45. Adeste infideles

I was at a performance of Handel’s Messiah a few weeks ago where—not for the first time, it must be said—I noticed some surprises in the orchestral accompaniment.  I have grown used to hearing trumpets and drums (derived ultimately from Mozart’s 1789 orchestration) creep into the “Wonderful Counselor” exclamations in the chorus “For unto us a child is born.”   After all, you’re paying the trumpet and timpani players, so why not get your money’s worth?  I don’t like this philosophy, but I get the justification.

It was clear, however, that not just the trumpet players but also at least the sole second violin player as well were using performing materials reprinted from the 1902 Ebenezer Prout edition:  numbers that should have had unison violins (the aria “How beautiful are the feet,” for example) had instead a fuller string accompaniment.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of Prout edition Vln. II part p. 27 (from scan at IMSLP #47447)

The conductor is a friend, so I asked him about this.  “They brought their own partbooks.  It wasn’t worth fixing.”  Particularly when you're operating on just one or two rehearsals, this is certainly efficient:  they’ve already marked it (bowings, etc.) and are used to it.  Why fight it for the one or two people in the audience who will grind their teeth?  (When it is a community performance anyway, who in their right mind would expect a purist approach?)

Such textual mash-ups hardly do any damage, at least as far as the vast majority of the audience is concerned.  What was performed was basically “Prout lite”:  we didn’t have the full Prout orchestration—flutes, clarinets, horns, etc.—but we had bits of his re-workings running in parallel against (and within the confines of) Handel's economical original scoring.  So what?

I guess the “so what?” is the principle of conflating editions by letting performers in an ensemble supply their own, independently of each other.  I was treated to an execrable example of this a few weeks later, and it gives rise to my thoughts today.  It was a pops concert by a community orchestra which also featured a local chorus.  The show concluded with a holiday sing-along section.  One of the sing-along carols was “O come, all ye faithful” (Adeste fideles—a tune which has a fascinating textual history of its own).  When we started a second verse—to the text “Sing, choirs of angels”—several sopranos in the choir took it upon themselves to sing the descant.  By this I mean a very popular descant devised by David Willcocks very early in his tenure as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge.

SOURCE:  detail of Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961) p. 89.

It is popular for good reason, as it makes very effective counterpoint out of a sequential figure familiar from another carol, the Renaissance tune associated with the 1901 text “Ding! dong! merrily on high.”  The earliest source I have located with Willcocks’s setting is a live recording of (portions of) the 1958 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  (More on that source later).  Many choral sopranos know this descant off by heart, and I have been only mildly surprised to see it appear even in hymnals—an implicit invitation for the congregation to join in as well.  This descant and its attendant harmonization, and with it Willcocks’s organ harmonization of the final verse, have become standards the world over.  Indeed, the final verse’s half-diminished-seventh chord at the word Word shows up regularly in Twitter and Facebook posts at this time of year—apparently as a sort of Christmas “money shot.”  By way of example:

SOURCE: screenshot from Twitter:  do your own search “Willcocks word chord” on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever and you'll get plenty of further examples.

Curious as it may seem, there have been instances in history of a descant supplanting the original as the main melody.  This seems to have happened in the case of “Puer natus in Bethlehem” and—for all we know—maybe “O come, O come Emmanuel” as well.  (For discussion of the textual situations of each, see The New Oxford Book of Carols, pp.172 and 45.)  I don’t think Adeste fideles is threatened at all by the descant, but Willcocks’s descant is clearly here to stay:  maybe because it seems to be such fun to sing.  And so the sopranos sang the descant at the concert—even though it was harmonically incompatible with the version the orchestra was playing.  It sounded awful.  And it could be easily fixed with the rehearsal instruction “Sopranos:  no descant.” If they would cooperate.

On the same program, the choir sang along to Leroy Anderson’s charming miniature Sleigh Ride.  Mitchell Parrish’s very clever lyrics were written for it when it was adapted to be a popular song—an extremely popular song, as it happens.  The original key and modulations don’t really work for singers, and it showed at this performance.  I love the piece, but here it was marred by trying to have both the song and the original orchestral work together:  Messiah wasn’t harmed really by the simultaneous versions, but Sleigh Ride was destroyed—just as was “Sing, choirs of angels.”  I’m not a purist, but without the textual meddling these performances would have been just fine.   Bah!  Humbug!

SOURCE:  scan of 1961 edition cover;
I'm not sure of the date of my copy, but
on the back the printed price is $1.80.

One final note about the Willcocks descant:  I believe it first appeared in print in 1961 in the fantastically successful anthology Carols for Choirs, coedited by Willcocks and Reginald Jacques.  This book has had a host of successors (so that it in reprints it was retitled Carols for Choirs 1), and has spread the “Lessons & Carols” style and liturgy all around the world, providing texts for others to perform.  Even in its earliest printing, however, the descant is not quite the same as the version captured on the 1958 recording.  In the recording, the trebles sing the text “Gloria in excelsis deo” at the start of the verse, rather than (with the rest of the choir and congregation) “Sing, choirs of angels.”  Unfamiliar as it is to me with this text, I have to say that I like Willcocks’s original version better:  the imperative Sing of the congregation is answered by the angelic voices above.  Oh, well; second thoughts are not always improvements.  Maybe some enterprising choral director will restore Willcocks’s original version on occasion?  (A word to the wise: just make sure everyone is singing the same version.)

36. What shall we tell the students?

In some ways, I feel that musicology is both my job and my hobby.  I’m paid to be a musicologist (or maybe I’m really paid to administer a department, but I have to teach something); I “do” musicology on the side, too.  With occasional exceptions, my bedtime reading and the books I take on vacation are musicological; issues of the Music Library Association journal Notes (which always has a few articles, but is mainly filled with reviews of books, scores, and other musical media) accumulate on my desk to take when I travel.  (I’ve found that Notes is perfect for travel conditions, as the fairly short items can easily be interrupted at any moment—a gate change, the refreshment cart coming down the aisle, etc.—and resumed later without really losing the thread.)  Most of what shows up on this blog inevitably comes from the “hobby” side of my musicology interests; indeed, very little has actually concerned the textual materials that have been my own research focus.

But this is one of my rare posts from the “job” side, straight out of the classroom.  It’s not that the others don’t deal with issues that might be useful in a classroom, but I tend not to write about what I do in the classroom.  In the blog I often dive deep into geeky details, but in class I seldom wade into textual waters, maybe for fear of drowning in digressions, or of scaring my students away.  But there are times where a textual matter is so central—a veritable elephant in the room—that it must somehow come up in class.

I have usually taught music history classes without a textbook as such, using anthologies instead—one of scores and one of primary sources.  (For years I did this happily pairing the W. W. Norton survey score anthologies with the Weiss/Taruskin Music in the Western World source readings.)  More recently, my approach to music major courses has changed so much that I find no text worth my students’ money, and so I have sometimes opted to make my own anthology—particularly with the easy access to public domain editions via the IMSLP.  I have kept my eye on the products out there, though, so I know pretty well what I am foregoing.

The only thing that I don’t like about the Norton anthologies is that they have recently opted sometimes to computer-set an item anew rather than reprinting an early edition.  Here is an example:

Source:  scan of Norton Anthology of Western Music (6th ed., 2010), pp. 238–9. 

I know that the notation of an early edition might be unwieldy for students, but it is not so foreign as to lose them completely.  (For example, here are the relevant pages of a 1679 printing of the Geneva Psalter, and a 1635 Scottish Psalmes of David in Prose in Meeter).  On the strength of the maxim about the value in teaching someone to fish, I would rather have the occasional difficult source in the classroom than always predigested texts.  Granted, the Norton anthologies do not generally seek out give original sources to reprint, but why re-set these here when the early printings could be such a handy teaching tool and take no more space?

Enough quibble about Norton.  A far larger disservice to students has been done by the competing Oxford Anthology of Western Music, three volumes conceived as an ancillary resource for the textbook version of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music.  Whatever one might say about Taruskin’s accomplishment (and many people have... including the bloggers of The Taruskin Challenge), he is a significant voice.  Whether adopted or rejected, his retelling of the story of Western music will inevitably influence the classroom (and music journalists, for whom he seems to have become a one-stop shop), despite his particular interests and lacunae.  If Oxford University Press has its way, Taruskin’s version will supplant all others for the next generation.

My criticism in this post has to do not with Taruskin but with the companion score anthology, which was prepared by others.  As far as I can tell, the editors have—understandably—resorted to public domain editions as often as possible to keep the costs down.  I have no problem with this:  I am convinced that you can teach effectively from any source (although some sources are better in one context than another); furthermore, in a music classroom there is no such thing as a “bad” edition, as long as we consider what precisely that edition can teach us.  What frustrates me is when the editors fail to realize the value of the eccentric edition they have chosen to reprint.  I will offer two examples here.

First, Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, op. 13:

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2nd ed., "2019" [sic!]), Vol. 2, p. 204.

The Oxford anthology reprints the old Breitkopf complete edition (although bar numbers have been added and the layout is altered to fit more systems on the page).  This is a work for which no autograph manuscript survives, so that the first edition (1799) is the most authoritative source, despite the occasional likely misprint.  One significant aspect in which some subsequent editors have departed from the text of that first edition is the placement of the exposition repeat:  is the pianist to go back to the beginning or to the Allegro di molto e con brio (b. 11)?

SOURCE:  bb. [11–13] cropped from the IMSLP scan of the 1799 first ed.

The first edition places this repeat at b. 11.  To be sure, there may be good musical reasons for wanting a reprise from the start—analogous to the Tempo I section which begins the development (b. 133)—but that is not what the first edition shows.  In his edition, Jonathan Del Mar concludes “There can be no [textual] justification for taking the repeat from bar 1, as has in some circles become fashionable” (p. 26; the bracketed emendation is mine). The Oxford anthologizers have missed a chance to remark on this textual detail, and it is a good "teaching moment" lost... or at least inconvenienced, as now the instructor would have to know of this discrepancy in order to point it out, if someone in the class doesn’t notice a difference between the text on the page and a recording they might hear.

Second, the overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville:

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2nd ed.), Vol. 2, p. 281.

Oxford reprints this from a 1900 G. Schirmer piano/vocal score.  It includes a very common textual variant in the first theme of the Allegro:  the opening motive is immediately repeated note-for-note—with three pick-ups—rather than with only two, as here in a Choudens vocal score of 1897:

SOURCE:  bb. 25-28, cropped scan of 1897 Choudens piano/vocal score "Edition conforme au manuscrit de Rossini", with piano reduction credited to L. Narici; scan from IMSLP 280519.

According to the critical commentary of the new WGR edition, the three-note echo appears in no authentic source of il Barbiere (1816), although Rossini had apparently previously altered the text thus when he used the same overture earlier in the year for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra.  (He was recycling it there from Aureliano in Palmira (1813), which had the two-note version.)  Rossini’s regularization mystifies me, as it is the lack of conformity that seems to me truly ingenious:  I am struck by the way in which the omission of a single eighth-note makes the whole passage seem less cluttered, less fussy.  The original is “the harder reading,” and it is no surprise that copyists would knock it back into conformity.  Whatever Rossini thought in the meantime, when it shows up again in Barbiere (here) the extra pick-up is gone, and the original text is restored.  But you wouldn’t know that from the Oxford anthology, where no mention of it is made at all.  Do we tell the students?

Perhaps these are nothing more than missed opportunities.  Most troubling in the Oxford anthology is the cavalier identification of some of the sources in the first volume.

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2013), Vol. 1 p. 530.

It appears to me that whoever put this list together regarded its purpose as indemnifying the publisher rather than citing the sources.  To say merely that items 56, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, and 78–91 are “public domain” tells us nothing about the identity and, consequently, the quality of the texts before us.  Some of these are newly typeset by OUP (although what the source text was, or how much intervention has occurred, is not shared).  Others are lifted from major nineteenth-century editions—Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, the Bach-Gesellschaft edition, and the like—and as such they represent a variety of different editorial approaches (including the piano reductions included on the full scores of the old Handel edition).  Why these editions are not identified is a mystery to me, unless no one thought any of this mattered.  It does to me.  And it should matter to students, as I daresay their instructors would never let them get away with citing a source merely as “public domain.”

But it’s not like I have been a paragon of textual transparency in the classroom.  For years I have had indistinct qualms about an example I have taught in which there is a huge textual departure which I never mention to my students.  I have regularly used the last portion of Act III of Le nozze di Figaro in my core-curriculum music course (the sort of course that has generally supplanted “appreciation” courses).  Even though the bit of the act I assign in the course starts just before the dictation duet (“Canzonetta sull'aria”), I have found it useful to screen the whole of Act III for the class.  It takes about 40 minutes, and so with a few minutes of contextualizing, and occasionally interrupting to make some comment about form or technique, it just fits in a 50-minute period.  The students always seem to enjoy it.

SOURCE:  DG website

For this screening I have regularly used the 1993 Jean-Louis Thamin stage production (for the Théâtre du Châtelet), featuring the team assembled by John Eliot Gardiner, and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in 2001.  I like to use this production because it looks pretty traditional on stage, but the stage “business” feels very current even after 25 years, and the students seem to relate pretty well to the singers-as-characters.  (It has a spectacular cast, too, with a young Bryn Terfel as Figaro.)

What I have always failed to tell my students, however, is that Gardiner modifies Mozart’s sequence in Act III to accord with a hypothesis of Christopher Raeburn and Robert Moberly—essentially moving the Countess’s aria to before the legal proceedings.  This scheme puts two soliloquy scenes back to back and removes altogether any solo numbers from the second half of the act.  Nonetheless, I like the pacing, and I think it works very well in that production.

Raeburn and Moberly published their idea in Music & Letters in 1965, at a time when Mozart’s autograph score of Acts III & IV was still missing as a casualty of World War II, but even among various copyists’ manuscripts and printed libretti they could produce not even a single document that would support them.  Subsequent scholars (in particular, Alan Tyson) have revisited the hypothesis now that the autograph has resurfaced, and still there is no documentary evidence to back it up.  As sensible as the revised Act III sequence is, it never seems to have been part of da Ponte’s or Mozart’s plan for the piece.  And yet this is the version I show to my students—and with no comment from the lectern to say that this is an eccentric ordering of the material.  (Granted, I don’t show the class Act IV, where Gardiner makes an even more daring departure from the text, bisecting a recitative in order to reposition later numbers in the midst of it, but even then I’m not sure that I would mention it.)  

My vague qualms notwithstanding, I’ve never lost any sleep about my silence in class about any of this.  Although (as should be clear from my blog) text is a matter of enormous import to me, the textual situation isn’t what I’m trying to teach in that particular general-education context.  I want my students to be moved, amused, shocked, transfixed by Figaro and by that performance of it.  In another context—this one, for example—the textual issue is my subject.  I expect that most of my students wouldn’t care about the manhandling of Mozart’s score.  Even if one did, given a 50-minute class period for a 40-minute act, I have no time for it, and it is scarcely worth returning to at the next class meeting, particularly when it isn’t even the assigned portion of the act.  (Then again, I also don’t tell them that the fandango in the Act III finale—very much part of my assigned section of the piece—is absent from most of the early Viennese sources, apparently cut after just a few performances.)

I remember once hearing a senior scholar respond to a graduate student’s idea, “Well, that's something you might tell undergraduates.”  I hated that.  I understood what he (sic) meant—something like “that is a hideously oversimplified explanation, but it is pedagogically useful as it is easily understood and would allow you to move on to other material.”  I don’t ever want to condescend to my students like that.  But I also don’t want to obscure the subject by belaboring them with my textual hobby.  While it is fun to have a hobby and a job that so closely intertwine, I’ve got to keep the two distinct enough that the everyone in the room is aware if I am momentarily digressing (or transgressing, really) into the hobby territory.  Such transgressions can be valuable—as sometimes I have had to see someone being passionate about something in order to understand why it matters.  And I don’t mind being geeky if my students can understand why I care about something.  Actually, I just don’t mind being geeky.

My conclusion is so trite as to not need saying, perhaps, to anyone but me:  What shall we tell the students?  Whatever works.

20. The chord that should get lost

So far I have generally avoided posting about my own work, but as it is only with my own work that I have really been able to be “behind the curtain,” I thought I would give an example where the reading I (as editor) wanted wasn’t what eventually made it to print, and where even the textual note about it didn’t ultimately satisfy me.  I don’t think this is a case of “telling tales out of school,” but a reminder (to myself, at least) that all sorts of hidden factors may stand between the editor’s intended text and that which is published.  I know that there must be many cases like these, but how can we know unless people share their experience?

I have the highest regard for my general editor on the William Walton Edition—the English conductor David Lloyd-Jones.  His path-breaking edition of Boris Godunov in the 1970s has had long-lasting effects on the way the opera was performed, restoring the quirkiness of Mussorgsky’s text, and he has produced critical editions of a wide range of works—principally nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and British works, but with a distinguished foray into Berlioz, too—all moonlighting alongside a distinguished conducting career.  By offering me a Walton volume to edit, he gave me my first big break professionally; by offering me a second volume, he shored up my confidence to continue.  I owe him an incalculable debt; and yet here is an instance where we disagreed—in this case just a single chord, but a chord I would so much like to lose.

The second of the volumes I did for the edition was an unusual one, consisting of concert suites derived from Walton’s film scores, including those for the Laurence Olivier Shakespeare films Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955).  These suites were made in the 1960s by Muir Mathieson (1911-1975), who had conducted the recording sessions for each of these films.

SOURCE:  1946 78s; scan of  US release front cover

There seems to be a critical consensus that the most successful of these films (and of these Walton scores) is Henry V.  Right after the release of the film, a four-movement concert suite was prepared (credited at the time to conductor Malcolm Sargent, although I have not found the slightest evidence that Sargent had any hand in it), but Walton’s publisher never offered it for sale, so it had only a marginal impact.  (The two movements for strings only were put on sale and were more widely circulated.)  A more successful commercial re-use was a recording of musical excerpts paired with Olivier reciting newly-recorded speeches on four 78 rpm discs [shown at right].  This recording had a good bit more music than the suite.  Significantly, it included the dramatic “Charge and Battle” music, a musical and cinematic climax of the film.  As the title indicates, these are actually two different musical cues—separated in the film by the launch of a volley of arrows.  (Walton marked the end of his autograph of the charge with the caption “Bombs gone!”)  The charge sequence is tremendously exciting to watch—particularly the virtuoso tracking shot lasting some fifty seconds as the French horses trot, then canter, then gallop across the field.  (A contemporary reviewer noted that the audience at the press-screening gave a spontaneous ovation at this moment, even though “they were applauding t’other side.”)  The whole charge sequence is analysed shot-by-shot and bar-by-bar in the 1957 Roger Manvell and John Huntley text The Technique of Film Music.

SOURCE:  Manvell & Hartley, The Technique of Film Music, p. 91 (the very end of the “Charge”); I have reformatted the page here to better fit a wide rather than tall aspect-ratio.  The penultimate bar is incorrectly transcribed:  Walton writes this as two bars of 3/4, with each 8th-note here really a quarter.

When Mathieson set about producing a new suite, he used the “Sargent” suite as his starting point, but deleted the choral parts (and consequently the music requiring a chorus) and reduced the scoring to double-wind, hoping to make it more attractive to smaller orchestras.  He also inserted the “Charge and Battle” music (plus another section, appended after the battle—but thereby hangs a tale for another time) as the centerpiece of a five-movement suite—and very effective it is, too.

Mathieson has skillfully spliced the cues together, but in doing so he added a chord.  The “Charge” cue ends abruptly on a downbeat—just an eighth-note chord.  (It was followed on both the film and the 1946 RCA recording by the launch of the arrows; to hear those, click either of those hyperlinks.)  The “Battle” cue continues in 3/4 time although with an eighth-rest on the downbeat.  Mathieson elides the two, so that the downbeat chord that ends “Charge” takes the place of the eighth-rest on the downbeat of “Battle.”  The problem comes in the second bar, which Walton indicates only by a ditto mark:

SOURCE:  detail of Walton's autograph of the beginning of the “Battle” cue (147c) of Henry V, taken from a screenshot of the page at the website of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University [http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1237439].  The measure numbers in red ink across the top were added by Mathieson as he prepared his suite.

Mathieson applies this ditto sign to everything in his newly-elided bar, so the downbeat chord appears a second time.

I sought to remove this extraneous chord from the new edition, as it forms no part of the film or any of the early sources, even if it was unambiguously a part of Mathieson's arrangement.  David Lloyd-Jones’s response—reasonable as ever—was that as Walton had conducted a recording of the Mathieson arrangement at the time of its publication, the appearance of the chord on that recording could be taken to be Walton's acceptance of the variant reading.  (Hear him conduct it here; listen closely and you might hear my teeth grinding in the background.)  Given that this recording was made twenty years after the music was composed, and that Walton was hardly the most detail-conscious of composers, I was not persuaded that the presence of the chord indicated that he had even noticed it, let alone endorsed it.

And so the offending chord appears in the William Walton Edition, over the objections of the volume editor:

 

SOURCE:  marked-up digital scan of William Walton Edition vol. 22, p. 48 (detail).

The corresponding textual note documents that this was Mathieson’s addition, but does nothing to suggest—as I wanted to—that one should at least consider eliminating it.  I believe our volume is an improvement over the first edition of Mathieson’s arrangement (especially because ours restores Walton’s original triple-wind scoring), but here is one place where I think we didn’t go far enough in restoring the composer's text.