Restore the content of the opera 200 years ago

Opera lovers will now be able to enjoy the Medee masterpiece by composer Luigi Cherubini. After more than 200 years, the entire contents of this opera were first restored by scientists using modern technology to recover because part of it was hidden under the carbon layer.

Recently, Uwe Bergmann - a German scientist at Stanford University (USA) - had the idea to restore Medee by the method that scientists at SLAC used to detect hidden texts. in the works of Archimedes. Uwe Bergmann explains, the naked eye cannot see the notes hidden under a layer of coal. But with the help of synchrotron devices, X-rays can detect iron and zinc in the ink that Cherubini uses, making them glow.

According to the Daily Mail, laboratory workers gathered X-rays at 50 microns to scan each line of the manuscript and took 8 hours to complete. A computer is used to convert obtained X-ray data into gray nuances to identify hidden musical notes.

The full name of the opera author Medee is Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini . He was born in 1760 in Florence, the tenth in a family of up to a dozen brothers and sisters. The content of Medee is based on Greek mythology about Medea, the woman killed her two children to avenge her betrayal husband. Cherubini wrote her opera masterpiece in 1797, but it only received the indifference of critics of the time, even complaining that 3 hours for an opera was too long. Annoyed by criticism, the author reacts by blackening part of the score to shorten it, so over the past 200 years one can only perform the opera Medee with this shortened part.