In the bicentenary of Paisiello’s death, Catania’s Bellini Theatre staged Fedra, a world premiere performance in modern times of this opera by the composer from Taranto. It was a musical and cultural operation of great interest, which saw the revival – based on the original manuscript and on various transcriptions – of a rich, complex score, and attracted the attention of the Italian and international critics. The French conductor Jérôme Correas, an authority in this repertoire, was on the podium. Fedra had only been performed once in the 20th century for a radio recording and had never been staged in our century before. That single radio recording, however valuable, is however incomplete and, unlike this edition, unfaithful, in many ways, to the original score.
