59. The latent textual value of a derivative score

A few weeks ago, my colleague Justin Vickers posted a very generous profile of my blog.  Speaking with Justin a few months ago, I gave him an example of material that has been on my idea list for posts even before I posted the very first one in the summer of 2016.  These ideas sometimes linger while I wait to find the right examples to illustrate the issue at hand.  One of those ideas—the second on the list, actually—was about the importance of vocal scores to the textual record.  (A vocal score is an edition of a vocal or choral work in which the orchestral accompaniment has been “reduced” so that is reasonably playable by one person at a piano; as opposed to a full score, in which all the orchestral lines are spelled out—but there are varieties of full score too numerous to discuss in this post).  Knowing that Justin is a Britten scholar, the example I shared was Peter Grimes.  But now is a good chance to finally write this post (not as post number 2, but as number 59), and thus to back up and look more into the Peter Grimes instance.  And, as so often in this blog, there is a long backstory here.  If you want to cut to the chase, skip the indented paragraphs and I’ll see you on the flip side.

Decades ago, during my graduate studies, the music seminar room doubled as the 

“locked press” of the music library.  In my very first blogpost, I described my favorite space in the Cornell music library before the building was renovated:  it held the M3s (collected editions) and the ML134s (work catalogues).  The locked press inspired a certain awe, as it held the stuff that could be accessed only with special oversight—the holdings that would be only rarely consulted and which would be impossible or expensive to replace.  I remember the bewildering array of facsimiles (in those days before digital scans were so readily available online), and sometimes during a class my eyes would wander up onto the shelves to behold these special volumes.  I remember one catching my eye, noteworthy because it wasn't a facsimile of a medieval or renaissance source, nor even of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century manuscript, although it was as impressively lavish in its presentation.  Two big volumes:  The Making of Peter Grimes:  I. Facsimile of Benjamin Britten’s composition draft and II.  Notes and Commentaries.  I knew very little of Britten’s music at the time; I knew the name of the opera, but I had never seen or heard it.  I knew it was an important work, but I was still surprised to see that something so recent—hardly fifty years old at the time—would merit a place in the holy of holies in the music library.

You should keep in mind that I was a snob of the first order at that time.  I had very strong opinions about what was worth looking at and what was worth listening to.  When in the late 1980s I came across the Dover reprints of full scores, what interested me most was that they were full scores (i.e., what I assumed to be “everything the composer wrote”), not really anything about what editions were being reprinted.  With my interest in Gilbert and Sullivan, it was a little frustrating at the time to be pretty much limited to vocal scores, but I still generally held vocal scores in contempt—at least at one remove from the real thing, at best.

I occasionally requested something from locked press, and those seemed like particularly momentous times.  In fact, almost soon asI arrived on campus campus I called up the facsimile of The Mikado, spending several hours at my carrel poring over it.  I perused several other locked press items over there years, but never Peter Grimes.  That wasn't until many years later, by which time I had come to know the opera pretty well, and was devoting much of my energies to British music generally.  So, in the spring of 2013, when I had some faculty development funds to spend, I splurged on several facsimiles:  Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, the composition score of Messiah, and a few others.  But also, seeing a chance flyer from Boydell & Brewer, I ordered The Making of Peter Grimes.  I spent a lot of time with it over a few weeks, looking at the score with the full score at hand, and reading the commentaries.  But then it went up on the shelf and didn't often come back down.

Fast forward a few years, when I was considering using something from Peter Grimes for one of my classes to analyze.  Finally over my full-score-only snobbishness, I had recognized that it would sometimes be easier for my students to see what I wanted them to see if they could use a reduced score of some sort (like Ravel’s two-piano transcription of La Valse... and, I thought to myself, at least the transcription is by the composer...).  So I went down the hall and borrowed the vocal score of Peter Grimes from one of my applied voice colleagues.

I had never looked at this vocal score before, but flipping through it, I kept thinking I’ve seen this before.  And I knew exactly where I had seen it.  It looked a lot like the “composition draft” that was in the facsimile on my shelf.  No, it’s not note-for-note the same—hardly that.  But what the vocal score transmits is derived not from the full score but from the composition draft.  The draft is written in “short score,” meaning lots of stuff crammed in a few staves, but generally not really conceived as a piano accompaniment.  Maybe because Britten was himself a formidable pianist, the notation of the short score betrays to my eye a sort of “pianistic thinking” which transferred nicely to the clean vocal score text prepared by Erwin Stein.  Looking at it now, it is actually hard to find a really good example to demonstrate this.  The section that had first attracted my attention was the interlude that opens Act III; the example below is from the storm interlude in the middle of Act I (the beginning of which has always struck me as prefiguring some of the “rumble” in West Side Story; Bernstein had conducted the US premiere of Peter Grimes in 1946.  Just sayin’...).  These are some of the most fascinating pages in the composition draft:  they reveal a complicated gestation, as Britten was asked to lengthen it, adding and revising material in the middle of the movement.  I think this is sufficient example, though, of how the compositional draft is taken over into the piano reduction with little more than cosmetic retouching (as well as spelling out everything that is otherwise indicated with ditto slashes).

 

SOURCE: Britten: Peter Grimes, Interlude II (Act 1); composite of (l.) p. 110 of the published vocal score; and (r.) detail of f. 35r from the composition draft, scanned from the Boydell facsimile.  The material of the composition draft begins in the second bar of the vocal score page (indicated by the red bracket).

There are even times when Britten brackets the upper two staves as “I” and the lower two as “II”—which certainly suggests thinking of it as two pianists.  Stein's reduction even sometimes asks for two pianists, but it interesting to note that these do not really match up with the times Britten writes that way.  The great Passacaglia in the middle of Act II, for example, appears in the composition draft on no more than three staves (though Stein expands it to full piano duet).

What this suggests to me is that the heart of Britten’s ideas of the piece are more easily seen in the notation of the vocal score than of the full score.  Moreover, since this was Britten’s regular working habit—short score before full score—maybe the vocal scores of his other works would similarly convey the essence of the work in ways that might be obscured in the full score, especially such complicated and overwhelming scores as War Requiem.  When Imogen Holst prepared the War Requiem vocal score, she relied on the compositional draft, and Philip Reed has made this point before (and doubtless others have, too):

“As with the vast majority of Britten’s output, the War Requiem took shape on the manscript paper as a through-composed short score draft written in pencil throughout, with the orchestral texture reduced onto two, three, or occasionally four staves and the vocal lines occupying their own staves.  At first glance the draft resembles something approaching a vocal score and was certainly used as a guide by Imogen Holst when she prepared the vocal score (under Britten’s supervision) for Boosey & Hawkes.  The instrumentation is indicated by verbal abbreviations—‘str’, ‘trbn’, ‘ww’—at the time of composition, ready for instant retrieval when the moment came for the full score to be made.  This simple technique was effective in allowing Britten to press on to the end of a work before making the full score, safe in the knowledge that the piece was in effect written; in the case of complex works, such as the War Requiem, it also allowed an assistant to follow behind the composer using the draft as a basis for the all-important vocal score from which the soloists and chorus would learn their music” (37).

And to add another nuance:  my guess is that greater fluency with the published reductions in the vocal scores of Britten’s works would yield similar fluency with reading his compositional drafts.  I think that it would give a greater facility to perceiving aspects of his compositional process than the rest of us can readily discern.

On this practical matter of needing a piano reduction of the orchestral material for rehearsals, in other research before I started this blog I had a few examples where the composer would depart from his [sic] usual routine in order to produce a vocal score first--because it would be needed sooner than a full score.  When Charles Villiers Stanford wrote his Songs of the Sea in 1904, he seems to have first thought of it as an orchestral song cycle for one singer, and started work on the full score; only later did he decide to add a men’s chorus, and then set to work on the vocal score.  When, in 1910, he followed it up with another cycle, Songs of the Fleet, he knew from the first that it would feature a mixed chorus along with the baritone soloist, so he started with writing the vocal score (with a piano part) before then turning to the full score.  All four of his autograph manuscripts for these two pieces are preserved at the Royal College of Music, London.  (What do we make of the well-established Stanford having to prepare the piano reduction rather than it being hackwork for someone contracted by the publisher?  I’m not sure.)

Another example:  William Walton was not much of a pianist himself, and so generally composed in full score (but, if the sketches that remain for the Variations on a Theme of Hindemith (1963) are typical, writing in concert pitch before producing a fair copy with the correct transpositions); in the case of the Cello Concerto (1955-56), however, Walton produced a keyboard “reduction” first.  (Can you “reduce” something that doesn’t yet exist?)  In the case of his chamber opera The Bear (1966–67), Walton worked on the piano score in tandem with the vocal score, apparently using the discipline of working out a piano score as the opportunity to test the worth of what he had already written.

But perhaps the greatest musicological value of vocal scores must be the preservation of material subsequently cut and lost in other sources.  Among the treasures on the IMSLP (and there are many!) is a scan of the two early Choudens vocal scores of Bizet’s Carmen.  They prove to be from two different issues:  the Eastman copy includes the recitatives composed by Ernest Guiraud, documenting the early reworking of the opera—and thus an early exemplar of the performance tradition that dominated during the first century of Carmen performances; the Chapel Hill copy is a true first edition, without recitatives (although the scan missed a few pages—most frustrating!).  But what is so important about this edition is that it contains the “Scène et Pantomime” that initially followed the opening chorus but was cut during the first run.  The autograph for this portion was removed from the rest of the opera, although it survives now in a private collection.  Fortunately, it has since been published (as in the 1992 Schott/Eulenberg score), but for a long time the first edition vocal score was the only available source for it.  Of this score, as Winton Dean notes, the 1875 vocal score is the authoritative source in determining the provenance of the early changes to the score:

“No retouch to the autograph, whether it is in the hand of Bizet, Guiraud, Antony Choudens, General de Gaulle, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, can by any human possibility have got into the 1875 vocal score after Bizet’s death or (barring misprints) without his approval.  All such modifications to the autograph must have been made in conformity with Bizet's wishes as expressed in the vocal score.”  (p. 289)

(Note that the Eastman copy indicates at the end of the opening chorus to follow directly with “no. 2,” but there is no “no. 2” in that source.) If you're interested, Richard Langham Smith (pp. 161–89) argues persuasively for the importance of this pantomime scene in understanding the work, even if it does seem to me like a speed bump in a performance.

One other example of the vocal score as an important conduit of evidence:  this spring I was teaching an American Music course, and for the class session when were talking about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American hymnody, I wanted them to look at a source I remembered seeing years ago (via a da Capo press reprint, but now of course more readily available as a scan online).

SOURCE: cropped screenshot of the title page of IMSLP 242918, the first edition (a copy at Eastman)

The reason I remembered looking at this source some thirty years ago was because of that line in the subtitle “together with many beautiful extras from the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other eminent modern composers never before published in this country.”  One such tune that had struck me as a particularly odd choice and thus memorable decades later.

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of p. 180 of IMSLP 242918

I recognized this melody from Act I of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito, and it struck me as strange that it would show up here.  As was customary in such sources, the melody is presented in the staff directly above the bass.  (Lest this be thought the tenor—one of my pet peeves—please note that the first hymn in this collection explicitly labels the top staff as “TENOR” and the third as “TREBLE OR AIR.”  The fact that tenors may sing this melody is another issue altogether and has to do with the practical use of these tunebooks, not the initial intention they present.)  

But this spring when I looked at it again, what stood out was that first triplet in the melody (second system, first downbeat).  I’ve never heard that before, I thought.  Where did they get that?  Out of curiosity, I looked up Mozart's autograph.

SOURCE:  cropped and marked-up scan of the autograph score, from IMSLP 807497 (p. 42); for reference, this is p. 74 as presented in the Bärenreiter facsimile of the autograph, which re-assembles portions held in different collections.

We are in a different key (A major) and in different clefs (the upper staff is the bassoon in bass clef, the lower staff is Annio, in soprano clef), but the reading shows two downward triadic arpeggios, a tonic and a supertonic chord.  None of that 8-7-8 neighbor-tone motion in the hymnbook.  Were the editors of the hymnbook trying to make it easier to sing?  (But if so, why include this tune at all?)

As the IMSLP had a scan of an early vocal score, I clicked on that.  Lo and behold!

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan of p. 25 of IMSLP 572308, a vocal score published by Simrock c. 1800

There was the Boston reading, clear as day.  So where did this come from?  The piano reduction in this source was credited (even on its title page) to Christan Gottlob Neefe, and it must have been one of the last things he did, since he died in 1798.  Was this figuration Neefe's idea?

I looked in the critical report of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe.  Crickets.  Not only was there no mention of the Simrock vocal score (and indeed very little reference to any of the early vocal scores), but there was nothing flagged about this passage.  So I pulled out the new edition of the Köchel Catalog.  Neefe's vocal score was not listed.  Instead, I found two 1795 editions of the vocal score:  one was published in Leipzig by Breitkopf, with a keyboard reduction by Siegfried Schmiedt; the other in Hamburg by Günther & Böhme, with a keyboard reduction by August Eberhard Müller.  I found a scan of the Schmiedt score right away; the only digital scan I could locate of the Müller reduction was from a subsequent Breitkopf score (c. 1803), but in any case both of them gave the same reading as the autograph:

SOURCE:  composite, marked-up, cropped scans of early vocal scores:  (top) p. 24 of Breitkopf (1795) available at archive.org; and p. 17 of Breitkopf (c. 1803), available at Harvard University Library.

I looked at other published vocal scores and manuscript copies; I couldn’t locate any other source that transmitted Neefe’s reading (assuming he originated it), but I was only looking at scores of the complete opera.  Maybe Neefe’s reading made it into some other excerpted anthology that I haven't seen.  Otherwise I can only conclude from all this at the moment that a copy of Neefe’s edition was the one that the Boston editor(s) referred to in preparing the Handel & Haydn Society Collection.  Not much, but it is gratifying to have at least something other than a wild goose chase.

ADDENDUM 5 July 2026

A fantastic recent example of the value of a derivative sources is Marc Shepherd's discovery of three cut numbers from Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, extant only in a manuscript copy of the full score; the score was under wraps in a D'Oyly Carte vaults for almost a century, and then languishing in the British Library until Shepherd paged it and saw what it contained.  It's a great story.

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.