Opera in Recent Researches Editions

Opera is a major part of the Recent Researches editions, and the volumes published in the series include a number of important works in this genre. Most of the editions are full-length works, and many of the operas are published for the first time by A-R Editions. As with other Recent Researches editions, these editions devoted to opera include an introduction, critical report, texts and translations.

Among the earliest opera volumes published by A-R Editions is an edition of Il pomo d’oro (Acts 3 and 5) by Antonio Cesti. Il pomo d’oro was commissioned by Leopold I of Austria in 1666, and it has the reputation of being the most sumptuously staged Baroque opera. This edition completes the partial opera published in Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich at the turn of the last century. Another early Italian opera is La morte d’Orfeo by Stefano Landi, a work that received its premiere in 1619.

Baroque operas include works of a lighter nature, like Pimpinone of Tomaso Albinoni and L’artigiano gentiluomo or, Larinda e Vanesio by Johann Adolph Hasse. A later Baroque comic opera is Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf Der Hochzeit des Comacho, which is based on an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. One further Baroque work is the opera seria Cephale et Procris by Jacquet de la Guerre. First performed in 1694, Cephale et Procris stands out as a significant opera in its day by a woman and an excellent example of French opera of the period.

A Classical-era opera, Ifigenia in Tauride by Gian Francesco de Majo, dates from 1764. In addition, A-R is the publisher of the only critical edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, a key work in the development of comic opera.

Gustav Mahler’s completion of Die drei Pintos, a comic opera that Carl Maria von Weber left unfinished, is a critical work of Mahler’s musical apprenticeship, and this edition makes available the full orchestral score for the first time.

A-R has also published a number of American operas, and among the most recent is The Sun Bride: A Pueblo Indian Opera by Charles Sanford Skilton. Other American operas include comic opera from the colonial period, The Disappointment, or Force of Credulity by Andrew Barton, and The Poor Soldier by John O’Keefe.