Who needs a new critical edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia? The opera has been around since 1816, performed in theaters all over the world; it has never gone out of the repertory; there are many, many recordings of it; and a critical edition was published back in the 1960s. Why has Bärenreiter very recently published a new one —edited by Patricia B. Brauner—, an edition whose preliminary score was already available to theaters in 2008. Indeed, it was used for performance for the first time in February 2008 at Lyric Opera of Chicago, under the direction of Donato Renzetti, with a cast featuring Joyce Di Donato and Nathan Gunn. Many other performances have now taken place and the next significant one planned, under the direction of Antonio Pappano, is at London's Covent Garden in July 2009.

There are two reasons: first, no earlier edition of the opera provides a fully accurate basic text of Rossini’s opera; second, there is a great deal of material pertaining to the opera and useful to scholars and performers that has never been made available in print.

The last published edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia was issued some forty years ago. It was a good effort for the time, but it was the first attempt ever to publish a nineteenth-century Italian opera in a critical edition. In the meantime not only musicological research of Rossini’s music has made great progress, but also editorial technique in general has been improved in the last decades. Both developments are reflected in various aspects of the new edition:

1) All relevant original sources have been consulted including some five manuscripts that have Rossini's own, autograph ornamentation for the opera. Not a single one of them is transcribed in the earlier edition;

2) Rossini’s notational idiosyncracies have been fully understood and respected (the older edition states unequivocally that the secco recitative is in Rossini's hand, whereas everyone who has studied the autograph manuscript over the past thirty years knows full well that the recitative is in the hand of a copyist, the same copyist who prepared the secco recitative for Torvaldo e Dorliska, earlier the same season)

3) A meticulous study of changes in the autograph manuscript helps to determine correct readings (a striking example is at the beginning of "Dunque io son," where the earlier edition insists on making equal two chords, the second of which Rossini clearly differentiated from the first because of a different harmonic context: by studying his autograph changes, one can see exactly what happened);

4)  Rossini’s signs of articulation are limited to the passages for which they were intended (examine, for example, "La calunnia," where the older edition extends staccato dots everywhere the main theme occurs, although Rossini is much more selective about how he uses them).

In the first measures of the Introduzione, to take one broader example, the double bass part in this earlier edition is written an octave too low (resulting in notes that could not have been played by Rossini’s instrument), a fp was indicated where Rossini wrote f under one note and p under another, the double-dotted rhythm of a prominent musical figure was always printed as single-dotted. Similar errors abound throughout the score.

The situation is worst in the overture, for which no autograph manuscript survives. The older edition understood that this famous overture is identical to the overture of Rossini’s earlier opera, Aureliano in Palmira, but it consulted only a single source of that opera. The new critical edition has taken into account the readings of thirteen manuscripts of Aureliano in Palmira and seven manuscripts of Il barbiere di Siviglia that include this overture (many manuscripts of Barbiere have no overture at all or substitute a different overture, often either the overture from Il Turco in Italia or the revised version of the Aureliano overture, prepared by Rossini for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra). The result is a new edition of the overture that in many places is markedly different, one that also applies articulation with care, following what seem to be the composer’s own markings, rather than extending articulation throughout the score. The new edition also allows performers either to use the original scoring of the overture, which includes two flutes, two oboes, and timpani, or the scoring of the remainder of Il barbiere di Siviglia (with only one flute and one oboe and no timpani).

A series of appendices in the new edition provides performers with music and information that appear in no other edition of the opera. (In a few cases similar material is available for rental from the publisher of the earlier edition, but does not appear in its printed score.) The first appendix contains all the vocal ornamentation for which we have manuscripts in Rossini’s own hand. These include some four different sets of variations for Rosina’s famous cavatina, “Una voce poco fa,” an important set of variations for Rosina in her duet with Figaro (“Dunque io son”), and—never before published—an extraordinary set of variations and cadenzas for Rosina in the Terzetto (“Ah qual colpo”). The second appendix is an aria that Rossini himself added to his score (before the Temporale) for the singer Giuseppina Fodor-Mainvielle, when she sang the role at the Teatro San Samuele of Venice in the Spring of 1819. This piece is particularly useful in cases where the role of Rosina is sung by a soprano. While not entirely new (the final section is derived from Rossini’s Sigismondo), “Ah se è ver” is an attractive composition that could well find a place in an appropriate staging of the opera.

Additional appendices offer three other kinds of material: appendix three provides a series of other compositions that formed a significant part of the perfomance history of the work, such as the first alternative for the lesson scene, “La mia pace, la mia calma,” sung by the original Rosina in the first revival of the opera, at the Teatro Contavalli of Bologna during the summer of 1816, or Pietro Romani’s aria, “Manca un foglio,” first sung by Don Bartolo in place of “Un dottor della mia sorte” at the Teatro Pergola of Florence in the autumn of 1816, and afterwards introduced countless times into the opera. The fourth appendix includes material that allows theaters to reproduce a version of the opera performed in Naples (with the role of Don Bartolo in Neapolitan dialect). A final appendix, prepared with the collaboration of Will Crutchfield, offers a broad selection of ornamentation used by singers during the first fifty years of the opera’s history, all carefully dated and described. Such material is not meant to prescribe how singers should ornament their parts, but only to indicate the kinds of variations and cadenzas singers actually introduced during Rossini’s lifetime. (Compare the older edition, which includes some ornamentation merely with indications such as "one might vary in this way").

Finally, the new edition recognizes the practical needs of theaters and includes in its rental material transposed versions of the Rosina Cavatina, the Basilio Aria, and the Rosina Aria in the lesson scene, so that singers who wish to employ the alternative tonalities (higher keys for Rosina, a lower key for Basilio) may do so.

Philip Gossett