49. The sound of (editorial) silence

There is a temptation for an editor to select a variant reading that alters the sound of a work enough to be audible to musically-sensitive listeners.  (It provides for a certain frisson: “They’re playing my edition!”)  Some years ago I discussed Thurston Dart’s edition of the “Brandenburg” Concertos as an extreme case of in-your-face textual difference.  This is an temptation I had to learn to resist when editing—being different for the sake of being different.

I stumbled across an example the other day.  I had been reading Christoph Wolff’s new book, Bach’s Musical Universe.  I was struck by this passage, which concerns a group of chorales associated with the lost St. Mark Passion:

“Moreover, their manner of four-part chorale harmonization shows a consistently greater degree of contrapuntal intricacy and rhythmic animation than Bach had typically brought to bear in the past, particularly in the inner voices—a trend that would continue in the Christmas Oratorio.” [p. 226]

It never occurred to me that Bach’s harmonizations “improved” as he aged.  Yet it brought to mind an e-mail exchange I had with a music theorist friend about a year ago about particular favorite Bach chorale harmonizations.  I had said then that my favorite—if I had to name one—would be the closing chorale of the first part of the Christmas Oratorio, a setting of “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her.”   That setting punctuates each phrase of the melody with a fanfare of trumpets and drums—which I once liked very much, but which now I regard as an intrusion on the real stuff, the harmonization.  (In any case, the fanfares are striking, as they seem at odds with the text:  essentially “Make for yourself a clean, soft bed in my heart, O sweet little Jesus, so that I never forget you.”  (As a further aside, my guess is that it was this thirteenth strophe of Martin Luther’s hymn which somehow gave rise to the false idea that Luther had authored “Away in a Manger.”  He didn’t, but the sentiment is there.)  Some conductors—Ton Koopman on the video linked above, and John Eliot Gardiner are examples—downplay the trumpets and drums, as if not to wake the baby.  But I think Philip Pickett is right to have them thunder away:  the effect is not of a newborn but rather the King of Heaven beating on the door of my heart.)

I love this harmonization, particularly the last two phrases.  Spurred by Wolff’s commentary, I pulled it out again and played it on the piano a few times.  The next day it was on my mind as I walked to my office, so when I got there I pulled the Dover reprint of the BG edition of the shelf and played it anew.  And right at the end—Is this a misprint?  What is that D doing there?

SOURCE: BWV 248/ix, bb. 10–15; cropped scan of BG bd. 5 (ed. W. Rust, 1856), p. 48; from ISMLP #02418.

The D may at first appear odd harmonically:  the tenor crosses below the bass to produce a second-inversion subdominant chord.  But assuming that the continuo bass line has some instruments sounding an octave lower (double bass, organ?), then the true bass line is still below the tenor; thus no such solecism has occurred.  The voicing is unusual, but the harmony at this cadence offers no surprises.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of NBA II/6, p. 54
(ed. W. Blankenberg and A. Dürr, 1960) 

I wasn’t expecting the D because it is not what I grew up hearing.  (The D is on the Koopman video above, though.)  What I heard for years is the reading in the NBA, where the tenor steps down to a wonderfully dissonant E.  I love that chord.  Now instead of IV we have ii, and my argument about the second-inversion is undone.  If we disregard the 16-foot doubling in the continuo line, the tenor becomes the bass of a (very proper) root position chord; but if we account for the octave doubling, we have an unexplained second-inversion chord.  That notwithstanding, I think it is a gorgeous effect.  And so I found myself wondering how it came to be, given that it was not in the old edition.  What was the story?

I turned next to the NBA critical report, which states that the autograph manuscript shows a correction from the D to the E, although the manuscript parts (tenor and viola) transmit the D.  Hmmmmm...  Let's take a look at that autograph....

SOURCE: enlarged details from D-B-Mus.ms Bach P 32, Bl. 12v (from Bach Digital).  The detail on the left shows alto, tenor, bass, and continuo staves for bb. 11–13 of no. 9; on the right the fourth tenor note of b. 12 is further enlarged.

So... is that a correction?  To my eye the D [we are in tenor clef] remains much clearer than the smudge that is alleged to be an E.  I will admit that the smudge is rounded like a note-head, though it appears a different color and much lighter, and would have to have been made at a different time, maybe unintentionally.  When Bach isn’t able to make a correction appear unambiguous (as, for example, the B which replaces an A as the very first choral bass note in the example above), he does something to clarify it—as he does elsewhere on this same page.  In this instance, Bach’s second thought was to let the third trumpet leap up rather than to repeat the same descending figure, but as the ink was smudged in the process, he clarified by indicated that the intended note was C.  (The lower C was sufficiently obliterated.)  

SOURCE:  same page as above; this detail is bb. 2–4 of the trumpet and drum staves. 

So why, then, did he not write the letter E in bar 12 to clarify the tenor correction?  

Because it wasn’t one.  Sometimes a smudge is just a smudge.  Indeed, for a blissful moment I thought it might just be ink bleeding through the paper.  Here is a side-by-side comparison of the same detail of the Bach with a mirrored image of the other side of the page—mirrored, that is, to facilitate comparison of markings which are bleeding through:

SOURCE: marked, cropped scans from P32.  Left is the same image as above; right is the corresponding portion of the other side of the page (f. 12r).

You can see the shadows of a lot of the markings bleeding through, the clearest of which I have marked with red arrows.  Conspicuously absent, though, is any mark to bleed through to create the “E” smudge:  I have circled that spot in blue.  But keep fol. 12v (with the chorale) was the last page of a fascicle, and it shows signs of other ink transfer (marked in yellow)—having been put down on top of something else. My guess—and it can only be a guess—is that the “E” smudge (which is very close to the area marked in yellow) is a similar offset transfer.  In any case, it's not an E.

If that smudge were an E, Bach’s figured bass should reflect it.  The figures transmitted in the continuo part (not in the score) show know signs of alteration.  (Those figures appear in both the BG and the NBA examples above.)  Nothing accounts for the E in the harmony; and in no other source is an E transmitted.  If this was indeed a second thought, Bach apparently didn't think it was important to have anyone actually perform it.  But I would argue instead that this reading is the wishful invention of Walter Blankenburg and Alfred Dürr, editors of that volume of the NBA.  I’d hate to see it go; I think it sounds fantastic.  But it has no textual authority, and is thus usurping the rightful place of the authoritative D.

All of this is a lot of words spent on a single quarter note; but it is an example, I think, of an editor opting for an audible difference even without the evidence to support it.  For a considerably more egregious example, get a load of this:

SOURCE:  cropped scan (p. 61) of BA 10303-01, C. Saint-Saëns, 3e Symphonie en ut mineur, op. 78, vol. 3 (ed. Michael Stegemann) of Camille Saint-Saëns:  œuvres instumentales complètes (Bärenreiter, 2016).

This new critical edition of Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony is marred by an astonishing number of typographical errors; it really merits a post of its own just for that reason, and maybe I will get around to that someday.  But what appears above is not an error.  It is what the editor (Michael Stegemann) meant.  In case there is any doubt of that, here is the remark in the critical commentary, together with my scrawled commentary in the margin.  Pardon my French.

SOURCE:  cropped scan (p. 206) of BA 10303-01 plus pencil annotations

On no authority whatsoever, Stegemann interrupted the composer’s very carefully contrived legato arpeggio, inserting a break right before the downbeat of b. 365.  (Say what you like about it, it is an audible change.) Other than the dotted-slur in the cello, there is no indication on the page that a change has been made, and users who do not consult the notes—or who do not already know the piece very well—will be none the wiser.  This edition has been issued as a much less expensive offprint, and Bärenreiter reports to me that typos (all of them?) have been corrected, but that edition appears without any of the critical commentary.  Users who trust the “Bärenreiter Urtext” marketing (“the last word in authentic text”) may well assume this represents responsible editing.  Caveat emptor.

If Stegemann had left this text as he had found it—if, that is, it appeared as in all other sources (including the first (1886) and second (1907) editions, issued by Durand)—he would not be neglecting his editorial duties.  An editor is still doing the job even when the decision is made to let any given reading stand without alteration.  But maybe an editor only feels like an editor in the act of emending something.  What is the sound of an editor not changing the text?

A few weeks ago I was amused to see someone in a Facebook group posting their various complaints about eccentric readings in “the Bärenreiter edition” of Handel's Messiah.  (What the post referenced is the vocal score published by Bärenreiter, which is a reduction of the text of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe (the HHA), but the textual decisions are not Bärenreiter’s editorial responsibility.)  The person was essentially complaining that this is not the textus receptus, and that Bärenreiter should just “get in line.”  I suppose the Novello edition is the closest thing to a standard edition now, having (in this country) replaced the old Schirmer edition.  But people use all sorts of editions all at once, and a few years ago in this blog I was grumbling about orchestral players bringing their own partbooks from different sets—leading to a chaos of conflation in performance.

A particular example the writer cited was from the climax of “the Hallelujah chorus.”  Here is the reading of Bärenreiter vocal score:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 247 and 248 of the HHA vocal score of Messiah, ed. John Tobin (Bärenreiter, 1965).

The textual surprise here:  the words sung in bb. 76-77.  We expect “and Lord of Lords,” yet we get “and He shall reign.”  But the HHA is a scholarly edition... or rather it became a scholarly edition after a rocky start and a number of superseded volumes.  The editor of Messiah, John Tobin, thus had no interest in what people have come to accept as Messiah.  He was interested only in what the authoritative texts convey.  My advice:  If the user doesn’t want to put up with a scholarly edition, then buy something else instead.  There are plenty of alternatives.

Perhaps “and He shall reign” is not what Handel intended here, but Tobin did not make the choice capriciously.  Here is this passage as it appears in Handel's composing score:

SOURCE:  scan of British Library RM 20.f.2, p. 205 (scanned from Bärenreiter facsimile edition).

Observe that both texts appear:  “and He shall reign” below the altos, “and Lord of Lords” below the tenors, and “and He” below the basses.  This bass “and He” is the only one in Handel’s hand.  The alto and tenor words have been inserted by his assistant, John Christopher Smith—and the smudge indicates some degree of uncertainty.

Smith was the copyist of the conducting score, a fair copy with some autograph insertions of new and revised movements, and a host of other markings in the composer's hand.  Here is the relevant page:

SOURCE:  scan of GB-Ob MS Tenbury 347 f. 96v, from the Scolar Press facsimile (1974).

Here there is no ambiguity.  Maybe Smith got it wrong, but there is no sign of correction here.  Tobin thus felt justifiably obligated to print “and He shall reign” (as did some of the earliest editions) because that is what the most authoritative sources transmit most consistently.  If you don’t like it, tough.  You don’t have to sing it that way; alter as you see fit, but don’t complain about a scholarly edition being scholarly.  

This issue of sticking with the authoritative text—come what may—has now hit home for me in a new way.  In the last year, I have been asked to assist with the completion of an edition that is already 75% done.  It is a critical edition of Princess Ida, a Gilbert & Sullivan opera that premiered in 1884, the immediate predecessor to The Mikado.  It is a scholarly edition, although with vocal score and orchestral parts prepared to facilitate its use in performance.  I have a student assistant; her first task has been just proofreading the text of the full score as it has been set against Sullivan's autograph.  She has done great work with this, and it is so good to have another pair of eyes on this sort of project.

A few weeks ago I got a text from her:  “I had a question about the lyrics, but we can discuss it another time if you're too busy.”  I was intrigued, mainly because the lyrics are not our task at the moment.  This edition has a policy of “divided authority”:  the autograph full score is the principal authority for the orchestral parts; the second state of the first edition of the vocal score is the principal authority for the vocal parts, the lyrics, and the text underlay; and a certain edition of the libretto is the principal authority for the dialogue.  So we weren't concerned about the lyrics as such at the moment.  What would her question be?

Actually, I should have foreseen it.  This was the page of proofs that prompted it, although it appears here as I think it should in print--with the offensive n-word redacted:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of proof of p. 197 of new critical edition of Princess Ida (forthcoming), no. 12, b. 109–112; I have redacted the text.

Of course she asked Why is this word there?  At the very least, why is it not relegated to the footnote, with the substitute text in the score proper?  As this edition seeks to establish the text as it was settled in the first run, the line quoted in the footnote is extraneous, and certainly doesn’t belong in the main text of the score.  But I feel strongly that we can't print what Gilbert wrote.  All the same, we can’t hide what Gilbert wrote—we need to leave the ugliness on display, or else we let Gilbert off the hook.  Princess Ida is a troubling piece in many ways, particularly as the focus of Act II is lampooning women's education generally.  (The joke, as it happens, is on Gilbert—or at least on his chauvinist characters.  They rattle off a list of impossible things that these “girl [sic] graduates” hope to accomplish; but several of the items on that list have actually come to pass since 1884.)  But ugly and troubling texts still need to be presented, and in ways that don't simply bypass the problems.  

Several years ago, at my previous institution, one of my responsibilities was directing the chamber orchestra.  I had great fun with it, particularly as the instrumentation changed substantially each year as students graduated and matriculated.  There were always new challenges and new opportunities.  One year I had such an idiosyncratic ensemble that I rashly decided to compose/compile/arrange a score to accompany a silent film.  If I had realized what I was getting into, I would never have done it—but it proved to be great fun despite the labor that it entailed.  I settled on a Buster Keaton film that I felt sure would appeal to my undergraduate audience:  College (1927). 

But there is a short scene right in the middle of the film where Keaton is in blackface.

SOURCE: cropped screenshot at 29:14 from the full film, available on youtube.

I considered skipping this scene in performance; I briefly considered not even scoring this film at all.  My solution, ultimately, was to show the film, but for the orchestra to remain tacet throughout the four or five minutes of the blackface scene.  We thus could present Keaton’s film intact, but—by remaining silent—pointedly not endorse it.  Or at least that was what I was hoping we could do.  We could remind the audience that in the midst of the brilliance and finesse, there is an ugly and indelible stain that is more than just an artifact of its time.

So too in this edition of Princess Ida, I want the ugly stain to be clear, even if I don’t feel we can actually print the n-word.  The opera dates from 1884, but the edition is a product of the early twenty-first century; our edition inevitably will reflect our historical moment, too.  At the moment, the black-box redaction (in the style of released government documents) seems the best way to do be faithful both to Gilbert’s text and our present interaction with it.  The page is visibly scarred, but the content of the text is still clear.  And anyone who wants to see what Gilbert wrote can easily consult a multitude of other sources.

To do otherwise in such a case—that is, to print the text as it stands, to remain silent as an editor—is simply not an option.  The editorial silence would be deafening.

46. Look ere ye leape

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don't know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, 
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine-and-twenty.

And here we are on that leap day.  Perhaps I ought to be celebrating Rossini’s birthday while I have the chance, but this is a post I’ve had in mind almost from the beginning of this blog:  What about scores that seem to have one bar too many (or too few)?

An example that many pianists know is the extra bar that shows up in some editions of BWV 846/i, the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I). 

SOURCE:  cropped from G. Schirmer (c. 1893) reprint of Czerny edition, from IMSLP #01005

This bar was introduced by Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke (1767–1822), I suppose as a remedy two faults he perceived in Bach’s text.  He seems to have wanted to make the prolonged Dominant pedal begin on a “strong” bar (the first of a group of 4 bars)—thus he needed that to fall on b. 25 instead of b. 24, and so introduced a new b. “23.”  He also took pains to eliminate the two false relations (here shown in color) in the voice-exchange.  The bracketed solid note-heads represent Schwencke’s interpolated bar.

(Incidentally, this doubly-chromatic voice-leading troubled analyst Heinrich Schencker too.  He made a big deal about the fact that in an autograph manuscript, Bach wrote stems for the bass F-sharp turned upward.  To Schencker this was conclusive proof that Bach thought of that note as nothing more than a foreground harmonization of the soprano E-flat.  I’m not convinced that the stemming was anything more than fortuitous.  Whatever.)  

The retention of Schwencke’s extra bar was codified by Czerny’s edition (reprinted and reissued by a number of publishers, and probably in print continuously to this day.)  Gounod was likely working from Czerny’s edition when he created his superimposed melody—initially as an instrumental Méditation, but subsequently texted (and forever after known as) Ave Maria.  Gounod has thus transformed this “Schwenckenische Takt” into a load-bearing bar:  it is impossible to correct it, as the climax of Gounod’s melody depends on it.  I am reluctant to claim that it does much damage to the Bach original.  It matters if you know to listen for it; otherwise it passes unnoticed.  And, as Malcolm Boyd has observed,

“Schwencke wrote numerous compositions—oratorios, cantatas, concertos, sonatas, and songs—but his most frequently performed piece of work is without doubt bar 23 of the first prelude in Book 1 of Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier....” [p. 444]

As it happens, Schwencke is a link to another work for which editions generally seem to have one bar more than the composer intended—although in this case the variant stems from the composer's hand.  It is Mozart’s celebrated thirteen–instrument serenade, K. 361, a work with a long history of textual problems, and to which I will return in future posts.  (The Schwencke connection:  he devised a charming version for piano quartet plus one woodwind.) The superfluous(?) bar is in the fifth movement, the Romance.  Here is the relevant page of the autograph manuscript:

SOURCE:  Mozart, K. 361, v (Romance) bb. 22-30; p. 54 of Mozart’s autograph; a downloaded digital scan on the Library of Congress website; a scan of the whole manuscript is available.

This movement is in a large ABA structure, but the A section is itself a binary form (aabb).  The page above shows the last three bars of the b and the first six bars of the B.  The return to A is indicated by the instruction da capo senza repliche a few pages later.  So the moment in question here is the third bar on the scan above:  it is to be played as b. 24 twice (as it is repeated); but is it to be played again as b. 111 on the third time through—the da capo without repeats?  

Mozart’s curved bracket above and below this bar was his usual indication of a first ending, but that wouldn't work in this case, as the transition from b. 23 to b. 25 is nonsensical.  Rather these seem to be an indication to skip b. “111” and go straight to the coda.  But—crucially—these curved brackets were both smudged while the ink was still wet.  Was Mozart changing his mind?  Or was the smudge accidental?  After all, if he made these markings after composing the B section, then all the rest of the ink on this page would have already dried.

Actually, I think this is exactly what happened.  Mozart was presumably impatient to start to work on the coda:  the previous page (folio 27v, numbered 53) of the manuscript shows a tell-tale mark where the still-wet slur near the top of this page (28r, p. 54) would have set-off when the page was put down too soon on top of the other folio.  I have marked the off-set smudge on p. 53 in red, as well as a space at the bottom of the page where we might expect to see a similar offset from the slur below the contrabass line:

So, is it a problem that the lower mark isn’t there?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  I speculate that the wet ink of the lower bracket of p. 54 could well have been smudged by the bottom edge of page 53, without leaving much on the page itself.  Here is my effort at representing the pages as they would have lain together to create the offset.  For this image you must imagine you are seeing through p. 54 (and so here its image has been reversed and made partially transparent).  The top brackets coincide when placed at such an angle—possible, as the pages were then unbound nested bi-folios:

The smudged top bracket and the mark on the previous page are uncannily similar.  The most suggestive detail to me is the “1” which, I suggest, explains the blob under the set-off bracket on p. 53.  Here’s a detail—p. 53 on the top, p. 54 (reversed, to align the offset) below, with the “1” and the set-off blob circled:

As I say, maybe.  I think editors are perfectly justified in omitting this bar on philological evidence (and speculation, it must be said) like that presented above.  One of the editors of the NMA volume including K. 361, Daniel N. Leeson, has written at length about this bar, voicing his regret that he did not fight more with the general editors in order to omit it from the NMA text.  (See, for example, his 2009 summary of his decades of research into this piece.  He seems not to have noticed the off-set on p. 53, however.)  Leeson, with his co-editor Neal Zaslaw, did at least manage to get a footnote in the NMA score to the effect that perhaps Mozart did not want this bar played, and directing the user to the critical report:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of NMA VII/17/2 (1979, ed. Leeson & Zaslaw), p. 191.

In fact, the critical report wasn’t issued until 2002, and was the work of a yet another hand—Dietrich Berke.  (See his comment here.)  When the NMA score was issued as a separate Bärenreiter offprint, the Leeson/Zaslaw footnote was modified:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Bärenreiter TP 312 (otherwise an offprint of the above; this is from the 6th printing, 2006), p. 51.

The Henle edition (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese) at least puts the bar in brackets, with an explanatory footnote:

SOURCE: detail of scan of Henle 9809 (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese), p. 45.  The relevant comment cited here describes the notation and the smudging, remarking “It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether this ‘volta’ applies or not, and what it refers to.  Presumably it relates to the transition from the recapitulation to the coda in mm. 111–112, so that the chords from M 24 (= M 111) give way to the entrance of the coda” [p. 77].

According to Leeson, the only edition yet to completely omit bar “111” is that edited by Roger Hellyer.  After explaining the situation in his Preface, Hellyer comments:  “If performers cannot accept my decision that I am here following Mozart's ill-expressed intentions, they are of course free to reinstate what has been played here at least since 1803, as in bar 24.”  Exactly so.

Unsurprisingly, performers have been more willing than editors to take a chance on omitting this bar.  Here, for example, is this moment in Christopher Hogwood’s recording with the Amadeus Winds.  The missing bar comes—or, rather, doesn’t come—at ten seconds into this clip, at the start of the coda:

I find this reading musically compelling, and certainly plausible as Mozart’s intention, with the suddenly reduced forces on the beginning of the coda (and the surprise dissonant harmony when we expect the full cadence).  Moreover, I think the textual evidence is suggestive enough to back it up, even if it is not conclusive.

Of course we may be deleting a bar Mozart intended, merely to satisfy our taste.  That seems to be what has sometimes happened near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s fourth symphony.  To some ears this ending seems to have one too many bar.  Jonathan Del Mar reports that Schumann (1840) and Czerny (1853) were early advocates of deleting it, and in one early set of manuscript parts the bar has been deleted—but it is impossible to say when this alteration was made, and no other source close to Beethoven supports it.  Other critical editions have brought up this question, but the only one I have seen to delete a bar for the sake of metrical regularity is Peter Hauschild’s 1996 edition for Breitkopf [below on the right].  Hauschild’s astoundingly naive justification for relying so heavily on this single source as transmitting Beethoven’s supposed alterations:  “da es wohl ausgeschlossen ist, daß andere an Beethovens Symphonie herumkorrigiert haben”! [p. 84; “because it is surely out of the question that others would have corrected Beethoven’s symphony.”]  The irony is delicious.

SOURCE:  marked-up page scans of the last page of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 4, op. 60:  (l.) Bäenreiter (1999, ed. Jonathan Del Mar—here from 2001 off-print); (r.) Breitkopf & Hartel (1996, ed. Peter Hauschild).

If you want to compare these in performance, compare John Eliot Gardiner (with the text on the left) and Daniel Barenboim omitting the bar, as on the right.  I suppose Barenboim and anyone else may do with the text as they see fit.  The composers themselves sometimes take such liberties.  Here is an extract from Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem Danse macabre (1875) in the composer’s own transcription for violin and piano.  He added the bar marked in red when he produced this version; it does not correspond to anything in the orchestral version.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of 1877 Durand edition of violin/piano version, p. 11 (from IMSLP #33277); the extract begins at b. 340.

Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz no. 1 is a similar example, if even more complicated in Liszt’s piano version both adds and delete bars compared to the orchestral original—so that the two versions do not correspond.  Already in the first 150 bars each version contains a bar that the other lacks, and it is clear from the composer’s sketches for the piano version that he had second thoughts.

SOURCE:  marked up scan of first edition (Leipzig, c. 1862), bb. 1–32; b. 25 is new to the piano version.  Scan from IMSLP #13711.

SOURCE:  top, as above, bb. 120–136; the orchestral version has an extra bar after b. 134; below, detail of manuscript sketch of this passage, scan from the Morgan Library.

For an example where I believe a new scholarly edition is led by the early sources into an error that an older edition had set right, look at the last aria of BWV 52, “Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht.”  As often elsewhere, Bach did not write out the final ritornello, but indicated it merely with a da Capo instruction:

SOURCE: detail of scan of the autograph (D-B Mus.Ms. Bach P 85, f. 8v) available on Bach Digital.

SOURCE:  the same, f. 7r.

Because the final cadence is (or at least I would argue is) elided with the return of the ritornello, Bach has notated the first bar of the ritornello again before the instruction “DC.”  Consequently, he surely meant not really a return to the beginning, but rather to the second bar.  And, indeed, at the second bar we find the segno marking we would expect to see [at right].

The BG edition interprets it thus, assuming that Bach’s “DC” really meant “DS.”  The NBA, on the other hand, takes the DC literally—correctly pointing out that the earliest performing parts (which are all the work of copyists) have da Capo, following the autograph faithfully.  In fact, one of these early parts—Oboe III—has a segno at b. 2, which indicates that someone recognized the problem early on.  (The lack of a correction in the other parts does not mean that it wasn't corrected:  the mistake seems so obvious that the musicians could recognize and remember the error.)  Incredibly, there is no comment in the NBA critical report about any of this—nor about the different editorial decision that has been taken.  As it is the policy of the NBA to print in full such passages that Bach has abbreviated, a redundant bar is introduced into the text:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite page scan with detail from pp. 162 and 163 of NBA I/26 (1994, ed. Andreas Glöckner), here scanned from Bärenreiter offprint TP1290 (2007).

In my opinion, this is just wrong—and the conclusive proof for it is an overlooked detail of the autograph score.  Where the other parts are given the da capo instruction, the singer—who will have nothing further to sing—is given exactly fifteen bars of rest (after the bar in which the cadence occurs):

SOURCE detail of scan of the autograph f. 8v again, just further enlarged.

 ...yet the NBA text calls for sixteen bars of rest to reach the end of the aria (as enumerated above).  Significantly, I haven’t found a single recording that includes this extra bar.  If they are using the NBA, the musicians are deleting it.  Sometimes an extra bar is just too much of a good thing.

37. Corroborative detail

I will begin with what was intended to be a digression, but has ended up taking over the post:

There is a charming detail of orchestration in the trio “Three Little Maids from School” in (Gilbert &) Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885).  Just as Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, and Peep-Bo are finishing up the refrain, they pause:

Three little maids who, all unwary,

Come from a ladies’ seminary,

Freed from its genius tutelary—

And in that moment, with the whole orchestra falling silent, a bassoon bubbles into life.


That bassoon idea was an afterthought.  A glance at the composer’s manuscript shows not just a blank bar at this point, but that originally he had notated a rest (in ink).  The bassoon effect has been pencilled-in later:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the 1968 facsimile of the autograph score of The Mikado, p. 143 (bb. 40–46a)

And there does not seem to be any document to establish with certainty when it was added.  By the 1880s, Sullivan’s practice was to sketch the musical numbers (and here is such a sketch for “Three Little Maids”), and then transfer the vocal lines onto the pages of what would later become the full score—ruling in the bars as necessary, but writing in only enough to give a copyist a means of preparing a sort of rudimentary vocal score for rehearsal.  The numbers would not be done in the order of the show:  the choruses and ensembles generally came first, with the solos later.  Only after the whole of the opera was “framed” would Sullivan turn to the orchestration, filling in the blank staves.  When the full score of a number was complete, the orchestral parts could be prepared and the keyboard reduction for the published vocal score finalized.

Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which dramatizes the months preceding The Mikado’s premiere, missed the chance to realize this moment.  Although there is a scene in which Sullivan has an exchange with the bassoonist, we do not see him have a flash of inspiration in the pit, handing down last-minute instructions to gurgle away.  Fun as that might have been, it is probably just as well that no such scene occurs, as we do not know that this episode occurred in the rehearsals for the first production.  Then again, the bubbling bassoon figure is played in performance in the movie, when by rights it should not have been.  It does not appear in vocal scores until the twentieth century; but admittedly, Sullivan took nowhere near as much care with the published scores as Gilbert did with the published libretti.  The absence of the bassoon whinny in the vocal scores (and the distinct piano-only score, which derives from the vocal score) is not strong evidence of anything beyond—as we know already—that it was not originally there.

Is it even the composer’s amendment at all?  I believe it is.  That the idea was an inspiration in the pit—as characterized above—is suggested by the notation in the manuscript:  the contour of the figure is there, but it is unclear what the pitches should be and one would certainly not guess from this scribble that the first note is d'.  This emendation his was not notated here for the eyes of a copyist; it appears to me to be nothing more than a hastily-added aide-mémoire to the composer of this addition.  Indeed, the strongest bits of evidence that this pencilled addition is indeed by the composer are 1) it is in the autograph, which in performances would have almost immediately been supplanted by a copyist’s conducting score of some sort; and 2) the bassoon is so imprecisely notated.  I would expect anyone else making such an interpolation to make it as neat as possible.  (In any case, the bassoon part needs the actual pitches much more than the full score does.)

For this to be Sullivan's own interpolation would require an occasion when the composer and his autograph score (not a company copy) were both together back in the pit to conduct a rehearsal, since this change could not realistically have been added during a performance.  As Sullivan generally did not often conduct after the opening night of an initial production, the possibilities for such an occasion after March 1885 are slim indeed.  He did, however, conduct the opening night of a revival at the Savoy Theatre on 6 November 1895, and he may well have rehearsed the company before that performance.  (Not having his diaries at hand—although they are extant—I cannot answer that question definitively at the moment.)

Two tidbits suggest that this 1895 production (rather than the original) was the occasion for the change.  One is the account of Thomas Dunhill, in his Sullivan’s Comic Operas:  A Critical Appreciation (1928):

[C]ould anything show more witchery than the use of the silent bar, just before the end of two of the verses?  Was Sullivan afraid that it could never be silent enough when, on the occasion of rehearsing one of the revivals, he broke this silence by pencilling a little curling phrase into the bassoon player’s part?  This stroke is amongst the most delicious of after-thoughts, but it is not in the original score.  One would gladly hear the passage both ways, on different occasions.  [pp. 131f.] 

The second tidbit is that the 1893 full score of The Mikado published by Bosworth (a German firm  heavily backed by Sullivan) has the original gran pausa here:  the autograph seems to have been the source for the Bosworth edition, so if the amendment had been made by 1893, the lithographist preparing the new edition apparently didn’t take it seriously:

SOURCE:  cropped page-scan of Kalmus reprint of Bosworth full score, p. 139, from IMSLP #30034 (bb. 40–43)

(I was a little surprised to find the bubbling bassoon absent from the 1907 recording as well, but in that instance the music had been heavily rescored to be audible with pre-electric technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the orchestration was done from the published vocal score, if not the Bosworth score—both of which lacked the figure in question.)

I have no doubt that—as Dunhill asserts—the idea is Sullivan’s own, but the case is not airtight.

As I say, all of this was supposed to have been a tangential point; I was going to introduce it because it seemed like an example of an musical detail conceived later than the rest of its context, perhaps suggesting itself to the composer because of the different activity—conducting a rehearsal with orchestra rather than composing in silence at his desk.  There are many examples one might use to illustrate such second thoughts, but I had thought this would be a fun one because some years ago I noticed that on 12 March 1885,  two nights before conducting the premiere of The Mikado, Sullivan had conducted Beethoven's Symphony no. 4 at the Philharmonic Concerts.  What if (I had thought) the giggling bassoon line was suggested to him by a celebrated bassoon solo in Beethoven’s finale?  (Granted, Sullivan's line resembles better the figures in the finale of Mozart’s Symphony no. 39, but never mind.)  Wouldn’t that be loverly?  Only as I came to look at it more closely did I see that there was not enough evidence to connect it to the Beethoven, so then I might as well use any example I liked.  I just got stuck on this one.

Having let the tail wag the dog for so many paragraphs, I will let the “dog” bark briefly here.  A few evenings ago I played the first movement of Alexandre Guilmant’s first organ sonata in a recital of “Scary Organ Music.”  It is a piece I first came to know as his Premiére Symphonie pour Orgue et Orchestre, op. 42 (1879)—hearing it (as mentioned in a previous post) in a splendid recording conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier; only later did I learn that the work started as a work for organ alone, the Premiére Sonate pour Orgue, also Op. 42 (1874).  The piece works so well for organ and orchestra together that it is hard to fathom that it was not originally conceived that way.

Below is a stemma of sources for these two versions that I have been reviewing in recent months.  The shaded boxes are sources I have not examined; the red text/lines trace the transmission of the orchestral version, while the black follows the organ solo version.  It will be seen that there is a complex interrelationship between the two versions, as ideas that crept into the orchestration gradually make their way into the text of the solo version—a few in the second edition, a few more in the third.   (Double lines indicate reprints of the same text.)

By far the bulk of these changes are rhythmic articulations where the original (in so far as I can determine it) had only sustained chords.  Thus, at the conclusion of the first movement (here copied from the 1876 Schirmer edition, but the Bärenreiter critical commentary testifies to the same reading in the autograph), Guilmant wrote:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Schirmer edition (IMSLP #290298), p. 13, showing I/353–359.

In the second edition this passage already has some substantial changes (marked in red below).

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Leupold reprint of 2nd edition, p. 45, showing I/353–359 (my hightlights added)

All of these, in fact, have their origins in the orchestration, the chords at bb. 355–56 rearticulated with an antiphonal effect between organ and orchestra, and the brass introducing the new figure at the final cadence (with consequently shorter note-values for those penultimate chords):

SOURCE:  cropped screen-shot from the first edition full score (IMSLP #245332), p. 43, showing I/354–359.

Rather than belaboring this point (as I had originally intended to), I will confine myself to one additional example—a change which does not make it into the sonata until the 1898 third edition, although clearly comes from the 1878 orchestration.  Here is the opening of the first movement as in the Schirmer edition (and the reading is identical (save for French-language registration markings) in the second edition):

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Schirmer edition (IMSLP #290298), p. 1, showing I/1–3.

Now here is the opening of the first movement as in the third edition:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Leupold reprint of 3rd edition, p. 1, showing I/1–2.

(And don't get me started about all those slurs.)  Again, the dramatic rhythmic punctuation—which he has very cleverly accomplished by the engaging of a manual coupler to a chord already being sustained—has its origins in the orchestration:

SOURCE:  cropped screen-shot from the first edition full score (IMSLP #245332), p. 1, showing I/1–2.

Clearly Guilmant liked the effects he had devised for the Symphonie, and he found ways of folding them into the Sonate.  This evokes The Mikado—not just the added bassoon in “Three Little Maids,” but also one of Gilbert’s lines of dialogue.   In Act II Pooh-Bah justifies his graphic embellishments to Ko-ko’s (entirely fabricated) account of executing the emperor's son thus:

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

(Actually, this takes us back even to Topsy-Turvy.  If the film missed the opportunity of highlighting a textual change of the score, it does in fact depict Gilbert making a textual change to the libretto during a rehearsal, adding the word “otherwise” to this line.  I am not aware of any evidence to support that, but it is a nice moment.)

If we take Pooh-Bah’s “corroborative detail” to be ameliorations made after the fact to an original that was already sufficient in itself, then these details manifest that sort of corroboration.  Neither “Three Little Maids” or Guilmant’s organ sonata is “bald and unconvincing” in its original version, but I think the addition of a little corroborative detail paid off in both cases.