Malena Kuss
University of North Texas, Denton

The massive output of Robert Stevenson precludes comprehensive bibliographic coverage of writings that span almost 50 years and amount to a colossal contribution to our knowledge of music in the Americas, the Iberian Peninsula, England, and the infinite number of links he has documented between the Old and New Worlds. This, in addition to topics such as Bach (1959) and Handel's oratorios (1959), the last years of Chopin (1949), the `Rivals: Hawkins, Burney, and Boswell (1950), or "Shakespeare's Cardinals and Bishops" (1950).
His earliest article, "The Musical Wesleys," published in Religion in Life (Autumn 1947), 589-93, was soon followed by writings on what was to become a lifetime dedicated to dignifying the musical legacy of the Americas by setting the highest standards of research, beginning with "Mexico: Land of Musical Charm," in Etude Music Magazine (February 1949), 67-68, and "Mexican Musical Panorama," in Southwestern Musician (April 1949), 9, 40-44, 47. Since the purpose of this session is to honor Stevenson by asking ourselves how we can build on his monumental contribution ("where do we go from Stevenson," "what topics can we propose to our Ph.D. students" - Paul Laird's questions), I shall propose that we first embark on an effort to control his entire output. Among the best bibliographic studies are "25 años de labor iberoamericana del doctor Robert Stevenson" by Samuel Claro Valdés, in Revista Musical Chilena, XXXI (1977); Luis Merino's "Contribución seminal de Robert Stevenson a la musicología histórica del Nuevo Mundo," also in Revista Musical Chilena (1985), 55-79; and Alfred Lemmon's entry for Emilio Casares' Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana (in press). Bibliographies of Stevenson's work often omit, for instance, his invaluable contribution to the "Music Section" for the Handbook of Latin American Studies, which he has compiled since 1976 (with No. 38); his pioneering efforts to record Hispanic American colonial music when it was not fashionable to do so; articles and interviews that have appeared in newspapers on the occasion of his numerous visits to Latin American cities; and so forth. We have a list (appended below) of the entries Stevenson contributed to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and to The New Grove. My first proposal is, then, to gain comprehensive bibliographic control of Stevenson's output and discuss here the most efficient way to accomplish the task.
Regarding his own writings published in Inter-American Music Review, the journal he created and has edited since 1978, I would like to propose another task, and this is to rectify authorship of articles, written by Stevenson and published in his journal without his name under each title, since in some bibliographies they have appeared as `anonymous.' On December 6, 1984, I wrote to Joseph Hickerson, then compiler of the "Current Bibliography" section for Ethnomusicology, about an omission I felt compelled to bring to his attention in vol. 28/3 (September 1984), p. 523, where, in the section on the "Americas," Stevenson's article on "The first published Native American (American Indian) composer," published in Inter-American Music Review, 4/2 (Spring-Summer 1982), 79-84 is attributed - as I put it in my letter - "to the most distinguished anonymous I know." I suggested a written rectification in the next issue to clarify this matter for all future listing of contributions in IAMR. I never received a reply. 
I have prepared a bibliography of writings limited to South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. It excludes entries in reference works (except for the appended entries for MGG and The New Grove ), it also excludes articles published in Inter-American Music Review (which is readily available), reviews in other journals, liner notes, and program notes. Its chronological organization reveals to us that his first interest was Mexico; that he made efforts to publish his writings in both English and Spanish; that he supported efforts to keep publications alive, like the Mexican Heterofonía edited by Esperanza Pulido, by always supplying her with articles; and it also reveals that, after Stevenson created Inter-American Music Review in 1978, he chose to publish his writings almost exclusively in this journal. 
Stevenson's editions of colonial music bring to mind a third proposal: reprinting what is presently unavailable. The interest in "reconstructing" the colonial past throughout Latin America, as well as the need for renewal of repertoire in the US and Europe make the printing of Stevenson's Latin American Colonial Music Anthology (1975) imperative. From the 40 transcriptions in the 1975 Anthology, only 18 appear printed in Inter-American Music Review, VII/1 (Fall-Winter 1985), a `supplement' of 41 (42) transcriptions whose publication in 1985 coincided with the Premio Interamericano de Cultura "Gabriela Mistral," bestowed upon Stevenson by the Consejo Interamericano de Educación Musical (CIDEM) and the Organization of American States (OAS) in recognition of his work.
Since my ten minutes are running out, I shall conclude with some reflections on Stevenson's contribution to South American opera and with a personal note, given that it was his research on this -then terra incognita - that stimulated not only my dissertation on 48 operas by Argentine composers premiered at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires between 1908 and 1972 (1976), but also my later work on operas from Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and most recently, Peru. My dissertation, written under his guidance, cost him two sleepless nights, since my then tenuous command of English required extensive revisions by an imminent deadline. Stevenson had plowed the field of Latin American opera by concentrating on this genre in an unprecedented survey for Music in the Modern Age, published in 1973 by London's Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In 1973, I took with me to Argentina Stevenson's own typewritten copy of this article (see Bibliography) and worked from it and its bibliography. It is well known that Stevenson found (at Lima's National Library) what we now consider to be the first opera written in the Americas, the 1701 La púrpura de la rosa by the Spanish-born Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, based on a libretto by Calderón de la Barca (see Bibliography), which Stevenson transcribed and published in 1973 with a 115-page critical preface. Twenty years later, this edition spawned several performances (at UCLA, 1981, Bibliography, as part of his Distinguished Professor's lecture; in Madrid, 1992; at the 1994 AMS meeting in Minneapolis; and in Mexico City, in a version by Aurelio Tello). In another seminal article, "The South American Lyric Stage (to 1800)," also published in 1973 (see Bibliography), Stevenson expanded his research to other Peruvian works of the colonial period, mainly those by the Italians Roque Ceruti and Bartolomé Massa. 
Other writings emphasized the significance of 19th- and early 20th-century Peruvian works, especially the first Atahualpa for the lyric stage by the Italian Carlo Enrico Pasta, who settled in Lima in 1855, with libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, premiered in Milan four years after Aida's performance in Cairo. Stevenson's emphasis on Ghislanzoni in references to this work is paradigmatic of his total output, that is, his virtuoso command of the European tradition without which academic traditions in the Americas up to the first decades of the 20th century cannot be understood in the context of their interdependent relationship with Europe. The Pasta/Ghislanzoni 1875 setting of one of the great tales of history (the imprisonment, sentence, and execution of the last Inca ruler by Francisco Pizarro in 1533) is remarkable for two reasons: Ghislanzoni's exultant verse is essentially a disquisition of the ideas that relegate human conflict to a level of dramatic insignificance, and in that sense comparable with Giuseppe Antonio Borgese's text for Roger Sessions's 1964 setting of Montezuma, based on that `other' great tale of history, the Conquest of Mexico.
The other remarkable fact about the first Atahualpa for the lyric stage by Pasta and Ghislanzoni is that two Italians could dramatize a Peruvian view of the Atahualpa story, one that touched a nerve of identification and amusement when I presented a paper on this work in Lima, on October 20, 1995. At the end of this most conventional and eclectic four-act score, the dying priestess Cora (syncretized here from Marmontel's Les Incas [1777]) projects a vision of redemption of the indigenous people, the vindication of a Conquest presented as massacre, through the musical symbolism of Peru's National Anthem (by José Bernardo Alcedo (1788-1878), which had been the subject of a tribute by Stevenson (see Bibliography). It is naive at best to think of the 1821 Peruvian Independence as vindication of the indigenous peoples whose destiny Pizarro changed forever, and the Limeñan anthropologists, historians, and cultural psychoanalysts present at my lecture found this interpretation of Peru's creole independence so fascinating as to have proposed another performance of this Atahualpa, 120 years after its premiere in Lima in 1877.