Please help fund critical editions of rare opera

Do you love late-18th-century opera? Have you heard or performed selected arias from operatic repertoire of this period and wished the entire opera was available? Well, here’s your chance! Let’s make it happen!

Before a work is performed on stage, a huge amount of research is undertaken, which the audience and listeners do not see, but is critically important for the musicians, such as locating the manuscript sources in libraries, ordering copies of the manuscripts, translating libretti, and transcribing the manuscripts for the musicians to perform.

With your help these works can be revived. Don’t leave them to languish on library shelves. Your support can bring these rare gems of operatic repertoire back to life!

I am an Australian musicologist who specializes in editing musical sources of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The project I am currently working on will be the first critical edition of Il Demetrio by Josef Mysliveček, who was a friend of the Mozart family. Il Demetrio was first staged at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples on 13 August 1779, starring Domenico Bedini in the title role, who would later go on to sing the role of Sesto in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito.

Your generous contribution will be acknowledged in the publications’ introductory sections.

With big thanks and appreciation for your support. I will be sure to keep you regularly updated on the project, as it progresses.

Please find below an excerpt from the final scene of Act II of Ill Demetrio (original video courtesy of YouTube).