About the Composer

San Francisco Opera has announced plans to commission a new work by Mark Adamo for a scheduled premiere in 2013. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, in Mark’s words, “draws on the Gnostic gospels, the canonical gospels and fifty years of new Biblical scholarship to reimagine the loves and conflicts of the New Testament through the eyes of its leading female character.”

Mark’s previous works, Little Women and Lysistrata, are both adaptations of existing works. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with in this work, where it appears he’ll be creating something out of whole cloth, to say nothing of the ambitious and potentially controversial subject matter.

I’m already in danger of this becoming a Mark Adamo fan site, but I must congratulate my friend, and share this major announcement here. More information is buried in this press release (pdf) from San Francisco Opera, and in time, you’ll surely see more about this on Mark’s own site.

The press release also contains welcome news of commissions for Jennifer Higdon and Christopher Theofanidis, both of whom I admire greatly.

OK, this may not be on par with finding the score of an unknown Beethoven symphony sewn into the lining of an 18th-Century Tyrolian overcoat, but I think this is kind of cool.

I have on my shelf what seems to be an original copy of the first full score of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, published in 1921 by Édition Russe de Musique.  (Prior to that, only the four-hand piano version had been published.)  I found it around 1990 in a Budapest antikvárium, a used book store.

The title page of this score bears the handwritten name “Ferencsik” and the year 1929, leading me to the conclusion that in 1929 it was a possession of the great Hungarian conductor János Ferencsik, who led the Hungarian National Philharmonic from the Fifties into the Eighties.

Click the thumbnail below to see where Ferencsik wrote his name on the cover page.

Not only that, there’s an indication that markings in red were supplied by Stravinsky himself.  In the image below, you can see where Ferencsik (presumably) wrote “Piros: Straw.”, indicating that the red markings were from Stravinsky. (“Piros” = “Red” in Hungarian)

I’m no expert on the various revisions of The Rite of Spring, nor do I have handy a copy of a more recent printing, so I have no idea if there’s any great significance to these markings. I’m assuming not, but here are a few examples:

Dynamics in the strings at rehearsal 32

Apparently rethinking the time signature notation at rehearsal 39

Rebeaming the trombones accordingly, also at rehearsal 39