IMSLP Forums

I waited for someone upload operas by Donizetti, Rossini and other Italian masters. Until now, most of these scores are filmed old manuscripts from Italian libraries. Are these scores out of protection now?

Why are there so few operas? Primarily because they are the lengthiest scores (by genre) to scan, edit, and upload. It takes quiet a long time to do this and often requires special scanners. Operas are often too much work for most to handle. But by all means, if you have an 800-page full score to a Rossini opera you'd like to scan, we would welcome your contribution

It seems to me that for things that are too big to sensibly scan, maybe they should simply be photographed with a DSLR and high quality (low distortion) prime lens. It would be far better than nothing, and almost certainly a lot faster as well as imposing less wear and tear on the binding of whatever tome holds them.

Operas are just to hard to scan? that's all?

No, that's not all. They are also

1. Hard to obtain
2. Time consuming to scan
3. Require specialized scanners
4. Time consuming to edit and compile

Assuming you are talking about full scores (not vocal scores), they just weren't published in great numbers. For example, at Sibley we have about 24 shelves of full scores in our open stacks, whereas we have well over a hundred shelves of opera vocal scores. For us a full score of an isn't any more difficult to scan than any other item, except that we often have to break it up into multiple files just because of the file size.

Generally speaking most part of musicophiles don't know that many operas (the most rare and no more performed) exist only in manuscript orchestral score. In some cases may be there is just the autograph because no performing copies are available. For many operas performed and famous during the 18th and 19th century the orchestral score is very often existing only as a manuscript and the printed vocal scores are not very easy to find. Italian libraries possess a lot of those but, apart the Internet culturale efforts the other public libraries try to sell image copies of those scores for a very high fee. By the way I tried to upload to IMSLP as many scores as possible, taking in account the difficulty of downloading and managing very big files, divide those in the different acts and so on.
Anyway the number of opera scores should increase more and more with the availability of new sources from libraries. Personal scores are very difficult to handle even with a A3 scanner. I think that very few users can afford to acquire a planetary non impact scanner, even though some "cheap" models are now available.