-
Read More
By Esther Criscuola de Laix
Editions of operas, operettas, oratorios, masques, musical theater pieces, and other dramatic or semidramatic pieces include a number of elements unique to dramatic music, from act and scene labeling to stage directions. This post offers guidelines on how to format and present these elements within a critical edition.
-
September 15, 2021Read More
By Richard Sherr
My edition of the Parisian revue de fin d’année for the year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, has its origins in a problem faced by many people my age: “What am I going to do in retirement?” In 2013, after my decision to retire in 2015 had been gleefully accepted by the administration of Smith College, I began to seriously contemplate my future scholarly life. In one sense, the answer was easy. I could continue doing what I had been doing for the past fifty years: working in the Vatican Library on the lives and careers of singers in the papal chapel in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, I was getting tired of it. So, I decided it was time for a change. But what change? I had always liked Paris; what topic could I choose that would bring me to (pre-COVID) Paris as often as possible? As I searched, one genre stood out: the revue de fin d’année, a specifically Parisian genre in which an entire year in the news and the theater was recapitulated in a series of comic and satirical skits. The result is the first edition ever of the complete text and music of a nineteenth-century Parisian revue de fin d’année.
