Professional Practice

The Edition Peters Urtext vocal score of Carmen was published in 2014, edited by Richard Langham Smith and Clair Rowden. The edition is unique in its consideration of both staged spectacle and musical text, creating a ‘performance Urtext’ that draws on four principal sources, two musical (one published and one manuscript) and two dealing with staging.

With its focus on performance traditions, the edition provides an authoritative and confident basis to underpin new performances, and despite the ‘urtext’ label, becomes a living document which is put to work by music and theatre professionals in many different ways.

Those professionals praise the legibility of the edition, avoiding the hindrance of unwieldy scholarly editions where all available materials are included but never performed. Nevertheless, the vocal score provides all original dialogues and prioritises the original French sung text, unlike the other Urtext edition available (Alkor).

Here you can find a document detailing survey responses regarding the Peters Edition score from a variety of international users, academic experts and opera professionals. This report also includes audience feedback from the event ‘Carmen: Performance, Performers and Production’, held at Cardiff University School of Music in collaboration with Friends of Welsh National Opera on 15 September 2019.

Testimonials

The videos presented on this page are interviews conducted by Clair Rowden in Spring 2018 with numerous professionals – a director, a composer, a singer, a French coach – who testify to the ways in which they used the Peters edition and how it impacted upon their professional practice.

Annabel Arden spoke about her work on the 2017 Grange Festival production of Carmen with new dialogue by Meredith Oakes, performed by actors Aïcha Kossoko and Tonderai Munyeva, and conducted By Jean-Luc Tingaud. Arden workshopped sections of the opera with the new dialogues twice during 2017 with Rowden and Langham Smith, along with student singers from Cardiff University.

If you are interested in contacting Annabel or exploring more of her work, please visit her professional page at Owl Artist Management.

Composer Stephen McNeff speaks about his 2014 adaptation of Carmen published by Peters Edition, for MidWales Opera, conducted by Nicholas Cleobury and directed by Sir Jonathan Miller. At that time, McNeff worked in close collaboration with Richard Langham Smith (‘Dick’ as referred to in the video). The production also commissioned a new translation of the libretto by Rory Bremner.

For more information about Stephen’s work please visit stephenmcneff.co.uk.

Pierre-Maurice Barlier spoke to Clair Rowden about his work as a French coach, on productions of Carmen in opera houses (Welsh National Opera, 2014, new production 2019; The Grange Festival, 2017), and gave insights into his professional practice in one-to-one coaching sessions with Bulgarian mezzo-soprano Mirouslava Yordanova, accompanied by coach Julian Smith, and how the Peters score changes the way he works.

Some examples he refers to are the detailed stage directions absent from other score editions and the inclusion of the full dialogue, both elements crucial for the recreation of character motivation on stage.

The dialogue becomes of particular interest as Mirouslava Yordanova is preparing to sing the opera in its version with recitatives which replace the dialogue of the original Opéra-Comique version. Recourse to the dialogues in the Peters ‘performance Urtext’ score becomes imperative therefore in order to create a sense of continuity of interpretation and characterisation which the recitatives (composed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet’s untimely death) cannot render.

To find out more about Mirouslava and her work, please visit her website: mirouslava-yordanova.com.