9. Q & A, but few answers

Two weeks ago, I gave a solo recital—something very unusual for me, as I’m really a musicologist rather than a musician.  Although I am regularly involved in various performance activities—most usually as an accompanist or church musician—I cannot recall any solo recital I have done since my senior recital in college.  Indeed, that event is the impetus for this one, as this recital fell intentionally on the twentieth anniversary of that senior recital, in the same hall, on the same instrument.  I decided it would be a good chance to revisit some of the same repertoire; and as I did I was reminded of how I got bitten by the musical text criticism bug to begin with.  (My hitherto unstated goal in this blog has been “writing about very technical points in a non-techical way,” and I fear the technical details of this post will mean that it necessarily falls short of that goal.  I don’t blame anyone for not bearing with me to the end of this post; nevertheless, it will be for me a stroll down memory lane.)

The central item on both recitals was the same:  J. S. Bach’s Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’ BWV 769—or rather BWV769a, and that brings up the textual point for this post.  The Canonic Variations is a late work, composed in 1746-47 as far as can be determined.  It is transmitted in a number of sources, including two authentic sources—the first edition print (usually allocated the siglum Q, as it will be here) and an autograph manuscript generally described as a fair copy (ditto A).  Both are now freely available on the web.  I have taken the images below from the scans available via the Berlin Staatsbibliothek website (print and autograph), but similar reproductions can be found on Bach Digital and the IMSLP, and other places too.

The relationship between Q and A is not as obvious as one might expect.  It would be reasonable to assume that the fair-copy score came first, and the printed edition later—and, indeed, that the fair-copy score might even have been prepared for the engraver of the print.  In fact these two authentic sources present very different versions of the piece, so that in Wolfgang Schmieder’s Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis we find the version of Q designated as number 769 while the version of A is 769a.  The issue of how Schmieder designated different versions of a work (and the consequences of such designations) deserves another post; some day I’ll come back to it.

Both versions contain five movements, but the sequence and presentation of those movements varies significantly.  (For convenience I will use the abbreviations devised by Walter Emery in his study of the work.)  In A the movements are:

• I.  C8    2-voice canon at the octave in the manuals, chorale cantus firmus in pedal
• II.  C5  2-voice canon at the fifth in the manauls, cantus firmus in pedal
• III.  CF  the cantus firmus in 2-voice inversion canons at the sixth, third, second and ninth, followed by the entire chorale in a stretto coda; the movement starts with three voices, adds an additional voice at the midpoint, and the coda adds two more voices.
• IV.  C7  2-voice canon at the seventh (pedal and left hand), cantus firmus + free cantabile line in the right hand
• V.  CA  2-voice augmentation canon at the octave in the manuals (+ free left hand line), chorale cantus firmus in pedal

A is notated throughout on three staves (conventional for organ music now, but not a default for Bach and his contemporaries).  In Q the movements appear in a different sequence, and are laid out differently:

• I.  C8  on two-stave puzzle notation (giving only the first few notes of the trailing canonic voice)
• II.  C5  ditto
• III.  C7 ditto.  These first three variations fit together on one “opening”—that is two printed pages, the verso of the cover page on the left, the recto of the next sheet on the right.
• IV. CA  in open score (4 staves), requiring two pages—the next “opening” of the print.
• V.  CF on three staves, requiring two pages, the final “opening.”

The BG edition gives only the version of Q (BWV 769), leaving discussion of BWV 769a to the critical commentary.  Largely due to the work of Friedrich Smend, in the first half of the twentieth century the scholarly consensus shifted, and A came to be regarded as the later source—and thus the Fassung letzter Hand [definitive version].  That it has never become the preferred version among performers is probably due to the apparent anticlimax:  the showy stretto which concludes BWV 769 comes at the end of only the third movement of BWV 769a.  (Not that either version is performed all that much!)  Gregory Butler, who has done extensive studies of Bach’s original prints, demonstrates that the first three variations of Q were engraved first (and very likely the only parts of Bach’s original conception of the piece), and that when CF was composed it could not be inserted between them without a considerable waste of labor.  As Bach’s conception of the work changed, he made a virtue of necessity (eventually adding CA), thus producing two very different versions of the same basic material.  By default Q is the more “public” version—that’s what published means, after all.  And it is no surprise that the version of Q was the more widely disseminated version.  We don’t know how many copies of Q were printed, but at least twenty survive now, and the Stemma devised by Hans Klotz for his edition in the NBA indicates many manuscript copies derived from the print.  See the tree on the left side—although, as my pencil scrawl indicates, “O” on the left is a very unfortunate typo—it surely must be Q; the “O” listed on the lower right is an entirely different source, transmitting BWV 769a.  (There are other problems with this Stemma not worth going into here.)

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Kritischer Bericht for NBA Ser. IV Bd. 2, ed. Hans Klotz (1957), p. 88.

It may seem odd to copy out printed works by hand, but in the centuries before photocopiers it was extremely common.  In this work it was particularly necessary, as the puzzle notation of the first three variations of Q would make them virtually unplayable without realizing them in notation.  Some of the manuscripts descending from Q (Klotz’s J4, E1, and B2, for example) transmit only movements that needed to be realized.  Thus rather than being bootleg manuscript copies of an out-of-print or otherwise inaccessible piece, these might have been used along side a copy of Q to play the complete work.

There are a plentitude of textual differences between Q and A, in and his comprehensive studies of this work Butler also convincingly argues that the very concept of a “definitive” version is meaningless in this piece.  Butler’s chronology is essentially this:

1. Initial conception:  C8, C5, and C7 composed and subsequently engraved.  Indeed, these seem at first to have been engraved without even indicating (beyond the signum S) the incipits of the canonic entries:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots of Q as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN614768373, pp. 4 and 5.

Especially in variations 2 and 3 the incipits have been crowded in with the utmost awkwardness.  Butler suggests that these might have intended to look more like the puzzle notation of Bach's other published canons, lacking any incipits at all, but that these were added as the concept of the work shifted.

2.  A new phase:  possibly inspired by his work on BWV 1087 (the fourteen extra canons based on the first eight notes of the bassline of the Goldberg Variations), Bach employed the chorale tune itself canonically, thus producing the series of 4 canons + stretto that make up CF.  At this point Bach started writing out a clean copy of the work—A—placing this new variation before the cantabile C7.  It is possible, indeed, that he considered the work complete after writing out C7, as he drew some final flourishes after the double bar at that point:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of A as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN812577051, p. 106.  The three flourishes which I have encircled in red) appear only at the end of the fourth variation (C7).

If one were pursuing “definitive” readings, this would suggests that variants readings contained in A would supercede those in Q for C8, C5, C7, and CF, as A is the later source for these movements.  Certainly Bach was making revisions even as he was preparing A, a source which Butler notes combines the characteristics of a composing score, a clean copy, and a revised copy.  For example, in C7 bb. 6-7, Butler posits a revised reading that initially appeared in A, subsequently modified, but faintly visible now:

SOURCES:  composite cropped screenshots of Q and A (as above) with my transcription from Butler B-Jb 2000, p. 18.

3.  The final phase:  despite the apparent final flourishes that conclude C7 in A, Bach revisited the work to produce CA, the most complex of the canons.  While this could be put nowhere but the end in A, in Q it could be placed either at the end or in between C7 and CF.  Butler has demonstrated that CA was certainly the last to be engraved, and analysis of the variant readings supports the argument that Q is the later source for this movement.  Walter Emery had raised this possibility some fifty years ago (without the benefit of Butler’s meticulous study of the printing of Q):

As a performer, I had to commit myself to one version or the other.  (As Susan Hellauer once memorably expressed it, “You can't sing a footnote.”)  I opted in this recital for the version of A basically using the text as printed in the NBA, but with a few alterations imported from the critical report (and a fistfull of wrong notes scattered here and there, too).  Scholars don’t have to commit, though, and as Werner Breig puts it in his new edition of the work for Breitkopf,

What is an appropriate type of close?  Whether it is a contrapuntal concentration such as the six-part stretto or a canon in augmentation that points beyond itself, so to speak, through the unfinished canonic imitation in one part—Bach would certainly not have wanted to commit himself to any particular solution. (p. 20)

Moreover, as Bach’s habit of not commiting himself was so pervasive throughout his career—and Bach editions in the last three centuries have had to deal with some perplexing variants—with this post I am launching a

For the first post of each month from now through November 2017 (approximating the liturgical year that generated Bach’s own Jahrgänge of cantatas in his first years in Leipzig) I will deal with some textual issue relating to the works of J. S. Bach.  While the quantity of text-critical work that has been done on Bach cannot rival that done on Shakespeare (still less the Bible), it is a massive body of literature and editions.  Needless to say there is no shortage of things to talk about—and I hope that these posts won’t be as tedious as this one might have been.

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.

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?