Il viaggio a Reims (review)

In his 1988 novel The Lyre of Orpheus, Robertson Davies centres his action on the reconstruction and performance of E. T. A. Hoffmann's fictionally incomplete opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. In a discussion concerning the merits of attempting such a completion, one of Robertson's characters opines 'I am not at all impressed by this passion to complete what fate has ordained should be incomplete', to which another character replies 'Ah, but you must admit that it has been done, and well done...Look at Janet Johnson's excellent reconstruction of Rossini's Journey to Reims...' (Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus (Harmondsworth, 1990), 56).

Although Davies's fictional character spoke for an entire generation of opera lovers, purchasers of CDs, and scholars of nineteenth-century music, even his fulsome praise does not do justice to the importance of Janet Johnson's reconstruction of Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims. The story of Rossini's last Italian opera was well known for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: written for the coronation of Charles X and performed at the Parisian Théâtre royal italien on 19 June 1825, half of Rossini's pièce de circonstance was almost immediately cannibalized as Le Comte Ory, premiered at the Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra) three years later. But after 1825, as anything more than a point of historical reference, Il viaggio a Reims disappeared almost completely.

By the time Davies's novel was published, Johnson's reconstruction of Il viaggio a Reims, ossia L'albergo del giglio d'oro had formed the basis of a performance at the Pesaro Festival in 1984 and a recording the following year. It took over a decade for the critical edition finally to appear, but it is has been well worth the wait. The edition falls into two handsome volumes now familiar from the Rossini critical edition, with a further paperback commento critico. The first volume includes the first four numbers and an extensive introduction, while the second contains the work's remaining five numbers. Perhaps the most striking thing about the edition is that, despite the immense complexity of the reconstruction, the score itself is uncluttered, and entirely usable in the pit. The very few footnotes on the page flag up matters of very real importance (where the music is not by Rossini for instance), but the bulk of the scholarly apparatus is consigned to the commento critico, where it can be considered by scholars, and—perhaps rightly—be treated with rather more circumspection by performers.

Tantalizing fragments of Il viaggio have remained in view ever since its premiere. It resurfaced in Paris in 1848 as Andremo a Parigi?— celebrating the 1848 revolution rather than the coronation of the last Bourbon, and again in Vienna in 1854—as Un viaggio a Vienna—for the marriage of Franz Joseph I and Elisabeth, the daughter of the Duke of Bavaria. Both the 1848 and 1854 versions of the work—however complicated they were by the types of reworking that such occasional circumstances entailed— bequeathed performance materials to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (L.19732 [A-C]; hereafter pPA II) and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (M486/83; hereafter pVI), and the full and piano-vocal scores of the opera's nemesis, Le Comte Ory, has been available ever since its publication by Troupenas in 1828 (hereafter Tr (CO)). The published libretto of the 1825 Il viaggio had enabled scholars to assess the textual changes between it and Le comte Ory, but the musical traces of the former were elusive in the extreme (Philip Edward Gossett, 'The Operas ofRossini: Problems of Textual Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Opera' (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1970), 515-20).

The beginnings of some hope that Il viaggio a Reims might some day reach the stage in its original form lay with the astonishing report in MGG of the existence of Rossini's fragmentary autograph of the opera in the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, Manoscritto G.55...