Form of Presentation

The project OPERA presents its results in the form of hybrid editions. This means that the score is published in traditional book format, while the critical report and the libretto are in electronic form (they will be included with the score volume in the form of a memory medium). In this way not only will the new standards be taken into account during the research for the edition, but also the critical reports will be kept open to the possibility of incorporating new developments in the realm of operatic editions.

With regard to the critical reports, OPERA has access to the new technical developments of the Edirom Project established at the University of Paderborn, which make it possible to show very complex source situations in a more comprehensible way; thanks to this technology, interconnections can be represented not only verbally, but also, for example, by placing all the relevant passages of a variant reading next to one another. The editorial decisions are thus shown with greater transparency. For the editions of the texts, OPERA uses the text-labelling standards developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which have already been tried and tested