66. See the facsimile edition of the autograph manuscript of Mosè in Egitto, vol. 2, ff. 289–291, as well as the critical edition, 786 –96.
67. For further information, see the preface to vol. 3 of the critical edition of La donna del lago. What no one in the nineteenth century could have imagined, however, is a scoring in which horns inappropriately took the place of the martial trumpets, precisely what audiences at the Rossini Opera Festival heard in a particularly unfortunate production of La donna del lago during the summer of 2001.
68. Rossini, La gazza ladra, ed. Zedda; the problem occurs at m. 172 (p. 741).
69. The critical edition ofRigoletto, ed. Chusid, places the chord on the second beat (see p. 81).
70. For a typical example, see the facsimile of the autograph manuscript of Mosè in Egitto, ff. 34v–37v, in the Quintetto, where Rossini originally indicated “Come Sopra” for the repetition of the theme of the cabaletta (“Voce di giubilo”), writing only a single measure in the vocal part and two measures in the bass. This 47-measure passage was meant to be identical to an earlier passage on ff. 28 –31v. A copyist later erased the “Come Sopra” and added the vocal and orchestral parts, but his readings are not philologically significant: a critical edition must independently fulfill Rossini’s original instruction.
71. Recall Berlioz’s description of rehearsals on his travels in his Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. Holmes and Holmes: “The first clarinet is ill, the wife of the oboe has just been confined, the child of the first violin has the croup, the trombones are on parade—they forgot to ask for an exemption from their military duty for today; the kettle-drum has sprained his wrist, the harp will not come to the rehearsal because he needs time to study his part” (267).
CHAPTER THREE
1. See Verdi’s letter to Barbieri-Nini of 2 January 1847 and to Varesi from the last week of January, both printed in Rosen and Porter, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” 28 –30 and 36 –37. On 4 February he sent Varesi the vocal part of the “Scena Aria e Morte di Macbet,” which survives at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena.
2. Letter to Barezzi of 16 June 1847, published in Garibaldi, Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio Barezzi, 329.
3. See the introduction to Verdi, I masnadieri, ed. Marvin, xxx–xxxi (English) and lx (Italian). Characteristic is Verdi’s addition of ascending staccato arpeggios at mm. 61 and 65 of the Scena e Cavatina Amalia (N. 4): compare the final version of the cavatina (on pp. 102–3 of the edition) and the early version (in appendix 1B, p. 492, mm. 58a and 62a).
4. The correct note is printed in the critical edition of Rigoletto, ed. Chusid (see the commentary to the Aria Gilda [N. 6], Note 65, 69, on p. 51).
5. Both versions are printed in the critical edition of Guillaume Tell, ed. Bartlet. The original version, without the reprise of the chorus, is given in appendix 2, pp. 1513–1607 (see, in particular, mm. 427–442); the revised version, with the reprise, discovered by Bartlet in performing parts at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, is in the main score, on pp. 992–1068 (see, in particular, mm. 358 –375).
6. The revised duet is discussed in Gossett, “Anna Bolena” and the Artistic Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti, 151–76. In the most recent Ricordi vocal score (the 1986 reprinting, with modifications, of a nineteenth-century score), this Duetto is included on 105–27.
7. I discuss Donizetti’s modifications in the Duetto for the Dottore and Don Pasquale (N. 11) in the introduction to the facsimile edition of Don Pasquale, 48 –61 (Italian) and 119–31 (English).
8. See Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi, Cenni di una donna già cantante (Bologna, 1823), 35. Thanks to the recent recovery of a highly significant group of letters from Rossini to his family from the 1810s and 1820s, published as vol. 3a of Lettere e documenti, we now have access to the letters Rossini himself wrote to his mother after opening night of Il barbiere di Siviglia and after the next performance, and his statements support the anecdotal evidence (see 3a:119–23). The letters were sold as lot 175 at the Sotheby’s auction of 7 December 2001.
9. The contract is reproduced in Conati, La bottega, 290 –92.
10. Letter to Tito Ricordi of 4 February 1859, published in I copialettere, 556 –57. There has been important recent work on the history of this opera. See Izzo, “Verdi’s Un giorno di regno.”
11. See Harwood, “Verdi’s Reform of the Italian Opera Orchestra.”
12. See Jensen, “The Emergence of the Modern Conductor in 19th-Century Italian Opera.”
13. In her description of the manuscript sources of Guillaume Tell in the commentary to the critical edition (23–33), Bartlet analyzes the history in considerable detail.
14. Verdi’s most famous letter on the subject was to Camille Du Locle, dated from Genoa on 7 December 1869. See I copialettere, 219–22.
15. Rossini, Lettere e documenti, 2:154 –56.
16. For further information, see L’occasione fa il ladro, ed. Carli-Ballola, Brauner, and Gossett, xxix; and Il signor Bruschino, ed. Gazzaniga, xxvii.
17. The sources are described in Selk, “Matilde di Shabran,” 69–79. See also Gossett, “Le fonti autografe delle opere teatrali di Rossini.”
18. The history is told in my introductory essay to the facsimile of the autograph manuscript of Il barbiere di Siviglia, 29–32 (English) and 82–86 (Italian).
19. Rossini, Lettere e documenti, 1:150. See my introduction to the facsimile of the autograph manuscript of La Cenerentola, as well as the introduction to the critical edition of the opera, xxii.
20. Fortunately, a unique copy of this chorus, “Ah! Della bella incognita,” survives in a copyist’s manuscript in Rome.
21. Since autograph manuscripts were rarely pristine documents, however, this was no guarantee of a satisfactory edition, as Bartlet has demonstrated throughout her critical edition of Guillaume Tell.
22. For further information, see Devries and Lesure, Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique française: Des origines à environ 1820, and Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique française II: De 1820 à 1914.
23. The standard reference source for Italian publishers is Antolini, Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani 1750 –1930.
24. An excellent study of Roman publishers in this period is Antolini and Bini, Editori e librai musicali a Roma nella prima metà dell’Ottocento; see pp. 146 –90 for a complete list of the publications of Ratti and Cencetti, organized by plate number.
25. For detailed observations on a particular case, the distribution of Rossini’s Semiramide, which contractually was owned by the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, see Gossett, “Piracy in Venice.”
26. These extracts, published by the Litografia Annibale Patrelli of Naples, are described in the commentary to the critical edition of Ermione, 22. For further information about Patrelli, see the entry by Rosa Cafiero in Antolini, Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani, 258 –59, as well as Cafiero and Seller, “Editoria musicale a Napoli attraverso la stampa periodica,” in particular items 18 and 19 on p. 66.
27. Verdi’s Ernani, for example, had its premiere in March 1844, and the complete vocal score was advertised by Ricordi in August; see the commentary to the critical edition, 8 –10.
28. All pieces are printed in the critical edition of Tancredi: the original first-act aria (N. 4) on 131–47, the Milanese substitution (N. 4a) on 718 –39.
29. The manuscript is Florence, Biblioteca del Conservatorio “L. Cherubini,” D-III-176. The reorchestration is discussed in the commentary to the critical edition, 248.
30. The letter is printed in Barblan and Walker “Contributo all’epistolario di Gaetano Donizetti,” 27–28 (letter 32, identified also as Z. 151a).
31. Cambi, Bellini: Epistolario, 287.
32. Ibid., 335.
33. The 173-page score, published in 1832 in oblong format, has the plate numbers 5900 –5911. The original passage is printed on 85–100.
34. In his Cambridge Opera Handbook, Vincenzo Bellini: “ Norma,” 83–86, for example, David Kimbell concludes,
“It would be opportune to reinstate the evidently superior original readings.”
35. For an account of the controversy and many of the relevant documents, see Seller, “Il Marin Faliero da Napoli a Parigi,” “Il libretto,” and “La pirateria musicale e Marin Faliero: nuovi documenti.” See also Girardi, Gaetano Donizetti, which is filled with important studies and documents.
36. Zavadini, Donizetti, 387.
37. Ibid., 420 –21.
38. For further details, see both the preface and the commentary to the critical edition of L’Italiana in Algeri. The Neapolitan manuscripts of the opera, which will be discussed in the following paragraphs, are described in the critical commentary, 20 –21.
39. Reviewing the first Milanese performance of Tancredi, which had inaugurated the Teatro Re several months earlier, on 18 December 1813, the critic of the Corriere Milanese commented that “not all the instruments foreseen in the score were actually present in the orchestra.” See the preface to the critical edition of Tancredi, xxx.
40. According to Will Crutchfield, in a private communication, the recording was made for Moscow Radio in about 1950.
41. The history of the libretto is discussed in greater detail in Fabbri and Bertieri, L’Italiana in Algeri. Anelli’s 1808 libretto is reproduced on 51–102.
42. In a private communication, Will Crutchfield informs me that these symbols are found in some engraved Italian vocal pieces published in the British Isles as early as 1781.
43. See Beghelli and Piana, “The New Critical Edition.” The essay describes and compares the sources for L’equivoco stravagante: see 37–44 (Italian) and 45–53 (English).
44. A copy of the libretto prepared on that occasion is found in the library of the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale of Bologna (4663).
45. On the Martorelli copisteria, see Antolini and Bini, Editori e librai musicali, 13–19.
46. A copy of this libretto, published for performances at the Teatro Valle during the autumn of 1819, is found in the Biblioteca di Santa Cecilia in Rome, XXII 147.
47. Roman censorship remained strong as long as the Papacy retained political control of the region. For a fascinating study of a later period, see Giger, “Social Control and the Censorship of Giuseppe Verdi’s Operas in Rome (1844 –1859).”
48. The events are summarized in the historical introduction to Donizetti, Poliuto, ed. Ashbrook and Parker, xiii–xiv, as well as in Black, “The Contract for Paris.” For the historical context of this disaster-laden season, see Maione and Seller, “L’ultima stagione napoletana di Domenico Barbaja (1836–1840).”
49. Bellini told Florimo in a letter of 21–22 December 1834 that he would not send the duet to Naples because the singers engaged there could not do it justice and because “both love of country and Liberty are invoked” (Cambi, Bellini: Epistolario, 492).
50. I discussed this example in “The Tragic Finale of Tancredi”; see, in particular, 71–77 (English) and 156–62 (Italian).
51. The manuscripts are Venice, Biblioteca del Conservatorio “B. Marcello,” Busta 89; and Vicenza, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana, FF.2.6.5–6.
52. Among the many studies of the effects of censorship in Rigoletto, the most important is Lavagetto, Un caso di censura.
53. This letter was published for the first time in Evan Baker, “Lettere di Giuseppe Verdi a Francesco Maria Piave 1843–1865,” 156–57; Verdi discusses the problem in another letter, written a few days later, on 29 November (see Conati, La bottega, 227). Many of Verdi’s letters to Piave are now in the Koch collection at the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale University.
54. I copialettere, 497.
55. For an even worse situation, see the discussion of Donizetti’s La Favorite in chapter 11. This opera continues to be performed today in an execrable Italian translation of the French original. Bowing to religious proprieties as they existed in Italy during the 1840s, the relationships among the protagonists and their very identity were altered in this translation, rendering the story incomprehensible. This is not a matter of whether the opera should be sung in French or Italian, a question to which serious responses can be advanced from both sides. Even if La Favorite is to be performed in Italian, it is impossible to understand how a travesty of the opera can continue to be foisted on a confused public to the discredit of the composer. The vocal score (Milan, 1999), derived from Rebecca Harris-Warrick’s critical edition of 1997, has both the original French words and a partially new translation by Fausto Broussard, which finally makes it possible to perform the opera responsibly in Italian. There can be no excuse for continuing to use the deeply flawed nineteenth-century translation.
56. All the substitute arias by Rossini mentioned here are printed as appendixes to the critical edition.
57. See chapter 7.
58. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see chapter 12.
59. Meucci, “Il cimbasso e gli strumenti affini nell’Ottocento italiano.”
60. The manuscript prepared for the Teatro La Fenice at the time of the first performance on 7 March 1824 is reproduced in Meyerbeer, Il crociato in Egitto.
61. For an overview of the Ricordi firm in the nineteenth century, see Antolini, Dizionario degli editori musicali italiani, 286–313. The publishing house itself has issued two important surveys of its production: Sartori, Casa Ricordi 1808–1958; and Musica Musicisti Editoria: 175 anni di Casa Ricordi 1808–1983.
62. There has been little work on copyright issues for Italian opera composers. For one interesting contribution, see Kallberg, “Marketing Rossini.” Kallberg’s most important contributions to the history of musical copyright, however, are associated with the music of Chopin: see, in particular, “Chopin in the Marketplace.”
63. White, Stravinsky, 99; for White’s comments on the Petrushka revision, see 165.
64. Many of the documents from which the following paragraphs are derived are found in Sartori, Casa Ricordi, 11–46.
65. Let me thank that inveterate Rossini collector and friend, Colwyn Philipps (Lord St. Davids), who first pointed out this relationship to me.
66. These negotiations are described more fully in the introduction to the critical edition of Rigoletto, xi–xii (English) and xxxv–xxxvi (Italian).
67. In his Giuseppe Verdi and Giovanni Ricordi, Luke Jensen provides an overview of the business dealings between Verdi and Giovanni Ricordi, who died in 1853, together with a listing of all Ricordi publications pertaining to the operas through La traviata.
68. Letters from Muzio to Barezzi of 14 April 1847 and 22 April 1847, in Garibaldi, Giuseppe Verdi, 315 and 316, respectively.
69. For full details, see the introduction and commentary to the critical edition of Alzira, ed. Castelvecchi with Cheskin. Verdi’s reduction of the overture for piano solo is printed as appendix 2 of the edition, 415–20.
70. Letter from Verdi to Tito Ricordi of 24 October 1855, published in I copialettere, 168.
71. As we saw in chapter 2, the remark is found in a letter of 12 May 1858 to his friend Clarina Maffei: “From Nabucco on I have not had, you might say, one hour of calm. Sixteen years on the galleys” (ibid., 572).
72. These proof sheets, pertaining to the “Lux æterna” movements, are described in Verdi, Messa da Requiem, ed. Rosen, critical commentary, 20–21.
73. Letter from Donizetti to Giovanni Ricordi of 13 June 1833, published in Zavadini, Donizetti, 313.
74. Letter from Donizetti to Giovanni Ricordi of 1 August 1833, ibid., 325.
75. Letter from Donizetti to Giovanni Ricordi of 5 July 1839, ibid., 497.
76. Letter from Donizetti to Francesco Lucca of 7 March 1841, ibid., 533.
77. The pages pertaining to Rigoletto are reproduced in I copialettere, the first as table III (between 114 and 115), the second as table IV (facing 116). Unfortunately, the editors of I copialettere did not transcribe this material; nor did they include any other information of this kind in their publication.
78. The remark is from a letter to Tito
Ricordi in the Ricordi archives in Milan of 17 January 1863, a letter in which he particularly takes the publisher to task for the sloppy way in which articulation and dynamics are handled in the “Rataplan” in the act 3 Accampamento scene.
79. Gui relates the story in his 1971 text “Storia avventurosa di alcuni capolavori del passato.”
80. In a more extreme vein, it is also quite possible to concern oneself with the historical problem of how successive generations have modified a musical text, and the reasons that prompted them to do so. For an excellent example, see Senici, “ ‘Adapted to the Modern Stage.’ ” But few, if any, would urge us to allow the perceived necessities of London performers in 1821 to guide our behavior in mounting Mozart’s opera today.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Vaughan, “Discordanze fra gli autografi verdiani e la loro stampa.” In other articles he turned his attention to several Puccini operas.
2. In his “Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,” Roger Parker finds little evidence that the Nabucco chorus was singled out during the early years of the opera. While I disagree with some of his conclusions, I think he is correct in his assessment that the immense prestige of this chorus is largely a product of mythmaking in postunification Italy. For recent studies of twentieth-century Verdian mythmaking, see Polo, Immaginari verdiani, and Basini, “Cults of Sacred Memory.”
3. Let me thank the Dutch critic, J. R. Evenhuis, who kindly sent me a copy of the printed invitation to the public “debate between Maestro Denis Vaughan and Maestro Giulio Confalonieri about the vexed question of errors and differences between the autograph manuscripts of Verdi and Puccini and the current editions of their works.”
4. In the first issue of Verdi (1960), the president of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, Mario Medici, wrote that one of the institute’s goals was “the publication of a critical edition of Verdi’s complete works” (x, Italian; xviii, English).
5. Gavazzeni, “Problemi di tradizione dinamico-fraseologica e critica testuale, in Verdi e in Puccini.” I am quoting from the English translation included in the Ricordi reprint.
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