Communications

This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of this journal, and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity.

To the Editor:

Your review of the edition of Il corsaro, edited by Elizabeth Hudson (The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, ser. I: Operas, vol. 13 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Milan: Ricordi, 1998]; Notes, September 2000, pp. 193-95) complains that the editor has only quoted the beginning of the inserted cabaletta "Oh! scellerato, la mia vendetta."
In fact, the voice part of the whole cabaletta is given in the article by Stephen Town, to which Hudson refers in her
notes. Strangely enough, neither Town nor Hudson has seen that this cabaletta is nothing other than Rolando's "Ahi scellerate alme d'inferno" from Act 3 of La battaglia di Legnano!

I take this opportunity of raising another question concerning Il corsaro.

The Bodleian Library here has a copy of the original oblong vocal score editon of I masnadieri, the back cover of which has an advertisement of operas published by Lucca running up to the year 1851. This advertisement lists three editions of operas in upright octavo using the treble clef, all three by Verdi: Attila, I masnadieri, and Il corsaro, which last is said to be in press ("sotto ai torchi"). Such an edition of Il
corsaro is mentioned neither by Hudson
nor by the Verdi bibliographies of Cecil Hopkinson (A Bibliography of the Works of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). 2 vols. [New York: Broude, 1973-78]) or Martin Chusid (A Catalog of Verdi's Operas [Hackensack, N.J.: J. Boonin, 1974]). Are we to conclude that, in view of the opera's poor success, this edition was never published?

RALPH LEAVIS
Oxford, England

To the Editor:

Thank you for your wonderful review of the American Memory digital media collections in the December 2000 issue of Notes (pp. 453-57)! I am a member of the National Digital Library music team and have worked extensively on the "Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870- 1885" collection for the past few years. It is nice to hear that our hard work is appreciated and put to use. I would like to bring to your attention a few very minor points in the "Music Collections" section of the review. Note that I can speak only for "Music for the Nation" and not the other American Memory music collections; some additional clarifications were brought to my
attention by the coordinator of the music team, Sue Manus.

In the first paragraph it is stated that cover art was scanned in color, but in our case this was not so--we scanned color covers as greyscale JPEGs. More importantly, it states that "at present there are no sound recordings of the music to go with the scores." There actually are a number of sound clips on our site if you follow the link, "In Performance--Choral Works from the Collection" (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/smhtml/audiodir.html). These went online shortly after the collection release date, so they may not have been available when the review was written. "Band Music from the Civil War Era" also contains music sound clips and the William Gottlieb jazz photos site has sound clips from oral history interviews with Mr. Gottlieb. The "American Ballroom Companion" site has an extensive selection of video dance tutorials produced especially for the site.

Also, the Dayton Miller Flute Collection does not now contain 1,650 online images (they have not all been photographed yet). It is currently in review with just over 100 digital images online. The Bernstein Collection has approximately 1,500 items online; these are just a sampling of the 400,000 physical items that are stored in the Bernstein archives. We would like your readers to understand that not everything in these two collections is available on the Web sites at this time.

On the art music front, an item of "late breaking news" is that the...