Gevaert, the learned head of the Brussels Conservatory, a work to which he gives honor due with glad and grateful obedience. In doing this the editor has followed the example, and benefited greatly, from the work done by F. It was therefore thought to be a wise course, instead of baldly presenting the original text as it has come down to us in the printed page, or leaving the suggested reading to an ossia or a marginal note, to present the text as it was sung in the olden time, and put the original notation above the staff for the sake of the happily curious student. Tradition was long relied upon to do this, but tradition is always a weak and uncertain reed, and teachers as well as singers have grown careless of it and too often have ignorantly and arrogantly ignored it.
All students of singing ought to know that the intentions of composers up to, let us say for convenience, the middle of the nineteenth century, were not explicitly and comprehensively expressed in the manner in which they wrote down their songs that in order to reproduce their music as they wished to hear it and as the singers for whom they wrote sang it, it is necessary to translate certain arbitrary signs appoggiaturas, mordents, and the like, the meanings of which are in danger of being forgotten, into the modern notes which represent the original manner. In order that the airs shall present themselves to the student and the singer as they did to the hearer and singer at the period of their creation, they are all given, a in the voice for which they were conceived b in the original keys c in the original texts, with as faithful a translation into the vernacular as the exigencies of the music would allow d in the manner in which they were sung when they were written. So far as was practicable all schools really significant from an historical or artistic point of view have been considered also, so far as possible, examples of all the various kinds of airs are given, from the earliest exfoliations of Florentine monody, through the artificial forms which mark the golden age of bel canto down to the freer and more dramatic utterances of the present day. The arrangement is chronological and the period covered is that from the invention of the Italian opera down to the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless the editor thinks it advisable to give some specific information about his purposes as realized here and the means adopted for their attainment. Buckethead sheet music, tabs and lead sheets
Much concerning the scope and plan of this collection of operatic airs including the volumes with which it is associated can be gathered from a glance over the table of contents and an intelligent perusal of the titles. Google Books has a complete edition of Songs from the Operas for Alto available for download.