27. “Let the rain pitter-patter”

The weather is fright’ning—

The thunder and lightning

Seem to be having their way;

But as far as I’m concerned,

It’s a lovely day.

Even with that epigram, this is the ninth installment in my now-slowed-down-but-still-appearing

This post is essentially a bit of the pre-history of this blog, and there will be more of that in time.  For now I want to tell about the time that the rainy weather changed my professional trajectory entirely.  And, as Irving Berlin put it, oh, what a break for me!

I have mentioned in passing that I am an organist, although this is very much an avocation.  I don’t really keep up my organ playing as I ought to, and for the first time in 15+ years I’m in a job where (with no organ on campus) I can’t just walk down the hall to practice.  I need to make more effort, and to make time for it.  But I do occasionally fill in for various congregations when the organist has to be away.  And so it happened one Sunday (25 October 2015, to be exact) that I was on the bench of a big downtown church in Greenville, SC for both morning and evening services.  I had a busy afternoon in between, so I had to choose music that I could pull together on minimal practice time.  Usually for me this means Bach, as you can pull the stops and go:  you don’t have to work out complicated registration changes unless you want to.   As on that day the church was celebrating Reformation Day (about a week early), Bach was a natural choice anyway.  I had learned from experience that this congregation didn’t listen to the postlude, so I chose something short and to the point for the evening service:  one of Bach’s settings of Luther’s German paraphrase of the Gloria, “Allein Gott in de höh sei Ehr.”  There are a quite a number of Bach settings extant, but I chose BWV 715, one of the easiest, flashiest, and most striking.  It is one of the six (extant) so-called “Passaggio chorales” which probably manifest something of the sort of chorale playing that got Bach in trouble with his congregation in Arnstadt in February 1706 after his Buxtehude pilgrimage:

“Reprove him for having hitherto made many curious variationes in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation has been confused by it.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 46]

In these works, the chorale is stated with a dense and aggressively dissonant in-your-face style harmony, with interspersed flamboyant runs and arpeggios.  (Hear Ton Koopman performing this work here.)  Think Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in a high Baroque vocabulary.

That morning between services as I was running through the music for the evening, it occurred to me that the dense chromatic writing would make good fodder for an exam I would be giving on the following Tuesday to my Theory II students.  Then I had an extra credit idea:  spot as many sets of parallel fifths/octaves as you can.  And would my students notice the disguised B-A-C-H in the last two bars?

SOURCE:  conclusion of BWV 715; cropped scan of NBA Ser. IV Bd. 3 (ed. Hans Klotz, 1961), p. 15. 

And so it happened that on the next morning I was sitting in my office working on the theory midterm exam, and I remembered my idea for the analysis question.  I discovered that I had left my organ score in my car.  Looking out the window to see a cold rain pouring down, I thought I’ll just go to the IMSLP and use the old complete works edition.  I had been playing out of the Bärenreiter offprint of the NBA text.  (These offprints sometimes include corrections, although the text in this instance was identical with that reproduced above.)  When I pulled up the BG edition, however, all but one of my parallel fifths/octaves were gone:

SOURCE:  the same passage; a marked-up cropped scan of the BG edition (1893), taken from the scan available on the IMSLP.  Those parallels in the NBA text that do not appear in the BG text are indicated in red (although I have not marked other variants here).  The parallel octave that remains is indicated in blue.

Although I had followed Bach research casually over the years, Bach was not at all my area of study.  I was intrigued by this, however, as it seemed like a pretty good example of different editorial ideologies:  the “1893 Bach” couldn’t have possibly intended such solecisms; the “1961 Bach” was a brash rebel.  It was a music textual equivalent of the difference between these famous representations:

SOURCES:  (left) Carl Seffner's 1908 statue of Bach in Leipzig, photo from wikimedia commons; (right) Bernd Göbel's 1985 statue of Bach in Arnstadt, photo from wikimedia commons.

Of course I wanted to know more, and promptly set aside the midterm.  The college library had many of the NBA scores but none of the NBA critical reports.  I e-mailed Patricia Sasser, the music librarian at Furman University just up the road, asking whether she could send me a scan of the page or two covering BWV 715 from the relevant critical report.  Within about an hour she graciously responded, but it only whetted my appetite.  When I asked for a few more pages and explained what I was looking into, she replied “That sounds like a paper for AMS-SE [the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society].”  At first I thought it was nothing more than a diversion from the work I ought to be doing, but having spent an hour pulling out all of the editions of Bach’s organ works that I could lay my hands on, I realized I was obsessed.  It did become a paper for AMS-SE, with the most complicated hand-out I’ve ever put together.  Here’s the first page of it:

There are six extant passaggio chorales attributed to Bach:

• Allein Gott in der höh sei Ehr, BWV 715
• Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722
• Herr Jesu Christ dich uns zu wend, BWV 726
• In dulci jubilo, BWV 729
• Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich BWV 732
• Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her, BWV 738

These six works offer a great perspective on the editing of Bach’s works because 1) none of them survives in his hand (although they do survive in manuscript copies from quite close to him) and 2) the texts conveyed by surviving sources are problematic at best.  None of these works was published until the 1840s.  Indeed, BWV 715 (together with BWV 726) actually did not make it into print until the 1893 BG volume.  These two chorales survive together in a manuscript copy by Johann Peter Kellner—neither a student nor a close colleague of Bach, but his sometimes flawed copies are nonetheless important sources for much of the Bach repertoire (as Russell Stinson has shown).  However audacious Bach’s chorale playing might have been, Kellner’s copy of BWV 715 is manifestly deficient—not only frequently omitting voices haphazardly, but giving harmonies that are implausible in their own terms or as the result of the counterpoint.  The start of Kellner’s manuscript is this:

SOURCE:  (left) detail of Kellner's score, from Bach-Digital; (right) my Finale transcription

Here the irregularity of the part-writing (at times three, or even just two voices) is surely suspect:  voices don’t merge, but they just disappear for a few beats, mid-phrase.  When the same melody is reharmonized a few bars later,

SOURCE:  as above, this time arranged vertically

that initial quartal harmony is, to the say the least, eccentric.  There are, indeed, enough problems here to make me wonder if Kellner was working from a fully-realized score at all, particularly as the four extant chorales apart from the two Kellner copied exist in two separate lines of transmission—one with full realized harmonies, and the other employing figured bass.    If Kellner was trying to realize the figured bass, though, he did it exceedingly poorly in this case.

All of this warrants further discussion, and this summer I was at work on an article about the editing of these works over nearly two centuries, but I had to put it aside when a new source for BWV 715 emerged.  It appears in a practical notebook of 154 pieces (mostly chorale settings) described on its label as being from the repertoire of Bach’s student Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809—an exact contemporary of Haydn).  This notebook is dated 1800, and is the work of one Johann Christoph Bach (1782-1846), an organist in Bindersleben.  Speaking of eccentricities, this Bach copies some of the pieces across the full spread of an opening (verso and recto), so that there are only four systems in image below, with the gutter of the binding crossing through each of them:

SOURCE:  BWV 715, in my composite of verso and recto digital scans from the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden 

What I note about this source:

1.  It lacks the harmonic eccentricities of Kellner’s copy, 
2.  While the number of voices is inconsistent (including the disappearance of the bass line entirely in the fifth phrase—was this ever played from this score?!?), there are never fewer than three in the harmonized sections, and there very often more than four (five, six, and at one point eight), and
3. While such a thick texture means that parallels are inevitably present, the parallel fifth in the final cadence which had been eliminated in BG is here eliminated by means of precisely the same strategy—arriving at the tenor C early, echoing the cadence which had concluded the fourth chorale phrase.

Curiously, BWV 715 is the only one of the 154 pieces in this collection to be attributed to J. S. Bach.  There are several other passaggio chorale settings—not surprising, as it was a common practice for chorale playing during the eighteenth century.  If Kittel was the conduit through which BWV 715 entered this collection, it suggests that JSB didn’t regard this showy style of harmonizing and peacock preening as a youthful indiscretion set to annoy his Arnstadt elders:  he was still conveying it to his students in Leipzig in his very last years.

Nevertheless, these pieces have been tainted in some of the Bach literature as unworthy of the master.  On that rainy October morning, one of the first commentaries I pulled off my shelf was candid:

I have much more to say about these pieces, and eventually I need to get around to writing that article, if it doesn’t get scooped.  In the meantime, I reflect upon the strange intersection between weather and career:  if it hadn’t been raining on that Monday morning, all of the subject matter of the blog would have remained for me just items of idle curiosity, and you wouldn't be reading this now.

Long as I can be with you, it’s a lovely day.

26. Moving targets (Episode #4)

A recurring theme on this blog is the source that purports to be one thing while it is actually something else.  (In a previous post I discussed this regarding sources for Handel’s Messiah available on the IMSLP.)  Another recurring theme is the edition (or sometimes even manuscript) that changes over time without necessarily calling attention to those changes.  (A post considered this with the case of Bernstein’s Overture to Candide.)  This post combines a little of both.  And while this may all seem innocuous, I’m not sure that it is.

Musicians will be familiar with the American firm Dover Publications.  By the 1970s and 80s they had turned almost entirely to sturdy reprints of public domain editions.  Their output extends far beyond music, and I can remember browsing through their sales catalog, bemused and amazed by the range of reprints for which they could find a market.  Since the 1990s they have originated a few editions of music, but their bread and butter has been reprinting out-of-print editions at competitive prices.  In contrast to the reprints from firms like Kalmus, Dover has made durable products, and the blurb on the back (“this is a permanent book”) wasn’t much of an overstatement.  A few of the scores I’ve used the most have fallen into pieces, but many of the Dover books I got 25+ years ago are still in good condition.

In about 1997 someone at Dover had the bright idea of issuing miniature scores, which would open up a wider educational market.  There was a problem with this:  a lot of the scores they were reprinting originally had appeared in a very large format—say 14 or 15 inches tall.  That was the case of the old Bach Gesellschaft edition, from which Dover drew extensively.  Dover’s “large” scores were already a reduction of the original dimensions:  often 9x12, sometimes 8.5x11.  The smallest of the Dover “large” scores I’ve used is their reprint of Franck organ works, an oblong volume measuring only 8.25 inches at the spine; the original Durand scores from which these were taken measured some 10.5 inches at the spine (although with more generous margins).  The further reduction to a miniature score format can be awkward.

And that is apparently what happened.  Dover’s first release of study scores were the same size as their popular “thrift” reprints of literature, with dimensions of 5x8 or slightly larger.  Within a few years, the same publications (with the same ISBNs) were issued in a slightly larger format.  The images below show side by side these two issues of one of these early publications:

SOURCE:  I put both copies side by side in the photocopier and scanned them, front and back.

The score on the left I got in the fall of 1998 as desk copy for a course for which I was one of the instructors.  I’m not sure when I got the copy on the right, but judging from some notes I made in it I must have had it by 2002.  The key differences on the back cover:  the elimination of the clause “ample margins at the bottom of each score page for notes an analysis” (which itself betrayed that the dimensions of the publication were not calculated with the right “aspect ratio” for the matter that was to appear on the page), the addition of a list of some other available scores, and the increased price (marked-up 1/3).  The contents are the same, so far as I can make out, and it would surprise me if they weren't.

Note the source of this publication.  Here it is (again) from either copyright page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover miniature score.

The words “an authoritative edition, n.d.” scarcely inspire confidence.  Most of the publications in this series reprint the same edition that Dover issued in a larger format.  Ironically, the large-score publication of Haydn's London symphonies reprinted a series of miniature scores:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover full score.

Eulenburg scores were designed to be small-format.  To my eye, Dover’s enlargement appears odd (there seems to be too much space between staves, too little information on each page) where the proportions seem right in the original format.

It would be reasonable to assume that the Dover miniature score was a reprint of this same text.  Indeed, the IMSLP has assumed as much:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot from IMSLP (accessed 20 June 2017)

But it isn’t so.  Below is a comparison of the first page:  the Dover 1985 (Eulenburg reprint) is on the left; the Dover 1997 miniature score is on the right.  (Apologies for the size of the image, but you can scroll back and forth as necessary to see the details.)

While even at first glance these are recognizably different scores, the differences are not just in the formatting (two systems for the first page of the miniature score).  There are textual differences too.  The miniature score has an initial dynamic of ff for the entire ensemble, has introduced crescendo hairpins in b. 5, and has accents rather than sf in the Violino I part in bb. 3-5.  The miniature score has 58 pages of music, while the Dover/Eulenburg has 74 (not surprising for a score designed to be in small format).

The score I refer to as Dover/Eulenburg (that is, the 1985 Dover reprint) is what it purports to be.  Here is the first page of the Eulenburg score, as proof of that:

SOURCE:  digital scan of p. 1 of 1936 Eulenburg score (ed. Ernst Praetorius)

What, then, is the “authoritative edition” that Dover reprinted in 1997?  It ought to be on the shelves somewhere—and readers at big music libraries might be able to lay their hands on it quickly.  I have pursued it via interlibrary loan (ordering up every edition I can find), but even then editions can be miscatalogued in so many ways.  I haven’t found it yet, and I would be glad to know.  Anyone?  I will be delighted to have an addendum to this post once the source edition is located.

ADDENDUM  21 June 2021

Many thanks to Rex Levang for pointing out that the mystery text appears now on the IMSLP as a Soviet edition (IMSLP #494060), but there is no indication of whether that edition itself was a reprint.  (I suspect it is--it just doesn’t have the look of a Soviet edition to me, although I freely admit that I can’t muster any specific evidence to support that opinion.)  The IMSLP cites Gyorgy Kirkor as the editor, and all twelve of the London Symphonies appear in the same imprint.  If this was an original edition (i.e., not a reprint), it is an odd choice for Dover.

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.

18. Moving targets (Episode #2)

Although I meant to get back to this a long time ago, this is only the second in a series considering different editions of the same work issued by the same publisher but without any notice of textual discrepancies between them.  Sometimes these changes are hardly more than cosmetic, but sometimes they are real nuisances, and sometimes inexplicable meddling.

SOURCE:  scan of 2013 printing

The example in this post will be the two Alphonse Leduc editions of Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto (1934), and I will be considering only the versions issued “avec accompagnement de piano” rather than the full score.  The first edition appeared in 1936, bearing the plate number “A.L. 19,256.”  A scan of a 2007 reprint of this edition (judging from the imprint date on the last page, anyway) is available on the IMSLP.  I cannot date the second edition, but the terminus ante quem is 2013, the imprint date of the copy I have to hand, and would roughly coincide with Leduc’s acqusition by the multinational Music Sales Group.  (Worldcat doesn’t help much to date this second edition:  all of the Leduc printings listed there are said to be 19 pages, while this is 22pp.)  The copyright date on the second edition remains 1936, and indeed both the cover (at right) and the plate number (AL 19 256) also remain the same.  I strongly oppose their re-use of the same plate number when the editions are manifestly different productions.  In any case, my use of plate number is not really accurate:  even if the first edition was engraved on copper plates, the second edition is a re-setting via computer notation software.  It is the tell-tale short cuts typical of computer-setting that I want to highlight here, as I think the earlier version makes for a clearer read.  Here is an example from the very first page:

SOURCES:  bb. 6-7; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 1 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 1 (right) 

Crowded as the first edition may be in b. 7, the five voices of the counterpoint are quite clear, and the pianist understands which notes belong to which line.  In the second edition, there is no delineation of the five voices, and the beaming in the new top “voice” even obscures that on beat 2 there is an entry—the highest, and thus arguably a climax—of the main motive of the introduction.  The viola and cello lines are subsumed into a sort of new “tenor” voice.  Most troubling is the movement of the f marking ahead by a beat, which suggests even a bringing out of the inner voice at beat 2.  The orchestral score presents the opposite situation—the f appears first in the first violins (beat 2) and in the rest of the ensemble a beat or more later.

What is frustrating about this is that it is merely the product of laziness:  it would take a little more time at the computer to arrive at the configuration of the first edition, and the setter apparently didn’t think it was worth it.  The version on the right is marginally easier to play, but I think that is the only thing I can say in its favor.

There are a number examples where to me the changes in the notational configurations in the two Leduc editions do not amount to improvements, but I will consider just a few here.

SOURCES:  bb. 47-48; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 3 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 4 (right) 

That one is hard to explain.  To my eye, the first edition is clearer, although I grant that the reading on the right makes the crossing of the upper parts more obvious.  Still, the lower stave looks curious, with the stem-down downbeat and no rest above it.

SOURCES:  bb. 131-32; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 7 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 9 (right) 

This one is my favorite, a true comedy of error.  I think I can reconstruct what happened in this instance.  I think the computer-setter set the lower staff first, then—while setting the upper staff and converting it to the bass clef—decided to move the mano destra line also into the upper staff.  The comedy is that the setter never deleted this line in the lower staff, so it is duplicated erroneously, uselessly—indeed meaninglessly.  Maybe it’s just me, but I chuckle to myself about such absurdities.

SOURCES:  bb. 227-28; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 12 (top) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 14 (bottom) 

Here I would argue that both versions are unplayable as notated (at least at the 100-beats-a-minute tempo).  The second edition moves the bass-line up an octave—something a player might do anyway—even when Glazunov scores this for cellos and basses an octave and two octaves below this register (but not at all in the register notated here).  As an accompanist often playing these sorts of orchestral reductions, I generally prefer to know what the general texture is (even when unplayable by me) and adapt as I have to than to have someone else attempt to much simplification for me.  The first edition just gives more.  It is instructive to compare this passage as it appears in the recent Bärenreiter edition:

SOURCE: bb. 227-28 of piano reduction by Martin Schelhaas (Bärenreiter 8732a), p. 13; the bar numbers are different because this edition counts the cadenza as one bar.  (It includes three different versions of the cadenza, and an interesting tale it is.)

Throughout the Bärenreiter edition the piano reduction has been entirely rethought with an eye toward simplifying it down to something reasonable—even though the editors acknowledge that the Leduc first edition piano reduction seems to have been the work of Glazunov himself rather than “A[ndre] Petiot,” to whom the Leduc editions have given the credit.  Thus the Bärenreiter “Urtext”—and a very good edition it is in many respects—has jettisoned the authentic piano part.  Although the “Urtext” label appears on the cover, the title page is more accurate:  “With an Urtext Solo part... Piano Reduction based on the Urtext.”  (There is a critical report included in the corresponding urtext full score, but there is of course not one for the new piano reduction, which also lacks a description of the sources.  Martin Schelhaas seems to have used the second Leduc edition as his starting point, but the result is a wholly new and worthy reduction.)  This piano reduction also includes an additional soloist part (i.e., non-urtext), edited for performance by Carina Raschèr, daughter of Sigurd Raschèr, for whom the work was written.

This publication is not the strongest in the Bärenreiter catalogue (as even without hunting for them I found small errors in both the musical text of the full score and the critical report), and it is even more curious for its mixture of urtext and practical approaches.  (I will return to that particular dilemma in my next post.)  Nonetheless, it is not the focus of this post, and it is in any case better than the second Leduc edition.  I find it extremely irksome that Leduc would reissue the work, bearing the same plate number as the first edition but with an inferior presentation of the text.  The Leduc standard has been lowered, although perhaps not to half-mast.

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.