56. Plucky and adventury

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a recording of Handel’s op. 4 concerti featuring organist Ottavio Dantone directing the Accademia Bizantina.  I admire this recording a lot and encourage you to give it a listen.  (At the moment, at least, it is freely available as youtube playlist).  As the soloist, Dantone takes pleasing liberties in embellishing the notated text, and his playing has opened these works to me anew—works I thought I knew pretty well since my teenage years.  The musicality of Dantone’s interpretations is inspiring, especially the insouciance with which he takes the Andante of op. 4 no. 4:  I would never have had the courage to take it that slowly until hearing him do it.

But I was totally unprepared for one particular Dantone liberty:  as the B section repeats in the Gigue that finishes up Op. 4 no. 5, suddenly the strings of the orchestra are plucking away (at 01:24 on this video).

  Here’s an attempt at capturing what is going on at this moment of the performance:

SOURCE:  Handel Op. 4 no. 5, mvt. IV, bb. 11–16, as given in the Deutsche Händelgesellschaft edition, v. 28 (1868); in red-ink, I have notated my guess at what Dantone has interpolated; it is derived wholly from bb. 1–2 of the movement (not shown); it ignores the 4/2 harmony of the figured bass, but as Dantone is not realizing any figures anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter.

This is a textual interpolation that has no basis in any of the sources; it is entirely the fabrication of Dantone or someone involved in his recording.  Effective though it may be (and I am not convinced that it is), it arrested my attention because I don’t associate Handel with such use of a pizzicato tutti.  I don't know enough Handel to know how characteristic pizzicato is in his music—as an orchestral effect, I mean—but I dare say there must be some moments in the operas.  [See ADDENDUM.]  In any case, this stands out to my ears.  I have written previously of an interpolation that leans on the side of “too clever by half,” and this one goes in that category.  

But hearing it reminded of another pizzicato example that I had meant to track down:

Once again, this was music I thought I knew.  I have known Trevor Pinnock’s recordings of the Bach harpsichord concertos for a long time, first on audiocassette and then on CD.  The credits on that recording indicate that it employed the BG edition (1869), and in the late 1980s that was what was available to me through the Dover reprint.  I got to know those works very well, and had never heard or seen any pizzicato at this point until I was given the Rousset/Hogwood recordings many years later .  I was puzzled when I pored over the Bärenreiter facsimile of the autograph (which is somehow more inviting than the same scans available on Bach Digital): again there was no sign of pizzicato at this point.  But I guess I had not ever looked carefully enough at the NBA, because there it is all for all to see:

SOURCE:  composite of marked-up scans showing portions of pp. 208 and 209 of NBA Ser. VII bd. 4 (1999), showing BWV 1056/iii bb. 1–16.

I will grant that I associate a pizzicato orchestral texture more readily with Bach than with Handel.  Two examples that came immediately to mind are the knocking-on-the-door recitative from BWV 61 (which Bach marks as “senza l’arco” [“without the bow”]—the effect if not the term “pizzicato” [literally “pinched”]) and the gorgeous Adagio from this very concerto, BWV 1056.  Incidentally,  the NBA score erroneously lacks the instruction that the accompaniment in that movement is pizzicato (corrected on in an erratum on p. 214 of the corresponding Kritische Bericht volume).  The autograph has the instruction “pizzicato” above the first violin staff, and we may reasonably apply that instruction to the whole ensemble, but there is no true confirmation without the original string parts, which seem not to have survived.

SOURCE:  scan of p. 13 of Schulze’s Peters edition of
BWV 1056, showing the opening of the Largo.

All of this leads nicely to my theme, which regards moments of which there is some confusion in editions about whether the orchestra is arco or pizzicato; but as this particular example led me down a rabbit hole, I want to digress for just a moment to comment on the NBA text for this concerto—which is really a conflation of two sources: Bach’s autograph and a curious manuscript copy by J. N. Forkel in which the work is transposed up a tone.  It is too much to detail here, but peculiarities both of notation and readings in Forkel’s copy make it unlikely that it is connected to the hypothetical earlier version of this piece, often presumed to be a violin concerto in G Minor.  It is Forkel’s copy, apparently, that introduces those pizzicato echoes in the last movement, heard in the video performance above.  Perhaps it was not just the novelty of that instruction that caused the NBA editor, Werner Breig, to incorporate it into the new text; in any case, the NBA largely agrees with an edition from 1976 edited by another great Bach authority, Hans-Joachim Schulze.  Schulze, it seems, was the one who reassessed the value of Forkel’s copy, and the highly ornamented version of the melody of the slow movement has become the standard text for the work directly because of Schulze’s digging and advocacy.  Because the NBA essentially transmits Forkel’s version, that has become the text to play; indeed, the NBA relegates the (it would seem deficient) final reading of the autograph of the Adagio to an appendix, and the reconstruction of the yet-earlier reading to the critical report.  This movement (also familiar in another version as the opening sinfonia to BWV 156) deserves a post of its own, especially in the light of revelations by Ian C. Payne and Steve Zohn that it is actually Bach’s parody of a work by Telemann.

Here endeth the digression.  The other examples I want to consider involve instances of confusion about whether something should be bowed or plucked.  Both textures are effective in themselves:  part of the strength of the passage near the end of the scherzo of Beethoven’s fifth symphony when the texture tapers into almost-all-pizzicato is that we've already heard those same musical ideas in a more robust arco.  It is a thrilling moment.  

That is a justly celebrated example, of course, and even the worst editions are clear about Beethoven’s instructions.  But what of this moment at the end of the slow movement of his seventh symphony?

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 54 of Beethoven, Sym. no. 7, op. 92 (Mvt. II, bb. 265–278), ed. J. Del Mar (Bärenreiter 9007, 2000).

The surprise here is the first violins, specifically that last e, which is a canonic imitation that starts in the basses and cellos, quickly working its way up through the strings.  Jonathan Del Mar’s edition, reproduced above, indicates that that e is still pizzicato, and that the arco does not start until the f-sharp, already in the middle of this motif.  (Note that the second violins are the only ones to present this motif here arco—the lower strings are still pizz.)  Crazy?  Absurd?  Bizarre, certainly.  But, as Del Mar takes pains to point out, the autograph here is not at all ambiguous:

SOURCE:  corresponding page from Beethoven’s autograph, as reproduced and captioned in Del Mar’s critical commentary, p.14; I have added the red arrow.

He notes in the critical commentary that all authoritative sources agree on this, including the first edition, remarking:

“However felicitous this [change to one beat earlier] seemed to 20th-century ears (so that it is even perpetuated in Ub [=1994 Breitkopf Urtext]), it is important (a) to remember that it has nothing to do with Beethoven, nor is there any reason to suspect an error (b) to take account of the fact that it relied for its effect on a wholly spurious hairpin crescendo added to both Vl 1 and Vl 2 Br [=1863 Breitkopf] parts (though not the score) in 275.”

And indeed, here is a comparison of this moment in the old Breitkopf score and parts, using the scans available on IMSLP (which, for the parts, come from 20th century reprints of the 1864 parts):

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of details from scans of 1863 Breitkopf score p. 44 (from IMSLP #57874) with
 Vl. 1 (IMSLP #19906) and Vl. 2 (IMSLP #19907) parts, showing bb. 273–78.

Even those performers who are aware of what Beethoven wrote (not just what Breitkopf printed) may shy away from his instructions.  David Zinman, for example, whose recordings proclaimed their use of the new Del Mar / Bärenreiter edition, opts to let everything remain pizzicato to the end of the movement:

Perhaps a justification here is that the arco markings are in pencil, and thus written in at some point after the initial notation of the notes:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 126 of Beethoven's autograph, PL-Kj Mus. Ms. Beethoven Mendelssohn-Stiftung 9, available as IMSLP #888719 (scan p. 132).

This is actually a pervasive occurrence throughout this manuscript, as Del Mar observes:  “Unusually for a Beethoven autograph, many essential features of the music (e.g., almost all II 110–34 Fls, Obs, Cors) were written first in pencil, then (mostly) inked over; these are obviously contemporaneous with much of the ink composition, perhaps when for some reason Beethoven simply did not have a pen with him” (Critical Commentary, p. 21f.).

Claudio Abbado, however, obeys the arco instruction exactly as written in this 1999 recording:

Simon Rattle does the same, in this recording from 2002:

To my ear, the effect of delaying the arco is to heighten the dissonant clash of the f-sharp in the first violins against the a-minor triad in the winds, and to downplay the contrapuntal element:  yes, the motif is still presented in canon, but it sounds less so.  It sounds perfectly musical to me either way.  I suspect I prefer the delayed arco for the wrong reason:  that everyone has been doing it the other way.  But this isn’t just a case of rooting for the textual underdog.  It is just what Beethoven wrote.

And I understand why the consistent reading has lasted.  It seems odd—and without the scrawl on the autograph manuscript, we’d put it down to some error in transmission.  Here’s a case in Mozart where without the autograph we might also question the reading:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Mozart, K. 488/ii bb. 84–87 as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Werke, XVI/4 (Breitkopf 1879), scanned from Dover reprint.

That is the way the old Mozart edition prints it.  And this is a famous moment in this movement, a place that seems to be crying out for the pianist to embellish the solo line, and that is what usually attracts my attention in a performance of it.  But underneath the solo, what the autograph reveals is that the violins are not pizzicato, though the rest of the strings are.  (In the autograph, the violins lack the pizzicato instruction in b. 84, and the consequent return to arco in b. 92.  I’m not going to use up the space to illustrate that here, but you can check it out for yourself, as a scan of the autograph is available as IMSLP #293132—see pp. 52 and 54 of the pdf.)  It is an odd effect, and the reading of the old edition is more what one would expect.  But, as Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.... To be great is to be misunderstood.”  And of course there are people still playing it in that misunderstood, nevertheless consistent, way—with everybody pizzicato:

But there are also plenty of orchestras who play the accompaniment that Mozart actually wrote and as printed in the NMA, and I find that effect a little thrilling even, although I admit that now I don’t pay as much attention to the soloist:

For what it is worth, there is a similar texture in the finale of the Mozart piano concerto that immediately preceded this one, K. 482.  In that instance, all the strings play the eighth notes pizzicato, and the solo piano has the syncopated figure:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Mozart's autograph of K. 482/iii from IMSLP #384760, showing bb. 252–60.  Strings are on the top three staves and the very bottom, with the solo piano right hand on the third stave from the bottom.

This texture is much more straightforward—all strings pizzicato—so I would be surprised if any edition got it wrong.  If you want to hear it:

But I will close today with one of my favorite early eighteenth-century moments of orchestral pizzicato—this charming movement by J. S. Bach’s contemporary Johann David Heinichen (1683–1729).  It is an intriguing and adventurous texture, as the score instructs that the pizzicato violins are doubled by both flutes and recorders (two of each on both the violin lines are requested):

SOURCE:  cropped scan from IMSLP #401983 p. 22, showing the beginning of the third movement, alla breve, of Heinichen's F Major concerto, S. 235.

And here’s a performance which should brighten anyone’s new year:

ADDENDUM 02 January 2025

I am grateful to Byron Adams for immediately pointing out a Handel tutti pizzicato example: “Tune your harps to cheerful strains” in Esther.  It was exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for.

47. X marks the spot(s)

As with most of us these days, I’m working more from my home office than usual.  A week or so ago, as my eyes wandered during a Zoom session, they fell upon a box containing files from work during my first summer of graduate school—a project involving all of Mozart’s works for wind ensemble.  Some of the questions I considered that summer prompted a first-hand examination of the autograph manuscript of the thirteen-instrument serenade K. 361 (the so-called “Gran Partita”), held by the Library of Congress.  This document has garnered a lot of attention over the years:  I recall a remark by one of the librarians in the manuscript division that day that it “ought to be attached to a clothesline” because they brought it out so frequently.  The LOC published a widely-available facsimile of it in 1976, and a few years ago supplanted that with a high-resolution digital scan on their website.  Readers of this blog will recall that I used those scans in the previous post.

There was something from that research long ago that I had long meant to write about here, but it always seemed too complicated to explain cogently.  (My intention for this blog is basically non-technical writing about very technical stuff, and sometimes I live up to it.)  It has preoccupied me so much in recent days, however, that I thought I might as well give it a try.  So I pulled out the file and flipped through it until I found this photocopied page.

SOURCE:  scan of my photocopy of Book Conservation Report (dated July 1986) shelved with the autograph of K. 361

The above was preserved with the autograph when I examined it in July 1998.  (I have no idea if it still is, and I have no way of checking right now because the Library is closed to the public as part of the COVID-19 shutdown.)  This page gives details about a specific aspect of how the fascicles—the individual sections of the manuscript—are bound together.  The vertical lines represent the binder's threads passing through the spines of each fascicle to make a codex.  The penciled note at the top is my identification of the item; conservator Pamela Spitzmueller’s note below that says that the fascicles are “all double folios / except 6 and 13 / which are single / folio.”  (A double folio here means that one large sheet (folded to produce two leaves = four pages) is nested inside another.)  “All” is not completely accurate; the description in the critical commentary the NMA (pub. 2002) gives a more typical schematic representation of the folio structure of this manuscript, revealing a slight discrepancy in the collation.

SOURCE:  description of the structure of the autograph of K. 361 as presented in the critical report (ed. Dietrich Berke, 2002) of NMA VII/17/2 p. 35, available in full online here.

Here the fascicles are given Roman Numerals (I-XIV); the single leaf the NMA labels as IX was apparently counted in with the next fascicle in Spitzmueller’s diagram.  (My illegible note in ink below Spitzmueller’s legend was to indicate how the stub end of the single leaf IX was folded behind the binding of X—which together were labelled just “9” by Spitzmueller, so the NMA numbering differs by one from that point onward.  I called it “Coda” there because it is the coda of the fifth movement—the moment that figured prominently in that last post.  I am not sure when I made that note:  because it is in ink it couldn’t have been in the LOC reading room, but must have been fairly soon after that visit.)  But the most important detail of Spitzmueller’s diagram is her discovery of the consistent appearance of three sets of “unused sewing holes” in the last half of the manuscript (each of which she marks with an X).  It is impossible to know where and when the fascicles were first bound together as a codex, but Spitzmueller’s evidence suggests that the last portion of the manuscript were at some point bound without the first portion.  The first six fascicles have five holes each, (almost) uniformly placed; the rest have those five holes but an additional two more—again uniformly placed in each fascicle—which remained unthreaded in the binding as of 1986 when Spitzmueller examined it.  My suggestion here is that this last portion, consisting of the last four movements of the work (as we know it today), existed as its own four-movement work for a time, bound together apart from the rest.

The idea that the seven-movement work could have originally been shorter is nothing new:  in fact, the first publication of K. 361 presented it as two shorter works, adapted for a more standard scoring of wind octet (pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons):  one contained movements 1, 2 3, and 7; the other presented movements 5, 4, and 6 (in that order).  This of course does not account for my suggestion, which groups movements 4–5–6–7 in some order.  And it has been suggested that the work initially included four movements, based on the first unambiguous documented reference to this unique combination of instruments:

“I heard music for wind instruments to-day, too, by Herr Mozart, in four movements—glorious and sublime!  It consisted of thirteen instruments, viz. four corni, two oboi, two fagotti, two clarinetti, two basset-corni, a contreviolon, and at each instrument sat a master—oh, what an effect it made--glorious and grand, excellent and sublime!”

[Johann Friedrich Schink, quoted in Deutsch (trans.), pp. 232f.]

Sitting through yet another Zoom presentation the other day, I tried to construct a different schematic representation of all of this information:  the NMA collation of the manuscript structure; the portions of Spitzmueller’s “unused sewing holes” (bracketed in red); an indication of the two types of paper used in this manuscript (yellow shading indicates Tyson 57—unshaded portions are Tyson 56); along with labels for each movement, to show which pages they make up (along the bottom).  The green markings I will explain below.  (For a larger view of this densely-packed image, see this page.)

SOURCE:  my attempt to represent all the information cited above; this diagram should be read left-to-right, and as if looking at the manuscript right-side up (so that a Necker illusion would confuse things, as everything would then be turned inside out):  the first page is facing away from you on the left extreme, while the blank final page is facing away from you on the right extreme.  NOTE:  There are seven blank (unnumbered) pages:  one after p. 43 (end of Fascicle V); one after p. 68 (end of Fascicle X, between Vars. 2 and 3); four after p. 80 (end of Fascicle XII); and the final page of Fascicle XIII. 

The musicological literature concerning K. 361—and particularly its autograph manuscript—is unusually large, and a substantial portion of it is by the late Daniel N. Leeson (1932–2018).  An enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateur, he was co-editor of the 1979 NMA volume that included K. 361 (though not its 2002 critical report), and he continued to explore and write about it for the next several decades, producing several important articles in the Mozart-Jahrbuch.  Near the end of his life he summarized all he had to say about K. 361 in a self-published monograph, gran Partitta [sic—adhering to the spelling and capitalization on the first page of the autograph—although he notes that this inscription is not in Mozart’s hand].  In that book, Leeson endeavored to “summarize everything that I think is important and valuable to be known about this work” [p. 12], delving into many mysteries and proposing solutions.  One that left him stumped, though, is a series of markings, each on the first page of five successive fascicles—but written-over by the subsequent enumeration of the pages of the whole manuscript.  For my own convenience, I am borrowing his representation of these—a composite of scans of details of five different pages—although readers can refer to the full pages on the Library of Congress scan here:  No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and No. 5.

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of Leeson, gran Partitta, p. 31.

It is these markings that I have indicated in green on my diagram above.  It can be clearly seen that all of these pages are within the section that Spitzmueller’s evidence suggests was at one time bound separately.  That is intriguing:  might these numbers and these holes have something to do with each other?

Leeson could find no meaning in the numbers.  His speculations about their origins go so far as to suggests they (not in Mozart's hand) were on the pages even before any music was written on them:

“What these sequential numbers represent, No. 1 ... No. 5, in entirely unknown.  They serve no enumerative purpose in describing anything in K. 361.  That there is no other such superfluous information anywhere on the 34 surfaces of these five units of paper is a clear indication that they—and, perhaps, others not known to us—were prepared in this fashion before Mozart began composing K. 361.”  [p. 30]

He notes that the numbers start where the type of paper changes (although there is no “No. 6” for the last fascicle of Tyson 56).  But I believe Leeson is wrong to say these “serve no enumerative purpose”:  what they do is place these fascicles in the order they now appear—putting the Theme and Variations (which begins at “No. 3”) after the Romance (which comprises Nos. 1 and 2).  What if at some earlier point the fascicles (and thus the movements) were in a different order?  I communicated this idea to Leeson in the summer of 1998, we corresponded briefly about it.  He pointed out that we know next to nothing about the way Mozart’s manuscripts were bound during his lifetime—if they were at all; and that to advance my hypothesis would require years of trying to sort out that issue for the whole corpus (much as Tyson did with watermarks).  I had other things I wanted to work on, so I left it there.

I have speculated on this blog before (as with my hare-brained idea about the absence of small-note ornaments in Bach autograph scores, and their presence in autograph performing parts):  indeed, it is one of the pleasures of writing a blog like this one.  I am a scholar of neither Bach nor Mozart, but I have found it fun to poke my head in the door (so to speak), eavesdrop for a bit, and see what I can make of the textual issues.  This is armchair musicology, admittedly, but I don’t think it is entirely irresponsible.  My speculation (not wholly from the armchair) in this case:  the autograph of K. 361 suggests that the work consisted at some point—maybe not originally, but possibly at the time of the documented 1784 performance—of movements 4–5–6–7 in a different order.

It would be extremely unlikely to begin with the present movement 4:  I can think of no other multi-movement work (other than suites of dances) by Mozart—or anyone else, off the top of my head—to begin with a Menuet specified as such.  (K. 188 is a possible exception.  If there are others, I’m sure I will hear about it and will post them in an addendum below.)  It would be impossible to begin with movement 5, as it is in a subordinate key (the Subdominant).  Movement 7 is labelled—in Mozart’s hand—Finale (although I suppose it is impossible to be certain when he wrote that label).  Thus movement 6 would be the first movement of the four-movement version I am positing.  Beginning with a Theme and Variations?  Unusual, perhaps, but he did it in the famous K. 331 (the A major piano sonata that concludes with the rondo alla Turca).  More to the point, the wind divertimento K. 253 also begins with a theme and variations (and with a not-dissimilar theme), so this would not be unprecedented.

My putative sequence would either be

• [6] Theme and Variations
• [4] Menuet/Trio/Trio
• [5] Romance
• [7] Finale

or

• [6] Theme and Variations
• [5] Romance
• [4] Menuet/Trio/Trio
• [7] Finale

Six of one and half a dozen of the other?  I'm not sure.  It is hard to make a very firm argument either way—but both of these sequences present the movements 6 and 5 out of their present order—which would explain why those fascicles would be numbered to get them right.  I favor my second suggested sequence because:

1. The last variation of Movement 6 is too similar in style to the Menuet for them to be adjacent movements, and
2. I think if the first order was correct then the fascicle for movement 4 would also have been included in the reordering enumeration.  The present movement 4 may have been an afterthought, anyway, given the change in paper-types:  thus Mozart would have composed 6, 5, and most of 7 on Tyson 56, then switched to Tyson 57 for the end of the finale, after which movement 4 (and subsequently the first three movements as we know them now) were added.  But Tyson finds that Mozart was mainly using these paper types in 1781:  the performance in 1784 is of “four movements” (if the account is to be trusted), and surely all seven movements were notated by then.  (I allow that if one were going to choose four movements to perform from this marvelous work, I cannot imagine leaving out the sublime Adagio.)  And why the four blank pages at the end of the Theme and Variations (the “No. 5” fascicle)?  Like Leeson, I am left with mysteries I cannot resolve—but trying out playlists in these alternate sequences has at least enabled me to hear this very familiar piece with new ears.

One further point about all of this:  Spitzmueller’s evidence is the sort of thing that is not transmitted in either a facsimile or scan of the page (which often serve us now as surrogates for an original):  the sewing holes become evident only when the manuscript is taken apart.  Unsewn and unseen these may be, but Spitzmueller’s X-marks are vitally suggestive of a hidden layer of this remarkable work’s history.  And yet the value of X remains unknown.

46. Look ere ye leape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCE:  the same, f. 7r.

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

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

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

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

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

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