OPERA COPYRIGHT REVITALISED


The IPKat has come across news of an opera squabble in Playbill.com. The Berlin Sing-Akademie has won the right to stop the Opera Barga and Düsseldorf’s Altstadtherbst Kulturfestival from performing versions on Vivaldi’s lost opera, Motezuma.

German musicologist Steffen Voss discovered the manuscript of the 18th Century lost opera, which is incomplete, in the archives of the Sing-Akademie in 2002. A premiere followed in June of this year.

A German court has ruled that German copyright law, which holds that the finder of a work owns the rights to its performance for 25 years, enables the Sing-Akademie to ban unauthorised performances of the work.

The IPKat is a bit torn on this one. On the one hand he is unhappy about copyright in a work by a long-dead author being “reawoken” in this way. On the other hand, he sees that it puts an incentive in place for people to search for and perform lost works.
OPERA COPYRIGHT REVITALISED OPERA COPYRIGHT REVITALISED Reviewed by Anonymous on Friday, August 05, 2005 Rating: 5

3 comments:

  1. Dutch IP Blawg www.boek9.nl featured an article on this case on july 19th, which also linked to the German judgement, the pressrelease of the Akademie and an article in English: http://www.boek9.nl/weblog2/pivot/entry.php?id=665 (Eventually, the singers did not sing the litigeous libretto, but recited it, while a mix 5 other pieces of Vivaldi was played by the oorchestra.)

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  2. Please read the new decision of the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf. Vivaldi's opera has already been published in the 18th century, therefore it may be performed by anybody without restrictions. Unfortunatly, there is no English translation available. http://www.olg-duesseldorf.nrw.de/presse/material/mitteil/2005-08-16-Vivaldi-Oper.pdf

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  3. putting to waste some good money that could have been used in other areas of development for the business involved.

    ReplyDelete

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