51. Cutting out the middleman?

 Why should we assume a priori that any score prepared some centuries ago by one musician for another musician to play from cannot be used by a musician today without the intervention of someone (often a non-musician) with a Ph.D. in musicology?  Why does the score first have to be entirely rewritten in some other form and accompanied by a lengthy critical report that can only be understood by someone else with a Ph.D. in musicology?

Alexander Silbiger:  “In Defense of Facsimiles”

Historical Performance 7/2 (Fall 1994), p. 103

SOURCE:  screenshoot of Facebook group post (June 26, 2022); poster name and profile picture redacted 

Today this blog turns six years old.  My original intent was to get to about fifty posts, posting twice a month for two years.  But it has slowed to a trickle.  With a change of jobs and then the more crowded schedule imposed by a global pandemic, it has taken me six years to reach the intended scope, and yet the list of topics that I scrawled in the summer of 2016 is not yet exhausted.  Today’s topic is from that list; it came to mind again this past February with the death of composer George Crumb (1929-2022).

There’s nothing quite like examining one of Crumb’s scores—especially those which require an oversize format to be legible at all.  His published scores very often bear this notice:

SOURCE:  found in a considerable number of Crumb scores; this is scanned from the title page of Mundis Canis (Edition Peters, 2000).

With good reason:  his notation is meticulously clean, and his innovative and idiosyncratic graphic notation would be challenging for a professional copyist/engraver to reproduce (which would add substantially to the cost of publishing the music).  If you haven’t seen any of it, just google george crumb graphic notation; sure, you’ll also get some non-Crumb images, but you will quickly get a sense of what he accomplished.  (Here’s a tribute that appeared in the Washington Post and has remained on my desk for several months to remind me to write this post.)  Crumb reminded me of this long-delayed post because he effectively bypassed an editor:  he cut out the middleman, with his carefully prepared fair-copy scores becoming the unmediated text for the performers’ eyes.

That sounds like a good idea:  no interfering editor meddling with the text.  And I have sometimes taken editors to task for overreach; even for making things too easy (in a way, like subverting the teaching of cursive by putting everything in print).   But I’m not in the least ready to dispense with the what a good editor offers us.

I remember very clearly a particular moment on an afternoon in the autumn of 1997.  It was in my first semester in graduate school, and my classmates and I were in a seminar about Haydn’s string quartets.  The professor was at the time finishing up a volume of some of the quartets for JHW—Joseph Haydn Werke, the (still ongoing) complete critical edition of Haydn's works.  One very important thing I learned from that seminar was to never assume I knew “what the composer wrote,” based on whatever edition I was using.  The JHW is actually among the most scrupulous of the 20th-century critical edition projects to give a pretty clear indication within the musical text of what the principal source really shows.  The edition uses a complicated series of brackets:  < > angle brackets to indicate material which the editor has filled in following Haydn's shorthand instructions in the autograph score; ( ) rounded brackets to indicate something that is lacking in the principal source but is supplied from a source that is right below it in the chain of textual authority, like performance parts prepared by one of Haydn’s copyists; and [ ] square brackets to indicate something that the editor has added by analogy with some other passage or in order to spell out something musically necessary.  Taking an example almost at random, here is the first system of the musical text of Symphony no. 46 as it appears in JHW, although I have highlighted these distinctions in different colors:

SOURCE:  scan (detail) of the opening of Haydn's Symphony no. 46, as it appears in JHW series I, volume 6 ("Sinfonien 1767-1772"), ed. C-G. Stellan Mörner, p. 104; I have added color highlighting.

The orange passages (indicated in the edition by angle brackets) are realizations of Haydn’s abbreviated instructions for the second violins to double the firsts; the markings highlighted in blue (indicated by the rounded brackets) do not appear in Haydn’s autograph at all but are taken from the most authoritative set of parts.  (Notice that the initial f dynamic is assumed in the autograph, but made explicit in the parts—except for the horns, who maybe never have to be told to play forte.)  The green markings (indicated by the square brackets) are not found in the first or second tier of sources, but were deemed by the editor to be intended or otherwise necessary.  All of this is clearly marked on the published score itself, without even having to turn to the critical report (which gives further details of Haydn’s corrections and second thoughts, as well as other variant readings in the principal sources).

I forget what the particular issue was that afternoon in the Haydn quartet seminar, but when the class was reminded that we needed to know what Haydn wrote (not just what was presented in whatever edition we might have to hand), one of my classmates posited that the ideal music library would comprise high-resolution scans of every source:  then we could all see exactly what was on the page—not just of a composer’s manuscript, but of all the copyists’ scores and parts, and even all the early editions.  Then we would not have to take anyone else’s word for it (as even a critical commentary gives one only the information an editor bothers to relay, and sometimes it may be in error).  

My reaction at the time: Wouldn’t this just compel us all to reinvent the wheel every time?  

A few years after this conversation came sites like Bach Digital:  such portals have the potential of fulfilling my classmate’s wish, with high-resolutions scans not just of autographs, but often a range of derivative sources too—and with no limit to how many sources might be uploaded in the future.  Or take the Online Chopin Variorum Edition—a misnomer, since there is really no editorial authority producing an edited text.  These resources encourage a see-for-yourself approach, even maybe a do-it-yourself approach, and I heartily approve making such resources available beyond the walls of the libraries and other holdings in which they are found.  But do the users of such sites know how to read them?  We are making the materials of editing available without any instruction of what it means.  

In an earlier post, I strongly criticized a particular “urtext” edition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations because of its amateurish assumption that it was presenting the Holy Grail (i.e., Bach’s intended text), while the editor had unknowingly taken a shortcut that undermined his claim.  And the unknowingly is the issue:  when we don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t really know what we’re doing.

Take this example, from a scan of Beethoven’s autograph of his Septet, op. 20, very near the end of the first movement.  The top stave is the clarinet, and below that the horn.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20 (held in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow), available on the ISMLP as #774464 and #774465.  This detail  (showing bb. 271–273) comes from the upper right corner of p. 25 (which appears as scan p 15 of $774464).

The last note in the clarinet staff is clearly marked c-natural.  The natural is ostensibly superfluous, as the key signature for a b-flat clarinet in a movement in e-flat major would be just one flat.  Thus it is no surprise that this accidental is eliminated in the new Beethoven Werke edition (ed. Egon Voss, 2008). 

SOURCE: detail of BW IV/I:  Kammermusik mit Blasintrumenten, p. 25.

The critical commentary does not even mention that there was ever a natural sign there—nor does it comment on b. 273 at all.  The commentary does list as a supplemental source Beethoven’s later arrangement of the work as a piano trio, op. 38 (with the option for a clarinet to substitute for the violin), and one would expect that substantial textual differences in otherwise analogous materials would be mentioned.  But when we look up the corresponding moment in op. 38 we may well be surprised:

SOURCE:  detail of p. 95 of Beethoven: Klavier Trios III, ed Friedhelm Klugmann (Henle, 1968), showing bb. 271–273 of the first movement of op. 38.

The top staff here is the violin, which may be replaced by the clarinet on the second staff.  Note that the last note in the clarinet here is c-sharp ( = the b-natural of the violin).  Voss doesn’t mention any of this in his critical commentary to the Septet. 

For the do-it-yourself editor, this discrepancy may seem like an inconsequential difference between the two texts, and that Beethoven clearly must have meant c-natural ( = concert b-flat) in the Septet at this moment, as he actually notated the natural sign.  That is the reading transmitted in virtually every edition.  (I see that someone involved in producing the French edition (Pleyel) in 1828 caught the mistake and emended it, but that emendation didn’t catch on.)  But, looking across a much wider range of manuscripts and with decades of experience, editor Jonathan Del Mar has spotted a pattern of errors which very neatly explains this problem.  This pattern manifests in erroneous accidentals in transposing parts, and indicates that Beethoven used the “clef substitution” method of transposing.  That is, instead of thinking that, for example, each note of a b-flat clarinet part sounds a whole tone lower than notated, he merely thought of this staff as being in the tenor clef, on which he could then note that sounding pitch (albeit sounding an octave higher).  

Beethoven indisputably notated c-natural; Del Mar makes the case that he meant concert b-natural (and thus c-sharp, when transposed up a tone).  He points to exactly the same mistake in a place in the second movement of the Eroica where there really cannot be any doubt of the error.  The autograph is lost, but as the wrong accidental occurs in the closest copyist score, the surviving parts used in the 1804 first performance, and the first edition of 1809 (shown below), the mistake surely descends from Beethoven himself.

SOURCE:  detail of p. 60 of the first edition of Beethoven, Symphony no. 3 (Cianchettini and Sperati, 1809), taken from scan available at https://www.beethoven.de/en/media/view/4716012494651392/scan/61; this shows bb. 139-144 of the second movement.

Surely the clarinets and the violas should be in unison; the viola b-natural would need to be transposed as c-sharp for the clarinets, and yet the same natural persists.  Del Mar has observed the same pattern with horns, for example the dubious f-flat that occurs in the fourth movement of the Septet.  Using the clef-substitution method for e-flat horn, Beethoven would have imagined a bass clef on this stave, and the flat is thus coming from the intended sounding a-flat.  Again the argument is that what Beethoven meant is not what he wrote (which should have been f-natural), but we need an experienced editor to recognize that; a facsimile won’t clue us in.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20; This detail  (showing bb. 100–102 of the fourth movement) comes from the upper right corner of p. [52] (which appears as scan p 7 of IMSLP #774465).

But editors should tread lightly on this thin ice, seeking what is meant in preference to what is actually on the page.  (Query:  What did the framers of the Constitution intend?)  A notorious example of this is Jacques-Louis Monod’s recomposed edition of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, in which Monod altered Schoenberg’s score to accord with Schoenberg's theories... or at least with Monod’s analysis.  As James Grier cautions, "Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as the editor" (p. 136).  (I think what my client was meaning to say...)

Many of my posts have dealt with overly intrusive editing—which I think often comes from the temptation to prefer a variant reading just for the sake of an audible difference, maybe in some sense justifying the new edition.  (Here’s a recent post on precisely that topic.)  But I find myself torn between the two quotations with which I started this post.  Silbiger (who himself earned two PhDs) is right to champion the great value of experiencing the sources closest to the original context of the music; and I looooove facsimiles.  I am interested in seeing sources that allow me a glimpse of the composer at work—composing scores, or revisions happening on the page of what otherwise seems to be an attempt at a fair copy.  Here, for example, is Bach revising the text as he transforms the E major violin concerto (BWV 1042) into the D major harpsichord concerto (BWV 1054) in D-B Mus. ms. Bach P 234, a collective score of all seven of the extant concertos for (one) harpsichord, plus a fragment of another.  He had already copied out and transposed the solo line (which at this point features some double stops in the violin version) when he decided to rework the figuration to be more idiomatic on the keyboard.  Having run out of space, he opted for keyboard tablature below the system:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Bach Digital of P 234, p. 48 (detail), showing BWV 1054/iii, bb. 77-87.

There are many examples of similar re-workings throughout these seven concertos—sometimes squeezing in passing tones, at other times inserting much more florid ornamentation.  There is a lot to learn from it. Werner Breig, the editor of the NBA volume of these works carefully documents the corrections and changes to the manuscript in his critical report.  I, for one, am glad to be guided by an editor who has the experience and expertise to discern the patterns behind the markings on the page as it stands; and I would certainly not attempt to perform from a scan of P 234, even the beautifully-produced Bärenreiter facsimile of it.

That is not to say, of course, that Bach intended anyone (other than himself?) to perform directly from this score.  But what of a text from the composer’s hand that is intended to be the performance copy?  This brings up the Facebook group post above:  “Why don’t composers just do their own engraving [recte computer-setting] and page layout?”  Cut out the middleman—like George Crumb, or (for that matter) Wagner.

I have learned a lot from the facebook “Music Engraving Tips” group:  there are all sorts of issues of spacing, orthography, and best-practices in preparing and printing parts, a lot of which had never crossed my mind.  But I’ve also learned that many people who prepare editions of music (whether professional or not) have very little education about music history.  I see the most elementary questions about the meaning of some mark in a manuscript or an old edition; thankfully, these queries are generally answered gracefully and without contempt.  And the group’s members are genuinely concerned with presenting the text in the way that is most immediately accessible to the user—that is, the performer.

Although an individual may interact with a musical text in many different ways, we should conceive of these as distinct roles.  There are surely very few people truly suited to fulfill all of them.  The primary roles might be delineated as: 

1. Composing:  originating and finalizing musical ideas;
2. Notating:  getting those ideas into a graphic form comprehensible by others;
3. Editing:  encompassing a wide variety of activities, but essentially amounting to tweaking the notated text (ideally in dialogue with the composer) to ensure that it presents what is meant; Ralph Vaughan Williams referred to this as “washing its face,” and his sometime assistant Roy Douglas has written an illuminating account of such activity;
4. Setting:  actually getting this text into a form that can be mechanically printed and/or distributed; and
5. Reading/Interpreting/Performing:  the “end user”(?) is presumably a performer, scholar, or listener.

Of course we might interpolate other such functions:  1a might be Orchestrating.  That in itself is a good reminder that an individual may be prodigiously gifted in one of these tasks while having no appreciable ability in another.  Certainly we expect roles 1 and 2 to go together, but we do not necessarily expect a composer to be the best conductor of their own music, though.  (William Walton, a composer I’ve done a lot of work on in my research, is a good example of someone who was generally better off leaving the conducting to the professionals.)  The Facebook post I reproduce above suggests that role 2 is essentially the same as role 4, and that role 3 might be bypassed altogether.

But at what cost?  The value of the middleman editor is to push back:  Is this what you mean?  (Or, for the dead or otherwise unavailable composer, Is this what was meant, given what we know about this composer’s usual practice?)  From my own experience with this blog, I know that I need someone else’s eyes to look over my prose.  I never publish a post without several pairs of eyes reviewing it—and always at least one of the reviewers is neither a musicologist nor a musician.  The comments and suggested revisions I get from that person are particularly helpful because they show where I have made a complete pig’s breakfast of my explanations.  I don’t always adopt the suggestions for revision—as sometimes they have completely misunderstood what I was trying to convey—but I am sure to do something to fix the problems that led them to misread it.  Here I am composing verbal text; musical text it is no different, and it can only be improved by an editorial review of some sort.

And yet, as stated above, I understand why publishers are glad to have camera-ready scores from their composers:  it saves money.  Again:  at what cost?  Here is a bit of the published score to Judith Weir's powerful one-unaccompanied-singer opera King Harald’s Saga.  In this scene, Harald’s two wives bid him farewell as he sets off to conquer England.  Weir wrote the libretto, too, and here it gives each wife the same 12-syllable text.  Weir duly sets this as a 12-tone row; presumably in order to throw the differences in characterization into sharp relief, the second wife presents the row in inversion.

SOURCE: detail of scan of  Judith Weir, King Harald's Saga (Novello, 1982), p. 6.

I have enjoyed teaching this work for many years now, and I’ve used it in classes for music majors as well as for general students who cannot even read music.  It is a fascinating work, particularly in the ways it pushes generic conventions to (maybe past) the breaking point.  And, as a meditation on the senselessness of violence and conquest, it seems always timely.  So I’ve spent a lot of time with this score.  Every time I look at this passage I am irked by the absence of a bar-line near the beginning of the second system:  the second wife should have “take / care,” shouldn’t she?  This is the only place in this section where the bar-line for the second wife is different than the first, and in every other place it seems to indicate which syllable is to be accented—namely, the one right after the bar-line.  I think this is a simple omission in Weir’s fair copy—one that may not matter, as in performance the singer may intuit what Weir was after despite any irregularity of the notation.  Or did Weir mean to break the pattern?  (I haven’t bothered to reach out to her and ask her.  It seems such a petty complaint.)  

Note that here the problem is what isn’t there:  it is not an erroneous marking (as in the Beethoven examples above), but a presumably missing marking.  I do not know in what ways the editorial staff at Novello were involved in the publication of this score, but I think someone should have caught that.  Sure, editors can and do introduce mistakes of their own.  Merely by imposing a house style, an edition can obscure a composer’s musical fingerprint (what in German is usefully called the Partiturbild).  John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven posits that Bach's manuscript notation is expressive of performance gestures:  “There is also the bonus of his graceful and expressive orthography, which reveals the way he experienced his music and expected it to unfold—the shapes and gestures suggestion of his phrasing an motion” (p. 226).  Perhaps. For a much more nuanced argument (relating to Haydn), I recommend James Webster’s “The Triumph of Variability:  Haydn’s Articulation Markings in the Autograph of Sonata No. 49 in E Flat.”  (Webster was the professor directing the seminar discussed above, although I didn’t come across this article until years later.)

Clearly, there is no substitute for getting back into the sources as much as possible; but I don’t regard a musician as negligent if they don’t do that, nor do I regard the performer who plays from a facsimile as on a higher artistic plane than anyone else.  Maybe an analogy would be that a critical edition is like currency or a credit card in place of gold:  the edited text is a convenient substitute for the real thing that will suffice for most musicians in most situations.  But for anyone for whom the text itself is a supreme concern, a good edition is a useful guide and nothing more.

26. Moving targets (Episode #4)

A recurring theme on this blog is the source that purports to be one thing while it is actually something else.  (In a previous post I discussed this regarding sources for Handel’s Messiah available on the IMSLP.)  Another recurring theme is the edition (or sometimes even manuscript) that changes over time without necessarily calling attention to those changes.  (A post considered this with the case of Bernstein’s Overture to Candide.)  This post combines a little of both.  And while this may all seem innocuous, I’m not sure that it is.

Musicians will be familiar with the American firm Dover Publications.  By the 1970s and 80s they had turned almost entirely to sturdy reprints of public domain editions.  Their output extends far beyond music, and I can remember browsing through their sales catalog, bemused and amazed by the range of reprints for which they could find a market.  Since the 1990s they have originated a few editions of music, but their bread and butter has been reprinting out-of-print editions at competitive prices.  In contrast to the reprints from firms like Kalmus, Dover has made durable products, and the blurb on the back (“this is a permanent book”) wasn’t much of an overstatement.  A few of the scores I’ve used the most have fallen into pieces, but many of the Dover books I got 25+ years ago are still in good condition.

In about 1997 someone at Dover had the bright idea of issuing miniature scores, which would open up a wider educational market.  There was a problem with this:  a lot of the scores they were reprinting originally had appeared in a very large format—say 14 or 15 inches tall.  That was the case of the old Bach Gesellschaft edition, from which Dover drew extensively.  Dover’s “large” scores were already a reduction of the original dimensions:  often 9x12, sometimes 8.5x11.  The smallest of the Dover “large” scores I’ve used is their reprint of Franck organ works, an oblong volume measuring only 8.25 inches at the spine; the original Durand scores from which these were taken measured some 10.5 inches at the spine (although with more generous margins).  The further reduction to a miniature score format can be awkward.

And that is apparently what happened.  Dover’s first release of study scores were the same size as their popular “thrift” reprints of literature, with dimensions of 5x8 or slightly larger.  Within a few years, the same publications (with the same ISBNs) were issued in a slightly larger format.  The images below show side by side these two issues of one of these early publications:

SOURCE:  I put both copies side by side in the photocopier and scanned them, front and back.

The score on the left I got in the fall of 1998 as desk copy for a course for which I was one of the instructors.  I’m not sure when I got the copy on the right, but judging from some notes I made in it I must have had it by 2002.  The key differences on the back cover:  the elimination of the clause “ample margins at the bottom of each score page for notes an analysis” (which itself betrayed that the dimensions of the publication were not calculated with the right “aspect ratio” for the matter that was to appear on the page), the addition of a list of some other available scores, and the increased price (marked-up 1/3).  The contents are the same, so far as I can make out, and it would surprise me if they weren't.

Note the source of this publication.  Here it is (again) from either copyright page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover miniature score.

The words “an authoritative edition, n.d.” scarcely inspire confidence.  Most of the publications in this series reprint the same edition that Dover issued in a larger format.  Ironically, the large-score publication of Haydn's London symphonies reprinted a series of miniature scores:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover full score.

Eulenburg scores were designed to be small-format.  To my eye, Dover’s enlargement appears odd (there seems to be too much space between staves, too little information on each page) where the proportions seem right in the original format.

It would be reasonable to assume that the Dover miniature score was a reprint of this same text.  Indeed, the IMSLP has assumed as much:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot from IMSLP (accessed 20 June 2017)

But it isn’t so.  Below is a comparison of the first page:  the Dover 1985 (Eulenburg reprint) is on the left; the Dover 1997 miniature score is on the right.  (Apologies for the size of the image, but you can scroll back and forth as necessary to see the details.)

While even at first glance these are recognizably different scores, the differences are not just in the formatting (two systems for the first page of the miniature score).  There are textual differences too.  The miniature score has an initial dynamic of ff for the entire ensemble, has introduced crescendo hairpins in b. 5, and has accents rather than sf in the Violino I part in bb. 3-5.  The miniature score has 58 pages of music, while the Dover/Eulenburg has 74 (not surprising for a score designed to be in small format).

The score I refer to as Dover/Eulenburg (that is, the 1985 Dover reprint) is what it purports to be.  Here is the first page of the Eulenburg score, as proof of that:

SOURCE:  digital scan of p. 1 of 1936 Eulenburg score (ed. Ernst Praetorius)

What, then, is the “authoritative edition” that Dover reprinted in 1997?  It ought to be on the shelves somewhere—and readers at big music libraries might be able to lay their hands on it quickly.  I have pursued it via interlibrary loan (ordering up every edition I can find), but even then editions can be miscatalogued in so many ways.  I haven’t found it yet, and I would be glad to know.  Anyone?  I will be delighted to have an addendum to this post once the source edition is located.

ADDENDUM  21 June 2021

Many thanks to Rex Levang for pointing out that the mystery text appears now on the IMSLP as a Soviet edition (IMSLP #494060), but there is no indication of whether that edition itself was a reprint.  (I suspect it is--it just doesn’t have the look of a Soviet edition to me, although I freely admit that I can’t muster any specific evidence to support that opinion.)  The IMSLP cites Gyorgy Kirkor as the editor, and all twelve of the London Symphonies appear in the same imprint.  If this was an original edition (i.e., not a reprint), it is an odd choice for Dover.

14. “Transport of Pleasure”

This post appears a day ahead of schedule; given the ... uh... nature of the material, I think the reason for this will be clear.

One of the pleasures of doing a blog is the opportunity it affords to dwell on subjects outside of my usual area.  When I was choosing grad schools, I chose Cornell precisely because of a historic strength there in eighteenth-century music:  Haydn, Mozart, and the Bach family in particular.  I ended up concentrating on much later music, but in many senses the eighteenth century still feels like home turf.  I haven’t published professionally on those repertories, and blogging is my chance to get my feet wet and my hands dirty.

Last summer, sheetmusicplus.com was having a sale of 20% off all Henle publications.  I had just run across a second-hand copy of the critical report to the first volume of songs of Joseph Haydn Werke (or JHW, the ongoing critical edition of Haydn's works), so in the sale I bought the Henle offprint of that volume aimed at the performance market.  I had stumbled across Haydn’s “English Canzonettas” while in high school, and I came to know them from the 1931 Peters edition (edited by Ludwig Landshoff), but I had never looked into the textual situation underlying them.  This seemed like an admirable opportunity to do some neglected homework.

That JHW volume appeared in 1960, edited by Paul Mies.  He died in 1976 before a critical report for the volume was issued.  The task of completing that fell to the intrepid Marianne Helms, who has done prodigious (and comparatively thankless) work for both the JHW and the NBA (the new Bach edition).  Her critical report appeared in 1983, and at the same time Henle issued the offprint of the score.  The offprint is actually preferable to the original, as it incorporates the corrections listed in the errata of the report.  These are numerous and sometimes very substantial, including the deletion of one item (discovered to be the work of Adalbert Gyrowetz).

Another revelation that only came to light after the JHW volume was published was rather racy: the text for one of the second set of “English Canzonettas” (no. 6, “Content”) had been cleaned up after the first publication in 1795.  The song in the first edition was entitled “Transport of Pleasure,” but already the second issue of the first edition presents “Content.”  That this came to light only after 1960 reveals that Paul Mies did not use the first issue of the first edition as one of his sources when he prepared the score volume; or, more likely, he was unaware that there were three distinct issues from the initial set of plates.  A scan of the uncorrected first issue is available on the IMSLP, although it lacks the last two pages; this is curious, as the source of the IMSLP scan is listed as Stanford University, but the scan available on the Stanford Library website is intact (and much better quality)—and is worth perusing just for the inscription on the flyleaf.  Here is the beginning of the song in question, as it appears in the Stanford scan:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Image 23 (detail) of https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10580550

Uniquely (it appears) among the Canzonettas, “Transport of Pleasure”/“Content” was actually a retexting of a song Haydn had originally written to a German text (“Der verdienstvolle Sylvius”).  That song appears to have been a favorite of Haydn’s, as during his second London visit he chose to sing it himself at a meet-and-greet with George III.  (Haydn's early biographer Griesinger records Haydn's recollections of this here.)  Glancing at the text, one might imagine a nudge-nudge-wink-wink between Haydn and the king.  While not overtly obscene, the text describes the body of the (female) lover in a bizarre coded language, vaguely reminiscent of the Song of Solomon.  I paraphrase:  My flock is only two small lambs, my field only a patch of clover, but if only you understood, I am a King, because I am the most in love of all mortals on earth.   Hmmmm....  wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

(For those interested, there’s an excellent recording of this version by the incomparable Anne Sofie von Otter with fortepianist Melvyn Tan.)

The subsequent (first) English text has a similar theme, as if a loose paraphrase. It is less suggestive of the body itself, although it does give her a name—Julia—and describes his intimacies with her.  It goes on for two stanzas, saving the climax for the end.  The text is anonymous (and I don't wonder); that it is directly related to the original German seems likely because of the fleeting reference to flocks and fields in the second stanza.  Here it is in its entirety.

What though no high descent I claim
No line of Kings or race divine,
Not all the mighty Sons of fame
Can vaunt of joys surpassing mine
Possess'd of blooming Julia’s charms,
My heart alive to love’s alarms;
   Transported with pleasure
   I’m bless’d beyond measure;
Such raptures I find in her arms. 

What though no robe of Tyrian dye,
No gold of Ophir I can boast,
Nor fields, nor flocks, yet rich am I
In wealth the gods might envy most,
For mine are blooming Julia’s charms,
With love my throbbing heart alarms;
    By love transported with pleasure
    I’m bless’d beyond measure
And die with delight in her arms.

“Die with delight” is scarcely a subtle trope, particularly after the “throbbing heart.”  Is this the handiwork of Anne Hunter, the lyricist of many of the other canzonettas?  Some sources attribute it to her, but in the critical report Helms is cautious enough to say that both the poet and Haydn’s source for the text are unknown.) It seems a more reckless dry run for Hunter’s later parting lament “O Tuneful Voice.”  (Incidentally, I think JHW is wrong in that  song not to capitalize Echo; it has “In echo’s cave,” when surely this refers to the mythological nymph Echo, not something more abstract.)  Whoever penned this song, the text was deemed reckless enough to be toned down several notches for the next print run.  Its replacement, “Content,” still retains the ovine reference, but now it is down to a single lamb.  How tame!  The climactic passage is reduced to “This heart, secure in its treasure / Is bless’d beyond measure, / Nor envies the monarch his throne.”  Pure, chaste, and (dare I say?) tedious by comparison.  

Most curious to me is that this seems to be the least performed (in any version) and least discussed of any of the canzonettas, and yet there seems to be the most to say and to hear.  The coverlet of good taste thrown on it in 1796 may have done it in.  The Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon seems to have only gradually woken to the nature of the text.  In 1976, in the third volume of his massive Chronicle & Works, in the “chronicle” section he remarks merely

For some reason not immediately apparent — can Lady Charlotte [Bertie, the set's dedicatee] have thought the original text slightly immodest? — new words and a new title were soon applied to the song and the plates were altered.  [p. 315]

But he came around even before finishing the volume, as in the “works” section he continues:

...there is no doubt that Haydn has if anything accentuated the erotic content, especially towards the end, where Haydn, having acheived a rather breathless series of triplets (“transported with pleasure, I'm blest [sic] beyond measure”), drops to pianissimo and in the third-last bar, slows the tempo to “piu adagio” in what Lady Bertie might have considered a post-coital slackening.  [Ibid., p. 392]

(But who can know the mind of Lady Bertie?)  Seven years later Landon produced a facsimile of all three original editions of the song, plus Haydn's full-length sketch.  The first edition of the German version appeared in 1795, but the text was modified to transfer the voice from “Sylvius” to a “lovely shepherdess.”  (This was “Das Geständniß einer schönen Schäferinn,” appearing in the Prague periodical Die Allgemeine Musikalische Bibliothek.)  This alteration had a bowdlerizing effect, as all of the subtle Song of Solomon imagery—if that is indeed what it is—is reduced to just idle chatter about two sheep in a clover patch.  Hardly something I would expect to interest even “Farmer George,” this seems unlikely to me to be the version Haydn sang for the king.

6. ex silentio

I found this score on my shelves a few months ago.  I’m not sure when or where I got it.

SOURCE:  cropped scan (600 dpi) of p. 1; Edition Peters no. 4894 (Pl no. 30053), pub. 1959.

Although this appeared as recently as 1959, it is—as the note says—the first time this work was published in score.  It was published in parts by Artaria in March 1785.  As with many Haydn symphonies, the autograph score is lost.  Here, from H. C. Robbins Landon’s monumental tome on Haydn’s symphonies, is a list of the autographs whose whereabouts were known at that time (1955):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Landon, The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn, pp. 27-28

Comparing this list with those volumes of JHW (the critical complete edition) devoted to his symphonies, one recognizes a cautious editorial strategy:  works which existed in autograph comprised those symphony volumes that appeared in the 1960s and 70s, and (the “London” symphonies excepted) the rest have waited as much as four decades to see publication.  (That said, even in 1955 Landon’s list wasn’t quite accurate:  Landon lists symphonies 98, 99, and 101 as being in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, but these three were actually part of the “lost” cache of scores hidden by the Nazis that ended up eventually in Krakow; they were not returned to Berlin until the 1980s.  Nigel Lewis’s journalistic account of this, Paperchase, is excellent beach reading, and at the moment there are a few cheap secondhand copies on abebooks.com.)

To return to Symphony 79:  when I found this score on my shelf, I had just acquired an excellent new recording of this symphony.  I was home one day when the kids were out at lunchtime, so I set the score on the table and put on the disc.  I hadn’t even taken a bite before I was interrupted by a textual discrepancy.  Here is the whole of the first page in Lassen’s edition:

SOURCE:  as above, less cropped

What arrested my sandwich halfway to my open mouth was the last half of bar 4.  In Lassen’s edition, there is a brief silence here before the next phrase, but on the recording I heard a horn playing the dominant on repeated eight-notes.  That isn’t really my story here:  I think this is a straightforward error in transcription, although I don't have adequate resources on hand to tell whether the error was already in Lassen’s sources or was new in his edition.

Here are the horn parts of the first few bars in a composite, comparing Lassen’s edition with the only other two editions this work has yet received—the Philharmonia edition which followed it by a few years, edited by H. C. Robbins Landon, and the much more recent JHW:

Although I think it is clearly an error, the rest at the end of bar 4 is plausible:  there is such a silence in the recapitulation at b. 105, although in that instance the next phrase is given in the parallel minor.

SOURCE:  Landon's edition, because Lassen has a page-turn that would obscure my point.

Nonetheless, the other similar passage is a false recapitulation (at b. 68) which has the repeated eighth-notes in place, this time allotted to the violas. Very unlikely, however, is Lassen’s reading in b. 5, in which the repeated figure in Horn II makes no sense.

Lassen lists only two sources, but gives no detail about how these were used, nor any variant readings:

By the time of the Philharmonia edition, Landon had to hand four sources, although he explicitly excludes the two that had been used by Lassen:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Critical Commentary to Landon's edition, vol. 8, p. LXVI, with my emphasis added.

Landon does not mention Lassen’s edition, and it is possible that he had not seen it.  The JHW editors jump to a different conclusion, however, because of editorial adjustments in other passages which agree in both the Lassen and the Landon editions:  post hoc ergo propter hoc, JHW surmises [p. 290 and n. 263] that Landon not only knew it but indeed used it for his working copy (that is, a copy of a prior edition marked up with any changes to be made in a new edition, saving the effort of writing out the score anew).

But I think they are wrong on this point:  Landon could very easily have devised the same editorial adjustments that Lassen had reasonably made.  Moreover, editors always go out of their way to point out how their edition is better than their predecessors.  Landon doesn’t mention bar 4 at all in his commentary; JHW does mention bar 4, but has nothing to say about Horn II.  I argue from silence here, but it seems clear to me that neither of them ever noticed the erroneous reading that Lassen transmitted in b. 4.  If they had, they would have told us.

Lassen’s edition is not an authoritative source, and there’s no reason that either Landon or JHW needed to consult it.  Clearly JHW did consult it, and I submit that the lack of a comment on b. 4 suggests that they did not do the due diligence required to make the assertion that Landon had cut some editorial corners.  The silence is telling.