Output details

Jean-Phillipe Rameau: "Zais", ed. Graham Sadler (full score)

This output is the most recent in a series of major editorial projects by Sadler across many years, including OUP editions of music by Campra (1973), Leclair (1976 and 1979) and Rameau (1980), as well as editions of seven Rameau operas for staged performances at Covent Garden, major European festivals and elsewhere. The submission is Sadler’s second contribution to _Jean-Philippe Rameau: Opera Omnia_, the complete edition published by Bärenreiter (Sadler is an editorial board member), the other volume being a reconstruction of the 1749 version of _Zoroastre_ (1999).

The _Zaïs_ volume is the first-ever critical edition of this work. Although it was included in the Durand _Œuvres complètes_ (1911), the editor Vincent d’Indy radically revised the orchestration and harmony, rendering the edition nowadays unusable.

In editing this work, the most authoritative musical source proved to be the Paris Opéra production score used during a period of 21 years; the editorial process thus required a painstaking disentangling of many layers of revision. For numerous movements, this score lacks inner choral and orchestral parts, which thus had to be retrieved from authoritative secondary sources or completed editorially.

The 40-page preface contextualises the work’s conception, performance history and reception, and analyses significant features, e.g. references to the rituals and symbols of Freemasonry, established by new research in masonic archives, and hitherto unexplored intertextual links within the genre of ‘la féerie’, some (unusually) noted by the librettist himself.

The critical apparatus (pp. 319–97) includes a comprehensive evaluation of 21 surviving musical sources and four editions of the libretto, plus appendices, facsimiles and 37 pages of critical notes.

The edition is scheduled for performance in 2014 by Jonathan Williams and the OAE and by Christophe Rousset’s Les Talens Lyriques.

Sadler’s research (Sadler_01–04) now forms part of the Conservatoire’s newly established French Music Research Hub.