Digitization Project

As already mentioned, the OPBS project started in 2012 with the digitization of opera and ballet related sources housed at the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU. These sources include several interesting collections from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as autograph scores of Giovanni Paisiello, and the French composers Charles Simon Catel, Victor Massé and Alexandre Luigini.Footnote ⁶ It also features materials from the copisteria of Luigi Marescalchi, an important music publisher active in late eighteenth-century Venice and Naples. In addition, the Harold B. Lee Library encompasses a large libretto collection, which holds over 200 ballet scenarios and several piano scores for ballets.

The selection of nineteenth-century French repertoire was further enriched when expanding the project to other archives and libraries in the summer of 2012, as they started digitizing the performance materials from the Théâtre de la Monnaie, housed at the City Archives of Brussels (CAB). La Monnaie is Brussels’ foremost opera house, and its nineteenth-century repertory consisted primarily of pieces that had premiered in Paris.Footnote ⁷ Unlike the Parisian theatres, though, La Monnaie was not bound to only performing opera and ballet, rather its stage was also a frequent host to more popular genres of music theatre such as vaudevilles, féeries and mélodrames. As a consequence, the archives contain a wide variety of materials that, according to Day, ‘represent more than six-hundred opera, about one hundred and sixty ballets, and an excess of sixteen-hundred vaudevilles’.Footnote ⁸ As these sources are being digitized, the OPBS project not only grows in size but also provides access to theatrical genres that have not traditionally been the focus of musicological investigation. This commitment to generic variety is also noticeable in the further expansion of the project to the Royal Conservatories of Brussels and Antwerp and the Royal Library of Brussels, which resulted in an addition of hundreds of scores from operas, ballets, comedies and other works.

This BYU–Belgian collaboration is of great interest to music scholars because it has made sources available from smaller institutions whose collections are not widely known or are difficult to access and thus would not be the first point of recourse for researchers. Although the CAB house a rich collection of performance materials, the existence of these sources is not immediately apparent from the archives’ homepage. This homepage provides but a brief, general description of the holdings as ‘about 25,000 volumes, mainly historic, urban and Brussels interest’.Footnote ⁹ The specific contents of these archives are searchable only by keyword or author through a catalogue of digitized index cards and a separate catalogue for the materials acquired after 2004. While the CAB are open during business days, documents are only conveyed to researchers a few times per day. Moreover, research at these archives is made more difficult by their closure during the winter break and for a month during the summer – times when it is easier for scholars to undertake archival research trips. Extended trips seem warranted not only because the index cards do not always provide sufficient information about the contents of a source, but also because it is impossible to order documents in advance. The situation is better at the libraries of the Royal Conservatories of Brussels and Antwerp; they provide better catalogues with more advanced search options and easier access to the documents.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, adding these sources to the Internet Archive gives these collections and archives a much greater visibility and expedites comparative studies between documents from these collections and other online materials. Perhaps most important, it facilitates the expansion of musicological research beyond the traditional generic and geographical boundaries by including performance materials for theatres outside of the European capitals and for genres other than opera.

The Sources in the Index

Searching the Internet Archive for the materials digitized through the BYU–Belgium collaboration is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore, the Index is a very useful tool for the researcher; it not only compiles all these materials but complements them with ‘related primary sources published online by a variety of independent institutions’.Footnote ¹¹ While the Index includes repertoire from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, its particular strength still lies in its coverage of sources from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries (1780–1850), which represents close to half of the documents.Footnote ¹² As expected, works of well-known composers are present in abundance: a search for Gaetano Donizetti yields no less than 1,250 hits. This list comprises 85 libretti and scores for his famous Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), but also libretti for some of his less familiar early works such as Enrico di Borgogna (1818) and Il falegname di Livonia, o Pietro il grande, czar delle Russie (1819).Footnote ¹³ Since many of the scores and libretti were produced in different years, for different theatres or publishers, and in several languages, the Index is a valuable tool for researchers who want to trace the dissemination of particular works or perform a comparative analysis of different versions.

Yet perhaps most valuable is the cornucopia of works from the revolutionary and Napoleonic era (1789–1815) – a period that has recently started to gain more widespread interest in musicology and theatre studies.Footnote ¹⁴ The collection of works by Paisiello, an Italian opera composer active in Italy, France and Russia, is particularly rich: it features 644 items including 270 manuscript scores and three autographs.Footnote ¹⁵ The oeuvre of several opéra comique composers from this period is also well represented: 317 entries appear under the name of André Gretry, who was one of the most successful and widely published opera composers in France at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yet even a search for the now lesser known François-Adrien Boieldieu finds 165 documents, with 32 full scores (for 17 of his operas), 17 piano-vocal scores, 6 piano scores, and a handful of orchestral and vocal parts. In this case, the Index even exceeds the number of scores for Boieldieu found at the Petrucci Music Library (imslp.org) – one of the few other online sources that easily provides scholars with an overview of digitally available scores. In the Petrucci Music Library, scores for only 13 operas by Boieldieu are found, and full scores are available for only seven of these works.Footnote ¹⁶ Given that many of these scores and libretti are not readily available in research libraries, the database provides a unique opportunity for scholars of this repertoire to quickly find available digitized copies.

The database also provides significant coverage of ‘popular’ music theatre genres that are not opera, in particular vaudevilles, mélodrames, féeries and pantomimes. A general keyword search for vaudeville results in a list of 2,396 items largely dating from the first half of the nineteenth century. The extensive presence of these genres in the Index is in part a result of the efforts to start scanning the 16,000 vaudeville-related sources of La Monnaie, of which 364 libretti and seven sets of orchestral parts have been digitized to date.Footnote ¹⁷ In the Index, these sources are supplemented with, among others, the rich Marandet libretti collection from the University of Warwick, which adds 938 French works in various genres from the revolutionary period through the Restoration (1789–1830), among which 337 vaudevilles.Footnote ¹⁸

These ‘popular’ genres are only starting to receive sustained scholarly attention – such attention is long overdue, because these genres constituted some of the most performed early nineteenth-century repertories and their study is essential to acquiring a more comprehensive perspective on Europe’s music theatrical landscape. Moreover, the comedic and parodic elements of these works, with several of them satirizing contemporary operatic and ballet trends, can provide alternative and additional perspectives to those gleaned from newspaper reviews and other critical writings. Previously, finding single pieces from these repertories – let alone multiple works of one author or one theatre – often required sustained research trips to mine multiple catalogues, collections, and archives that were at times hard to navigate. The gathering of these sources into one database has considerably eased the task of the researcher. It allows for a straightforward way of accessing single pieces as well as a (limited) overview of groups of pieces performed and printed during a particular period or in a specific place. While libretti are more plentiful among these entries, the database also includes a handful of scores and libretti with inserted musical excerpts for vaudeville and other ‘popular’ genres. Thus, the Index provides a window – even if still a rather small one – onto the music of these repertoires. This may prove of great value to musicologists, as much of this music has either been lost or was long thought to have been lost. Recently, some of these materials have surfaced in archives, but many are still in the process of being catalogued.Footnote ¹⁹

Searching the Index

The search engine for the Index is designed ‘to facilitate more convenient searching with the specialist scholar in mind’.Footnote ²⁰ The Index is indeed relatively straightforward and easy to navigate. It provides a browsing option and both a simple and an advanced search option. The browsing option leads to a list of all entries providing the following information: title, composer, genre (as recorded on the source), format and date (of publication). This list can be organized in ascending or descending order by clicking on the category (see Fig. 1).Footnote ²¹ There are three issues that render this browsing option the less preferable one. First, the full list is very long, consisting of all 47,557 entries, so that often much time is required to successfully navigate the results unless you are looking for documents that are located at the beginning of a sorted list. Second, the list only provides a selected number of categories that can be used for ordering, and you can only order one category at a time. Finally, the actual information recorded in the categories can make browsing difficult. For instance, since the date category records the date of publication rather than the date of the premiere or of composition, multiple sources of one specific work can be scattered throughout the list. While a simple ordering by title could help in such cases, titles are not always recorded in the language of the premiere, but sometimes in the language of the translation. For example, the two entries for Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor are found under the French title Prince Igor and the Cyrillic Князь Игорь.

Fig. 1

Index to Opera and Ballet Primary Sources Online, browsing first page ordered according to ‘composer’

The search options are largely preferable and faster than browsing. The simple search automatically looks by keyword, while the advanced search offers the following additional categories for a more focused result: person (with a choice of composer, librettist, choreographer, and set designer), title, genre, publisher, RISM number and RISM sigla (see Fig. 2). You can also limit the time period and give further specifications by selecting from seven drop-down menus: specific genre (as recorded on the source), internet project (describing the online repository of the digitized collection),Footnote ²² format, print/manuscript, language, main genre, and whether or not the source is an autograph.

Fig. 2

Index to Opera and Ballet Primary Sources Online, Advanced Search page with drop down menu for search categories

One of the great advantages of this database is that it allows the scholar to search multiple collections of sources at once through the Index’s standardized metadata files. The standardization has been most conspicuous with regard to names, titles, and main genre. Names generally seem to follow the spelling found in Oxford Music Online, which has the greatest impact on names in Cyrillic script such as Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky.Footnote ²³ While the database does not record any variants for names, titles are entered in three different formats: ‘first, an abbreviated title page transcription; second, a short title in the language of its premiere; and third, variant titles that appear in the scanned source’.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, the category of ‘main genre’ represents an attempt to subdivide the multitude of different sources included in the database according to simple and straightforward generic labels: ballet, opera, opera-ballet, vaudeville, documents and programmes.

While it is indeed relatively easy to search the Index’s standardized files, the advanced scholar may be more successful at navigating its content than someone who is just starting out. First, it is necessary to be familiar with the standardized name versions, because different spellings will not yield any results. While this is less of a problem when these standardized versions are widespread and familiar to most scholars, it becomes a challenge for lesser-known persons whose names are often spelled in a variety of ways on the sources themselves. One example is the early nineteenth-century French composer Jean-François Le Sueur, whose name is often spelled ‘Lesueur’ in primary sources as well as the secondary literature.Footnote ²⁵ Yet, a search for ‘Lesueur’ leads to three entries for works by a different individual: the librettist J.L. Lesueur. Perhaps it would be more useful if the name category, like the title category, also included variants such as those recorded on the original documents.

The most confusing – and perhaps superfluous – category in the search engine is that of ‘main genre’ with its four simple generic labels of opera, ballet, opera-ballet and vaudeville. As the drop-down menu for ‘specific genre’ demonstrates, hundreds of different genre designations were used in the actual sources throughout the history of music theatre. Such designations would vary depending on the theatre, language, kind of document, and so on. For example, browsing the sources of Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix (1842), one encounters such various generic descriptions as opera, melodramma, große Oper, and opéra italien. A manuscript full score in Spanish translation describes the work on the title page as a zarzuela and an 1845 Hungarian libretto of this opera calls it nagy opera – Hungarian for ‘grand opera’. These genre designations do not complicate a division in the ‘main genre’ labels, because they all fall under the general overarching category of ‘opera’.

The problem of generic pigeonholing becomes evident, however, when considering popular kinds of theatre. In the Index, early nineteenth-century mélodrame and féerie are generally categorized as ‘opera’, even though music plays a different role in these genres. Mélodrame is generally spoken theatre interrupted by instrumental sections of various length, and sometimes it features musical accompaniment for spoken scenes, but it hardly ever includes vocal music. Féeries, on the other hand, are generally much closer in structure to vaudevilles: spoken dialogues alternate with songs, ensembles, choruses and instrumental interludes. Thus, by simplifying the generic labels and having to categorize vastly different kinds of music theatre under the same label, the helpfulness of the ‘main genre’ category to the researcher becomes very limited. At the same time, the drop-down menu for ‘specific genre’ is an unwieldy list of over 200 alphabetically organized names. Perhaps a middle way can be found in having a tiered list of genres or one organized according to language. Another helpful addition would be the possibility of selecting more than one generic name in the drop-down menus. Selecting multiple options in the drop-down menus would also be useful for some of the other categories in the advanced search database, for example, when you want to search a few collections among the ‘internet projects’ rather than just one or all.

The Name Authority File

The Name Authority File provides biographical information about persons mentioned in the Index. In its search engine, you can select the person according to their artistic involvement: arranger, choreographer, composer, copyist, editor, librettist, scene designer, singer, translator, institution, or author of the literary source a plot is based on (see Fig. 3). It compiles information from a wide variety of documents both primary and secondary, indicated as ‘authority sources’. These sources include the materials collected in the Index as well as various Oxford Companions, national and international encyclopaedias and dictionaries (such as Oxford Music Online), online catalogues (such as Gallica and Worldcat) and online databases (such as the Stanford Opening Night and Virtual International Authority File). They include not only recent publications, but also standard reference works like Claudio Sartori’s I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini fino al 1800 (1990–94) and historical ones, for instance, François-Joseph Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (1866–68). This database provides basic information such as birth and death year, creative role, a summary of some biographical information or the title of the work the person was involved in and links to the ‘authoritative source’.

Fig. 3

Name Authority File, Advanced Search page with drop down menu for role

The Name Authority File is a useful complement to the Index. It provides an overview of places where one can find biographical information or works by particular people. However, in contrast to the Index, where all links direct to materials that are available to the general public and free of charge, some of the ‘authority sources’ require institutional access, such as the links to Oxford Music Online. Moreover, for biographical information on lesser-known figures, the World Biographical Information System Online (https://wbis.degruyter.com/index) may be more useful to the researcher with access to this reference database, because it provides a wider range of results. The Italian composer Bernardo Porta, who spent much of his career in Paris and was a good friend of the painter Jacques-Louis David, when looked up in the Name Authority File, only results in one biographical article, that in the Oxford Music Online – the entry on this composer in Fétis’s Biographie universelle seems to be missing in this case.Footnote ²⁶ In contrast, the WBIS provides full text access to six dictionary entries: by Fétis (1866–68), Leo Benvenuti (1890), Robert Eitner (1900–04), Carlo Schmidl (1937–38), Ugo Imperatori (1956) and in La musica, Dizionario (1968–71). Nevertheless, the Name Authority File is a good first point of reference because it quickly and easily searches multiple ‘authority sources’ and because several of the links in the files direct to freely accessible biographical information.

Closing Thoughts

The accomplishments of the OPBS project are impressive, and the project has the capability to become of significant influence in the further development of scholarship on European music theatre in its broadest sense. Day has expressed hopes that it will become a model that showcases ‘the advantages of independent or informal collaborations among related institutions and collections’ in particular because ‘no single institution can provide all the potentially requisite resources’.Footnote ²⁷ The project indeed demonstrates some of the benefits reaped when the individual efforts of independent institutions are pooled together. Collaborations between international institutions and a focus on smaller projects has resulted in an online resource that has broad research potential.

One of the outstanding qualities of this project is the enormous diversity of collections that it brings together, not only with regard to generic variety, but also concerning the geographical and temporal provenance of the sources. As a result, the Index and Name Authority File are both productive points of recourse for various kinds of research projects: those focusing on the dissemination of one work, on one genre or on one institution; those investigating musical and theatrical culture in a specific locale or from a particular time period; or comparative studies between various European places. The OPBS homepage could benefit from more conspicuous and regular announcements about the additions to source collections, for example through the blog that is featured on this page, and there remains room for improvement with regard to the search modalities and options for the databases. Nevertheless, the Index and Name Authority File are valuable tools for both the beginning student and the specialist researcher. What is more, by bringing together a database project with a digitization venture, the OPBS is not only noteworthy for compiling such a diverse collection of materials but also for actively pursuing diversification by seeking out interesting collections that could further enrich the database and research on the history of music theatre in Europe.