Customer Reviews

Don Carlos in Full Score (Dover Vocal Scores)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Warned by a previous reviewer, I knew that the text of this edition would be in Italian, despite it being called "Don Carlos".

I also correctly surmised that various original material re-additions such as those used in Act IV of the EMI Classics recording of the Paris Theatre du Chatelet performance in 1996 (Pappano conducting, Alagna in the title role) would probably not appear. The previous reviewer also mentioned that some material used by the Met in performance does not appear.

This is still a very useful edition, but it also suffers in print quality slightly in that some pages of the original Ricordi score require greater scale reduction than others to fit on the page. These pages are noticeably poorer in appearance, with visible breaks in the staff lines. Everything is still readable, however.

It would be nice to see an affordable edition of the full five act score, in French, with the various performance alternatives used today included, at least in an appendix.

First, the bad news: In spite of the "s" in the title, this score doesn't have the orignal French text, but the standard Italian translation by Achille de Lauzières and Angelo Zandarini. As for being "unabridged", it is an unabridged score of the standard five-act "Modena" version, with "notations for an alternative four-act version" (The "La Scala" version of 1884). i.e. it has the alternative version of the title character's aria "Je l'ai vue" ("Io la vidi") for performance in what was originally the second act. None of the extra material from other versions of the opera (such as the opening "Prelude et Introduction" that the Met uses) is included.

Nonetheless, it's good to have a fairly inexpensive edition of this score (my favorite Verdi opera) available.

"It would be nice," as another reviewer remarked, "to see an affordable edition of the full five act score, in French, with the various performance alternatives used today included, at least in an appendix." Needless to say, no such edition is yet in existence, which is no surprise. Verdi never erected or envisioned an edition including all of these alternatives, many of which were only rediscovered by scholars in the 1970's. A complete critical edition of the 5-act version including earlier versions of some parts of the opera and other material cut by the composer will eventually be published within the ongoing critical edition undertaken by Ricordi in collaboration with The University of Chicago Press under the general editorship of Verdi scholar Philip Gossett. Unfortunately, when it is finally published, the full score will be in multiple volumes and cost hundreds of dollars. Meanwhile, there is a bilingual (Italian/French) 2-volume piano-vocal score of the complete 5-Act Don Carlos/Carlo published by Ricordi in the 1990's that includes most of the material unearthed in the 1970's. As it stands, we should be grateful to Dover for making available the full score of the final five-act Italian-language edition, the final edition sanctioned by the composer himself, and for making it available at an affordable price. To expect more from Dover would be to misunderstand its mission.