Should an unfinished Rameau opera be reconstructed or left to languish in the dust of libraries? Of course “Io” had to be made performable on the stage! And a performance has now taken place.

Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito” is very well-known. But Gluck’s setting of the same libretto by Pietro Metastasio with “music of a completely different style, never heard before” offers a good alternative.The opra remained unperformed for over 200 years, even though the libretto was always known through Mozart’s famous work. It was only revived in 1987 in Metz under Jean-Claude Malgoire. Cecilia Bartoli thrilled audiences with this music in 2001 when she recorded a CD with Gluck arias, including several from “La clemenza di Tito.”

The new edition of Handel’s opera “Scipione” reveals two different performance versions of a work which carries an explosive political subject in a musically shattering form.

What better present could there be for a composer than making his works available in the best possible form? 4 September 2024 is the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. A season full of performances of his works awaits. And several of these will be memorable first performances, as Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag Wien is preparing new editions of the much-discussed versions of the Bruckner symphonies. These include the annulled Symphony in D minor of 1869, the first version of the Fourth, the Sixth, Seventh and the Adagio of 1887–1889 and the second version of the Eighth.

He was the master of the refined chiaroscuro: Gabriel Fauré, who succeeded in composing some of the most popular tunes in fin-de-siècle French music: the fine subtlety of his sumptuous, yet serene “Pavane”, for example, which exists in numerous versions, the ethereal “Pie Jesu” from his Requiem, the “Masques et Bergamasques”. In 2024, with the 100th anniversary of Fauré’s death on 4 November, Robin Tait’s scholarly-critical new edition enables an appraisal not only of his most popular works, but also rediscoveries, such as the incidental music to “Caligula”, “Shylock” and “Pelléas et Mélisande”, orchestrated versions of his “Ballade”, “La Naissance de Vénus”, “Madrigal”, several “Mélodies” and “La Passion”, and the prelude to his major operatic work “Pénélope”.

It is over seventy years since the publication of the first volume of the Complete Works of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Now the edition, which made many works accessible for the first time, is almost complete. A preliminary assessment.

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Castor et Pollux was an outstanding success, though initially in the reworked version of 1754. The performance material for this work is now available. The volume from the Complete Edition will follow.