Armide: Tragedie en musique (review)

It is not often that a major composer is the object of two competing critical editions. It is even less often that the publisher of one of these editions reviews a volume from the other. Yet, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must declare at the outset that this is just what is happening in the review that follows.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) was one of the most influential composers in the history of Western music. He was also one of the most unpleasant. Ambitious, autocratic, and vindictive, he was a skillful and ruthless intriguer, and those who fell afoul of him did so to their misfortune; his victims included his quondam secrétaire Jean François Lallouette (1651–1728), the claveciniste Jacques Champion, Sieur de Chambonnières (1601/2–1672), and the great actor–manager–playwright Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–1673).

One might well believe that the curse of one of Lully's enemies has pursued the composer down the centuries, denying him the modern edition that has made available for performance and study the music of virtually every other composer of his stature. Just the sort of friction that characterized Lully's own career has plagued the modern editions of his works. The first collected edition, the Œuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions de La revue musicale, 1930–39; reprint, New York: Broude Brothers, 1966– 74), directed by Henry Prunières and underwritten by Louise B. M. Dyer, passed through the French courts. ( Jim Davidson's Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre, 1884–1962, Miegunyah Press Series, 14 [Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994], chronicles the litigation.) Of the thirty-six volumes projected, ten were published before World War II, and an eleventh (edited, engraved, and proofread under Prunières before his death in 1942) was brought out by Broude Brothers in 1972. At the 1976 meeting of the International Musicological Society in Berkeley, California, a new edition, The Collected Works, was organized in accordance with new editorial guidelines, to be published by Broude Brothers Limited (with responsibility transferred to the nonprofit Broude Trust in 1981). Yet the members of the editorial committee, whatever their individual competencies, proved unable to work together or with the publisher, and it was not until 1996 that a volume was issued (ser. 4, vol. 5, containing motets). By then some of the original editors had departed in search of a more congenial publisher, while others remained with the Trust. The departing editors eventually signed on with Georg Olms Verlag, a German firm known to musicologists principally for its extensive backlist of reprints, to create a new edition under the old title Œuvres complètes—a decision certain to confuse library catalog users.

The success of the Olms edition as a musicological enterprise will depend upon how accurately editors and publisher identify the users to whom the edition is best addressed and how skillfully they negotiate the compromises that are inevitable in critical editions of seventeenth-century music. Potential users range from researchers and performers capable of extracting every bit of meaning from a baroque score to casual naïfs quite unfamiliar with seventeenth-century notation. No edition can hope to satisfy every possible user, but an edition that attempts to satisfy too many will end up making no one happy. Under the general supervision of Jérôme de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider, the Œuvres complètes, sponsored by the Association Lully and issued as part of the Musica Gallica project, aims for...