Cherubini's Medée in new crititical edition
(January 2008)
New edition of Cherubini's Medée in Vienna and BrusselsThe first stagings of Médée using the new authoritative Cherubini Edition take place in Vienna and Brussels this season.
Fabio Luisi conducts six performances of the new Cherubini Edition of Medée, opening on 6 March at the Theater an der Wien in a production by Torsten Fischer. The following month Christophe Rousset is on the podium in Brussels for a new staging at the Theatre de la Monnaie with Les Talents Lyriques providing the orchestra. The production by Krzysztof Warlikowski runs for nine performances between 12 April and 2 May.
This new edition of Médée is the major achievement to date for the Cherubini Edition published by Anton J. Benjamin (Edition Simrock), the most historic of the Boosey & Hawkes family of imprints. It is the first score and performing materials for the opera to be based on a critical-scholarly consideration of all the surviving original sources: Cherubini’s autograph, the set of parts from the premiere, and the composer’s subsequent alterations found among the holdings of the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra in Paris and the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire in Brussels.
Luigi Cherubini’s Médée, premiered in Paris in 1797, was popularised for the modern age by the remarkable artistry of Maria Callas, reviving the opera at the 1953 Maggio Musicale in Florence and prompting stagings in Milan, Rome, Venice, London and Dallas. However, this Italian-language version was far from the work that Cherubini would have recognised. It translated German recitatives by Franz Lachner dating from the 1850s which displaced the original French dialogue, and perpetuated cuts totalling 600 bars of music, alterations to the orchestral score and mistranspositions in the choral parts.
The original and complete French version of Médée only resurfaced at a New York concert in 1997, and a staging in Giessen the following year used materials representing work-in-progress by editor Heiko Cullmann in preparation for the new Cherubini Edition. Instead of a Romantic music-drama laden with veristic effects – as exemplified by Callas’ interpretation – the new edition reveals the opera as a masterpiece of the French revolutionary era, stylistically indebted to the eighteenth century yet retaining its dramatic power for modern audiences.
The 250th anniversary of Cherubini's birth is celebrated in 2010.
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