Opera Scores Research Articles

Об оперной режиссуре современного музыкального театра

The article is devoted to the issue of the stage director’s rendition of opera scores, as well as to the definition of the roles of the stage director, the conductor and the composer in the present-day opera theater. The author examines the historical premises for development of opera stage production and two main vectors of evolution of the process of stage production: the traditional and the innovative. The parameters which make it possible to fathom the level of transformation of the operatic source in its stage realization, namely, the temporally frameworks of the presentation of the line of the plot, correspondence to the instructions of the original libretto and the correlation of the composer’s ideas with those of the interpreting stage director. The author bases himself on the four types of manifestations of opera presentations of opera productions revealed by Evgeny Tsodokov – total authenticism, traditional realism, musical and poetical symbolism, and the innovative “stage director’s opera” – and characterizations are given defining the relation of the opera productions to each one of them. A comparative analysis is made of three production manifestations of Verdi’s pera “Rigoletto” on the topic of them pertaining to the indicated trends of the stage director’s rendition of the scores. Several fragments of productions are presented with an analysis of their production-related interpretation and, correspondingly, the relation of the productions to innovative or traditional approaches to the manifestation of the composer’s or stage director’s conceptions. The conclusion is arrived at regarding the significance of innovative production-related rendition for the contemporary opera theater. Keywords: opera stage production, interpretation of the libretto, the opera “Rigoletto,” typology of the stage director’s approaches.

Psychiatrist Teams With Elyn Saks on Opera Depicting Psychosis

Psychiatrist Teams With Elyn Saks on Opera Depicting Psychosis

Leoš Janáček ed. by Jiří Zahrádka

Reviewed by: Leoš Janáček ed. by Jiří Zahrádka John Tyrrell Leoš Janáček. Osud = Fate = Schicksal. Edited by Jiří Zahrádka. (Leoš Janáček: Souborné kritické vydání, Řada A / Svazek 5 = Complete Critical Edition, Series A / Volume 5.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016. [Introd. in Czech, Eng., and Ger., p. vii–l; libretto in Czech, Eng., and Ger., p. li–xcviii; ensemble in Czech, Eng., and Ger., p. xcix–ci; score, p. 1–439; crit. report, p. 441–63. ISMN 979-0-2601-0738-0, pub. nos. BA 9562-01, H 8038. €575.] Fate, or as often known by its Czech title Osud, is the only opera by Janáček that the composer never saw on stage: it was first performed as recently as 1958, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Together with the early and unrepresentative Počátek románu (The Beginning of a Romance) it was until recently the only Janáček opera still unpublished, available only for hire (three different piano-vocal hire scores were issued between 1964 and 1985, a full score in 1978). So the publication of Jiří Zahrádka’s full score for Bärenreiter is an important event, at the same time inaugurating the first of the publisher’s opera scores in the Complete Critical Edition. In its red cloth boards, with over four hundred pages of musical text, it is a handsome production. Over one hundred pages are devoted to Zahrádka’s historical preface tracing the opera’s checkered compositional and attempted performance history. Then follow side-by-side Czech-English and Czech-German librettos. These are not literal translations, but the earlier singing translations by Rodney Blumer and Claus H. Hennenberg supplied with the music text but now shorn of repetitions. Why has it taken so long for Fate to appear in print? Once Janáček achieved his breakthrough in Prague with his third opera Její pastorkyňa (Jenůfa) in 1916, [End Page 773] Universal Edition was quick off the mark, publishing a Czech piano-vocal score with a German translation, and continuing this practice for all his subsequently staged operas (full scores were also issued for three of them). Universal has been exemplary in keeping the piano-vocal scores in print and, from 1993 onward, began issuing high-quality study scores, a process that continues with the recent appearance of Zahrádka’s edition of Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair [Vienna: Universal Edition, 2016]). Even Šárka has not been forgotten. Janáček was touchingly proud of his first opera, which he extensively revised after the success of Jenůfa, and it was only his death in 1928 that let Universal Edition off the hook. Universal Edition finally published it in 2002, again edited by Jiří Zahrádka. Two operas escaped the Universal Edition net: The Beginning of a Romance, not much more than a folksong compilation that the composer himself rejected after conducting a few performances; and Fate, an opera, on the other hand, that Janáček desperately believed in. Years later, in an autobiographical sketch, he recalled his fourth opera with the following words: “And she was one of the most beautiful of women. Her voice was like that of a viola d’amore. The Luhačovice Slanice was in the scorching heat of the August sun. Why did she walk about with three fiery roses and why did she relate the story of her young life? And why was its end so strange?” (p. xxi). One of the problems with Fate (but also one reason why Janáček clutched on to it so tenaciously) was its autobiographical nature. The “she” that Janáček does not further identify here was Mrs. Camilla Urválková, whom Janáček had met in the summer of 1903 at the Moravian spa of Luhačovice, where he had gone to get over the death of his daughter Olga. With his third opera Jenůfa recently finished and awaiting its Brno premiere the next season, his mind was open to new impulses. Urválková provided one. Hearing that Janáček was a composer, she told him about her encounter with another composer, Ludvík Čelanský (better known as...

Briefs / Feuilletons

Briefs / Feuilletons Natalie Lorch, Pauline Sjöberg, and Ricardo Tacuchian The Music Department of the German Historical Institute in Rome (Italy), with a project funded by the German Research Council DFG, has completely digitised two of the most important collections of Italian opera manuscripts. The work was completed by a team under the scientific supervision of musicologist, Dr. Roland Pfeiffer. Aspects of this project were presented at the IAML annual congresses in Moscow (2010) and Dublin (2011). The original manuscripts are in the possession of aristocratic families in Rome. Their digitisation consists of more than 110,000 single images and includes copies of around 143 full opera scores from the Roman and Neapolitan region, datable from 1770 to 1815, and held by the private library located in the palace of the Principi Massimo family. These manuscripts had first been recognized within a list published by Friedrich Lippmann in 1976 (“Musikhandschriften und –Drucke in der Bibliothek des Fürstenhauses Massimo, Rom. Katalog“, in Studien zur italienisch-deutschen Musikgeschichte XI, ed. by Friedrich Lippmann. Analecta musicologica, 17. [Köln, 1976], 254–295). The originals of the second opera collection now digitised are held by the Archivio Doria Pamphilj, situated in the palace of this well-known aristocratic family, where also can be found one of the most important private art museums of the city. The thirty-six complete scores are mostly Roman comic and serious operas datable around 1760–1770, but there are also some earlier and later datable oratorios. To these scores must be added twenty-eight volumes of aria collections (often titled with “Arie di diversi autori”, among these also music by less known composers), and around 125 single pieces in loose quires (mostly arias and some ensembles), which have also been included in the digitisation project. At present, all digital copies can be consulted by researchers within the library of the Music Department of the German Historical Institute in Rome (contact: pfeiffer@dhiroma.it). Detailed schedules of the opera scores from the Massimo collection (library siglum: I-Rmassimo), created by the team of the project, can be found in the RISM database https://opac.rism.info. Authority control for historic recordings and METS/MODS exchange format for digitised historic sound carriers at the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden (SLUB). Since July 2015, it is possible to generate data records for historic sound recordings in the German Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei – GND). A set of categories for this purpose was prepared at the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden (SLUB) in cooperation with the project partners from the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek – DNB), and the Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, Vienna. Information on historic recordings of the shellac era (ca. 1890–1960), such as recording date or place is very rare. Consequently, the project aims to provide a cataloguing tool and obtaining a data pool for research on early recordings. Within this project, SLUB will prepare 5,000 data records as a basic set for this discographic authority file. The fundamental metadata will be supplied by the recently completed 78 rpm record project “Archiv der Stimmen”, in which SLUB catalogued and digitised about 16,000 sound recordings (see mediathek.slub-dresden.de). [End Page 45] The discographic authority file is part of the project “Standardisation of Metadata for Audiofiles” (Standardisierung von Erschließungsdaten digitalisierter Tonträger in wiss-enschaftlichen Sammlungen), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Another part of this project consists of modeling a METS/MODS profile for digitised sound carriers. The ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) in New York City has recently partnered with the Internet Archive in San Francisco. They have afforded us the space and capabilities to process and handle a great many new projects and donations. Here are a few developments that may be of interest to readers: • Gracenote (who supply metadata to a great many commercial entities, including iTunes) donated 13,074 DVDs. There are also a few thousand compact discs, music books, and music periodicals. The good news is that everything is expertly, electronically, catalogued. While there are a great many music videos in this collection, there are also a substantial amount of Hollywood releases, foreign films, TV...

Hybrid Critical Editions of Opera: Motives, Milestones, and Quandaries

The publication term “hybrid digital edition” came into existence at the end of 2013, with the publication of Salieri’s theatrical divertimento Prima la musica, e poi la parola . It is a hybrid in that its theatritical apparatus is a digital constellation of auxiliary materials consulted in the course of constructing a new edition, while the score is a conventional one. A user can in principle consult the two bilaterally, but the confinement of the critical report to a physical device unsuited to network use has crippled it in some libraries. Since Prima la musica is both the first of a series of other operas presented in the same way, and of a more opened-ended effort to edit works in other genres similarly, it is important to understand how this combination came to be and what its potential advantages are. Since the new model was perceived by many librarians in the U.S. as excessively expensive, a table of prices of recently published opera editions is provided. These editions prove not to be moderately priced, but the costs of opera scores produced in Europe is, on average, much higher than those produced in the U.S.

<i>Caesar</i> Re-Configured: An Ensemble Presentation of Improvised Permutations

Many years ago it used to be claimed that one must ‘perform the play as Shakespeare wrote it’. Today the absurdity of this is more or less recognized: nobody knows what scenic form he had in mind. All that one knows is that he wrote a chain of words that have in them the possibility of giving birth to forms that are constantly renewed. There is no limit to the virtual forms that are present in a great text. A mediocre text may only give birth to a few forms, whereas a great text, a great piece of music, a great opera score are true knots of energy. Like electricity, like all sources of energy, energy itself does not have a form, but it has a direction, a power. (Peter Brook)1

An optical music recognition system for traditional Chinese Kunqu Opera scores written in Gong-Che Notation

This paper presents an optical music recognition (OMR) system to process the handwritten musical scores of Kunqu Opera written in Gong-Che Notation (GCN). First, it introduces the background of Kunqu Opera and GCN. Kunqu Opera is one of the oldest forms of musical activity, spanning the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and GCN has been the most popular notation for recording musical works in China since the seventh century. Many Kunqu Operas that use GCN are available as original manuscripts or photocopies, and transforming these versions into a machine-readable format is a pressing need. The OMR system comprises six stages: image pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, symbol recognition, musical semantics, and musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) representation. This paper focuses on the symbol recognition stage and obtains the musical information with Bayesian, genetic algorithm, and K-nearest neighbor classifiers. The experimental results indicate that symbol recognition for Kunqu Opera's handwritten musical scores is effective. This work will help to preserve and popularize Chinese cultural heritage and to store Kunqu Opera scores in a machine-readable format, thereby ensuring the possibility of spreading and performing original Kunqu Opera musical scores.

Reviving early opera: the past as progress

As the Verdi anniversary year begins, we should bear in mind his celebrated statement: ‘Let’s go back to the old ways: it will be progress’. Opposing the Wagnerian ‘art of the future’, Verdi praises what we today consider ‘early music’: Palestrina ‘in primis’, then Carissimi and Cavalli for the 17th century, and Scarlatti, Leo, Pergolesi and Piccinni among later masters. Not Monteverdi, however, whom he regarded as ‘incompetent in setting voices’!1 But it was Monteverdi’s music that sparked the rediscovery of early opera at the beginning of the 20th century, with multiple revivals of his Orfeo. A century later, the early opera revival appears to be the most significant facet of the early music movement of the post-war era.2 I outline here one paradigmatic case: the discovery of Francesco Cavalli, which was a consequence of the immense international popularity gained by Monteverdi over the last 50 years. Because there are only three surviving operas by Monteverdi, conductors and artistic directors started searching quite early on for other works similar to Monteverdi’s masterpieces, which could be presented in festivals or at the opera house. The most obvious choice was Cavalli, not only because he was a pupil of and the faithful successor to Monteverdi in 17th-century Venice, but also because no fewer than 23 opera scores by him survive and are readily available: a treasure-trove left almost untouched until the late 1960s (the first modern revival was Didone, in a 1952 Florence production conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini). Around that time, Raymond Leppard inaugurated a series of Cavalli performances—some of which were recorded—and so the Cavalli renaissance began. In the generation following Leppard, the most important figure in the revival has been the Belgian singer and conductor René Jacobs: his 1985 Xerse recording with Concerto Vocale soon became the model for a new way of performing Italian 17th-century opera, and Cavalli in particular.

Chemical Mapping of Paleontological and Archeological Artifacts with Synchrotron X-Rays

The application of the recently developed synchrotron rapid scanning X-ray fluorescence (SRS-XRF) technique to the mapping of large objects is the focus of this review. We discuss the advantages of SRS-XRF over traditional systems and the use of other synchrotron radiation (SR) techniques to provide corroborating spectroscopic and diffraction analyses during the same analytical session. After reviewing routine techniques used to analyze precious specimens, we present several case studies that show how SR-based methods have been successfully applied in archeology and paleontology. For example, SRS-XRF imaging of a seventh-century Qur'ān palimpsest and an overpainted original opera score from Luigi Cherubini is described. We also review the recent discovery of soft-tissue residue in fossils of Archaeopteryx and an ancient reptile, as well as work that has successfully resolved the remnants of pigment in Confuciusornis sanctus, a 120-million-year-old fossil of the oldest documented bird with a fully derived avian beak.

Notation and expression of emotion in operatic laughter

AbstractThe emotional expression of laughter in opera scores and performance was evaluated by converting notation to temporal data and contrasting it with the conversational laughter it emulates. The potency of scored and sung laughter was assayed by its ability to trigger contagion in audiences.

Who Can Write An Opera? F.C. Bressand and the Baroque Opera Libretto

Abstract The German opera librettist of the seventeenth century wielded a surprising amount of power. The birth of opera in Germany is marked by authorial practices that seem peculiar by current standards, the interpretation of which is complicated by the disappearance of virtually all opera scores from this period. The libretti, however, were consistently preserved and published—as operas or singspiels—under the name of the librettist. The genre of texts written for operatic setting was a recognized literary form in itself. The German opera librettist stood in a tradition that reached back to the medieval Minnesingers and that was rearticulated in the poetics of Martin Opitz. Through the example of F. C. Bressand, a prominent Baroque librettist who has now nearly been forgotten, I argue that the authorial dynamic between opera composers and librettists was the reverse of that which has since prevailed: the librettist was considered the primary author. (ESH)

Who Can Write An Opera? F.C. Bressand and the Baroque Opera Libretto

The German opera librettist of the seventeenth century wielded a surprising amount of power. The birth of opera in Germany is marked by authorial practices that seem peculiar by current standards, the interpretation of which is complicated by the disappearance of virtually all opera scores from this period. The libretti, however, were consistently preserved and published—as operas or singspiels—under the name of the librettist. The genre of texts written for operatic setting was a recognized literary form in itself. The German opera librettist stood in a tradition that reached back to the medieval Minnesingers and that was rearticulated in the poetics of Martin Opitz. Through the example of F. C. Bressand, a prominent Baroque librettist who has now nearly been forgotten, I argue that the authorial dynamic between opera composers and librettists was the reverse of that which has since prevailed: the librettist was considered the primary author.

The clarinet in England

As one of the authors of the article concerned, I feel I should respond to Albert Rice's claim (‘The clarinet in England during the 1760s’, EM, xxxiii/1 (Feb 2005), p.63, n.27) that ‘Contrary to the worklist in New Grove II, [Thomas] Arne did not use the clarinet in his cantata Love & Resentment’. In fact, in the compressed score of the first air of the work, ‘Why Damon, wilt thou strive in vain’, as published in Arne's collection Summer Amusement (London, 1766), pp.27–36, there are three indications for ‘Clar[ine]ts’ above a stave labelled at the outset ‘violins’. Arne seems to have intended the clarinets to combine and alternate with the violins. There are no other indications for them in the other two movements, though it would also make sense for them to play along with the violins in some of the passages of the last air, ‘No, no, for a thought so meanly base’. Incidentally, a quick look through The solo cantata in eighteenth-century Britain, a thematic catalog (Warren, MI, 2003) by Rice's namesake Paul F. Rice reveals only one extra work that probably comes within the scope of the article, Charles Dibdin's cantata ‘Oft I've implor'd the gods in vain’, published in 1770, though the clarinet is also called for in cantatas published in the 1770s by Thomas Arne (Diana, 1774), Samuel Arnold, Joseph Ganthony, Tommaso Giordani and James Hook. It reinforces Rice's point that the instrument was well established in English musical life by the early 1770s. A systemic search through opera scores, song collections, psalmody collections and military band music of the period would doubtless fill out the picture further.

Disability Studies and the Vancouver Opera's Of Mice and Men

In Disability Studies and the Vancouver Opera's Of Mice and Men, the author analyzes disability representation, revision and erasure in John Steinbeck's novella, Of Mice and Men, Carlisle Floyd's opera score, and the Vancouver Opera's 2002 production. She argues that the attempt to rewrite the central character Lennie as merely a metaphor leaves a social and aesthetic gap that is underscored by a performer's attempt to embody the role.

Les papiers a musique imprimes en France au XVIIe siecle: Un nouveau critere d'analyse des manuscrits musicaux

About 10 to 15 % of the seventeenth-century French music manuscripts are written on printed music paper, i.e. paper on which staves were printed or engraved beforehand. Such papers appear to be more and more common in France as they become an usual stationery product, available in more than 20 combinations of formats and stavings. A few printing centres and workshops can be identified: Paris (mostly a Ballard production, and Bonnard), Strasbourg and Lyon, while marketing trend oscillates between music printing, stationery and print trade. The A. describes 65 different papers and lists manuscripts using them in 33 European or American libraries. Describing these papers in music manuscripts can add new scientific clues in addition to the study of watermarks, handwriting, binding or provenances. The main sources where printed music paper can be found are student/master manuscripts, Lully's opera scores and large corpuses as the collection of the Petit-Peres des Victoires or the famous Charpentier's Melanges.

La Carmen essentielle et sa réalisation au spectacle (review)

Book Reviews the genre: its tendency to shock, the excess of description, and the entropie vision of reality. Baguley has written an excellent, well-supported study which, despite the complexities inherent in post-modern literary criticism, contributes to our understanding of the paradox of naturalist literature. Shelley Thomas Middle Tennessee State University Mary B. Collier. La Carmen essentielle et sa réalisation au spectacle. (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, no. 14.) New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Pp. χ + 194. In this year of grace, when theaters around the world, from London to San Francisco, are presenting their versions of Carmen, nothing could be more appropriate to the air of general revival than this study by Mary B. Collier. Since the day when Nietzsche could demand, after hearing Bizet's opera, that music must be more Mediterranean, or Mahler advise aspiring composers to study carefully the opera score, Western audiences have been not merely attracted to this work, well-known to the point of becoming trite, but also fascinated, as if under a spell. The early attention paid to the opera was concerned primarily with the love-interest, or how Carmen was to bed Don José; while a later public, no doubt under the influence of Freud and his successors, has been more drawn to the prevalence of a death-wish in both the heroine and the hero. Amid critics raving about various interpretations of Carmen as hoyden, or seductress, or disturbed (if not deranged) woman, or of Carmen as any number of other "cases, " the simple opera-goer would like—in fact needs—a surer guide than the writers of morning-after reviews. This book fulfills that need. Divided into three parts, the first deals with the origins in Mérimée and Bizet, completed by an essay on the transformation of genres. It seems that not a stone in the critical literature has been left unturned in the attempt to be definitive. For Mérimée, the author has consulted not only the basics, like Trahard, Raitt et al., but also the sometimes neglected but important work of F. P. Bowman; while for Bizet, she has dug into nineteenth-century sources and such ephemeridae as articles and reviews, completing this last with twentiethcentury criticism in newspapers and magazines. She remarks time and again on the importance of the air "En vain pour éviter..." (Act III), and, despite many another critic, defends Bizet for remaining true to Mérimée's original. This interpretation is the key to the second part, where the author treats a selection of twentieth-century works. Here there are chapters devoted to Carmen Jones, Roland Petit's ballet, Peter Brook's stage version, Carlos Saura's transmogrification, and other adaptations by Igesz, Rosi and Hall. In each instance, there is a careful, objective presentation, followed by a nice analysis with conclusions that do honor to Mérimée-Bizet no less than to Ms. Collier herself. The pages devoted to Carmen Jones and Saura seem the most satisfying , but in every case the interpretation is founded on excellent critical acumen. The whole is completed by a conclusion in which the originals are again summarized and their glories noted for today's interested reader. But this work is more than a guide or handbook; it is an informed and most intelligent piece of both literary and musical criticism, accompanied by a table of musical illustrations, an apparently exhaustive bibliography, and an index that make of it a truly "essential" offering. Basil Guy University of California, Berkeley VOL. XXXVII, NO. 3 97 ...

Twentieth-Century Farinelli

Farinelli the film disappoints. Despite the possibilities inherent in the historical story, not to mention the pageantry, sexuality, and music, the film lacks a compelling narrative and fails to make any of the characters meaningful or sympathetic.1 Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that the film is not so much about any of the main characters (Farinelli, his brother Riccardo Broschi, or Handel) but about a rather superficial idea: the equation of music and sex. What we learn is that music, here specifically Farinelli's voice, has the power to drive crowds into a frenzy and bring individual listeners to sexual climax. This theme is emphasized by limiting the music in the film to realistic use; that is, music functions as an integral part of the scene, is performed and heard by the characters,2 and, as a result, becomes a full-fledged actor, if not the most important actor, in the drama. This is true even in the one striking exception to the use of realistic music in an early scene, where Farinelli's voice is overlaid during one of his sexual adventures.3 Here the use of background music serves to underscore both the relation of music and sex and the point that it is Farinelli's voice that brings the orgasm.4 The film reaches for and almost obtains real substance in offering one important caveat to the otherwise trite equation of sex and music: that in music, as with sex, virtuosity for its own sake brings only empty pleasure, but music and sex with true feeling are transcendent experiences. Compositionally, this idea pits a swarthy and domineering Riccardo Broschi against an urbane and curmudgeonly Handel. Each composer in turn holds a cruel and fascinating sway over Farinelli. Under Broschi's domination, Farinelli loses his ability to procreate, sings his brother's endless roulades, and sexually excites women for his brother to inseminate. After Handel takes hold of Farinelli through his music, the castrato sings for the first time with emotion, discovers a sexual will of his own (as opposed to being his brother's opening act), and finds true love in the fictional Alexandra Leyris, who empowers Farinelli's transformation by stealing a Handelian opera score for the castrato to perform. The details of this story, of course, fall into the realm of historical fiction.5 However, the frame on which it is thinly stretched remains surprisingly true to the known facts. Farinelli did study with Porpora; he did frequently sing the music of his brother, Riccardo Broschi, and Broschi's music

Gounod's Faust and Bulgakov's the Master and Margarita

M ikhail Bulgakov's love of the opera Faust verged on the fanatical. According to his sister Vera, the young Bulgakov attended no fewer than forty-one performances of Gounod's opera in Kiev. His first wife recalled that the writer often sang two arias from Faust: Mephistopheles' Le veau d'or [calf of gold] (in Russian: Na zemle ves' mir liudskoi [all people on the earth]) and Valentin's prayer.2 It is no exaggeration to say, as Ellendea Proffer does, that the French opera occupied such an important place in Bulgakov's psyche that the very image of the opera's score standing open on the piano, as it does in White Guard, symbolized security for him.3 Not surprisingly, works from throughout his career reflect Bulgakov's enduring love affair with Gounod's Faust.4

Newly Identified Manuscripts of Operas and Related Works from Mannheim

Opera at the court of Elector Palatine Carl Theodor in Mannheim during the period 1742-78 attained a level of prestige fully equivalent to that of other leading courts of the day. Yet the loss of most of the performance materials in use at Mannheim has constantly hindered basic research in this area. The present article reports the existence of twenty-eight manuscripts (mainly full scores) of twenty separate operas and related secular dramatic works that were either copied at Mannheim or prepared for use there. Eight of these are revealed to have belonged to the personal collection of Count Carl Heinrich Joseph von Sickingen (1737-91), privy councillor to Carl Theodor and his envoy in Paris from 1768 until his death. Discovery of a thematic catalogue of Sickingen's collection allows the partial reconstruction of its contents; this has special relevance in that Mozart was a frequent guest of the count during his sojourn in Paris in 1777/78 and can be shown to have known and made use of his collection of opera scores.

NEW SOURCES FOR ‘POPPEA’

AS IS WELL KNOWN, La coronazione di Poppea lies at the centre of a range of problems -questions of attribution, sources, historical interpretation -which, far from being resolved, seem to have become ever more complicated with the passing of time.' Two new manuscript librettos can now be added to the list of sources relating to the opera (a list that is already anything but short), and even a preliminary examination of them can illuminate the literary fortunes of Busenello's text, which seem increasingly to have surpassed those of the opera's score and, effectively, its performance. But before proceeding to an examination of the relationship between these new sources and those already known to scholars, it is worth recalling that the methods of classical textual philology can be applied to librettos only with great flexibility, given the nature of the mechanisms of reproduction and the fact that texts for the stage are only part of a given production and that their contents are far from immutable. The application of such methods here, then, is made in that light, and the conclusions that emerge must necessarily remain speculative. They are, however, not without interest. The first libretto (henceforth W) survives in Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, BOZ 1043. In fact, it would be inappropriate to call this a new discovery, for the manuscript has been known for some time and indeed has been regularly included in printed catalogues of the library since 1976.2 But given that references to it have generally been restricted to writings in Polish -one exception is a discussion of it by Jerzy Kowalczyk in an article in Italian3 -most scholars have not been aware of its existence. This manuscript libretto comes from Zamos'c in Poland and should in all probability be associated with the noble Jan 'Sobiepan' Zamoyski, who was born in 1627 and who visited Italy several times in the mid seventeenth century: for the period 1643-5 (in Venice, Mantua, Florence, Naples, Rome, Pisa and Lucca) -that is, about the time of the premiere of Poppea -and on at least four occasions between 1646 and 1652 (in Padua, Bologna, Rome and Venice).4