27. “Let the rain pitter-patter”

The weather is fright’ning—

The thunder and lightning

Seem to be having their way;

But as far as I’m concerned,

It’s a lovely day.

Even with that epigram, this is the ninth installment in my now-slowed-down-but-still-appearing

This post is essentially a bit of the pre-history of this blog, and there will be more of that in time.  For now I want to tell about the time that the rainy weather changed my professional trajectory entirely.  And, as Irving Berlin put it, oh, what a break for me!

I have mentioned in passing that I am an organist, although this is very much an avocation.  I don’t really keep up my organ playing as I ought to, and for the first time in 15+ years I’m in a job where (with no organ on campus) I can’t just walk down the hall to practice.  I need to make more effort, and to make time for it.  But I do occasionally fill in for various congregations when the organist has to be away.  And so it happened one Sunday (25 October 2015, to be exact) that I was on the bench of a big downtown church in Greenville, SC for both morning and evening services.  I had a busy afternoon in between, so I had to choose music that I could pull together on minimal practice time.  Usually for me this means Bach, as you can pull the stops and go:  you don’t have to work out complicated registration changes unless you want to.   As on that day the church was celebrating Reformation Day (about a week early), Bach was a natural choice anyway.  I had learned from experience that this congregation didn’t listen to the postlude, so I chose something short and to the point for the evening service:  one of Bach’s settings of Luther’s German paraphrase of the Gloria, “Allein Gott in de höh sei Ehr.”  There are a quite a number of Bach settings extant, but I chose BWV 715, one of the easiest, flashiest, and most striking.  It is one of the six (extant) so-called “Passaggio chorales” which probably manifest something of the sort of chorale playing that got Bach in trouble with his congregation in Arnstadt in February 1706 after his Buxtehude pilgrimage:

“Reprove him for having hitherto made many curious variationes in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation has been confused by it.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 46]

In these works, the chorale is stated with a dense and aggressively dissonant in-your-face style harmony, with interspersed flamboyant runs and arpeggios.  (Hear Ton Koopman performing this work here.)  Think Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in a high Baroque vocabulary.

That morning between services as I was running through the music for the evening, it occurred to me that the dense chromatic writing would make good fodder for an exam I would be giving on the following Tuesday to my Theory II students.  Then I had an extra credit idea:  spot as many sets of parallel fifths/octaves as you can.  And would my students notice the disguised B-A-C-H in the last two bars?

SOURCE:  conclusion of BWV 715; cropped scan of NBA Ser. IV Bd. 3 (ed. Hans Klotz, 1961), p. 15. 

And so it happened that on the next morning I was sitting in my office working on the theory midterm exam, and I remembered my idea for the analysis question.  I discovered that I had left my organ score in my car.  Looking out the window to see a cold rain pouring down, I thought I’ll just go to the IMSLP and use the old complete works edition.  I had been playing out of the Bärenreiter offprint of the NBA text.  (These offprints sometimes include corrections, although the text in this instance was identical with that reproduced above.)  When I pulled up the BG edition, however, all but one of my parallel fifths/octaves were gone:

SOURCE:  the same passage; a marked-up cropped scan of the BG edition (1893), taken from the scan available on the IMSLP.  Those parallels in the NBA text that do not appear in the BG text are indicated in red (although I have not marked other variants here).  The parallel octave that remains is indicated in blue.

Although I had followed Bach research casually over the years, Bach was not at all my area of study.  I was intrigued by this, however, as it seemed like a pretty good example of different editorial ideologies:  the “1893 Bach” couldn’t have possibly intended such solecisms; the “1961 Bach” was a brash rebel.  It was a music textual equivalent of the difference between these famous representations:

SOURCES:  (left) Carl Seffner's 1908 statue of Bach in Leipzig, photo from wikimedia commons; (right) Bernd Göbel's 1985 statue of Bach in Arnstadt, photo from wikimedia commons.

Of course I wanted to know more, and promptly set aside the midterm.  The college library had many of the NBA scores but none of the NBA critical reports.  I e-mailed Patricia Sasser, the music librarian at Furman University just up the road, asking whether she could send me a scan of the page or two covering BWV 715 from the relevant critical report.  Within about an hour she graciously responded, but it only whetted my appetite.  When I asked for a few more pages and explained what I was looking into, she replied “That sounds like a paper for AMS-SE [the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society].”  At first I thought it was nothing more than a diversion from the work I ought to be doing, but having spent an hour pulling out all of the editions of Bach’s organ works that I could lay my hands on, I realized I was obsessed.  It did become a paper for AMS-SE, with the most complicated hand-out I’ve ever put together.  Here’s the first page of it:

There are six extant passaggio chorales attributed to Bach:

• Allein Gott in der höh sei Ehr, BWV 715
• Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722
• Herr Jesu Christ dich uns zu wend, BWV 726
• In dulci jubilo, BWV 729
• Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich BWV 732
• Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her, BWV 738

These six works offer a great perspective on the editing of Bach’s works because 1) none of them survives in his hand (although they do survive in manuscript copies from quite close to him) and 2) the texts conveyed by surviving sources are problematic at best.  None of these works was published until the 1840s.  Indeed, BWV 715 (together with BWV 726) actually did not make it into print until the 1893 BG volume.  These two chorales survive together in a manuscript copy by Johann Peter Kellner—neither a student nor a close colleague of Bach, but his sometimes flawed copies are nonetheless important sources for much of the Bach repertoire (as Russell Stinson has shown).  However audacious Bach’s chorale playing might have been, Kellner’s copy of BWV 715 is manifestly deficient—not only frequently omitting voices haphazardly, but giving harmonies that are implausible in their own terms or as the result of the counterpoint.  The start of Kellner’s manuscript is this:

SOURCE:  (left) detail of Kellner's score, from Bach-Digital; (right) my Finale transcription

Here the irregularity of the part-writing (at times three, or even just two voices) is surely suspect:  voices don’t merge, but they just disappear for a few beats, mid-phrase.  When the same melody is reharmonized a few bars later,

SOURCE:  as above, this time arranged vertically

that initial quartal harmony is, to the say the least, eccentric.  There are, indeed, enough problems here to make me wonder if Kellner was working from a fully-realized score at all, particularly as the four extant chorales apart from the two Kellner copied exist in two separate lines of transmission—one with full realized harmonies, and the other employing figured bass.    If Kellner was trying to realize the figured bass, though, he did it exceedingly poorly in this case.

All of this warrants further discussion, and this summer I was at work on an article about the editing of these works over nearly two centuries, but I had to put it aside when a new source for BWV 715 emerged.  It appears in a practical notebook of 154 pieces (mostly chorale settings) described on its label as being from the repertoire of Bach’s student Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809—an exact contemporary of Haydn).  This notebook is dated 1800, and is the work of one Johann Christoph Bach (1782-1846), an organist in Bindersleben.  Speaking of eccentricities, this Bach copies some of the pieces across the full spread of an opening (verso and recto), so that there are only four systems in image below, with the gutter of the binding crossing through each of them:

SOURCE:  BWV 715, in my composite of verso and recto digital scans from the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden 

What I note about this source:

1.  It lacks the harmonic eccentricities of Kellner’s copy, 
2.  While the number of voices is inconsistent (including the disappearance of the bass line entirely in the fifth phrase—was this ever played from this score?!?), there are never fewer than three in the harmonized sections, and there very often more than four (five, six, and at one point eight), and
3. While such a thick texture means that parallels are inevitably present, the parallel fifth in the final cadence which had been eliminated in BG is here eliminated by means of precisely the same strategy—arriving at the tenor C early, echoing the cadence which had concluded the fourth chorale phrase.

Curiously, BWV 715 is the only one of the 154 pieces in this collection to be attributed to J. S. Bach.  There are several other passaggio chorale settings—not surprising, as it was a common practice for chorale playing during the eighteenth century.  If Kittel was the conduit through which BWV 715 entered this collection, it suggests that JSB didn’t regard this showy style of harmonizing and peacock preening as a youthful indiscretion set to annoy his Arnstadt elders:  he was still conveying it to his students in Leipzig in his very last years.

Nevertheless, these pieces have been tainted in some of the Bach literature as unworthy of the master.  On that rainy October morning, one of the first commentaries I pulled off my shelf was candid:

I have much more to say about these pieces, and eventually I need to get around to writing that article, if it doesn’t get scooped.  In the meantime, I reflect upon the strange intersection between weather and career:  if it hadn’t been raining on that Monday morning, all of the subject matter of the blog would have remained for me just items of idle curiosity, and you wouldn't be reading this now.

Long as I can be with you, it’s a lovely day.

23. Tidbits at the first milepost

The subject of this eighth installment of the Settling Scores

comes about by chance.  Quite independently of this project, I had set myself the task of studying all of Bach’s extant cantatas in more-or-less the sequence in which they were performed during his first few years in Leipzig.  (I will go back later to pick up the earlier cantatas—those, anyway, that he isn’t known to have reprised.)  This project occurred to me a few years ago when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, a stimulating Bach book by John Eliot Gardiner, who himself undertook a different sort of Bach cantata pilgrimage in the Bach anniversary year, 2000.  Gardiner’s book was for me a healthy resituating of the context, especially as he gives much more attention given to the vocal works than to the instrumental works.  (Moreover, Thuringian potato farming had never before crossed my mind.)

Gardiner inspired me to go through the cantatas methodically, giving myself basically a week with each—looking, of course, for specific ways in which Bach himself developed over the years.  I splurged on a copy of the NBA study scores of the complete set of cantatas (and when Bärenreiter tweeted asking for pictures of “towers” of their publications, I obliged with this [at right]—even just my NBA holdings now loom over my middle child).  And so I started in the first week of June with his first cantata for Leipzig, BWV 75 Die Elenden sollen essen, written for the first Sunday after Trinity, 1723.  (At the moment I’m a little ahead of the liturgical calendar, as Easter was later this year than it was in 1723, but this allows me to get Advent in the right place.)

On Sunday, 4 June, I listened to the cantata and read what Alfred Dürr had to say in his magisterial survey.  On Monday, I went through the score and listened again, and then that evening idly opened the relevant Kritischer Bericht of the NBA.  I wasn’t expecting my listening project to be a topic for this blog, but already I find interest stirred by textual minutiae—the “trees,” so to speak, that may well prevent me from giving Bach's “forests” my full attention.  I think I have written already that I can’t look at a critical report without finding something that is curious enough to make me want to say “Hey, listen to this....”  (In this respect I am particularly blessed to be married to a musician; she is used to hearing me go on about such trivia, and while she may not particularly care about it, she at least understands why I do.)

SOURCE:  marked-up Bach-Digital screen-shot

Curiosity no. 1

C. P. E. Bach inherited the now-extant autograph score after his father’s death, but the work is mislabeled in the subsequent catalogue of C. P. E.’s estate.  It is listed there not as “Die Elenden sollen essen” (the first words to be sung) but as “Was hilft des Purpurs Majestät” (the beginning of the recitative that follows the opening chorus) because his economical father had used the empty staves under the chorus to write in the recitative.  “Was hilft” are thus the first words to appear in the score, and the hasty cataloguer of the estate skipped the title page and copied merely the words on the first page of the score, not recognizing that the beginnings of two consecutive movements appeared together.  The first page of the autograph score is shown at right; I have added a red-dotted line to divide the opening chorus at the top of the page from the first recitative at the bottom, and I have circled the quoted text.

Curiosity no. 2

The BG edition omits fourteen bars in the middle of the first aria.  This was discovered by Robert L. Marshall more than 50 years ago, but IMSLP users (or those who use Kalmus reprints of it) may well be unaware of the omission.  It is an egregious textual error:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of extract from first aria (no. 3): (left) BG volume XVIII, detail of p. 166, downloaded from IMSLP; (right) digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 106 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6, p. *132).

This parablepsis is easily explained, as it relates directly to curiosity no. 1:  the opening chorus is so long that not only the first recitative but also this first aria is notated one-system-at-a-time at the bottom of the page.  The first movement ends on the same page (a verso) that concludes with b. 111 of the aria.  On the facing recto, Bach continues with b. 112 at the top of the page—for the first and only time in that aria.  Wilhelm Rust, the BG editor, overlooked this and the following system as he was preparing the third movement, as for the previous eighteen pages he could safely tune out everything at the top of the page (material that he would have already dealt with for the first movement).  He didn’t realize that he had omitted fourteen bars, but he must have noticed something was wrong, as he altered the text in order to make syntactic sense.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite scan of pages from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 18-19).

Curiosity no. 3

Hypermeter (that is, groupings of bars in strong-weak patterns).  Much of this is obvious without turning to the critical report—for example in no. 10, an alto aria notated in 3/8 time, but in which the only bar that is a simple 3/8 bar is the very first one.  All the rest are grouped together by means of short barlines into groups of two (effectively 6/8) or, occasionally, three (= 9/8).  I am reminded of Beethoven’s instruction ritmo di tre battutte in the Scherzo of Symphony no. 9—although, with no timpani thundering away here, it may be less obvious to the listener.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of the first two systems of no. 10, cropped from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 29 and 30);
I have marked some of the short barlines and circled the first of the quasi-9/8 groups.

Although Bach does not always notate these short barlines in all three staves, the pattern is clear.  He is thus more consistent in his usage here than, for example, in his autograph of the Corrente of the B-minor solo violin partita, BWV 1002  There the hypermetrical paired bars of the musical material is clear enough, but it is hard to know from his notation whether he intended short barlines to indicate the hypermetrical groupings (as above in BWV 75), or if these were merely a matter of notational convenience—that is, a short barline (not always the same length) in the immediate (i.e., vertical) proximity to each note on either side of that barline.  Without pushing any argument here beyond this, I have circled below in red those short barlines that are placed close to the notes before and after; in green the strongest evidence that these barlines are indeed intended to be short (together with the fact that his full barlines tend to extend either above or below the staff, or both); and in blue the two instances where the full barline before the putative “weak” bar is again proximate to the notes on either side (in both cases the d and c in the staff).

SOURCE:  marked-up cropped screenshot of autograph fair copy of BWV 1002/iii, bb. 1-32 (P967 f. 5r  from Bach-Digital)

A further hypermetrical curiosity in BWV 75 is a change Bach made as he prepared the manuscript.

SOURCE: cropped scan of the beginning of no. 5, from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

Although it manuscript is very clean (and Stephen Crist has unraveled fascinating evidence by comparing this clean manuscript with the unusually messy manuscript of BWV 76, the cantata that followed it for Bach’s second week in Leipzig), as he began no. 5, a soprano aria with obbligato oboe d’amore, he first notated the solo part with the time signature C, immediately cancelling it by superimposing 3/8.  (As shown at right, the other two staves have 3/8 from the start.)  I have puzzled over this.  This aria proceeds in a regular pattern of 4-bar groups (with few deviations); was he thinking of [re-notating?] it as a compound meter, essentially 12/8?  (If so, why not just write 12/8?)  Was it merely a slip of the pen?  Very curious indeed.

Are we having fun yet?

Curiosity no. 4

Neither the BG nor the NBA text accurately reflects the autograph’s rhythmic notation for the Oboe d'amore in movement five (the beginning of which is pictured above), but this is because the editors sought to present what they surmise Bach intended rather than what he ultimately left on the page.

SOURCE: cropped scan of no. 5 (bb. 16-18), from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

The opening figure of the oboe d’amore ritornello recurs as a primary motive in the solo vocal part, but by the time he wrote the vocal entry he recognized that the placement of the dotted rhythm made for very awkward text declamation.  Consequently he moved the 32nd-note earlier in the figure [at left].  The discrepancy between the oboe figure and the vocal figure continues in the autograph until b. 59 (an incipit indicating the repetition of the opening ritornello), at which point he wrote the revised (that is, vocal) rhythm into the instrumental part.  In no instance, however, does the autograph show any signs of an alteration to the rhythm.  Both the BG and NBA presume (reasonably, but not inevitably) that the rhythm should be made uniform throughout.

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 108 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6 p. *134)

These were not the only curiosities in this work (for example, how the 32-bar choral setting concluding each part of this cantata was later transformed into the 39-bar setting that concludes BWV 100)—and of course one wouldn’t have to resort to the critical report to find all of these.  Still, I think it is a pity that musicians generally seem to regard the critical reports—even without looking at them—as dry if not actually intimidating.  Admittedly they are not generally page-turners, to say the least.  For Americans, it doesn’t help that they’re often in a language other than English, and even when they are not the technical language can seem impenetrable.  But it doesn’t take long to get used to them with their specialized vocabulary and the ubiquitous abbreviations.  After I got this blog off the ground, a colleague remarked to me that “it’s sort of like you read the critical reports so we don’t have to.”  I hope that’s not the case.   And I greatly respect those editors like Jonathan Del Mar who make a genuine effort to make their commentaries as lucid and even winsome as possible—editors, that is, who seem to take real joy in communicating with others about their work, rather than regarding the critical report as a contractual obligation of unutterable drudgery.  There is buried treasure in many critical reports, a subject I will return to time and again, I’m sure.

21. Moving targets (Episode #3)

Two Settling Scores projects intersect in this post—the ongoing series of “moving targets” and the seventh installment of my

Even the exact boundaries around Bach’s oeuvre are a perpetually moving target, and the best illustration of these is the very notion of the “complete” organ works.  A review of the contents of the standard complete editions of Bach's organ works is a good introduction to the disputed borders of this repertoire.  Those editions, all widely in use today, are (in roughly chronological order)

Peters = the first attempt at a complete edition of the organ music, edited principally by Friedrich Conrad Griepenkerl (1782-1849); seven volumes were issued by C. F. Peters 1844-1847, with an eighth following in 1852, when the series was regarded as complete.  In 1881 the ninth volume appeared, and that gradually morphing ninth volume is my principal concern in this post.  Despite its age, the Peters edition is not to be discounted by any means, as some important manuscript sources available to Griepenkerl have subsequently disappeared. This edition had a splendidly ostentatious title page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of title page of a copy of Peters Vol. XVIII (1852, but this copy must be printed between 1881 and 1904, as the first version of Volume IX is listed in an advertisement on the back cover)—cropped because of the huge tracts of nineteenth-century margins that would take up too much real estate on my blog.  Subsequent reprints significantly reduced the margin size.  The changing dimensions of different printings of a single edition would be an interesting topic, if one had but time.

BG = although Griepenkerl beat them to it, of course the first attempt at publishing the complete works eventually got around to the organ works.  These appeared in five volumes during the years 1853-1893; these became the text underlying a practical edition issued by Breitkopf & Härtel, but the original BG is still used today because of (for example) Dover’s reprints of much of it.  It also became the main source text for a number of other practical editions—particularly those issued by G. Schirmer (the Schweitzer edition), Novello & Co. (early volumes were based on Peters, and some volumes have subsequently been re-edited), and Bornemann (the Dupre edition).  

20th B&H = In the late 1930s, Bärenreiter had started an edition of the organ works, edited by Hermann Keller; this project as aborted because of the Second World War after only two volumes.  After the war, two new editions capitalized on the recent explosion of Bach textual scholarship.  Heinz Lohmann edited this ten-volume set for Breitkopf & Härtel, with the first volume appearing in 1968, but with the set completed scarcely a decade later.

NBA = The other edition which began to emerge after the war was that of the Neue Bach Ausgabe, the new complete works.  Series IV (organ works) had eight planned volumes, but a ninth was necessary because of the 1985 discovery of the so-called “Neumeister Chorales,” now attributed to Bach's early years; much later came the appearance of two additional volumes featuring works from the Bach circle that could plausibly (if doubtfully) be attributed to him.  All told, it took fifty years for Series IV to be completed.  This expansion of the series indicates a tendency to cast the net ever wider—an understandable temptation when the NBA project as a whole is an obligatory expense at many libraries around the world.  The sales numbers may be comparatively small, but they are pretty much guaranteed.  (Bärenreiter issues offprints of the musical text of all eleven volumes, and it is in this form that the NBA shows up on the music racks of organs.)  Now a new revision (NBArev) promises at least two volumes of organ chorales, which I assume will essentially replace the flawed Ser. IV. Bde. 2-3, the earliest of the original volumes to appear.

Truly, of the making of many Bach editions there is no end.  Two very interesting editions are ongoing as I write:

Leupold = This is a very serious scholarly edition that does a very good job of catering to the very serious student.  All the volumes that have appeared so far have been edited by George B. Stauffer, certainly a prominent name in the last generation of Bach scholarship, and Stauffer does his best to make the editorial issues clear to the user.  It's not clear to me how many volumes this edition will eventually comprise, as some are to be issued in two very distinct versions (“Standard Urtext” and “Practical Urtext”—a concept which seems a little dubious to me).

21st B&H = And now Breitkopf & Härtel is at it again, with an entirely new edition planned to comprise ten volumes.  With so many accumulating, it seems odd to call this one a “welcome addition,” but in my estimation it is just that—and the edition I would recommend to organists wanting a chance to look anew at works they have played for years (although in my experience using any unfamiliar edition will force that new glimpse).  This is certainly an edition for the new century—taking advantage of digital advances (with online resources and enclosed CD-ROMs which allow users to print out the variants they want while avoiding the bulk and waste of paper for those who don’t require them).   To quote the Preface, “In addition to presenting the musical text with comments, this disk allows synoptic depictions and a cogent search process for specific measures, thus providing a better and faster overview than would be possible with a printed version.”

And surely that’s enough to be getting on with.  But here I want to focus just on the oldest of these, and just its last volume, which appeared in three substantially different manifestations—first in 1881 (three decades after the rest of the set), then again in 1904, and finally again in 1940.  Each issue was the work of a different editor—in 1881 by Griepenkerl’s successor Ferdinand Roitszch; Max Seiffert’s 1904 revision coinciding with his important discovery of new sources; and Hermann Keller's in 1940 at the moment that his Bärenreiter set was abandoned.  Even from the start, Vol. IX was something of a catch-all volume, with a mixture of chorale-based and free works.

Between them, the three different versions of Peters Volume IX contain some 38 individual works, but only twelve works appear in all three.  Several of the works included by Roitszch in 1881 were later ruled to be misattributions.  Seiffert excluded three of these (BWV 692; BWV Anh. 57 and 171), and three that escaped the 1904 purge were tossed out by Keller (BWV 561, 580, and 587).  Further, seven of Seiffert’s twelve new additions were deleted by Keller (BWV 742, 743, 747, 752, 754, 757, and 763), although five of those have subsequently found a place in the NBA.  (Only one of Keller's seven additions was not retained in the NBA (BWV 1027/4a); the music is not printed, but it is given its own section in the critical report to Ser. IV, Bd. 11.)

Excluding the thorny question of which Clavier pieces were not intended for organ anyway, if one takes the Bach organ repertoire at its widest breadth (as does the late, lamented Peter Williams, for example, in his excellent survey, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach—and really his second edition doesn't completely supersede his first) I find that there is actually no single “complete” edition that comprises the repertoire in toto.  Even if one has ready access to the BG and NBA, there are still missing works (not likely to appear in either Leupold or 21st B&H).  I note, for example, two works that have appeared only in Seiffert’s 1904 version of Peters Vol. IX (BWV 752, and 763) and you will search in vain for them elsewhere (unless you are content with homemade editions posted on the IMSLP).  As more and more performers perform the whole corpus as Bach organ “marathons” [Google it ], it would be nice to know exactly how the placement of the finish line is determined.

As Williams has astutely remarked, “[i]t is a curious irony that the uniform appearance presented by any edition of Bach’s organ works distorts them in that it does not give a true impression of the disparate nature and origins of the pieces themselves....  In giving pieces of edited music to the public, editors misrepresent them, despite earnest endeavors to do the opposite.” [p. 274].  The impressive bindings of such series conceal the bewildering array of textual situations for the repertoire contained therein.  Even that repertoire won’t stand still for a generation.

19. (im)posing

which is the sixth installment of the Settling Scores

In this post I consider an edition of a central item in the Bach keyboard repertoire, BWV 971, the Italian Concerto from Clavierübung II.  The edition at hand was the work of Rosalyn Tureck (1914-2003), and it was published by G. Schirmer in 1983 under an imprint revealing that it was to be the first of many:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the title page of Tureck’s 1983 edition

The series nameplate combines three terms that do not necessarily mix well:  critical edition, performance edition, and urtext.  (Later issues in the short-lived series add facsimile to the namplate, and this is accurate as each one includes a facsimile reproduction of her principal source(s), although sometimes these are reduced in size or too faint to be very useful.)

A critical edition is particular type of scholarly edition:  it is the product of the studious application of some text-critical method involving multiple sources.  In musical editions these methods are usually deployed in pursuit either of the earliest version penned by a composer, the last version as revised by a composer, or (increasingly, so it seems to me) a version that the composer never got down on paper but for which there is some authoritative evidence; but a critical edition need not seek a version known to the composer, but might seek a subsequent version (like Mendelssohn’s or Vaughan Williams’s re-scorings of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—in either case the usual Bach sources would be generally irrelevant to the text-critical process).  Whatever goal a critical edition is aiming for, I am all in favor of it when it is done well.

Many critical editions also claim the label urtext, which was coined to refer to the original reading of a text, but which in musical editions has come to describe little more than editions purged of interpretive editorial accretions—slurs and other articulation marks, dynamics, fingerings, pedalings, bowings, etc.  In that sense an urtext may not prove to be “critical” in the sense described above.  I would argue that an edition based on a single source—that is, in which there has been no collation of variant readings—cannot be a critical edition in its strict sense, although it may well be an urtext in at least the marketing sense.  (Although a number of webpages credit the publisher Günter Henle as the first to apply the term to music, the OED has a 1932 citation from the TLS referring to “the nearest thing possible in Chopin’s case to an Urtext,” and Breitkopf & Härtel used it for a series of publications in the 1890s.)

A performance edition aims to make visible to the user the various unwritten or obscure conventions that are otherwise invisible on the page—or, indeed, performance practices that are quite far removed from the composer.  Editorial additions to the text in such editions vary widely, and sometimes recognizing them for what they are can be difficult, as you have to know what a composer “looks like” to know when something has been added; at other times the interpretive suggestions are bleedingly obvious.  And—as I indicated in my very first post—I don’t disparage such editions in the least, as they are vital resources in understanding performance conventions of their time.  The goals of urtext and performing editions are  essentially at odds.  While it is a standard practice to adapt a text to modern notation conventions (for example, using treble and bass clefs only for keyboard music), many editions I see marketed as urtexts make more extensive concessions to aid in performers’ interpretations.  Tureck’s does this, but at least she explains in her preface exactly the sorts of interpretive marks she has added.   Nonetheless, her approach to these editions seems to transfer them out of the urtext realm into something else altogether.

The two other issues of the Tureck’s series were the lute suites BWV 996 and 997 adapted for the guitar.  These bear a curious note in which the editor insists that “[t]he Suites in this series, edited for classical guitar, are not arrangements.  This edition preserves the original form of Bach’s compositions” [p. ii].  Indeed?  An urtext for the wrong instrument?  If the word arrangement was too slippery for her to assert authority, why not transcription?  Clearly adjustments have been made in order to make this playable at all:  “Where notes are considered unplayable on the guitar the editor does not omit them.  For the sake of musical completeness they are included within parentheses in the musical text.  8ve signifies an octave above the original register, an editorial solution” [BWV 996, p. v].  An “editorial solution,” that is, to a problem created by the editor.  These are transcriptions—very good ones, perhaps, made by an authority on Bach performance—but they unnecessarily claim a specious scholarly objectivity.  She is posing to be more than she is.

So too her edition of the Italian Concerto (which Tureck significantly describes as edited “for Harpsichord or Piano”), which presents not merely a critically-established text, but overlays it with her interpretation.  The fidelity is not thus to the text of the work but rather to a learned artist’s understanding of it.  She glosses the Italian Concerto so that we can see what she perceives when she reads the music.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that:  I am reminded of Malcolm Bilson’s complaint that everyone uses urtext editions but few know how to read them. Tureck’s profuse prefatory remarks give the impression that hers is—for the first time ever—the text Bach meant.

“No autograph copy of the Italian Concerto exists.  Although several manuscripts in other hands are extant, the most reliable source is Bach’s own corrected copy of the first printing, published in 1735, in which revisions are set down in his hand. [Bach-Digital description here.]  The second printing appeared in 1736.  The inestimable value of Bach’s text is self-evident.  It is a rare instance in the keyboard works of direct contact with the original textual and performance intentions of Johann Sebastian.  The editor employs this musical text [i.e., the 1736 edition or the hand-corrected 1735 edition?] for this edition which, besides being an urtext edition, is also edited for performance on the piano or the harpsichord according to all the original indications in Bach’s corrected copy.  The stem directions, which in the editor’s opinion are of prime importance, have also been preserved as closely as possible.... [p. iii]  It has long been the custom to present a ‘clean’ score with urtext references, leaving the performer to find the way to performance solutions.  This procedure has served two functions:  (1) it has rescued editions from erroneous music texts and anachronistic performance directions[,] and (2) it has reflected scholarly research and orientation.  The bare urtext editions give the performing musician and teacher contact with the scholar’s approach and with increasingly reliable scores which provide a textual foundation upon which an authentic performance art may be developed....”  [p. iv]

The eyes glaze over at some point, and she relies increasingly on an authoritarian passive voice:

“In addition to current editing procedures, performance practices must now be introduced if musicians are to employ an urtext which will contribute to an authentic performance style.  Heretofore, the performer has been left uninstructed, an impossible practice for music composed some 250 years ago. Innumerable specific, historical performance practices are identifiable, and substantial data concerning them are available....  This edition integrates the textual sources with Bach’s own performance indications and historical style, based on Baroque performance practices for harpsichord. These practices, when combined with an uncompromising purity of Baroque style, considerations of the musical structure, and a fitting piano technique, have valid applications on the piano.” [p. iv]

Paul Badura-Skoda blasts this edition in his Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard, particularly in a section he calls “The Urtext Problem: An Imaginary Interview” [p. 188-200], where he imagines all the questions he wants to be asked and so that he can respond pithily.  In particular he takes Tureck to task for her radical proposal that in the second movement the accompanying alto line may be ornamented.  See her note before the beginning of the movement:

SOURCE:  digital scan of Tureck ed., p. 8

Whatever else one might say of this edition, it doesn't have the look of an Urtext.  As promised, it is laden with interpretive information.  These alto-line embellishments are a step too far for Badura-Skoda:

B.-S.  Look, if a professional musicologist comes up with a sensational claim such as, for example, that in the second movement of the Italian Concerto the alto voice should be freely embellished throughout, then he or she should adduce some evidence to support it.  I know of no Italian or German treatise written during Bach's lifetime that suggests the embellishment of accompanying (in contrast to imitative) inner voices.  Thus one might expect from Dr Tureck some evidence or explanation for such a claim... 

DR C.  Doesn’t she point to the fact that the thirds in the lower system of the Andante have two tails [stems] throughout, thus proving that they are two distinct voices? 

B.-S.  This is simply a naïve remark and doesn’t prove anything.  Everyone who is acquainted with the keyboard music of the eighteenth century knows that it was common notational practice to add tails to all thirds, sixths, and so on.  This even occurs in Haydn and Mozart.  If what she says were true, one could also, in the Italian Concerto, set about enriching the accompaniment of bars 30f., 46f., and 129f. of the first movement with ornaments. 

DR C.  But Tureck points to bar 17 of the second movement, where, in the first edition, there really is a Pralltriller sign in the middle voice... 

B.-S.  ... which is almost certainly an engraver’s error...  [p. 195f.; the ellipses are his]

He belabors this point at some length, adding that her suggested execution of the trill is wrong “because the Pralltriller formula she adduces is not found in a single treatise before 1757, seven years after Bach died.”

This notwithstanding, the only thing that irks me about Tureck’s edition is that she overreaches, imposing her way as the one true path to Bach.  Badura-Skoda does the same.  Maybe this is an occupational hazard for performers, but particularly for one who communed with the composer as “the high priestess of Bach.”  And, like any editor, Tureck is delighted when she can restore some textual variant in order to give us the truth:

“As a result of this comparative analysis, the editor brings to light an error in the first movement which appears in well-known 19th and 20th century editions including the Neue Bach Ausgabe.  At measures 13-14 the figure in the soprano had been altered to match measures 175-176 in the closing da capo section.  This figure is restored in this edition to its original version.”  [p. iii]

The figure to which she refers is this:

SOURCE: composite; my own transcriptions (clefs updated) from the first edition (1735) from IMSLP #417409

Tureck makes a big deal of this, but other editors before her have noted the oddity and opted to regularize.  Badura-Skoda’s response: “In the other Bach concertos initial and final tuttis of a movement are identical, which means that this discrepancy goes back to an engraver’s error that Bach overlooked” [p. 198].  Just off the top of my head I can think of one closing ritornello markedly different from the opening—the first movement of Bach's second “Brandenburg” concerto. (When another example occurred to me, I find that it is slippery—so slippery that, rather than digress here, I will plan to get back to it a future post; if you want to whet your appetite, you can see it here.)

In any case, “Original version” may be too much for Tureck to claim, as it appears that this figured had changed a bit before the 1735 publication.  A manuscript copied by Johann Christoph Oley (1735-1789) held by the Boston Public Library (details at Bach-Digital here, but a scan is available at the IMSLP) presented an earlier reading of the text which Oley subsequently updated to match the published version (altering even the title page to conform—see the account in the NBA Kritischer Bericht).  Wherever they might be placed metrically, these twiddles seem to have been second thoughts.  In these and other instances Oley has originally written 16th-notes, and then crammed the extra note in to make a pair of 32nds.  (Note that here, in addition to the cramped space, often the stem of the added note does not cross the closest beam, although in the places where Oley originally wrote 32nds (as throughout the second movement), the stems cross all the way to the main beam.)

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots from Oley MS, at IMSLP #302163

Even here, Oley doesn’t quite match the printed text: in bb. 73-74, the 32nds are early (by which I mean, on the first half of each half-beat); in bb. 175-76, the first pair is early, while the other two pairs accord with the printed reading.

Tureck’s labors devoted to Bach interpretation are admirable—especially her “progressive anthology” series, An Introduction to the Performance of Bach (3 vols, Oxford,  1960).  Most interesting there is a sort of etude in which she has rewritten the C-major 2-part invention (BWV 772) so that the hands are essentially reversed “for the development of flexible thinking in two parts”:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan  from Tureck, An Introduction to the Performance of Bach, vol. 2, p. 14

This series is naturally a product of its time.  (See especially her discussion of the sources of the Aria Variata, BWV 989, in vol. 3, p. 7)  The same is true of the Schirmer series from the 1980s.  This edition of the Italian Concerto remains in print, and it is part of a long tradition of instructional editions.  Its presumption to be more than it is probably does no harm—but a phrase from an earlier Badura-Skoda publication come to mind (co-written with his wife, Eva):  “[i]t would be a good thing if the use of the word ‘Urtext’ were protected by law...” [p. 129], rather like Champagne and organic in some jurisdictions.  It sells well, but is the label accurate? 

17. Just kidding?

The fifth installment of the Settling Scores

Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 biography of Bach has many over-the-top claims which bash the reader over the head with Bach’s supreme genius.  Today I consider just one of these, drawn from information related by C. P. E. Bach.  I’m prompted to write about it now because of some evidence that I have stumbled across in recent months supporting my doubts about it.

In the chapter concerning “Bach the clavier player,” Forkel records that

“He even went so far, when he was in a cheerful humor and in the full consciousness of his powers, as to add extempore to three single parts a fourth part, and thus to make a quartet out of a trio.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 435; cf. C.P.E.'s letter in ibid, p. 397]

And he repeats it in the chapter concerning “Bach’s character”:

“If he was in a cheerful mood and knew that the composer of the piece, if he happened to be present, would not take it amiss, he used, as we have said above, to make extempore, either out of the figured bass a new trio, or of three single parts a quartet.  These, however, are really the only cases in which he proved to others how strong he was.”  [Ibid., p. 460]

Maybe there is some basis in fact to this story—even if it was only a single occasion—but it seems to me literally incredible otherwise.  Forkel even acknowledged elsewhere that the sort of polyphony that allows the adding or reducing of parts has to be very specially constructed:

“In his compositions in four parts, you may sometimes even leave out the upper and lower part and still hear in the two middle parts an intelligible and pleasing music.  [Only the two middle parts, Herr Forkel?  An example would be nice....]  But to produce such harmony, in which the single parts must be in the highest degree flexible and yielding towards each other if they are all to have a free and fluent melody, Bach made use of peculiar means, which had not been taught in the treatises of musical instruction in those times, but with which his great genius inspired him.  These means consisted in the great liberty which he gave to the progress of the parts.  He thereby transgressed in appearance, but not in reality, all the long-standing rules which, in his time, were held sacred.”  [Ibid., p. 443]

As an organist I am occasionally in a situation where a descant is added for the final verse of a hymn.  Sometimes the descant line is printed in the hymnal on an extra stave above the four-part harmony.  What I notice invariably—because it is indeed inevitable (that word that dogged my previous post)—is that in order to give the descant line a musically-satisfying melody, it will at times borrow note-progressions from the alto or tenor (or even the soprano), creating intrusive parallel unisons or octaves.  Really, the right way—if I may be so bold—to add a descant is to compose it as a counterpoint to the melody, and then write a harmonic background for those two lines together.  There are many examples of this done well, but too often I’m playing the other type.  And it beggars belief that a hypothetical trio by Forkel’s “composer of the piece, if he happened to be present” would accommodate an added fourth line with its own integrity while not making substantial alterations to the original parts.  I have naively accepted this as literal truth for too long.  No longer:  two examples I recently noticed suggest to me that four voices was too many for Bach to shuffle around in his head.  Heresy?  Maybe so.  But look at these:

1)  strict canon:  “Christe eleison” from the Missa in A, BWV 234

I love this movement.  For years I have used it on the very first day of Theory I, when students generally have no theoretical background, may only read one clef (if that), and may never have seen a full score.  I throw it at them and ask them to observe:  What do you see?  And there’s much to be seen.  It is a strict canon beginning with the bass soloist, and with ensuing entries in the tenor, alto, soprano, and finally two flutes in unison—each of these entries a perfect fourth higher than the last, and with the sustained harmonies in the strings never really relaxing into anything that feels like a resolution.  Even the apparently simple question “What key is this in?” defies a simple answer.  Also interesting is that the canonic line echoes its opening arpeggio (and more) twice even as the voices accumulate, so that the arpeggio occurs not just five but nine times, as if in stretto.  (This is partially illustrated below, but if you’re curious you’ll save time just looking up the movement yourself.  Good stuff.)

One day, sitting in the Subaru service department with the NBA Kritischer Bericht at hand—as you do—I was killing time looking at the variant readings for this movement.  The report documented a series of systematic corrections in the autograph, commenting merely (and I paraphrase) “the corrections in bb. 80, 82, and 85 are related:  Bach altered his conception after the fact, as the fourth canonic phrase initially began with a leap of a fourth.”  [p.27]  Each note circled below (the autograph score on the left, the NBA text on the right) was originally a fourth lower in the autograph.

Composite of BWV 234/i; SOURCES: (left) cropped scan of autograph score f. 3v (bb. 75-85) from ULB Darmstadt scan;
(right) scan of Barenreiter TP 266 (off-print of NBA Ser. II Bd. 2), p. 11 (bb. 80-85); for both, I have added the red circles.

Here is the bottom system of the same page of the NBA (bb. 83-85), which presents the complete “Stimmtausch block” of the canon, marked-up to show the canonic phrases.  [I appropriate the term from Robert L. Marshall’s landmark study of Bach’s compositional process (v. 1, p. 134f.]  “1” is how the line begins (originally in the basses, now in the flutes), continuing to “2” and so on to accumulate five canonic elements (although each voice is a fourth higher than the previous one).

SOURCE: cropped scan of Barenreiter TP 266 (off-print of NBA Ser. II Bd. 2), p. 11 (bb. 83-85)

The NBA does not go on to explain why Bach would have made the changes.  Bar 85 makes the reason clear:  the A in the alto (the pick-up to canonic phrase “4”) was originally an E, but the leap up from E to A would cause parallel fifths with the tenor leap from A to D.  This became an issue only when he wrote the fifth canonic phrase, but apparently he didn’t notice it in b. 82, so had to go back to fix it there; the retrospective change in b. 80 was only necessary to preserve the strict canon, and was thus presumably the last to be made.  The lesson here?  Bach could juggle a number of voices in his head as he constructed the canon, but clearly had to get it down on paper to get it right once too many voices had accumulated.  In other words, he had not conceived phrase 5 when he first notated phrase 3.

2)  permutation fugue:  chorus Himmelskönig, sei willkommen, BWV 182/ii

This is a similar example—this time more complicated because the lines had to work as invertible counterpoint rather than just a canon.  Arthur Mendel discussed this example in a 1960 Musical Quarterly article; his point was really just that an autograph that Spitta had taken to be a fair copy was really a composing score, as the types of corrections were not copying errors but rather directly related to the substance of the counterpoint:

Composite of BWV 182/ii bb. 1-5; SOURCES: (top) cropped scan of f. 1v of autograph score of BWV 182 from Bach Digital; (bottom) cropped scan of Mendel’s reconstruction of the first reading of these bars (Musical Quarterly (1960), his Ex. 1, p. 292); for both I have added the accolades on the left.

 Mendel notes a pattern of corrections:

“...we see that while there are no corrections in the first two measures, in measure 3 the last note in the soprano has been changed from an original a1 to d2, and there is a corresponding change in the alto in measure 4 and the tenor in measure 5.  In the bass in measure 6 [not shown above], however, at the beginning of the second brace, there is no corresponding correction; here the corrected reading found in the other three voices was written in to begin with.  If we look a little further, we can see that at the end of measure 4 not only the alto but also the soprano, and at the end of measure 5 not only the tenor but also the alto, have been corrected.  But again in measure 6, the tenor bears no correction corresponding to those in the alto in measure 5 and in the soprano in measure 4.”  [p. 292]

and then reconstructs Bach’s compositional process:

“Bach starts out as follows, writing in the first brace the whole four measures of the soprano, then the rests plus three measures of the alto, then the rests plus two measures of the tenor, and finally the rests plus the subject in the bass.  [This produces Mendel’s Ex. 1, given in the above composite.]  But already on the fourth beat of the bass's subject-entrance (the first beat of measure 5) there occur consecutive octaves between bass and soprano.  Apparently he next changed the soprano, inverting its motion to read d2-f#2 instead of f#2-d2.”  [pp. 292f.]

He then charts further changes to get from his putative original to the eventual (I hesitate to say final with Bach) reading.  He concludes

“It is surprising to find that in writing such a permutation fugue (he had already written several that we know, and the scheme remained a favorite one with him) he had not worked out the invertibility of his four melodic elements until he set pen to paper to write a score that is neat enough to have been taken by Spitta for a fair copy.” [p. 293]

Granted, Bach was clearly very good at this.  The anecdote transmitted by Forkel suggests a contrapuntal understanding of such profundity (being able to spontaneously convert a trio into a quartet by the addition of an extra line) that writing out such examples into fair copy would not be surprising at all.  For too long I’ve taken the Forkel story at face value, but when I stop to think of it it really can’t be true.  “Just kidding,” as my students sometimes say when corrected; maybe Forkel would say the same.

ADDENDUM  20 August 2017

In the course of my Bach cantata pilgrimage, I have run across an interesting example going the other way—something originally in five real parts (SATB with a descant) in which Bach later deleted the fifth part, and had to make only very minor adjustments in two spots for the four-part version:  compare the closing chorale of BWV 12 with its later use in BWV 69.

ADDENDUM  28 November 2017

Then again, the seven-part scoring of the final chorale of BWV 70 more than amply demonstrates Bach’s ability to write integrated-yet-disposable lines.  Even so, there were some small alterations to the inner parts when this harmonization was included as a four-part chorale as no. 347 of the Breitkopf edition of Bach's chorales (1784-1787).  See NBA Ser. III, Bd. 2, Teil 2, where this chorale appears on p. 200.