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differentiation of three quite independent instruments with different ranges. This works fine
when there are three notes on the staff, and we assign them to Trn I, Trn II, and Trn III accordingly,
but what if there are only two notes on the staff or only one? How many instruments
should play and what parts should they play. Silence. The full autograph allows us to
guess, but it doesn’t tell us explicitly what to do. Here the performance material becomes
crucial. If the notes are found in a part, at least the musician or editor or publisher who
prepared the material believed that the note so indicated should be played by that part
(and normally separate parts were prepared for each oboe or the two clarinets were
placed on two separate staves, or there were separate parts for Trns I and II together and
for Trn III, etc.). So, instead of simply guessing who should play what note, we have at least
some contemporary evidence about the matter.
This proved fundamental in our work with Semiramide, for example, an opera
that uses four separate horns, but in which the autograph is not always clear about what
each part should play. In some cases there were so many parts that not even the larger
paper Rossini used for his score was adequate to contain all this information, so that
Rossini had to write additional parts on separate “spartitini,” as we call them, some of
which were subsequently lost. Thus, it is only from the performance material that we can
reconstruct what actually was performed at the theater.
I have emphasized the problem of the trombones because the handling of Trn II
is particularly tricky. That Trn I should play the upper note of, say, an octave, is clear, just as
Trn III should presumably play the lower note. But what should Trn II do? Should it play
the upper part, the lower part, or simply drop out? What we know from contemporary
evidence is that it did none of the above: it tended to jump around, playing notes that
were comfortably within its register. And so on one octave Trn II plays with Trn I, but on
the next octave it may be playing with Trn III. Thus, our critical editions sometimes seem
to have the peculiar appearance of I and II playing together on the first and third beats of
the measure and II and III playing together on the second and fourth beats: if we do
something of this kind, it is because that is the information we gather from qualified
performance materials of the period.
The Rio parts, of course, cannot pretend to have been used for the earliest
performances of any of these operas, so that we cannot be certain that what they reveal
is what the composer may have had in mind. Yet, they are closer to this reality than pure
guesswork on the part of the editors. Thus, in many cases they will prove invaluable to
those who are preparing critical editions of the repertory of nineteenth-century Italian
opera. I would not want to do a critical edition of Verdi’s I Lombardi, to take one example,
without consulting closely the materials in the Rio collection, some of which stems from
Giovanni Ricordi in Milan (hence pre-1854) and some of which comes from Ricordi’s
Neapolitan colleague, Clausetti.
I could go on about other uncertainties in the autograph manuscripts (ambiguities
about signs of dynamic level, about the length of slurs, etc.) for which performing materials
offer additional information, but I think the example I have given is clear enough.
There is yet another way in which these materials prove fundamental. Ricordi
and other publishers, faced with the growing popularity of Verdi’s operas, in particular,
began to change their procedures. First, instead of preparing all performance materials
by hand, they began to print parts where multiple copies were needed for a performance,
especially choral parts and string parts. But finding this material is a nightmare. There are
a few collections with some of it, but frequently we have had to admit defeat: no copies
had been located in any library or theater collection of parts known before the publication
of the edition. From now on such judgments cannot be made without consulting the Rio
collection, which has many printed parts: for I Lombardi, for example, there are printed
Atualidade da Ópera - Série Simpósio Internacional de Musicologia da UFRJ