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Shortly before the premiere of Cavalleria rusticana, Pietro Mascagni cut 246 measures from his opera. This substantial section of music has remained largely unknown and has never been examined. Recent access to the original prompter's score, the score once in the possession of the first conductor (Leopoldo Mugnone), autograph letters, unexplored reviews, and a rediscovered staging manual have made a thorough evaluation of the cuts possible. These cuts fall into three categories: (1) those tightening the pace, (2) those reducing the taxing part of the chorus, and (3) those accommodating transpositions requested at the last minute by the star singers Gemma Bellincioni (Santuzza) and Roberto Stagno (Turiddu). The article argues that the cuts had consequences beyond their originally intended function, affecting the staging, drama, and formal conception. In the “Introduzione,” for instance, they lead to confusion about the way in which the scene should be staged; in the “Sortita di Alfio,” they eliminate music that functioned as the culmination of the aria's large-scale formal plan; and in the composite No. 5, they exaggerate the so-called dramaturgy of harsh junctures. In short, these cuts shed important light on the composer's original dramatic intentions and technical aspirations, and have lingered for over one hundred years without being considered for reinstatement.

In 1943 Allied bombs destroyed the archives of Leoncavallo's publisher, Sonzogno, and of the Teatro Dal Verme, where Pagliacci was first performed. As a result, many sources pertaining to the opera's compositional history were lost, and scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Leoncavallo's unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Appunti.” Contextual sources such as notifications in the press, eyewitness accounts, and a large body of mostly unpublished correspondence now suggest that Leoncavallo cloaked the opera's genesis to protect its legacy. Leoncavallo was twice charged with having imitated an existing play. In his protracted defense, he took every opportunity to distinguish his libretto from the literary tradition to which it belongs and tie it instead to the verismo movement (with which critics had associated it since the premiere). He began to claim, for instance, that the libretto was based on a crime of passion he had witnessed in Montalto and invented a version of that crime that matched the libretto. Furthermore, in preparation of the first performance in Paris, he actively contributed to a staging faithfully depicting Montalto in an attempt to highlight the originality of the story. And as he was tightening the opera's connection to verismo, he was concealing aspects that would have reflected poorly on the opera's reception, including Sonzogno's initial concerns regarding the music and the presence of substantial musical self-borrowings.

Martin Chusid, one of the most prolific and respected Verdi and Schubert scholars, passed away in December 2013, two months after the celebrations of Verdi’s two-hundredth birthday at New York Univ...

The preparation of the critical edition of Verdi's I due Foscari has drawn attention to two overlooked sources: an early scenario attributed to Andrea Maffei and an early manuscript copy with various layers of corrections. This article questions the scenario's attribution to Maffei, revising the opera's early history. It furthermore identifies one of the layers in the manuscript copy as being in Verdi's hand, showing that the composer's role in fine-tuning a libretto at this early stage in his career was greater than has so far been possible to show.

A certain Filippo Nardoni, upon completing his review of the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi'sDon Alvaro(the Roman version ofLa forza del destino), wrote to the director of the police: ‘I have marked in pencil the proposed corrections, which I have thought advisable for the wretched subject of the opera. If you don't like them, they can be easily erased with sandarac’. It seems strange that an ostensible censor would correct a libretto and then not mind seeing his corrections erased; censors were, after all, gatekeepers of morality and political propriety, and no libretto was supposed to be permitted without their approval. As it turns out, Nardoni was not an official Roman censor, and yet, he and other prominent personalities were more important in censoring Verdi's operas than their official colleagues. They were not only more rigorous when it came to identifying potentially dangerous passages but also worked as a team, passing the libretto around among themselves until an acceptable alternative was found.

The bulk of Leonard Bernstein's first book, The Joy of Music (1959), consists of three imaginary conversations and seven scripts of Omnibus lectures intended for the education of lay audiences. These texts have long been admired for their pedagogy but have largely been ignored as reflections of Bernstein's aesthetic views. This article proposes that The Joy of Music functions not only as a pedagogical document but also as an aesthetic manifesto preparing Bernstein's audiences for some of his best compositions—especially the Third Symphony (Kaddish; 1963, rev. 1977) and West Side Story (1957). In the context of The Joy of Music, Kaddish appears as the fulfillment of “the real American symphonic form” and West Side Story as the ultimate American musical stage work, that is, a work that is as sophisticated as opera but rooted in the American musical.

Verismo, a term originally applied to nineteenth-century art and literature of various degrees of realism, has been the subject of controversy when applied to opera. While literary scholarship has come to measure verismo against the narrowly defined models provided by the theories, novels, and short stories of Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, operatic scholarship has either superimposed these same theories on the dramatic genre of the libretto or it has constructed concepts of questionable historical foundation. Drawing mainly on a large corpus of neglected nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of verismo, this article uncovers the original meanings of the termand outlines how we have come to adopt a view of verismo that is problematic in regard to both literature and opera. Contrary to this view, verismo was seen in the nineteenth century primarily as a reaction to the idealism and conventionality of earlier artworks; in this sense it had already been applied to opera before 1890, and it is, in fact, a perfectly appropriate designation for opera in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In comparison to Romantic Italian opera, with its conventional forms of both libretto and music, verismo opera reacts to idealism in any combination of categories ranging from plot to vocabulary, verse, harmony and melody, performance practice, and production.

To a nineteenth-century opera composer, the related terms of versification and prosody implied not only a set of rules to which to adhere but a set of rhetorical choices with distinct dramatic consequences. This chapter discusses samples from the French, German, and Italian repertory, focusing on Verdi’s I due Foscari, Les vêpres siciliennes, and Don Carlos; Adam’s Le brasseur de Preston; Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; and Weber’s Der Freischütz, interpreting the choices at a composer’s disposal. It shows that these choices can underscore the rhetoric of an aria or phrase, contribute to the caricature of a character, play a role in determining what version of a particular text should be the principal one, and contribute to an understanding of the reasons that an opera is more effective in its original language than in translation.

This study investigates a variety of primary sources dealing with French poetic rhythm and concludes that the variety of approaches discussed in these sources must be kept in mind when evaluating a composer's setting of French verse. French poetic theory discusses practices such as scanning verse in iambs and trochees regardless of interior accents; determining the number of accents based on the metre of the verse; and observing only the most essential accents based on syntactic considerations. Focusing on Verdi's French operas, this study examines the relationship between these possibilities and the melodic style. 42 For evidence regarding Les Vipres siciliennes, see Giger, 'The Role of Verdi's French Operas', ch. 4; evidence regarding Don Carlos will be provided in a study that is currently in progress.

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.

Leoncavallo: Life and Works. By Konrad Dryden. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. [xvi, 351 p. ISBN-10 0810858800; ISBN-13 9780810858800. $75.] Illustrations, references, bibliography, appendix, index. No scholar deserves more credit for furthering the cause of neglected turn-of-thetwentieth- century Italian composers than Konrad Dryden. Following the publication of his biography of Riccardo Zandonai (New York: Lang, 1999), Dryden has now provided a study of Ruggiero Leoncavallo's life and works. With relatively little information about Leoncavallo readily accessible, Dryden had to start almost from scratch, wondering with some justification "why a composer of one of the world's most famous operas has received such little research over the past one hundred years" (p. xiii). Dryden set himself the lofty goal of writing "the ultimate reference on this important figure in music and opera history" (http://www.konrad-dryden.de [accessed 21 November 2007]); while this goal has turned out to be too ambitious, he has realized his goal of providing a foundation for future research (p. xv). Dryden's study consists of two parts, a biography (to p. 186) and a description of the major works (to p. 320). An appendix of the major compositions (including references to the operas' literary sources, original casts, and places and dates of the first performances), a bibliography, and an index of names conclude the book. Dryden paints a paradoxical but convincing picture of Leoncavallo. On the one hand, he sees a generous man of high culture who lived in four countries (Italy, Egypt, France, and Switzerland), had an extensive knowledge of literature (due in part to studies with Giosue Carducci), made generous charitable contributions, and composed effective works in addition to Pagliacci (especially La nuit de mai, La boheme, Zaza, and Maia). On the other hand, he sees a man who repeatedly sacrificed artistic integrity, accepted every libretto apparently without ever requesting revisions, played one publisher against another, and blamed others for his lack of success: his publisher Sonzogno for insufficient promotion, Ricordi for waging a war against him, and famous performers such as Enrico Caruso, Tita Ruffo, and Arturo Toscanini for not performing his works more often. According to Dryden, Leoncavallo's decline began with Der Roland von Berlin (commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II and premiered in 1904) and accelerated with Sonzogno's increasing financial problems and the onset of World War I, during which Leoncavallo's opportunistic but inconsistent stance vis-a-vis the Germans and the French proved counterproductive for the performance of his operas in those countries. Dryden assembles a large number of unpublished documents and succeeds in shedding light on periods of Leoncavallo's life that have been hardly known at all, such as his relationship with the German publisher Furstner and his years in Paris, when he worked as a pianist in cafe concerts and barely managed to make ends meet. The introduction to the book raises the expectation that Dryden might also be able to solve some of the "mysteries" of Leoncavallo's life, most of which the composer himself promoted (beginning "with the uncertain year of his birth, the time spent in Egypt and Paris, his health, his finances, Pagliacci's origins, and his relationship with Puccini and other colleagues" [p. xiii]). Dryden does establish the date of Leoncavallo's birth (reproducing the birth certificate) and covers Leoncavallo's Egyptian period. But the composer's health, the origins of Pagliacci, and his relationship with Puccini remain either mysterious or less thoroughly covered than elsewhere. For example, Dryden's discussion of Leoncavallo's health is limited to providing Latin names for the illnesses, and his treatment of Pagliacci's origins is less thorough than has been provided by Matteo Sansone ("The Verismo of Ruggero Leoncavallo: A Source Study of Pagliacci," Music & Letters 70, no. …

Focusing on Verdi's French operas, Giger shows how the composer acquired an ever better understanding of the various approaches to French versification while gradually bringing his works in line with French melodic aesthetic. In his first French opera, Jérusalem, Verdi treated the text in an overly cautious manner, trying to avoid prosodic mistakes; in Les Vêpres siciliennes he began to apply more freedom, scanning the verses against some prosodic accents to convey the lightheartedness of a melody; and in Don Carlos he finally drew on the entire palette of prosodic interpretations. Most of Verdi's melodic accomplishments in the French operas carried over into the subsequent Italian ones, setting the stage for what later would be called operatic verismo. Drawing attention to the significance of the libretto for the development of nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, this text illustrates Verdi's gradual mastery of the challenges he faced, and their historical significance.

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Blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) MRI was shown to allow non-invasive observation of renal oxygenation in humans. However, clinical applications of this type of functional MRI of the kidney are still limited, most likely because of difficulties in obtaining reproducible and reliable information. The aim of this study was to evaluate the reproducibility and robustness of a BOLD method applied to the kidneys and to identify systematic physiological changes potentially influencing the renal oxygenation of healthy volunteers. To measure the BOLD effect, a modified multi-echo data image combination (MEDIC) sequence was used to acquire 12 T2*-weighted images within a single breath-hold. Three identical measurements were performed on three axial and three coronal slices of right and left kidneys in 18 volunteers. The mean R2* (1/T2*) values determined in medulla and cortex showed no significant differences over three repetitions and low intra-subject coefficients of variation (CV) (3 and 4% in medulla and cortex, respectively). The average R2* values were higher in the medulla (16.15 +/- 0.11) than in the cortex (11.69 +/- 0.18) (P < 0.001). Only a minor influence of slice orientation was observed. Mean R2* values were slightly higher (3%) in the left than in the right kidney (P < 0.001). Differences between volunteers were identified (P < 0.001). Part of these differences was attributable to age-dependent R2* values, since these values increased with age when medulla (P < 0.001, r = 0.67) or cortex (P < 0.020, r = 0.42) were considered. Thus, BOLD measurements in the kidney are highly reproducible and robust. The results allow one to identify the known cortico-medullary gradient of oxygenation evidenced by the gradient of R2* values and suggest that medulla is more hypoxic in older than younger individuals. BOLD-MRI is therefore a useful tool to study sequentially and non-invasively regional oxygenation of human kidneys.

Background Efforts are now routinely made for early detection of vesicoureteric reflux after urinary tract infections in order to limit secondary renal damage. Methods The age at diagnosis of reflux after urinary tract infections was analysed in 162 Swiss patients (46 boys and 116 girls) referred by primary care physicians to the Division of Paediatric Nephrology, University of Bern, Switzerland between 1978 and 1999. The figures noted in Switzerland were also compared with those noted in 102 Australian patients (35 boys and 67 girls) reported by Lenaghan in 1976. Results In Switzerland the median age at diagnosis was 23 months in 74 subjects diagnosed between 1978 and 1988 and 10 months in 88 subjects diagnosed between 1989 and 1999. The difference was statistically significant in girls but not in boys. In Australia the median age at diagnosis was 15 months for boys and 78 months for girls; in Switzerland, the corresponding figures were 12 and 29 months (between 1978 and 1988), respectively 5 and 14 months (between 1989 and 1999). The difference between Australia and Switzerland was statistically significant in girls but not in boys. Conclusions In Switzerland vesicoureteric reflux is now detected earlier than in the past. This trend is more marked in girls than in boys but the detection of reflux is still earlier in boys than in girls.

Die erfolgreiche Ansprache der grunen Kunden, die auch als LOHAS bezeichnet werden, stellt fur die Marketing- und Vertriebsorganisation vieler Unternehmen eine grose Herausforderung dar. Wir sprachen mit Dr. Andreas Giger, Zukunftsforscher und Zukunfts-Philosoph, uber die besonderen Eigenschaften, die wichtigsten Werte und das Verhalten der grunen Kunden.

This article gives a brief account of an ongoing project whose ultimate aim is to create a comprehensive, indexed, and annotated bibliography of published materials and theses relating to the use of existing music in the tradition of Western art music.(1) As a work in progress, it is obviously not yet comprehensive; it now contains about 350 annotated and another 550 unannotated entries. It is also not yet indexed. This project has been a collaborative undertaking from the start. In 1988, J. Peter Burkholder and David C. Birchler initiated the bibliography at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. The former now supervises the project, which has been continued at Indiana University, first by students in a seminar on musical borrowings and since 1990 by me, with other assistants. My work has included (1) editing existing entries, (2) finding new items, (3) annotating entries, and (4) searching for criteria according to which we should include or exclude certain items. During weekly meetings, we gradually refined our procedures and policies. But many questions remain open. This account summarizes both what we have decided so far and what still needs clarification. We intend to cover all periods of music history and all types of borrowing. Nevertheless, we did choose to exclude popular music since about 1700 from the current bibliography. We had collected dozens of items related to popular music, but decided that they would appear most usefully in a separate volume dedicated to popular music. The reasons are practical rather than ideological: different issues seem to be involved, particularly in a tradition preserved in sound rather than on paper; the resulting work would have a different potential readership; and the journals, magazines, and papers that deal with popular music often differ from those that address art music. More obviously, concentrating on art music cuts the number of items we must examine by more than half. We continue to be interested in collecting citations for items on popular music and will keep them in our files, but we are not currently seeking them out. We plan to include in the bibliography items that consider the reworking of one or more particular musical works in new compositions; those that present a substantial list or catalogue of borrowings, even if no discussion is provided; or those that consider some aspect of the field as a whole. We do not include sources that discuss only allusions to musical styles or archetypes or that do no more than mention in passing the relation of a newer work to an earlier one, without exploring the connection to some extent. To be included, an article or book need not necessarily refer to borrowing in the title, nor must a major portion deal with a particular borrowing technique, if it otherwise satisfies the abovementioned criteria. One special category needs mentioning here. We decided to include articles that deny the existence of borrowing in a piece or of a particular relationship between a work and its supposed source. Such an argument usually includes useful interpretation, and it may respond to other items in our bibliography, making it of interest as an alternative point of view. We can find such a case in Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht's Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, where he discusses those melodies in Mahler's symphonies that sound so familiar to us that we may try to trace their origins.(2) Eggebrecht argues, however, that there is no point in trying to find their sources, because these seemingly borrowed passages reflect instead Mahler's attempt to evoke a "colloquial" sound (umgangssprachlicher Ton) or the impression of deja vu. For a better sense of the bibliography and what it seeks to accomplish, let us turn to a specific example. The excerpt printed below shows an annotation of an article by Friedrich Gennrich, in which the author refers to the development of the motet ente, a type of motet that at least in one of its parts is framed by a refrain, whose first half appears at the beginning of the part, the other half at its end. …