The time of doubtful passages in Adolphe Adam’s world-famous ballet is over. The new edition clarifies a great deal and returns to the original version.

”Giselle ou Les Wilis” – now known as Giselle – was first performed at the Paris Opéra (Salle Le Peletier) on 28 June 1841. Within five years of its rapturous reception there, it had been premièred in Bordeaux (1841), Marseilles, London, Brussels, Vienna, St. Petersburg (1842), Lyon, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Madrid (1843), The Hague, Valencia, Florence, Genoa (1844), Rome, Stockholm (1845), Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston (1846). The ballet continued to be performed in Europe and the Americas throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it endures today as a popular fixture in the international repertory.

The great merit of the “Giselle” score was recognized immediately by Parisian critics at the time of the ballet’s debut, and it remains the most frequently recorded of all Adolphe Adam’s stage works.  It is skilfully orchestrated and in some numbers employs the characteristically French texture of the symphonie concertante; it endows each distinct group of characters (villagers, nobles, Wilis) with its own style of music; it plunges into an altogether new sound world as the action moves to the supernatural domain of the Wilis; it closely follows the action, and in some scenes makes use of  “musique parlante” (music that sounds pointedly like talking and sometimes the syllabification of particular words). It is an excellent, imaginative and theatrically effective score.

Yet the idiosyncratic way it has been handed down has caused many of its striking and meaningful elements to be obscured. Some versions of “Giselle” were, for practical reasons, orchestrated from piano reductions.  Others drew more closely from the Opéra’s sources but have been altered over the years. Thus conductors today have been obliged to rely upon versions of “Giselle” derived from non-definitive sources, often with unattributed and anachronistic orchestrations, altered dynamics, and altered notes.  So, though “Giselle” is by far the most popular and most performed Romantic ballet in today’s repertory (it was created during the “Romantic” era of the 1830s to 1860s), no authentic edition of its score has been produced until now.   


Sources

We began research for this project with a close study of the pertinent manuscripts today housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, including but not limited to Adolphe Adam’s autograph composing score (which includes informative annotations by the composer describing the action), the original orchestral parts (used at the Opéra from 1841 to 1868), and a scribally copied orchestra score (apparently a reference copy at the Opéra that was not used in performance) that requires scrupulous cross-checking with the autograph and orchestra parts because of  its many copying errors. 

We also made use of a highly informative rehearsal score (housed at the Theatre Museum in St. Petersburg) from 1841 or 1842 and heavily annotated by (probably) the ballet master Antoine Titus, who was dispatched to Paris to write down details about the ballet’s performance in preparation for the St. Petersburg production of 1842. Though Titus’s choreographic notebook has been lost, this surviving rehearsal score offers long-forgotten and surprising information about how the music was originally fitted to the movement of the performers in the mime and action scenes. We reproduce in this new Bärenreiter score (above the staff lines) the annotations from the Titus score, and the annotations from  Adam’s autograph as well.  They are eye-opening. Ballet directors may not choose to follow the directions stipulated in the annotations, but readers will gain deeper insight than previously possible about the connection of music to movement in this important stage work and surely other stage works from this period at the Opéra as well.

Other Russian sources we consulted include an extract from an orchestral “Giselle” score: a variation originally composed for the ballet “Fiammetta”, likely by Riccardo Drigo in 1887. It may be the earliest extant orchestral score for this variation, which was added to the first act of the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet production of “Giselle” as early as 1888.  The editors include this variation in the Bärenreiter score because, though it was not part of the original nineteenth-century Paris production of “Giselle”, it has since become a permanent part of the ballet. Likewise editors include Giselle’s second-act waltz variation (probably composed by Ludwig Minkus) interpolated in 1866 and still regularly included in the ballet. (Here it must be noted that the Giselle score also includes an interpolation made very shortly before its premiere in Paris: music by Friedrich Burgmüller to accompany a last-minute choreographic addition, the “Peasant” pas de deux in Act One.)


The new Bärenreiter Edition

This new “Giselle” score is an authentic edition of the music, with complete critical commentary. It includes in appendices music that was cut (in some cases, likely before the première), early versions of music that was revised, and music that was added in subsequent productions and that remains relevant in latter-day performance practice. 

In the Preface, discussions of the borrowed music, recurring melodies and musique parlante in this score are offered. In Edirom, the online component of this edition, one may find information in short essays ( “Additional commentary”) about, inter alia, Adam’s self-borrowings from his “Faust” score, revisions to the “Giselle” score made in Paris in the 1860s, quoted music, concertante passages, and the genesis of the celebrated “scene d’amour” (No. 3).

For international use, the score is introduced by a detailed trilingual preface, and it includes the original libretto (a prose document by Théophile Gautier and Georges Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges explaining the action scene by scene) in the original French, as well as in German and English.

Doug Fullington / Marian Smith  
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson / from [t]akte 2/2024)