Helen Greenwald: Tackling "Attila"
Title Page of Greenwald's edition of "Zelmira"
“I can get very happy from very little,� says NEC musicologist Helen Greenwald about her critical edition work. Solving the mysteries posed by an old musical score, “you make a sudden connection with what happened.� In communion with the intentions of a long dead composer, “you say, ‘I can see you. I get it.’�
Having just completed the critical edition of Rossini’s opera, Zelmira, Greenwald is about to embark on an important new project, the score of Verdi’s Attila. While Zelmira is rarely heard, Attila has had a modern performing life: Riccardo Muti recorded it in 1991 as did Maurizio Benini for Opera Rara, and it’s been performed by Chicago’s Lyric Opera, Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York, and the New York City Opera. Boston’s Chorus Pro Musica will perform it in June.
What audiences hear in those performances is probably not the most authentic incarnation of the work. The Attila score—like many other Italian operas from the 19th Century—may be plagued by distortions and inaccuracies, large and small, that have accumulated over the years. To clean them up, to recreate as faithfully as possible an authentic score is the goal of the Giuseppe Verdi Critical Edition begun in 1983 at the University of Chicago under the direction of scholar Phillip Gossett. The project is sponsored in part by funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gossett is also general editor of the Rossini edition and was Greenwald’s boss on the Zelmira project. He assigned her the Attila edition.
How is it possible, one might ask, that Verdi’s operas are only now being issued in critical editions? “The reasons have to do first with the idea of distance from a subject,� Greenwald explained. “Musicology was initially a discipline bound to a distant past, meaning, for example, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. There was an unwritten expectation that there should be at least a century or two between scholar and subject. I ran up against this sort of prejudice, as I undertook Puccini studies in the late 1980s, but so did people studying Brahms! This view has altered considerably in the last few years and living subjects from rock musicians to Elliott Carter are now fair game for scholars.
“Another facet in what seems to be a delay in the edition has to do with the formulation of an ideal regarding the music itself, that is, contemporary ideals of authenticity and methodology. Operas existed in many different versions, often owing to the practices and needs of different opera houses. Sometimes the composer himself, in this case Verdi, would sanction a change made for a specific performance. All of this has to be taken into account.�
There's more, though, Greenwald says.
“Loosely speaking, the editors of 19th Century editions didn’t think it a bad thing to alter Beethoven, to ‘fix things,’ to add accompaniments, for example, to Bach unaccompanied works. In the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, however, we are obsessed with authenticity. Modern scholars disavow the editions of previous centuries, so over time, more and more composers are undergoing the detailed study and minute scrutiny that go into a critical edition and Verdi is among the major Italian opera composers to receive this attention. (The Rossini edition was started in 1979, Donizetti in 1990, Bellini in 2000.). But the sheer massive labor of a critical edition is “something that cannot be undertaken lightly,� Greenwald asserts. “The Mozart edition, begun in 1955, took 36 years and it’s still a work in progress.�
As she sets out on the Attila project, there are certain necessary first steps, Greenwald said. The first is to create a “baseline� score that will become “the platform for all editorial decisions.� In order to do that, the editor must choose the principal source for the baseline—usually the autograph score or a first edition, and sometimes a set of parts used in a production supervised by the composer.
None of these is infallible, including the autograph, the musicologist says. “There’s a whole society inside an autograph, a whole city. There’s the composer, of course, but also many other people who have put their hands in the autograph.�
Greenwald will work from a copy of the autograph of Attila, referring as well to microfilms and facsimiles of other Verdi autographs to learn the “secrets� of Verdi’s handwriting. Eventually, she will to go to London and Venice to check the original sources, because copies tend to obscure lots of important information. For every discrepancy between sources—a different pitch, rest, articulation marking--she will need to make an educated decision on which is correct. The changes will be entered in red pencil and the decision-making process documented in a critical report—which when published is often as thick as the score. After the baseline is completed, it will be subject to more changes. Among those might be variants introduced at different productions of the opera—an aria interpolated for a particular singer, for example.
Greenwald tells a fascinating story about just such an interpolated aria that Rossini wrote for the diva Guiditta Pasta for a Paris production of Zelmira. The new aria was not included in the manuscript because it had been written later. (Indeed the aria was discovered in fragments “all over the place.�) In order to perform the new piece in the opera house, original music had been cut and prefatory and concluding music revised. Greenwald’s task was to locate the spots where the old and new music dovetailed. Sitting in a library in Paris with the Rossini autograph, she searched the pages where the Parisian conductor would have marked the cuts. Since he didn’t actually excise the superfluous pages or glue them together, she concluded he must have folded and pinned them together so he could flip from the point where the new aria began to the point where it ended. But there was no visible evidence of this.
Closing her eyes, Greenwald silently pleaded, “Speak to me� and began running her fingers over the pages. In a Eureka moment, she felt the pin pricks she couldn’t see. Then, lifting those pages to the light, she was able to discern the faint 180-year old crease marks in the paper—that had been ironed flat for more than a century by the heavy book.
For every gratifying discovery of this type, of course, there are mysteries that remain unresolved and left for future scholars to crack. One in Zelmira was a hieroglyph that resembles an intertwined N and B. It appears four times in the autograph in different places on the page and in different media—including shocking pink ink and red crayon. “It’s in different hands and there is no consistency to it,� Greenwald mused. “We never figured it out.� Of course, like the meticulous editor that she is, she left a note about it.
Certainly some of the work can be tedious, but Greenwald finds it deeply rewarding. “It’s nice to play in the notes, to wallow in the score,� she maintains. “You get to know the composer and to get in his head.�