I spoiled the mood. I was at a dinner with musicological colleagues and students after a meeting of the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society last spring. It was a lovely time—great food and conversation—but then someone thought to ask a question to the whole table: What is your favorite opera?
When the turn to answer came around to me, I knew that there would be a universal howl of disapproval for my choice: Così fan tutte. There was. I suppose I could have picked several others as honest answers to the question. “Favorite” isn’t really a fair word for such a big repertory. Still, I adore Così even while I dislike it. And I certainly understand why others are repelled by it or think it unworthy of Mozart’s genius. It can certainly be played tastelessly (as this perceptive review of the current Seattle Opera production shows). But I think it can be staged beautifully in a way that doesn’t sugarcoat anything. I have taught the piece many times, and in class I usually have turned to Nicholas Hytner’s superb (and superb-looking) Glyndebourne production from 2006. As I regularly tell my students, each time I teach this piece I am seeing it again, where they are (almost always) seeing it for the first time. Each time it affects me more deeply, and there will be tears streaming down my cheeks while they look on unfazed. But that's how art works: the more you invest, the more you reap. This scene—beautiful as it is—is harrowing for me to watch, as these guys put their girlfriends in an utterly false position just over a cocky bet. I hate it. And yet....
Certainly Così is an example of what I would describe as the Disney Happy Ending Problem. All sorts of terrible, traumatic events happen in children’s movies; no matter how blissfully perfect the finale ultimo appears to be, it never seems to me to compensate for the kidnapping, the guardian’s death, the lonely wanderings (or whatever) of Scene 2. Granted, by the time we reach the end of Così, I’m not really enjoying it anymore—but I’d say that of just about every opera I know (Idomeneo being an exception in that regard). Hytner’s production does a good job of leaving the audience—or me, at any rate—with a lingering bad taste. As Mozart’s C major fanfares bellow in the pit, the four protagonists eye each other nervously. “Happily ever after,” perhaps, but it is no longer clear who belongs with whom.
SOURCE: The original couples restored but confused: cropped screenshot from DVD of 2006 Glyndebourne production (at 2:56:58, during the orchestral conclusion to the Act II finale).
One of the things that makes the ending so unsatisfactory is that we’ve hardly seen the “right” pairings of these couples, and—more than this—those “right” pairings are so musically wrong: the opera seria soprano Fiordiligi is not the fiancée of the romantic tenor Ferrando, but rather of the baritone Guglielmo; it is the buffa mezzo Dorabella who is engaged to the tenor. Our ears—or at least my ears—know that something is wrong with this.
It was thus refreshing to read Ian Woodfield’s fascinating monograph Mozart’s Così fan tutte: A Compositional History. I read it when it came out in 2008, but have been eagerly awaiting a chance to re-read it, and teaching the work again this spring while also writing the blog prompted me to find the time to do it—and to have the (relatively inexpensive) facsimile of Mozart's autograph at my elbow. This is a great convenience, as the autograph itself is split between two libraries (Kraków and Berlin), and the facsimile includes also a scan of the original printed libretto and portions of a Viennese copyist manuscript. That is only a start, though, as Woodfield scrutinized twenty further copyists’ scores of the work. “Scrutinized” is a mild word to capture the intensity of Woodfield’s examinations, but the only way to appreciate that is to read the book. This sort of forensic study is not for everyone, but I would expect anyone who follows this blog would find it at least worth a try. That said, the conclusions Woodfield draws from this are earth-shattering. Of these, the most astonishing is that, at some point during their work on the opera, Mozart and da Ponte planned that the couples would not be switched—that the conditions of the bet would be that the guys would be compelled to seduce their own (rather than each other’s) fiancees.
This is, of course, not the work as we know it. I suspect that it was an attempt to make the far-fetched plot seem a little more reasonable (not that that is a precondition for opera libretti...). We might be more willing to accept the women’s yielding so quickly to suitors physically like their boyfriends, but that would result in a dramatically much weaker second act. In the opera as finished Ferrando has to learn from Guglielmo that his side of the bet is lost, and we get two powerful reactions: Guglielmo’s misogynist rage (“Donne mie, la fate a tanti”) and Ferrando’s conflicted recognition that he loves her still, sadder but wiser (“Tradito, schernito”). If the pairs were not crossed, Ferrando would not need to be told anything (nor Guglielmo later), nor would the audience. It would be a recipe for tedium.
I should add that Woodfield does not argue that the un-switched pairs was da Ponte’s original plan, but that instead it was an innovation during the gestation of the work with Mozart. Intriguingly, the opera was first intended for Antonio Salieri, whose incomplete draft of the first few numbers survives. (On this issue, see the compelling 1996 Cambridge Opera Journalarticle by Bruce Alan Brown and John A. Rice.) The libretto Salieri was working on begins in exactly the same way, commencing with Ferrando praising “his” Dorabella as “incapable” of infidelity:
SOURCE: cropped screenshot of a page from Antonio Salieri’s attempt [La scola degli amanti], Austrian National Library, shelfmark Mus.Hs.4531, fol. 5.
With Mozart’s(?) idea to revise the plot, these name-pairings remained the same—that is, Dorabella and Ferrando were paired (throughout, even with Ferrando in disguise)—and similarly Fiordiligi and Guglielmo. Leaving these couples together, though, made it necessary to switch the vocal types, with Dorabella as the high soprano and Fiordiligi as the mezzo. Evidence supporting this can be seen where these vocal parts have been reversed in the autograph (as in the example below in their first number (4), but nos. 6, 10, and 13 have the same situation); also suggestive are places where lines given in the first edition of the libretto to one sister are set by Mozart for the other.
SOURCE: detail of scan of Bärenreiter facsimile (Vol. I, p. 55), reproducing Act I, fol. 28—the beginning of the duet No. 4, “Ah guarda, sorella”
Woodfield’s scrutiny of the autograph score reveals Mozart’s considerable indecision at crucial moments. In the recitative below, there is a false start for Ferrando, then (after the new accolade with clefs) the same text allocated but given to Guglielmo, followed by Ferrando’s response, but which Mozart then struck through, reversing the order of the characters back to the original plan, and adapting the vocal parts accordingly.
SOURCE: detail of scan of Bärenreiter facsimile (Vol. I, p. 207), reproducing Act I, fol. 104—the beginning of the recitative “Ah non partite.”
If Woodfield had to rely on a single page for strong evidence of his theory, it would certainly be the first page of an aria intended for Guglielmo, but replaced long before the premiere. There are good dramatic reasons for replacing it, but Mozart clearly valued it enough that even after removing it from the opera he entered it in his own catalogue of works, where it appears thus:
In December [1789] An aria intended for the opera Così fan tutte, for Benuccì. Rivolgete à me lo sguardo etc: —2 violini, viola, 2 oboe, 2 fagotti, 2 clarini e Timpany e Baßi:
The cut aria remains in situ in the score. Here’s the first page:
SOURCE: detail of scan of Bärenreiter facsimile (Vol. I, p. 209), reproducing Act I, fol. 105—the beginning of the Guglielmo's cut aria “Rivolgete”
SOURCE: the same, even more detailed
Looking more closely [detail at right], we can see that the aria was originally addressed to Dorabella, but her name has been scratched out and Fiordiligi’s superimposed. Beyond this, though, Woodfield notes the ink color of the word “lui” is different than the surrounding text. Mozart left the space for the pronoun blank for a while as he decided what Guglielmo was to say (and to whom). In the catalog listing, he says “Turn and look at me” (“Rivolgete àme lo sguardo”); but in the score he says instead “Turn and look at him.” Mozart’s omission of the pronoun allowed him time to figure out what would work best for the opera. Ultimately that was a restoration (apparently) to the criss-cross couplings, but it is fascinating to consider how different the work might have been.
These are a few of the dozens of examples Woodfield musters to support his conclusions, and I cannot do justice to them in the small scale of a blog post—still less to his examinations of performing traditions in sources dating from the first few decades after the premiere. The work that resulted is not perfect. It bears the traces of Mozart trying to make changes as he went along, and then incompletely fixing them. (Fiordiligi’s first line of recitative, for example—“I’m ready for some mischief this morning”—seems more in character with her sister.) This is a problematic work, and Mozart struggled to bring it off. Given that Mozart fell in love with one woman and ultimately married her sister (to whom he was later to write about the necessity of her fidelity in preserving his honor), it wouldn’t be surprising if this plot hit particularly close to home. One reason I like teaching this piece is that I think it comes close to my students, too. Generally speaking, my students are still idealists, like the couples in this opera. The moral of the tale—that one will be better off accepting how people are than pretending they are who we want them to be (and consequently being perpetually hurt or disappointed)—is, I think, one well worth learning. Maybe it is my Calvinist upbringing, but I have found the #metoo revelations simultaneously appalling and unsurprising. What conceivable grounds do we have to expect people in power to behave better? (Granted, Le nozze di Figaro deals more overtly with #metoo; and the moment at the end of Act III where Barbarina turns it to her advantage is particularly satisfying.) I don’t like the plot of Così; I don’t like the situations the characters are put in. I understand why people don’t want to see it (and thus the howls of disapproval at an otherwise pleasant dinner last spring). It is an ugly story beautifully—though problematically—told. I can’t stand its title, which singles out women specifically and unfairly. It should be called Men behaving badly: their arrogance is the cause of all the heartache. I would settle for This is how people are. Any work with a title like that is bound to be a tragedy: da Ponte in bed with Voltaire.
The textual situation of Così is a healthy reminder that (of course) all life is compromise: not just politics, but relationships too—and even art from as sure a hand as Mozart. The music is so beautiful, but it appears he didn’t get it to work out quite the way he wanted. Still, it’s so much better than nothing at all. That, too, is the lesson his couples have to learn if the ending is going to mean anything to us.
This tenth installment in my slowed-but-still-proceeding
further explores an idea that crossed my mind as I was writing the fourth installment, which examined the two “AMB” notebooks. Toward the end of that post, writing about one of the two incomplete copies of the aria “Schlummert ein” (from BWV 82) in one of these notebooks, I wrote:
Several pages later the aria appears a second time, although this time AMB did not finish the copy. The vocal line breaks off midway through bar 60 (at the end of a page); the unfigured bassline breaks off after 28 bars. It seems likely to me that it was added in later, as it too breaks off at a page-turn: waiting for the ink to dry before turning the page, she was needed elsewhere and never completed the project. (Similarly, I wondered, are the five missing appoggiaturas in her first copy merely a sign of a practical notational issue? That is, might she have used a different pen-nib for the appoggiaturas, so that there was a reason to leave space and move on, coming back to fill them in later? I don’t know the Bach literature well enough to know if this has been explored, nor have I seen it discussed in other eighteenth-century sources.) [On the image on the left, the vertical blemish in the middle of my red circle where the appoggiatura ought to be does not seem to be an erasure—and there is no such blemish in the other four instances.]
SOURCE: cropped scans of "Schlummert ein" b. 40 in AMB2 p. 108 (f. 55r) [with absent appoggiatura highlighted] and 113 (f. 59v) from Bach-Digital.
The example above is in the hand of Anna Magdelena Bach. In the past several months of exploring Bach sources (particularly in his own hand), this issue about the absence of small-note ornaments has recurred with such regularity that I find myself with a short catalogue of data points. I should stress that I’m thinking exclusively of the “small-note” ornaments (i.e., those in which a note is written smaller to indicate that it is ornamental) rather than what one might call the “squiggle” ornaments (i.e., those indicated by an arbitrary symbol—trill, mordent, turn, Schleifer, etc.) These latter show up regularly in composing scores, and thus (I am speculating) did not require a change of nib to notate. (And nota bene: Pen-nib was not quite accurate in my earlier post, as really it is quill-nibs that are at issue.)
Indeed, much of this post is really just speculation, as I do not have much to go on. I remember a moment in a graduate school seminar when I voiced some idea for which I had assembled a similar paucity of evidence, and the professor (rightly) shot it down with the line “That’s not a theory; that’s speculation.” The contempt with which he enunciated the word still sticks with me. For some reason, I enjoy reliving that moment in my memory—maybe because it was an important lesson I needed to learn.
I have also written in this blog about the dangers of amateurism in music scholarship—yet I will wallow in amateurism in this post. As I’ve said before, I am no Bach scholar; his music is an inevitable topic in a blog such as mine, as the amount of textual research to which his Nachlass has been subjected is truly staggering. There is just so much for me to write about. Like Everest, he’s there. But in this post I find myself writing speculatively, without any underpinnings in the literature.
A few weeks ago I was studying the new Bärenreiter facsimile of BWV 20 (which reproduces the autograph composing score of the cantata together with the original manuscript parts and the two wrappers). Although it wasn’t what I was looking for, I was startled by a consistent discrepancy: the small-note ornaments in the parts were not in the composing score. These ornaments were authentic—there for all to see in the parts (the collective work of the composer and four copyists). But of course the parts were where these marks needed to be in order to be heard because they would not be played directly from the score. This brought to mind my earlier idea about the smaller nib: would it have been more trouble than it was worth to put the small-note ornaments in the hastily-written score? (Indeed, the number of instances of small-note ornaments in the composing score is exceedingly small: mvt. 1 / b. 92 / Vln. I; and a handful in mvts. 5 and 10.)
I have made no general survey of the Bach works for which both a composing score and an authentic set of parts survive; that task is certainly beyond what can be done with a blog that is very much on the side of my obligations. But that the parts supply this sort of information when the scores may not is noted by Moritz Hauptmann, the original chairman of the Bach Gesellschaft edition, and the editor of this cantata in the second volume of the BG (1852):
SOURCE: detail of "Vorwort" (p. xiii) to BG vol. 2, from scan available via the IMSLP.
[Third and fourth sentences; roughly:] “...Where in addition to the score the original parts were also available, these were conscientiously consulted. The parts are of importance not only for the appoggiatura markings and the figuring of the basso continuo, of which the score seldom has any; they also serve to verify unclearly-written notes and lyrics [in the score]....”
A particularly striking example of this in BWV 20 is the sixth movement, the alto aria “O Mensch, errette deine Seele,” which is replete with small-note ornaments in both the BG and the NBA, both of which give proper editorial deference to the parts over the score in this respect. As a sample, observe (if you can make it out below) just the opening bars of the BG, the autograph, and the original Vln. I part:
SOURCES: (top L) cropped screen-shot of BG Bd. 2, p. 314 from IMSLP; (top R) cropped scan of Bärenreiter 2017 facsimile of D-LEb Rara I,14; (bottom) cropped screenshot of original Vln. I part f. 2r. from Bach-Digital. [Note also that the trill in the score b. 3 is dutifully copied into the part; the trill in b. 2 is Bach’s added ornament (the identical mark as in the score) to the copied part, and thus not in the score.]
All of this brought to mind a startling difference between the early version of the St. Matthew Passion and the version universally familiar from Bach’s c. 1736 fair copy score. The sole extant source for the early version is a copy by J. C. Farlau made some ten or so years after Bach's fair copy “revised” version was prepared. Originally the NBA issued the early version only as a grey-scale facsimile of Farlau’s score (which at the time—1972—was attributed to Johann Christoph Altnickol), although it has subsequently been issued as a newly-edited volume in its own right. It has been recently recorded by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr, who (on the promotional video for this release) notes the absence of some of these appoggiaturas:
“I find a lot of things sharper in focus and more dramatic in color, whereas in the later version things have been softened up with appoggiaturas and more rococo ornaments. So generally I find some things are a little bit more shocking, and a bit clearer.” (at 04:21)
On that video we hear what must be the most “shocking” example of this textual difference, which is the duet “So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen” (no. 27a, near the end of Part I). Here is the beginning as it appears in Bach’s c. 1736 manuscript, replete with "small notes" in the imitative woodwind lines:
And the same passage as it appears in Farlau’s copy; nary an appoggiatura in sight:
SOURCE: BWV 244b no. 27a, bb. 1-5; detail of copy by J. C. Farlau (D-B Am. B. 6) from Bach-Digital.
To Egarr, this is an intentional stylistic difference: Bach has added (new) ornaments as he revised the work in 1736; they weren’t there in 1727. If we take Farlau’s effort to have resulted in a faithful copy of Bach’s 1727 score (and there is nothing at all to suggest he was scoring up from parts), we can grant that these were not in that source. But maybe (I speculate) these appoggiaturas were in Bach’s conception of the work in 1727, but included in the no-longer-extant parts rather than the score. As in BWV 20, the parts were where it would really matter, as this would be what the players read. The later fair copy autograph is justly celebrated as a beautiful calligraphic copy, and it is reasonable that Bach would make more effort to present a more accurate text in it than in run-of-the-mill scores. But if the original 1727 score was anything like that of the hastily-prepared BWV 20—and if indeed adding such notes meant using a different nib—I would not really expect them to be there. That is not something Farlau would have known to take into account as he prepared his copy. One thing that is consistent about Farlau’s copy is the incredibly scarcity of small-note ornaments. In my examination of this source, apart from the more profusely ornamented no. 39 (the alto aria “Erbarme dich”), I located only nine examples in the whole work. (If you want to see a list, click here. My list also includes some instances where the 1736 fair copy score lacks some of the small-note ornaments transmitted in the corresponding(?) set of parts.)
My speculative nib idea also suggests a new way at looking at (for example) the profusely ornamented chorale “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein,” BWV 641 (in the Orgelbüchlein). This is the chorale which was later revised as the so-called “deathbed chorale” (“Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich,” BWV 668), stripped of the ornamentation, and with imitative interludes interpolated between the chorale phrases. (Christoph Wolff has dealt with this situation very lucidly.) But what strikes me as I look at the page is that the ornamented melody seems to have been written with two different sized quill-points—and am I imagining things to perceive a different tint to the ink? Here is the full page:
And here is a detail of the third measure leading into the fourth. The downbeat of b. 3 seems to be a normal-sized note-head; all of the notes of beat two, and the first note of beat 3 and beat 4 similarly seem to be the default size, as well as all of the notes in the other voices. But the rest of the figuration seems significantly smaller:
Turning to Peter Williams's excellent survey The Organ Music of J. S. Bach, I’m delighted to see that he has noticed the same thing:
“The coloraturas, unlike most of those in BWV 614 and 622, centre around turning phrases that lead to the next note of the cantus, which is placed where it would be even if there were no decoration. This is a particular technique that can be understood in two ways: these embellishments could be taken out in order to produce BWV 668, or they could be added in order to produce BWV 641, where they are written as smaller notes in P 283.” (p. 311; emphasis mine)
We might imagine (uh... speculate), then, that Bach initially wrote something like this:
only later to squeeze in the more florid version. His use of the smaller nib would then be merely a practical matter—not indicating “small-note ornamentation,” but simply cramming a lot of notes into an insufficient space. It is certainly hard to believe that he would have intended such a florid second beat of b. 4 when originally laying out the work in this manuscript, as he ends up not just in the margin but in the gutter of the binding of his “little book.”
Another imponderable question: do the squiggle ornaments which would then have been written mainly over quarter notes apply also to my putatively new florid line (i.e., resulting in the face-value reading of the page, as it is invariably played now)? Or does the filigree supersede the squiggles (or some of them), themselves mere remnants of a previous version?
One thought leads to another, and the suggestions here about BWV 641 strike me as support for those organists who would add ornamentation to another Orgelbüchlein chorale, BWV 639 “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” in which the first half of the chorale is decorated with a few passing tones but the second half is left in bare quarter notes. I have always taken this to mean “you get the idea... go thou and do likewise.” The Orgelbüchlein was explicitly a teaching volume—and, like Bach's other pedagogical works, transmitted not in print but by students (and subsequently their students) copying it out. From the NBAcritical report for this work and from perusing some of the scans available via Bach-Digital, I see that some of these extant copies (NBA sigla B2, L2 and M1 particularly) do indeed have a few added squiggle ornaments and passing tones in the second half—although, of course, the presence of such decoration on the page is not the prerequisite to the performance of a more decorated version.
And so I sit and speculate. And piece after piece comes before my eyes in which the similar small-note ornament discrepancies recur, although the conditions are never quite the same. It should be noted, for example, that solo music need not have the ornamental details worked out that ensemble music (particularly ripieno parts) would need. It is also worth keeping in mind that unlike our current rehearsal situation, where a pencil or other writing implement should always be handy, Bach's players may have had no writing implement at hand (surely not any requiring an inkwell!), and so it paid for ensemble parts to be as carefully prepared as time allowed.
I have been wondering about what evidence might refute this whole idea. Certainly an example intermingling squiggle and small-note ornaments in close proximity could be inconvenient for my proposal, although it might be hard to show that the two different sorts of notation were written in the source in the same sitting. (At this point in a draft of this post, I digressed with an example from BWV 873/1, the C# minor prelude from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. I took it out because it was too dense for the flow of this already-too-dense post, but if you want to see it, here it is.)
I will close with an example I stumbled across while flipping through Walter Emery’s classic study, Bach’s Ornaments. As with most treatises on ornamentation, Emery’s subject is how an ornament should be interpreted in performance. That is not my subject, but I turned to Emery nonetheless because of his keen eye for the notation. I have quoted Emery on this blog before—and will surely do so again. In this book, he is scrupulously cautious about the sources he quotes, remarking sagely “one cannot deduce Bach's habits from ornaments that he did not write. As things stand, this means that unless a writer on ornamentation has made himself competent to edit every work he wishes to quote, he must take examples only from reproductions of autograph manuscripts, and from a few texts whose reliability can easily be tested. The Bach examples in this book have been chosen in this way; with a few exceptions, included for special reasons and expressly described as questionable, they are authentic beyond all reasonable doubt.” (p. 7)
Thus his Ex.157 caught my eye, in which small-note appoggiaturas surround a single hook (b. 11):
SOURCE: cropped scan of Walter Emery, Bach's Ornaments (Novello, 1953), p. 77.
But Emery was cautious as ever:
“As the hooks have been translated into small notes by all but the most conscientious of editors, it is impossible to say, without access to large numbers of autograph manuscripts, whether Bach made any distinction between hooks and small notes. If the BG is to be trusted, he used them indifferently in the tenor aria of Cantata 67 [his Ex. 157].” (p. 76)
If the BG is to be trusted, he writes, and even before looking up the BG I went straight to Bach-Digital—a resource which gives precisely the “access to large numbers of autograph manuscripts” that Emery craved. There I found a scan of the original Violin I part, copied by J. A. Kuhnau, and what did I see?
Source: BWV 67/ii, Violin I part, end of b. 1; cropped scan from Bach-Digital
Emery was right to be wary. In fact, BG is unreliable here: the small-note E appoggiatura is actually there—but I can’t help wondering if Kuhnau's “hooked” flags for the sixteenths might have caught the editor (Wilhelm Rust) out on this one instance—the hook from the f# flag somehow being turned into an appoggiatura hook on the d#. Otherwise it is hard to explain whence the hook in BG came. It does no damage in performance: the appoggiatura is authentic; it's just Rust's notation of it that is not. Even more curious, actually, is (for example) bar 5 of the same aria, where Rust converts the original small-notes all into hooks—rather than, as Emery would have expected, the other way around:
SOURCE: BWV 67/ii b. 5-6; (top) BG vol. XVI, p. 228 (at IMSLP); (bottom) original Vl. I part (as above).
Rust actually does this switch inconsistently throughout the aria in both Violin and Oboe lines, and I can see no logic to it. The lesson I take from it, though, is that I don't have the time or the energy to plumb the depths of the small-nib question further. At least for now.
ADDENDUM 03 February 2019
Another example to keep in mind: BWV 125/ii: the original parts are preserved replete with small notes; but other sources transmit the presumed reading of the (now lost) score, lacking the graces. See NBA Ser. I Bd. 28.1, pp. 66-74 (cf. 46-54).
Absolutely. And although the focus of this blog will generally be sources written down and printed before the digital age, increasingly our access to such sources is through some digital means—an image on the screen, whether or not it ever makes it on to paper in our hands. Inevitably this blog will often deal with the IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project—a massive database of musical sources, mostly printed editions, but some manuscript copies or and even “born digital” files that need not necessarily ever have made it to paper. There are full scores, vocal scores, parts, arrangements and transcriptions, and more recently even recordings. The idea behind it is to make public domain material accessible globally—although of course what is in the public domain varies across the globe according to the copyright laws of any given jurisdiction.
There is much good to be said about the IMSLP, but I think many of its users have little sense of the problems inherent in this sort of resource. Principally, as a wiki there is tremendous inconsistency in the quality, quantity, and reliability of the information it makes so readily accessible—even when the contributors to the site include major research libraries. As an example, here is what the IMSLP currently displays at the head of the section marked “Full Scores” for Handel’s oratorio Messiah (which Handel was in the middle of writing exactly 275 years ago):
These first items seem to present two different digital images of the autograph manuscript (the “composing score,” as it is generally called). The second of these items (it currently appears in two different scans—IMSLP #18920 and #296169) is a scan of a facsimile published in 1892 as Vol. 45a of the German Handel Society’s complete edition. The bulk of the project was the work of an individual, Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901). For his Messiah facsimile, Chrysander sought to draw together all known autograph material for the work. This volume thus contains not only the whole of the composing score (British Library R.M.20.f.2), but also a few settings in Handel’s hand in the “conducting score” (held in the collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford), as well as two settings of the text “How beautiful are the feet” which Chrysander mistakenly thought related to Messiah (amounting to some 25 pages from yet another manuscript in the BL—whose Handel holdings have all been digitized and made available), and a few sketch leaves at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This facsimile is therefore not intended to represent a single source: it is an anthology of sources.
The first item listed on the IMSLP (divided into four files—#414200-414203) has a very misleading description. Despite the claim that this is the “holograph manuscript,” these files together comprise a color scan of the same (black-and-white) 1892 facsimile that appears in black-and-white scans immediately below. It troubles me that the scan omits the title page and front matter of the 1892 facsimile, and thus presents itself to be a scan of the autograph itself. There are plenty of tidbits to reveal its true identity. The source is indicated as being “State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg (D-Hs): M/B/1722.” A user familiar with Handel sources would know that D-Hs has a very important collection of Handel’s conducting scores, the bulk of it coming to Hamburg through Chrysander himself. The composing score of Messiah, however, is not in that collection, but in the British Library, as noted above. D-Hs has made available a digital scan of M/B/1722, and it is much more honest than what is in the IMSLP: there is the front matter for all to see—and indeed we see from the book plate on the inside front cover that this copy was originally the property of its editor.
IMSLP #414200-414203 does not include that image. But Chrysander’s printed page numbers are there, which should arouse some suspicions. There is no signal to the user, however, that these files have pages from several different documents—anthologized in print in 1892. Anyone turning to these files to do their Handel research will get a false sense of the document(s).
That would be bad enough, but Chrysander’s facsimile is false in another important respect—no matter which scan is consulted. In his efforts to produce as clean a facsimile as possible, Chrysander doctored the images. In his preface, he complains of an earlier facsimile issued by the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1868:
“Handel’s music paper is always the best of his age, but yet the ink often shows through. In the printed photograph, the ink of these passages appears on the wrong side of the page with the same thickness and blackness as real notes, if it has not been previously carefully removed. In the London [1868] facsimile the photographic plate is generally printed off rudely without any such cleansing. The result is that the notes that show through seem to have equal value with the written ones, and make the page not only ugly, but in numerous places illegible, and even give rise to false readings. I have removed more than ten thousand such blots from the London edition by comparison with the autograph.” (Preface, p. v)
In his removal of “ten thousand such blots,” Chrysander sometimes went too far. Here is a glimpse of Chrysander’s facsimile: the tenor staff of bb. 111-122 of the chorus “And the Glory of the Lord”:
And, for good measure, the same selection as it appears in the new facsimile issued by Bärenreiter in 2008:
Source: cropped from a digital scan (600 dpi) JPEG of
the printed facsimile.
It appears to me that these
last two are identical—and I would guess that the scans that appear on the BL
website are the same digital files used in the production of the Bärenreiter
volume. (I gladly acknowledge that it
was Donald Burrows’s commentary in the new Bärenreiter facsimile that drew my
attention to the doctored Chrysander facsimile, and to these details
particularly.) The text in the new BL
scan is replete with the blotches and blains that Chrysander so painstakingly
removed. But in his clean-up, Chrysander
changed the text: his fourth note is
clearly on the fourth line (a C# in the tenor clef), where the blotted version
reproduced in the later scan extends well into the fourth space—and that D is
confirmed by the doubling in the viola line (which had no blot and so did not
need to be cleaned):
Source: viola line of Chrysander facsimile, as above; this is in alto clef
This D is the reading Chysander ultimately adopted in his edition of the work, with no comment about the apparent discrepancy in his facsimile.
Speaking of the blotchiest bar in the tenor line here (b. 119), Max Seiffert (who, after Chrysander’s death in 1901, brought the edition of Messiah through the press) comments
Compare the two images of the
composing score here (bb. 119-120 from “And the glory of the Lord”—Chrysander
from IMSLP #414203 on the left; BL scan on the right):
John Tobin (who edited Messiah for the new Handel complete edition, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe—a project to which I will have cause to return in later posts) reads Handel’s procedure here differently than Seiffert—but then again Seiffert may have only seen the score via the already doctored facsimile. According to Tobin (who translates this into the treble clef):
“Obviously in error,” and it is easy enough to see how Handel’s copyist could make such an error. Tobin’s putative original reading fits the blots which the BL scan shows, but would be less clear from the 1892 facsimile’s reading (even blotty as it remains in this instance). Seiffert complete misses out the E.
Just as another example of Chrysander’s tidying up, here is the 1892 facsimile’s presentation of something out of the Bodleian conducting score (which he included because it was in Handel’s hand); note particularly the annotations at the top of the page.
Here is the page as reproduced in the 1974 facsimile of the conducting score:
Source: a digital scan (600) JPEG of the printed
facsimile (f. 57 of part II).
Not only has Chrysander eliminated a lot of the marginalia, as Donald Burrows points out, he has misread “Miss Young” and converted it into “Mißion.” Note also his tempo marking: allegro Larghetto. (Whatever that means.) In the original, is it allegro, that is, struck through—or is that just a stray smudge? (In Chysander the smudge is eliminated.) Its placement to the far left suggests to my eye that it was added afterLarghetto, and thus maybe less likely to be a cancelled (earlier) marking. But the sources are inconsistent for the tempo marking of this movement: the version (for bass) preserved in the composing score is marked NBallegro; another version reads Andante. Yet another lacks any instruction.
And so on. With a work as textually well-documented as Messiah, the problems posed by these IMSLP items (and what they claim to be) scarcely do any real harm. Indeed, by the time you read this, it may have been fixed. (Check here.) Even so, there have been tens of thousands of downloads of these files—if the IMSLP figures are to be believed—so somebody is using them. This is surely the tip of the iceberg, and caution is advised.
