Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  31. For further details and references, consult Gossett, “Rossini e i suoi Péchés de Vieillesse,” and Bruson, “Olympe, Pacini, Michotte ed altri.”

  32. There is a description of this colorful character by his great-nephew, Michael Grant, in My First Eighty Years (Henley-on-Thames, 1994), 191–93. Let me thank Ronald Mellor for bringing this memoir to my attention.

  33. A copy of the catalogue, with annotations concerning the disposition of each lot and a list of those who acquired the manuscripts, is in the British Library.

  34. Vitoux, Fin de saison au Palazzo Pedrotti, 77.

  35. The recording, with Richard Bonynge conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, was issued by Decca (London A-4383). Sutherland and Horne had previously sung the opera together in concert performances in Los Angeles and New York (in 1964) and in a staged performed in Boston (1965).

  36. The notice was published in Venice on 27 March in the Giornale dipartimentale dell’Adriatico.

  37. The relevant documents are published in Gossett, “The Tragic Finale of Rossini’s Tancredi,” and in the critical edition of the opera.

  38. The page is reproduced in “The Tragic Finale of Rossini’s Tancredi” as plate V.

  39. The letter is published in Foscolo, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, vol. 16, Epistolario, bk. 3, 58.

  40. Ibid., 317.

  41. See the critical edition of Tancredi, 704–5 and 710–11. The edition, of course, contains both the original ending (in the bulk of the score as part of the original version of the opera) and the tragic ending (in an appendix featuring all the music Rossini prepared for Ferrara).

  42. In a most interesting study, Benjamin Walton has recently argued that Charles’s coronation itself was “operatic”: see his “ ‘Quelque peu théâtral.’”

  43. For full details, see the preface to Il viaggio a Reims, ed. Johnson.

  44. Gossett, The Operas of Rossini, 506–21.

  45. Most, but not all. I had hypothesized (see The Operas of Rossini, 517–19), on the basis of the structure of the poetry, that the duet for the Marchese Melibea and the Conte di Libenskof (N. 8) in Il viaggio a Reims was derived from a duet from Rossini’s Armida, the famous “Amor! (Possente nome!)”; see N. 5 in Armida, ed. Brauner and Brauner. In fact, although the poetry was indeed identical in shape, form, and meter, and had clearly been modeled on the Armida text, the duet from Il viaggio a Reims was a brand-new composition.

  46. The page is reproduced as Tavola 3 in the critical edition.

  47. I have only recently been informed, by Annalisa Bini, librarian of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, that the manuscript had belonged to Queen Margherita of Savoy (the widow of Umberto I) and was donated to the conservatory, along with an important group of other manuscripts, during the 1920s.

  48. See the section of the article “Römische Handschriften” written by Emilia Zanetti, in Blume, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 11:765–66.

  49. See, in particular, Johnson, “A Lost Rossini Opera Recovered.”

  50. The Italian critics gave it their Abbiati prize for the best operatic production of the year. For Andrew Porter’s withering attack, see his “Un viaggio a Pesaro.”

  51. Herbert Weinstock, who died in 1971, was the author of the important Rossini: A Biography.

  52. It is printed in the critical edition of Il viaggio a Reims, 762–825.

  53. See the Recitativo Dopo l’Aria Don Profondo, mm. 39–55 (on pp. 569–70).

  54. Donizetti, Maria Stuarda, ed. Wiklund. In fact, the autograph incorporates changes made by Donizetti when the opera was given in Milan at the end of 1835, so that a complete reconstruction of the Neapolitan version may never be possible. The remarkable collection of musical manuscripts in Stockholm is described in Lomnäs and Lomnäs, Stiftelsen Muikkulturens främjande (Nydahl Collection).

  55. The reconstruction of Gustavo III will be discussed in chapter 14.

  56. For complete information, see Hansell’s introduction to the critical edition of Stiffelio. For a discussion of the early Ricordi vocal score, see her commentary to the edition, 22–26; the surviving manuscript copies are discussed on 14–18.

  57. There are those, such as Julian Budden (see his discussion of La traviata in The Operas of Verdi, 2:165–66), who utterly reject the notion that Verdi’s art and his personal life might have interacted. My sympathies are much more with Luzio’s interpretation in “La ‘Traviata’ e il dramma intimo personale di Verdi,” in Carteggi verdiani, 4:250–76, which I do not find “sentimental” at all (the word is Budden’s), but wise and sensitive to the complex ways in which art and life intermingle.

  58. See the chorus near the beginning of the Scena, Coro, e Finale Primo (N. 5) at mm. 75–77, etc. (pp. 185–86). The changes begin as soon as the curtain goes up, where Verdi’s autograph manuscript indicates that Jorg “sta leggendo la Bibbia” (is reading the Bible), whereas other contemporary sources have him simply “leggendo” (reading).

  59. No written evidence has been produced to that effect, but so the story has been passed down from one generation to the next. See Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4:666, as well as Phillips-Matz, Verdi, 760, who reports it using much the same terms as Abbiati: “One of his main concerns was to provide for the destruction of the two wooden crates that contained his early compositions, which he had gathered in over many years. At the end of 1900 he asked Maria [Carrara] to take care of this for him.” For a fuller consideration of these questions, see Martin, “Two Unpublished Early Works: ‘La madre e la patria’ and ‘Marcia funebre,’ ” in his Aspects of Verdi, 139–56. See also the important contributions by Marvin, “A Verdi Autograph and the Problem of Authenticity,” in which she discusses a youthful Sinfonia in D major, and by Rizzo, “ ‘Con eletta musica del Sig. Verdi da Busseto, fu celebrata la Messa solenne,’ ” in which he announces the recovery of a Messa di gloria, part of which he convincingly attributes to the early Verdi. See also the publication of the facsimiles of Verdi’s autographs for three early works whose manuscripts are in the Museo teatrale alla Scala, with descriptions and critical editions of the music, in Giuseppe Verdi: the Sinfonia in D major, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin; the Tantum ergo for tenor and orchestra (1836), ed. Dino Rizzo; and the Notturno a tre voci with flute and piano (1839), ed. Marco Marica.

  60. From the unpaginated preface to Gatti, L’abbozzo del Rigoletto di Giuseppe Verdi.

  61. See Girardi and Petrobelli, Messa per Rossini.

  62. Verdi, Libera me domine (Messa per Rossini).

  63. The missing pages included the Preghiera e Finale Ultimo (N. 10), which needed to be reconstructed (see 397–412 in the critical edition) from a contemporary manuscript and—for the censored sections—from Verdi’s quite complete continuity draft.

  64. See, in particular, the studies by Gossett (“New Sources for Stiffelio”) and Hansell (“Compositional Techniques in Stiffelio”).

  65. See the Scena, Coro, e Finale Primo (N. 5), at mm. 284–288 (pp. 212–13), where Verdi’s “Del perfido Giuda il vil tradimento” was changed to “Antico. Dell’empio il vil tradimento” or “Antico. Dell’empio sarà il tradimento,” as well as the Duetto, Quartetto, Finale Secondo (N. 7), at mm. 323–324 (p. 336) and mm. 335–338 (p. 338), where Verdi’s “Ah! Sacerdote sono!” and “Da questa Croce agli uomini ha Cristo perdonato” were changed to “Assasveriano io sono!” or “Ah! sì, Stifellio io son!” and “Da questa Croce agli uomini ha il Giusto perdonato” or “Da questa Croce agli uomini il Giusto ha perdonato.”

  66. This Scena e Duetto (N. 9) is printed on 362–96 of the critical edition; see also the commentary, 136–51, for a discussion of the censored passages.

  67. For thoughtful, if somewhat contradictory, analyses of this term, see Della Seta, “ ‘Parola scenica’ in Verdi e nella critica verdiana”; and Folena, “Lessico melodrammatico verdiano.”

  68. Verdi also used the form “Dunque perdere volete.”

  69. I first presented this example in �
�New Sources for Stiffelio.” For an imaginative effort to interpret its possible meaning, see Parker, “Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings,” chap. 7 in his Leonora’s Last Act.

  70. Della Seta’s critical edition of La traviata and edition of the sketches are both in print; work on the other two operas is proceeding.

  71. See Gossett, “Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle and Its Several Versions.” A first performance in the United States, sponsored by the Juilliard School of Music and under the direction of Judith Clurman, took place at Alice Tully Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center on 19 March 2004.

  72. See Marvin’s introduction and commentary to I masnadieri.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. A bibliography pertaining to general issues of performance practice goes beyond the framework of this book. Readers interested in exploring some of the most recent work in this field should consult the pages of Early Music, a journal devoted to these matters, or the late and lamented Performance Practice Review, which ceased publication after ten years in 1997. Many of the historical issues mentioned in this section are highly controversial and have engendered acrimonious debate. For the most part, I will limit myself here to documenting matters that have general theoretical significance or pertain specifically to the performance of Italian opera.

  2. See Herz, “Johann Sebastian Bach in the Early Romantic Period” (esp. 100–109) and “The Performance History of Bach’s B Minor Mass.” A more recent discussion of these issues is Stauffer, Bach—the “Mass in B Minor,” esp. chapters 6 (“The B-Minor Mass after Bach’s Death: Survival, Revival, and Reinterpretation”) and 7 (“Issues of Performance Practice”), 175–249.

  3. Publication began in 1851. Rossini’s name appears as a subscriber during most of the years he lived in Paris (1855–68), from vol. 7 (1857) through vol. 16 (1868), with the sole exception of vol. 8. Traces of Bach’s style are to be found in many pieces from Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse.

  4. Later it would become de rigueur, for example, to accompany secco recitative with a harpsichord—rather than a piano—in operas by Mozart and Rossini, a practice widely accepted even among musicians who scorned other features of the growing interest in early instruments. For further observations on the accompaniment of secco recitative, see chapter 12.

  5. The new edition, which began publication in 1954, revolutionized our knowledge of much of Bach’s output—especially of his vocal music—thanks in part to the brilliant work of Alfred Dürr and Georg von Dadelsen.

  6. The debate was provoked by Rifkin’s recording on Nonesuch 79036 (New York, 1982), which was accompanied by Rifkin’s explanatory article “Bach’s ‘Chorus.’ ” A critical response by Robert Marshall, “Bach’s ‘Choruses’ Reconstituted,” was followed by a Rifkin rebuttal, “Bach’s ‘Choruses’: The Record Cleared.”

  7. For a suggestive discussion of the problem of early pianos, see Winter, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Malcolm Bilson himself has written extensively in the pages of Early Music. See also the remarks by Charles Rosen in his essay “The Benefits of Authenticity,” originally published in the New York Review of Books (19 July 1990) as “The Shock of the Old,” reprinted in Critical Entertainments, 201–21, esp. 208–10.

  8. I am thinking of a performance of the Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 for strings and continuo that I heard a few seasons back at Chicago’s Symphony Center, in which Barenboim placed the soloists in a semicircle around him, and signaled to them for more and more expression: the vibrato regularly grew so intense that it was impossible to make out the intricate contrapuntal lines.

  9. See Brendel, “Schubert’s Last Sonatas,” esp. 79–84. See, too, the responses in the New York Review of Books by Walter Frisch (16 March 1989), 42–43, with a reasoned rebuttal by Brendel, and by Neal Zaslaw (23 April 1989), with a Brendel wisecrack substituting for a rebuttal.

  10. See, for example, the beginning of his chapter “Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms,” in The Romantic Generation, 279–82.

  11. Taruskin, Text and Act. Those interested in pursuing the debate should begin their exploration with Kenyon, Authenticity and Early Music. I recommend particularly the contributions of Philip Brett and Howard Mayer Brown as correctives to Taruskin’s polemic in the same volume. For remarks aimed at performers, see le Hurray, Authenticity in Performance. Two philosophical treatises on the subject are Kivy, Authenticities, and Scruton, The Aesthetic of Music, esp. chapter 14, “Performance,” 438–56. As always, Charles Rosen, in “The Benefits of Authenticity,” brings to the discussion strong beliefs, elegant prose, and the ability to separate good arguments from bad. The most important recent contribution, and one that attempts for the first time to deal seriously with historical, critical, and philosophical arguments, while developing a genuinely new approach to the issues, is Butt, Playing with History.

  12. For Stravinsky’s most prominent compositional interaction with Baroque music, see Brook, “Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.” In most cases Stravinsky accessed the Baroque repertory from printed sources edited by twentieth-century musicians or scholars working from manuscripts and printed editions in the British Library or the library of the “S. Pietro a Majella” Conservatory in Naples. Edmund van der Straeten, who worked with the sources in the British Library, is best known as a cellist concerned with early instruments—the viol and viol playing, in particular—and unknown Baroque and Classical works. His most important book is History of the Violoncello, the Viol da Gamba, their Precursors and Collateral Instruments with Biographies of All the Most Eminent Players of Every Country. That only some of the music adopted by Stravinsky is by Pergolesi, as we now know, is of relatively minor interest for understanding Pulcinella. The questions that do matter are (1) What music did the scholars choose and why? (2) How did the manuscripts submitted by Diaghilev to Stravinsky reflect editorial decisions made by early twentieth-century musicians and scholars? That Stravinsky did with the music what he needed to do as an artist is, of course, unaffected by these questions, nor is there any presumption that Stravinsky’s music, in turn, did not have an effect upon modern attitudes toward music of the Baroque era. As ever, though, the relation between scholarship and composition or performance cannot be reduced to slogans.

  13. In fact, Kivy seeks to rehabilitate the term by referring to what he calls the “personally authentic performer” (Authenticities, 286).

  14. Furie, “An ‘Authentic’ Cavpag!” reviewing Angel SZCX 3895.

  15. Righetti-Giorgi, Cenni di una donna già cantante, 29–37. As we saw at the beginning of chapter 3, Rossini’s own reactions were expressed in recently recovered letters to his mother: they were written after opening night and again after the much more successful second performance: see Rossini, Lettere e documenti, 3a:119–23.

  16. Stendhal’s Vie de Rossini is filled with piquant observations about the social life of Italian theaters. See, for example, chapter 6, “L’Impresario et son théâtre,” 136–48 (translated in Coe, Life of Rossini by Stendhal, 110–19). Balzac’s finest description of life in an Italian theater is found in his short novel Massimilla Doni (1839), which includes the imaginary reconstruction of a performance of Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto at the Teatro La Fenice of Venice.

  17. These matters are discussed in chapters 9, 12, and 13, respectively.

  18. Perhaps the most fascinating effort to achieve a modern performance using nineteenth-century techniques of staging, lighting, singing, and orchestral placement was in the production of Verdi’s early opera Ernani at the Teatro Comunale of Modena, in December 1984, the first Italian performances of the critical edition. Papers delivered at a conference held during the same period are gathered in Ernani ieri e oggi.

  19. Rosen, “The Benefits of Authenticity,” 204.

  20. Some of them, of course, may have known the Voltaire tale, Candide, thanks to Leonard Bernstein’s musical.

  21. Donal Henahan, “Met Season: Better Than It Looked,” New York Times, 21 April 1991, 25.

  22. All matters per
taining to the critical edition of Semiramide are fully documented in that edition, and I have not repeated in footnotes what can be found through a perusal of the edition.

  23. Ricordi had moved its most precious autograph manuscripts to safer quarters, but not the bulk of its musical archive.

  24. We now know, however, that many nineteenth-century editions are derived from the first Italian edition, published in 1825 by Ricordi of Milan, an edition that partially depends on imperfect oral transmission (see Gossett, “Piracy in Venice”).

  25. Available vocal scores, either reprintings or reproductions of the Ricordi “edizione economica” or the Boosey vocal score, were fairly complete, so that it was immediately apparent where the full score was deficient.

  26. A small number of changes are needed to use these materials today. Because of the poor quality of the trumpets available in typical bands of the period, for example, arrangers often used trumpets tuned in different keys and parceled out a melody among these various trumpets, one note here, one note there, depending on which trumpets could play a particular note more easily. In today’s theaters it is wiser to trust the artistry of a trumpet player, whether he or she is employing a historical or a modern instrument, and—where possible—to assign the entire melody to a single instrument.

  27. Indeed, when it came time to print the critical edition of Semiramide in 2001, we abandoned that earlier score altogether and had the entire opera processed anew: it was more work, to be sure, but we felt decidedly more confident in the likely accuracy of the resulting score.

  28. The surviving sets and costumes from early productions in Italy are reproduced in Biggi and Ferraro, Rossini sulla scena dell’Ottocento.

  29. An ample selection of surviving ornamentation from the ninenteenth century is reproduced in the commentary to the critical edition. Rossini’s own ornamentation is given in an appendix to the main score.

  30. Usually orchestral rehearsals begin after those with the singers, but in the case of Semiramide the Metropolitan Opera schedule required that the first orchestral readings actually preceded work with the singers.