a production of Semiramide at the Rossini Opera Festival of Pesaro during the summer of 2003 the original ensemble was used to splendid effect. What actually transpired in New York we will see shortly.
4. THE NEW CRITICAL EDITION RENDERS ROSSINI’S OPERA MORE ACCURATELY AND PROVIDES A MORE IDIOMATIC TREATMENT OF ARTICULATION, DYNAMICS, AND SO FORTH. Every composer has different habits, some determined by personal considerations, some by external ones. When an opera composer is accustomed to the idea that his autograph will be used to prepare a printed edition of the complete orchestral score, he is motivated to be more precise about details, ensuring that there are dynamic markings in each part, that articulation is clear and reasonably coherent, that errors are corrected. He is precise because the medium in which his score will circulate is a precise one. When an opera composer expects his score to circulate in manuscript, as Rossini usually did, he tends to be less precise, since copyists’ manuscripts are prepared in haste and rarely reflect with accuracy a composer’s text. If a modern edition of an opera does not resolve contradictions and imprecisions in the autograph, chaos plagues the rehearsals. Rossini could count on musicians thoroughly familiar with his style, but the stylistic orientation of orchestral players today mutates with each work they perform. In its social framework, then, an edition of an opera differs markedly from an edition of a novel or even of a piano sonata. Experience dealing with Rossini autographs provides a framework within which to resolve these problems.
Sometimes errors and confu
sions in the autograph are amusing. At the beginning of Semiramide, for example, the Babylonians are celebrating the day in which their queen will announce her choice for their new king. Peoples from around the Middle East offer gifts and pay homage. Many nineteenth-century sources carefully copy the following choral text from Rossini’s autograph: “Dal Gange aurato, dal Nilo altero, dall’Orso indomito, dall’orbe intero” (From the golden Ganges, from the proud Nile, from the indomitable Bear, from the entire world). Indomitable Bear? What is this “Bear” doing among the major rivers of the ancient world? It is, of course, a Rossinian mistake. While entering the text of the libretto, Rossini wrote “Dal Gange aurato, dal Nilo altero, dall’orbe,” before realizing that he had skipped a line, “da Tigri indomito” (from the indomitable Tigris). Thus, the Tigris is properly invoked together with the Ganges and the Nile. But, as my associate editor, Patricia Brauner, commented when she first noted this problem, Rossini’s error is perfectly comprehensible: he simply substituted a bear (orso) for a tiger (tigre).
In our editorial efforts, of course, we assumed that we could reasonably control both the editorial process and the end product. Semiramide, however, was the first title in the Rossini edition to be prepared and typeset through computer processing. The advantages are manifold: changes and corrections are much simpler than they used to be, when every sign was punched into copper plates, and corrections entailed punching out signs already introduced and flattening the plate so that it could be punched again. Furthermore, computer processing allows performance parts to be generated directly from the full score, without the need to prepare those materials anew. However much we may lament the disappearance of the craft of music engraving, previously passed down from generation to generation, most music is now being processed through computer technology. But Semiramide was a first for us, and it soon became clear how many bugs were swarming around the computer program. As we corrected wave after wave of proof, we realized to our horror that new errors kept emerging. The process was controlling us, rather than the other way around. A correction made on page 225 in the cellos caused changes on page 227 in the bassoons because of linkages that had been made while the music was being entered into the computer. The lines seemed to be identical, and it was so easy for the computer operator to copy one from the other. What no one understood was that the linkage continued to be operative even when it was no longer appropriate. I personally read the proofs of Semiramide five times from beginning to end, swearing each time that I would never allow a score to be done on the computer again (an oath I promptly forgot). I don’t want to think how many readings were done by my staff or by Casa Ricordi.27
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