44. Bedtime stories

A few weeks ago I was skimming through Christopher Small’s Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening in search of something I recalled reading years ago and wanted to mention in this blog.  I did not find what I was looking for; maybe it will turn up eventually and that post will get written.  It was very good, though, to open Musicking again; my skimming quickly became a more extensive perusal.  The book appeared while I was in graduate school.  Although it was never assigned reading for me, it shaped me more than just about anything else I read.  I would put it on any shortlist of the most important books on music of the last century.

I used to assign Musicking in my introductory music course, but I gave it up because my students regularly complained that it moved too slowly.  I think that is actually one of its virtues:  Small’s writing is wonderfully lucid, and filled with so many fascinating observations.  Most of the book consists of a “thick description”—about as thick as possible—of an orchestral concert.  He starts with a long consideration of an audience member's approach to the concert hall,  eventually making his way through the lobby into the auditorium.  He fills five chapters before the conductor is even in a position to give a downbeat, and even thereafter he writes not so much about the music being played as about the relationships established between the notes and the people involved (composer, performers, listeners), in search of “what is really going on here.”  In a chapter of that name he makes a compelling comparison:

“I intend no insult to either the ceremony of the symphony concert or to the works that are played there when I characterize them, at least in part, as bedtime stories told to adults.  The two ceremonies have features in common.  The first is that what is going on in both is the telling of a story and that the story partakes of the nature of the great meta-narrative.  The second is that the stories have become so familiar through repetition that they have lost whatever power they might once have had to disturb.  The third is that in both there is an insistence on perfect repetition of a series of actions that are prompted by a text, which in one case is the reading of words that comprise a story and in the other is the performance of sequences of musical sounds that comprise musical works.” (187)

I cannot do Small justice here; if you find this anywhere near as intriguing as I do, do yourself the favor of reading him cover to cover.  I want to extrapolate from the issue he raises about accumulation of a concert repertoire to consider how the bedtime story analogy illuminates further textual situations of music.  I have spent a lot of hours in the last ten years reading bedtime stories—and maybe that's why I have a new appreciation for Small’s comparison, a detail I had completely forgotten from my previous uses of this book.

I suspect that my family's experience is a common one:  a repertoire of bedtime stories develops over time, and while there are differences between the preferences of different children, there are some stories that become canonic family favorites.  This may not be related to any intrinsic quality of those stories: it may be just that the reader (me) enjoys reading them, and thus the child is used to hearing them before they have a say about what will be read.  Some books are tried once and then go back on the shelf or back to the library.  Others linger around on the floor beside the bed because we know we will be returning to them time and time again.  There are hints of a seasonal calendar to the repertoire—stories that relate to Thanksgiving or Christmas or summertime or the beginning of school—but most of the stories could be read at any time.  (The parallels with the development of a concert repertory are very interesting, but that is Small’s topic more than mine.  Again, I encourage readers to go directly to him; what matters here is that the texts become canonic by repetition.)

Different Texts, Same Story
As a core repertoire of bedtime stories develops in a family, both the reader and the listener inevitably become more attuned to textual details.  Sometimes I have to improvise my way through an already-familiar story because the book is not at hand.  In such cases, if the story is very familiar to the child, I will get critiques about the bits I omitted or over-embellished.  This is even more piquant when I read an already-familiar story in a new-to-us account (one of those “as told by” books); the child recognizes that the printed texts themselves differ—that “the story” and “the text” are not one and the same thing.  I have lost count of how many Star Wars books we have checked out of the library that would fit this situation, but of course it is also common with fairy tales and fables generally.  Perhaps the characters have names where they did not before (Cinderella’s stepsisters, for example), or new characters and scenes are introduced; certainly different texts emphasize different aspects of the story.

Often these differences are literary, having more to do with the construction of the story and the use of imagery or foreshadowing.  Sometimes they reveal different ideological perspectives.  I have seen this most in books of Bible stories for children—the sort of things well-meaning friends gave us when each of our kids were born.  The selection of stories included is revealing enough:  the Bible is full of sex, violence, gore, war, plague, pestilence, and massacre.  Many children’s versions instead tend to focus on the peace and love aspects, although these to me seem so disconnected from real life that I wonder if children will find anything relevant in them.  No, I think the bad and scary stuff needs to be there, and I am always interested to see how such is told.  That said, the storybook that, in narrating the story of David and Goliath, read “because David didn’t have a gun...” went straight into the trash.  (I wish I could include an image of it here, but I don’t even remember which it was.  That line, however, is indelibly imprinted on my memory.)

There are musical manifestations of this sort of textual variety.  Very common, surely, are different arrangements of the same tune (like so many albums of holiday music, each artist putting their own stamp on it in one way or another).  But this can also be seen in the most audible differences between different versions of standard works.  I can remember, for example, when first hearing Richard Maunder’s completion of the Mozart Requiem, the absence of Süßmayr’s trombone/woodwind chord at the beginning of “Rex tremendae majestatis” gave me a sensation akin to the slapstick gag of  leaning back against a wall that was not there.

SOURCE:  composite of the opening of “Rex tremendae” from K. 626:  (l.) Süßmayr's version, as given in the  NMA Ser. II Vol. 14, p. 83; (r.) completion by Richard Maunder (1988), full score, p. 61.  To hear this moment of Maunder's version in performance, click here.  (Robert Levin makes a similar choice in his completion.)

Or, for a similar example, in the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565, generally attributed to J. S. Bach):  when an organist is using the NBA (or the new Breitkopf edition as well), there is a rest on a downbeat where older editions accustomed me to a concluding low D.  I’m not sure that I totally agree with the source argument for leaving out the D:  there are no authentic sources for this work to link it to Bach, nor even to anyone else.  We have different versions “as told by” different copyists.  Either is effective.   So what?

SOURCE:  composite of bb. 12ff. from BWV 565: (top) BG vol. 15, detail of p. 268 (from ISMLP #01335); (bottom) NBA Ser. IV vol. 6, detail of p. 32.

Textual Preferences
In practice, all sorts of textual changes in a family’s bedtime story repertoire might creep in just in the repeated telling of the stories.  The result is something like the liturgical concept of a “use”—essentially a local variant to an established text.  The best known (because best preserved) of these is the Sarum Use, the variant of the Roman rite that evolved in Salisbury around the twelfth century and lingered until it was supplanted by (and adapted into) the vernacular service in the English Reformation.  This variant wasn’t limited to Salibury:  it got picked up by other British and Irish dioceses, and even some further afield.  While basically in accordance with the Roman tradition, the Use of Sarum accrued supplemental bits and pieces and different ways of doing things.

As I say, I have observed this sort of thing in my own bedtime storytelling.  I have made local “improvements” (as I would like to think of them) which have become part of the textus receptus for my kids.  Thus, when I read Joan Heilbroner’s 1962 Robert the Rose Horse, I modify her refrain that leads up to the allergic horse’s increasingly explosive sneezes:

Something about the word itch twice in such close succession strikes me as weak.  I invariably substitute twitch for the second:

His eyes began to itch.  His nose began to twitch.

As I reflect on this now, I note that I also add a rhythm and even a hint of pitch inflection to my recitation of this phrase—probably because it is a repeated figure in the book, with an internal textual repetition as well.   As I read it, it comes out something like

By changing the text, of course, I am usurping the authority of the author herself.  And musicians have done that—made unauthorized changes to a text—as long as we have any documentation that could confirm it.  They (we) still do it today, and I don’t think it is a problem.  I am more troubled, I suppose, by those like David Zinman, whose recording of the Beethoven symphonies was proclaimed as being the first cycle to use the new Bärenreiter urtext edition, but exactly how Zinman uses it is not clear:  I suppose anyone is free to use an edition however they like, but if one doesn’t agree with the Bärenreiter main text, what is the point of putting the name on the label?  Perhaps I can return to that for a later post.  Even if Zinman reverts to more traditional readings in many instances, he is in any case closer to the composer’s text than is (say) Barenboim, whose Beethoven still seems to be that which was in vogue at the time of his own birth.  Still, the “Barenboim Use” (or is it Furtwängler?) has as much a right to exist as any number of others.  Vive la différence.

Performing Texts
At even a more micro- level, the ritual of bedtime stories extends beyond just the verbal text (which I may or may not intentionally alter).  “Do the voices!” says my four-year-old, and I am compelled to read a children’s book as if it were a radio drama, with a cast of characters and a Foley effects man.   Thus this page from Tim Egan’s superb Metropolitan Cow (1999) requires from me the falsetto of Henrietta Gibbons (gasping for breath after a search all over the neighborhood for her missing calf, Bennett), followed by the stentorian basso of her distressed husband, Frederick.  Somewhere along the line, I see that I have made another textual alteration, as now alter the word just in Frederick’s second line to simply:  I [simply] don’t know!

This reminds me, too, of the entire complexes of ornaments that manifest the teacher/pupil lineage across multiple generations—whether it be Carnatic ragas or Rossini arias.  The textual fossilization of accruing ornamentation marries tradition and evolution.

SOURCE:  scan from Will Crutchfield, "Early Vocal Ornamenation" in the Critical Commentary of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter, 2008), pp. 361-420; the pages shown collate sources from singers relatively close to the composer for bb. 96-106 of Rosina's "Una voce poco fa"; I have added red brackets to mark the staff which gives Rossini's text (as edited in the WGR).

Ritual Action
In some instances, my enactment of the story goes beyond audible (i.e., radio drama) to physical embodiment.  I go through particular motions at key moments in the story, not unlike those actions specified in the rubrics for the eucharistic celebrant—again recalling the Sarum variants.  Thus in Roger Duvoisin’s Donkey Donkey (1933), I can hardly resist giving the child a gentle pinch on the ear when “the wicked nail” caught the eponymous donkey on his way into his stable.  (If only he had kept his ears up as donkeys do....)

I have found Small’s reference to the ritual of the bedtime story to be wonderfully illuminating because it is applicable far beyond the narrow context to which he applies it.  It is an excellent analogy for how and why concert etiquette and expectations have evolved as they have.  Beyond this, however, I recognize that it also exemplifies the evolution of text and textual practices generally.  Texts do not replicate themselves; people replicate texts, and in so doing there may be all sorts of individual reasons to change ( = corrupt) the text to new ends.  This must surely happen often with family recipes, handed down over generations.  Somewhere along the line someone replaces the lemon with rum, and your great-grandmother’s pound cake is not quite your great-grandmother’s pound cake anymore, even if it is regarded as such.

But, like baking, bedtime stories require someone to realize the text.  Your great-grandmother's pound cake doesn't really exist on an index card, nor does “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” quite exist merely on paper (save for the illustrations).  Bedtime stories are performance art—like music—requiring performer(s) to bring them to life.  As several times before in this blog, I find myself quoting Dorothy L. Sayers:

“From experience I am inclined to think that one reason why writing for the stage is so much more interesting than writing for publication is the very fact that, when the play is acted, the free will of the actor is incorporated into the written character.  The common man is aware of the conflicting desires within the playwright’s mind, and often asks questions about them.  Sometimes he asks:  ‘Isn’t it exciting to see your characters coming alive upon stage?’  Sometimes he inquires sympathetically:  ‘Isn’t it maddening to hear the actors ruining your best lines?’  The playwright can only reply that (unless the production is quite unnaturally good or superlatively bad) both propositions are undoubtedly true.
“A good deal, of course, depends upon the temperament of the playwright.  If he is of the egotistical kind, finding no satisfaction except in the autocratic enforcement of his sole will, he will find actors maddening almost beyond endurance.  This is the type of person who, in the sphere of procreation, tends to become a Roman parent.  But if he is the more liberal kind of creator, he will eagerly welcome—I will not say bad acting, which is altogether sinful and regrettable—but imaginative and free acting, and find an immensely increased satisfaction in the individual creativeness which the actor brings to his part.”  [The Mind of the Maker, pp. 64–65.]

Small’s bedtime story analogy allowed me to confront directly some ways in which I have been complicit in textual corruption—and indeed to see that this is the natural entropy of texts.  If in this blog I am sometimes baffled by certain textual variants—What were they thinking?—it is now easier to see that, at the very least, they weren’t thinking of me.  One can corrupt a text with not only the best of intentions, but with perfectly justifiable results, entering into the creative collaboration of performance.  Some of this came up in my second post, where I considered how much authority the author deserves.  Heresy?  I don’t think so.  If you can only countenance one possible reading of a text—as if set in stone for all time—I think that your concept of art is much too small.

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.

2. Risky business

It’s not news that music is a risky business.  Even with the narrower field of musical text, there is an element of risk.  Certainly music publishers are now more than ever in a risky business:  they compete for what is apparently a diminishing number of customers, and this competition may be against free legal downloads even more than against other publishers.  For a composer, notation is itself risky—virtually every element fraught with potential misinterpretation.  If they choose for their music to be performed by live musicians (and that is no longer the no-brainer that it used to be), they must give up some degree of control of “their” music:  the score is the inevitable nexus between the person trying to get the musical material in and those who would get the material out.   And I find the issues that arise from that interface compelling.

Much of what I will write in this blog has been said before—sometimes, indeed, because I want to point out things others before me have said (and done) that deserve renewed attention.  One such example is a small booklet by Walter Emery, published in 1957 by Novello & Co.  He called it Editions and Musicians, but I think his subtitle says it all:

Emery can get preachy at times.  At times that is stimulating, at times perhaps a little tedious.  I appreciate every page of this book, even when I find that I disagree with him.  For example, Emery concludes his chapter “The Need for Editing” thus:

“The fact is that until an editor has done his work, and done it properly, no performer can safely play old music, no analyst can safely analyse it, and no historian or critic can safely assess it.  The editor’s work is the foundation on which all other musical and musicological activities are based.”  (p. 14)

Really?  I can remember a time when I would have endorsed every word of this, but no longer.  It is not that I am against good editions of music—on the contrary, even when they cost a bundle.  It is really the word “safely” that bothers me.  Implicit in it, I think, is the idea of a definitive conception of the piece in the composer’s head, and that we are obliged to try to get as close to that as we can before we do anything else.  Moreover, I think Emery would say that these other activities (performance, analysis, criticism) that occur without such a proper editorial foundation are doomed eventually to crumble.

I’m skeptical that such a definitive conception ever existed in any meaningful and permanent way, and even more skeptical that such an idea could be conveyed to anyone else.  Think of the composers—first-rate composers—who couldn’t leave well enough alone.  (Not just “well-enough”—we might sometimes tend to gush with phrases like “apparent perfection.”)  Chopin might be an extreme example of this:  not only was he praised for “ever different expression” (and “Chopin never played his own compositions alike twice,” etc.), but those remarks are consistent with the documentary record of his own manuscripts and the editions that flow from them (i.e., all sorts of authorized variant readings).  Even given the fascinating editorial collation that has been unfolding through the superb Online Chopin Variorum Edition, isn’t there perhaps just too much here for anyone to take in?  Must the establishment of every authentic Chopin text of a work be complete before anyone can “safely” (to use Emery’s word) perform or analyze or critique it?  Could Emery be satisfied if an authentic text (say, a copy of the first French edition of a work marked up by Chopin for his pupil Jane Stirling) was all that a performer had seen?  This is, of course, extremely improbable, given the glut of Chopin editions on the market, settled in domestic piano benches, littering cabinets and weighing down shelves.  When Emery writes of the need for editing, it is a need to redress a context dominated by editing that was not done “properly” (again Emery’s word).

Or consider J. S. Bach, for whom, as Christoph Wolff has put it, there was apparently “no such thing as ‘untouchable’ text,” evidenced by his changes (not just “corrections”) even to his published works, and his revisions and reworkings of  (for example) the cantatas as he reused them in a subsequent years.  These are often instances where it is difficult to argue one reading is better than the other (indeed, there a few cases, like the two versions of the Canonic Variations, BWV 769 and BWV 769a, when it is seems impossible to say definitively which version came first).

Or Mendelssohn—whose “Revisionskrankheit” was a chronic (fatal?) compulsion to tinker away endlessly at his completed works.  At some point in this blog I will eventually return to the case of Mendelssohn’s celebrated “Italian” Symphony—a work that until recently was known only in its first version; Mendelssohn’s second thoughts prompted him to rewrites of the last three movements; the first movement he ultimately deemed unredeemable.  All this notwithstanding, it is one of his most popular works with audiences, who don’t seem to have noticed how unredeemable it is.  But more on that later.

In my first post, I mentioned the very different manifestations of Mussorgksy’s Pictures at an Exhibition, diverging in many respects from the autograph score, but still holding a secure place in the repertoire of pianists and orchestras.  I’d guess that Emery would regard any performance of the Rimsky-Korsakov version (or the editions derived from it) as a travesty.  But what about when later minds uncover new ways of hearing a piece—and a composer even embraces those new readings?  (Think Bob Dylan’s response to Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.”)

I have been delighted to see that the editorial principles behind the new Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter) take into account not just the authorial conception of the works, but also these works in performance, accumulating non-authorial performance traditions.  The score of the recent edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia (ed. Patricia Brauner), for example, includes in appendices not only three substitute numbers Rossini composed for later productions, but also several vocal variants (i.e., ornamented versions) that are extant in Rossini’s hand in as many as three (differing) sources.

Source:  cropped scan of p. 504 of WGR score of Il barbiere... (Bärenreiter, 2009)

Beyond this, however, the critical commentary includes materials about the performance tradition not directly deriving from Rossini:  a) the libretto for a Neapolitan-dialect version with spoken dialogue, and b) an extensive essay (59 pages!) by Will Crutchfield on “Early Vocal Ornamentation.”  I think it is a pity that these gems lie in the comparative obscurity of the very pricey commentary volume.

Would Emery say that as these latter variants are not from Rossini (but rather from the early performance tradition), a “safe” performance would be no performance at all?  Or that analysis or critique would be meaningless because it doesn’t relate directly to the composer?

Then again, just because Chopin was known to interpret his music anew each time, he didn’t take just any pupil; should we read his varying instructions to them with similar caution?  His famous remark to Filtsch (“We each understand this remark differently, but go your own way, do as you feel, it can also be played that way”) could hardly be regarded as interpretive carte blanche for any pianist.  Still, there is a sense in which G. Thomas Tanselle’s conceptual distinction between the text of the work and the text of the document might be useful—another idea I will be returning to in later posts.

I find that I’m more willing to see more risky performances, ponder risky analyses, and read risky critiques.  The safe alternative seems embalmed (fossilized?) in an established text, when the text itself was never sufficient.  That said, inauthentic readings (when they are known) should be acknowledged as such.  The situation can become bizarre, such as an exchange prompted by David B. Levy’s review of a critical edition of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by Jonathan Del Mar (1996).  (Levy's review is “Urtext or Performing Edition?” in Beethoven Forum 9/2 (2002), pp. 225-232).  Del Mar’s edition is a remarkable accomplishment in many respects, but Levy is astonished to see Del Mar depart from an established reading to favor a variant that is admittedly authentic (mvt. I, b. 81; the D in flute and oboe, rather than the familiar reading of B-flat):

Source: detail (woodwinds only) of scan of p. 13 of Del Mar’s edition of Symphony no. 9 (Kassel:  Bärenreiter, 1996)

[Here is a performance of this moment with this text.]

This “new” (original) reading results in a curious discrepancy in the subsequent appearances of this figure, where there is no leap of a sixth.  (This isn’t really an issue of recomposition in the recapitulation, but rather a different conception of motivic unity.)  Yet, as Del Mar remarks in the critical commentary, this D appears in all sources (which for this instance means the autograph (below), five scores made by copyists, and the first edition score and parts (1826)).  Del Mar surmises that the Bb (which first appeared in the 1864 Breitkopf edition)

“… was apparently invented by analogy with 276/80,346 [later recurrences of the motive].  Yet Beethoven wrote d in both instruments in A, so it can hardly be a mistake.”  (p. 25)

Source:  detail of screenshot of http://beethoven.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/beethoven/pix/sinfonien/9/1/990/00000020.jpg  
(mm. 80-84 as in Beethoven’s autograph f. 8v.)

 Levy puzzles that Del Mar would depart from the reading that would support “many published analytical studies… [which] have drawn attention to the significance of the perfect fourth (and its inversion, the perfect fifth) not only within the first movement, but throughout the entire work” (p. 229).  Del Mar replies:

“… where I as a sensible musician have to judge that the reading in the authentic sources is inconceivable (no less)—and especially where I can show how the error could well have arisen—I will present the more likely text. But if it is conceivable, I have a duty to stick to what Beethoven wrote. So despite all published analytical studies—which inevitably were based on the text they had in front of them—I restore Beethoven’s D in movt. I, m.81. Sorry: if we subsequently find that the analysts’ text was faulty, their studies will have to be rewritten. That is quite simply inevitable, and to argue that we must print a text that accords with previously published analytical studies is obviously putting the cart before the horse.”  (p. 105)

No need, in my view, for these “risky” analyses to be “safely” re-written:  the analyses can account for the work as it came to be known.  More significantly they document an important aspect of reception history:  our(?) sense of what the product of a genius should manifest, with (in this instance) an organic unity of motivic development encompassing the whole work.  The altered B-flat is no less a part of Beethoven’s 9th symphony (i.e., the cultural property it has become) just because Beethoven didn't write it.  If, with Del Mar, we regard the B-flat as bad editorial judgment, we must now correct it; we can't eliminate the effects it has had over the years (and we could, if we chose, continue to play it and analyze it), but we do have to acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it.  Those who disagree with Del Mar should still acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it, but they may argue however they may that Beethoven meant it.

As my envoi, take this example from Emery (p. 19), who quotes Donald Francis Tovey’s hedging conclusion when faced with an (unknown) chromatic error in his text of the F# minor prelude from Bach’s WTC II: “a harmonic point of peculiar subtlety.”  But of course.  That’s what we expect from a genius, right?