About this edition
Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr, Op. 42, is a landmark of German Romantic opera and one of the earliest works to bring the vampire legend to the stage. Premiered in Leipzig in 1828, it channels the same Gothic imagination that gripped Byron's circle — the story descends from the same 1816 ghost-story summer that produced Polidori's "The Vampyre" — into a score of brooding orchestral color, supernatural atmosphere, and taut dramatic pacing. Marschner stands as the crucial link between Weber's Der Freischütz and Wagner's early operas, and Der Vampyr, with its unsettling harmonic language and vivid scene-painting, shows exactly why the young Wagner so admired him.
This edition reproduces the full orchestral score as published in Berlin by Adolph Fürstner in 1925 (plate A. 7860/7863 F.), one of the most respected German music publishing houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a house closely associated with the German Romantic and post-Romantic repertoire. The score was edited by the composer Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949), himself one of the great custodians of the German Romantic tradition in the early twentieth century. Pfitzner's editorial hand reflects a musician's deep sympathy for Marschner's idiom, and this Fürstner printing has long stood as a benchmark text for conductors and scholars approaching the opera.
About this edition:
- Full orchestral score, engraved and complete
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from a public domain historical source
- Edited by Hans Pfitzner, originally published by Adolph Fürstner, Berlin, 1925
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
Because this historical score has entered the public domain, we're able to bring Pfitzner's edition of Marschner's Der Vampyr back into print — making a foundational work of German Romantic opera accessible again to conductors, orchestral musicians, students, and anyone drawn to its dark, imaginative world.
