No fewer than 28 operas by Francesco Cavalli, the famous Monteverdi pupil of his day, survive. The edition Francesco Cavalli – Opere reveals this early Baroque world once more.

Over the past several decades, the operas of Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676) have become increasingly in demand in theaters around the world, an interest stimulated in part by the overwhelming popular success of the operas of Monteverdi, Cavalli’s great predecessor and teacher. Whereas Monteverdi’s extant operas are only three, however, Cavalli’s number nearly thirty. Indeed, Cavalli was the most prolific and important opera composer of the seventeenth century, and it is his works that set the stage for the subsequent development of opera as a genre. Cavalli’s operas indeed share some of the most outstanding features of Monteverdi’s. But they demonstrate their own distinctive musical and dramatic richness (passion), thus providing a treasure trove of  material waiting to be performed.

The few editions that were available in the last decades of the 20th century, though path-breaking for their time, and actually responsible for the increasing interest in Cavalli, were not in keeping with present day performance standards for early music. Two more recent critical editions, published during the past decade, however, have encouraged a number of productions, especially of La Calisto, but productions of other Cavalli operas have depended on ad hoc editions made for the occasion, without much thought for future use.

The new Bärenreiter critical edition of the Operas of Francesco Cavalli attempts to fill the need for reliable source-based editions as well as dependable performance materials. It is also designed to encourage productions of operas that have not yet been resurrected in modern times.

The first phase of this edition will comprise fourteen operas, half of those for which scores have survived: they include (in approximate order of planned publication) La Calisto, Artemisia, L’Orione, L’Eliogabalo, Scipione Affricano, La Didone, L’Erismena, L’Eritrea, Veremonda l’Amazzone di Aragona, L’Ipermestra, L’Egisto Ercole amante,  Il Xerse, and Giasone. These were chosen on the basis of a variety of criteria: the historical importance of the works, the variety and interest of particular source materials, the interests of the individual editors, some of whom had already been working on their editions before the
Cavalli Edition was established, or as representative examples of important trends or moments in the development of the composer’s career.

Editorial challenges posed by these works differ profoundly from those of later operas. For one thing, the original musical material for these operas is notoriously laconic – the scores consist essentially of only two lines, a voice part and a sparsely figured bass line, interspersed with a few passages for three or five-part strings. The scores may also contain certain verbal notations and shorthand symbols for orchestration, transposition, or other editorial intervention, material that the original performers could understand, but whose meaning is not immediately obvious to contemporary ones. Translation into usable performing material thus requires the intervention of specialist editors who understand the implications of the scores and can flesh them out – or provide performers with the means of doing so themselves – with appropriate additional material.

The Sources

Although nearly all were produced more than once in the seventeenth century, as attested by numerous published librettos (exceptions are Eliogabalo, never performed at all, Calisto, Ipermestra, and Ercole amante), some are represented by only a single musical score (Eliogabalo, Calisto, Ipermestra, Ercole amante, Eritrea, Artemisia, Didone, and Veremonda), while others have multiple scores – Giasone (11), Erismena, Xerse, and Scipione Affricano (three), Orione, and Egisto (two).

This source situation is both ameliorated and further complicated, however, by the existence of multiple librettos for most of the works. The importance of these librettos – as testifying to multiple productions and as a means of understanding various editorial annotations in the extant scores – makes them an essential part of this edition. Indeed, because of the paucity of musical sources, the librettos can often reflect more about the reception of the opera than the score does. It is for this reason that each individual opera will have a libretto editor as well as a music editor.

Most of the primary musical sources for the individual volumes come from the famous Contarini Collection at the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice. The 28 Cavalli scores in this collection, representing all of his extant operas, seem to have been collected by the composer himself, with an eye toward preserving them for posterity. (The result is one of the earliest collections of a single composer’s manuscripts in the history of music.)  More than half of them (including Calisto, Orione, Veremonda, Xerse, Artemisia, Ipermestra, and Ercole amante) are full or partial autographs, some (including Calisto) are partly in the hand of the composer’s wife, Maria Sosomeno, who was active as a copyist between 1650 and 1652, when she died, and others (including Didone, Eritrea, Giasone, Erismena, Scipione Affricano, and Eliogabalo) are fair copies that were probably made between 1652 and 1676, when the composer died. Other mostly subsidiary manuscripts come from libraries in Florence, Lisbon, Modena, Naples, Oxford, Paris, Rome, and Vienna. The primary librettos are all found in Venetian collections (Cini, Correr, Goldoni, Marciana), but some of those for subsequent productions come from elsewhere (Bologna, Florence, London, Milan, Modena, Naples, Rome).

General Editorial Policy

For the scores, we have applied only basic performance aids, such as writing out ritornellos where they were implied or adding the occasional missing instrumental part. We have added figures only in cases where the harmony is ambiguous, and filled out or regularized whatever expressive indications may be implied or applied inconsistently. In all cases, editorial additions will be clearly differentiated from original material.

Most of our musical sources are singular, but there are at least two distinct versions of the libretto: the literary text given in the Critical Edition, and the sung text, given under the notes. Although distinctions between them will be preserved, occasional mistakes or ambiguities in one will be corrected with reference to the other. English translations will be provided. Each volume will contain a substantial prefatory essay covering the historical and literary background and the production history, as well as a synopsis, a list of characters (with vocal ranges), and a list of stage settings. The preface will include a Guide to Performance, which will contain a section on suggested transpositions and cuts. It will also provide facsimiles of frontispieces from the libretto and representative pages from the score.

The goal of the Bärenreiter edition is to provide a dependable score for music libraries, where these milestones of operatic composition belong, and a basic framework that can be used as it is or else modified by those responsible for individual productions, who will need to make their own decisions regarding the distribution of continuo instruments, dynamics, and so forth. By making available critical editions that are designed for performance in a variety of venues – from college or university concert halls to major opera houses around the world, we hope to satisfy and stimulate the interest in these works, which demonstrate for the first time in history the ways in which the vicissitudes of theatrical life were managed in the production of operas on a regular basis.
 
The first volume of the series (Calisto), has just been published, and two more (Artemisia and Orione) are imminent. Performance materials for these, as well as several others (Giasone, Ercole amante, and Eliogabalo) are already available for hire through Bärenreiter.

Ellen Rosand
George A. Saden Professor of Music
Yale University
General Editor, Francesco Cavalli Opere
(from [t]akte 2/2012)