Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983
Verdi Victorious
By Charles Rosen
The Works of Giuseppe Verdi
edited by Philip Gossett
Series I, Vol. 17: pp.
Rigoletto: Melodrama in Three Acts
by Francesco Maria Piave, edited by Martin Chusid
University of Chicago Press/G. Ricordi, 347 pp., $200.00 (both score and commentary)
Until this year Giuseppe Verdi was the only major nineteenth-century composer whose works were not enshrined in a complete critical edition. Editions of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, Wagner, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf were all prepared as a matter of course since German scholarship has dominated musicology. But there is also one critical edition of Berlioz with a new one under way, two of Chopin (both equally inadequate), and an unfinished one of Liszt (a new one, begun recently in Hungary, is inferior to the old in almost every respect). Most of these editions were already in existence by 1900. The greatest composer of Italian opera has had to wait until 1983 for a start to be made. This is not surprising. The monumental critical edition is an academic consecration, the ultimate guarantee of musical respectability, and nineteenth-century Italian opera is still not fully respectable.
Review, 4976 words
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