This dissertation centers on creating a new critical edition of the Rip Van Winkle overture. One of America's earliest opera composers, George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898), completed the opera Rip Van Winkle in 1855. When he revised it twenty-five years later in 1880, the composer omitted the original overture which was then thought to be lost. A concert version of this overture exists today only in manuscript form, located at the New York Public Library. Rip Van Winkle is significant to the history of American Music because it is one of the earliest operas composed by an American, and the first to be written on American subject matter (in this case, Washington Irving's story of the same name). Adding to the work's considerable historical significance is that the overture was one of the first American pieces performed by the New York Philharmonic Society, in which Bristow was a violinist. There is currently no scholarly edition of the overture, and thus this edition will fill a significant gap in the understanding of nineteenth-century American music. This critical edition of the overture to George Frederick Bristow's Rip Van Winkle was created in order to be published and available for performance and study, shedding light on the often under-represented American opera in the United States.