October 23, 2023

Dear Nathaniel,

Thank you for the copy of the letter from Kathryn Libin.

You can take a look at the attachment, which is is screenshot of page 5 of https://onb.digital/result/10004E08 I circumvented ONB's charges for pdf scans of its files with screenshots of all 41 pages of the libretto.  These I can e-mail to you if your want them.

As you can see, the original title is "Il Secreto" which the  multiligual dictionary "Leo" which I have found reliable defines secreto https://dict.leo.org/italienisch-deutsch/il%20secreto as that which is segregated physically, i.e. secreted, whereas it defines segreto https://dict.leo.org/italienisch-deutsch/il%20segreto as that which is segregated conceptually, i.e. secret.

My Italian is so rudimentary that I haven't been able to decide from reading the libretto which definition is intended.  Conceivably the meaning of secreto might have changed in the intervening 200 years.  Conceivably the word secreto might have been used as a pun to refer to a secret paramour who was secretly rejected from a relationship.

Please note the distinction between Kathryn Libin's reference to a request to digitize which would entail AI or more likely manual translation of a manuscript into electronically printable musical scores, and what we had in mind, a simple request to copy manuscripts by photograph or computer scan, a process which would be much less expensive but which would require conversion into a readable score to be arranged by ourselves.

I would be pleasantly surprised if Dr. Petr Slouka, Curator of the Lobkowicz Music Archive, would offer to provide even inexpensively produced jpg or pdf images without charge.  In any event, I respectfully urge you to start by asking for only two or three pages of representative manuscripts of musical scores, to make sure they are of use to you, especially before paying substantial sums of money. 

Jochen