Why do we need a new edition of La forza del destino? Let Verdi himself answer. He was in Madrid in January and February 1863 to stage his opera, just a few months after the St. Petersburg premiere on 10 November 1862. Having just examined the materials his publisher, Ricordi, had provided for the performances, he was not pleased. These are his own words, from a letter to Ricordi, written on 17 January 1863.

Permit me to make some frank and sincere observations about your copyists, who must be better supervised. Apart from their terrible handwriting, the uncertainty of the notes, all the many errors, what I absolutely can’t pardon is the almost complete lack of colors and expression. Never or almost never in the vocal parts is there a scenic indication, never a crescendo, staccato, rallentando, stentato, pppp, ffff, etc.

At the most a few simple f or p. In this way the music becomes a solfeggio [singing exercise]. Worse, your copyists have the unfortunate habit of adding notes (and imagine what notes) when I choose to elide two vowels under a single note. They think it is ignorance on my part, and make two notes where I write one.

Let me give you an example. With all these faults, in the vocal parts of the Rataplan alone, which is about 80 measures long, I corrected 14 errors of notes and 74 indications of color or expression.

A piece for voices alone in which the entire effect resides in the colors becomes a non-entity. In short, it is clear that your copyists work too quickly.

If they are paid by the page, pay them instead by the hour; augment their salaries; do whatever you think best. But stop this disorder, which can have a devastating impact on the success or failure of an opera.

Thanks to the kindness of the Verdi heirs, we now have access to Verdi’s own manuscripts for his sketches, his 1861 score, and almost all the music from 1862 that he removed in 1869. For the first time, then, it is possible to provide modern performers with a score of the 1862 St. Petersburg version based entirely on Verdi’s own notation, not that of the anonymous copyists about whom he complained so bitterly.

Making a critical edition is not just a matter of copying mindlessly an autograph source: it requires constant comparison of all surviving musical materials, taking into account letters, the testimony of contemporaries, and a profound knowledge of the social framework of Italian opera houses. At the end of the process, it is our job to give today’s performers what we believe to be the best possible score of the opera, as close as we can come to Verdi’s own desires. Then it is up to them to make music and theater.

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Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music (University of Chicago), is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He is author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (2006, Chicago), which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of the year. He serves as General Editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (The University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan) and of Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel).

Philip Gossett is also the editor of:

Gioachino Rossini

• Ermione (with Patricia B. Brauner)
• La gazzetta (with Fabrizio Scipioni)
• L'occasione fa il ladro (with Giovanni Carli Ballola and Patricia B. Brauner)
• Semiramide (with Alberto Zedda)
  
• Tancredi
  
• Alle voci della gloria
  
• Messa di Gloria (with Giovanni Acciai)
• "Un vero militare", "Alla gloria un genio eletto"
  

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