A critical edition of the Opéra-comique ‘Le Docteur Miracle’ (Charles Lecocq)

The subject of this starter research project is the one-act opérette by Charles Lecocq, a work with a telling origin. In 1856 Jacques Offenbach launched a competition for a comic one-acter on a libretto by Battu and Halévy; against seventy-eight rivals, first prize was shared between the young Georges Bizet and Lecocq, each setting the very same text. Bizet's setting went on to a modest afterlife; Lecocq's twin, by contrast, all but vanished from the repertoire.

The project returned to that neglected score and established a new performing edition from the surviving sources. With no full score extant and the orchestral material initially untraceable, the edition was reconstructed from handwritten parts – collating inconsistencies of articulation, dynamics and phrasing against the piano-vocal score and period treatises, notably Gevaert's – and completed with a fresh piano reduction, an extensive critical apparatus, and an original re-orchestration for salon ensemble in the manner of the nineteenth-century café-concert.

The edition then came to life in performance: staged by Volksopera with Theater Zuidpool, it gave Lecocq's Docteur Miracle its first hearing in this region in many years, touring Theater aan Zee (Ostend), Leuven, the Arenbergschouwburg in Antwerp and Operadagen Rotterdam across 2015–2016.