Par CAVALLI FRANCESCO. In 1662, Cavalli’s career was at its zenith. The two dozen operas he had written for Venice had helped establish Venice as the world’s first operatic superpower. “Scipione Affricano” (Venice 1664), Cavalli’s first opera after returning from France, was one of his most successful compositions. In a period that valued new works over familiar ones, “Scipione” was one of a handful of operas to live on after its premiere season: it was revived eight times and chosen to inaugurate Rome’s Teatro Tordinona in 1671. Cavalli’s librettist, Nicolò Minato, was inspired by historical accounts of the life of the Roman general Scipio, whose defeat of Carthage in 202 BCE earned him the honorary agnomen “Africanus.” In setting Minato’s libretto, Cavalli drew upon the lyrical gifts that have made operas like “La Calisto” and “Giasone” so popular today. But at the same time “Scipione Affricano” also shows the composer embracing aspects of his two years in France, and responding to musical changes that, in the 1660s, were rapidly altering the face of Italian opera: the growing dominance of arias, a clearer sense of aria organization, and increased interplay between voice and instruments. The first goal of this edition is a practical one: to develop a version of the opera suited to the needs of both professional and student performers. A second goal is to reconstruct the opera’s complete performance history. An amply documented appendix reconstructs earlier versions of 21 arias. Other appendices print the surviving additional music from revivals in Rome and Venice. The edition is framed by a substantial Introduction, covering the drama, the musical style, the composition, premiere, and revivals, and a guide for performance today, plus a detailed “decoding” of the sources. - series Francesco Cavalli – Opere / Date parution : 2022-11-08/ Répertoire / Opéra

Crit. Ed. Fabrizio Della Seta. Par BELLINI VINCENZO. I PURITANI is the last work of Vincenzo Bellini: composed in nine months, from April 1834 to January 1835 (a gestation unusually long for that time), was performed for the first time in Paris, Théâtre Italien, 24 January 1835. The new Critical Edition is based on the autograph, on the libretto of the first performance and on four manuscript copies produced in the context of the Théâtre Italien in the first months of life of the work, three of which contain autographinterventions (these sources are now kept at the Biblioteca Comunale in Palermo, at the Museo Civico Belliniano in Catania, at the Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milano and at the Staatsbibliothek zur Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin). This edition presents for the first time all the music composed by Bellini, it restores the sections deleted before or after the first performance in Paris and returns the modified sections of the Naples version. It consists of three-score volumes -introduced by a detailed reconstruction of the historical context - and of a 'Apparati' volume with a description of the Sources and the Critical Commentary to the musical text. / Opéra-opérette / Répertoire / Opéra