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THE CRITICAL EDITION of the OPERAS of GIACOMO PUCCINI PRESS RELEASE the Inaugural Volume of the Critical Edition of the Operas O THE CRITICAL EDITION OF THE OPERAS OF GIACOMO PUCCINI PRESS RELEASE The inaugural volume of the Critical Edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini is now available In Milan, on Thursday 27 February 2014, the presentation will take place of Manon Lescaut, the first volume of the series, published after a long period of preparatory work. A first performance of a preliminary version of the edition, in 2008, had attracted great interest in the musicological world. Milan, the city of Ricordi, Puccini’s “main publisher”, will serve as the backdrop for the presentation of the Critical Edition of the Operas of the Maestro. A monumental enterprise which, after many years of preparatory study and research as well as practical testing-ground performances, responds to the need – as Gabriele Dotto, general editor of the Edition, writes – “to provide a new generation of scholars and interpreters with the opportunity to make full use of these innovative masterpieces of the musical language of the late 19th and early 20th centuries”. The very success that Puccini’s operas enjoyed early on, with numerous productions in various theatres, has left us a set of musical documents of a highly complex nature. While Puccini’s propensity to continually revise his own work is well known (a propensity that inevitably places the contemporary scholar and performer before a broad range of versions of his works), much less known is the practice, common at the time, that made provision for further updates and adjustments to materials rented out to theatres as well as corrections that were not always reflected in the scores made available for sale. The urgent need for a critical edition of Puccini’s operas is clear. An edition that could not have been entrusted to any music publisher other than the Maestro’s principal “publisher” of old. “At the time,” as Gabriele Dotto once again writes, “Ricordi could - thanks to a large editorial staff and state-of-the-art printing systems – rapidly produce various revised full scores and piano reductions”; and today, thanks to the wealth of materials preserved in the Ricordi Historical Archive throughout the 20th century, the company is able to offer the scholarly community and the world of music lovers a new resource that will be “enormously important for anyone who approaches this splendid repertory, whether for reasons of study or performance”. Fundamental for the completion of this work have been the sources and the documentation in possession of the publisher (today this material is preserved in the Archivio Storico Ricordi, the famous collection of musical and other documentary material owned by the German group Bertelsmann and hosted by the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense), alongside a number of documents preserved in other archives. Musical sources and a broad range of other documents which come together to make of the Critical Edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini a new and monumental resource which will provide the foundation for extraordinary performances and fresh approaches to the study of these works. The first volume, edited by Roger Parker, is now ready: “The critical edition of Manon Lescaut makes available to interpreters for the first time the principal versions of the opera that have come down to us in various sources, offering a musical text revised in every respect and free of the numerous editorial interpolations introduced into the traditional performance materials after the death of the composer. Puccini made a substantial number of changes to Manon Lescaut in the course of some 30 years, from its premiere in 1893 up to the revival at the Teatro alla Scala in 1923 , conducted by Arturo Toscanini”. Performances based on Parker’s editorial reconstruction of the first (1893) version of the opera enjoyed considerable acclaim at the Leipzig Opera, conducted by Riccardo Chailly, typical of the testing grounds to which the works of the Edition will be subjected before publication. This production took place in 2008, the same year as the production of the four-act version of Edgar (edited by Linda Fairtile) at the Teatro Regio in Turin, which made use of the autograph of the fourth act, a recently rediscovered document which had long been thought lost. Both events underscored how the long-awaited Critical Edition of the Operas of Puccini will represent a reason for keen interest not just on the part of scholars, artistic directors, theatre managers and performers, but for all music-lovers as well. Subscriptions to the entire series are now available. The presentation of the Critical Edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini will take place on Thursday 27 February at 18:00 in the Sala Maria Teresa of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense. Speakers: Andrea De Pasquale, Director of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense Claudio Buja, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Casa Ricordi Cristiano Ostinelli, Managing Director of Casa Ricordi Pierluigi Ledda, Managing Director of Ricordi & C. Gabriele Dotto, General Editor of the Critical Edition of the Operas of Giacomo Puccini Claudio Toscani, Università di Milano, member of the editorial board In the course of the presentation it will be possible to view a number of rare and unique documents relating to the first production of Manon Lescaut as well as pages of Giacomo Puccini’s autograph of the opera itself. .
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