46. Look ere ye leape

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don't know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, 
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine-and-twenty.

And here we are on that leap day.  Perhaps I ought to be celebrating Rossini’s birthday while I have the chance, but this is a post I’ve had in mind almost from the beginning of this blog:  What about scores that seem to have one bar too many (or too few)?

An example that many pianists know is the extra bar that shows up in some editions of BWV 846/i, the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I). 

SOURCE:  cropped from G. Schirmer (c. 1893) reprint of Czerny edition, from IMSLP #01005

This bar was introduced by Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke (1767–1822), I suppose as a remedy two faults he perceived in Bach’s text.  He seems to have wanted to make the prolonged Dominant pedal begin on a “strong” bar (the first of a group of 4 bars)—thus he needed that to fall on b. 25 instead of b. 24, and so introduced a new b. “23.”  He also took pains to eliminate the two false relations (here shown in color) in the voice-exchange.  The bracketed solid note-heads represent Schwencke’s interpolated bar.

(Incidentally, this doubly-chromatic voice-leading troubled analyst Heinrich Schencker too.  He made a big deal about the fact that in an autograph manuscript, Bach wrote stems for the bass F-sharp turned upward.  To Schencker this was conclusive proof that Bach thought of that note as nothing more than a foreground harmonization of the soprano E-flat.  I’m not convinced that the stemming was anything more than fortuitous.  Whatever.)  

The retention of Schwencke’s extra bar was codified by Czerny’s edition (reprinted and reissued by a number of publishers, and probably in print continuously to this day.)  Gounod was likely working from Czerny’s edition when he created his superimposed melody—initially as an instrumental Méditation, but subsequently texted (and forever after known as) Ave Maria.  Gounod has thus transformed this “Schwenckenische Takt” into a load-bearing bar:  it is impossible to correct it, as the climax of Gounod’s melody depends on it.  I am reluctant to claim that it does much damage to the Bach original.  It matters if you know to listen for it; otherwise it passes unnoticed.  And, as Malcolm Boyd has observed,

“Schwencke wrote numerous compositions—oratorios, cantatas, concertos, sonatas, and songs—but his most frequently performed piece of work is without doubt bar 23 of the first prelude in Book 1 of Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier....” [p. 444]

As it happens, Schwencke is a link to another work for which editions generally seem to have one bar more than the composer intended—although in this case the variant stems from the composer's hand.  It is Mozart’s celebrated thirteen–instrument serenade, K. 361, a work with a long history of textual problems, and to which I will return in future posts.  (The Schwencke connection:  he devised a charming version for piano quartet plus one woodwind.) The superfluous(?) bar is in the fifth movement, the Romance.  Here is the relevant page of the autograph manuscript:

SOURCE:  Mozart, K. 361, v (Romance) bb. 22-30; p. 54 of Mozart’s autograph; a downloaded digital scan on the Library of Congress website; a scan of the whole manuscript is available.

This movement is in a large ABA structure, but the A section is itself a binary form (aabb).  The page above shows the last three bars of the b and the first six bars of the B.  The return to A is indicated by the instruction da capo senza repliche a few pages later.  So the moment in question here is the third bar on the scan above:  it is to be played as b. 24 twice (as it is repeated); but is it to be played again as b. 111 on the third time through—the da capo without repeats?  

Mozart’s curved bracket above and below this bar was his usual indication of a first ending, but that wouldn't work in this case, as the transition from b. 23 to b. 25 is nonsensical.  Rather these seem to be an indication to skip b. “111” and go straight to the coda.  But—crucially—these curved brackets were both smudged while the ink was still wet.  Was Mozart changing his mind?  Or was the smudge accidental?  After all, if he made these markings after composing the B section, then all the rest of the ink on this page would have already dried.

Actually, I think this is exactly what happened.  Mozart was presumably impatient to start to work on the coda:  the previous page (folio 27v, numbered 53) of the manuscript shows a tell-tale mark where the still-wet slur near the top of this page (28r, p. 54) would have set-off when the page was put down too soon on top of the other folio.  I have marked the off-set smudge on p. 53 in red, as well as a space at the bottom of the page where we might expect to see a similar offset from the slur below the contrabass line:

So, is it a problem that the lower mark isn’t there?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  I speculate that the wet ink of the lower bracket of p. 54 could well have been smudged by the bottom edge of page 53, without leaving much on the page itself.  Here is my effort at representing the pages as they would have lain together to create the offset.  For this image you must imagine you are seeing through p. 54 (and so here its image has been reversed and made partially transparent).  The top brackets coincide when placed at such an angle—possible, as the pages were then unbound nested bi-folios:

The smudged top bracket and the mark on the previous page are uncannily similar.  The most suggestive detail to me is the “1” which, I suggest, explains the blob under the set-off bracket on p. 53.  Here’s a detail—p. 53 on the top, p. 54 (reversed, to align the offset) below, with the “1” and the set-off blob circled:

As I say, maybe.  I think editors are perfectly justified in omitting this bar on philological evidence (and speculation, it must be said) like that presented above.  One of the editors of the NMA volume including K. 361, Daniel N. Leeson, has written at length about this bar, voicing his regret that he did not fight more with the general editors in order to omit it from the NMA text.  (See, for example, his 2009 summary of his decades of research into this piece.  He seems not to have noticed the off-set on p. 53, however.)  Leeson, with his co-editor Neal Zaslaw, did at least manage to get a footnote in the NMA score to the effect that perhaps Mozart did not want this bar played, and directing the user to the critical report:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of NMA VII/17/2 (1979, ed. Leeson & Zaslaw), p. 191.

In fact, the critical report wasn’t issued until 2002, and was the work of a yet another hand—Dietrich Berke.  (See his comment here.)  When the NMA score was issued as a separate Bärenreiter offprint, the Leeson/Zaslaw footnote was modified:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Bärenreiter TP 312 (otherwise an offprint of the above; this is from the 6th printing, 2006), p. 51.

The Henle edition (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese) at least puts the bar in brackets, with an explanatory footnote:

SOURCE: detail of scan of Henle 9809 (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese), p. 45.  The relevant comment cited here describes the notation and the smudging, remarking “It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether this ‘volta’ applies or not, and what it refers to.  Presumably it relates to the transition from the recapitulation to the coda in mm. 111–112, so that the chords from M 24 (= M 111) give way to the entrance of the coda” [p. 77].

According to Leeson, the only edition yet to completely omit bar “111” is that edited by Roger Hellyer.  After explaining the situation in his Preface, Hellyer comments:  “If performers cannot accept my decision that I am here following Mozart's ill-expressed intentions, they are of course free to reinstate what has been played here at least since 1803, as in bar 24.”  Exactly so.

Unsurprisingly, performers have been more willing than editors to take a chance on omitting this bar.  Here, for example, is this moment in Christopher Hogwood’s recording with the Amadeus Winds.  The missing bar comes—or, rather, doesn’t come—at ten seconds into this clip, at the start of the coda:

I find this reading musically compelling, and certainly plausible as Mozart’s intention, with the suddenly reduced forces on the beginning of the coda (and the surprise dissonant harmony when we expect the full cadence).  Moreover, I think the textual evidence is suggestive enough to back it up, even if it is not conclusive.

Of course we may be deleting a bar Mozart intended, merely to satisfy our taste.  That seems to be what has sometimes happened near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s fourth symphony.  To some ears this ending seems to have one too many bar.  Jonathan Del Mar reports that Schumann (1840) and Czerny (1853) were early advocates of deleting it, and in one early set of manuscript parts the bar has been deleted—but it is impossible to say when this alteration was made, and no other source close to Beethoven supports it.  Other critical editions have brought up this question, but the only one I have seen to delete a bar for the sake of metrical regularity is Peter Hauschild’s 1996 edition for Breitkopf [below on the right].  Hauschild’s astoundingly naive justification for relying so heavily on this single source as transmitting Beethoven’s supposed alterations:  “da es wohl ausgeschlossen ist, daß andere an Beethovens Symphonie herumkorrigiert haben”! [p. 84; “because it is surely out of the question that others would have corrected Beethoven’s symphony.”]  The irony is delicious.

SOURCE:  marked-up page scans of the last page of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 4, op. 60:  (l.) Bäenreiter (1999, ed. Jonathan Del Mar—here from 2001 off-print); (r.) Breitkopf & Hartel (1996, ed. Peter Hauschild).

If you want to compare these in performance, compare John Eliot Gardiner (with the text on the left) and Daniel Barenboim omitting the bar, as on the right.  I suppose Barenboim and anyone else may do with the text as they see fit.  The composers themselves sometimes take such liberties.  Here is an extract from Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem Danse macabre (1875) in the composer’s own transcription for violin and piano.  He added the bar marked in red when he produced this version; it does not correspond to anything in the orchestral version.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of 1877 Durand edition of violin/piano version, p. 11 (from IMSLP #33277); the extract begins at b. 340.

Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz no. 1 is a similar example, if even more complicated in Liszt’s piano version both adds and delete bars compared to the orchestral original—so that the two versions do not correspond.  Already in the first 150 bars each version contains a bar that the other lacks, and it is clear from the composer’s sketches for the piano version that he had second thoughts.

SOURCE:  marked up scan of first edition (Leipzig, c. 1862), bb. 1–32; b. 25 is new to the piano version.  Scan from IMSLP #13711.

SOURCE:  top, as above, bb. 120–136; the orchestral version has an extra bar after b. 134; below, detail of manuscript sketch of this passage, scan from the Morgan Library.

For an example where I believe a new scholarly edition is led by the early sources into an error that an older edition had set right, look at the last aria of BWV 52, “Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht.”  As often elsewhere, Bach did not write out the final ritornello, but indicated it merely with a da Capo instruction:

SOURCE: detail of scan of the autograph (D-B Mus.Ms. Bach P 85, f. 8v) available on Bach Digital.

SOURCE:  the same, f. 7r.

Because the final cadence is (or at least I would argue is) elided with the return of the ritornello, Bach has notated the first bar of the ritornello again before the instruction “DC.”  Consequently, he surely meant not really a return to the beginning, but rather to the second bar.  And, indeed, at the second bar we find the segno marking we would expect to see [at right].

The BG edition interprets it thus, assuming that Bach’s “DC” really meant “DS.”  The NBA, on the other hand, takes the DC literally—correctly pointing out that the earliest performing parts (which are all the work of copyists) have da Capo, following the autograph faithfully.  In fact, one of these early parts—Oboe III—has a segno at b. 2, which indicates that someone recognized the problem early on.  (The lack of a correction in the other parts does not mean that it wasn't corrected:  the mistake seems so obvious that the musicians could recognize and remember the error.)  Incredibly, there is no comment in the NBA critical report about any of this—nor about the different editorial decision that has been taken.  As it is the policy of the NBA to print in full such passages that Bach has abbreviated, a redundant bar is introduced into the text:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite page scan with detail from pp. 162 and 163 of NBA I/26 (1994, ed. Andreas Glöckner), here scanned from Bärenreiter offprint TP1290 (2007).

In my opinion, this is just wrong—and the conclusive proof for it is an overlooked detail of the autograph score.  Where the other parts are given the da capo instruction, the singer—who will have nothing further to sing—is given exactly fifteen bars of rest (after the bar in which the cadence occurs):

SOURCE detail of scan of the autograph f. 8v again, just further enlarged.

 ...yet the NBA text calls for sixteen bars of rest to reach the end of the aria (as enumerated above).  Significantly, I haven’t found a single recording that includes this extra bar.  If they are using the NBA, the musicians are deleting it.  Sometimes an extra bar is just too much of a good thing.

34. So teach us to number our bars

Today’s post marks the second birthday of Settling Scores.  I have been having altogether too much fun with it, and I’ve met all sorts of interesting (and interested) people.  Some were names I knew professionally, but very many have been entirely new.  I am gratified by the response, even if I am sometimes completely in the dark on the reasons why some posts take off and others fall comparatively flat.

Although when I started this project I had a long list of issues I wanted to cover—and that list remains long—I never imagined I would spend a post on bar numbers.  What could there possibly to say?  The bars are numbered!  End of story!  But just a few weeks after I began blogging, I knew eventually this post would happen.  It was prompted by a post on the blog put out by the G. Henle Verlag.  Henle urtext editions have dominated the market (particularly for piano students) in the USA for as long as I can remember.  You’d know those slate blue covers anywhere, even if they have updated the look a bit over the years.  Their blog comes out every two weeks, written by their house editors in rotation.  It offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse at editorial work in progress.

The post that got me thinking concerned their new edition of Camille Saint-Saëns’s marvellous second piano concerto.  (To clarify:  the edition is a two-piano version, with a new reduction of the orchestral material.)

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of https://www.henle.com/en/detail/index.html?Title=Piano+Concerto+no.+2+in+g+minor+op.+22_1355, accessed 20 July 2018

Although in the preface editor Peter Jost goes to some pains to point out that the piano reduction published as the first edition in 1868 was not by the composer (but rather his pupil, Adam Laussel), the Henle blurb above gets this wrong.

Jost’s blog post concerns the arresting opening of this concerto—a free-flowing, unmeasured prelude at first, developing gradually into more conventional Romantic virtuoso piano figures covering the whole compass of the instrument.  Here are the first three pages as they appeared in first edition of the full score:

SOURCE:  scan of 1875 Durand edition from 1995 Dover reprint.

The Durand engravers have provided the conventional full score accolade on the first page, showing the complete resources required for the work.  In the autograph, however, the first page to be in full score is the third page, at the orchestral entrance, and the preceding two pages appear very much as a separate introduction, ending mid-page with a double bar and a clearly implied attacca across the page:

SOURCE:  scans of the autograph score, F-Pn Mus. MS-488, fully available here.  In this example, I have taken the images not from the Bibliotheque Nationale site, but rather from the Henle blogpost.  This has required cropping them to display them appropriately:  Henle inaccurately represents p. 2 abutting p. 1 (as if recto facing the preceding verso), although it really should abut p. 3, as above.

Jost points out that Saint-Saëns numbered the measures of this movement, starting with the orchestral entrance.  Thus the “prelude” is unnumbered—although it isn’t entirely unmetered, and even concludes with ruled bars.  Jost follows the composer on this, yielding a movement of a prelude plus 112 bars.

The first edition lacked measure numbers, but had rehearsal letters.  Sabina Teller Ratner’s thematic catalogue of Saint-Saëns works gives the total number of measures in each movement, and thus in this case numbers from the beginning, with the last bar as number 115.  (Her bar 11 below is Jost’s bar 8.)

SOURCE scan of Ratner catalogue (OUP, 2002) Vol. 1, p. 353

I do not understand the value of Mr. Jost’s “return” to the composer’s “original numbering.”  We don’t know enough to understand whether those numbers were intended to mean anything at all.  Was Saint-Saëns making a philosophical statement about the music (as Mr. Jost inevitably is—some music designated as “preceding” the real piece)?  Was there at that moment nothing written on the preceding pages, with the composer planning to improvise an introduction based on material that appears later in the movement—eventually codifying it as text?  I exchanged e-mails with Mr. Jost in the days following his post, but came away unsatisfied.

As I see it, bar numbers serve one principal and practical function:  orienting the user in a score.  A bar number is a coordinate used to locate something.  It need not be anything else. 

For any music requiring more than one player, numbered bars are useful in rehearsal (“We’ll start in bar 63”), where the system is more precise—and arguably less cumbersome—than rehearsal letters (“We’ll start six bars before F”).  In Jost's edition, taking it “from the top” is not the same as from bar #1, and that may lead to some confusion.

Measure numbers are essential, however, in critical editions (like Jost’s) so that the editor can cite a detail in the critical commentary and the user can locate it easily.  Compare, in this connection, how the new C. P. E. Bach edition deals with the unmeasured sections of the fantasies:

Source:  cropped scan of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach:  The Complete Works, Ser. I, Vol. 3 (ed. David Schulenberg, 2005); detail of p. 34, the fantasy from Wq 63 no. 6.

Here the first portion of the piece goes without a barline for several systems, so each system is given a letter:  bar 1a, bar 1b, bar 1c.  This illustration begins at bar 1h.  The first barline does not appear until after the 3/4 time signature, so that in this edition the bar marked Largo is still bar 1j, with the bar following it reckoned (finally) as bar 2.  (The critical commentary can thus cite a note in a specified portion of this extended bar 1.)  This method is necessarily idiosyncratic:  it works for this edition, but it would not be readily translated to another.  But it doesn't need to be:  the sole function of these bar numbers is to connect the critical commentary portion of the volume with the score, and this system works well enough.  (To be fair, Jost does employ a similar policy:  the opening systems of the Saint-Saëns are labeled with Roman numerals—like the front matter of a book—which inevitably suggests that we haven’t yet reached the “real thing.”)

It is a more honest method than, for example, Henle’s treatment of the Mozart “Modulating prelude” (K. Anh. C 15.11) which gets a new bar number for each system, despite no barlines:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Mozart:  Klavierstücke (HN 22, ed Ullrich Scheideler, 2006), p. 66.

Glancing through their back catalogue, I see that Henle’s practice has been inconsistent.  Here is a page of K. 394 in their 1955 edition (no longer in print), and the circled bar numbers correspond with ruled bars rather than with systems:

SOURCE:  scan of p. 40 of Mozart:  Klavierstücke (ed. B. A. Wallner; Henle, 1955)

Incredibly, this same work—newly edited by Mr. Scheideler—appears in the same new volume as the modulating prelude (HN22) with the bar numbers allocated exactly the same way as in 1955, so the new volume itself is inconsistent.  The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe isn’t much better in this respect:  K. 394 is treated as above (although the Henle and NMA bar numbers do not correspond); other works in the volume, including the modulating prelude, use the a... b... c... system as in the C. P. E. Bach edition.  For a particularly interesting situation, see the NMA’s presentation of K. 284a [NMA IX/27/2, pp. 5–9]; bar “(25)” is my favorite.

Does any of this really matter?  It depends, of course, on whether a number is merely a milepost or whether it has any substantive meaning relating to the music.  Once you start disconnecting the numbers from the sequence of bars on the page you surely must mean something.  I looked to see what the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe does with those passages in the organ concertos in which they have interpolated Wolfgang Stockmeier’s “suggestions” of how to improvise in response to Handel's instruction “ad libitum.”  I, for one, don't think such interpolations belong in that sort of scholarly edition, but at least the editors had the good judgment to leave those bars unnumbered (and in small type):  Handel didn’t indicate how many bars to play, and neither should the HHA.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of a portion of the second movement Op. 7 no. 4 (HWV 309) as presented in HHA Ser. IV Bd. 8, p. 204

For comparison, here’s Handel's autograph for this section:

SOURCE:  page from Handel’s autograph for HWV 309 (Op. 7 no. 4), mvt. 2; British Library R.M.20.g.12, f. 66r

When I began work on my first editorial project—Walton’s Variations on a Theme by Hindemith for the William Walton Edition—I remember starting by numbering the bars and assuming that it would be a straightforward task (young and callow as I was).  The anxiety that awaited me!  I wanted to number the bars sequentially across all the variations.  In a way, this was a substantive statement:  it meant essentially the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  But really there was a practical reason for this:  the critical commentary would be much harder to use if you had to keep track not only of the bar number but also of the variation number.  When I set to work, however, I found that Walton had paid no attention to the seams between the variations.  This might be because he would send off a completed variation to his publisher before starting another, but it is just as likely that he didn’t care if a complete final bar of one variation was followed by a pick-up bar of the next.  In many musical editions, “bar number 1” is the first complete bar rather than the first thing on the page—but I found I would have to count each of these incomplete tags at the beginnings and ends of variations as full bars if I wanted to have just a single numbering system for the whole piece.  It worked, but I still don’t like the look of it.

On the substantive (rather than practical) value of rehearsal marks, the words of Jonathan Del Mar are a useful reminder.  The following disclaimer can be found in the preface to each of the scores of his Bärenreiter editions of Beethoven symphonies (and a similar one for the concertos, etc.):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. V of Del Mar's edition of Symphony no. 9 (BA9009)

How orchestras survived for so long without rehearsal marks I can’t imagine, and at least those who attempt historically-informed-performance are not bound to historical rehearsal practices.  (The unions would never stand for it.)  I bristle against heavy-handed editing, when the editor goes out of the way to make a mountain out of a molehill.  Herr Jost’s treatment of the Saint-Saëns strikes me as just that.  Then again, this blog is made entirely out of molehills treated as if they were mountains, so I’m one to talk.

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.

5. “What's the best edition of ________?”

Every now and then a student will come down the hall to my office—away, that is, from the mire of applied studies and into the transcendent world of musicological speculation (... or so I sometimes would like it to seem)—and say:  "Prof. X told me to ask you what edition I should get of _________."

It doesn’t happen all that often.  Usually Prof. X tells the student what edition to buy, so they never come to see me.  As before in this blog, I turn to the words of Walter Emery:

The ordinary musician does not buy an edition because it is good; as he does not know how editing is done, he cannot tell whether an edition is good or bad.  He buys an edition because its title-page bears a famous name or the magic word Urtext:  or because it has a pretty cover:  or, more likely, because it is sixpence cheaper than any other:  or again, because his teacher has told him to (which means only that the teacher was told to buy it by his teacher, has used it for twenty years, and has got used to the look of it).  [pp. 7f.]

In a very interesting and useful article that deals with edition selection as a teaching moment, Rachel E. Scott gives an anecdote which fulfills Emery's worst fears:

As a freshman vocal performance major, my voice teacher assigned me “Le Violette” by Alessandro Scarlatti. The following week I naively showed up for my lesson with my shiny new 26 Italian Songs and Arias: An Authoritative Edition Based on Authentic Sources. I quickly learned that my “Le Violette” was not her “Le Violette.” My professor rejected my anthology, pulled out Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and declared that the accompaniment in my edition was “just awful.” Not only are the accompaniments very different, but the vocal line is also slightly different. In short, the two editions presented two very different pieces.  While this experience certainly opened my eyes to the existence of different editions, it did not provide a solution to the problem. I did not understand that my teacher’s preference was based on tradition and not on the quality of the editorial work....  [pp. 133f.]

No doubt this scenario has repeated itself countless times.

Sometimes a teacher might think they are recommending the best edition simply because the publisher has a good reputation.  (See for example this recent post by violinist Phillipe Quint (“Usually I rely on two editions:  Henle and Barenreiter”).)  Certainly when I was studying piano 20+ years ago, Henle seemed to have sewn up the market, despite a wide variety in the quality of their backlist—a problem that has been rectified to a significant extent as new editions have superseded many old ones.

Judging from Google searches, the perennial question of which edition to buy has migrated to various internet forums.  Typical of many hits that came up was this one:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/22938/good-non-henle-urtext-edition-of-bach/23012
(accessed 30 Sept. 2016)

There is much to read between the lines here.  The teacher said “urtext” so that a student would have a text free from interpretive interpolations (mainly, I imagine, slurs); the teacher didn’t specify which, as the various urtexts of the Bach English Suites do look pretty much the same.  The student knows the word urtext has to be on the cover and has noticed that this increases the price—money which it would probably be more enjoyable to spend elsewhere.  The first responder points out that the BG edition is “urtext” in the sense that the teacher probably wants.  The estimate of the quality is attributed to they (“they say”—a vile phrase), followed by recourse to Wikipedia.  There is no assertion of an edition being good for x reason or bad for y reason.  And who can say?

Indeed, who can say?  Very few people actually spend their time looking at multiple editions of the same works, still less comparing multiple editions to their sources and (if present) the editorial remarks.  As has been brought home to me when reviewing editions, I simply don’t have enough information to verify that the editor has done the work properly.  Unless I have all the sources in front of me and can do the editor’s work over again, I have to take the editor’s word that the edition is what it claims to be.  True, I can talk about methodological problems (particularly sources not consulted) or editorial policies that I find disagreeable, but otherwise I am only barely qualified to offer an opinion.  And I suspect this is the case for most professionals (except perhaps for the repertoire at the very center of our interest).

Musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason calls her admirable blog Not another music history cliché!  I wish someone would write one called Not another uncritical review!  These are easy to spot, as they are almost invariably glowing reviews, and they usually conclude with a formulation like “It is handsomely bound and will make an attractive addition to your shelves.”  While these tend not to be by musicologists, they do tend to be published in sources more readily available to the average musician, and thus are much more significant in terms of their influence.  There are some, however, who have dealt explicitly with comparing editions, not just reviewing a new edition in a vacuum.  Judging from my RILM and Google searches, many of these are in practical periodicals (The Strad, Clavier, and the like), where they would be most useful to teachers.  This topic also seems to be a frequent topic for DMA dissertations.

I don't believe in “best” editions, but I've certainly seen some bad ones.  I also am familiar with the gnawing sense that I don't know enough to evaluate what is in my hands.   And so I  propose a crowd-sourced bibliography.  I welcome citations for articles/chapters/blogposts/etc. that compare different editions (i.e., not just reviews of a new edition).  With the rise of the IMSLP and students’ use of it, these need not necessarily focus on new editions.  The old editions are ever with us—and I think that is a very good thing.  Many are superb.  (They also have the virtue of printing more music per page, and so have fewer page turns.  If a requirement for best edition is practicality, page turns might rank pretty high.)  I have put a new tab on the blog for this project so that it will be readily available; send me citations through the contact form and I will gladly add them to the list:  articles, books, blogposts, webforum posts, whatever.