Esperienze di un editore di melodrammi

The critical edition of an opera has to tackle problems partially unknown to the literary text criticism. Such issues derive primarily from the multilayered character of the operatic text, which is made of words, sounds, scenery, stage action, transmitted from sources of different sorts (scores, librettos, stage arrangements, set design sketches). Secondly, problems arise from the nature of musical and theatrical languages: the written text is not an end in itself, but a premise to the properly artistic event, the performance. The critical editing of an opera must be concerned not only to reconstruct an “authentic” text, that is a text in accordance with the author’s thought, but also to how the same text can be used by today’s performers in order to arrange different stagings. The author illustrates these issues with examples from 19th-century operas edited by him—Rossini’s Adina and Bellini’s I Puritani—which have already passed the scrutiny of the performance.