The aim of the internationally geared project is the critical edition of exemplary works of the European music theatre from Baroque to Modernism. Thus, for the first time an academy-project exclusively addresses the music theatre and its diverse manifestations. Published are the works from the French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and Slavic music theatre.
In total, 16 works of different genres are edited, including operetta, melodrama, ballet, and multimedia experiments of the modernity of theatre. The works are collected in thematic modular units, which reflect the specific editing-difficulty, e.g. “own-text and foreign-text”, “performance practice and interpretation” or “transfer and transformation”.
The editions are presented in a “Hybrid-edition”: The scores are published as printed sheet music; the critical reports along with the sources however are presented on a digital platform. An essential element of the digital component is also the edition of the opera libretti.
Therefore, the project differs significantly from previous editing practice of musical stage work: On the one hand, the editorial decisions on the basis of the possibility to access the underlying sources are immediately comprehensible and therefore transparent in every respect. On the other hand, it is possible for the user to generate different versions of the opera libretto, which opens up new possibilities not only for the musical stage experience. The planned editions are of great importance equally for the musicology and the dramatics as well as literary studies.