ABSTRACT
The act of editing a seventeenth-century opera demands a certain amount of schizophrenia: editors are faced with the need to bridge the dichotomy that exists between an essentially performance-oriented genre and the very act of textually fixing and publishing the aspects of the opera in question. In the process of editing the source, the opera changes its characteristics twice. In the editor's perception of the Performance Score the opera changes from prescriptive notation to purely descriptive and from a ritualistic work concept to a mixture between ritualistic and transcendental. The Transcendental Work comprises the traditional work concept in which the music exists independently from a particular performance. Hitherto, there have been attempts to either entirely discard the notion of regarding seventeenth-century music in terms of the work concept, or to incorporate a range of different concepts under the heading of the term "work".
