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Reviewed by:
  • Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini
  • Martin Deasy
Il barbiere di Siviglia. By Gioachino Rossini. Ed. by Patricia B. Brauner. Score: pp. lxxiv + 552, €647; Critical Commentary: pp. 420, €328. Works of Gioachino Rossini, vol. 2. (Bärenreiter, Kassel, 2008, ISMN 9790006552009 and ISMN 9790006552016.)

The project of preparing critical editions of the complete works of Rossini began in 1971, with the launch of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini under the aegis of the Fondazione Rossini and Casa Ricordi. With the aim of producing scholarly editions of all thirty-nine operas, not to mention the secular instrumental music, songs, and miscellaneous works(76 volumes in all), it was an enterprise of daunting scope. Nevertheless, by 2005, twenty-two operas and nine ancillary volumes had been issued, and, with the blocks of uniform brown cloth scores expanding inexorably along the world’s library shelves, there seemed every chance that these monumental ambitions would be fully realized. But alas, after nearly four decades of exceptionally fruitful cooperation, political considerations led to fallings out among scholars. As a consequence, since 2007 there have been two competing scholarly editions: the Edizione critica, published by Ricordi in collaboration with the Fondazione Rossini; and the new Works of Gioachino Rossini [WGR] issued by Bärenreiter in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Center for Italian Opera Studies.

In this way, nearly forty years after Alberto Zedda made the first moves towards a genuinely critical engagement with Rossini’s autograph sources, his 1969 critical edition for Ricordi of Il barbiere di Siviglia has been superseded by not one, but two authoritative successors, as both Ricordi and Bärenreiter brought out new editions of the opera in quick succession. There is, of course, no small irony in the fact that an endeavour intended to bring a degree of bibliographic control and stability to the famously proliferous and complex textuality of the operatic universe has ended up producing yet more multiplicity—already beginning, indeed, to accrue a textual history of its own. (Bärenreiter has published a revised version of the WGR Preface on its website, at <https://www.baerenreiter.com/fileadmin/ecs/BA10506-01/pdf/9790006552009_Innenansicht.pdf> (accessed 4 Nov. 2012).)

Under review here is the WGR edition, edited by Patricia B. Brauner, and distinguished from the brown Ricordi volumes by its bright yellow cloth binding. A 420-page Critical Commentary accompanies the single-volume score, which, besides the detailed Preface, includes a valuable ‘reading text’ of the libretto as set by Rossini, in which the versification and scansion of the original text is clearly represented.

The edition has benefited from the great strides in Rossini scholarship that have taken place since the publication of Zedda’s 1969 edition. In the intervening period, numerous additional sources have come to light in archives and libraries around the world; the autograph score itself underwent cleaning in 2001, enabling a number of readings to be clarified. However, it is the cumulative understanding of Rossini’s compositional practice from which the edition has benefited most. Four decades of intensive scholarly engagement with Rossini’s autograph sources have left modern editors far better equipped than their predecessors to interpret his musical notation, frequently set down at speed, and consequently often telegraphic and laconic in nature. Whereas for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, editors were prone to interpret differences in articulation as signs of inconsistency or distraction, their instinct being to homogenize readings, modern editors, informed in part by parallel developments in historically informed performance practice, are more likely to take Rossini’s written notation seriously.

Bartolo’s Act I aria (No. 8, ‘A un dottor della mia sorte’) demonstrates particularly clearly the results of such sustained attention to the autograph source. In Bartolo’s part at bars 14–15 of the Andante maestoso, WGR reports Rossini’s autograph notation: the four demisemiquavers are marked staccato, but the ‘structural’ semiquavers remain unmarked (in contrast to the articulation in the winds). In older scores (for example, the late nineteenth-century Ricordi score reprinted by Dover), [End Page 594] Bartolo’s demisemiquavers had traditionally been slurred in pairs, in keeping with a general tendency towards a broadly...

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