49. The sound of (editorial) silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

29. Fine print

This tenth installment in my slowed-but-still-proceeding

further explores an idea that crossed my mind as I was writing the fourth installment, which examined the two “AMB” notebooks.  Toward the end of that post, writing about one of the two incomplete copies of the aria “Schlummert ein” (from BWV 82) in one of these notebooks, I wrote:

Several pages later the aria appears a second time, although this time AMB did not finish the copy.  The vocal line breaks off midway through bar 60 (at the end of a page); the unfigured bassline breaks off after 28 bars.  It seems likely to me that it was added in later, as it too breaks off at a page-turn:  waiting for the ink to dry before turning the page, she was needed elsewhere and never completed the project.  (Similarly, I wondered, are the five missing appoggiaturas in her first copy merely a sign of a practical notational issue?  That is, might she have used a different pen-nib for the appoggiaturas, so that there was a reason to leave space and move on, coming back to fill them in later? I don’t know the Bach literature well enough to know if this has been explored, nor have I seen it discussed in other eighteenth-century sources.)  [On the image on the left, the vertical blemish in the middle of my red circle where the appoggiatura ought to be does not seem to be an erasure—and there is no such blemish in the other four instances.]

SOURCE:  cropped scans of "Schlummert ein" b. 40 in AMB2 p. 108 (f. 55r) [with absent appoggiatura highlighted] and 113 (f. 59v) from Bach-Digital.

The example above is in the hand of Anna Magdelena Bach.  In the past several months of exploring Bach sources (particularly in his own hand), this issue about the absence of small-note ornaments has recurred with such regularity that I find myself with a short catalogue of data points.  I should stress that I’m thinking exclusively of the “small-note” ornaments (i.e., those in which a note is written smaller to indicate that it is ornamental) rather than what one might call the “squiggle” ornaments (i.e., those indicated by an arbitrary symbol—trill, mordent, turn, Schleifer, etc.)  These latter show up regularly in composing scores, and thus (I am speculating) did not require a change of nib to notate.  (And nota bene:  Pen-nib was not quite accurate in my earlier post, as really it is quill-nibs that are at issue.)

Indeed, much of this post is really just speculation, as I do not have much to go on.  I remember a moment in a graduate school seminar when I voiced some idea for which I had assembled a similar paucity of evidence, and the professor (rightly) shot it down with the line “That’s not a theory; that’s speculation.”  The contempt with which he enunciated the word still sticks with me.  For some reason, I enjoy reliving that moment in my memory—maybe because it was an important lesson I needed to learn.

I have also written in this blog about the dangers of amateurism in music scholarship—yet I will wallow in amateurism in this post.  As I’ve said before, I am no Bach scholar; his music is an inevitable topic in a blog such as mine, as the amount of textual research to which his Nachlass has been subjected is truly staggering.  There is just so much for me to write about.  Like Everest, he’s there.  But in this post I find myself writing speculatively, without any underpinnings in the literature.

SOURCE:  Bärenreiter promotional photo

A few weeks ago I was studying the new Bärenreiter facsimile of BWV 20 (which reproduces the autograph composing score of the cantata together with the original manuscript parts and the two wrappers).  Although it wasn’t what I was looking for, I was startled by a consistent discrepancy:  the small-note ornaments in the parts were not in the composing score.  These ornaments were authentic—there for all to see in the parts (the collective work of the composer and four copyists).  But of course the parts were where these marks needed to be in order to be heard because they would not be played directly from the score.  This brought to mind my earlier idea about the smaller nib:  would it have been more trouble than it was worth to put the small-note ornaments in the hastily-written score?  (Indeed, the number of instances of small-note ornaments in the composing score is exceedingly small: mvt. 1 / b. 92 / Vln. I; and a handful in mvts. 5 and 10.)

I have made no general survey of the Bach works for which both a composing score and an authentic set of parts survive; that task is certainly beyond what can be done with a blog that is very much on the side of my obligations.  But that the parts supply this sort of information when the scores may not is noted by Moritz Hauptmann, the original chairman of the Bach Gesellschaft edition, and the editor of this cantata in the second volume of the BG (1852):

SOURCE: detail of "Vorwort" (p. xiii) to BG vol. 2, from scan available via the IMSLP.

[Third and fourth sentences; roughly:]  “...Where in addition to the score the original parts were also available, these were conscientiously consulted.  The parts are of importance not only for the appoggiatura markings and the figuring of the basso continuo, of which the score seldom has any; they also serve to verify unclearly-written notes and lyrics [in the score]....”

A particularly striking example of this in BWV 20 is the sixth movement, the alto aria “O Mensch, errette deine Seele,” which is replete with small-note ornaments in both the BG and the NBA, both of which give proper editorial deference to the parts over the score in this respect.  As a sample, observe (if you can make it out below) just the opening bars of the BG, the autograph, and the original Vln. I part:

SOURCES: (top L) cropped screen-shot of BG Bd. 2, p. 314 from IMSLP; (top R) cropped scan of Bärenreiter 2017 facsimile of D-LEb Rara I,14; (bottom) cropped screenshot of original Vln. I part f. 2r. from Bach-Digital.  [Note also that the trill in the score b. 3 is dutifully copied into the part; the trill in b. 2 is Bach’s added ornament (the identical mark as in the score) to the copied part, and thus not in the score.]

All of this brought to mind a startling difference between the early version of the St. Matthew Passion and the version universally familiar from Bach’s c. 1736 fair copy score.  The sole extant source for the early version is a copy by J. C. Farlau made some ten or so years after Bach's fair copy “revised” version was prepared.  Originally the NBA issued the early version only as a grey-scale facsimile of Farlau’s score (which at the time—1972—was attributed to Johann Christoph Altnickol), although it has subsequently been issued as a newly-edited volume in its own right.  It has been recently recorded by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr, who (on the promotional video for this release) notes the absence of some of these appoggiaturas:

“I find a lot of things sharper in focus and more dramatic in color, whereas in the later version things have been softened up with appoggiaturas and more rococo ornaments.  So generally I find some things are a little bit more shocking, and a bit clearer.” (at 04:21)

On that video we hear what must be the most “shocking” example of this textual difference, which is the duet “So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen” (no. 27a, near the end of Part I).  Here is the beginning as it appears in Bach’s c. 1736 manuscript, replete with "small notes" in the imitative woodwind lines:

SOURCE:  BWV 244 no. 27, bb. 1-5;  detail (p. 55) of Bach's fair copy (D-B Mus. ms. Bach P 25) from Bach-Digital. 

And the same passage as it appears in Farlau’s copy; nary an appoggiatura in sight:

SOURCE:  BWV 244b no. 27a, bb. 1-5;  detail of copy by J. C. Farlau (D-B Am. B. 6) from Bach-Digital.

To Egarr, this is an intentional stylistic difference:  Bach has added (new) ornaments as he revised the work in 1736; they weren’t there in 1727.  If we take Farlau’s effort to have resulted in a faithful copy of Bach’s 1727 score (and there is nothing at all to suggest he was scoring up from parts), we can grant that these were not in that source.  But maybe (I speculate) these appoggiaturas were in Bach’s conception of the work in 1727, but included in the no-longer-extant parts rather than the score.  As in BWV 20, the parts were where it would really matter, as this would be what the players read.  The later fair copy autograph is justly celebrated as a beautiful calligraphic copy, and it is reasonable that Bach would make more effort to present a more accurate text in it than in run-of-the-mill scores.  But if the original 1727 score was anything like that of the hastily-prepared BWV 20—and if indeed adding such notes meant using a different nib—I would not really expect them to be there.  That is not something Farlau would have known to take into account as he prepared his copy.  One thing that is consistent about Farlau’s copy is the incredibly scarcity of small-note ornaments.  In my examination of this source, apart from the more profusely ornamented no. 39 (the alto aria “Erbarme dich”), I located only nine examples in the whole work.  (If you want to see a list, click here.  My list also includes some instances where the 1736 fair copy score lacks some of the small-note ornaments transmitted in the corresponding(?) set of parts.)

My speculative nib idea also suggests a new way at looking at (for example) the profusely ornamented chorale “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein,” BWV 641 (in the Orgelbüchlein).  This is the chorale which was later revised as the so-called “deathbed chorale” (“Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich,” BWV 668), stripped of the ornamentation, and with imitative interludes interpolated between the chorale phrases.  (Christoph Wolff has dealt with this situation very lucidly.)  But what strikes me as I look at the page is that the ornamented melody seems to have been written with two different sized quill-points—and am I imagining things to perceive a different tint to the ink?  Here is the full page:

SOURCE:  BWV 641, p. 115 of Bach's autograph of the Orgelbüchlein (D-B Mus. Ms. Bach P 283); scan from Bach-Digital

And here is a detail of the third measure leading into the fourth.  The downbeat of b. 3 seems to be a normal-sized note-head; all of the notes of beat two, and the first note of beat 3 and beat 4 similarly seem to be the default size, as well as all of the notes in the other voices.  But the rest of the figuration seems significantly smaller:

SOURCE:  detail (bb. 3-4) of BWV 641 (D-B Mus. Ms. Bach P 283); scan from Bach-Digital

Turning to Peter Williams's excellent survey The Organ Music of J. S. Bach, I’m delighted to see that he has noticed the same thing:

“The coloraturas, unlike most of those in BWV 614 and 622, centre around turning phrases that lead to the next note of the cantus, which is placed where it would be even if there were no decoration.  This is a particular technique that can be understood in two ways:  these embellishments could be taken out in order to produce BWV 668, or they could be added in order to produce BWV 641, where they are written as smaller notes in P 283.”  (p. 311; emphasis mine)

We might imagine (uh... speculate), then, that Bach initially wrote something like this:

only later to squeeze in the more florid version.  His use of the smaller nib would then be merely a practical matter—not indicating “small-note ornamentation,” but simply cramming a lot of notes into an insufficient space.  It is certainly hard to believe that he would have intended such a florid second beat of b. 4 when originally laying out the work in this manuscript, as he ends up not just in the margin but in the gutter of the binding of his “little book.”

Another imponderable question:  do the squiggle ornaments which would then have been written mainly over quarter notes apply also to my putatively new florid line (i.e., resulting in the face-value reading of the page, as it is invariably played now)?  Or does the filigree supersede the squiggles (or some of them), themselves mere remnants of a previous version?

One thought leads to another, and the suggestions here about BWV 641 strike me as support for those organists who would add ornamentation to another Orgelbüchlein chorale, BWV 639 “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” in which the first half of the chorale is decorated with a few passing tones but the second half is left in bare quarter notes.  I have always taken this to mean “you get the idea... go thou and do likewise.”  The Orgelbüchlein was explicitly a teaching volume—and, like Bach's other pedagogical works, transmitted not in print but by students (and subsequently their students) copying it out.  From the NBA critical report for this work and from perusing some of the scans available via Bach-Digital, I see that some of these extant copies (NBA sigla B2, L2 and M1 particularly) do indeed have a few added squiggle ornaments and passing tones in the second half—although, of course, the presence of such decoration on the page is not the prerequisite to the performance of a more decorated version.

And so I sit and speculate.  And piece after piece comes before my eyes in which the similar small-note ornament discrepancies recur, although the conditions are never quite the same.  It should be noted, for example, that solo music need not have the ornamental details worked out that ensemble music (particularly ripieno parts) would need.  It is also worth keeping in mind that unlike our current rehearsal situation, where a pencil or other writing implement should always be handy, Bach's players may have had no writing implement at hand (surely not any requiring an inkwell!), and so it paid for ensemble parts to be as carefully prepared as time allowed.

I have been wondering about what evidence might refute this whole idea.  Certainly an example intermingling squiggle and small-note ornaments in close proximity could be inconvenient for my proposal, although it might be hard to show that the two different sorts of notation were written in the source in the same sitting.  (At this point in a draft of this post, I digressed with an example from BWV 873/1, the C# minor prelude from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier.  I took it out because it was too dense for the flow of this already-too-dense post, but if you want to see it, here it is.)

I will close with an example I stumbled across while flipping through Walter Emery’s classic study, Bach’s Ornaments.  As with most treatises on ornamentation, Emery’s subject is how an ornament should be interpreted in performance.  That is not my subject, but I turned to Emery nonetheless because of his keen eye for the notation.  I have quoted Emery on this blog before—and will surely do so again.  In this book, he is scrupulously cautious about the sources he quotes, remarking sagely “one cannot deduce Bach's habits from ornaments that he did not write.  As things stand, this means that unless a writer on ornamentation has made himself competent to edit every work he wishes to quote, he must take examples only from reproductions of autograph manuscripts, and from a few texts whose reliability can easily be tested.  The Bach examples in this book have been chosen in this way; with a few exceptions, included for special reasons and expressly described as questionable, they are authentic beyond all reasonable doubt.” (p. 7)

Thus his Ex.157 caught my eye, in which small-note appoggiaturas surround a single hook (b. 11):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Walter Emery, Bach's Ornaments (Novello, 1953), p. 77.

But Emery was cautious as ever:

“As the hooks have been translated into small notes by all but the most conscientious of editors, it is impossible to say, without access to large numbers of autograph manuscripts, whether Bach made any distinction between hooks and small notes.  If the BG is to be trusted, he used them indifferently in the tenor aria of Cantata 67 [his Ex. 157].” (p. 76)

If the BG is to be trusted, he writes, and even before looking up the BG I went straight to Bach-Digital—a resource which gives precisely the “access to large numbers of autograph manuscripts” that Emery craved.  There I found a scan of the original Violin I part, copied by J. A. Kuhnau, and what did I see?

Source: BWV 67/ii, Violin I part, end of b. 1; cropped scan from Bach-Digital

Emery was right to be wary.  In fact, BG is unreliable here:  the small-note E appoggiatura is actually there—but I can’t help wondering if Kuhnau's “hooked” flags for the sixteenths might have caught the editor (Wilhelm Rust) out on this one instance—the hook from the f# flag somehow being turned into an appoggiatura hook on the d#.  Otherwise it is hard to explain whence the hook in BG came.  It does no damage in performance:  the appoggiatura is authentic; it's just Rust's notation of it that is not.   Even more curious, actually, is (for example) bar 5 of the same aria, where Rust converts the original small-notes all into hooks—rather than, as Emery would have expected, the other way around:

SOURCE:  BWV 67/ii b. 5-6; (top) BG vol. XVI, p. 228  (at IMSLP); (bottom) original Vl. I part (as above).

Rust actually does this switch inconsistently throughout the aria in both Violin and Oboe lines, and I can see no logic to it.  The lesson I take from it, though, is that I don't have the time or the energy to plumb the depths of the small-nib question further.  At least for now.

ADDENDUM
03 February 2019

Another example to keep in mind:  BWV 125/ii:  the original parts are preserved replete with small notes; but other sources transmit the presumed reading of the (now lost) score, lacking the graces.   See NBA Ser. I Bd. 28.1, pp. 66-74 (cf. 46-54).