53. Lost (and found) in translation

As the academic term winds down, I find time to get to that stack of books unwrapped at Christmas.  In the preface of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music (ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell), I read these words:

“The musical score itself is an imprecise mechanism, which by its very nature offers even the most dutiful performer a rich variety of possibilities.  There has always been much detail that a composer did not trouble to notate, knowing that certain conventions would be observed; some of these are no longer current or have undergone significant changes of meaning.  For example, musical notation can give little indication of tempo flexibility or the balance of instruments within an ensemble.  Those elements of style which a composer found it unnecessary to notate will always have the character of a foreign language, but one within which today’s musicians can learn to converse freely.  Using the resources and techniques for which a particular repertory was intended may well make more sense of what the composer actually wrote, recreating something of its initial impact on the listener” [p. xvi].

Indeed; and while I object to the notion of music as a “universal language” (on which see the late, great Linda Shaver-Gleason), the comparison here with a language in which one may gain fluency, with a fuller sense of idioms and subtexts, makes a lot of sense to me.  Such fluency will never be that of a native-speaker—we cannot be reborn in seventeenth century Europe (nor would I wish to be)—but with eyes open and ears attuned, an immersion into as much of that music’s culture that we can find may at least lead us in the right direction.  Whatever that is.

I remember years ago hearing a snide reference to a certain university music department as one in which “music is seen and not heard.”  I get it.  Musicologists can get wrapped up in the text and forget the experience.  I recognize in myself the tendency, when in museums, to look first to the commentary before I look at whatever is inside the frame—wanting to know what I'm looking at, maybe even what I’m supposed to see.  I'm probably more comfortable in the scholarly conversation (“discourse” is the word that was hammered into me in graduate school) than in the aesthetic experience.  No real surprise there, as I have much more in common with the critics than the creators.  Part of what has made the “historically-informed performance” movement so vibrant, I think, is the interchange between musicologists and musicians:  each has much to learn from the other.  Instruments can teach us what the text is saying, just as much as the philologist can seek to elucidate a particular reading within the larger context of a textual tradition.

As any reader of the blog knows, my concern here is about the musical text, almost always the notated text.  The text is frozen and lifeless, rather like the specimen in the biology laboratory.  Music-as-written is not the live creature in its natural habitat; that would be the music-as-sounded.  The notated text is at best a translation (a transubstantiation, even?) of the musical experience into written form.  Its medium is changed, and whatever new potential this new state affords, this necessarily comes with many costs as well.  Something is always lost in translation.  Even more than this, the notated text cannot be regarded as an end in itself, seen and not heard; rather, it is a means to another end, and it must be reawakened in a new resurrection of the music in sound.  (I offer no apologies for the religious language in this paragraph; I think there are useful connections to be made, if you’re interested you can read more in this prehistory of Settling Scores.)

And this text-as-lifeless-remnant is as true of recordings as of notated music.  A recording is music-as-sounded in only the most literal sense.  Otherwise, it is as frozen as the most prosaic printed page.  As Hua Hsu comments in a perceptive review of a lavish limited edition that presents (one is led to believe) an audio document of 1969 Woodstock festival from idealistic start to muddy end, “Listening to thirty-eight CDs brings you no closer to experiencing such felicity and innocence—the possibility in the tripper’s brittle laugh.  There’s the past, and there’s the story we tell about it” [p. 73].  Memory is fickle, and whatever text survives is all we have, for better or worse.  But text is also fickle.  It is only what happens to have been preserved, a mixture of intention and carelessness.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

A few years ago, I heard a fascinating paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship.  Alan Galey (who is in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto) was addressing what he called “digital streaming lacunae”—how audio streamed from platforms such as iMusic or Spotify may lack information that would be heard on the corresponding compact disc.  The example that has stuck with me was from the fourth volume of Columbia Records’ “Bootleg Series” of Bob Dylan recordings.  The cover says “The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” although the source recording is actually from the May 17, 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall concert—and the quotation marks around “Royal Albert Hall” acknowledge that there has been fan confusion about this recording for decades (noted, too, on the back cover).  In any case, this CD release preserves the famous heckling fan shouting “Judas!”  

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Galey noticed, however, that if one accesses this recording via any of the streaming services, this most-famous moment is missing.  Moreover, there is nothing to indicate that something is missing.  It may as well have been intentionally edited out.

What Galey discovered, however, was that omission was oversight, not intention.  On the Columbia CD, the “Judas!” exchange (as well as other things between the songs) were coded as pre-gap.  (Those of us old enough to remember compact discs can recall seeing the timer display sometimes indicate negative numbers right before a track started:  -00:03, -00:02, -00:01, 00:00 [start].  That is the pre-gap.)  Whoever was assigned to rip the CDs to provide the files to the streaming services neglected to check off “Include pre-gap” in the dialogue box, and so those sections simply disappeared, absent from the data.  Consequently the streamed version of this album is more than three minutes shorter than the CD release it purports to represent.  The “non-musical” moments of the album have been lost in the translation from one digital medium to another.  Even more alarming:  the digital text is not quite as fixed as we might have assumed.

As intriguing as that example is, I am much more interested in the disconnect between words and music--that is, where the words used to clarify the musical idea prove utterly insufficient, maybe because they are too slippery.  Felix Mendelssohn, in an oft-quoted letter of November 1842, rails about precisely this problem; I quote here the translation by John Michael Cooper (who also writes illuminatingly on the context and significance of this letter):

“There is so much spoken about music, and yet so little is said. I believe that words are entirely insufficient for that, and if I should find that they were sufficient, then I would write no more music.  People usually complain that music is ambiguous; that what they should think of when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words; but for me it is just the opposite, and not just with entire discourses, but also with individual words; these, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so unclear, so misleading in comparison to good music, which fills one’s soul with a thousand things better than words.—What the music I love expresses to me is thought not too unclear for words, but rather too clear.  I therefore find in all attempts to put these thoughts into words something correct, but also always something insufficient...” [p. 159].  

Mendelssohn goes on to state that the music would “arouse the same feeling in one person as in another.”  I’m not as sanguine about that, but I do agree with him that we are wrong to assume that our words are infallibly communicating what we intend.  

I ran across an example of this recently, working on a review of Breitkopf & Härtel’s impressive new edition of Mahler's third symphony.  Near the beginning of the second movement there is an interesting footnote in which Mahler endeavors to clarify his poco riten. instruction:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan (p. 114), showing bb. 29-35 of the second movement from Gustav Mahler, Symphonie nr. 3, ed. Christian Rudolf Riedel (Breitkopf & Härtel, 2021).

In case that print it is too small for you, it reads (in its English version):  “The 16th-notes always in the same tempo; the rit. should be in the rests.”  This is not a literal translation of the German:  “immer gleich schnell” [always as quickly] for the 16th-notes isn’t quite “the same tempo,” but I think we understand what he means.  As the beat slows, the length of the 16th-notes does not get appreciably longer.  He explains that the slowing happens “in the rests” [“in die Pausen”].  But look at the second violin line in b. 32, where we find the asterisk indicating the foot note:  there are no rests.  

SOURCE:  enlarged detail of image of above

A previous editor, Erwin Ratz, tried to fix this in his 1974 edition.  He decided to replace Mahler’s word “Pausen” [rests] with “Punkte” [dots (i.e., on the eighth notes)]:

SOURCE:  detail of p. 106 of a) first edition (Weinberger, 1898) available as IMSLP 109864; and b) revised edition ed. Erwin Ratz (Universal, 1974), see perusal score.

Ratz’s solution does indeed clarify, but it remains unclear whether this is indeed what Mahler intended.  The effect of Ratz’s reading is (I think) that one should hold out the dotted-eighth notes longer and longer, while keeping the 16th-notes the same.

SOURCE:  detail of the corresponding critical remark in Riedel's edition (p. 70). 

An alternate reading—and the one which Riedel favors—is that Mahler's use of the word “Pausen” is a clue to his intentions of the performance of the dotted notes.  Riedel declares in his critical remarks that Pausen “doubtless” indicates that the dots were really intended to be performed as if 16th-rests.  

Maybe.  Certainly there are many other moments in the same movement where Mahler opts to notate with a rest in place of a dot; but throughout he employs a variety of combinations of dots or rests (with and without slurs) for this basic division of a beat into a longer and a shorter note.  What at first glance appears merely inconsistent may also be regarded as exactly what is intended—that each of the various instances is notated as Mahler wanted it, and that what applies to one instrument need not apply to another..  There would not then have to be a stylistic shortening of the dotted-eighth to make room for a 16th-rest (which would be lengthened in the ritenuto); instead both the dotted-eighths and the negligible gaps between the two articulated notes could be gradually lengthened.  That is, both sound and silence are stretched, just not the 16th-notes (which remain the same duration).  I struggle for what word Mahler should have chosen if this is what he had intended:  Lücke [“gaps”], perhaps?  The lack of an obvious word might explain why the word that he uses seems particularly unsatisfying in this case, so that both editors have had to devise a way to make the musical text and the verbal text agree.  Ratz changes the word; Riedel leaves the word but argues for its literal meaning—and thank goodness he doesn’t alter the musical notation to agree with his reading!

This Mahler “lost in translation” issue is perhaps instructive because the it appears to be wrought from the difficulty in finding the right verbal instruction to make sense of the musical notation.   We might also encounter the “divided by a common language” issue, where an instruction means different things to different people, even close collaborators.  I ran across this several years ago in my work on Gilbert and Sullivan.  For Gilbert—the librettist—the word recitative indicated that he was breaking from a verse prosody into a different kind of declamation, generally switching to Italianate endecasillibi.  (If you want more on this—and there is a lot more—see my article, "Recitative in the Savoy Operas.")  Here’s an example from Princess Ida (1884), the eighth of their fourteen collaborations. Gilbert’s label “recitative” in the middle of this longer musical number denotes a shift in topic as well as prosody, as Florian changes the subject:

SOURCE:  cropped page-scan of The First Night Gilbert and Sullivan, p. 221; showing an extract from Act I[I] of Princess Ida.

When we compare the libretto—the verbal text—to the vocal score of Sullivan’s musical setting, we find quite a different use of the term recitative:

SOURCE:  marked up page-scan (slightly cropped) of p. 55 of the first edition (second state) vocal score of Princess Ida, available at IMSLP #331094.

Florian’s outburst (“A woman's college!”) has no “recitative” instruction.  That doesn’t come until fifteen bars later, when Hilarion responds, and Sullivan repeats the marking again three bars later.  In both instances, he cancels it with the musical instruction “a tempo” (i.e., return to the tempo as it was).  What this shows is that for Sullivan, “Recit.” was in this instance a musical instruction:  it meant for the conductor to stop beating in tempo, and to accommodate a free recitation of the text—not necessarily following notated rhythmic patterns strictly.  

One would not know from listening to the music or looking at the score that Gilbert’s recitative (with a corresponding change in the prosody) had happened much earlier.  Sullivan essentially ignored that, setting the new verse structure within the prevailing musical texture.  Yes, the musical style changes a bit, but in a few bars (just after “...worth knowing”), Sullivan has reintroduced the countermelody that has been going on in the accompaniment for all of the previous section.  Sullivan saves the interruption for the first moment of disagreement between the three characters on stage, and it is dramatically more powerful for that reason.  If we imagine all six lines set to this sort of secco recitative, the scene would have stopped dead in its tracks, and it would have been very hard to get the momentum back.

But it doesn’t take two people to use a word to mean different things.  For Handel, it seems that Adagio could be both a mood and a gesture.  The gesture occurs frequently at the end of a movement as a transition to the next:  after a full cadence, then a new instruction (“Adagio”), and then a few chords (often above a descending tetrachord) framing a Phyrgian half-cadence, over which someone presumably extemporizes some sort of embellishment.  This is a common enough Baroque convention, of course—not at all limited to Handel.  I associate it with the Corellian tradition, but Handel turns it almost into a mannerism.  Probably the most talked-about example is Bach’s third “Brandenburg” concerto (BWV 1048), where some have tended to refer to the transitional half-cadence as “the second movement.”  (If you don’t believe me, Google it.  Only as a heuristic do I think we can regard it as a movement unto itself; that or as a CD track.)  The transition at the end of the slow movement first “Brandenburg” (BWV 1046) is more remarkable still:  the tonic chord is denied us, and as the bass gives the notes of the tetrachord in isolation, each is followed by an exchange between oboes (presenting a diatonic chord we might have expected), and the strings (presenting an increasingly intense chromatic alternative).  A haunting moment.  At the slow tempo (Adagio, of course) and with the silences around each of the chords, we stand gazing into the abyss.   

SOURCE:  my own score reduction of BWV 1046/ii bb. 36-39.

(Continuing this digression, for my money a much more intriguing Phrygian half cadence is the one that concludes the aria “Behold and see” in Messiah.  Handel employs the cadence dramatically, leaving this crucial moment pointedly unresolved—willing the music on.)

There are transitional Phrygian cadences in Handel that lack a new tempo designation, but I've never seen him use any designation for such a transition other than Adagio.  And thus, on occasion, one finds him appending this Adagio transitional gesture at the end of a movement that is already marked Adagio.  Here, for example, is the conclusion of the first movement of the concerto Op. 4 no. 3, HWV 291:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Handel's autograph ms of HWV 291, now contained within BL Kings MS 317.  This detail is the top half of f. 12v, which gives bb. 26-30 of the first movement.

In case this is a little hard to read (and Handel’s writing often is), here is the same passage as it appears in the (revised) volume of the HHA:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Orgelkonzerte I, HHA Ser. IV vol. 2 (which superseded an insufficient 1955 volume of the same works); this detail is the bottom of p. 54, which shows bb. 26-30 of the first movement of HWV 291. 

Note the adagio instruction for the cadential transition in b. 30.  (Or is it really in b 29, as it seems to be in the autograph?)  But this movement is already marked Adagio from the start.  Significantly, Handel is not using the word to indicate a return to the tempo in b. 28 after the improvisatory cello passage.  There is no marking at all at b. 28 (i.e., a dog not barking in the nighttime); thus, he must have considered even an a tempo marking superfluous.  But the second adagio in b. 29/30 is a new instruction, not at all superfluous, nor (it would seem) merely redundant.  Handel moves from the “Adagio mood” of the movement to the “Adagio gesture” of the transition after the cadence.  (There is a similar situation in the first movement of Op. 7 no. 4 (HWV309), although in that case Handel was reusing a slightly longer movement, truncating it and adding the half cadence and the seemingly redundant Adagio instruction at that time.)

The editors of the HHA volume, Terence Best and William D. Gudger, evidently thought that the second adagio seemed out of place; their solution was the editorial footnote “= più adagio”—although, as in Riedel’s interpretation of the Mahler Pausen this instruction is an interpretive prescription which seems to be speculative at best.  More Adagio?  Says who?  Granted, my reading is also speculative; but I’d argue that 1) a blogpost is a fitter venue for speculation than a critical edition, and 2) mine is not an ad hoc solution to a unique textual problem, but seems more consistent with Handel’s usage generally.  (Does Handel ever use the instruction “più adagio”?  I wonder.  I don’t know nearly enough Handel to pronounce on that, but something about it doesn’t sound quite right.)

If Lawson and Stowell are onto something with their linguistic metaphor for musical instructions of the past, I’d argue that there is no shortcut—no Google translate—for our attempts to understand it and acquire any measure of fluency.  The past is gone, and we have no real way of immersing ourselves in it.  We are not the original listeners; indeed, we are not an intended audience at all.  We are eavesdroppers on a sometimes static-filled line in a game of textual telephone; to some extent, like the participants in that game, our interactions with the musical texts can affect their transmission to those who come after.  (In this blog I’ve regularly returned to the problems editorial misreadings have caused by narrowing the interpretive possibilities.)  Returning to the earliest sources does not guarantee that we actually know what we’re reading, still less how.

If a blogpost is a proper venue for textual speculation, it may not be the best venue for pleas for humility, but that is how I will conclude.  The more we approach these texts with an awareness of the chasm between the lost musical experience and the accessible musical text as notated (or recorded)—and with a willingness for the notations to mean something other than our common assumption of it, the better our chances (it seems to me) to approaching anything meaningful.   Otherwise, we are merely recreating the music in our own image, just as some may do with the Constitution of the United States... or with whatever you care to name, up to and including God Almighty.

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.