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).

21. Moving targets (Episode #3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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