49. The sound of (editorial) silence

There is a temptation for an editor to select a variant reading that alters the sound of a work enough to be audible to musically-sensitive listeners.  (It provides for a certain frisson: “They’re playing my edition!”)  Some years ago I discussed Thurston Dart’s edition of the “Brandenburg” Concertos as an extreme case of in-your-face textual difference.  This is an temptation I had to learn to resist when editing—being different for the sake of being different.

I stumbled across an example the other day.  I had been reading Christoph Wolff’s new book, Bach’s Musical Universe.  I was struck by this passage, which concerns a group of chorales associated with the lost St. Mark Passion:

“Moreover, their manner of four-part chorale harmonization shows a consistently greater degree of contrapuntal intricacy and rhythmic animation than Bach had typically brought to bear in the past, particularly in the inner voices—a trend that would continue in the Christmas Oratorio.” [p. 226]

It never occurred to me that Bach’s harmonizations “improved” as he aged.  Yet it brought to mind an e-mail exchange I had with a music theorist friend about a year ago about particular favorite Bach chorale harmonizations.  I had said then that my favorite—if I had to name one—would be the closing chorale of the first part of the Christmas Oratorio, a setting of “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her.”   That setting punctuates each phrase of the melody with a fanfare of trumpets and drums—which I once liked very much, but which now I regard as an intrusion on the real stuff, the harmonization.  (In any case, the fanfares are striking, as they seem at odds with the text:  essentially “Make for yourself a clean, soft bed in my heart, O sweet little Jesus, so that I never forget you.”  (As a further aside, my guess is that it was this thirteenth strophe of Martin Luther’s hymn which somehow gave rise to the false idea that Luther had authored “Away in a Manger.”  He didn’t, but the sentiment is there.)  Some conductors—Ton Koopman on the video linked above, and John Eliot Gardiner are examples—downplay the trumpets and drums, as if not to wake the baby.  But I think Philip Pickett is right to have them thunder away:  the effect is not of a newborn but rather the King of Heaven beating on the door of my heart.)

I love this harmonization, particularly the last two phrases.  Spurred by Wolff’s commentary, I pulled it out again and played it on the piano a few times.  The next day it was on my mind as I walked to my office, so when I got there I pulled the Dover reprint of the BG edition of the shelf and played it anew.  And right at the end—Is this a misprint?  What is that D doing there?

SOURCE: BWV 248/ix, bb. 10–15; cropped scan of BG bd. 5 (ed. W. Rust, 1856), p. 48; from ISMLP #02418.

The D may at first appear odd harmonically:  the tenor crosses below the bass to produce a second-inversion subdominant chord.  But assuming that the continuo bass line has some instruments sounding an octave lower (double bass, organ?), then the true bass line is still below the tenor; thus no such solecism has occurred.  The voicing is unusual, but the harmony at this cadence offers no surprises.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of NBA II/6, p. 54
(ed. W. Blankenberg and A. Dürr, 1960) 

I wasn’t expecting the D because it is not what I grew up hearing.  (The D is on the Koopman video above, though.)  What I heard for years is the reading in the NBA, where the tenor steps down to a wonderfully dissonant E.  I love that chord.  Now instead of IV we have ii, and my argument about the second-inversion is undone.  If we disregard the 16-foot doubling in the continuo line, the tenor becomes the bass of a (very proper) root position chord; but if we account for the octave doubling, we have an unexplained second-inversion chord.  That notwithstanding, I think it is a gorgeous effect.  And so I found myself wondering how it came to be, given that it was not in the old edition.  What was the story?

I turned next to the NBA critical report, which states that the autograph manuscript shows a correction from the D to the E, although the manuscript parts (tenor and viola) transmit the D.  Hmmmmm...  Let's take a look at that autograph....

SOURCE: enlarged details from D-B-Mus.ms Bach P 32, Bl. 12v (from Bach Digital).  The detail on the left shows alto, tenor, bass, and continuo staves for bb. 11–13 of no. 9; on the right the fourth tenor note of b. 12 is further enlarged.

So... is that a correction?  To my eye the D [we are in tenor clef] remains much clearer than the smudge that is alleged to be an E.  I will admit that the smudge is rounded like a note-head, though it appears a different color and much lighter, and would have to have been made at a different time, maybe unintentionally.  When Bach isn’t able to make a correction appear unambiguous (as, for example, the B which replaces an A as the very first choral bass note in the example above), he does something to clarify it—as he does elsewhere on this same page.  In this instance, Bach’s second thought was to let the third trumpet leap up rather than to repeat the same descending figure, but as the ink was smudged in the process, he clarified by indicated that the intended note was C.  (The lower C was sufficiently obliterated.)  

SOURCE:  same page as above; this detail is bb. 2–4 of the trumpet and drum staves. 

So why, then, did he not write the letter E in bar 12 to clarify the tenor correction?  

Because it wasn’t one.  Sometimes a smudge is just a smudge.  Indeed, for a blissful moment I thought it might just be ink bleeding through the paper.  Here is a side-by-side comparison of the same detail of the Bach with a mirrored image of the other side of the page—mirrored, that is, to facilitate comparison of markings which are bleeding through:

SOURCE: marked, cropped scans from P32.  Left is the same image as above; right is the corresponding portion of the other side of the page (f. 12r).

You can see the shadows of a lot of the markings bleeding through, the clearest of which I have marked with red arrows.  Conspicuously absent, though, is any mark to bleed through to create the “E” smudge:  I have circled that spot in blue.  But keep fol. 12v (with the chorale) was the last page of a fascicle, and it shows signs of other ink transfer (marked in yellow)—having been put down on top of something else. My guess—and it can only be a guess—is that the “E” smudge (which is very close to the area marked in yellow) is a similar offset transfer.  In any case, it's not an E.

If that smudge were an E, Bach’s figured bass should reflect it.  The figures transmitted in the continuo part (not in the score) show know signs of alteration.  (Those figures appear in both the BG and the NBA examples above.)  Nothing accounts for the E in the harmony; and in no other source is an E transmitted.  If this was indeed a second thought, Bach apparently didn't think it was important to have anyone actually perform it.  But I would argue instead that this reading is the wishful invention of Walter Blankenburg and Alfred Dürr, editors of that volume of the NBA.  I’d hate to see it go; I think it sounds fantastic.  But it has no textual authority, and is thus usurping the rightful place of the authoritative D.

All of this is a lot of words spent on a single quarter note; but it is an example, I think, of an editor opting for an audible difference even without the evidence to support it.  For a considerably more egregious example, get a load of this:

SOURCE:  cropped scan (p. 61) of BA 10303-01, C. Saint-Saëns, 3e Symphonie en ut mineur, op. 78, vol. 3 (ed. Michael Stegemann) of Camille Saint-Saëns:  œuvres instumentales complètes (Bärenreiter, 2016).

This new critical edition of Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony is marred by an astonishing number of typographical errors; it really merits a post of its own just for that reason, and maybe I will get around to that someday.  But what appears above is not an error.  It is what the editor (Michael Stegemann) meant.  In case there is any doubt of that, here is the remark in the critical commentary, together with my scrawled commentary in the margin.  Pardon my French.

SOURCE:  cropped scan (p. 206) of BA 10303-01 plus pencil annotations

On no authority whatsoever, Stegemann interrupted the composer’s very carefully contrived legato arpeggio, inserting a break right before the downbeat of b. 365.  (Say what you like about it, it is an audible change.) Other than the dotted-slur in the cello, there is no indication on the page that a change has been made, and users who do not consult the notes—or who do not already know the piece very well—will be none the wiser.  This edition has been issued as a much less expensive offprint, and Bärenreiter reports to me that typos (all of them?) have been corrected, but that edition appears without any of the critical commentary.  Users who trust the “Bärenreiter Urtext” marketing (“the last word in authentic text”) may well assume this represents responsible editing.  Caveat emptor.

If Stegemann had left this text as he had found it—if, that is, it appeared as in all other sources (including the first (1886) and second (1907) editions, issued by Durand)—he would not be neglecting his editorial duties.  An editor is still doing the job even when the decision is made to let any given reading stand without alteration.  But maybe an editor only feels like an editor in the act of emending something.  What is the sound of an editor not changing the text?

A few weeks ago I was amused to see someone in a Facebook group posting their various complaints about eccentric readings in “the Bärenreiter edition” of Handel's Messiah.  (What the post referenced is the vocal score published by Bärenreiter, which is a reduction of the text of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe (the HHA), but the textual decisions are not Bärenreiter’s editorial responsibility.)  The person was essentially complaining that this is not the textus receptus, and that Bärenreiter should just “get in line.”  I suppose the Novello edition is the closest thing to a standard edition now, having (in this country) replaced the old Schirmer edition.  But people use all sorts of editions all at once, and a few years ago in this blog I was grumbling about orchestral players bringing their own partbooks from different sets—leading to a chaos of conflation in performance.

A particular example the writer cited was from the climax of “the Hallelujah chorus.”  Here is the reading of Bärenreiter vocal score:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 247 and 248 of the HHA vocal score of Messiah, ed. John Tobin (Bärenreiter, 1965).

The textual surprise here:  the words sung in bb. 76-77.  We expect “and Lord of Lords,” yet we get “and He shall reign.”  But the HHA is a scholarly edition... or rather it became a scholarly edition after a rocky start and a number of superseded volumes.  The editor of Messiah, John Tobin, thus had no interest in what people have come to accept as Messiah.  He was interested only in what the authoritative texts convey.  My advice:  If the user doesn’t want to put up with a scholarly edition, then buy something else instead.  There are plenty of alternatives.

Perhaps “and He shall reign” is not what Handel intended here, but Tobin did not make the choice capriciously.  Here is this passage as it appears in Handel's composing score:

SOURCE:  scan of British Library RM 20.f.2, p. 205 (scanned from Bärenreiter facsimile edition).

Observe that both texts appear:  “and He shall reign” below the altos, “and Lord of Lords” below the tenors, and “and He” below the basses.  This bass “and He” is the only one in Handel’s hand.  The alto and tenor words have been inserted by his assistant, John Christopher Smith—and the smudge indicates some degree of uncertainty.

Smith was the copyist of the conducting score, a fair copy with some autograph insertions of new and revised movements, and a host of other markings in the composer's hand.  Here is the relevant page:

SOURCE:  scan of GB-Ob MS Tenbury 347 f. 96v, from the Scolar Press facsimile (1974).

Here there is no ambiguity.  Maybe Smith got it wrong, but there is no sign of correction here.  Tobin thus felt justifiably obligated to print “and He shall reign” (as did some of the earliest editions) because that is what the most authoritative sources transmit most consistently.  If you don’t like it, tough.  You don’t have to sing it that way; alter as you see fit, but don’t complain about a scholarly edition being scholarly.  

This issue of sticking with the authoritative text—come what may—has now hit home for me in a new way.  In the last year, I have been asked to assist with the completion of an edition that is already 75% done.  It is a critical edition of Princess Ida, a Gilbert & Sullivan opera that premiered in 1884, the immediate predecessor to The Mikado.  It is a scholarly edition, although with vocal score and orchestral parts prepared to facilitate its use in performance.  I have a student assistant; her first task has been just proofreading the text of the full score as it has been set against Sullivan's autograph.  She has done great work with this, and it is so good to have another pair of eyes on this sort of project.

A few weeks ago I got a text from her:  “I had a question about the lyrics, but we can discuss it another time if you're too busy.”  I was intrigued, mainly because the lyrics are not our task at the moment.  This edition has a policy of “divided authority”:  the autograph full score is the principal authority for the orchestral parts; the second state of the first edition of the vocal score is the principal authority for the vocal parts, the lyrics, and the text underlay; and a certain edition of the libretto is the principal authority for the dialogue.  So we weren't concerned about the lyrics as such at the moment.  What would her question be?

Actually, I should have foreseen it.  This was the page of proofs that prompted it, although it appears here as I think it should in print--with the offensive n-word redacted:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of proof of p. 197 of new critical edition of Princess Ida (forthcoming), no. 12, b. 109–112; I have redacted the text.

Of course she asked Why is this word there?  At the very least, why is it not relegated to the footnote, with the substitute text in the score proper?  As this edition seeks to establish the text as it was settled in the first run, the line quoted in the footnote is extraneous, and certainly doesn’t belong in the main text of the score.  But I feel strongly that we can't print what Gilbert wrote.  All the same, we can’t hide what Gilbert wrote—we need to leave the ugliness on display, or else we let Gilbert off the hook.  Princess Ida is a troubling piece in many ways, particularly as the focus of Act II is lampooning women's education generally.  (The joke, as it happens, is on Gilbert—or at least on his chauvinist characters.  They rattle off a list of impossible things that these “girl [sic] graduates” hope to accomplish; but several of the items on that list have actually come to pass since 1884.)  But ugly and troubling texts still need to be presented, and in ways that don't simply bypass the problems.  

Several years ago, at my previous institution, one of my responsibilities was directing the chamber orchestra.  I had great fun with it, particularly as the instrumentation changed substantially each year as students graduated and matriculated.  There were always new challenges and new opportunities.  One year I had such an idiosyncratic ensemble that I rashly decided to compose/compile/arrange a score to accompany a silent film.  If I had realized what I was getting into, I would never have done it—but it proved to be great fun despite the labor that it entailed.  I settled on a Buster Keaton film that I felt sure would appeal to my undergraduate audience:  College (1927). 

But there is a short scene right in the middle of the film where Keaton is in blackface.

SOURCE: cropped screenshot at 29:14 from the full film, available on youtube.

I considered skipping this scene in performance; I briefly considered not even scoring this film at all.  My solution, ultimately, was to show the film, but for the orchestra to remain tacet throughout the four or five minutes of the blackface scene.  We thus could present Keaton’s film intact, but—by remaining silent—pointedly not endorse it.  Or at least that was what I was hoping we could do.  We could remind the audience that in the midst of the brilliance and finesse, there is an ugly and indelible stain that is more than just an artifact of its time.

So too in this edition of Princess Ida, I want the ugly stain to be clear, even if I don’t feel we can actually print the n-word.  The opera dates from 1884, but the edition is a product of the early twenty-first century; our edition inevitably will reflect our historical moment, too.  At the moment, the black-box redaction (in the style of released government documents) seems the best way to do be faithful both to Gilbert’s text and our present interaction with it.  The page is visibly scarred, but the content of the text is still clear.  And anyone who wants to see what Gilbert wrote can easily consult a multitude of other sources.

To do otherwise in such a case—that is, to print the text as it stands, to remain silent as an editor—is simply not an option.  The editorial silence would be deafening.

45. Adeste infideles

I was at a performance of Handel’s Messiah a few weeks ago where—not for the first time, it must be said—I noticed some surprises in the orchestral accompaniment.  I have grown used to hearing trumpets and drums (derived ultimately from Mozart’s 1789 orchestration) creep into the “Wonderful Counselor” exclamations in the chorus “For unto us a child is born.”   After all, you’re paying the trumpet and timpani players, so why not get your money’s worth?  I don’t like this philosophy, but I get the justification.

It was clear, however, that not just the trumpet players but also at least the sole second violin player as well were using performing materials reprinted from the 1902 Ebenezer Prout edition:  numbers that should have had unison violins (the aria “How beautiful are the feet,” for example) had instead a fuller string accompaniment.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of Prout edition Vln. II part p. 27 (from scan at IMSLP #47447)

The conductor is a friend, so I asked him about this.  “They brought their own partbooks.  It wasn’t worth fixing.”  Particularly when you're operating on just one or two rehearsals, this is certainly efficient:  they’ve already marked it (bowings, etc.) and are used to it.  Why fight it for the one or two people in the audience who will grind their teeth?  (When it is a community performance anyway, who in their right mind would expect a purist approach?)

Such textual mash-ups hardly do any damage, at least as far as the vast majority of the audience is concerned.  What was performed was basically “Prout lite”:  we didn’t have the full Prout orchestration—flutes, clarinets, horns, etc.—but we had bits of his re-workings running in parallel against (and within the confines of) Handel's economical original scoring.  So what?

I guess the “so what?” is the principle of conflating editions by letting performers in an ensemble supply their own, independently of each other.  I was treated to an execrable example of this a few weeks later, and it gives rise to my thoughts today.  It was a pops concert by a community orchestra which also featured a local chorus.  The show concluded with a holiday sing-along section.  One of the sing-along carols was “O come, all ye faithful” (Adeste fideles—a tune which has a fascinating textual history of its own).  When we started a second verse—to the text “Sing, choirs of angels”—several sopranos in the choir took it upon themselves to sing the descant.  By this I mean a very popular descant devised by David Willcocks very early in his tenure as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge.

SOURCE:  detail of Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961) p. 89.

It is popular for good reason, as it makes very effective counterpoint out of a sequential figure familiar from another carol, the Renaissance tune associated with the 1901 text “Ding! dong! merrily on high.”  The earliest source I have located with Willcocks’s setting is a live recording of (portions of) the 1958 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  (More on that source later).  Many choral sopranos know this descant off by heart, and I have been only mildly surprised to see it appear even in hymnals—an implicit invitation for the congregation to join in as well.  This descant and its attendant harmonization, and with it Willcocks’s organ harmonization of the final verse, have become standards the world over.  Indeed, the final verse’s half-diminished-seventh chord at the word Word shows up regularly in Twitter and Facebook posts at this time of year—apparently as a sort of Christmas “money shot.”  By way of example:

SOURCE: screenshot from Twitter:  do your own search “Willcocks word chord” on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever and you'll get plenty of further examples.

Curious as it may seem, there have been instances in history of a descant supplanting the original as the main melody.  This seems to have happened in the case of “Puer natus in Bethlehem” and—for all we know—maybe “O come, O come Emmanuel” as well.  (For discussion of the textual situations of each, see The New Oxford Book of Carols, pp.172 and 45.)  I don’t think Adeste fideles is threatened at all by the descant, but Willcocks’s descant is clearly here to stay:  maybe because it seems to be such fun to sing.  And so the sopranos sang the descant at the concert—even though it was harmonically incompatible with the version the orchestra was playing.  It sounded awful.  And it could be easily fixed with the rehearsal instruction “Sopranos:  no descant.” If they would cooperate.

On the same program, the choir sang along to Leroy Anderson’s charming miniature Sleigh Ride.  Mitchell Parish’s very clever lyrics were written for it when it was adapted to be a popular song—an extremely popular song, as it happens.  The original key and modulations don’t really work for singers, and it showed at this performance.  I love the piece, but here it was marred by trying to have both the song and the original orchestral work together:  Messiah wasn’t harmed really by the simultaneous versions, but Sleigh Ride was destroyed—just as was “Sing, choirs of angels.”  I’m not a purist, but without the textual meddling these performances would have been just fine.   Bah!  Humbug!

SOURCE:  scan of 1961 edition cover;
I'm not sure of the date of my copy, but
on the back the printed price is $1.80.

One final note about the Willcocks descant:  I believe it first appeared in print in 1961 in the fantastically successful anthology Carols for Choirs, coedited by Willcocks and Reginald Jacques.  This book has had a host of successors (so that it in reprints it was retitled Carols for Choirs 1), and has spread the “Lessons & Carols” style and liturgy all around the world, providing texts for others to perform.  Even in its earliest printing, however, the descant is not quite the same as the version captured on the 1958 recording.  In the recording, the trebles sing the text “Gloria in excelsis deo” at the start of the verse, rather than (with the rest of the choir and congregation) “Sing, choirs of angels.”  Unfamiliar as it is to me with this text, I have to say that I like Willcocks’s original version better:  the imperative Sing of the congregation is answered by the angelic voices above.  Oh, well; second thoughts are not always improvements.  Maybe some enterprising choral director will restore Willcocks’s original version on occasion?  (A word to the wise: just make sure everyone is singing the same version.)

3. Handel with care?

The blurb on the back of the recent Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (2013) begins

Absolutely.  And although the focus of this blog will generally be sources written down and printed before the digital age, increasingly our access to such sources is through some digital means—an image on the screen, whether or not it ever makes it on to paper in our hands.  Inevitably this blog will often deal with the IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project—a massive database of musical sources, mostly printed editions, but some manuscript copies or and even “born digital” files that need not necessarily ever have made it to paper.  There are full scores, vocal scores, parts, arrangements and transcriptions, and more recently even recordings.  The idea behind it is to make public domain material accessible globally—although of course what is in the public domain varies across the globe according to the copyright laws of any given jurisdiction.

There is much good to be said about the IMSLP, but I think many of its users have little sense of the problems inherent in this sort of resource.  Principally, as a wiki there is tremendous inconsistency in the quality, quantity, and reliability of the information it makes so readily accessible—even when the contributors to the site include major research libraries.  As an example, here is what the IMSLP currently displays at the head of the section marked “Full Scores” for Handel’s oratorio Messiah (which Handel was in the middle of writing exactly 275 years ago):

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of http://imslp.org/wiki/Messiah,_HWV_56_(Handel,_George_Frideric) (accessed 30 Aug. 2016)

These first items seem to present two different digital images of the autograph manuscript (the “composing score,” as it is generally called).  The second of these items (it currently appears in two different scans—IMSLP #18920 and #296169) is a scan of a facsimile published in 1892 as Vol. 45a of the German Handel Society’s complete edition.  The bulk of the project was the work of an individual, Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901).  For his Messiah facsimile, Chrysander sought to draw together all known autograph material for the work.  This volume thus contains not only the whole of the composing score (British Library R.M.20.f.2), but also a few settings in Handel’s hand in the “conducting score” (held in the collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford), as well as two settings of the text “How beautiful are the feet” which Chrysander mistakenly thought related to Messiah (amounting to some 25 pages from yet another manuscript in the BL—whose Handel holdings have all been digitized and made available), and a few sketch leaves at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.  This facsimile is therefore not intended to represent a single source:  it is an anthology of sources.

The first item listed on the IMSLP (divided into four files—#414200-414203) has a very misleading description.  Despite the claim that this is the “holograph manuscript,” these files together comprise a color scan of the same (black-and-white) 1892 facsimile that appears in black-and-white scans immediately below.  It troubles me that the scan omits the title page and front matter of the 1892 facsimile, and thus presents itself to be a scan of the autograph itself.  There are plenty of tidbits to reveal its true identity.  The source is indicated as being “State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg (D-Hs):  M/B/1722.” A user familiar with Handel sources would know that D-Hs has a very important collection of Handel’s conducting scores, the bulk of it coming to Hamburg through Chrysander himself.  The composing score of Messiah, however, is not in that collection, but in the British Library, as noted above.  D-Hs has made available a digital scan of M/B/1722, and it is much more honest than what is in the IMSLP:  there is the front matter for all to see—and indeed we see from the book plate on the inside front cover that this copy was originally the property of its editor.

Source:  cropped screenshot of http://gcs.sub.uni-hamburg.de/PPN818310642/2000/0/00000002.tif

IMSLP #414200-414203 does not include that image.  But Chrysander’s printed page numbers are there, which should arouse some suspicions.  There is no signal to the user, however, that these files have pages from several different documents—anthologized in print in 1892.  Anyone turning to these files to do their Handel research will get a false sense of the document(s).

That would be bad enough, but Chrysander’s facsimile is false in another important respect—no matter which scan is consulted.  In his efforts to produce as clean a facsimile as possible, Chrysander doctored the images.  In his preface, he complains of an earlier facsimile issued by the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1868:

“Handel’s music paper is always the best of his age, but yet the ink often shows through.  In the printed photograph, the ink of these passages appears on the wrong side of the page with the same thickness and blackness as real notes, if it has not been previously carefully removed.  In the London [1868] facsimile the photographic plate is generally printed off rudely without any such cleansing.  The result is that the notes that show through seem to have equal value with the written ones, and make the page not only ugly, but in numerous places illegible, and even give rise to false readings.  I have removed more than ten thousand such blots from the London edition by comparison with the autograph.”  (Preface, p. v)

In his removal of “ten thousand such blots,” Chrysander sometimes went too far.  Here is a glimpse of Chrysander’s facsimile:  the tenor staff of bb. 111-122 of the chorus “And the Glory of the Lord”:

Source:  cropped screenshot of IMSLP #18920

http://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/7/7f/IMSLP18920-PMLP22568-HG_Band_45a.pdf p. 21 (pdf p. 41)

Here is the same excerpt as it appears on the scan available on the British Library website:

Source:  cropped screenshot of http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=r.m.20.f.2_f012r

 And, for good measure, the same selection as it appears in the new facsimile issued by Bärenreiter in 2008:

Source:  cropped from a digital scan (600 dpi) JPEG of the printed facsimile.

It appears to me that these last two are identical—and I would guess that the scans that appear on the BL website are the same digital files used in the production of the Bärenreiter volume.  (I gladly acknowledge that it was Donald Burrows’s commentary in the new Bärenreiter facsimile that drew my attention to the doctored Chrysander facsimile, and to these details particularly.)  The text in the new BL scan is replete with the blotches and blains that Chrysander so painstakingly removed.  But in his clean-up, Chrysander changed the text:  his fourth note is clearly on the fourth line (a C# in the tenor clef), where the blotted version reproduced in the later scan extends well into the fourth space—and that D is confirmed by the doubling in the viola line (which had no blot and so did not need to be cleaned):

Source:  viola line of Chrysander facsimile, as above; this is in alto clef

This D is the reading Chysander ultimately adopted in his edition of the work, with no comment about the apparent discrepancy in his facsimile.

Speaking of the blotchiest bar in the tenor line here (b. 119), Max Seiffert (who, after Chrysander’s death in 1901, brought the edition of Messiah through the press) comments

Source:  screenshot of http://petrucci.mus.auth.gr/imglnks/usimg/0/0b/IMSLP17693-Handel_Messiah.pdf, p. x (pdf p.8).  Seiffert’s A = Handel’s composing score; O, G and H are copies by John Christopher Smith (O is the copy in the Bodleian, G is at the Morgan Library in New York, and H a subsequent copy that was acquired by Chrysander for the Hamburg library.  Why doesn’t Hamburg scan THAT for the IMSLP?).

Compare the two images of the composing score here (bb. 119-120 from “And the glory of the Lord”—Chrysander from IMSLP #414203 on the left; BL scan on the right):

John Tobin (who edited Messiah for the new Handel complete edition, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe—a project to which I will have cause to return in later posts) reads Handel’s procedure here differently than Seiffert—but then again Seiffert may have only seen the score via the already doctored facsimile.  According to Tobin (who translates this into the treble clef):

Source:  scan of John Tobin, Handel’s Messiah:  A Critical Account of the Manuscript Sources and Printed Editions (1969), p. 190

“Obviously in error,” and it is easy enough to see how Handel’s copyist could make such an error.  Tobin’s putative original reading fits the blots which the BL scan shows, but would be less clear from the 1892 facsimile’s reading (even blotty as it remains in this instance).  Seiffert complete misses out the E.

Just as another example of Chrysander’s tidying up, here is the 1892 facsimile’s presentation of something out of the Bodleian conducting score (which he included because it was in Handel’s hand); note particularly the annotations at the top of the page.

Source:  screenshot of IMSLP #18920 http://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/7/7f/IMSLP18920-PMLP22568-HG_Band_45a.pdf p. 281 (pdf p. 301)

Here is the page as reproduced in the 1974 facsimile of the conducting score:

Source:  a digital scan (600) JPEG of the printed facsimile (f. 57 of part II).

Not only has Chrysander eliminated a lot of the marginalia, as Donald Burrows points out, he has misread “Miss Young” and converted it into “Mißion.”  Note also his tempo marking:  allegro Larghetto.  (Whatever that means.)  In the original, is it allegro, that is, struck through—or is that just a stray smudge?  (In Chysander the smudge is eliminated.)  Its placement to the far left suggests to my eye that it was added after Larghetto, and thus maybe less likely to be a cancelled (earlier) marking.  But the sources are inconsistent for the tempo marking of this movement:  the version (for bass) preserved in the composing score is marked NBallegro; another version reads Andante.  Yet another lacks any instruction.

And so on.  With a work as textually well-documented as Messiah, the problems posed by these IMSLP items (and what they claim to be) scarcely do any real harm.  Indeed, by the time you read this, it may have been fixed.  (Check here.)  Even so, there have been tens of thousands of downloads of these files—if the IMSLP figures are to be believed—so somebody is using them.  This is surely the tip of the iceberg, and caution is advised.