49. The sound of (editorial) silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

19. (im)posing

which is the sixth installment of the Settling Scores

In this post I consider an edition of a central item in the Bach keyboard repertoire, BWV 971, the Italian Concerto from Clavierübung II.  The edition at hand was the work of Rosalyn Tureck (1914-2003), and it was published by G. Schirmer in 1983 under an imprint revealing that it was to be the first of many:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the title page of Tureck’s 1983 edition

The series nameplate combines three terms that do not necessarily mix well:  critical edition, performance edition, and urtext.  (Later issues in the short-lived series add facsimile to the namplate, and this is accurate as each one includes a facsimile reproduction of her principal source(s), although sometimes these are reduced in size or too faint to be very useful.)

A critical edition is particular type of scholarly edition:  it is the product of the studious application of some text-critical method involving multiple sources.  In musical editions these methods are usually deployed in pursuit either of the earliest version penned by a composer, the last version as revised by a composer, or (increasingly, so it seems to me) a version that the composer never got down on paper but for which there is some authoritative evidence; but a critical edition need not seek a version known to the composer, but might seek a subsequent version (like Mendelssohn’s or Vaughan Williams’s re-scorings of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—in either case the usual Bach sources would be generally irrelevant to the text-critical process).  Whatever goal a critical edition is aiming for, I am all in favor of it when it is done well.

Many critical editions also claim the label urtext, which was coined to refer to the original reading of a text, but which in musical editions has come to describe little more than editions purged of interpretive editorial accretions—slurs and other articulation marks, dynamics, fingerings, pedalings, bowings, etc.  In that sense an urtext may not prove to be “critical” in the sense described above.  I would argue that an edition based on a single source—that is, in which there has been no collation of variant readings—cannot be a critical edition in its strict sense, although it may well be an urtext in at least the marketing sense.  (Although a number of webpages credit the publisher Günter Henle as the first to apply the term to music, the OED has a 1932 citation from the TLS referring to “the nearest thing possible in Chopin’s case to an Urtext,” and Breitkopf & Härtel used it for a series of publications in the 1890s.)

A performance edition aims to make visible to the user the various unwritten or obscure conventions that are otherwise invisible on the page—or, indeed, performance practices that are quite far removed from the composer.  Editorial additions to the text in such editions vary widely, and sometimes recognizing them for what they are can be difficult, as you have to know what a composer “looks like” to know when something has been added; at other times the interpretive suggestions are bleedingly obvious.  And—as I indicated in my very first post—I don’t disparage such editions in the least, as they are vital resources in understanding performance conventions of their time.  The goals of urtext and performing editions are  essentially at odds.  While it is a standard practice to adapt a text to modern notation conventions (for example, using treble and bass clefs only for keyboard music), many editions I see marketed as urtexts make more extensive concessions to aid in performers’ interpretations.  Tureck’s does this, but at least she explains in her preface exactly the sorts of interpretive marks she has added.   Nonetheless, her approach to these editions seems to transfer them out of the urtext realm into something else altogether.

The two other issues of the Tureck’s series were the lute suites BWV 996 and 997 adapted for the guitar.  These bear a curious note in which the editor insists that “[t]he Suites in this series, edited for classical guitar, are not arrangements.  This edition preserves the original form of Bach’s compositions” [p. ii].  Indeed?  An urtext for the wrong instrument?  If the word arrangement was too slippery for her to assert authority, why not transcription?  Clearly adjustments have been made in order to make this playable at all:  “Where notes are considered unplayable on the guitar the editor does not omit them.  For the sake of musical completeness they are included within parentheses in the musical text.  8ve signifies an octave above the original register, an editorial solution” [BWV 996, p. v].  An “editorial solution,” that is, to a problem created by the editor.  These are transcriptions—very good ones, perhaps, made by an authority on Bach performance—but they unnecessarily claim a specious scholarly objectivity.  She is posing to be more than she is.

So too her edition of the Italian Concerto (which Tureck significantly describes as edited “for Harpsichord or Piano”), which presents not merely a critically-established text, but overlays it with her interpretation.  The fidelity is not thus to the text of the work but rather to a learned artist’s understanding of it.  She glosses the Italian Concerto so that we can see what she perceives when she reads the music.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that:  I am reminded of Malcolm Bilson’s complaint that everyone uses urtext editions but few know how to read them. Tureck’s profuse prefatory remarks give the impression that hers is—for the first time ever—the text Bach meant.

“No autograph copy of the Italian Concerto exists.  Although several manuscripts in other hands are extant, the most reliable source is Bach’s own corrected copy of the first printing, published in 1735, in which revisions are set down in his hand. [Bach-Digital description here.]  The second printing appeared in 1736.  The inestimable value of Bach’s text is self-evident.  It is a rare instance in the keyboard works of direct contact with the original textual and performance intentions of Johann Sebastian.  The editor employs this musical text [i.e., the 1736 edition or the hand-corrected 1735 edition?] for this edition which, besides being an urtext edition, is also edited for performance on the piano or the harpsichord according to all the original indications in Bach’s corrected copy.  The stem directions, which in the editor’s opinion are of prime importance, have also been preserved as closely as possible.... [p. iii]  It has long been the custom to present a ‘clean’ score with urtext references, leaving the performer to find the way to performance solutions.  This procedure has served two functions:  (1) it has rescued editions from erroneous music texts and anachronistic performance directions[,] and (2) it has reflected scholarly research and orientation.  The bare urtext editions give the performing musician and teacher contact with the scholar’s approach and with increasingly reliable scores which provide a textual foundation upon which an authentic performance art may be developed....”  [p. iv]

The eyes glaze over at some point, and she relies increasingly on an authoritarian passive voice:

“In addition to current editing procedures, performance practices must now be introduced if musicians are to employ an urtext which will contribute to an authentic performance style.  Heretofore, the performer has been left uninstructed, an impossible practice for music composed some 250 years ago. Innumerable specific, historical performance practices are identifiable, and substantial data concerning them are available....  This edition integrates the textual sources with Bach’s own performance indications and historical style, based on Baroque performance practices for harpsichord. These practices, when combined with an uncompromising purity of Baroque style, considerations of the musical structure, and a fitting piano technique, have valid applications on the piano.” [p. iv]

Paul Badura-Skoda blasts this edition in his Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard, particularly in a section he calls “The Urtext Problem: An Imaginary Interview” [p. 188-200], where he imagines all the questions he wants to be asked and so that he can respond pithily.  In particular he takes Tureck to task for her radical proposal that in the second movement the accompanying alto line may be ornamented.  See her note before the beginning of the movement:

SOURCE:  digital scan of Tureck ed., p. 8

Whatever else one might say of this edition, it doesn't have the look of an Urtext.  As promised, it is laden with interpretive information.  These alto-line embellishments are a step too far for Badura-Skoda:

B.-S.  Look, if a professional musicologist comes up with a sensational claim such as, for example, that in the second movement of the Italian Concerto the alto voice should be freely embellished throughout, then he or she should adduce some evidence to support it.  I know of no Italian or German treatise written during Bach's lifetime that suggests the embellishment of accompanying (in contrast to imitative) inner voices.  Thus one might expect from Dr Tureck some evidence or explanation for such a claim... 

DR C.  Doesn’t she point to the fact that the thirds in the lower system of the Andante have two tails [stems] throughout, thus proving that they are two distinct voices? 

B.-S.  This is simply a naïve remark and doesn’t prove anything.  Everyone who is acquainted with the keyboard music of the eighteenth century knows that it was common notational practice to add tails to all thirds, sixths, and so on.  This even occurs in Haydn and Mozart.  If what she says were true, one could also, in the Italian Concerto, set about enriching the accompaniment of bars 30f., 46f., and 129f. of the first movement with ornaments. 

DR C.  But Tureck points to bar 17 of the second movement, where, in the first edition, there really is a Pralltriller sign in the middle voice... 

B.-S.  ... which is almost certainly an engraver’s error...  [p. 195f.; the ellipses are his]

He belabors this point at some length, adding that her suggested execution of the trill is wrong “because the Pralltriller formula she adduces is not found in a single treatise before 1757, seven years after Bach died.”

This notwithstanding, the only thing that irks me about Tureck’s edition is that she overreaches, imposing her way as the one true path to Bach.  Badura-Skoda does the same.  Maybe this is an occupational hazard for performers, but particularly for one who communed with the composer as “the high priestess of Bach.”  And, like any editor, Tureck is delighted when she can restore some textual variant in order to give us the truth:

“As a result of this comparative analysis, the editor brings to light an error in the first movement which appears in well-known 19th and 20th century editions including the Neue Bach Ausgabe.  At measures 13-14 the figure in the soprano had been altered to match measures 175-176 in the closing da capo section.  This figure is restored in this edition to its original version.”  [p. iii]

The figure to which she refers is this:

SOURCE: composite; my own transcriptions (clefs updated) from the first edition (1735) from IMSLP #417409

Tureck makes a big deal of this, but other editors before her have noted the oddity and opted to regularize.  Badura-Skoda’s response: “In the other Bach concertos initial and final tuttis of a movement are identical, which means that this discrepancy goes back to an engraver’s error that Bach overlooked” [p. 198].  Just off the top of my head I can think of one closing ritornello markedly different from the opening—the first movement of Bach's second “Brandenburg” concerto. (When another example occurred to me, I find that it is slippery—so slippery that, rather than digress here, I will plan to get back to it a future post; if you want to whet your appetite, you can see it here.)

In any case, “Original version” may be too much for Tureck to claim, as it appears that this figured had changed a bit before the 1735 publication.  A manuscript copied by Johann Christoph Oley (1735-1789) held by the Boston Public Library (details at Bach-Digital here, but a scan is available at the IMSLP) presented an earlier reading of the text which Oley subsequently updated to match the published version (altering even the title page to conform—see the account in the NBA Kritischer Bericht).  Wherever they might be placed metrically, these twiddles seem to have been second thoughts.  In these and other instances Oley has originally written 16th-notes, and then crammed the extra note in to make a pair of 32nds.  (Note that here, in addition to the cramped space, often the stem of the added note does not cross the closest beam, although in the places where Oley originally wrote 32nds (as throughout the second movement), the stems cross all the way to the main beam.)

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots from Oley MS, at IMSLP #302163

Even here, Oley doesn’t quite match the printed text: in bb. 73-74, the 32nds are early (by which I mean, on the first half of each half-beat); in bb. 175-76, the first pair is early, while the other two pairs accord with the printed reading.

Tureck’s labors devoted to Bach interpretation are admirable—especially her “progressive anthology” series, An Introduction to the Performance of Bach (3 vols, Oxford,  1960).  Most interesting there is a sort of etude in which she has rewritten the C-major 2-part invention (BWV 772) so that the hands are essentially reversed “for the development of flexible thinking in two parts”:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan  from Tureck, An Introduction to the Performance of Bach, vol. 2, p. 14

This series is naturally a product of its time.  (See especially her discussion of the sources of the Aria Variata, BWV 989, in vol. 3, p. 7)  The same is true of the Schirmer series from the 1980s.  This edition of the Italian Concerto remains in print, and it is part of a long tradition of instructional editions.  Its presumption to be more than it is probably does no harm—but a phrase from an earlier Badura-Skoda publication come to mind (co-written with his wife, Eva):  “[i]t would be a good thing if the use of the word ‘Urtext’ were protected by law...” [p. 129], rather like Champagne and organic in some jurisdictions.  It sells well, but is the label accurate? 

5. “What's the best edition of ________?”

Every now and then a student will come down the hall to my office—away, that is, from the mire of applied studies and into the transcendent world of musicological speculation (... or so I sometimes would like it to seem)—and say:  "Prof. X told me to ask you what edition I should get of _________."

It doesn’t happen all that often.  Usually Prof. X tells the student what edition to buy, so they never come to see me.  As before in this blog, I turn to the words of Walter Emery:

The ordinary musician does not buy an edition because it is good; as he does not know how editing is done, he cannot tell whether an edition is good or bad.  He buys an edition because its title-page bears a famous name or the magic word Urtext:  or because it has a pretty cover:  or, more likely, because it is sixpence cheaper than any other:  or again, because his teacher has told him to (which means only that the teacher was told to buy it by his teacher, has used it for twenty years, and has got used to the look of it).  [pp. 7f.]

In a very interesting and useful article that deals with edition selection as a teaching moment, Rachel E. Scott gives an anecdote which fulfills Emery's worst fears:

As a freshman vocal performance major, my voice teacher assigned me “Le Violette” by Alessandro Scarlatti. The following week I naively showed up for my lesson with my shiny new 26 Italian Songs and Arias: An Authoritative Edition Based on Authentic Sources. I quickly learned that my “Le Violette” was not her “Le Violette.” My professor rejected my anthology, pulled out Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and declared that the accompaniment in my edition was “just awful.” Not only are the accompaniments very different, but the vocal line is also slightly different. In short, the two editions presented two very different pieces.  While this experience certainly opened my eyes to the existence of different editions, it did not provide a solution to the problem. I did not understand that my teacher’s preference was based on tradition and not on the quality of the editorial work....  [pp. 133f.]

No doubt this scenario has repeated itself countless times.

Sometimes a teacher might think they are recommending the best edition simply because the publisher has a good reputation.  (See for example this recent post by violinist Phillipe Quint (“Usually I rely on two editions:  Henle and Barenreiter”).)  Certainly when I was studying piano 20+ years ago, Henle seemed to have sewn up the market, despite a wide variety in the quality of their backlist—a problem that has been rectified to a significant extent as new editions have superseded many old ones.

Judging from Google searches, the perennial question of which edition to buy has migrated to various internet forums.  Typical of many hits that came up was this one:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/22938/good-non-henle-urtext-edition-of-bach/23012
(accessed 30 Sept. 2016)

There is much to read between the lines here.  The teacher said “urtext” so that a student would have a text free from interpretive interpolations (mainly, I imagine, slurs); the teacher didn’t specify which, as the various urtexts of the Bach English Suites do look pretty much the same.  The student knows the word urtext has to be on the cover and has noticed that this increases the price—money which it would probably be more enjoyable to spend elsewhere.  The first responder points out that the BG edition is “urtext” in the sense that the teacher probably wants.  The estimate of the quality is attributed to they (“they say”—a vile phrase), followed by recourse to Wikipedia.  There is no assertion of an edition being good for x reason or bad for y reason.  And who can say?

Indeed, who can say?  Very few people actually spend their time looking at multiple editions of the same works, still less comparing multiple editions to their sources and (if present) the editorial remarks.  As has been brought home to me when reviewing editions, I simply don’t have enough information to verify that the editor has done the work properly.  Unless I have all the sources in front of me and can do the editor’s work over again, I have to take the editor’s word that the edition is what it claims to be.  True, I can talk about methodological problems (particularly sources not consulted) or editorial policies that I find disagreeable, but otherwise I am only barely qualified to offer an opinion.  And I suspect this is the case for most professionals (except perhaps for the repertoire at the very center of our interest).

Musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason calls her admirable blog Not another music history cliché!  I wish someone would write one called Not another uncritical review!  These are easy to spot, as they are almost invariably glowing reviews, and they usually conclude with a formulation like “It is handsomely bound and will make an attractive addition to your shelves.”  While these tend not to be by musicologists, they do tend to be published in sources more readily available to the average musician, and thus are much more significant in terms of their influence.  There are some, however, who have dealt explicitly with comparing editions, not just reviewing a new edition in a vacuum.  Judging from my RILM and Google searches, many of these are in practical periodicals (The Strad, Clavier, and the like), where they would be most useful to teachers.  This topic also seems to be a frequent topic for DMA dissertations.

I don't believe in “best” editions, but I've certainly seen some bad ones.  I also am familiar with the gnawing sense that I don't know enough to evaluate what is in my hands.   And so I  propose a crowd-sourced bibliography.  I welcome citations for articles/chapters/blogposts/etc. that compare different editions (i.e., not just reviews of a new edition).  With the rise of the IMSLP and students’ use of it, these need not necessarily focus on new editions.  The old editions are ever with us—and I think that is a very good thing.  Many are superb.  (They also have the virtue of printing more music per page, and so have fewer page turns.  If a requirement for best edition is practicality, page turns might rank pretty high.)  I have put a new tab on the blog for this project so that it will be readily available; send me citations through the contact form and I will gladly add them to the list:  articles, books, blogposts, webforum posts, whatever.