Leonore is no longer a victim. In “Fidelio schweigt” for the Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen the character who was merely a lover becomes an active subject and in so doing, emancipates herself from the well-known, all-too-familiar subject matter.

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.

The new edition of Bizet’s “Carmen” from Bärenreiter-Verlag follows the approach that scholarship shouldn’t decide which version is the right one or the real one – and instead presents an edition containing all the surviving original versions of the opéra-comique. René Jacobs, who conducted the first performances using the new edition, comments on its merits following Paul Prévost's article.

Fishergate Music is publishing successive critical new editions of Georges Bizet’s lesser-known operas, which are available in unreliable editions, if at all. The editor and publisher is the renowned British musicologist Hugh Macdonald, who has contributed significantly to the establishing of Hector Berlioz’s entire output in the musical repertoire in recent years with his “New Berlioz Edition”, published by Bärenreiter. This is also the aim of the series “Bizet’s Other Operas”. The performance material, available on hire, can be obtained from Bärenreiter · Alkor.

A highly dramatic opera which portrays one of the most exciting female figures in world literature with unusually varied colours: “Médée” develops from deceived woman to frightening witch in Marc Antoine Charpentier’s tragic opera. His only tragédie composed for the Académie royale de musique was premiered on 4 December 1693 in Paris. To contemporaries, his fundamentally renewed musical language with great harmonic richness, a developed counterpoint and a colourful use of the orchestra sounded insufficiently like Lully. Now a new benchmark edition invites rediscovery of this work. It will be used for the first time on 19 November 2023 at the Staatsoper Berlin for a staged production conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and directed by Peter Sellars.

As no early manuscript sources of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” have survived, modern editions are forced to draw on later copies of the work that vary in a range of respects. Bärenreiter’s new edition opens up a fresh perspective on the opera.