26. Moving targets (Episode #4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADDENDUM  21 June 2021

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

21. Moving targets (Episode #3)

Two Settling Scores projects intersect in this post—the ongoing series of “moving targets” and the seventh installment of my

Even the exact boundaries around Bach’s oeuvre are a perpetually moving target, and the best illustration of these is the very notion of the “complete” organ works.  A review of the contents of the standard complete editions of Bach's organ works is a good introduction to the disputed borders of this repertoire.  Those editions, all widely in use today, are (in roughly chronological order)

Peters = the first attempt at a complete edition of the organ music, edited principally by Friedrich Conrad Griepenkerl (1782-1849); seven volumes were issued by C. F. Peters 1844-1847, with an eighth following in 1852, when the series was regarded as complete.  In 1881 the ninth volume appeared, and that gradually morphing ninth volume is my principal concern in this post.  Despite its age, the Peters edition is not to be discounted by any means, as some important manuscript sources available to Griepenkerl have subsequently disappeared. This edition had a splendidly ostentatious title page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of title page of a copy of Peters Vol. XVIII (1852, but this copy must be printed between 1881 and 1904, as the first version of Volume IX is listed in an advertisement on the back cover)—cropped because of the huge tracts of nineteenth-century margins that would take up too much real estate on my blog.  Subsequent reprints significantly reduced the margin size.  The changing dimensions of different printings of a single edition would be an interesting topic, if one had but time.

BG = although Griepenkerl beat them to it, of course the first attempt at publishing the complete works eventually got around to the organ works.  These appeared in five volumes during the years 1853-1893; these became the text underlying a practical edition issued by Breitkopf & Härtel, but the original BG is still used today because of (for example) Dover’s reprints of much of it.  It also became the main source text for a number of other practical editions—particularly those issued by G. Schirmer (the Schweitzer edition), Novello & Co. (early volumes were based on Peters, and some volumes have subsequently been re-edited), and Bornemann (the Dupre edition).  

20th B&H = In the late 1930s, Bärenreiter had started an edition of the organ works, edited by Hermann Keller; this project as aborted because of the Second World War after only two volumes.  After the war, two new editions capitalized on the recent explosion of Bach textual scholarship.  Heinz Lohmann edited this ten-volume set for Breitkopf & Härtel, with the first volume appearing in 1968, but with the set completed scarcely a decade later.

NBA = The other edition which began to emerge after the war was that of the Neue Bach Ausgabe, the new complete works.  Series IV (organ works) had eight planned volumes, but a ninth was necessary because of the 1985 discovery of the so-called “Neumeister Chorales,” now attributed to Bach's early years; much later came the appearance of two additional volumes featuring works from the Bach circle that could plausibly (if doubtfully) be attributed to him.  All told, it took fifty years for Series IV to be completed.  This expansion of the series indicates a tendency to cast the net ever wider—an understandable temptation when the NBA project as a whole is an obligatory expense at many libraries around the world.  The sales numbers may be comparatively small, but they are pretty much guaranteed.  (Bärenreiter issues offprints of the musical text of all eleven volumes, and it is in this form that the NBA shows up on the music racks of organs.)  Now a new revision (NBArev) promises at least two volumes of organ chorales, which I assume will essentially replace the flawed Ser. IV. Bde. 2-3, the earliest of the original volumes to appear.

Truly, of the making of many Bach editions there is no end.  Two very interesting editions are ongoing as I write:

Leupold = This is a very serious scholarly edition that does a very good job of catering to the very serious student.  All the volumes that have appeared so far have been edited by George B. Stauffer, certainly a prominent name in the last generation of Bach scholarship, and Stauffer does his best to make the editorial issues clear to the user.  It's not clear to me how many volumes this edition will eventually comprise, as some are to be issued in two very distinct versions (“Standard Urtext” and “Practical Urtext”—a concept which seems a little dubious to me).

21st B&H = And now Breitkopf & Härtel is at it again, with an entirely new edition planned to comprise ten volumes.  With so many accumulating, it seems odd to call this one a “welcome addition,” but in my estimation it is just that—and the edition I would recommend to organists wanting a chance to look anew at works they have played for years (although in my experience using any unfamiliar edition will force that new glimpse).  This is certainly an edition for the new century—taking advantage of digital advances (with online resources and enclosed CD-ROMs which allow users to print out the variants they want while avoiding the bulk and waste of paper for those who don’t require them).   To quote the Preface, “In addition to presenting the musical text with comments, this disk allows synoptic depictions and a cogent search process for specific measures, thus providing a better and faster overview than would be possible with a printed version.”

And surely that’s enough to be getting on with.  But here I want to focus just on the oldest of these, and just its last volume, which appeared in three substantially different manifestations—first in 1881 (three decades after the rest of the set), then again in 1904, and finally again in 1940.  Each issue was the work of a different editor—in 1881 by Griepenkerl’s successor Ferdinand Roitszch; Max Seiffert’s 1904 revision coinciding with his important discovery of new sources; and Hermann Keller's in 1940 at the moment that his Bärenreiter set was abandoned.  Even from the start, Vol. IX was something of a catch-all volume, with a mixture of chorale-based and free works.

Between them, the three different versions of Peters Volume IX contain some 38 individual works, but only twelve works appear in all three.  Several of the works included by Roitszch in 1881 were later ruled to be misattributions.  Seiffert excluded three of these (BWV 692; BWV Anh. 57 and 171), and three that escaped the 1904 purge were tossed out by Keller (BWV 561, 580, and 587).  Further, seven of Seiffert’s twelve new additions were deleted by Keller (BWV 742, 743, 747, 752, 754, 757, and 763), although five of those have subsequently found a place in the NBA.  (Only one of Keller's seven additions was not retained in the NBA (BWV 1027/4a); the music is not printed, but it is given its own section in the critical report to Ser. IV, Bd. 11.)

Excluding the thorny question of which Clavier pieces were not intended for organ anyway, if one takes the Bach organ repertoire at its widest breadth (as does the late, lamented Peter Williams, for example, in his excellent survey, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach—and really his second edition doesn't completely supersede his first) I find that there is actually no single “complete” edition that comprises the repertoire in toto.  Even if one has ready access to the BG and NBA, there are still missing works (not likely to appear in either Leupold or 21st B&H).  I note, for example, two works that have appeared only in Seiffert’s 1904 version of Peters Vol. IX (BWV 752, and 763) and you will search in vain for them elsewhere (unless you are content with homemade editions posted on the IMSLP).  As more and more performers perform the whole corpus as Bach organ “marathons” [Google it ], it would be nice to know exactly how the placement of the finish line is determined.

As Williams has astutely remarked, “[i]t is a curious irony that the uniform appearance presented by any edition of Bach’s organ works distorts them in that it does not give a true impression of the disparate nature and origins of the pieces themselves....  In giving pieces of edited music to the public, editors misrepresent them, despite earnest endeavors to do the opposite.” [p. 274].  The impressive bindings of such series conceal the bewildering array of textual situations for the repertoire contained therein.  Even that repertoire won’t stand still for a generation.

18. Moving targets (Episode #2)

Although I meant to get back to this a long time ago, this is only the second in a series considering different editions of the same work issued by the same publisher but without any notice of textual discrepancies between them.  Sometimes these changes are hardly more than cosmetic, but sometimes they are real nuisances, and sometimes inexplicable meddling.

SOURCE:  scan of 2013 printing

The example in this post will be the two Alphonse Leduc editions of Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto (1934), and I will be considering only the versions issued “avec accompagnement de piano” rather than the full score.  The first edition appeared in 1936, bearing the plate number “A.L. 19,256.”  A scan of a 2007 reprint of this edition (judging from the imprint date on the last page, anyway) is available on the IMSLP.  I cannot date the second edition, but the terminus ante quem is 2013, the imprint date of the copy I have to hand, and would roughly coincide with Leduc’s acqusition by the multinational Music Sales Group.  (Worldcat doesn’t help much to date this second edition:  all of the Leduc printings listed there are said to be 19 pages, while this is 22pp.)  The copyright date on the second edition remains 1936, and indeed both the cover (at right) and the plate number (AL 19 256) also remain the same.  I strongly oppose their re-use of the same plate number when the editions are manifestly different productions.  In any case, my use of plate number is not really accurate:  even if the first edition was engraved on copper plates, the second edition is a re-setting via computer notation software.  It is the tell-tale short cuts typical of computer-setting that I want to highlight here, as I think the earlier version makes for a clearer read.  Here is an example from the very first page:

SOURCES:  bb. 6-7; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 1 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 1 (right) 

Crowded as the first edition may be in b. 7, the five voices of the counterpoint are quite clear, and the pianist understands which notes belong to which line.  In the second edition, there is no delineation of the five voices, and the beaming in the new top “voice” even obscures that on beat 2 there is an entry—the highest, and thus arguably a climax—of the main motive of the introduction.  The viola and cello lines are subsumed into a sort of new “tenor” voice.  Most troubling is the movement of the f marking ahead by a beat, which suggests even a bringing out of the inner voice at beat 2.  The orchestral score presents the opposite situation—the f appears first in the first violins (beat 2) and in the rest of the ensemble a beat or more later.

What is frustrating about this is that it is merely the product of laziness:  it would take a little more time at the computer to arrive at the configuration of the first edition, and the setter apparently didn’t think it was worth it.  The version on the right is marginally easier to play, but I think that is the only thing I can say in its favor.

There are a number examples where to me the changes in the notational configurations in the two Leduc editions do not amount to improvements, but I will consider just a few here.

SOURCES:  bb. 47-48; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 3 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 4 (right) 

That one is hard to explain.  To my eye, the first edition is clearer, although I grant that the reading on the right makes the crossing of the upper parts more obvious.  Still, the lower stave looks curious, with the stem-down downbeat and no rest above it.

SOURCES:  bb. 131-32; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 7 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 9 (right) 

This one is my favorite, a true comedy of error.  I think I can reconstruct what happened in this instance.  I think the computer-setter set the lower staff first, then—while setting the upper staff and converting it to the bass clef—decided to move the mano destra line also into the upper staff.  The comedy is that the setter never deleted this line in the lower staff, so it is duplicated erroneously, uselessly—indeed meaninglessly.  Maybe it’s just me, but I chuckle to myself about such absurdities.

SOURCES:  bb. 227-28; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 12 (top) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 14 (bottom) 

Here I would argue that both versions are unplayable as notated (at least at the 100-beats-a-minute tempo).  The second edition moves the bass-line up an octave—something a player might do anyway—even when Glazunov scores this for cellos and basses an octave and two octaves below this register (but not at all in the register notated here).  As an accompanist often playing these sorts of orchestral reductions, I generally prefer to know what the general texture is (even when unplayable by me) and adapt as I have to than to have someone else attempt to much simplification for me.  The first edition just gives more.  It is instructive to compare this passage as it appears in the recent Bärenreiter edition:

SOURCE: bb. 227-28 of piano reduction by Martin Schelhaas (Bärenreiter 8732a), p. 13; the bar numbers are different because this edition counts the cadenza as one bar.  (It includes three different versions of the cadenza, and an interesting tale it is.)

Throughout the Bärenreiter edition the piano reduction has been entirely rethought with an eye toward simplifying it down to something reasonable—even though the editors acknowledge that the Leduc first edition piano reduction seems to have been the work of Glazunov himself rather than “A[ndre] Petiot,” to whom the Leduc editions have given the credit.  Thus the Bärenreiter “Urtext”—and a very good edition it is in many respects—has jettisoned the authentic piano part.  Although the “Urtext” label appears on the cover, the title page is more accurate:  “With an Urtext Solo part... Piano Reduction based on the Urtext.”  (There is a critical report included in the corresponding urtext full score, but there is of course not one for the new piano reduction, which also lacks a description of the sources.  Martin Schelhaas seems to have used the second Leduc edition as his starting point, but the result is a wholly new and worthy reduction.)  This piano reduction also includes an additional soloist part (i.e., non-urtext), edited for performance by Carina Raschèr, daughter of Sigurd Raschèr, for whom the work was written.

This publication is not the strongest in the Bärenreiter catalogue (as even without hunting for them I found small errors in both the musical text of the full score and the critical report), and it is even more curious for its mixture of urtext and practical approaches.  (I will return to that particular dilemma in my next post.)  Nonetheless, it is not the focus of this post, and it is in any case better than the second Leduc edition.  I find it extremely irksome that Leduc would reissue the work, bearing the same plate number as the first edition but with an inferior presentation of the text.  The Leduc standard has been lowered, although perhaps not to half-mast.

4. Moving targets (Episode #1)

As will be gathered from the title, I will be doing an occasional series of “moving targets” posts.  In these posts, my targets are not the musical works so much as the editions of them—editions which change while under cover; sometimes under the same physical cover without any notice from publisher of the nature of the changes.  Sometimes the ISBN or ISMN remains the same, so that the alterations might only be discovered by accident when they are not advertised as “corrected.”  But even when they are so advertised, it isn’t always immediately clear what we hold in our hands.

For a while in the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of the Fassung letzter Hand held sway in scholarly editions of music, particularly those of 18th and 19th century music.  To a certain extent it still does.  It doesn’t really translate well:  “the version of the last hand” doesn’t convey much.  It really means something more like “the last authorized version.”  The concept has even been stretched to mean the version the composer indicated in some way that (s)he preferred, even if (s)he never documented it precisely.  (A good example of this is William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida.  The version that appears in the William Walton Edition is not one the composer ever heard or even put down on paper, but it is consistent with the comments he made about the 1976 Covent Garden revision:  he preferred the cuts, but he didn't like the transpositions and other alterations to accommodate Janet Baker's lower tessitura.)  And of course the idea of “new and improved” is a good marketing tool for selling another copy of something to someone who already owns it.  So even if some musicologists have moved on to “process editions” which document a piece in various stages of its existence, commercial publishers love it when a composer’s final thoughts can boost sales in an already established work.

In the course of looking into something for quite a different post appearing months hence, I stumbled across an interesting example of this.  I knew already that Leonard Bernstein's Candide has a complex textual history.  The show has been different things at different times, not only with lots of music scrapped and then resurrected (sometimes with entirely new lyrics, assigned to a different character), but the whole book replaced and then later patched and re-patched.  A good sign of this textual confusion is the copyright page of the only published full (i.e., orchestra) score of any version of the show—billed on its title page as “”SCOTTISH OPERA EDITION OF THE OPERA-HOUSE VERSION / (1989).”

And of course this doesn’t account for the further vicissitudes this work has undergone since Bernstein’s death in 1990.  I don’t expect to live to see a comprehensive critical edition of Candide.  It would probably take at least four volumes:  the 1956 version, the 1973 version (in which Bernstein took no active part, but which had great consequences for the subsequent manifestations), the 1988 version, and a huge appendix of all the other material, including details of at least the 1971 and 1982 versions.  The only project I have run across that seeks such comprehensivity in a work with such textual complications is this edition of Bizet's Carmen, but I don't know how much of it has actually come to fruition, as all of the information detailing what it was supposed to encompass has disappeared from the web.  [Here are scans of a few pages I downloaded a few years ago.]

Regarding the 1994 full score, the Bernstein website acknowledges:

While this publication encompasses the complete score, it by no means reflects a final, frozen show. Like its hero, Candide is perhaps destined never to find its perfect form and function; in the final analysis, however, that may prove philosophically appropriate.

Fine.  But Boosey & Hawkes seems to want to have it another way.  In this self-same 1994 score, we find the following notice:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. [i] of 1994 score

And yet, when the overture was included in Leonard Bernstein Orchestral Anthology, vol. 2 (1998), we find a notice that at first glance would amount to pretty much the same thing:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. viii of 1998 score

These two scores cannot present identical readings, however, because the instrumentation is substantially different.  The 1998 score presents what must be called—although it isn’t anywhere that I can see—the “concert version” of the work, scored for full symphony orchestra (basically triple wind with three percussionists, in addition to timpani).  This scoring seems to be Bernstein's own, as here is the first page of his manuscript (according to the Bernstein website).  This orchestra is too big for a theater pit, and always was.  The original 1956 Broadway recording is for a smaller ensemble, and from my listening it seems to correspond closely to scoring of the “Scottish Opera” version.  (The two aren’t quite identical, at least to my ear:  the most prominent differences are in the percussion.)  The reduced scoring—and reducing also the expense of remunerating musicians—cuts and redistributes the music of one flute, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, a trombone, and a percussionist.  That saves 10 players, not counting shrinking the string sections too.

Listening to the 1989 recording, one finds that Bernstein actually used the full symphonic scoring for the overture, and the reduced scoring for the rest of the show.  (Just listen to the percussion at the beginning.  If in doubt, watch the live performance given a few days before the recording was made.)  Thus, despite the apparent contradiction because of the different scoring, both statements reproduced above could be true, as both texts do relate to the 1989 recording.  But it seems more complicated than that.

Although the 1994 publication is the only edition of the orchestral score of the complete show, the overture has been published in score three other times (not counting arrangements for band, etc.): in 1960 (G. Schirmer), reprinted with a few alterations in 1990 as “corrected edition” (Boosey & Hawkes), and newly computer-generated in 1998 as “corrected edition” (in the Boosey & Hawkes Anthology mentioned above).  I do not want to bog down this blog with all of the textual variants of these three editions, but the findings of my somewhat hasty collation of these sources are here, for the most indefatigable of readers.

A few of the most audible differences are worth mentioning.  One is the tempo:  the 1960 version is quite a bit faster (half-note = 152 at the beginning; whole-note equals 96 at the coda) than the subsequent editions (half-note = 132 at the beginning; half-note equals 152 at the coda), although the original metronome marks appear in the 1976 vocal score of the 1973 version.  This slowing down of the whole piece is consistent with Bernstein's own recordings.  His recording with the New York Phil made on Sept. 28, 1960 is at the tempi published in 1960; his 1989 London Symphony recording is at the tempi published in 1990.  In this respect at least the scores published in the 1990s can be said to reflect his performances in 1989.

This is not always the case.  The 1998 score (which claims to reflect changes made in 1989) includes an interesting change made at some later point.  Bernstein's performance 1960 recording, 1989 recording (and indeed the 1989 concert performance) all give this reading for the cymbals.  Note particularly the two clashes in b. 51

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1960 G. Schirmer score, p. 10, bb. 47-53

The 1998 score—and only that score—prints this:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1998 Boosey & Hawkes anthology, p. 9, bb. 47-53

Sensible though this is (i.e., aligned with the brass pattern), it is nowhere to be heard on Bernstein's recordings, nor indeed on any recording I have located before the 1997 “New Broadway Cast” recording.  It is not in the 1994 score, which claims to be based also “on the manuscripts of Leonard Bernstein at the Library of Congress.”  One wonders on what authority this change was made.   I haven’t seen those manuscripts, but even if the 1998 reading accords with the original notation, do we know enough—does anyone know enough, that is—about how the 1960 reading came about to know it does not have an authority superceding the original?  Is it an accident that has been performed faithfully for decades (and recorded by the composer), or is it the correct reading?  Are Bernstein’s recordings of it evidence of at least tacet acceptance?  And if the 1998 score is going to interpose such a change, should there not at least be some indication of how and/or why?  (The battle scene in Act I of the 1994 score (no. 5f) has at one point cymbals matching the reading of the 1998 score of the overture, and that might have been the source of the change; but I would like to have been told.)

I think the most curious variant reading is one that was revised at some point before the 1989 performance and recording.  The 1960 reading of the horn line in the final canon before the coda was this:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1960 G. Schirmer score, p. 38, bb. 225-230

Note the lack of a syncopation at the end of b.227—and it is to be heard thus in the early recordings, even though this departs from the strict canon with the other upper parts.  For me the puzzle is why it was ever this way at all—but it upholds the old maxim of philology that the more “difficult” reading is more likely the original.  (Who would think to modify it to this reading?)

The three scores printed in the 1990s all give the syncopated figure, yielding a more conventional strict canon:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1998 Boosey & Hawkes anthology, p. 34, bb. 225-230

And, until now, that was the way I thought it had always gone.


I will return periodically to instances of publishers accumulating more confusion than clarity.  That works exist in multiple versions doesn’t trouble me in the least.  Indeed, I find such differences to be of consuming interest.  But I am irked when a publisher makes a text more difficult to access, and particularly so when the information is ambiguous or misleading.  Still, it does give me something to write about.