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Isis: Tragédie en musique. Livret de Philippe Quinault. Édition de Lionel Sawkins by Jean-Baptiste Lully

2018; Music Library Association; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2018.0119

1534-150X

Rebekah Ahrendt,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Reviewed by: Isis: Tragédie en musique. Livret de Philippe Quinault. Édition de Lionel Sawkins by Jean-Baptiste Lully Rebekah Ahrendt Jean-Baptiste Lully. Isis: Tragédie en musique. Livret de Philippe Quinault. Édition de Lionel Sawkins; édition du livret: Sylvain Cornic et Lionel Sawkins. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2014. (Œuvres complètes. Série III: Opéras, vol. 6.) (Musica Gallica.) [Gen. pref. in Fre., Eng., Ger. (Jerôme de La Gorce, Herbert Schneider), p. v–vii; introd. in Fre., Eng., p. ix–xlii; introd. to the livret in Fre., Eng., p. 3– 6; livret, p. 7–33; table of contents, p. 35–38; liste des rôles/list of characters, p. 39–40; score, p. 41–311; annexe 1a–b [singers, dancers, instrumentalists on-stage], p. 313–17; facsims., p. 319–32; crit. apparatus in Eng., p. 335–51; table of contents, p. 353; note on revision/engraving, p. 354; list of volumes in edition, p. 355–56. Cloth. ISBN 978-3-487-15193-9. i298.] Every would-be editor of the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully is faced with one cold fact: there are no autograph manuscripts. Instead, the principal sources are generally the printed editions issued by the house of Ballard, which held a music printing monopoly in the kingdom of France, and which from an early date established a cooperation with the composer. The first tragédie en musique to be printed by Ballard was Lully and librettist Philippe Qui nault's fifth exercise in the genre, Isis (premiered in January of 1677). The opera was issued sometime after March 1677 not as a score, but in a set of ten part-books in oblong quarto format. Why Lully turned to printing his tragédies en musique only at this point remains an open question, as does the fact that Isis, unlike any other, was issued as a set of parts. A full score of the opera would not be published by Ballard until 1719. Oblong quarto partbooks carry a particular use value: they are intended for performance, and not for score study. Such is not the case for a critical edition (more on this below). The volume here under review marks the third of Lully's operas to appear in the series published by Olms, after Armide (ed. Lois Rosow, 2003) and Thésée (ed. Pascal Denécheau, 2010). Like its fore-bears in the Olms series, Isis has been published as both a full score and a keyboard-vocal reduction (ed. Noam A. Krieger, including simple continuo realizations; not reviewed here). Isis has been the subject of a modern edition before, as part of the Chefs-d'œuvres classiques de l'opéra français series, edited by Théodore de Lajarte in the late nineteenth century. Lajarte's edition might seem lamentable from the purist's perspective, as it is a wildly unfaithful piano-vocal reduction, but it is golden as an example of nineteenth-century reception of earlier musics. The complete works edition started by Henry Prunières in 1930 and continued by Broude Brothers in the 1960s and 1970s never got around to Isis, thus this marks the first attempt at a modern critical edition. (For a history of the various Lully editions, see Ronald Broude's review of Lois Rosow's Olms [End Page 329] edition of Armide, Notes 62, no. 3 [March 2006]: 797–802, at 797.) One of the most important features of a critical edition for this reviewer, at least, is the introduction to the volume. Sawkins covers an enormous amount of ground in his introduction; unfortunately, the line of his argument is not always clear. Readers unfamiliar with Isis might not understand all of the important points Sawkins attempts to make, for he tends to write around some of the major issues of the opera and its reception, rather than clearly stating the problems. Such is the case for one of the central elements of the traditional Isis narrative: that this opera was understood as tacit criticism of Louis XIV's amours and the character of Io was identified with Mme de Ludres, while Mme de Montespan was seen in jealous Juno. Supposedly, the...