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.

 

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