Featured Publications

By Jane Schatkin Hettrick

When you hear the name Salieri, what comes to your mind? A villain? The jealous rival who killed Mozart? If you have seen F. Murray Abraham play Salieri in the award-winning film Amadeus (1984) or perhaps Ian McKellen in the same role in Peter Shaffer’s play on Broadway (1979), you might hold that negative view. Indeed, theatergoers a century and a half earlier would have heard a similar treatment of the composer in Alexander Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri (1831), which likewise focused on the subject of envy (one of the “seven deadly sins”). Keeping the malign portrayal of Salieri going seventy years later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov created an opera, also titled Mozart and Salieri (1898), based on Pushkin’s play. All this and more, all false characterization. Could it be, however, that “bad press was better than no press”? In any event, that question no longer obtains as we prepare to mark in 2025 the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death.

By Brian S. Locke

By Brian S. Locke

The landmark edition of Otakar Zich’s 1922 opera Vina (Guilt) in full score came about in an unlikely manner: it began as a “useful side project” while I searched for a tenure-track position. Furthermore, a scrawled inscription, “this piano score is swarming with mistakes,” steered me away from the piano-vocal score toward a transcription of the full score, all in order to hear Zich’s music playback via MIDI. The manuscript I settled on is a fair copy of Vina’s full score, housed in the Music Archive of the National Theatre in Prague. Only when I had transcribed approximately 100 of the manuscript’s 987 total pages did I consider that this project should result in a critical edition. After nine years of work, the three-volume full score edition of Vina in 2014 became the largest contracted project to date (and the first in oversize format) in the history of A-R Editions.

By Jonathan R. J. Drennan

Requiems by Giovanni Croce and Giovanni Rovetta: The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, in the Seventeenth Century (B238) is the inaugural entry in The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, a three-part anthology that explores the high (or sung) requiem mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, over the course of four centuries, from the late sixteenth to the last decade of the nineteenth. The anthology, which represents the first-ever attempt to make critical editions of the requiem masses composed by musicians at St. Mark’s, includes abundant new research. There are various objectives here; primarily, I endeavor to tell the story of the Requiem, but the “package,” taken as a whole, serves to provide an engaging musical-cum-liturgical-cum-historical story of St. Mark’s and, ultimately, Venice.

By Estelle Murphy

My interest in John Eccles (ca. 1668–1735) began with my MPhil research on his court odes. Eccles began his career in London’s theaters around 1690, composing for the United Company at Drury Lane Theater, and then, when the company broke up in 1695, moved with Thomas Betterton to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The songs he composed were enormously popular, and he quickly became one of London’s best-known theater composers. He was appointed to a position as a violinist in the king’s band in 1696 and was made Master of the King’s Musick in 1700; in this position he continued to compose for the theater. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eccles’s approach to the songs in his court odes echoed the style he used for his theater songs, and both types appeared in print as single sheets and alongside one another in collections.

By Ross W. Duffin

Lost music—thwarting the performance of something that otherwise is obviously worth hearing—has long been a fascination of mine, and I’m drawn to projects with some missing feature that I might supply. Since retiring from university teaching in 2018, I have often found myself on the trail of music for poetry collections that were originally intended to be sung, but for which little or no evidence has survived of their tunes. The roots of that interest extend back into my work on songs in early modern English plays, including Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And it was while tracing further theatrical tunes that I ran across Gude & Godlie Ballatis (first published 1565), the first of three poetic collections I noticed that were crying out for musical attention.

By Allan W. Atlas

It was in or around 1990 that I met Wilkie Collins (1824–89) for the first time, our introduction courtesy of the phenomenally popular Woman in White (1860). Looking back, I can say that my initial experience with that novel echoed that of the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer (and later four-term prime minister) William Ewart Gladstone (1809–96), who, while reading the work at home one evening, became so engrossed in it that he forgot to keep an appointment at the theater. I, too, could not put down The Woman in White. And though I could not have possibly realized it at the time, it was that meeting that marked the genesis of A Wilkie Collins Songbook.

By Natasha Roule

Paris, December 2015. I had come in search of opera. I had hoped to unearth reams of scores copied for provincial music academies, ideally complete with performance annotations and musicians’ cues. Instead, I stumbled across La chute de Phaéton, comédie en musique—a slender, unassuming livret by a playwright I had never heard of named Marc-Antoine Legrand. As I leafed through its pages, I couldn’t stop grinning. A spunky cast of hammy singers, foppish patrons, coy lovers, and no-nonsense officials sprang to life, mimicking the elegant verse of Lully’s tragédie en musique Phaéton (1683) with a humor that matched the dry wit of Oscar Wilde and the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. Lully’s opera told the story of the rise and demise of an arrogant demigod, cautioning spectators on the dangerous consequences of misplaced ambition and pride. Instead of a proud demigod, it is the opera company of Lyon—crippled by a history of poor financial decisions and personalities who do not care to truly set things right—that is the star of Legrand’s work.

By Cory M. Gavito

The three guitar song anthologies collected by Giovanni Stefani (fl. 1618–26) open us to a world in which musical performance and music editing collide in ways that reveal much about the circulation of music in the early seventeenth century. As materials that served performers, Stefani’s anthologies carry the imprint of oral transmission; they not only document the textual circulation of the popular songs they contain but also record the performing practices and traditions of the numerous musicians who consulted them. In editing these anthologies, I was tasked with the challenge of offering a transparent and authoritative report of concordances while still acknowledging the openness, variability, orality, and anonymity that characterizes the transmission of these songs to (and from) Stefani’s books.

By Alan Green

This year we celebrate the centennial year of American composer Allen Sapp (1922–99). I first heard Sapp’s music when I came to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) for my undergraduate studies. His Third Piano Sonata was performed at a faculty composer recital in 1985, and on first listening, it made a very powerful impression on me. I decided to take the time to study it carefully. This first took the form of repeated listening, as I had made a tape recording of the recital from a broadcast of the recital on the local NPR radio station, WGUC. The performance was preceded by an interview with the composer, speaking about the work, and his reasons for writing it. Piano Sonatas II, III, and IV were all written in 1956–57 while Sapp was on sabbatical leave from Harvard, living in Rome. A few excerpts from this interview will give you an idea of why I became interested in studying Sapp’s music.

By Robert Crowe

Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780–1861), or Giambattista, or even Gianni, as some of his friends seem to have called him, has been my constant companion since 2011. Back when I thought Angus Heriot’s 1956 The Castrati in Opera was a good, reliable source (was I ever so young?), Velluti’s wild life, full of saucy stories of flirtations—and more—with divas both operatic and aristocratic, of narrow escapes from their jealous boyfriends, of improbably witty badinage with emperors, queens, and skeptical policemen of all descriptions, was highly entertaining. But what really piqued my curiosity was his life and all of its collisions with the surrounding world—a stranger in a strange land—dragging all the accoutrements of the eighteenth century with him, deep into the nineteenth. Stared at, gossiped about, closely observed, lied about, mythologized, lionized, “monstered”—all while he was walking the same streets with those who were busily rewriting—and redrawing—his existence. I got to know him first as a newspaper figure, a caricature, but as I dug deeper, I found more and more sources that dug more deeply in the man himself.