Communications

This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of the 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:

[In reference to] Kimberly White’s remark [see her review of Gioachino Rossini’s Le comte Ory (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2014) in Notes 72, no. 3 (March 2016): 610–15] on the need to revise Il viaggio a Reims: the printed full score published by Troupenas in 1828 (TR) has served as a common source for editing both operas, but since the manuscript F-Po A 490a (PA) and the material F-Po Mat 19 [292 (pPA) were not used for Viaggio, the present edition of Le comte Ory [could not] serve to revise that of Viaggio, if indeed that should be necessary.

White notes that Mark Everist’s article on petit opéra (Music & Letters 94, no. 4 [2013], 684–88) “is not even cited” (p. 613). I would like to remind readers that I have already declared my own view on this question in my article, “Le petit opéra à l’Académie au xix^e siècle. Quelques considérations d’ordre terminologique relatives à ce corpus,” in L’Opéra de Paris, la Comédie-Française et l’Opéra-Comique (1669–2010), ed. Sabine Chaouche, Denis Herlin, Solveig Serre (Paris: École des chartes, 2011), 165–79.

[Additionally,] it is in May 1839, not in 1834, that Berlioz mentions the alternative aria “Ah, plaignez ma misère!” derived from Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, even if Dorus-Gras had reprised the rôle of the countess earlier. As for the letters of Hildebert de Lavardin, archbishop of Tours, which I have consulted in an edition of 1854, they were written in the twelfth century, long before Scribe’s writing.

To the editor:

I should like to correct an unfortunate error that the book review editor introduced into my review of The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra, by Inge Van Rij in Notes 73, no. 1 (September 2016). There, I mention Berlioz’s Rome Prize-winning cantata of 1830, and its principal figure, Sardanapalus. The book review editor, no doubt wishing to clarify matters, inserted into my text the title of the cantata: Cléopâtre. That, of course, is the title of Berlioz’s famously non-prizewinning cantata of 1829, a work that has nothing to do with the following year’s victorious Sardanapale. Now, Sardanapalus had an extraordinarily large bed, as Berlioz knew, and as we know, from Eugène Delacroix’s La mort de Sardanapale of 1827. That your editor put Cleopatra in it, however, is a bit promiscuous, and some six hundred years off the mark!

Liza Vick, Book Review Editor, responds:

I take full responsibility for inserting the title Cléopâtre, when in fact, the correct title of this 1830 cantata is, of course, Sardanapale. The sentence, as Dr. Bloom wrote:

Van Rij traces Berlioz’s surprisingly numerous references to bayadères, and misses only one, in the Rome-Prize-winning cantata of 1830, when the concupiscent Sardanapalus cries out “venez, bayadères charmantes” in a line whose musical setting one of the reviewers of the first performance found especially enchanting.

From the editor:

In the column, Notes for Notes (September 2016), page 79, the information about the University of Richmond’s Boatwright Memorial Library was supplied by Linda Fairtile, Head of Parsons Music Library at the University of Richmond. I apologize for the errors.

July 11, 2016

To whom it may concern:

Shortly after the 2015 annual meetings of the Music Library Association and the Music OCLC Users Group in Denver, MLA President Michael Rogan and (then) MOUG Chair Bruce Evans empaneled a joint task force with the following charge:

“Working with the Music OCLC Users Group, investigate OCLC's WorldCat Discovery Services to determine if it will be sufficient to meet the needs of music users. If the Task Force determines that WorldCat Discovery Services is not...