Beschreibung
The first of its kind, this is a customized Comtesse-only audition cut of "En proie à la tristesse" from Gioachino Rossini's Le comte Ory (1828). In the past, singers wishing to audition for the role of Countess Adele would have to make a series of awkward cuts to eliminate the gaps created by the Comte and Isolier's lines, and deal with a needlessly inflated page count due to the choral parts, when performing this excerpt. The current edition omits and condenses those passages and, as a result, noticeably reduces the page count to 13. In addition, this new engraving is remarkably clearer than the existing French-language vocal score, which has deteriorated severely from age.
The piano reduction itself has not been simplified or drastically altered (at the commissioner's request), although the engraving features minor changes from the original edition (for example, eliminating cross-staff chord notation, correcting some obvious typos, and reconciling details in the Ricordi and French editions).
In this edition, the score cuts immediately from 2 measures after rehearsal 41 to the beginning of rehearsal 42 (so the Comtesse sings the last syllable of "bonheur" on the first downbeat of cut time and the C major/C minor sections are cut away completely). This brings the excerpt in line with most cavatina/cabaletta numbers that do not have a discernible break in between the two.