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A personal introductory note will, I hope, not be out of place. Nearly three quarters of a century have passed since this reviewer, working in 1916 on bis doctoral dissertation on Beethoven's Leonore overtures, pored over the weighty Leonore Sketchbook (Mendelssohn 15) in the then Royal Library in Berlin. Being almost a centenarian now, I approached the task of reviewing Das Fidelio-Buch by Willy Hess as someone with a stake in the matter. This hook is the fulfillment of what my monograph on the Leonore overtures, published in 1927,1 only touched upon, and so I read Das Fidelio-Buch not only with keen interest, hut also with gratitude and joy.
Willy Hess, Das Fidelio-Bucb. Winterthur, Switzerland: Amacleus, 1986. 428 pp. 96 DM ($65.00).
The Swiss musician Willy Hess (b. 1906) has devoted a lifetime to Beethoven research, and his achievements, both in number and substance, are considerable. Realizing the shortcomings of the incomplete complete edition of Beethoven's works, published during the years 1864-67 in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Martel, Hess worked diligently to find and assemble the missing compositions, which augment the Gesamtausgabeby sixteen volumes. His Verzeichnis der nicht in der Gesamtausgabe veröffentlichten Werke Beethovens (Wiesbanden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1957), better known as the Hess Verzeichnis, has become an indispensible bibliographical tool for obtaining information about those Beethoven works that are missing in the old Gesamtausgabe. Among his additions are the orchestral scores of the first (1805) and second (1806) versions of the opera Leonore. Hess's title, Das Fidelio-Buch (The Fidelio-Book), emphasizes his intention that the book be considered the definitive study of Beethoven's only opera, about which he furnishes a bibliography of about 400 titles (books, yearbooks, essays, articles) in German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Fidelio dominated Hess's research for six decades, as we gather from a chronological list of his contributions to this topic, including a 254-page book entitled Beethovens Oper Fidelio und ihre drei Fassungen (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1953), which must be regarded as an important precursor to the present work.
Before discussing Fidelio proper, Hess provides a prologue on Beethoven's stage works, reviewing the ballets and the incidental music to Goethe's Egmont and to the festival plays König Stephan and Die Ruinen von Athen, both written...