15. A Bach family playlist

which is the fourth installment of the Settling Scores

A few weeks before the birth of my first child, I self-centeredly started compiling some playlists.  What music could I share with this new creature?  I knew all along that part of my motive was really to accustom him or her to the music I liked, or at least avoid overexposure to music I didn’t like.  We managed to avoid most of the baby toys that play music, although I remember a music box mobile on the Pack ’n[’] Play that had an infuriatingly incompetent harmonization of “Rock-a-bye baby.”  I used that in class to see if my students could transcribe and critique it.  Truly horrible, but at least it was worth something.

A few of my playlists were intended for bedtime and even to leave playing after Gentle Morpheus had sped his airy flight hither.  Although all sorts of pieces came to mind, one of the challenges of nineteenth-century repertoire was that many pieces that would have been perfect restful music otherwise had a loud outburst at some point.  (That disqualified the slow movement of Beethoven’s 9th, for example, as I feared the fanfares about three quarters of the way through would rouse a snoozing baby.  And for a similar reason I had to edit the applause off of the ending of a track of the Oscar Peterson Trio playing “In the wee small hours of the morning.”)  Still, there was plenty to choose from.  I suspect that my children’s familiarity with Dowland’s solo lute repertoire is probably excessive, and I wonder if in later life a lute recital would put them to sleep.  I hope not.

There was a good bit of Bach on the lullaby playlists, which gradually accumulated more and more items over the years.  One of the first items to be included was the aria “Schlummert ein” from Bach's cantata “Ich habe genung,” BWV 82.  This aria is to me the ideal musical manifestation of solace; listening to it I feel like Bach is gently cradling me in his arms.  (Hear a performance of it here.)  Of course the text is not about sleep at all, but points instead beyond the grave.  And he had stood at the graves of many of his loved ones, and fully half of his children.

Slumber on, you tired eyes,
Close softly and blessedly!
     World, I remain no longer here
     And take no more part in you
     That can serve my soul.
Slumber on, etc.
     Here I endure suffering,
     But there I shall see
     Sweet peace, quiet rest.
Slumber on, etc.

It was in the course of reading totally unrelated to all of this that I stumbled across a reference to a version of this aria found in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, where it is appears—twice!—in her hand.  This detail spurred me to look more at that source—a source that was very different from what I had assumed.  Indeed, brought up in piano lessons playing selections from “AMB,” I didn’t realize that there were actually two AMB notebooks—1722 and 1725—and that they are rather different from each other.  (As Robert L. Marshall put it, the first book seems to be compiled for AMB, while the second is compiled by AMB.)  Although selections from the AMB repertory have been published many times and in many forms, even in the Neue Bach Ausgabe the presentation of these collections is still a bit misleading.  Both books are included intact in the fourth volume of NBA Serie V, the series encompassing “Klavier- und Lautenwerke” [“works for keyboard and for lute”]  The title for this particular volume (edited by Georg von Dadelsen) is “Die Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach (1722 und 1725).” 

Indeed, Clavier-Büchlein [“little keyboard book”] appears on the title page of the 1722 collection (hereafter AMB1), as it had also for the 1720 collection Bach made for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann (hereafter WFB).  

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the title page of the AMB1, from Bach-Digital.  (This seems to be AMB's decorative script.)

There is no title page for the 1725 collection (hereafter AMB2).  Might that be significant?  (There is no evidence in the structure of gatherings to suggest that such a page is lost.)  AMB2 differs markedly from the others, both of which are limited to keyboard music. 

For AMB2, Notenbuch (notebook)—the term used in the old BG edition (and in all of the practical editions I have glanced at)—is much more apt than the NBA’s imposition of Klavierbüchlein.  First, the contents are more varied, with a substantial number of vocal works in addition to both large and small keyboard works.  The 67 leaves remaining in the notebook (with evidence that 8 leaves have at some point been removed) comprise more than fifty items:

1)  four multi-movement keyboard works by JSB:  early versions of two Partitas (BWV 827 and 830) in the composer’s hand; early on Anna Magdalena copied the first two French Suites (BWV 812 and 813), although the second breaks off in the middle of the third movement.

2)  a melange of short keyboard works by various composers (almost invariably without attribution), including nine menuets (the one made [in]famous as “A Lover's Concerto” turns out to be by C. F. Petzold), six polonaises, three marches, the C major prelude from WTC bk. I, the “Aria” theme of the Goldberg Variations (in AMB’s hand, and possibly copied from the now lost autograph of the Variations),  a rondeau by F. Couperin (unattributed; and not merely a copy, but with the left-hand figuration adjusted somewhat), a sketched rigoudon apparently by Johann Christian Bach, and an ornamented setting of “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten” (BWV 691), copied by AMB from WFB, and so much taken over into the Bach organ repertory that it appears also in the NBA volumes of individually transmitted organ chorales (Serie IV Bd. 3).  Among these are four pieces now attributed to C.P.E. Bach (including a familiar Marche in D Major, BWV Anh. 122), which appear also in the new C. P. E. Bach:  The Complete Works, classified as Juvenilia (in I.8.2).  Compiling his own catalog of keyboard works in 1772, C.P.E. remarks “I have suppressed all works before the year 1733, because they were too youthful.”  He is too harsh. This is a good tune:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 115 of C.P.E. Bach:  The Complete Works, Ser. I Vol. 8.2, Miscellaneous Keyboard Works II, ed. Peter Wollny.

3)  A number of vocal works:  probably the most famous of all is the song “Bist du bei mir,” but in addition to the recitative and aria from BWV 82 with which this post began (and to which I will return), the rather frivolous “Aria di G[i]ovannini,” the contemplative smoking song “So oft ich meine Tobackspfeife,” and several spiritual songs and chorales not dissimilar to those of the Schmelli Gesangbuch (1736).  (Indeed, one of these—“Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen”(BWV 452, but cf. BWV 299)—appears in Schmelli’s collection in a negligibly different form.)

4) Finally there is a nuptial poem in AMB’s hand (“of rather dubious taste” is Marshall's assessment) and two sets of rules regarding figured bass, 

Moreover, the accumulation of material in the source itself involved at least eight hands.  The bulk of the material appears in the hand of AMB herself (whose notation is memorably described by Spitta as “without a trace of feminine ineptitude” [“ohne eine Spur weiblicher Ungeübtheit”]—the ultimate chauvinist compliment).  JSB has a much more limited role (discussed below), and the other six hands include AMB’s sons Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, as well as her stepson C.P.E.  Two of the anonymous scribes (designated by Kobayashi as Anon. L23 and Anon. L24) apparently appear only in this source.  I speculate:  could these be among JSB’s daughters?  Certainly the book seems reserved for the intimates of the family, as the other known hand is that of Bernhard Dietrich Ludewig (in just one item, the tobacco “aria”); Ludewig was a Bach pupil who acted as tutor to the younger children as well, and that familiarity might explain his appearance here.  

AMB2 seems to have taken a much longer time than AMB1 or WFB to fill up.  Only five blank pages remain, mainly scattered among the last 30 pages.  Like Bach’s other manuscript collections, it is evident that whole sections of pages were originally left blank so that additional items could be added later (although in WFB and the Orgelbüchlein the staves were drawn on the all the pages, where in AMB2 they were not).  Consequently the sequence of items presented in such a collection is not generally an indication of the order in which they were notated in that source, and AMB’s handwriting evolved enough during the years that it the NBA editor (Georg von Dadelson) was able to conclude which items were late entries in her hand.

In AMB2, J. S. Bach’s contribution is limited:  the first 41 pages present two of the partitas (BWV 827 and 830) in his hand, but thereafter his hand appears only a few times.  Here he copied out a menuet by “Mons. Böhm.”  (Is this his one-time Luneburg teacher Georg Böhm?  David Schulenburg mentioned the possibility of one Johann Michael Böhm, who was Telemann’s brother-in-law, but deleted that suggestion in his second edition.) This is often among those pieces young piano students learn.

SOURCE:  scan of AMB2 p. 70 (f. 35v) from Bach-Digital.

This is one of the few items in AMB2 to bear an attribution, so it has long been known not to be by Bach himself.  In many editions (up to the present day) the rest of the contents are tacitly or explicitly attributed to Bach even when this is now known not to be the case.  The famous “aria” Bist du bei mir (which appears in Anna Magdalena’s late hand) is not by Bach, but since 1915 has been known to be the work of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel--a musician clearly held in high regard by JSB, who apparently used an entire cycle of his cantatas in Leipzig in 1735-36, and possibly more.  I would be eager to hear more of his work, although it seems that a large portion has been lost.

SOURCE:  scan of AMB2 pp. 75 (f. 38r) and 78 (39v) from Bach-Digital.

 A curious aspect of AMB2—and again differentiating it from both AMB1 and WFB—is the number of works that appear more than once in different versions, generally one right after the other.  Sometimes these are transpositions with other slight differences.  The chorale “Gib dich zufrieden,” BWV 511 appears again immediately below as BWV 512, transposed down a minor third—and both in JSB's hand.  The smoking song (BWV 515) appears first—or at least on the verso side, although that need not be first—in Ludewig's hand and without lyrics; it appears on the facing recto as a collaboration of AMB (melody, transposed up a fourth, and with the first stanza of lyrics) and JSB (slightly different bass line). Without the lyrics one might have assumed this piece was just a menuet; indeed, maybe it was originally, and the lyrics were only inserted after the fact—that the anonymous text existed independently of AMB2 is clear from Telemann’s (earlier?) setting of the same text (TWV 36:142).  

Most curious of all, however, is “Schlummert ein.”  It appears twice—not in immediate succession, but with intervening pages.  Both appearances are the work of AMB, in her younger hand and the transposition for both is consistent with “second version” of the cantata (catalogued in the Bach Compendium as A169b, dating from the early 1730s)  The first appearance includes the recitative, which is complete although unfigured.  (The first few notes of the bass line bear traces of corrections: evidence of transposition errors?)  Following this is the aria, although the ritornelli have been omitted so that only the vocal portions remain; and although AMB provided a staff for a bassline, she left it blank.  At some point, however, someone sketched in a bassline in the first three bars:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of AMB2 p. 105 (f. 53v) from Bach-Digital.

This bassline seems to have been newly composed, as it was not copied or transposed from the cantata itself—or if it was, it was done incompetently.  In any case, it does not continue.

Several pages later the aria appears a second time, although this time AMB did not finish the copy.  The vocal line breaks off midway through bar 60 (at the end of a page); the unfigured bassline breaks off after 28 bars.  It seems likely to me that it was added in later, as it too breaks off at a page-turn:  waiting for the ink to dry before turning the page, she was needed elsewhere and never completed the project.  (Similarly, I wondered, are the five missing appoggiaturas in her first copy merely a sign of a practical notational issue?  That is, might she have used a different pen-nib for the appoggiaturas, so that there was a reason to leave space and move on, coming back to fill them in later? I don’t know the Bach literature well enough to know if this has been explored, nor have I seen it discussed in other eighteenth-century sources.)  [On the image on the left, the vertical blemish in the middle of my red circle where the appoggiatura ought to be does not seem to be an erasure—and there is no such blemish in the other four instances.]

SOURCE:  cropped scans of "Schlummert ein" b. 40 in AMB2 p. 108 (f. 55r) [with absent appoggiatura highlighted] and 113 (f. 59v) from Bach-Digital.

So why is this aria entered twice, neither time complete?  Why write it out a second time rather than finish the first?  And how useful would they be without the bass?  (It doesn’t really matter that it isn’t figured, as the harmonies are intuitive.  I had no problem playing a passable version at sight—at least until the bass ran out.)  Was the bass not needed here because it could be read off of a separate part?  (It might be needed in the recitative to help keep the singer and continuo together, but less essential in the aria with its metrical predictablity.)  Was the bassline added to the first three bars of the first copy a pedagogical exercise for one of the children?  And does the presence of the aria here indicate a favorite of AMB’s (who never got to sing it in church), or of one of the trebles of the family?  It raises many more questions than it answers, even if it is a fascinating glimpse into domestic music-making chez Bach.  For nineteenth-century commentators, this glimpse seems to have been voyeuristic, and their writings tend to emphasize the pious contents and downplay the vulgar.

But taking it altogether, this family album is a sort of playlist—not exactly the sort I was compiling for my own family, but in its patchwork assembly still more akin to a playlist than any other of JSB’s collections.  Indeed, AMB2 really isn’t one of Bach’s collections:  his was the primary hand in the compiling of WFB and AMB1, but not this one.  The overlap between these collections suggests some particular favorites.  Although no one work appears in all three, a number of pieces appear in two of the books—in each case in different hands:

WFB and AMB1:  BWV 841 (a menuet—possibly an early work of Wilhelm Friedemann?)
WFB and AMB2:  BWV 691 (an ornamented chorale); and BWV 846 (the first prelude of WTC1)
AMB1 and AMB2:  BWV 812 and 813 (“French” Suites nos. 1 and 2, albeit incomplete)

Did other Bach family collections exist that have since been lost?  I wonder what further oddities and intimacies they might have contained.  Not that it is any of our business....

13. The best and worst of amateurism

...which is the third installment of the Settling Scores

Having discussed descriptive and prescriptive notation in my last post, I find an opportunity to explore an example (and which is it supposed to be?) relating to Bach.  Here is a surprising recent publication:

SOURCE:  Anthony Tommasini, "Glenn Gould's Every Detail.  But Why?" nyt.com (June 1, 2016)

This curious edition presents two texts of the “Goldberg” Variations on facing pages throughout.  The left-hand [verso] pages are labelled “Original Version,” while the right-hand [recto] pages are labelled “Gould’s 1981 Version.”  I reproduce an extract of the beginning of Var. 29 below, although with the twin texts arranged here vertically rather than horizontally just to be more legible in the blog medium:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 146-147 of Hopkins, ed., Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations.

From what I can tell, Hopkins’s transcription of Gould’s 1981 performance is impressive, even if it leaves me with some questions.  (In the example above, what distinction does Hopkins intend between Bach’s triplet notation and his transcription of Gould’s performances as sextuplets? I found no explanation of this idiosyncracy, and the only thing I can imagine from it is that Gould’s performance downplays the half-beat.)   This project was clearly a labor of love for Hopkins, and the right-hand pages thus reveal the very best of amateurism—doing something for the love of it, going far beyond what might be asked or imagined.

It is the left-hand pages that leave me disturbed.  Even just the use of the word version for both the “original” (and I’m coming back to that word in a minute, too) and the performance troubles me.  I would have favored different words—maybe “text” for what Gould read, and “interpretation” for what he played.  Granted, the interpretation is filtered through Hopkins’s interpretation into score.  Whatever.  There would be great value in comparing what Gould had studied with what he played.  Of the text Gould used, Hopkins asserts that it was the 1938 G. Schirmer edition prepared by Ralph Kirkpatrick:

“We know that Gould used the Kirkpatrick edition, and only this edition, because three copies of this edition are presently housed in the Glenn Gould Archive (the official repository for Gould’s archives) in the National Library of Canada (NLC).  On the basis of Gould’s editorial markings in these scores (or lack of markings), each copy was seemingly used by him at various points in his career for various purposes.” [p. 10]

Hopkins suggests that one of these three copies (“almost entirely free of markings, such as fingerings, articulations, dynamics and tempos”) was likely the one that Gould used as he learned the work prior to the 1955 recording, and informs us that some pages have gone missing; a second copy seems to be a “reference score during the post-production process for the 1981 recording.”  (I wondered if it is a more recent printing; Hopkins doesn’t give any such information, still less any shelf-mark or locating information.)  The third copy, also incomplete but with very neat and comprehensive fingerings added for the aria and the first eight variations, belonged to Gould’s girlfriend during his conservatory years.  Hopkins concludes

“The relevance of the three copies of this edition is that they show Gould had little concern with the quality of editions that he used over the course of his career.  There is no evidence that he ever researched or consulted other editions for the purpose of critical analysis.” [p. 10]

And yet a page later Hopkins quotes Kevin Bazzana discussing films made immediately after the 1981 recording saying “in [NLC] videotape no. 50A, [Gould] can be seen with the 1979 [recte 1978?] Henle edition of the score.”  Well, what was he doing with that?  Is that not evidence—at least circumstantial, if not an actual smoking gun—of Gould “consulting” another edition?  And I noticed an instance (Var. 26, b. 14, 2nd beat, middle voice) where the note Gould plays in 1981 (D) is in the Henle text and NOT in the Kirkpatrick text (which has E; in 1955 he had played E).  As Hopkins uses these tapes to determine Gould’s fingering as best he can (and an impressive job it seems to be), clearly he deems the videos relevant to the 1981 audio recording.

If a facing-page edition is going to have some value, the facing pages need to relate to each other.  I can imagine two ways that this might have been done:  1) on the left-hand pages, provide a transcription of Gould’s 1955 recording, so that the two performances might be compared, or 2) on the left-hand pages, reproduce the Kirkpatrick text that Hopkins claims Gould used.  (Probably there would be copyright issues with that.  Did Hopkins ever pitch this project to Schirmer, who presumably holds that copyright?)

The Kirkpatrick edition is apparently still in print, and it is also very widely available in libraries (and, I imagine, in piano benches here and there)—indeed, more available in libraries than this Gould transcription will ever be—so interested individuals should have no trouble getting their hands on a copy to make the comparison.  (At a glance, WorldCat lists over 450 library copies of various printings of the Kirkpatrick edition, with just over 30 of the Hopkins/Gould score.)  Comparing the two is particularly interesting because Kirkpatrick often resorts to extra staves to realize Bach’s ornamentation or (yet more significant in this context) to modify the part-crossing to facilitate performance on a piano.  Here are two examples—the aria, where Gould’s ornamentation is somewhat slower than Kirkpatrick’s instructions (32nd-notes rather than 64th-notes), and an example of adapting the music for a single keyboard:

SOURCES:  first sixteen bars of the Aria, in scans of Kirkpatrick p. 3 and Hopkins p. 49.

SOURCES: the end of Var. VIII in marked-up cropped scans of Kirkpatrick p. 23 and Hopkins p. 75.

Instead of either of these strategies, on the left side Hopkins provides an entirely new text, which he explains thus in his introduction:

“Each of the variations [and the Aria] is presented in its original form on verso pages, accompanied by Gould's realization on recto pages, thereby allowing for ease of comparative analysis.  The original forms, labelled ‘Original Version,’ were produced from the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe edition (BGA) of 1853, the Hans Bischoff edition of 1883 and the Ralph Kirkpatrick edition of 1938.  The Handexemplar, Bach’s personal copy of the first engraved edition, was likewise used for this purpose, yet the editions produced by the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA) of 1977 and Henle of 1979 could only be consulted, due to copyright restrictions.  Discrepancies amongst these editions are noted in the Critical Notes on pp. 45-47.”  (p. 9)

Bach’s Handexemplar, corrected in many places by the composer, was rediscovered in 1975.  It was naturally the most important source for Christoph Wolff’s NBA text and its discovery also prompted Henle to issue a revised version of Rudolf Steglich’s 1973 edition (with the revisions undertaken in 1978 by Paul Badura-Skoda).  What does Hopkins mean by “could only be consulted”?  All of the sources he lists were presumably “consulted,” and as his critical notes list variants in each of these texts, it is unclear how “copyright restrictions” have impinged on his task at all.  No, what we have here appears to me to be a reinventing of the wheel:  a new edition that presumes to be scholarly, but executed, in my opinion, in an haphazard way.

Before giving some examples of this, I should note that the NBA text of the Goldbergs has not been universally acclaimed.  In particular, in a 1990 article in Performance Practice Review, Erich Schwandt took Wolff’s edition to task for a number of perceived deficiencies, concluding

“Something must be broken in the mechanism when musicological ‘overkill’ produces 27 pages of Critical Apparatus (roughly two-thirds of a page of words per page of music) and then gets the notes wrong.  I believe that the Neue Bach Ausgabe should seriously consider withdrawing Christoph Wolff’s edition of the ‘Goldberg Variations.’” (p. 69) 

I have examined Schwandt’s critique closey, and I see no warrant for such a charge.  Wolff has not gotten “the notes wrong.”  An edition is an interpretation—a performance, if you like—and although I would like to see every alteration to a source text logged in the critical report, I find only four instances where this not is the case, each having to do with an added appoggiaturas that are not clearly marked in the score as editorial additions.  Schwandt may disagree with Wolff’s and the NBA’s editorial principles (over the ornamentation symbols particularly), but in the critical report Wolff articulates those principles and the decisions that proceed from them.

It must be stressed that in a critical edition, the printed score and the critical report are equally necessary for an understanding of the textual situation.  This seems to have escaped Nicholas Hopkins as he prepared his new “original version” for his Glenn Gould project.  His basic editorial principle seems to be that the Handexemplar, bearing corrections in Bach’s hand, establishes a final text for the Goldbergs once and for all.  His “original version” thus aims to be essentially a resetting (following modern notational practices) of the corrected reading of the Handexemplar, and his critical notes detail differences between his new text and the other five published texts he cites above.  In fact, the vast majority of his critical notes list places where an accidental is missing in the Handexemplar but appears in the other editions.  There is a good reason for this:  the first edition (of which the Handexemplar is a copy, of course) is a product of different notational conventions than ours today:  an accidental was regarded as affecting only the note to which it was affixed.  As an example, in Var. XXVIII b. 23, the left-hand part is crowded with repeated sharps for the recurring note:

SOURCE: cropped scan of the Handexemplar, p. 30 (my mark-up)

This would be too many accidentals by our current standards; the following bar has one too many, while also lacking two that would now be needed:

SOURCE:  ditto

The second natural sign seems superfluous by today’s standards, but we would now expect a natural sign for the last note in both hands—no longer D-sharp but D-natural.  As Hopkins seems unaware of the older practice, he documents it as if it is news.  More than half (at a rough count, 37 out of about 70 total) of his notes deal with this, an item not even worth noting.  Several of Hopkins’s notes record details such as “a dotted tie is notated ... in the NBA.  This tie is found in no other sources.”  Exactly:  the tie is dotted because it is an editorial emendation.

A more serious problem is that—as he gives no indication that he has seen the NBA critical report—he is apparently utterly unaware that of the seventeen other copies of the original print which Wolff examined, six have corrections that Wolff is able to attribute to Bach, and no two of these copies have exactly the same corrections:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Kritisher Bericht for NBA Ser. V, Bd. 2 (1981), p. 93.

In Wolff’s table, source A1 is the Handexemplar, but not all of the corrections made it into the Handexemplar.  (This table only lists corrections found in the other six copies, noting when they are or are not duplicated in the Handexemplar; there are quite a number of corrections unique to the Handexemplar which Wolff documents elsewhere.)  Evidently not knowing of this, Hopkins re-introduces errors into this text which Bach had corrected:

SOURCE: Var. XVI, from marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 102.

As the table above indicates, in five of the seven copies with corrections traceable to Bach, this E has been changed to F-sharp.  The note is given as F-sharp already in the BG edition (1853), as the copy Wolff identifies as A5 was the source for the edition and has the correction.  Kirkpatrick was working from a different copy, lacking the correction, and so gives E.

Another instance concerns a missing accidental:

SOURCE: marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 130

The circled A is given as A-flat in all of the editions that Hopkins consulted save the original print; it had been changed to A-flat in only two copies of the first edition (Wolff’s A6 and A8)—neither of which was used as a source for editions prior to the NBA, although it did show up in an early manuscript copy (Wolff's C1) which Bischhoff and Steglich had used.  All of these editors recognized the musical sense of A-flat; even in the intensely chromatic vocabulary of Var. XXV, the A natural is jarring.  Try it for yourself.

Hopkins did catch a genuine lapse in all of the editions he used, and apparently hitherto unnoticed.  It again concerns a missing accidental in this same movement, and it seems clear how it was missed for so long:

Composite of Var. XXV, b. 10
SOURCES:  marked-up cropped scans of  (top) Handexemplar p. 25; (lower left) NBA Ser. V Bd. 2 p. 104; (lower right) Hopkins "original version" p. 130.

The natural sign (missing in the NBA and all the other editions) would not have been expected in the original print, given its conventions regarding accidentals; but subsequent editors may have missed it because 1) in the original print there is a system break before beat 2 of this measure, so that the preceding D-sharp is out of sight and out of mind; and 2) it is so manifestly obvious musically that it was implied even when not on the page.  Neither is a satisfactory excuse.  But has anyone ever played a D-sharp here?  I wonder.  Hopkins is the first of these editors to publish the work as a computer-set (rather than engraved) score, and this is the sort of detail that computer-setting captures more readily than the weary eye.

That said, Hopkins also introduces what is, in my opinion, a shocking error:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 60.

The first two notes in the right hand are a third too high.  That might be regarded as a typo, but the error is compounded on the facing-page transcription:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 61.

These are not the notes that Gould plays—he plays B-G, exactly as notated in every other edition.  And although this could be a simple copy-and-paste error if Hopkins used his own “original version” as the base text for his “Gould’s 1981 version,” it is further compounded by a footnote at the bottom of the same page, explaining the asterisk and even naming the notes (incorrectly) “D and B.”

SOURCE:  ditto

This is not a typo, but rather an editorial blunder.  That there could be an error of this magnitude—even redoubled in a footnote—suggests to me the possibility that there was no editorial oversight whatever to this production.  (Hopkins apparently set this edition himself.)  Lack of editorial oversight would be par for the course for a product that appears under a Creative Commons license on the IMSLP; it is astounding in a publication from a house of the reputation of Carl Fischer.  Granted, there is no backlist of “urtexts” at Carl Fischer, but now Hopkins’s “original” version (that is, the left-hand pages) has just been issued as a new urtext of the Goldberg Variations.  I have not examined that publication, but I hope that—at the very least—this error has been fixed.  Even so, given the rest of the concerns voiced above, Hopkins’s “original version” presumes too much.  As followers of the blog will know, I am all in favor of the proliferation of editions offering valid texts of all sorts, but I think the market has no need of this “urtext” edition of the Goldberg Variations.

The right-hand pages show the best of amateur devotion (although I think the introduction sometimes veers over into hagiography); the left-hand pages appear, in my view, to manifest ad hoc amateur naïveté presented as serious scholarship.  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

11. Dart’s Brandenburgs

...which is the second installment of the Settling Scores

I am never in Manhattan over New Year’s, but years of following the concert listings in The New Yorker and The New York Times indicate that in NYC there is a holiday tradition of programming all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.  (Okay, so that’s a nineteenth century name for these works, but I think we’re stuck with it, so I’ll dispense with the scare quotes.)  Somebody—the Chamber Music Society of of Lincoln Center, the NY Phil, or St Luke’s, or a visiting group at Bargemusic, Symphony Space or somewhere—presents these six exquisite pieces as an essential secular holiday event.  With that in the back of my mind, this seems like as good a time as any to look at textual issues relating to these works.

Bach’s 1721 fair-copy dedication manuscript survives to this day, and one might assume that it should settle any textual questions about the music.  It served as the sole source for Wilhelm Rust’s 1871 Bach Gesellschaft edition, except for the fifth concerto, for which Rust also consulted an autograph set of parts.  Rust’s edition is readily available in inexpensive reprints, and that is a good thing:  with really just one source, the edition is quite faithful to that dedicatory manuscript.  In one important respect, the BG edition is closer to Bach’s notation than that of the Neue Bach Ausgabe (ed. Heinrich Besseler in 1956):  the BG preserves the transposing notation, not converting everything to concert pitch as the NBA does (although determining “concert pitch” in Bach is an issue I must return to later this year).  This affects not only the brass:  importantly, it affects the violino piccolo (conc. no. 1), whose triple-stops appear completely unidiomatic when rendered in concert pitch.  (Granted, the BG changes the clef of the recorders (if that’s what they are, in nos. 2 & 4), which the NBA does as well.  The NBA goes further, and changes the clef of the violas da gamba in no. 6 from tenor to alto.)  It’s nice when the cheap and convenient editions are also good ones.  The Dover reprint even includes an English summary of Rust's preface, which at least makes users aware that there are textual issues to consider.

I describe Rust’s edition as “good” because it is so close to the reading of the dedication score, although Besseler was right to question what value that source should have:  “The numerous errors show that Bach was careless.  As only some have been corrected, the dedication score does not have the value that a manuscript made for his own use would have.”  [NBA Krit. Ber. p. 12.]  This would mean that the dedication score is “authorized” (i.e., in Bach’s hand) while not really being “authoritative” (i.e., his intentional definitive presentation of the text)—an interesting distinction—although, as I discussed last month, “definitive” is not the most useful term in such contexts.  The search, then, is for the parent texts from which Bach (carelessly) prepared the dedication score.  That search led Besseler to some manuscript copies made by Christian Friedrich Penzel some ten years after Bach’s death.  Penzel was one of Bach’s very last students—not quite 13 when the old man died in 1750.  As the readings differ a bit from the dedication score (and, as that score would not have been available to Penzel in Leipzig anyway), these sources seem to be a useful point of departure in understanding a “first version”—even if, at best, Penzel’s source postdates Bach’s re-use of some of the material in cantatas (BWV 52, 207, and 207a), and it cannot be regarded as an uncontaminated earliest [i.e., Ur-] text.  Other Leipzig copyists transmit material we associate with the Brandenburg Concertos, but these too are disconnected from the dedication score, and so also likely transmit early readings—most famously, perhaps, the much shorter version of the harpsichord solo in concerto no. 5, transmitted in only one source.  Indeed, that source is eccentric in other ways, for example its description of the concerto as a “Concerto Quadruplo,” elevating the cello into the concertante group:

SOURCE:  Bach Digital, detail of title wrapper for parts of  Concerto no. 5 copied by J. C. Farlau.
To my eye, the word Quadruplo is clearly a later addition, as is the insertion Violoncello Concertato,
but even then it's not clear that both of those are written in the same hand:  look at the r in each.

(The cello part transmitted with that set—but in the hand of yet another copyist—is rather different than the traditional reading, adding it as continuo in the second movement, and doubling or adapting the left-hand harpsichord part in other places.  If you want to see something crazy, look at the first movement, bb. 95ff., where this cello is included with the six-bars of trills from the soloists.)

SOURCE: The Music Parlour blog

The most powerful way to become aware of musical textual variants is to hear them, and no one brought these audibly to our attention more than the short-lived but remarkable English musician and musicologist Thurston Dart.  Already in 1959 he released a recording of the Brandenburgs which was a veritable shot across the bow of conventional musical wisdom.  These recordings—available for download via this interesting post on The Music Parlour blog—seem  to borrow the rhetoric of the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard it said..., but I say unto you....”  You think Bach’s corni da caccia are horns?  Dart says they should be Jagdhörner sounding an octave higher, so he does the first concerto using trumpets instead.  He inserts the slow movement of BWV 1021 to provide the Phrygian half-cadence between the two movements of the third concerto.  It is a provocative recording.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Dart wasn’t finished with the Brandenburgs.  He prepared an version for the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields for their 1971 recording, conducted by Neville Marriner.  (Although the Phillips release refers to “Dart’s edition” it was never published in score. Perhaps “version” or “reading” is a more accurate term?)  Here again the same I’ll-show-you spirit prevails in Dart’s interpretations of the evidence, and the album cover has the audacious claim “FIRST VERSION—FIRST RECORDING.”  He follows Penzel's text for the first concerto, so that the third movement is gone, as is the polonaise (both appear in an appendix) and the accompaniment to the horns in Trio II is a rather different unison line for strings rather than oboes.  In this recording the corni da caccia parts of the first concerto are restored to the horns in their usual octave, but the tromba of the second concerto is allocated to the horn rather than the trumpet, down an octave, no longer at the very top of the texture.  His evidence for this is a copyist’s part annotated (by whom?) “ô vero Corno di caccia”—and this alters the soundscape in a remarkable way.

Dart expended a lot of scholarly energy on Bach’s description Fiauti d’Echo in the fourth concerto:

SOURCE:  Bach Digital, cropped page scan from the dedication score, f. 38r. 

His conclusion was that these were really flageolets, sounding an octave higher than notated, so that on the 1971 Marriner recording these are performed on sopranino recorders.  You can’t miss them. Much more could be said here, and this issue has generated a literature of its own.

Dart died before the 1971 recordings were issued; he participated as a continuo player in only six movements (including all of Conc. no. 3, including the interpolated movement from BWV 1021).  Although Philips re-released the 1971 Marriner recording on CD at least as late as 1989, these recordings seem utterly unavailable today through newer releases or streaming/download services (other than Concerto no. 4 as part of a 2004 Marriner tribute collection).  I only ran across them because I married into a copy.  Dart’s approach—if not precisely his conclusions—has become much more widely known through the output of his former Cambridge student Christopher Hogwood, who was also always ready to perform a variant for the sheer excitement of hearing something new.  His 1985 recording of the Brandenburgs retains some of Dart’s ideas, as well as some new departures (particularly regarding the choice of instrument for the bass line).  The Dart attitude is clear in Hogwood’s liner notes:

[Bach’s] desire to impress the Margrave with variety above all is apparent, alarmingly in Concerto 1 where the revised version addas a new concertante third movement for the violino piccolo to a work that opens with a strongly ripieno movement; and in Concerto 5, where a harpsichord episode of nineteen bars is inflated out of all proportion to produce what is currently mistermed a ‘cadenza’ of sixty-five bars.  [Notes to Decca 414-187-1, p. 2]

SOURCE:  allmusic.com

How alarming!  How disproportionate!  How tasteless!  Add to this Hogwood’s characterization of the dedication score's “specious authority stemming more from its Dedication and calligraphy than from its value as source material,” and we may perceive that we are receiving Dart’s spirit through Hogwood’s hands.  At every turn he offers something different.  For the first concerto, Hogwood follows Penzel’s text strictly—no violino piccolo, no Allegro 6/8 and no Polonaise.  Marriner had conceded to the 1971 public with an appendix, but Hogwood’s public in 1985 was ready to be shocked by difference.    To differ from Dart he scraps the idea of interpolating a movement from BWV 1021 as a slow movement to Concerto no. 3; he restores alto recorders as the Fiauti d’Echo in no. 4; and the horns and trumpet are back in their usual places (nos. 1 and 2 respectively) at their usual octave.  With admirable restraint—or is it marketing savvy?—he eschews the lengthy harpsichord solo in no. 5 for the more abrupt version.  I can remember hearing this recording of no. 5 on the radio in about 1987, as I was about to shell out some cash for the Brandenburgs.  Hearing the short variant, I recall reacting “Aw, man! No!” and buying Trevor Pinnock’s recording instead.  And—much as I admire Hogwood and his work over the decades—I can’t say I’ve regretted that youthful investment.  As well-played as these recordings are, are they (and Dart’s) not just a little too eccentric to become standards?  As Richard Taruskin wrote thirty years ago, after quoting the same Hogwood passages I quote above,

In his recording, Mr Hogwood has rectified Bach’s lapse by reinstating the original nineteen-bar solo.  Let me suggest that this conglomeration of shallow fireworks and harmonic barbarities, however ‘in proportion’, and however it may conform to the performer’s idea of the stylistic norms of the day, is poor music by any standard, and that by replacing it Bach judged it so.  As a snapshot of Bach the improviser, it has human interest to be sure, but it is unfinished composition at best.  It is amusing to hear it as a once-only curio, but to offer it as a viable substitute for what Bach offered as representative of his best and most fully elaborated work is manifestly to devalue both that work and the critical sensibility that impelled its revision....  I see here the ultimate perversion of the idea of authenticity:  the elevation of what amounts to a rejected draft to the status of a viable alternative—and even a preferable one—because it is earlier, more in keeping with ex post facto historical generalizations, and less demanding on the listener.  [pp. 192f; later included in Text & Act, p. 139]

Indeed, as Taruskin goes on to insist, the label Brandenburg on the Hogwood (and Dart) recordings is false advertising, as that can only be used to describe the texts contained in the dedicatory score.  Certainly those Leipzig copyists would have been mystified if someone requested one of Bach’s Brandenburg works.  Was ist das?  The alternative texts really ought to be called something different.  “Dart’s Brandenburgs” don’t exist.

9. Q & A, but few answers

Two weeks ago, I gave a solo recital—something very unusual for me, as I’m really a musicologist rather than a musician.  Although I am regularly involved in various performance activities—most usually as an accompanist or church musician—I cannot recall any solo recital I have done since my senior recital in college.  Indeed, that event is the impetus for this one, as this recital fell intentionally on the twentieth anniversary of that senior recital, in the same hall, on the same instrument.  I decided it would be a good chance to revisit some of the same repertoire; and as I did I was reminded of how I got bitten by the musical text criticism bug to begin with.  (My hitherto unstated goal in this blog has been “writing about very technical points in a non-techical way,” and I fear the technical details of this post will mean that it necessarily falls short of that goal.  I don’t blame anyone for not bearing with me to the end of this post; nevertheless, it will be for me a stroll down memory lane.)

The central item on both recitals was the same:  J. S. Bach’s Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’ BWV 769—or rather BWV769a, and that brings up the textual point for this post.  The Canonic Variations is a late work, composed in 1746-47 as far as can be determined.  It is transmitted in a number of sources, including two authentic sources—the first edition print (usually allocated the siglum Q, as it will be here) and an autograph manuscript generally described as a fair copy (ditto A).  Both are now freely available on the web.  I have taken the images below from the scans available via the Berlin Staatsbibliothek website (print and autograph), but similar reproductions can be found on Bach Digital and the IMSLP, and other places too.

The relationship between Q and A is not as obvious as one might expect.  It would be reasonable to assume that the fair-copy score came first, and the printed edition later—and, indeed, that the fair-copy score might even have been prepared for the engraver of the print.  In fact these two authentic sources present very different versions of the piece, so that in Wolfgang Schmieder’s Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis we find the version of Q designated as number 769 while the version of A is 769a.  The issue of how Schmieder designated different versions of a work (and the consequences of such designations) deserves another post; some day I’ll come back to it.

Both versions contain five movements, but the sequence and presentation of those movements varies significantly.  (For convenience I will use the abbreviations devised by Walter Emery in his study of the work.)  In A the movements are:

• I.  C8    2-voice canon at the octave in the manuals, chorale cantus firmus in pedal
• II.  C5  2-voice canon at the fifth in the manauls, cantus firmus in pedal
• III.  CF  the cantus firmus in 2-voice inversion canons at the sixth, third, second and ninth, followed by the entire chorale in a stretto coda; the movement starts with three voices, adds an additional voice at the midpoint, and the coda adds two more voices.
• IV.  C7  2-voice canon at the seventh (pedal and left hand), cantus firmus + free cantabile line in the right hand
• V.  CA  2-voice augmentation canon at the octave in the manuals (+ free left hand line), chorale cantus firmus in pedal

A is notated throughout on three staves (conventional for organ music now, but not a default for Bach and his contemporaries).  In Q the movements appear in a different sequence, and are laid out differently:

• I.  C8  on two-stave puzzle notation (giving only the first few notes of the trailing canonic voice)
• II.  C5  ditto
• III.  C7 ditto.  These first three variations fit together on one “opening”—that is two printed pages, the verso of the cover page on the left, the recto of the next sheet on the right.
• IV. CA  in open score (4 staves), requiring two pages—the next “opening” of the print.
• V.  CF on three staves, requiring two pages, the final “opening.”

The BG edition gives only the version of Q (BWV 769), leaving discussion of BWV 769a to the critical commentary.  Largely due to the work of Friedrich Smend, in the first half of the twentieth century the scholarly consensus shifted, and A came to be regarded as the later source—and thus the Fassung letzter Hand [definitive version].  That it has never become the preferred version among performers is probably due to the apparent anticlimax:  the showy stretto which concludes BWV 769 comes at the end of only the third movement of BWV 769a.  (Not that either version is performed all that much!)  Gregory Butler, who has done extensive studies of Bach’s original prints, demonstrates that the first three variations of Q were engraved first (and very likely the only parts of Bach’s original conception of the piece), and that when CF was composed it could not be inserted between them without a considerable waste of labor.  As Bach’s conception of the work changed, he made a virtue of necessity (eventually adding CA), thus producing two very different versions of the same basic material.  By default Q is the more “public” version—that’s what published means, after all.  And it is no surprise that the version of Q was the more widely disseminated version.  We don’t know how many copies of Q were printed, but at least twenty survive now, and the Stemma devised by Hans Klotz for his edition in the NBA indicates many manuscript copies derived from the print.  See the tree on the left side—although, as my pencil scrawl indicates, “O” on the left is a very unfortunate typo—it surely must be Q; the “O” listed on the lower right is an entirely different source, transmitting BWV 769a.  (There are other problems with this Stemma not worth going into here.)

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Kritischer Bericht for NBA Ser. IV Bd. 2, ed. Hans Klotz (1957), p. 88.

It may seem odd to copy out printed works by hand, but in the centuries before photocopiers it was extremely common.  In this work it was particularly necessary, as the puzzle notation of the first three variations of Q would make them virtually unplayable without realizing them in notation.  Some of the manuscripts descending from Q (Klotz’s J4, E1, and B2, for example) transmit only movements that needed to be realized.  Thus rather than being bootleg manuscript copies of an out-of-print or otherwise inaccessible piece, these might have been used along side a copy of Q to play the complete work.

There are a plentitude of textual differences between Q and A, in and his comprehensive studies of this work Butler also convincingly argues that the very concept of a “definitive” version is meaningless in this piece.  Butler’s chronology is essentially this:

1. Initial conception:  C8, C5, and C7 composed and subsequently engraved.  Indeed, these seem at first to have been engraved without even indicating (beyond the signum S) the incipits of the canonic entries:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots of Q as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN614768373, pp. 4 and 5.

Especially in variations 2 and 3 the incipits have been crowded in with the utmost awkwardness.  Butler suggests that these might have intended to look more like the puzzle notation of Bach's other published canons, lacking any incipits at all, but that these were added as the concept of the work shifted.

2.  A new phase:  possibly inspired by his work on BWV 1087 (the fourteen extra canons based on the first eight notes of the bassline of the Goldberg Variations), Bach employed the chorale tune itself canonically, thus producing the series of 4 canons + stretto that make up CF.  At this point Bach started writing out a clean copy of the work—A—placing this new variation before the cantabile C7.  It is possible, indeed, that he considered the work complete after writing out C7, as he drew some final flourishes after the double bar at that point:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of A as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN812577051, p. 106.  The three flourishes which I have encircled in red) appear only at the end of the fourth variation (C7).

If one were pursuing “definitive” readings, this would suggests that variants readings contained in A would supercede those in Q for C8, C5, C7, and CF, as A is the later source for these movements.  Certainly Bach was making revisions even as he was preparing A, a source which Butler notes combines the characteristics of a composing score, a clean copy, and a revised copy.  For example, in C7 bb. 6-7, Butler posits a revised reading that initially appeared in A, subsequently modified, but faintly visible now:

SOURCES:  composite cropped screenshots of Q and A (as above) with my transcription from Butler B-Jb 2000, p. 18.

3.  The final phase:  despite the apparent final flourishes that conclude C7 in A, Bach revisited the work to produce CA, the most complex of the canons.  While this could be put nowhere but the end in A, in Q it could be placed either at the end or in between C7 and CF.  Butler has demonstrated that CA was certainly the last to be engraved, and analysis of the variant readings supports the argument that Q is the later source for this movement.  Walter Emery had raised this possibility some fifty years ago (without the benefit of Butler’s meticulous study of the printing of Q):

As a performer, I had to commit myself to one version or the other.  (As Susan Hellauer once memorably expressed it, “You can't sing a footnote.”)  I opted in this recital for the version of A basically using the text as printed in the NBA, but with a few alterations imported from the critical report (and a fistfull of wrong notes scattered here and there, too).  Scholars don’t have to commit, though, and as Werner Breig puts it in his new edition of the work for Breitkopf,

What is an appropriate type of close?  Whether it is a contrapuntal concentration such as the six-part stretto or a canon in augmentation that points beyond itself, so to speak, through the unfinished canonic imitation in one part—Bach would certainly not have wanted to commit himself to any particular solution. (p. 20)

Moreover, as Bach’s habit of not commiting himself was so pervasive throughout his career—and Bach editions in the last three centuries have had to deal with some perplexing variants—with this post I am launching a

For the first post of each month from now through November 2017 (approximating the liturgical year that generated Bach’s own Jahrgänge of cantatas in his first years in Leipzig) I will deal with some textual issue relating to the works of J. S. Bach.  While the quantity of text-critical work that has been done on Bach cannot rival that done on Shakespeare (still less the Bible), it is a massive body of literature and editions.  Needless to say there is no shortage of things to talk about—and I hope that these posts won’t be as tedious as this one might have been.