Stiffelio (review)

Giuseppe Verdi's Stiffelio premiered in Trieste on 16 November 1850. The text that was performed, however, did not reflect the opera as Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave had originally conceived it, for the religious and moral issues in the tale of a minister with an adulterous wife did not pass the government censors. Even as the composer and librettist began to consider revisions to the original score in 1851, an unauthorized, revamped version of Stiffelio entitled Guglielmo Wellingrode began to appear on stages in Rome and Florence. The composer, however, never sanctioned this adaptation; in fact, he considered it to be a distortion of the original work. Despite his protests, both works continued to be performed. Stiffelio, for instance, saw an important production in Venice in January 1852, followed by the publication of a complete vocal score by Ricordi in June and a revival in Trieste in November. After the November 1855 production of Guglielmo Wellingrode in Naples, an angry Verdi ordered his publisher, Casa Ricordi, to cease distribution of the opera in any form until he could revise it properly.

Indeed, the composer did not abandon the opera that he had created alongside Rigoletto (which had premiered in Venice on 11 March 1851). After several abandoned attempts, he and Piave revisited Stiffelio seriously in 1856. While the librettist provided a new plot and text, Verdi extracted numbers from Stiffelio's score, interspersing them with newly composed ones; the result was Aroldo, a work offered to Rimini the following year as a "new" opera, performed at the Teatro Nuovo on 16 August 1857. Because the only known autograph sections of Stiffelio were thought to be those imbedded in Aroldo, scholars presumed that Verdi had destroyed the rest of the score that Julian Budden describes as "doomed" by censors, critics, and confused audiences (see Budden's oft-cited history of Stiffelio in The Operas of Verdi: From Oberto to Rigoletto [London: Cassell; New York: Praeger, 1973; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; rev. ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 447-74, at 453). The only other possible repository of autograph materials would have been at the Ricordi rental archive in Milan but, had any scores been housed therein, they would have been destroyed when the archive was bombed in World War II.

With the rest of Verdi's autograph presumed lost, the discovery of several copyists' autographs in the mid-twentieth century took on greater significance and indeed paved the way for the first performances of Stiffelio in over a hundred years. Two of the manuscripts, one of a highly-censored version of Stiffelio and the other of Guglielmo Wellingrode, were found in the Biblioteca di S. Pietro a Majella in Naples; these were subsequently employed as the basis of a performing edition for the opera's first modern production in Parma in December 1968. Another copyist's score of Stiffelio was located in Vienna at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek several years later. Separate editors used this score to create performing editions for La Fenice in December 1985 and Covent Garden in January 1993. While together these manuscripts are significant in the opera's history, none of the three can be considered an accurate reflection of Verdi's original.

When the Metropolitan Opera began planning its 1993 production of Stiffelio, Philip Gossett, general editor of the The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, was asked to assist, and a hunt for further sources...