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detail that a composer did not trouble to notate, knowing that certain conventions would be observed; some of these are no longer current or have undergone significant changes of meaning.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.

41. audacity

I recently came across Richard Egarr’s recordings of the Handel organ concertos—pieces I have known for decades, but that I learned first from the recordings of E. Power Biggs (with Adrian Boult) and Simon Preston (with Trevor Pinnock).  Much as I respect and enjoy Biggs and Preston, the Egarr recordings have a impetuous audacity that strives to emulate the (basically unwritten) example of the composer.

To take only the most striking example, at the end of the second movement of Op. 7 no. 4, where Handel’s instruction reads merely “Organo ad libitum,” Egarr uses that rarest of intervals, the doubly-augmented unison/octave, to effect the modulation from D to F major, for his interpolated slow improvisation.

SOURCE:  my transcription of this moment (the transition from Track 15 to 16) on disc I of Egarr’s recordings of Handel's Op. 7 (and more) with the Academy of Ancient Music; Harmonia Mundi HMU 807447.48 (2009).  The recording is streamed on Spotify here.

I spell it thus (D-sharp against D-flat) because that is how these notes are functioning:  chromatic side-steps up from D to E and down from D to C.  The resulting passing dissonance should not be spelled as a diminished third (which would indicate converging rather than expanding motion); a major second would be meaningless.  Audacious is the only word.  The interval is not part of Handel’s musical style, but it has the (I think) appropriate consequence of directing the spotlight onto the soloist.  What will he do next?

Handel himself seems to have relished the spotlight:  he used his organ concertos mainly in performances of his oratorios, where during the breaks between sections he could have all the attention to himself.  But he wasn’t above stealing the show from his highly-paid vocal soloists.  His first London opera, Rinaldo (1711) includes a remarkable moment at the end of Act II when Handel apparently wanted to divert the attention at least temporarily from the stage to the pit.  His autograph of the aria “Vo’ far guerra” has disappeared, but the early copies indicate that in the opening ritornello there was to be an extended extempore passage for harpsichord (Cembalo), for the composer himself to display his gifts:

SOURCE:  Opening of “Vo’ far guerra” (Rinaldo, Act II) in a copyist’s manuscript held by the British Library (f. 91r of R.M. 19.d.5); scanned from Graham Pont, “Handel versus Domenico Scarlatti:  music of an historic encounter” in Göttiger Händel-Beiträge IV (1991), p. 234.

Susan McClary famously characterized the texture of the first movement of Bach’s fifth “Brandenburg” concerto as one in which “the harpsichord, which first serves as continuo support then begins to compete with the other soloists for attention, and finally overthrows the other forces in a kind of hijacking of the piece” [p. 28].  How much more audacious was it for Handel to upstage the singer of an aria, left lingering on stage while the composer showed off?  The aria includes collaborative passages in which the soloist and the harpsichord run in parallel as a sort of duet, and where Signora Pilotti (for whom this aria was written) holds a note for several bars while a harpsichord obbligato is conspicuously busy underneath, but there is another totally free section—left to the discretion of the soloist—in the closing ritornello, while again the singer is left at loose ends on stage.  Moreover, as it is a da capo aria, all this happens twice (with, presumably, different extemporizations). 

We do not know what Handel played in these ad libitum episodes, but I expect they could not have been lasted very long, as otherwise there would surely be some press comment.  The Spectator lampooned the first production of Rinaldo, but no mention is made of excessive keyboard virtuosity in those reviews.  Perhaps later in the run the solos became more extended and showy; certainly there’s no reason to assume that he always played the same thing.

When Chrysander published Rinaldo in the old complete works (HG vol. 58 in 1874), he had the portions of the autograph preserved in the Royal Music Library, and copies like that above, and so his edition has the same “Cembalo” instruction with no indication of what to play.  After doing a little more legwork and tracking down more sources, he published Rinaldo again (HG vol. 58 [bis] in 1894), including both the 1711 and 1731 versions.  “Vo’ far guerra” was cut from the 1731 version, but for the 1711 version this time Chrysander added an appendix with a complete realization of the harpsichord solo:

SOURCE:  detail of revised edition of HG vol. 58 (1894), p. 117; from IMSLP #18974

If we look up the aria in the new HHA volume presenting the 1711 version of Rinaldo, an almost identical realization is given not in an appendix but in the main text—without even a footnote to indicate that its source is not easily authenticated.  One has to look elsewhere in these scholarly editions to find that “the Harpsichord piece perform’d by Mr Hendel” comes from a keyboard arrangement, Song’s in the Opera of Rinaldo; this was originally published by John Walsh in the weeks after the February premiere (and a scan of that first edition is available as IMSLP #71438), but this elaborate keyboard part for “Vo’ far guerra” materialized only in a later printing (with a new title page Arie dell’opera di Rinaldo, apparently June 1711).

What originally prompted me to look at all of this for this post was finding a seminar paper I had written in graduate school that was comparing these keyboard passages with those found in Handel’s organ concertos, essentially arguing that all of this could easily be cobbled together from the figuration of Handel’s other bravura works.  (I’ve scanned some of my examples for that paper here.)  Now the glaringly obvious problem with my thesis is that all of my Handel examples post-date these Rinaldo performances by at least two decades; I picked the wrong music for comparison.  Handel had written a concertante part for organ in his Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Rome, c. 1707), but it’s not all that much like the published Rinaldo solos; the closest comparison would be his Sonata for Harpsichord with Double Keys (HWV 579), which Terence Best dates to c. 1707-08 [p. 125].  Best argues that BWV 579 “has no connection” with Walsh’s Rinaldo realizations.  In that the text is different, Best is correct; but the similar figuration at least shows that Handelian origins of the latter are plausible.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the beginning of HWV 579 as given in HHA Ser. IV Bd. 6, p. 80

There is no reason to assume that Handel ever notated the Rinaldo cadenzas; particularly as he apparently had no professional relationship at this time with the publisher, John Walsh, it is much more likely that another hand supplied these keyboard passages.  The scribe seems to have been William Babell (c. 1690–1723), who would have heard Handel’s original performances at first hand, as he was a violinist in the King’s Theatre where Rinaldo was produced.  Babell was much more widely known in his short life as a keyboardist—indeed, this reputation was strong enough that Johann Mattheson would cite him in 1739 as possibly the greatest organist of the age.  Here is the relevant bit of Mattheson’s Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (as translated in Deutsch):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Deutsch, Handel:  A Documentary Biography, p. 485, with a portion of Mattheson.

Even though Mattheson never heard Babell, this is remarkable praise.  It is known that he studied with Johann Christoph Pepusch in London; that he studied under Handel is not certain, but he was clearly in Handel’s circle.  Moreover, in 1717 Walsh published his Suits of the most Celebrated Lessons Collected and Fitted to the Harpsicord or Spinnet by Mr. Wm. Babell with Variety of Passages by the Author.  This was a tremendously successful publication, and remained in print (from one pirated edition or another) throughout the eighteenth century.  Note the last item in the table of contents:

SOURCE:  cropped from (incomplete) scan available at archive.org.  A complete monochrome scan is available at IMSLP #279417.

The “Vo’ far guerra” in the Suits of Celebrated Lessons is considerably more elaborate than that published in Arie dell’opera di Rinaldo a few years prior.  Graham Pont has probably devoted more attention than anyone else to the Handel/Babell connection, with several intriguing articles published over two decades.  From the first of these, he has contended that the substance of the harpsichord elaborations were Handel’s rather than Babell’s (and in subsequent articles he demonstrates that there were a number of copies of this made by people close to Handel—although he also shows that the text kept changing).

We thus have several different versions of the keyboard cadenzas (for lack of a better word) for "Vo’ far guerra," from the rather tame but still dramatically intrusive version that Walsh published in about 1715 (and which has become the main text of the HHA, tacitly presenting it as the work of Handel himself) to the wildly fantastic version Babell’s Suits that was surely never intended for operatic performance, but rather uses “Vo’ far guerra” as the medium for a solo keyboard showpiece.  Chrysander published it—or one version of it—in HG vol. 48, and it must be some of the most visually-stimulating pages in the whole of that monumental edition:

SOURCE cropped from IMSLP #18931 scan of HG vol. 48, p. 242 ; but there's much more where this came from.

Gotta love that beaming!

If the original aria wasn’t audacious enough, this blows it out of the water completely, with a variety of special effects.  (Peter Holman, in a fascinating article that posits that Babell rather than Handel should get the credit for the first English keyboard concerto, characterizes Babell's music as a “mixture of boldness and limited compositional technique”; from my limited exposure to it, I have to agree.)  There are remarkable moments, to be sure.  Consider this compelling crescendo–decrescendo effect, achieved by a thickening and subsiding of the texture:

SOURCE:  ibid., p. 239

Perhaps this conveys some element that originated with Handel.  (Perhaps.  I doubt it.  There is nothing else I know from his pen that is remotely like this.)  If so, I suspect that Babell’s audaciously over-extended cadenza strings together ideas that Handel might have used in different performances of Rinaldo, not ever intending them to go together, and connected by who-knows-what.  Another speculation occurs to me:  maybe Handel did not conduct all the performances, and Babell (who must have been the finest keyboard player in the orchestra) took over for the harpsichord solos, later reworking his ideas from those extemporizations into the work that was eventually published as a “lesson.”   (For a fine recording of Babell’s lesson, you cannot do better than Erin Helyard’s.)

For one more audacity, René Jacobs’s 2003 recording of Rinaldo (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901796.98) turns to the Babell lesson for inspiration for the harpsichord solos of “Vo’ far guerra” (starting about two minutes in).  I think this choice absolutely spoils the dramatic momentum that ends the act—or rather, it redirects all attention to the pit.  (Forty-five percent of this track is taken up just by the cadenza after the singer’s last cadence.) I think this decision is a serious mistake, but I concede that at least

1.  it makes the da capo different than the first time through, 
2.  maybe this shifting of attention does less damage on a recording than a live performance, and 
3.  it is audaciously well played.

39. standardize/compromise

As we welcome the new year, fireworks are inevitably on my mind.  At the very least, my dogs make me aware of fireworks:  even distant explosions are enough to keep my dogs anxiously pacing the house.  (I can only imagine what it must be like for veterans with PTSD, hearing these explosions at too-close range well into the early hours.)  Moreover, beautiful as such displays may be, it’s hard for me not to feel that if you’ve seen one good one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  I don’t bother to stay up for them, and then I’m cross when I am woken by worried canines.  On such occasions, I'm inclined to agree with Hamlet’s view of a similar noisy custom: 

More honoured in the breach than the observance (Act 1 Sc. 4).

SOURCE:  “A view of the magnificent structure erected for the fireworks to be exhibited for the solemnization of the General Peace” (uncredited, but apparently in the British Library), cropped from scan of the cover of Bärenreiter facsimile Georg Friedrich Händel:  The Musick for the Royal Fireworks / Feuerwerkmusik / British Library Manuscript R. M. 20.g.7 (2004).  (Christopher Hogwood's introduction to this volume is available here.)

Only because of this pyrotechnical connection, I thought it was time for me to comment on a few of my frustrations related to editions of Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks (celebrating the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle).  I grew up on a musical diet in which the largest “food group” consisted of Bach, Handel, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Mendelssohn.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the Fireworks music, I think mostly from a 1972 recording by Neville Marriner and his Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields.  (It sounds very familiar to me now, and it’s exactly the sort of recording my father would have bought.)  But I remember, too, a recording of the suite orchestrated by Hamilton Harty, as well as hearing some of the early attempts at historically-informed reconstruction of the original all-winds and percussion scoring—24 oboes, 12 bassoons, a contrabassoon (and, by rights, a serpent—although I’m not sure if that has yet been included on any of the recordings), nine each of trumpets and horns, plus timpani and side drum.  Those outrageous figures were already scaled back from the official plans.  A press blurb several months before the actual event listed “40 trumpets, 20 French horns, 16 hautboys, 16 bassoons, eight pair of kettle-drums, 12 side-drums, a proper number of flutes and fifes; with 100 cannon to go off singly at intervals, with the musick.”

SOURCE:  detail of A Description of the Machine for the Fireworks... (London, 1749), p. 8, just for the heck of it; cropped scan from appendix in Bärenreiter facsimile, p. 92.

Then, as now, one must be skeptical of figures from those in power.  Just two years ago, the (then) White House press secretary Sean Spicer stepped in front of journalists to insist that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD, both in person and around the globe.”  (My transcription hardly does him justice.  If you want to watch it again, here he is.)  Handel rehearsed the work inVauxhall Gardens, south of the Thames, on 21 April 1749 to what must have been a large audience, but—as David Hunter has shown—the official figure quoted (“an audience of above 12,000 persons (tickets 2s. 6d.)”) is just not possible.  Taking “physical, economic, social, and mathematical” factors into account, Hunter reckons the realistic audience size charitably around 3500, allowing that it might have been a good bit smaller still [pp. 75–84].  Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

I grant, however, that the music Handel wrote was extraordinary, at least in that it departed dramatically from any sort of ensemble he had used hitherto.  Handel was much more adventurous in his use of brass sonorities than was his contemporary J. S. Bach (although admittedly Bach called upon greater technical feats from his players).  The only Bach work I can think of that employs trumpets and horns simultaneously is BWV 205, the secular cantata Zerreißet, zersprenget, zertrümmert die Gruft.  (If there are others, perhaps someone will let me know.)  Handel uses those instruments in combination more often, particularly—as in the Water Music and his sumptuous oratorio Solomon—for antiphonal or double-chorus effects, where the contrasting timbres have much more impact than when he pits two identical ensembles together. (In this regard these works have the advantage of his three Concerti a due cori).  The three distinct ensembles of the Fireworks music are very evident on the first page of Handel’s autograph:  trumpets/timpani (four staves), horns (three staves), woodwinds (five staves):

SOURCE:  scanned from Bärenreiter facsimile, p. 59; also available at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=R.M.20.g.7 (see f. 16r).

When in about 1988 I learned of Dover’s reprints of public domain editions, their paperback comprising the Water and the Fireworks music (both reprinted from Friedrich Chysander’s Händelgesellschaft volume of 1886) was on my very first order form.  As I had grown accustomed to that, which prints the score with the staves allocated more or less as in Handel’s autograph, I found myself disorientated when opening both the 1962 volume of the HHA and its 2007 HHA revision.  In these newer editions, the score has been radically redistributed according (almost) to modern ordering conventions:  woodwinds at the top of the page, then brass (horns first, trumpets next), then percussion, then strings.  (What strings?  I’ll come back to that.)  The “almost” is that in both of these HHA volumes, the bassoons are at the bottom of the page among the strings.  There is a reason for this:  in practice, the HHA only gives a bassoon its own staff when Handel has written an independent part, not just doubling the bass line common to the strings.

SOURCE:  (l.) Händelgesellschaft edition, vol. 47 (1886),  p. 100 [available at IMSLP #24009]; (r.) revised HHA Ser. IV Bd. 13 (2004), p. 87.

I grant that a standard score order is a useful thing, especially for a standardized ensemble.  I don’t object to seeing Mozart scores reorganized in this way, with the upper strings moved from the very top (where he habitually put them) to the bottom (just above the cello/contrabass line).  That said, I think we do miss something when we look at a page so differently laid out from what he wrote, and I appreciate those texts—a good example is Simon P. Keefe’s Mozart in Vienna:  the Final Decade—in which the musical examples restore his score order.  Whatever reordering the HHA might impose on Handel in general, I think the Fireworks music deserves to be treated as an exception:  even by Handel's terms, the ensemble is exceptional.  (Even the NMA abandons its use of modernized score order when dealing with works for a non-standard ensemble; see for example the wind serenades, which retain Mozart’s placement of the horns above the bassoons.)  There are times when the modernized allotment of staves obscures what Handel is doing with his triple ensemble.  Compare the pages below.  The HHA gives me the impression of a dialogue between only two ensembles—brass (in the middle of the score) and oboes/strings (at the top and bottom); placing the horns above the trumpets means that when any of the horns play with the trumpet ensemble they appears to lead the brass altogether, and the use of two consorts (three trumpets + horn, then three horns) becomes almost invisible, while it is very clear in the autograph.

SOURCE:  (l.) autograph, f. 22v (facsimile p. 72); (r.) revised HHA Ser. IV Bd. 13 (2004), p. 107.

(I note with some distaste that already in 1788 Samuel Arnold had put the horns above the trumpets in his edition.)

A further complaint:  both the original HHA volume and the revised version present a score including five staves of strings, realizing instructions for doubling that Handel added to his autograph score.  Doing so while also retaining the inflated wind numbers conflates two distinct versions—outdoor and indoor—into a form Handel never heard:  massed winds + strings.  The conflation makes a striking effect, but it is not something that ever happened in his time.  If you’d like to experience this version but can’t muster 80+ period-instrument players, here’s a 2012 BBC Proms performance by Le Concert Spirituel under Hervé Niquet that does it for you, even adding a drum interlude (at 01:43ff, corresponding with Handel’s later-cancelled instruction “alla Bruit de guerre”) in lieu of discharging cannon:

Strings were not part of the outdoor performance—apparently vetoed by George II himself.  I have my doubts that the overture was composed with strings in mind, given the problematically high “viola” line (generally doubling Oboe III), and the confusing pair of bass lines, in which the contrabass seems to be on the wrong line.  In his revised HHA, Christopher Hogwood has modified the viola line;  I find his version just as dubious, often doubling the bass up an octave even when it seems to me to intrude in the texture.  Whatever one does seems unsatisfactory.  The string doublings were likely added with an eye to a performance at the Foundling Hospital several weeks after the fireworks display; for that concert, the doubled-and-redoubled winds must surely have been scaled back to normal size.

Intriguingly, Hogwood interprets the marginalia in the autograph manuscript as indicating that the work heard at the Foundling Hospital performance differed in another significant respect:  the suite was truncated with just a few movements, and for the finale Handel borrowed the last movement of a trumpet/horn “due cori” concerto, HWV 335a—a work thematically linked to the Fireworks overture and preserved in a different fascicle of the same bound volume now.  (For Hogwood's argument, see his Cambridge Music Handbook [pp. 115 and 127] and the revised HHA volume [p. xxviii-xxix].)  Musically, I like this suggestion a lot:  to me, the two menuets that conclude Fireworks are an unconvincing conclusion to such a work, at least when not followed by fireworks.  Those menuets plod.  The finale of HWV 335a, however, is buoyant.  (Hear it here.)  A problem with this solution to the marginalia is the scoring:  although the scoring is similar, it is not identical:  two (not three) trumpets + two pairs of horns (the first pair consistently with oboes, the second pair consistently with strings).  In that the rest of that Foundling Hospital performance included music from Solomon (two trumpets + two horns), I began to wonder if they jettisoned Trumpet III (or, Principale, as he labels it, denoting its low register) altogether—but what did they do about the extra horn part?  A further problem:  the only movement in the autograph of Fireworks to have a staff allotted to the violas is the final menuet—which this theory would exclude from the strings version of the piece; granted, the staff is lightly crossed-out as it stands.  Is that significant?

SOURCE:  cropped scan of autograph, f. 28v (facsimile, p. 84)

This leads me to my third frustration:  my sense is that the “indoor” version of the Fireworks music (and “Fireworks” no longer seems the right name) really deserves to be published as its own distinct work—and with its own catalogue number.  The revised HHA volume does right by the Water Music (and I’ll come back to it sometime), but I fear an opportunity was missed to do justice to the Fireworks music.  The new volume’s blue covers enclose both a triumphant flourish (the much-needed update of Water Music, since many important sources had come to light) and a damp squib.  Surely there will not be a second revised volume to give us distinct “outdoor” and “indoor” versions of Fireworks; we will have to wait for someone else to do it—someone willing to defy standardization and its inevitable compromise.  Someone, that is, willing to honor the custom in the breach rather than the observance.