The Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini

At its simplest, a critical edition of music presents a printed score that reflects as accurately as possible the composer's concept and provides the user with information about how the editor arrived at this form of the score and with the tools to interpret it. An immediate qualification is necessary. To speak of the composer's concept as something that is fixed, that can be expressed in a score and that can be recovered through study of the sources raises the issues of authorship and the nature of an opera as a work of art. These topics have been much discussed by textual critics and musical scholars. In some senses an opera has multiple authors: we consider the composer to be the principal author, but the work of the librettist with whom he collaborates can also be seen as authorial. Censors and financial controls can affect the final form of the opera. An opera, furthermore, needs a theatre directorship, stage director, set and costume designers, musicians and stage hands to realise it in performance.

Nonetheless, the Rossini critical edition, like the critical editions of other nineteenth-century Italian opera composers, generally regards the original score as reflecting the composer's intention – much as that intention may have been modified by the entire social setting in which an opera is composed, produced and published or otherwise disseminated – and takes the autograph as the principal source for the edition. As adjunct sources the editor uses the librettos, manuscript copies, published scores, performing materials and designs for sets and costumes for the première and subsequent authentic productions (defined as those that Rossini directly supervised), reviews, letters and whatever else may exist. In the critical edition the poetic text as found in the score is given preference over that of the printed libretto; no edition of the text as a literary entity is attempted, nor is the libretto printed separately from the music.