45. Adeste infideles

I was at a performance of Handel’s Messiah a few weeks ago where—not for the first time, it must be said—I noticed some surprises in the orchestral accompaniment.  I have grown used to hearing trumpets and drums (derived ultimately from Mozart’s 1789 orchestration) creep into the “Wonderful Counselor” exclamations in the chorus “For unto us a child is born.”   After all, you’re paying the trumpet and timpani players, so why not get your money’s worth?  I don’t like this philosophy, but I get the justification.

It was clear, however, that not just the trumpet players but also at least the sole second violin player as well were using performing materials reprinted from the 1902 Ebenezer Prout edition:  numbers that should have had unison violins (the aria “How beautiful are the feet,” for example) had instead a fuller string accompaniment.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of Prout edition Vln. II part p. 27 (from scan at IMSLP #47447)

The conductor is a friend, so I asked him about this.  “They brought their own partbooks.  It wasn’t worth fixing.”  Particularly when you're operating on just one or two rehearsals, this is certainly efficient:  they’ve already marked it (bowings, etc.) and are used to it.  Why fight it for the one or two people in the audience who will grind their teeth?  (When it is a community performance anyway, who in their right mind would expect a purist approach?)

Such textual mash-ups hardly do any damage, at least as far as the vast majority of the audience is concerned.  What was performed was basically “Prout lite”:  we didn’t have the full Prout orchestration—flutes, clarinets, horns, etc.—but we had bits of his re-workings running in parallel against (and within the confines of) Handel's economical original scoring.  So what?

I guess the “so what?” is the principle of conflating editions by letting performers in an ensemble supply their own, independently of each other.  I was treated to an execrable example of this a few weeks later, and it gives rise to my thoughts today.  It was a pops concert by a community orchestra which also featured a local chorus.  The show concluded with a holiday sing-along section.  One of the sing-along carols was “O come, all ye faithful” (Adeste fideles—a tune which has a fascinating textual history of its own).  When we started a second verse—to the text “Sing, choirs of angels”—several sopranos in the choir took it upon themselves to sing the descant.  By this I mean a very popular descant devised by David Willcocks very early in his tenure as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge.

SOURCE:  detail of Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961) p. 89.

It is popular for good reason, as it makes very effective counterpoint out of a sequential figure familiar from another carol, the Renaissance tune associated with the 1901 text “Ding! dong! merrily on high.”  The earliest source I have located with Willcocks’s setting is a live recording of (portions of) the 1958 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  (More on that source later).  Many choral sopranos know this descant off by heart, and I have been only mildly surprised to see it appear even in hymnals—an implicit invitation for the congregation to join in as well.  This descant and its attendant harmonization, and with it Willcocks’s organ harmonization of the final verse, have become standards the world over.  Indeed, the final verse’s half-diminished-seventh chord at the word Word shows up regularly in Twitter and Facebook posts at this time of year—apparently as a sort of Christmas “money shot.”  By way of example:

SOURCE: screenshot from Twitter:  do your own search “Willcocks word chord” on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever and you'll get plenty of further examples.

Curious as it may seem, there have been instances in history of a descant supplanting the original as the main melody.  This seems to have happened in the case of “Puer natus in Bethlehem” and—for all we know—maybe “O come, O come Emmanuel” as well.  (For discussion of the textual situations of each, see The New Oxford Book of Carols, pp.172 and 45.)  I don’t think Adeste fideles is threatened at all by the descant, but Willcocks’s descant is clearly here to stay:  maybe because it seems to be such fun to sing.  And so the sopranos sang the descant at the concert—even though it was harmonically incompatible with the version the orchestra was playing.  It sounded awful.  And it could be easily fixed with the rehearsal instruction “Sopranos:  no descant.” If they would cooperate.

On the same program, the choir sang along to Leroy Anderson’s charming miniature Sleigh Ride.  Mitchell Parrish’s very clever lyrics were written for it when it was adapted to be a popular song—an extremely popular song, as it happens.  The original key and modulations don’t really work for singers, and it showed at this performance.  I love the piece, but here it was marred by trying to have both the song and the original orchestral work together:  Messiah wasn’t harmed really by the simultaneous versions, but Sleigh Ride was destroyed—just as was “Sing, choirs of angels.”  I’m not a purist, but without the textual meddling these performances would have been just fine.   Bah!  Humbug!

SOURCE:  scan of 1961 edition cover;
I'm not sure of the date of my copy, but
on the back the printed price is $1.80.

One final note about the Willcocks descant:  I believe it first appeared in print in 1961 in the fantastically successful anthology Carols for Choirs, coedited by Willcocks and Reginald Jacques.  This book has had a host of successors (so that it in reprints it was retitled Carols for Choirs 1), and has spread the “Lessons & Carols” style and liturgy all around the world, providing texts for others to perform.  Even in its earliest printing, however, the descant is not quite the same as the version captured on the 1958 recording.  In the recording, the trebles sing the text “Gloria in excelsis deo” at the start of the verse, rather than (with the rest of the choir and congregation) “Sing, choirs of angels.”  Unfamiliar as it is to me with this text, I have to say that I like Willcocks’s original version better:  the imperative Sing of the congregation is answered by the angelic voices above.  Oh, well; second thoughts are not always improvements.  Maybe some enterprising choral director will restore Willcocks’s original version on occasion?  (A word to the wise: just make sure everyone is singing the same version.)

43. seen and not heard

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

Als alle Knospen sprangen,

Da ist in meinem Herzen

Die Liebe aufgegangen....

[In the wondrously beautiful month of May
as all of the buds were bursting,
then in my heart
love unfolded.]

The opening quatrain of Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo (1823) is stirring enough, but it is almost a cliché to point to the beginning of Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (1840) as reaching heights (and depths) that Heine’s words cannot.  The unutterable longing expressed somehow in the initial piano figure, wavering back and forth in a repeated (it seems) Phrygian half-cadence, D – C-sharp – D – C-sharp in the bass, until it suddenly resolves not into F-sharp minor (to which our ear may be leading us) but with disarming ease into A major.  (A recording is available from the IMSLP here.)

SOURCE: cropped scan of first edition of Dichterliebe (Leipzig:  Peters, c. 1844), p. 3, from IMSLP #25011.

Schumann pointedly leaves this figure unresolved when it returns at the end of the song, the ambiguity persisting several seconds into the next song (again resolving in A major).  It is a great moment—hauntingly beautiful, as I suppose it is intended to be.  And, because of such inspiration, Schumann’s place among the canon is secure.  Or is it?  After all, the canon is really just whoever we say it is.

I moved to Virginia in July 2017, and a few weeks after I arrived white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, about 60 miles away, for a demonstration that turned deadly and seized headlines all over the world.  Appalled and repulsed, I watched white men—people who look like me—proclaiming their entitlement, endeavoring to reclaim privilege they regarded as their birthright.  Even as they chanted their vile slogans, I was working on my syllabus for the second part of a two-semester music history survey for music majors I would start teaching later that month.  As I struggled to pack far too much essential content into a semester, I wistfully thought of all the things I wouldn’t have time to talk about—things that revealed that the claim of entitlement on rampant display a short drive away was really a recurring story in music history.  (“Jews will not replace us!” is the essence of Richard Wagner’s notorious 1850 essay Das Judenthum in der Musik.)  Us versus them is, indeed, the story of so much history that its continuing manifestations in the headlines now seem more akin to “DOG BITES MAN” than to “MAN BITES DOG.”  But when, as is the rule rather than exception in history, the violence is perpetrated by those in power against those excluded from it, the news must always be shouted from the rooftops.

And so in my first year teaching in Virginia I introduced an overhaul to the music history sequence, jettisoning the soup-to-nuts survey from plainchant to the present (an approach which gives students a false sense of comprehensiveness).  Instead I used the allotment of two semesters for a different approach:

1. For Music History I:  genres and forms, I concentrated on only two genres, a mini-survey that allowed us to trace genre-specific traits and innovations over a shorter time period.  I selected concertos and song cycles as our twin foci.  Those were not easy choices, but they allowed me to focus on contrasts between domestic and public music-making, to consider text-setting as well as non-texted music, to have the students learn to navigate orchestral scores as well as (sometimes equally bewildering) keyboard writing.  Although the chronology of the song-cycle is particularly restricted—basically starting in the early nineteenth century—I reached back to solo cantatas and other works that could be seen as antecedent (though not really ancestors) of the genre—just as I brought in concept albums as a continuation of the tradition.  Even with only two genres, I found that I had the same impossibility of fitting everything I wanted to discuss into a single semester.
2. For Music History II:  narratives and ideologies, I wanted a course that was basically “What lessons can we learn from music history?”  Two of the questions considered in that course were pulled directly out of my reactions to the white nationalist rally:  “How does a composer become a privileged voice, and who gets suppressed in the process?”  and “If we view music history not in terms of composers or even of performers but rather of patrons, what does the landscape look like?”  Inextricably part of both of these is gender, and there were plenty of good reading assignments to provoke them to think about the propped-up nature of the canon of Great Composers which we had all inherited.

As will be clear from this blog, Great Composers is (sic) very much my bread and butter.  Even in my first post I tried to be candid that dead white males would inevitably dominate my posts, if for no more nefarious reason than their music generally has a longer paper-trail.  That said, I have been keenly and uncomfortably aware that I have yet to post about the music of a female composer (even though a number of female editors have come up).  As we begin Heine’s “wondrously beautiful month of May,” however, I make this humble effort to emend my ways.

Does this sound familiar?  (Listen to it here.)

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 41, II/31–36 (Breitkopf, 1990).

This is from the slow movement of the Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7,  by Clara Wieck (later Clara Schumann).  She wrote this in about 1835, and it is a striking anticipation of Robert’s “wunderschönen Monat Mai” figure—the same two harmonies wavering back and forth, even expressed in the same key.  Is it too much to say Robert stole it from her?  He clearly knew the piece well.  An inside joke?  An unintentional derivation?  Common property of husband and wife?  Admittedly Wieck doesn’t use this gesture to slip into A major, as Robert was to do.  More remarkably, this is part of a transition to A-flat major—very far removed from her home tonic.  Indeed, Claudia Macdonald quotes an early reviewer who attempts a chauvinist joke about this:

Women are moody.... [I]f in their cherished domestic and matrimonial circumstance the daughters of Eve would make no other, larger leaps, deviations or evasions than such a teensy half step, then everything would be just fine.

[Allgemeiner musikalische Anzeiger 
in 1838; trans. Macdonald, p. 31]

Did Robert face this sort of nonsense when, in his piano Phantasie for piano and orchestra (also in A minor, and later revised as the first movement of his own concerto in that key) he also modulated to A-flat major?  Or was that just genius?  Granted, Robert’s choice of A-flat may be dictated by a strategy to emphasize melodic unity:  he preserves C-natural as the third scale degree, on which he begins his motive whether in its home minor key or—with the tonic lowered by a half-step—in major:

SOURCE:  composite from Robert Schumanns Werke, Ser. III (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1883--from IMSLP #291223), pp. 147 and 159, with my own indications of the opening of the Ur-melody in each key.

Still, there is something about the same tonal maneuver (A minor to A-flat major and back) in both works that to me has a sense of “anything you can do, I can do better” about it.

SOURCE:  Clara Wieck, aged 16, with the finale
of her concerto on the music desk before her;
lithograph by J. Giere, scan from
Europeana Collections

Much as I love and admire the work, I did not include Robert’s piano concerto in my music history class; I featured him instead in the song-cycle part of the course.  I did, however, use Wieck’s concerto—a work hitherto completely unknown to me.  Her anticipation of the “wunderschönen” figure arrested my attention, but I was equally struck by very many blog-worthy textual details.

The source situation is pitiful:  no autograph from Wieck survives; the only manuscript that survives is Robert’s and is fragmentary, as it seems he orchestrated her finale.  (Like his own concerto later, Wieck’s work started as a one-movement Concertsatz, though in her case it was what would later be the finale.)  There is no extant manuscript of any sort for the first or second movement, and until 1990 the only edition of the work was its first one, published by Hoffmeister in about 1836, and handily available on the IMSLP (#566786).  (A 1987 “edition” reproduced a manuscript full score apparently derived from the Hoffmeister parts.)   I’ll come back to the original edition below.

More than anything else, I have been intrigued and fascinated by rhythmic details of Wieck’s score.  Note, for example the stunning variety of rhythms in the piano sprays tossed off here—at a tempo that make these differences barely perceptible to the audience:

SOURCE:  highlighted cropped scan of p. 58, III/73–79 (Breitkopf, 1990).

(I also like the way the bassoon accumulates longer and longer statements, starting from just the initial motive of the main theme.)

I also noted places in which the solo part has very slightly different rhythms from other instruments doubling the same idea.  In this example, I think she has accommodated the large left-hand jump made across the bar-line:

 SOURCE:  highlighted cropped scan of p. 52, III/41–44 (Breitkopf, 1990).

A similar motivation seems to be behind these alterations:

SOURCE:  my composite from details of pp. 23–24, I/94–97(Breitkopf, 1990).

But I confess that I am flummoxed about what to make of this rhythmic notation [though see ADDENDUM]:

SOURCE:  highlighted detail of p. 41, II/37–39 (Breitkopf, 1990).

The illustrations above come from the new edition issued by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1990, edited by Janina Klassen.  As I compare the cover pages of the original Hoffmeister and the new edition [below], I wonder if Breitkopf’s decision to refer to her only by her married name isn’t just a marketing ploy, linking her music to the canonic name of her famous husband.  She was not yet married when it was first published, and her name was much more widely known than Robert’s was at the time.  She was a pianist of international renown already at a young age.  Indeed, she was just sixteen when she premiered the complete work on 9 November 1835 with Felix Mendelssohn conducting at the Leipzig Gewandhaus.

Despite the many virtues of the new edition, the Hoffmeister original is particularly useful in the classroom, as it exemplifies the practical publication of this sort of work in the nineteenth century.  In place of a full score, the piano part includes orchestral cues throughout (and, as the title page indicates, could serve for rendition of the work by piano alone); the first violin part is similarly cued to facilitate directing a performance; all the string parts have small-note alternate lines to enable the piece to be performed with only a string quintet accompaniment.  Here, for example, is the bottom of the first page of the violin part, bearing the instruction that notes marked avec Quintuor (as on the second staff) are for this chamber version, while the other instrumental cues are only there to assist a violinist/conductor:

SOURCE:  C. Wieck op. 7, detail of Vln. I p. 1 (Leipzig, Hoffmeister, c. 1836) from IMSLP #566786 [p. 29]

In the absence of any other sources, it is impossible to know whether the quintet adaptation is Wieck’s or Robert’s, or maybe even an in-house job by the Hoffmeister firm.  Indeed, in the absence of any other orchestral works by Wieck, we cannot even make a guess about whether the orchestration in the first movement is her own.  I have been puzzled by remarks such as “Whether [Robert] Schumann orchestrated the other movements is not known”:  except for a solo cello, the orchestra is entirely silent in the second movement.  Sometimes I suspect that we musicologists get so caught up in the commentary that we fail to look at the very music we study.

This is only one aspect of a problem musical women (whether composers, performers, or patrons) have faced for a very long time:  seen and not heard, recognized but not valued, subject always to the male gaze but essentially invisible.  (For a recent ripped-from-the-headlines example of an analogous situation, see Imani Mosley's perceptive reflection on the “erasure” of Peter Pears from the public face of the Benjamin Britten legacy.)  I am grateful for initiatives that facilitate addressing this issue—for example the Institute for Composer Diversity and the database Music Theory Examples by Women—and for writings by Cyrilla Barr, Ralph Locke, and Marian Wilson Kimber (among many others) that I now view as required reading for my students.  Systemic prejudice against women composers; exclusion from educational, performance, and career opportunities; dismissal of women’s musical activism as mere volunteerism; and critical approaches that cite women merely as also-rans are just some of the factors that have unfairly shaped the music historical narratives.  That is a much more important thing for my students to learn than any particular “masterwork” of the repertory.

ADDENDUM  2 May 2019

Regarding the “impossible” rhythmic notation I note above, I thank William van Geest for directing my attention to this 2011 article by Julian Hook, in which the Wieck seems to be the earliest example among many similar examples from within the larger Schumann circle: 
http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.4/mto.11.17.4.hook.html

7. On second thought

In the Christian liturgical calendar, today is All Saints’ Day, which prompts me to consider small textual point about a hymntune that will be much in use today in Anglican services.  Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his tune SINE NOMINE for the text “For all the saints who from their labors rest” as a processional hymn in The English Hymnal (1906), for which he served as music editor.  This book revolutionized the music of Anglo-American hymnody, incorporating a wealth of traditions (chorales, Genevan Psalms, plainchant, folk music) into a new mainstream.  In addition to many hymn arrangements of folk tunes, Vaughan Williams contributed a several original tunes to the book.  SINE NOMINE is probably RVW's best known hymntune, but there are a handful of other contenders for that distinction.  

Some fifty years after the fact, RVW described his work on the hymnal partly as one of purging the Victorian hymntune repertory:

Whilst trying to include all the good tunes, I did my best to eliminate the bad ones.  This was difficult, because I was not entirely my own master.  My committee insisted that certain very popular tunes should be retained.  The climax came when my masters declared that I must myself write a fulsome letter to a prominent ecclesiastic asking for leave to print his horrible little tune.  My committee and I finally settled our quarrel with a compromise by which the worst offenders were confined to an appendix at the end of the book, which we nicknamed the “Chamber of Horrors.”  (p. 3)

In his preface to the volume itself he is somewhat more restrained:  “...a short appendix is added of alternative tunes to certain hymns for the use of those who do not agree with the choice of the musical editor.”  (p. xii).  Joseph Barnby's tune for "For all the saints" was clearly one not to RVW's taste, as it is confined to the Appendix.  Charles Villiers Stanford's stirring tune ENGELBURG (1904) was under copyright in the new edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern, and thus not available for The English Hymnal.  So Vaughan Williams wrote his own.

Below on the left is the beginning of the hymn as it appeared in the first edition.  The hymnal appeared in a second edition in 1933, and the image on the right is how it appears there.  Ignore the difference in formatting:  the textual variant is bb. 4-6.

Source:  cropped digital scans (600 dpi) of (L) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826; and (R) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1933 ed., p. 832.

The harmony of b. 4 is identical (tonic) in both versions, but in the later edition the walking bassline of the pedal is changed in order to accommodate a new harmony (V/V) in b. 5.  This, in turn, allows a suspended E on the downbeat of b. 6, resolving back to the 1906 text in the middle of that measure.

I have wondered about this passage for years.  This hymn is always in the service when I am on the organ bench on All Saints’ Day—or on the Sunday nearest to it.  It appears in many American hymnals, some with the 1906 text (as I first came to know it), and some with the revised text.  Why and when was the change made?

It is hard to date when it was changed, but earliest example I have found with the revised reading is another hymnal which RVW edited, namely Songs of Praise (OUP) which appeared first in 1925:

Source:   cropped digital scan Songs of Praise (OUP) 1925, p. 162.

If anyone can locate this reading in any printing of the first edition of The English Hymnal, I would be eager to know about it.  (A number of separate pamphlets of hymns from The English Hymnal were published over the years, including one in 1921 that included “For all the Saints.”  The only copy I have located is in the British Library, and for this post I haven't been able to check the reading there.  Perhaps the alteration was made at that time?)  Hymns are often the victims of cavalier and arbitrary musical alterations, as often the music editors of a hymnal are not really editors at all; at least in this instance, where Vaughan Williams was the musical editor and this is his own hymn tune, we can rule out the arbitrary and cavalier as a factors.

As to why the change was made, I can only suggest a possible reason.  Over the first notes of the hymn are instructions:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826.

Verses 4-6 are given a four-part harmony setting:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 828.

There we note that the “original” harmony is used for bb. 5-6, and that all that is lacking of the original in b. 4 is  the walking bass of the organ pedal line.  My suggestion is that, as this harmonization would appear in three verses already, RVW made an alteration for the other five just for the sake of variety.  I can’t prove it, and I’ve never been convinced that is an improvement.  But while I’m on the subject of this alternate four-part setting, I think the counterpoint for the Alleluyas is gorgeous, the tenor line in particular:

Source:  ditto

Here is a performance from York Minster; it uses the 1906 reading through verse 7.  At verse 8, the revised reading is used.  I’ll remember that idea the next time it is on the service list when I am on the bench.

6. ex silentio

I found this score on my shelves a few months ago.  I’m not sure when or where I got it.

SOURCE:  cropped scan (600 dpi) of p. 1; Edition Peters no. 4894 (Pl no. 30053), pub. 1959.

Although this appeared as recently as 1959, it is—as the note says—the first time this work was published in score.  It was published in parts by Artaria in March 1785.  As with many Haydn symphonies, the autograph score is lost.  Here, from H. C. Robbins Landon’s monumental tome on Haydn’s symphonies, is a list of the autographs whose whereabouts were known at that time (1955):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Landon, The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn, pp. 27-28

Comparing this list with those volumes of JHW (the critical complete edition) devoted to his symphonies, one recognizes a cautious editorial strategy:  works which existed in autograph comprised those symphony volumes that appeared in the 1960s and 70s, and (the “London” symphonies excepted) the rest have waited as much as four decades to see publication.  (That said, even in 1955 Landon’s list wasn’t quite accurate:  Landon lists symphonies 98, 99, and 101 as being in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, but these three were actually part of the “lost” cache of scores hidden by the Nazis that ended up eventually in Krakow; they were not returned to Berlin until the 1980s.  Nigel Lewis’s journalistic account of this, Paperchase, is excellent beach reading, and at the moment there are a few cheap secondhand copies on abebooks.com.)

To return to Symphony 79:  when I found this score on my shelf, I had just acquired an excellent new recording of this symphony.  I was home one day when the kids were out at lunchtime, so I set the score on the table and put on the disc.  I hadn’t even taken a bite before I was interrupted by a textual discrepancy.  Here is the whole of the first page in Lassen’s edition:

SOURCE:  as above, less cropped

What arrested my sandwich halfway to my open mouth was the last half of bar 4.  In Lassen’s edition, there is a brief silence here before the next phrase, but on the recording I heard a horn playing the dominant on repeated eight-notes.  That isn’t really my story here:  I think this is a straightforward error in transcription, although I don't have adequate resources on hand to tell whether the error was already in Lassen’s sources or was new in his edition.

Here are the horn parts of the first few bars in a composite, comparing Lassen’s edition with the only other two (scpreditions this work has yet received—the Philharmonia edition which followed it by a few years, edited by H. C. Robbins Landon, and the much more recent JHW:

Although I think it is clearly an error, the rest at the end of bar 4 is plausible:  there is such a silence in the recapitulation at b. 105, although in that instance the next phrase is given in the parallel minor.

SOURCE:  Landon's edition, because Lassen has a page-turn that would obscure my point.

Nonetheless, the other similar passage is a false recapitulation (at b. 68) which has the repeated eighth-notes in place, this time allotted to the violas. Very unlikely, however, is Lassen’s reading in b. 5, in which the repeated figure in Horn II makes no sense.

Lassen lists only two sources, but gives no detail about how these were used, nor any variant readings:

By the time of the Philharmonia edition, Landon had to hand four sources, although he explicitly excludes the two that had been used by Lassen:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Critical Commentary to Landon's edition, vol. 8, p. LXVI, with my emphasis added.

Landon does not mention Lassen’s edition, and it is possible that he had not seen it.  The JHW editors jump to a different conclusion, however, because of editorial adjustments in other passages which agree in both the Lassen and the Landon editions:  post hoc ergo propter hoc, JHW surmises [p. 290 and n. 263] that Landon not only knew it but indeed used it for his working copy (that is, a copy of a prior edition marked up with any changes to be made in a new edition, saving the effort of writing out the score anew).

But I think they are wrong on this point:  Landon could very easily have devised the same editorial adjustments that Lassen had reasonably made.  Moreover, editors always go out of their way to point out how their edition is better than their predecessors.  Landon doesn’t mention bar 4 at all in his commentary; JHW does mention bar 4, but has nothing to say about Horn II.  I argue from silence here, but it seems clear to me that neither of them ever noticed the erroneous reading that Lassen transmitted in b. 4.  If they had, they would have told us.

Lassen’s edition is not an authoritative source, and there’s no reason that either Landon or JHW needed to consult it.  Clearly JHW did consult it, and I submit that the lack of a comment on b. 4 suggests that they did not do the due diligence required to make the assertion that Landon had cut some editorial corners.  The silence is telling.