Departing wisely from the text

This enthralling and important book offers vital reading for anyone with a serious interest in opera. Its author Philip Gossett describes himself as ‘a fan, a musician and a scholar’; more specifically, he works from a base at the University of Chicago as one of the foremost authorities on the period broadly circumscribed by Rossini’s Tancredi (1813) and Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (1859), supervising the ongoing complete editions of those two composers and counselling singers and conductors on productions and recordings.

This volume is the summation of his life’s work. Written with unfailing clarity and waspish wit, it charts the musical problems, both theoretical and practical, presented by the autograph manuscripts, printed scores and performances of this great corpus. They turn out to be every bit as complex and frustrating as anything in the baroque or early music fields — a trail of contradictions, ambiguities and lacunae in the evidence along which Gossett proves the canniest of sleuths.

In matters of interpretation, he is a liberal, but a rigorous one, insistent on consistency and honesty. ‘Authenticity’ is not a term he likes, and he is highly sceptical of the claims of Riccardo Muti and his kind to stand for the text come scritto, ‘as written’. ‘What does it mean to perform an opera exactly as it was conceived?’ Gossett asks. Very little, he replies, his view being that there is rarely any such thing as a pure, correct or original text, and the banner of accuracy begs the question — accuracy to what?

Italian operas of this epoch were in a constant state of transmutation — scores were designed to fit the circumstances of particular theatres, censors insisted on rewriting of the text, prima donnas altered keys and added ornaments and cadenzas, composers changed their minds in rehearsal.