OPERA

OPERA: Spectrum of European Music Theatre in Separate Editions is dedicated to critical editions of outstanding works of European music theatre from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Compositions of French, Italian, German, English and Slavic origin are being edited. These include specific genres which have seldom been given attention in editorial undertakings until now and which present their own editorial problems, such as ballet, theatre music, melodrama or operetta.

A new feature is the form of the presentation in so-called hybrid editions. While the scores appear in traditional cloth-bound volumes, the musical and textual sources, the editions of the dramatic texts, as well as the critical commentaries are prepared and presented on an electronic platform (Edirom). Thanks to this ability to access the underlying sources, the editorial decisions are completely transparent to the user. This special editorial access being implemented by OPERA’s editions uses the software Edirom, which was developed in a project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) based at the University of Paderborn. All components of the electronic part are encoded according to the modern standard of XML. The text components follow the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Each volume contains a preface in German and English along with the language of the individual work.

All of the musical and textual sources, the editions of the dramatic texts, the editions of the music, as well as the critical reports for each volume are contained on a credit-card style USB flash drive.