With Antonio Salieri’s opera ‘Prima la musica e poi le parole’ Germany based ‘Bärenreiter-Verlag’ has begun a new kind of edition project. ‘Opera – Spectrum of European Music Theatre in Single Editions’ is dedicated to critical editions of outstanding works from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Each of the planned 21 volumes of music includes a data carrier containing the libretto, the sources and the complete score. The multiple interconnections create an entirely new working basis for scholarship and operatic praxis.
The 21 compositions are of French, Italian, German, English, Scandinavian and Slavic origin. They include specific genres which have seldom been given attention in editorial undertakings until now and which present their own editorial problems, such as ballet, theatre music, melodrama or operetta.
What’s really new is the form of the presentation in so-called hybrid editions. While the scores appear in traditional cloth-bound volumes, the musical and textual sources, the editions of the dramatic texts, as well as the critical commentaries are prepared and presented on an electronic platform (Edirom). Thanks to this ability to access the underlying sources, the editorial decisions are completely transparent to the user.
More information: www.opera-edition.com
