Médée by Luigi Cherubini is one of the great works in opera history. Published by Simrock, the new score provides for the first time a reliable musical text of the reconstructed original version. It won the Best Musical Edition Award ‘Best Edition’ 2008 in the category ‘Performance Material’, has been staged with great success in Vienna, Brussels and Paris and released on DVD by Bel Air.

Simrock has released here the first vocal score of the composer’s original version of Médée, dating from 1797. It restores the spoken dialogue between the musical numbers typical of the French opéra comique genre, expunging the unstylistic recitatives composed later by Franz Lachner and familiarised through Maria Callas’s Italianate recordings. The edition by Heiko Cullmann also restores numerous cuts in vocal and orchestral numbers, restoring the opera to a full version reflecting the composer’s original intentions.