Philip Gossett

[lennygoran]

Gotta admit-I never heard of him. Regards, Len



Philip Gossett, a musicologist whose shoe-leather detective work in musty archives and Italian villas helped bring long-lost operas back to the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 75.

Ellen T. Harris, a professor emeritus of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, confirmed the death. She said he had long been treated for progressive supranuclear palsy.

Mr. Gossett made it his life’s work to recover scores that had disappeared or become messy — marred by years of bad copies, mistakes, revisions for different singers and productions, later interpolations and lost passages — and return them to something close to what their composers had intended.

He was a pioneer in the creation of scholarly critical editions of opera scores, and served as the general editor of new editions of the works of Verdi and Rossini. He had a distinguished academic career as a professor at the University of Chicago. And he became a familiar figure in rehearsal rooms around the world, sought after by top conductors, singers and opera companies working to bring his discoveries to life.


The conductor Riccardo Muti, a noted proponent of fidelity to the score, said in an interview that Mr. Gossett’s contributions were “a blessing for the conductors that wanted, really, to bring back a certain dignity to the scores, to bring back the original ideas of the composers.”

Mr. Muti lamented that many Italian operas had become corrupted over the years by bad scores and inauthentic performance traditions.

“There were all these changes that, if you were to do them in Mozart, or in Wagner, or in Strauss, you would be killed, completely crucified,” he said. “But in the Italian repertoire, all these things had been permitted.”

He gave one example of the kind of restoration Mr. Gossett specialized in: Traditional productions of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” had the lascivious Duke of Mantua appear at a tavern in the last act and ask for “Una stanza, e del vino” (“A room, and some wine”), a seemingly innocuous request that is oddly met with disgust by the others on stage.

The original line, which was cut by censors but put back by Mr. Gossett in his critical edition of the opera, makes more sense: “Tua sorella, e del vino” (“Your sister, and some wine”). Mr. Muti conducted the premiere of this version in 1983.

Mr. Gossett helped spur the Rossini revival that has brought attention to works beyond the evergreen “Barber of Seville.” The mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, an early champion of Rossini’s less-famous serious operas, recalled meeting Mr. Gossett in the early 1970s, when he suggested that she should consider singing the title role in “Tancredi.”

The opera, based on a play by Voltaire, was originally given a happy ending for its 1813 premiere in Venice. For a revival in Ferrara, Rossini rewrote it, giving it a tragic ending closer to Voltaire. But it was not deemed a success and was soon lost.

“I said, ‘Nah, I really don’t want to do ‘Tancredi’ unless we can have the tragic ending, and it’s lost,’” Ms. Horne recalled in a telephone interview. “And he said, ‘Oh, no, we can find it.’ And he did.”

A few years after Mr. Gossett’s meeting with Ms. Horne, an Italian count discovered the tragic finale at his family’s villa in Brescia. Mr. Gossett and officials from the Fondazione Rossini visited the villa, where they were able to authenticate the manuscript. He then incorporated it into a new critical edition of the score, which Ms. Horne sang at the Houston Grand Opera in 1977.

She also sang the role in concert at Carnegie Hall the next year, prompting the critic Harold C. Schonberg to write in The New York Times, “Hearing Rossini under these conditions, with a century of increment removed, is almost a new experience.”


Mr. Gossett often took an active role in helping opera houses bring his discoveries, and those of his colleagues, to the stage, working with singers, including Cecilia Bartoli, Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming, Juan Diego Flórez and Samuel Ramey, and conductors like Mr. Muti and Claudio Abbado.

When the Metropolitan Opera staged Rossini’s “Semiramide” in 1990, after an absence of nearly a century, it used the critical edition that Mr. Gossett and Alberto Zedda had created, and when it staged that composer’s “La Cenerentola” for the first time, in 1997, Mr. Gossett was a stylistic adviser.

Cristiano Ostinelli, the general manager of the music publisher Ricordi, said in an interview that Mr. Gossett’s rigorous approach had helped the growing field of critical editions take off. (Ricordi, with the University of Chicago Press, published the Verdi critical editions, of which Mr. Gossett was general editor.)

“Philip, in a way, founded the critical approach to Italian operas,” he said.

Mr. Gossett fought battles over the music he loved. In 2001, he resigned from the board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when it did not use his edition of Verdi’s Requiem, and in 2006 he was effectively dismissed from the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, after accusing festival officials of ignoring scholarship. But he cautioned against being doctrinaire.

“A printed edition, no matter how critical,” he wrote in his engaging 2006 book “Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera,” “is a point of departure for a performance, not a blueprint to be followed with architectural precision.”

When Mr. Gossett set out to study Italian opera, he later recalled, it was not considered an entirely reputable field by his fellow musicologists, who dismissed it, he said, as “banal tunes over oompah-pah accompaniments.”

Mr. Gossett was born on Sept. 27, 1941, in Brooklyn to Harold and Pearl Gossett. His father was a furrier. After his family moved to Queens, he attended Forest Hills High School.

Mr. Gossett graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, earned his doctorate from Princeton University after spending a year in Paris as a Fulbright scholar, and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1968, where he remained for the rest of his academic career.

He married Suzanne Solomon in 1963. (On an early date, the story goes, he took her to hear Birgit Nilsson sing Wagner’s less-than-short “Tristan und Isolde” at the Metropolitan Opera. The couple — she in three-inch spike heels — saw it from standing room.)

Suzanne Gossett, a professor emerita at Loyola University of Chicago, survives him, as do his sons, David and Jeffrey, and five granddaughters.

Mr. Gossett never seemed to lose the thrill of the chase. He once recalled his first encounter, for example, with long-lost parts of Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims” in a library in Rome.

“How do you describe the experience of reading through a score that no one had seen for more than 150 years,” he wrote, “reproducing its melodies and its rich orchestral textures in your mind?”


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/arts ... ic-reviews

[jbuck919]

I didn't know that MIT had a music department.

[jbuck919]

I didn't know that MIT had a music department.

When I was in college I learned of a manuscript devotee (not Gossett, who appears to have been a very serious scholar) who was born to wealth and loved music but by his own admission had no talent. (Except for the born to wealth part that sounds like me. ) He decided to devote his fortune to buying manuscripts and donating them to various institutions. Perhaps one of you know who this person was/is.

[John F]

I'm very sorry to hear that. Just the other day I was browsing in one of his books, and he played an important part in the revival of many bel canto operas. Also, he was a year younger than me.

[John F]

a manuscript devotee ... who was born to wealth and loved music but by his own admission had no talent. He decided to devote his fortune to buying manuscripts and donating them to various institutions.

That sounds like Hans Moldenhauer, who died in 1987 in Spokane, WA and whose extraordinary archive of musical manuscripts has been divvied up among nine libraries and institutions. But he not only collected Webern's manuscripts, he wrote the standard biography of Webern in English, so he did have some talent if not for making music.

[jserraglio]

I didn't know that MIT had a music department.

A wind and brass ensemble, a symphony orchestra, some recordings and a high IQ . . .



https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2jrH-8IWDSo

[diegobueno]

The MIT music department also has on its faculty the distinguished composer John Harbison and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn.

[barney]

A friend of mine wrote in a review that while, of course he did not in any way want to defend Hitler, the Fuhrer made one contribution to the common good: he had the autograph score to Rienzi and lost it.

[Beckmesser]

"When Mr. Gossett set out to study Italian opera, he later recalled, it was not considered an entirely reputable field by his fellow musicologists, who dismissed it, he said, as “banal tunes over oompah-pah accompaniments.”

Gee, that pretty much sums up my opinion about a lot of bel canto opera and early Verdi.