Siegfried in Full Score :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

Excellent, high-quality yet cheap reproduction of 1st-Edition score of great opera!

2007-11-27
Keith Dillon has already said much of what needs be said about this score. Ideally I'd have given it a 4.5 or even only 4 stars due to 2 faults with those initial Schott editions - except Mr. Dillon has already beaten me to it (yet his review is warmer...)! Consequently, I'll raise my mark to counter-balance given the low price. [Getting the current Schott Complete-Wagner Works Edition, which does follow proper conventions, surely would cost a king's ransom...]

The faults are: 1) Inconsistency about ordering of instruments and/or voices per system; 2) Slightly less than ideal clarity in printing due to the styles/fonts of engraving then used.

Regarding the first point: it was a period of transition from an initial time where other instruments and voices would be inserted between the upper strings (violins, violas) and the low ones (which still were notated à la "Continuo" function long after that style of composition had died) versus today's systematisation where everything is grouped by order of class of instruments and/or voices (woodwinds, brass, percussion, harps, keyboards, solo-voices, choral-voices, strings - going from top to bottom in a system). That full-transition hadn't quite finished yet (it so did around 1910 with Peters' editions of the Wagner operas - "Tristan und Isolde" used the old order Wagner used, whereas "Die Walküre" and "Parsifal" were in the new order - other composers like Richard Strauss were already established however with the new order...).

Also, as an extra challenge, tenor voices (in this case: Siegfried, Mime) are notated using the tenor clef - not that I mind; however, others might.

Anyway, those are minor quibbles - in compensation one knows that he's dealing with very reliable scores proofed (if I recall correctly) by Wagner himself, with few mistakes if any - all of which can be corrected by listening to appropriate recordings. Definitely recommended!

The Return of the Walkure

2000-07-17
Siegfried is the third opera in Wagner's tetrology, the Ring of the Nibeling. It tells the story of Siegfried, the young hero who bursts through a ring of fire to saves Brunnhilde, his aunt and eventual lover, from a fate of eternal sleep. This opera contains remarkable music, such as Brunnhilde and Siegfrieds' love duets, and the prophetic twittering of the forest bird. As with Das Rheingold, Dover republished the B. Schott's Sohne edition, which means that what we see on the page was approved by Wagner himself. Again, Dover editions are reasonably priced, easy to read, and capable of enduring all reasonable, and some unreasonable wear and tear. Dover's Siegfried is large enough to conduct from, which isn't always true with Dover's Wagner scores. In any case, a copy of this score belongs in the home of all self respecting Opera lovers.