46. Look ere ye leape

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don't know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, 
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine-and-twenty.

And here we are on that leap day.  Perhaps I ought to be celebrating Rossini’s birthday while I have the chance, but this is a post I’ve had in mind almost from the beginning of this blog:  What about scores that seem to have one bar too many (or too few)?

An example that many pianists know is the extra bar that shows up in some editions of BWV 846/i, the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I). 

SOURCE:  cropped from G. Schirmer (c. 1893) reprint of Czerny edition, from IMSLP #01005

This bar was introduced by Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke (1767–1822), I suppose as a remedy two faults he perceived in Bach’s text.  He seems to have wanted to make the prolonged Dominant pedal begin on a “strong” bar (the first of a group of 4 bars)—thus he needed that to fall on b. 25 instead of b. 24, and so introduced a new b. “23.”  He also took pains to eliminate the two false relations (here shown in color) in the voice-exchange.  The bracketed solid note-heads represent Schwencke’s interpolated bar.

(Incidentally, this doubly-chromatic voice-leading troubled analyst Heinrich Schencker too.  He made a big deal about the fact that in an autograph manuscript, Bach wrote stems for the bass F-sharp turned upward.  To Schencker this was conclusive proof that Bach thought of that note as nothing more than a foreground harmonization of the soprano E-flat.  I’m not convinced that the stemming was anything more than fortuitous.  Whatever.)  

The retention of Schwencke’s extra bar was codified by Czerny’s edition (reprinted and reissued by a number of publishers, and probably in print continuously to this day.)  Gounod was likely working from Czerny’s edition when he created his superimposed melody—initially as an instrumental Méditation, but subsequently texted (and forever after known as) Ave Maria.  Gounod has thus transformed this “Schwenckenische Takt” into a load-bearing bar:  it is impossible to correct it, as the climax of Gounod’s melody depends on it.  I am reluctant to claim that it does much damage to the Bach original.  It matters if you know to listen for it; otherwise it passes unnoticed.  And, as Malcolm Boyd has observed,

“Schwencke wrote numerous compositions—oratorios, cantatas, concertos, sonatas, and songs—but his most frequently performed piece of work is without doubt bar 23 of the first prelude in Book 1 of Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier....” [p. 444]

As it happens, Schwencke is a link to another work for which editions generally seem to have one bar more than the composer intended—although in this case the variant stems from the composer's hand.  It is Mozart’s celebrated thirteen–instrument serenade, K. 361, a work with a long history of textual problems, and to which I will return in future posts.  (The Schwencke connection:  he devised a charming version for piano quartet plus one woodwind.) The superfluous(?) bar is in the fifth movement, the Romance.  Here is the relevant page of the autograph manuscript:

SOURCE:  Mozart, K. 361, v (Romance) bb. 22-30; p. 54 of Mozart’s autograph; a downloaded digital scan on the Library of Congress website; a scan of the whole manuscript is available.

This movement is in a large ABA structure, but the A section is itself a binary form (aabb).  The page above shows the last three bars of the b and the first six bars of the B.  The return to A is indicated by the instruction da capo senza repliche a few pages later.  So the moment in question here is the third bar on the scan above:  it is to be played as b. 24 twice (as it is repeated); but is it to be played again as b. 111 on the third time through—the da capo without repeats?  

Mozart’s curved bracket above and below this bar was his usual indication of a first ending, but that wouldn't work in this case, as the transition from b. 23 to b. 25 is nonsensical.  Rather these seem to be an indication to skip b. “111” and go straight to the coda.  But—crucially—these curved brackets were both smudged while the ink was still wet.  Was Mozart changing his mind?  Or was the smudge accidental?  After all, if he made these markings after composing the B section, then all the rest of the ink on this page would have already dried.

Actually, I think this is exactly what happened.  Mozart was presumably impatient to start to work on the coda:  the previous page (folio 27v, numbered 53) of the manuscript shows a tell-tale mark where the still-wet slur near the top of this page (28r, p. 54) would have set-off when the page was put down too soon on top of the other folio.  I have marked the off-set smudge on p. 53 in red, as well as a space at the bottom of the page where we might expect to see a similar offset from the slur below the contrabass line:

So, is it a problem that the lower mark isn’t there?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  I speculate that the wet ink of the lower bracket of p. 54 could well have been smudged by the bottom edge of page 53, without leaving much on the page itself.  Here is my effort at representing the pages as they would have lain together to create the offset.  For this image you must imagine you are seeing through p. 54 (and so here its image has been reversed and made partially transparent).  The top brackets coincide when placed at such an angle—possible, as the pages were then unbound nested bi-folios:

The smudged top bracket and the mark on the previous page are uncannily similar.  The most suggestive detail to me is the “1” which, I suggest, explains the blob under the set-off bracket on p. 53.  Here’s a detail—p. 53 on the top, p. 54 (reversed, to align the offset) below, with the “1” and the set-off blob circled:

As I say, maybe.  I think editors are perfectly justified in omitting this bar on philological evidence (and speculation, it must be said) like that presented above.  One of the editors of the NMA volume including K. 361, Daniel N. Leeson, has written at length about this bar, voicing his regret that he did not fight more with the general editors in order to omit it from the NMA text.  (See, for example, his 2009 summary of his decades of research into this piece.  He seems not to have noticed the off-set on p. 53, however.)  Leeson, with his co-editor Neal Zaslaw, did at least manage to get a footnote in the NMA score to the effect that perhaps Mozart did not want this bar played, and directing the user to the critical report:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of NMA VII/17/2 (1979, ed. Leeson & Zaslaw), p. 191.

In fact, the critical report wasn’t issued until 2002, and was the work of a yet another hand—Dietrich Berke.  (See his comment here.)  When the NMA score was issued as a separate Bärenreiter offprint, the Leeson/Zaslaw footnote was modified:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Bärenreiter TP 312 (otherwise an offprint of the above; this is from the 6th printing, 2006), p. 51.

The Henle edition (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese) at least puts the bar in brackets, with an explanatory footnote:

SOURCE: detail of scan of Henle 9809 (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese), p. 45.  The relevant comment cited here describes the notation and the smudging, remarking “It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether this ‘volta’ applies or not, and what it refers to.  Presumably it relates to the transition from the recapitulation to the coda in mm. 111–112, so that the chords from M 24 (= M 111) give way to the entrance of the coda” [p. 77].

According to Leeson, the only edition yet to completely omit bar “111” is that edited by Roger Hellyer.  After explaining the situation in his Preface, Hellyer comments:  “If performers cannot accept my decision that I am here following Mozart's ill-expressed intentions, they are of course free to reinstate what has been played here at least since 1803, as in bar 24.”  Exactly so.

Unsurprisingly, performers have been more willing than editors to take a chance on omitting this bar.  Here, for example, is this moment in Christopher Hogwood’s recording with the Amadeus Winds.  The missing bar comes—or, rather, doesn’t come—at ten seconds into this clip, at the start of the coda:

I find this reading musically compelling, and certainly plausible as Mozart’s intention, with the suddenly reduced forces on the beginning of the coda (and the surprise dissonant harmony when we expect the full cadence).  Moreover, I think the textual evidence is suggestive enough to back it up, even if it is not conclusive.

Of course we may be deleting a bar Mozart intended, merely to satisfy our taste.  That seems to be what has sometimes happened near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s fourth symphony.  To some ears this ending seems to have one too many bar.  Jonathan Del Mar reports that Schumann (1840) and Czerny (1853) were early advocates of deleting it, and in one early set of manuscript parts the bar has been deleted—but it is impossible to say when this alteration was made, and no other source close to Beethoven supports it.  Other critical editions have brought up this question, but the only one I have seen to delete a bar for the sake of metrical regularity is Peter Hauschild’s 1996 edition for Breitkopf [below on the right].  Hauschild’s astoundingly naive justification for relying so heavily on this single source as transmitting Beethoven’s supposed alterations:  “da es wohl ausgeschlossen ist, daß andere an Beethovens Symphonie herumkorrigiert haben”! [p. 84; “because it is surely out of the question that others would have corrected Beethoven’s symphony.”]  The irony is delicious.

SOURCE:  marked-up page scans of the last page of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 4, op. 60:  (l.) Bäenreiter (1999, ed. Jonathan Del Mar—here from 2001 off-print); (r.) Breitkopf & Hartel (1996, ed. Peter Hauschild).

If you want to compare these in performance, compare John Eliot Gardiner (with the text on the left) and Daniel Barenboim omitting the bar, as on the right.  I suppose Barenboim and anyone else may do with the text as they see fit.  The composers themselves sometimes take such liberties.  Here is an extract from Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem Danse macabre (1875) in the composer’s own transcription for violin and piano.  He added the bar marked in red when he produced this version; it does not correspond to anything in the orchestral version.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of 1877 Durand edition of violin/piano version, p. 11 (from IMSLP #33277); the extract begins at b. 340.

Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz no. 1 is a similar example, if even more complicated in Liszt’s piano version both adds and delete bars compared to the orchestral original—so that the two versions do not correspond.  Already in the first 150 bars each version contains a bar that the other lacks, and it is clear from the composer’s sketches for the piano version that he had second thoughts.

SOURCE:  marked up scan of first edition (Leipzig, c. 1862), bb. 1–32; b. 25 is new to the piano version.  Scan from IMSLP #13711.

SOURCE:  top, as above, bb. 120–136; the orchestral version has an extra bar after b. 134; below, detail of manuscript sketch of this passage, scan from the Morgan Library.

For an example where I believe a new scholarly edition is led by the early sources into an error that an older edition had set right, look at the last aria of BWV 52, “Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht.”  As often elsewhere, Bach did not write out the final ritornello, but indicated it merely with a da Capo instruction:

SOURCE: detail of scan of the autograph (D-B Mus.Ms. Bach P 85, f. 8v) available on Bach Digital.

SOURCE:  the same, f. 7r.

Because the final cadence is (or at least I would argue is) elided with the return of the ritornello, Bach has notated the first bar of the ritornello again before the instruction “DC.”  Consequently, he surely meant not really a return to the beginning, but rather to the second bar.  And, indeed, at the second bar we find the segno marking we would expect to see [at right].

The BG edition interprets it thus, assuming that Bach’s “DC” really meant “DS.”  The NBA, on the other hand, takes the DC literally—correctly pointing out that the earliest performing parts (which are all the work of copyists) have da Capo, following the autograph faithfully.  In fact, one of these early parts—Oboe III—has a segno at b. 2, which indicates that someone recognized the problem early on.  (The lack of a correction in the other parts does not mean that it wasn't corrected:  the mistake seems so obvious that the musicians could recognize and remember the error.)  Incredibly, there is no comment in the NBA critical report about any of this—nor about the different editorial decision that has been taken.  As it is the policy of the NBA to print in full such passages that Bach has abbreviated, a redundant bar is introduced into the text:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite page scan with detail from pp. 162 and 163 of NBA I/26 (1994, ed. Andreas Glöckner), here scanned from Bärenreiter offprint TP1290 (2007).

In my opinion, this is just wrong—and the conclusive proof for it is an overlooked detail of the autograph score.  Where the other parts are given the da capo instruction, the singer—who will have nothing further to sing—is given exactly fifteen bars of rest (after the bar in which the cadence occurs):

SOURCE detail of scan of the autograph f. 8v again, just further enlarged.

 ...yet the NBA text calls for sixteen bars of rest to reach the end of the aria (as enumerated above).  Significantly, I haven’t found a single recording that includes this extra bar.  If they are using the NBA, the musicians are deleting it.  Sometimes an extra bar is just too much of a good thing.

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.)

44. Bedtime stories

A few weeks ago I was skimming through Christopher Small’s Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening in search of something I recalled reading years ago and wanted to mention in this blog.  I did not find what I was looking for; maybe it will turn up eventually and that post will get written.  It was very good, though, to open Musicking again; my skimming quickly became a more extensive perusal.  The book appeared while I was in graduate school.  Although it was never assigned reading for me, it shaped me more than just about anything else I read.  I would put it on any shortlist of the most important books on music of the last century.

I used to assign Musicking in my introductory music course, but I gave it up because my students regularly complained that it moved too slowly.  I think that is actually one of its virtues:  Small’s writing is wonderfully lucid, and filled with so many fascinating observations.  Most of the book consists of a “thick description”—about as thick as possible—of an orchestral concert.  He starts with a long consideration of an audience member's approach to the concert hall,  eventually making his way through the lobby into the auditorium.  He fills five chapters before the conductor is even in a position to give a downbeat, and even thereafter he writes not so much about the music being played as about the relationships established between the notes and the people involved (composer, performers, listeners), in search of “what is really going on here.”  In a chapter of that name he makes a compelling comparison:

“I intend no insult to either the ceremony of the symphony concert or to the works that are played there when I characterize them, at least in part, as bedtime stories told to adults.  The two ceremonies have features in common.  The first is that what is going on in both is the telling of a story and that the story partakes of the nature of the great meta-narrative.  The second is that the stories have become so familiar through repetition that they have lost whatever power they might once have had to disturb.  The third is that in both there is an insistence on perfect repetition of a series of actions that are prompted by a text, which in one case is the reading of words that comprise a story and in the other is the performance of sequences of musical sounds that comprise musical works.” (187)

I cannot do Small justice here; if you find this anywhere near as intriguing as I do, do yourself the favor of reading him cover to cover.  I want to extrapolate from the issue he raises about accumulation of a concert repertoire to consider how the bedtime story analogy illuminates further textual situations of music.  I have spent a lot of hours in the last ten years reading bedtime stories—and maybe that's why I have a new appreciation for Small’s comparison, a detail I had completely forgotten from my previous uses of this book.

I suspect that my family's experience is a common one:  a repertoire of bedtime stories develops over time, and while there are differences between the preferences of different children, there are some stories that become canonic family favorites.  This may not be related to any intrinsic quality of those stories: it may be just that the reader (me) enjoys reading them, and thus the child is used to hearing them before they have a say about what will be read.  Some books are tried once and then go back on the shelf or back to the library.  Others linger around on the floor beside the bed because we know we will be returning to them time and time again.  There are hints of a seasonal calendar to the repertoire—stories that relate to Thanksgiving or Christmas or summertime or the beginning of school—but most of the stories could be read at any time.  (The parallels with the development of a concert repertory are very interesting, but that is Small’s topic more than mine.  Again, I encourage readers to go directly to him; what matters here is that the texts become canonic by repetition.)

Different Texts, Same Story
As a core repertoire of bedtime stories develops in a family, both the reader and the listener inevitably become more attuned to textual details.  Sometimes I have to improvise my way through an already-familiar story because the book is not at hand.  In such cases, if the story is very familiar to the child, I will get critiques about the bits I omitted or over-embellished.  This is even more piquant when I read an already-familiar story in a new-to-us account (one of those “as told by” books); the child recognizes that the printed texts themselves differ—that “the story” and “the text” are not one and the same thing.  I have lost count of how many Star Wars books we have checked out of the library that would fit this situation, but of course it is also common with fairy tales and fables generally.  Perhaps the characters have names where they did not before (Cinderella’s stepsisters, for example), or new characters and scenes are introduced; certainly different texts emphasize different aspects of the story.

Often these differences are literary, having more to do with the construction of the story and the use of imagery or foreshadowing.  Sometimes they reveal different ideological perspectives.  I have seen this most in books of Bible stories for children—the sort of things well-meaning friends gave us when each of our kids were born.  The selection of stories included is revealing enough:  the Bible is full of sex, violence, gore, war, plague, pestilence, and massacre.  Many children’s versions instead tend to focus on the peace and love aspects, although these to me seem so disconnected from real life that I wonder if children will find anything relevant in them.  No, I think the bad and scary stuff needs to be there, and I am always interested to see how such is told.  That said, the storybook that, in narrating the story of David and Goliath, read “because David didn’t have a gun...” went straight into the trash.  (I wish I could include an image of it here, but I don’t even remember which it was.  That line, however, is indelibly imprinted on my memory.)

There are musical manifestations of this sort of textual variety.  Very common, surely, are different arrangements of the same tune (like so many albums of holiday music, each artist putting their own stamp on it in one way or another).  But this can also be seen in the most audible differences between different versions of standard works.  I can remember, for example, when first hearing Richard Maunder’s completion of the Mozart Requiem, the absence of Süßmayr’s trombone/woodwind chord at the beginning of “Rex tremendae majestatis” gave me a sensation akin to the slapstick gag of  leaning back against a wall that was not there.

SOURCE:  composite of the opening of “Rex tremendae” from K. 626:  (l.) Süßmayr's version, as given in the  NMA Ser. II Vol. 14, p. 83; (r.) completion by Richard Maunder (1988), full score, p. 61.  To hear this moment of Maunder's version in performance, click here.  (Robert Levin makes a similar choice in his completion.)

Or, for a similar example, in the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565, generally attributed to J. S. Bach):  when an organist is using the NBA (or the new Breitkopf edition as well), there is a rest on a downbeat where older editions accustomed me to a concluding low D.  I’m not sure that I totally agree with the source argument for leaving out the D:  there are no authentic sources for this work to link it to Bach, nor even to anyone else.  We have different versions “as told by” different copyists.  Either is effective.   So what?

SOURCE:  composite of bb. 12ff. from BWV 565: (top) BG vol. 15, detail of p. 268 (from ISMLP #01335); (bottom) NBA Ser. IV vol. 6, detail of p. 32.

Textual Preferences
In practice, all sorts of textual changes in a family’s bedtime story repertoire might creep in just in the repeated telling of the stories.  The result is something like the liturgical concept of a “use”—essentially a local variant to an established text.  The best known (because best preserved) of these is the Sarum Use, the variant of the Roman rite that evolved in Salisbury around the twelfth century and lingered until it was supplanted by (and adapted into) the vernacular service in the English Reformation.  This variant wasn’t limited to Salibury:  it got picked up by other British and Irish dioceses, and even some further afield.  While basically in accordance with the Roman tradition, the Use of Sarum accrued supplemental bits and pieces and different ways of doing things.

As I say, I have observed this sort of thing in my own bedtime storytelling.  I have made local “improvements” (as I would like to think of them) which have become part of the textus receptus for my kids.  Thus, when I read Joan Heilbroner’s 1962 Robert the Rose Horse, I modify her refrain that leads up to the allergic horse’s increasingly explosive sneezes:

Something about the word itch twice in such close succession strikes me as weak.  I invariably substitute twitch for the second:

His eyes began to itch.  His nose began to twitch.

As I reflect on this now, I note that I also add a rhythm and even a hint of pitch inflection to my recitation of this phrase—probably because it is a repeated figure in the book, with an internal textual repetition as well.   As I read it, it comes out something like

By changing the text, of course, I am usurping the authority of the author herself.  And musicians have done that—made unauthorized changes to a text—as long as we have any documentation that could confirm it.  They (we) still do it today, and I don’t think it is a problem.  I am more troubled, I suppose, by those like David Zinman, whose recording of the Beethoven symphonies was proclaimed as being the first cycle to use the new Bärenreiter urtext edition, but exactly how Zinman uses it is not clear:  I suppose anyone is free to use an edition however they like, but if one doesn’t agree with the Bärenreiter main text, what is the point of putting the name on the label?  Perhaps I can return to that for a later post.  Even if Zinman reverts to more traditional readings in many instances, he is in any case closer to the composer’s text than is (say) Barenboim, whose Beethoven still seems to be that which was in vogue at the time of his own birth.  Still, the “Barenboim Use” (or is it Furtwängler?) has as much a right to exist as any number of others.  Vive la différence.

Performing Texts
At even a more micro- level, the ritual of bedtime stories extends beyond just the verbal text (which I may or may not intentionally alter).  “Do the voices!” says my four-year-old, and I am compelled to read a children’s book as if it were a radio drama, with a cast of characters and a Foley effects man.   Thus this page from Tim Egan’s superb Metropolitan Cow (1999) requires from me the falsetto of Henrietta Gibbons (gasping for breath after a search all over the neighborhood for her missing calf, Bennett), followed by the stentorian basso of her distressed husband, Frederick.  Somewhere along the line, I see that I have made another textual alteration, as now alter the word just in Frederick’s second line to simply:  I [simply] don’t know!

This reminds me, too, of the entire complexes of ornaments that manifest the teacher/pupil lineage across multiple generations—whether it be Carnatic ragas or Rossini arias.  The textual fossilization of accruing ornamentation marries tradition and evolution.

SOURCE:  scan from Will Crutchfield, "Early Vocal Ornamenation" in the Critical Commentary of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter, 2008), pp. 361-420; the pages shown collate sources from singers relatively close to the composer for bb. 96-106 of Rosina's "Una voce poco fa"; I have added red brackets to mark the staff which gives Rossini's text (as edited in the WGR).

Ritual Action
In some instances, my enactment of the story goes beyond audible (i.e., radio drama) to physical embodiment.  I go through particular motions at key moments in the story, not unlike those actions specified in the rubrics for the eucharistic celebrant—again recalling the Sarum variants.  Thus in Roger Duvoisin’s Donkey Donkey (1933), I can hardly resist giving the child a gentle pinch on the ear when “the wicked nail” caught the eponymous donkey on his way into his stable.  (If only he had kept his ears up as donkeys do....)

I have found Small’s reference to the ritual of the bedtime story to be wonderfully illuminating because it is applicable far beyond the narrow context to which he applies it.  It is an excellent analogy for how and why concert etiquette and expectations have evolved as they have.  Beyond this, however, I recognize that it also exemplifies the evolution of text and textual practices generally.  Texts do not replicate themselves; people replicate texts, and in so doing there may be all sorts of individual reasons to change ( = corrupt) the text to new ends.  This must surely happen often with family recipes, handed down over generations.  Somewhere along the line someone replaces the lemon with rum, and your great-grandmother’s pound cake is not quite your great-grandmother’s pound cake anymore, even if it is regarded as such.

But, like baking, bedtime stories require someone to realize the text.  Your great-grandmother's pound cake doesn't really exist on an index card, nor does “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” quite exist merely on paper (save for the illustrations).  Bedtime stories are performance art—like music—requiring performer(s) to bring them to life.  As several times before in this blog, I find myself quoting Dorothy L. Sayers:

“From experience I am inclined to think that one reason why writing for the stage is so much more interesting than writing for publication is the very fact that, when the play is acted, the free will of the actor is incorporated into the written character.  The common man is aware of the conflicting desires within the playwright’s mind, and often asks questions about them.  Sometimes he asks:  ‘Isn’t it exciting to see your characters coming alive upon stage?’  Sometimes he inquires sympathetically:  ‘Isn’t it maddening to hear the actors ruining your best lines?’  The playwright can only reply that (unless the production is quite unnaturally good or superlatively bad) both propositions are undoubtedly true.
“A good deal, of course, depends upon the temperament of the playwright.  If he is of the egotistical kind, finding no satisfaction except in the autocratic enforcement of his sole will, he will find actors maddening almost beyond endurance.  This is the type of person who, in the sphere of procreation, tends to become a Roman parent.  But if he is the more liberal kind of creator, he will eagerly welcome—I will not say bad acting, which is altogether sinful and regrettable—but imaginative and free acting, and find an immensely increased satisfaction in the individual creativeness which the actor brings to his part.”  [The Mind of the Maker, pp. 64–65.]

Small’s bedtime story analogy allowed me to confront directly some ways in which I have been complicit in textual corruption—and indeed to see that this is the natural entropy of texts.  If in this blog I am sometimes baffled by certain textual variants—What were they thinking?—it is now easier to see that, at the very least, they weren’t thinking of me.  One can corrupt a text with not only the best of intentions, but with perfectly justifiable results, entering into the creative collaboration of performance.  Some of this came up in my second post, where I considered how much authority the author deserves.  Heresy?  I don’t think so.  If you can only countenance one possible reading of a text—as if set in stone for all time—I think that your concept of art is much too small.

41. audacity

I recently came across Richard Egarr’s recordings of the Handel organ concertos—pieces I have known for decades, but that I learned first from the recordings of E. Power Biggs (with Adrian Boult) and Simon Preston (with Trevor Pinnock).  Much as I respect and enjoy Biggs and Preston, the Egarr recordings have a impetuous audacity that strives to emulate the (basically unwritten) example of the composer.

To take only the most striking example, at the end of the second movement of Op. 7 no. 4, where Handel’s instruction reads merely “Organo ad libitum,” Egarr uses that rarest of intervals, the doubly-augmented unison/octave, to effect the modulation from D to F major, for his interpolated slow improvisation.

SOURCE:  my transcription of this moment (the transition from Track 15 to 16) on disc I of Egarr’s recordings of Handel's Op. 7 (and more) with the Academy of Ancient Music; Harmonia Mundi HMU 807447.48 (2009).  The recording is streamed on Spotify here.

I spell it thus (D-sharp against D-flat) because that is how these notes are functioning:  chromatic side-steps up from D to E and down from D to C.  The resulting passing dissonance should not be spelled as a diminished third (which would indicate converging rather than expanding motion); a major second would be meaningless.  Audacious is the only word.  The interval is not part of Handel’s musical style, but it has the (I think) appropriate consequence of directing the spotlight onto the soloist.  What will he do next?

Handel himself seems to have relished the spotlight:  he used his organ concertos mainly in performances of his oratorios, where during the breaks between sections he could have all the attention to himself.  But he wasn’t above stealing the show from his highly-paid vocal soloists.  His first London opera, Rinaldo (1711) includes a remarkable moment at the end of Act II when Handel apparently wanted to divert the attention at least temporarily from the stage to the pit.  His autograph of the aria “Vo’ far guerra” has disappeared, but the early copies indicate that in the opening ritornello there was to be an extended extempore passage for harpsichord (Cembalo), for the composer himself to display his gifts:

SOURCE:  Opening of “Vo’ far guerra” (Rinaldo, Act II) in a copyist’s manuscript held by the British Library (f. 91r of R.M. 19.d.5); scanned from Graham Pont, “Handel versus Domenico Scarlatti:  music of an historic encounter” in Göttiger Händel-Beiträge IV (1991), p. 234.

Susan McClary famously characterized the texture of the first movement of Bach’s fifth “Brandenburg” concerto as one in which “the harpsichord, which first serves as continuo support then begins to compete with the other soloists for attention, and finally overthrows the other forces in a kind of hijacking of the piece” [p. 28].  How much more audacious was it for Handel to upstage the singer of an aria, left lingering on stage while the composer showed off?  The aria includes collaborative passages in which the soloist and the harpsichord run in parallel as a sort of duet, and where Signora Pilotti (for whom this aria was written) holds a note for several bars while a harpsichord obbligato is conspicuously busy underneath, but there is another totally free section—left to the discretion of the soloist—in the closing ritornello, while again the singer is left at loose ends on stage.  Moreover, as it is a da capo aria, all this happens twice (with, presumably, different extemporizations). 

We do not know what Handel played in these ad libitum episodes, but I expect they could not have been lasted very long, as otherwise there would surely be some press comment.  The Spectator lampooned the first production of Rinaldo, but no mention is made of excessive keyboard virtuosity in those reviews.  Perhaps later in the run the solos became more extended and showy; certainly there’s no reason to assume that he always played the same thing.

When Chrysander published Rinaldo in the old complete works (HG vol. 58 in 1874), he had the portions of the autograph preserved in the Royal Music Library, and copies like that above, and so his edition has the same “Cembalo” instruction with no indication of what to play.  After doing a little more legwork and tracking down more sources, he published Rinaldo again (HG vol. 58 [bis] in 1894), including both the 1711 and 1731 versions.  “Vo’ far guerra” was cut from the 1731 version, but for the 1711 version this time Chrysander added an appendix with a complete realization of the harpsichord solo:

SOURCE:  detail of revised edition of HG vol. 58 (1894), p. 117; from IMSLP #18974

If we look up the aria in the new HHA volume presenting the 1711 version of Rinaldo, an almost identical realization is given not in an appendix but in the main text—without even a footnote to indicate that its source is not easily authenticated.  One has to look elsewhere in these scholarly editions to find that “the Harpsichord piece perform’d by Mr Hendel” comes from a keyboard arrangement, Song’s in the Opera of Rinaldo; this was originally published by John Walsh in the weeks after the February premiere (and a scan of that first edition is available as IMSLP #71438), but this elaborate keyboard part for “Vo’ far guerra” materialized only in a later printing (with a new title page Arie dell’opera di Rinaldo, apparently June 1711).

What originally prompted me to look at all of this for this post was finding a seminar paper I had written in graduate school that was comparing these keyboard passages with those found in Handel’s organ concertos, essentially arguing that all of this could easily be cobbled together from the figuration of Handel’s other bravura works.  (I’ve scanned some of my examples for that paper here.)  Now the glaringly obvious problem with my thesis is that all of my Handel examples post-date these Rinaldo performances by at least two decades; I picked the wrong music for comparison.  Handel had written a concertante part for organ in his Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Rome, c. 1707), but it’s not all that much like the published Rinaldo solos; the closest comparison would be his Sonata for Harpsichord with Double Keys (HWV 579), which Terence Best dates to c. 1707-08 [p. 125].  Best argues that BWV 579 “has no connection” with Walsh’s Rinaldo realizations.  In that the text is different, Best is correct; but the similar figuration at least shows that Handelian origins of the latter are plausible.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the beginning of HWV 579 as given in HHA Ser. IV Bd. 6, p. 80

There is no reason to assume that Handel ever notated the Rinaldo cadenzas; particularly as he apparently had no professional relationship at this time with the publisher, John Walsh, it is much more likely that another hand supplied these keyboard passages.  The scribe seems to have been William Babell (c. 1690–1723), who would have heard Handel’s original performances at first hand, as he was a violinist in the King’s Theatre where Rinaldo was produced.  Babell was much more widely known in his short life as a keyboardist—indeed, this reputation was strong enough that Johann Mattheson would cite him in 1739 as possibly the greatest organist of the age.  Here is the relevant bit of Mattheson’s Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (as translated in Deutsch):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Deutsch, Handel:  A Documentary Biography, p. 485, with a portion of Mattheson.

Even though Mattheson never heard Babell, this is remarkable praise.  It is known that he studied with Johann Christoph Pepusch in London; that he studied under Handel is not certain, but he was clearly in Handel’s circle.  Moreover, in 1717 Walsh published his Suits of the most Celebrated Lessons Collected and Fitted to the Harpsicord or Spinnet by Mr. Wm. Babell with Variety of Passages by the Author.  This was a tremendously successful publication, and remained in print (from one pirated edition or another) throughout the eighteenth century.  Note the last item in the table of contents:

SOURCE:  cropped from (incomplete) scan available at archive.org.  A complete monochrome scan is available at IMSLP #279417.

The “Vo’ far guerra” in the Suits of Celebrated Lessons is considerably more elaborate than that published in Arie dell’opera di Rinaldo a few years prior.  Graham Pont has probably devoted more attention than anyone else to the Handel/Babell connection, with several intriguing articles published over two decades.  From the first of these, he has contended that the substance of the harpsichord elaborations were Handel’s rather than Babell’s (and in subsequent articles he demonstrates that there were a number of copies of this made by people close to Handel—although he also shows that the text kept changing).

We thus have several different versions of the keyboard cadenzas (for lack of a better word) for "Vo’ far guerra," from the rather tame but still dramatically intrusive version that Walsh published in about 1715 (and which has become the main text of the HHA, tacitly presenting it as the work of Handel himself) to the wildly fantastic version Babell’s Suits that was surely never intended for operatic performance, but rather uses “Vo’ far guerra” as the medium for a solo keyboard showpiece.  Chrysander published it—or one version of it—in HG vol. 48, and it must be some of the most visually-stimulating pages in the whole of that monumental edition:

SOURCE cropped from IMSLP #18931 scan of HG vol. 48, p. 242 ; but there's much more where this came from.

Gotta love that beaming!

If the original aria wasn’t audacious enough, this blows it out of the water completely, with a variety of special effects.  (Peter Holman, in a fascinating article that posits that Babell rather than Handel should get the credit for the first English keyboard concerto, characterizes Babell's music as a “mixture of boldness and limited compositional technique”; from my limited exposure to it, I have to agree.)  There are remarkable moments, to be sure.  Consider this compelling crescendo–decrescendo effect, achieved by a thickening and subsiding of the texture:

SOURCE:  ibid., p. 239

Perhaps this conveys some element that originated with Handel.  (Perhaps.  I doubt it.  There is nothing else I know from his pen that is remotely like this.)  If so, I suspect that Babell’s audaciously over-extended cadenza strings together ideas that Handel might have used in different performances of Rinaldo, not ever intending them to go together, and connected by who-knows-what.  Another speculation occurs to me:  maybe Handel did not conduct all the performances, and Babell (who must have been the finest keyboard player in the orchestra) took over for the harpsichord solos, later reworking his ideas from those extemporizations into the work that was eventually published as a “lesson.”   (For a fine recording of Babell’s lesson, you cannot do better than Erin Helyard’s.)

For one more audacity, René Jacobs’s 2003 recording of Rinaldo (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901796.98) turns to the Babell lesson for inspiration for the harpsichord solos of “Vo’ far guerra” (starting about two minutes in).  I think this choice absolutely spoils the dramatic momentum that ends the act—or rather, it redirects all attention to the pit.  (Forty-five percent of this track is taken up just by the cadenza after the singer’s last cadence.) I think this decision is a serious mistake, but I concede that at least

1.  it makes the da capo different than the first time through, 
2.  maybe this shifting of attention does less damage on a recording than a live performance, and 
3.  it is audaciously well played.