This article—part of a Common Knowledge symposium titled “Between Text and Performance”—argues that the publication of a new edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel) offers an excellent opportunity to reflect upon the written text of an opera and its relationship to the work that performers must do to realize the opera in the theater. Rossini wrote many passages that demand the intervention of performers (performing them “as written” is simply an error), yet this (...) does not mean necessarily that “anything goes.” The new edition not only gives Rossini's own variations for the opera, but also (in an appendix prepared by Will Crutchfield) indicates the nature of ornamentation and variations employed by singers before 1850. Many of the variations still heard today in the opera house reflect practices from the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no moral obligation to avoid such practices, but one wants singers to be fully aware of what they are doing. This essay provides extensive examples of the kind of autograph notation that signals the obligatory intervention of performers and offers many examples from performers who were contemporaries of Rossini as to how they went about their task of representing the composer's work on stage. (shrink)

The existence of extensive written communications between Verdi and his librettists should have prompted scholars to prepare editions of the correspondence and to analyze its meaning and implications. Only rarely can we participate directly in the formative stages of an opera, and available material such as the correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal is invaluable.1 Obeisance, at least, has been done to Verdi's correspondence. Alessandro Luzio calls the letters of Verdi to Antonio Ghislanzoni, "versifier" of Aida , "the (...) most marvelous course in musical aesthetics in action." Yet, for no opera do we have available a complete editions of the surviving letters between Verdi and a librettist. · 1. Willi Schuh, ed., Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briedwechsel, 4th ed. . An English edition, made from an earlier German edition with many omissions, was published as A Working Friendship: The Correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, trans. Hans Hammelmann and Ewald Osers . Philip Gossett is the general editor of the critical edition of the works of Rossini and author of numerous articles on Renaissance music, Italian opera, Beethoven, and musical theory. (shrink)

This essay introduces a Common Knowledge symposium on the relationship between texts (for instance, musical scores or dramatic scripts) and performance in the arts by drawing out its implications for the interpretation of publicly consequential texts (such as constitutions, legal statutes, and canon law). Arguing that judges and clerics could learn much from studying the work of Philip Gossett and other practitioners of textual criticism in the arts, the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation (...) than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled “Between Text and Performance”) emphasize what Roger Moseley calls “improvisatory fluency in historical idioms,” and this introduction recommends that jurists develop for the law the kind of “ear” that musicians must have when a score invites or demands improvisation. (shrink)