More than just the Symphonie fantastique
The New Berlioz Edition is now complete
On 3 May 2006 a celebration will be held in London to mark the completion of the New Berlioz Edition, the scholarly-critical publication of the complete works of the French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869).
The edition comprises 23 volumes of music (some in subvolumes) and three supplementary volumes. It will contain all of Berlioz's operas, symphonies, overtures, choral works, chansons and minor pieces.
The great enterprise was founded by a group of English musicians and scholars and began operations in 1965 after receiving a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Soon the House of Bärenreiter was retained as a publisher, and the first volume, containing the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, was issued in 1967 at a concert of the Royal Liverpool Orchestra, conducted by Charles Groves. The volume was edited by Hugh Macdonald, the chief editor of the entire project. In 1969, for the 100th anniversary of Berlioz's death, Les Troyens was issued in three subvolumes, again edited by Hugh Macdonald. Today this opera ranks among the great masterpieces of the nineteenth century and is regularly produced at the world's great opera houses, along with Berlioz's three other stage works, Benvenuto Cellini, Béatrice et Bénédict, and La Damnation de Faust.
In 1992 a sensation arose when Berlioz's first large-scale piece of music, the purportedly lost Messe solennelle, resurfaced in an Antwerp church. One year later it appeared as
volume 23 of the complete edition. Other first publications include the unfinished but important operas Les francs-juges and La nonne sanglante.
Two volumes are devoted to Berlioz's arrangements of works by other composers, including Gluck's Orphée and Weber's Der Freischütz.
The three supplementary volumes consist of Berlioz's famous treatise on orchestration, the Grand Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes (vol. 24), a thematic catalogue prepared by D. Kern Holoman (vol. 25, 1987) and a complete collection of all known portraits of the composer (vol. 26).
Among the many scholars and conductors closely associated with the New Berlioz Edition are David Cairns, John Warrack, Ian Kemp, Paul Banks, Richard Macnutt, Sir Colin Davis, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Jürgen Kindermann, Nicholas Temperley, David Lloyd-Jones and Ian Rumbold. All of them helped to make the complete edition the definitive basis for any study of the composer and for all professional performances of his music.