55. If you come to a fork in the road, take it

That line by Yogi Berra might as well be a motto of this blog:  much of what concerns me here is the comparison of variant readings, the dividing of the textual stemma.  And, unlike Kermit and Fozzie—or Robert Frost, for that matter—in this blog I can “take” as many forks as I come to.

Every year since this blog started in 2016 I have managed to get in a Christmas music post, and this time it’s virtually the last minute.  I was reminded last week of a textual curiosity in “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”), and it may not be the oddity you’re thinking about.  It wasn’t the familiar ending—the “Sleep in heavenly peace” melody, which is well known to be different from the reading in the autograph sources.  (At least eight autograph manuscripts are documented, but some are no longer extant.  If you want a deep dive into all of this, a 64 page bilingual booklet is available as a free pdf download from the Stille Nacht Gesellschaft.)  For a performance that tries to reconstruct an original 1818 version, here are members of the Taverner Consort (under the direction of Andrew Parrott, one of the editors of the New Oxford Book of Carols, where this version is published).  Listen especially to the penultimate phrase, which is also repeated when the chorus comes in.

But that wasn’t the variant that interested me this time.  It was this:

SOURCE: cropped scan of Glorious Things in Sacred Song (1886), p. 25 from hymnary.org

Okay, to be totally honest that wasn’t exactly what my eyes fell upon, but I chose this particular exemplar to use on the blog because it manages (with some strategic repeats) to fit the whole thing in a single system across the page.  I also appreciate that it gives a source attribution:  Devotional Harmonist, which was apparently the first American printing of the tune, according to the Stille Nacht Gesellschaft.  Upon locating it, I confirmed that Glorious Things had made a few changes and actually introduced an error.  (Can you spot it?) What interested me is marked below.  

SOURCE:  marked up screenshot from archive.org of Devotional Harmonist (1851), p. 373

Much to see here.  Note that it is a different, very free translation of Mohr’s original text.  And, as in many hymnals of this sort, the melody is presented in the line immediately above the bass—which is not the same thing as “the tenor voice.”  (But don’t get me started on that.  Actually, I have already started on that; since that didn’t help, here’s this.)

These dotted rhythms in bars 3–4 reminded me of books I used to play out of in my childhood that had those same figures.  It strikes me now that it has been years since I have seen it printed that way.  It is as if these dotted figures have been ironed out of the textual tradition.  And yet referring to the hundreds of page-scans on hymnary.org, I found dozens of examples (up through the 1940s) that preserved those dotted figures, which seemed to persist particularly in midwestern US publishers issuing very inexpensive hymnals and songbooks.  (I’m out of my area here, but I’m guessing that sometimes they were reusing the same stereotyping from one book to the next.)

Those dotted figures now seem odd.  The autographs do not have that reading, so the figure isn't “original.”  At first I wondered if they had been introduced in order to accommodate an extra syllable in a translation to some other language of this universally beloved carol.  But no—there it was, already in the first known publication of the carol in the early 1830s, German text and all:

SOURCE:  page scan of Vier ächte Tyroler Lieder (Dresden, c. 1832), the whole of which is available as a download from Martin Luther University Halle.

That publication was associated with the Strasser Family Singers, one of two groups whose performing tours had the effect of disseminating the tune widely in Europe and North American.  And note that it has the “Sleep in heavenly peace melody” as we regularly here it today.

Of course a lot has been written about this carol.  Indeed, I see that Norbert Müllemann wrote on it for the Henle Blog in 2012, and there he compared the first print readings with the autograph.  He mentions these dotted figures in passing:  

“... the print shows odd ornamental-like dottings that are presumably to be executed glissando-style and may possibly reflect performance by the Strasser family (and, incidentally, that of singers of our time).”  

I think he’s probably right about that.  What that notation suggests to me is a portamento rather in the manner of George Jones singing “She thinks I still care”—gliding gracefully down to the new pitch just before it would be called for in the meter:

It is not puzzling that these dotted figures have disappeared from the textual tradition; as I (and many others) have said before, the rough places tend to be made smooth with use.  In so doing, bars 3–4 returned to something more like the melody of the several autographs, while the “Sleep in heavenly peace” deviation has persisted.  In this, I am inclined to agree with Müllemann’s conclusion:

“So, doesn’t an Urtext edition have to re-establish ‘Silent Night’ in its authentic version and free the melody from later interventions? Clearly, the answer is yes. But we don’t want to be pedantic here. A good edition must, on the one hand, also document established readings, even when they are not authentic. On the other hand, the composer Gruber might well have approved the second version – it did after all appear in his lifetime. Finally, we must admit that possibly the application of rigid Urtext principles may not apply in the case of song literature undergoing popular dissemination. In short, perhaps we should again be made more strongly aware of Gruber’s original version and properly appreciate it. But in this case no one really wants to condemn any sort of adaptation. In this spirit:  Merry Christmas!”

Amen to that: no need to choose a fork here.  And to all a good night.