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that a composer did not trouble to notate, knowing that certain conventions would be observed; some of these are no longer current or have undergone significant changes of meaning.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

2. Risky business

It’s not news that music is a risky business.  Even with the narrower field of musical text, there is an element of risk.  Certainly music publishers are now more than ever in a risky business:  they compete for what is apparently a diminishing number of customers, and this competition may be against free legal downloads even more than against other publishers.  For a composer, notation is itself risky—virtually every element fraught with potential misinterpretation.  If they choose for their music to be performed by live musicians (and that is no longer the no-brainer that it used to be), they must give up some degree of control of “their” music:  the score is the inevitable nexus between the person trying to get the musical material in and those who would get the material out.   And I find the issues that arise from that interface compelling.

Much of what I will write in this blog has been said before—sometimes, indeed, because I want to point out things others before me have said (and done) that deserve renewed attention.  One such example is a small booklet by Walter Emery, published in 1957 by Novello & Co.  He called it Editions and Musicians, but I think his subtitle says it all:

Emery can get preachy at times.  At times that is stimulating, at times perhaps a little tedious.  I appreciate every page of this book, even when I find that I disagree with him.  For example, Emery concludes his chapter “The Need for Editing” thus:

“The fact is that until an editor has done his work, and done it properly, no performer can safely play old music, no analyst can safely analyse it, and no historian or critic can safely assess it.  The editor’s work is the foundation on which all other musical and musicological activities are based.”  (p. 14)

Really?  I can remember a time when I would have endorsed every word of this, but no longer.  It is not that I am against good editions of music—on the contrary, even when they cost a bundle.  It is really the word “safely” that bothers me.  Implicit in it, I think, is the idea of a definitive conception of the piece in the composer’s head, and that we are obliged to try to get as close to that as we can before we do anything else.  Moreover, I think Emery would say that these other activities (performance, analysis, criticism) that occur without such a proper editorial foundation are doomed eventually to crumble.

I’m skeptical that such a definitive conception ever existed in any meaningful and permanent way, and even more skeptical that such an idea could be conveyed to anyone else.  Think of the composers—first-rate composers—who couldn’t leave well enough alone.  (Not just “well-enough”—we might sometimes tend to gush with phrases like “apparent perfection.”)  Chopin might be an extreme example of this:  not only was he praised for “ever different expression” (and “Chopin never played his own compositions alike twice,” etc.), but those remarks are consistent with the documentary record of his own manuscripts and the editions that flow from them (i.e., all sorts of authorized variant readings).  Even given the fascinating editorial collation that has been unfolding through the superb Online Chopin Variorum Edition, isn’t there perhaps just too much here for anyone to take in?  Must the establishment of every authentic Chopin text of a work be complete before anyone can “safely” (to use Emery’s word) perform or analyze or critique it?  Could Emery be satisfied if an authentic text (say, a copy of the first French edition of a work marked up by Chopin for his pupil Jane Stirling) was all that a performer had seen?  This is, of course, extremely improbable, given the glut of Chopin editions on the market, settled in domestic piano benches, littering cabinets and weighing down shelves.  When Emery writes of the need for editing, it is a need to redress a context dominated by editing that was not done “properly” (again Emery’s word).

Or consider J. S. Bach, for whom, as Christoph Wolff has put it, there was apparently “no such thing as ‘untouchable’ text,” evidenced by his changes (not just “corrections”) even to his published works, and his revisions and reworkings of  (for example) the cantatas as he reused them in a subsequent years.  These are often instances where it is difficult to argue one reading is better than the other (indeed, there a few cases, like the two versions of the Canonic Variations, BWV 769 and BWV 769a, when it is seems impossible to say definitively which version came first).

Or Mendelssohn—whose “Revisionskrankheit” was a chronic (fatal?) compulsion to tinker away endlessly at his completed works.  At some point in this blog I will eventually return to the case of Mendelssohn’s celebrated “Italian” Symphony—a work that until recently was known only in its first version; Mendelssohn’s second thoughts prompted him to rewrites of the last three movements; the first movement he ultimately deemed unredeemable.  All this notwithstanding, it is one of his most popular works with audiences, who don’t seem to have noticed how unredeemable it is.  But more on that later.

In my first post, I mentioned the very different manifestations of Mussorgksy’s Pictures at an Exhibition, diverging in many respects from the autograph score, but still holding a secure place in the repertoire of pianists and orchestras.  I’d guess that Emery would regard any performance of the Rimsky-Korsakov version (or the editions derived from it) as a travesty.  But what about when later minds uncover new ways of hearing a piece—and a composer even embraces those new readings?  (Think Bob Dylan’s response to Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.”)

I have been delighted to see that the editorial principles behind the new Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter) take into account not just the authorial conception of the works, but also these works in performance, accumulating non-authorial performance traditions.  The score of the recent edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia (ed. Patricia Brauner), for example, includes in appendices not only three substitute numbers Rossini composed for later productions, but also several vocal variants (i.e., ornamented versions) that are extant in Rossini’s hand in as many as three (differing) sources.

Source:  cropped scan of p. 504 of WGR score of Il barbiere... (Bärenreiter, 2009)

Beyond this, however, the critical commentary includes materials about the performance tradition not directly deriving from Rossini:  a) the libretto for a Neapolitan-dialect version with spoken dialogue, and b) an extensive essay (59 pages!) by Will Crutchfield on “Early Vocal Ornamentation.”  I think it is a pity that these gems lie in the comparative obscurity of the very pricey commentary volume.

Would Emery say that as these latter variants are not from Rossini (but rather from the early performance tradition), a “safe” performance would be no performance at all?  Or that analysis or critique would be meaningless because it doesn’t relate directly to the composer?

Then again, just because Chopin was known to interpret his music anew each time, he didn’t take just any pupil; should we read his varying instructions to them with similar caution?  His famous remark to Filtsch (“We each understand this remark differently, but go your own way, do as you feel, it can also be played that way”) could hardly be regarded as interpretive carte blanche for any pianist.  Still, there is a sense in which G. Thomas Tanselle’s conceptual distinction between the text of the work and the text of the document might be useful—another idea I will be returning to in later posts.

I find that I’m more willing to see more risky performances, ponder risky analyses, and read risky critiques.  The safe alternative seems embalmed (fossilized?) in an established text, when the text itself was never sufficient.  That said, inauthentic readings (when they are known) should be acknowledged as such.  The situation can become bizarre, such as an exchange prompted by David B. Levy’s review of a critical edition of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by Jonathan Del Mar (1996).  (Levy's review is “Urtext or Performing Edition?” in Beethoven Forum 9/2 (2002), pp. 225-232).  Del Mar’s edition is a remarkable accomplishment in many respects, but Levy is astonished to see Del Mar depart from an established reading to favor a variant that is admittedly authentic (mvt. I, b. 81; the D in flute and oboe, rather than the familiar reading of B-flat):

Source: detail (woodwinds only) of scan of p. 13 of Del Mar’s edition of Symphony no. 9 (Kassel:  Bärenreiter, 1996)

[Here is a performance of this moment with this text.]

This “new” (original) reading results in a curious discrepancy in the subsequent appearances of this figure, where there is no leap of a sixth.  (This isn’t really an issue of recomposition in the recapitulation, but rather a different conception of motivic unity.)  Yet, as Del Mar remarks in the critical commentary, this D appears in all sources (which for this instance means the autograph (below), five scores made by copyists, and the first edition score and parts (1826)).  Del Mar surmises that the Bb (which first appeared in the 1864 Breitkopf edition)

“… was apparently invented by analogy with 276/80,346 [later recurrences of the motive].  Yet Beethoven wrote d in both instruments in A, so it can hardly be a mistake.”  (p. 25)

Source:  detail of screenshot of http://beethoven.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/beethoven/pix/sinfonien/9/1/990/00000020.jpg  
(mm. 80-84 as in Beethoven’s autograph f. 8v.)

 Levy puzzles that Del Mar would depart from the reading that would support “many published analytical studies… [which] have drawn attention to the significance of the perfect fourth (and its inversion, the perfect fifth) not only within the first movement, but throughout the entire work” (p. 229).  Del Mar replies:

“… where I as a sensible musician have to judge that the reading in the authentic sources is inconceivable (no less)—and especially where I can show how the error could well have arisen—I will present the more likely text. But if it is conceivable, I have a duty to stick to what Beethoven wrote. So despite all published analytical studies—which inevitably were based on the text they had in front of them—I restore Beethoven’s D in movt. I, m.81. Sorry: if we subsequently find that the analysts’ text was faulty, their studies will have to be rewritten. That is quite simply inevitable, and to argue that we must print a text that accords with previously published analytical studies is obviously putting the cart before the horse.”  (p. 105)

No need, in my view, for these “risky” analyses to be “safely” re-written:  the analyses can account for the work as it came to be known.  More significantly they document an important aspect of reception history:  our(?) sense of what the product of a genius should manifest, with (in this instance) an organic unity of motivic development encompassing the whole work.  The altered B-flat is no less a part of Beethoven’s 9th symphony (i.e., the cultural property it has become) just because Beethoven didn't write it.  If, with Del Mar, we regard the B-flat as bad editorial judgment, we must now correct it; we can't eliminate the effects it has had over the years (and we could, if we chose, continue to play it and analyze it), but we do have to acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it.  Those who disagree with Del Mar should still acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it, but they may argue however they may that Beethoven meant it.

As my envoi, take this example from Emery (p. 19), who quotes Donald Francis Tovey’s hedging conclusion when faced with an (unknown) chromatic error in his text of the F# minor prelude from Bach’s WTC II: “a harmonic point of peculiar subtlety.”  But of course.  That’s what we expect from a genius, right?