Not quite as good as I hoped

Warned by a previous reviewer, I knew that the text of this edition would be in Italian, despite it being called "Don Carlos".

I also correctly surmised that various original material re-additions such as those used in Act IV of the EMI Classics recording of the Paris Theatre du Chatelet performance in 1996 (Pappano conducting, Alagna in the title role) would probably not appear. The previous reviewer also mentioned that some material used by the Met in performance does not appear.

This is still a very useful edition, but it also suffers in print quality slightly in that some pages of the original Ricordi score require greater scale reduction than others to fit on the page. These pages are noticeably poorer in appearance, with visible breaks in the staff lines. Everything is still readable, however.

It would be nice to see an affordable edition of the full five act score, in French, with the various performance alternatives used today included, at least in an appendix.

Actually, Don Carlo

First, the bad news: In spite of the "s" in the title, this score doesn't have the orignal French text, but the standard Italian translation by Achille de Lauzières and Angelo Zandarini. As for being "unabridged", it is an unabridged score of the standard five-act "Modena" version, with "notations for an alternative four-act version" (The "La Scala" version of 1884). i.e. it has the alternative version of the title character's aria "Je l'ai vue" ("Io la vidi") for performance in what was originally the second act. None of the extra material from other versions of the opera (such as the opening "Prelude et Introduction" that the Met uses) is included.

Nonetheless, it's good to have a fairly inexpensive edition of this score (my favorite Verdi opera) available.