Over the past decades, I have collected data of complete recordings of Verdi operas and kept building up a small collection. Frustrated with the incomplete data you find in many
of the available discographies (they either list only a few recordings, or only the most recent ones, or the ones of the editor's 'best choice', or they give only the main
characters of a cast etc.), I have decided in favour of presenting complete casts, and in favour of as much information as I could collect with regard to record labels; I therefore
thought it reasonable to dedicate a whole screen page to each individual recording.
My experience is that unless you were on the spot and took your notes while a recording was made, you can never really rely on dates and casts given by record companies; even the big
ones will eventually forget a name in a cast, or spell it incorrectly. I have therefore tried to check my data against as many sources as I could lay hands on, the sources ranging
from official programme booklets to printed discographies and data published on the Internet. And again the experience is that you cannot rely on the published material - with a few
laudable exceptions as for example the discographies of Carlo Marinelli, or the Met performances register by Gerald Fitzgerald and Jean Seward Uppman, or the Scala Database.
Presently, the discography is a set of dynamic data tables (one table for each opera) which offer a number of options to view the data. You may either choose an opera and then scan
the recordings page by page, or have a look at a list of several recordings and choose from them; or you may use the search routine included with each opera which offers search for
an artist, or a performance date, or a place of performance - but you can only search for these data in one individual data table, and not within the complete set at the same
time. An asterisk after the recording date indicates that I own a copy myself.
I have tried my very best to be as reliable as possible, though I do not claim that my discography is better than any other. If you notice a mistake, I will gladly correct it and mention your contribution under 'Sources'. Any comment or suggestion is also welcome.
Please
send your emails to
busse(at)phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de,
or write to
W.G. Busse, Harzstraße 68, D - 42579 Heiligenhaus.