37. Corroborative detail

I will begin with what was intended to be a digression, but has ended up taking over the post:

There is a charming detail of orchestration in the trio “Three Little Maids from School” in (Gilbert &) Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885).  Just as Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, and Peep-Bo are finishing up the refrain, they pause:

Three little maids who, all unwary,

Come from a ladies’ seminary,

Freed from its genius tutelary—

And in that moment, with the whole orchestra falling silent, a bassoon bubbles into life.


That bassoon idea was an afterthought.  A glance at the composer’s manuscript shows not just a blank bar at this point, but that originally he had notated a rest (in ink).  The bassoon effect has been pencilled-in later:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the 1968 facsimile of the autograph score of The Mikado, p. 143 (bb. 40–46a)

And there does not seem to be any document to establish with certainty when it was added.  By the 1880s, Sullivan’s practice was to sketch the musical numbers (and here is such a sketch for “Three Little Maids”), and then transfer the vocal lines onto the pages of what would later become the full score—ruling in the bars as necessary, but writing in only enough to give a copyist a means of preparing a sort of rudimentary vocal score for rehearsal.  The numbers would not be done in the order of the show:  the choruses and ensembles generally came first, with the solos later.  Only after the whole of the opera was “framed” would Sullivan turn to the orchestration, filling in the blank staves.  When the full score of a number was complete, the orchestral parts could be prepared and the keyboard reduction for the published vocal score finalized.

Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which dramatizes the months preceding The Mikado’s premiere, missed the chance to realize this moment.  Although there is a scene in which Sullivan has an exchange with the bassoonist, we do not see him have a flash of inspiration in the pit, handing down last-minute instructions to gurgle away.  Fun as that might have been, it is probably just as well that no such scene occurs, as we do not know that this episode occurred in the rehearsals for the first production.  Then again, the bubbling bassoon figure is played in performance in the movie, when by rights it should not have been.  It does not appear in vocal scores until the twentieth century; but admittedly, Sullivan took nowhere near as much care with the published scores as Gilbert did with the published libretti.  The absence of the bassoon whinny in the vocal scores (and the distinct piano-only score, which derives from the vocal score) is not strong evidence of anything beyond—as we know already—that it was not originally there.

Is it even the composer’s amendment at all?  I believe it is.  That the idea was an inspiration in the pit—as characterized above—is suggested by the notation in the manuscript:  the contour of the figure is there, but it is unclear what the pitches should be and one would certainly not guess from this scribble that the first note is d'.  This emendation his was not notated here for the eyes of a copyist; it appears to me to be nothing more than a hastily-added aide-mémoire to the composer of this addition.  Indeed, the strongest bits of evidence that this pencilled addition is indeed by the composer are 1) it is in the autograph, which in performances would have almost immediately been supplanted by a copyist’s conducting score of some sort; and 2) the bassoon is so imprecisely notated.  I would expect anyone else making such an interpolation to make it as neat as possible.  (In any case, the bassoon part needs the actual pitches much more than the full score does.)

For this to be Sullivan's own interpolation would require an occasion when the composer and his autograph score (not a company copy) were both together back in the pit to conduct a rehearsal, since this change could not realistically have been added during a performance.  As Sullivan generally did not often conduct after the opening night of an initial production, the possibilities for such an occasion after March 1885 are slim indeed.  He did, however, conduct the opening night of a revival at the Savoy Theatre on 6 November 1895, and he may well have rehearsed the company before that performance.  (Not having his diaries at hand—although they are extant—I cannot answer that question definitively at the moment.)

Two tidbits suggest that this 1895 production (rather than the original) was the occasion for the change.  One is the account of Thomas Dunhill, in his Sullivan’s Comic Operas:  A Critical Appreciation (1928):

[C]ould anything show more witchery than the use of the silent bar, just before the end of two of the verses?  Was Sullivan afraid that it could never be silent enough when, on the occasion of rehearsing one of the revivals, he broke this silence by pencilling a little curling phrase into the bassoon player’s part?  This stroke is amongst the most delicious of after-thoughts, but it is not in the original score.  One would gladly hear the passage both ways, on different occasions.  [pp. 131f.] 

The second tidbit is that the 1893 full score of The Mikado published by Bosworth (a German firm  heavily backed by Sullivan) has the original gran pausa here:  the autograph seems to have been the source for the Bosworth edition, so if the amendment had been made by 1893, the lithographist preparing the new edition apparently didn’t take it seriously:

SOURCE:  cropped page-scan of Kalmus reprint of Bosworth full score, p. 139, from IMSLP #30034 (bb. 40–43)

(I was a little surprised to find the bubbling bassoon absent from the 1907 recording as well, but in that instance the music had been heavily rescored to be audible with pre-electric technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the orchestration was done from the published vocal score, if not the Bosworth score—both of which lacked the figure in question.)

I have no doubt that—as Dunhill asserts—the idea is Sullivan’s own, but the case is not airtight.

As I say, all of this was supposed to have been a tangential point; I was going to introduce it because it seemed like an example of an musical detail conceived later than the rest of its context, perhaps suggesting itself to the composer because of the different activity—conducting a rehearsal with orchestra rather than composing in silence at his desk.  There are many examples one might use to illustrate such second thoughts, but I had thought this would be a fun one because some years ago I noticed that on 12 March 1885,  two nights before conducting the premiere of The Mikado, Sullivan had conducted Beethoven's Symphony no. 4 at the Philharmonic Concerts.  What if (I had thought) the giggling bassoon line was suggested to him by a celebrated bassoon solo in Beethoven’s finale?  (Granted, Sullivan's line resembles better the figures in the finale of Mozart’s Symphony no. 39, but never mind.)  Wouldn’t that be loverly?  Only as I came to look at it more closely did I see that there was not enough evidence to connect it to the Beethoven, so then I might as well use any example I liked.  I just got stuck on this one.

Having let the tail wag the dog for so many paragraphs, I will let the “dog” bark briefly here.  A few evenings ago I played the first movement of Alexandre Guilmant’s first organ sonata in a recital of “Scary Organ Music.”  It is a piece I first came to know as his Premiére Symphonie pour Orgue et Orchestre, op. 42 (1879)—hearing it (as mentioned in a previous post) in a splendid recording conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier; only later did I learn that the work started as a work for organ alone, the Premiére Sonate pour Orgue, also Op. 42 (1874).  The piece works so well for organ and orchestra together that it is hard to fathom that it was not originally conceived that way.

Below is a stemma of sources for these two versions that I have been reviewing in recent months.  The shaded boxes are sources I have not examined; the red text/lines trace the transmission of the orchestral version, while the black follows the organ solo version.  It will be seen that there is a complex interrelationship between the two versions, as ideas that crept into the orchestration gradually make their way into the text of the solo version—a few in the second edition, a few more in the third.   (Double lines indicate reprints of the same text.)

By far the bulk of these changes are rhythmic articulations where the original (in so far as I can determine it) had only sustained chords.  Thus, at the conclusion of the first movement (here copied from the 1876 Schirmer edition, but the Bärenreiter critical commentary testifies to the same reading in the autograph), Guilmant wrote:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Schirmer edition (IMSLP #290298), p. 13, showing I/353–359.

In the second edition this passage already has some substantial changes (marked in red below).

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Leupold reprint of 2nd edition, p. 45, showing I/353–359 (my hightlights added)

All of these, in fact, have their origins in the orchestration, the chords at bb. 355–56 rearticulated with an antiphonal effect between organ and orchestra, and the brass introducing the new figure at the final cadence (with consequently shorter note-values for those penultimate chords):

SOURCE:  cropped screen-shot from the first edition full score (IMSLP #245332), p. 43, showing I/354–359.

Rather than belaboring this point (as I had originally intended to), I will confine myself to one additional example—a change which does not make it into the sonata until the 1898 third edition, although clearly comes from the 1878 orchestration.  Here is the opening of the first movement as in the Schirmer edition (and the reading is identical (save for French-language registration markings) in the second edition):

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Schirmer edition (IMSLP #290298), p. 1, showing I/1–3.

Now here is the opening of the first movement as in the third edition:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Leupold reprint of 3rd edition, p. 1, showing I/1–2.

(And don't get me started about all those slurs.)  Again, the dramatic rhythmic punctuation—which he has very cleverly accomplished by the engaging of a manual coupler to a chord already being sustained—has its origins in the orchestration:

SOURCE:  cropped screen-shot from the first edition full score (IMSLP #245332), p. 1, showing I/1–2.

Clearly Guilmant liked the effects he had devised for the Symphonie, and he found ways of folding them into the Sonate.  This evokes The Mikado—not just the added bassoon in “Three Little Maids,” but also one of Gilbert’s lines of dialogue.   In Act II Pooh-Bah justifies his graphic embellishments to Ko-ko’s (entirely fabricated) account of executing the emperor's son thus:

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

(Actually, this takes us back even to Topsy-Turvy.  If the film missed the opportunity of highlighting a textual change of the score, it does in fact depict Gilbert making a textual change to the libretto during a rehearsal, adding the word “otherwise” to this line.  I am not aware of any evidence to support that, but it is a nice moment.)

If we take Pooh-Bah’s “corroborative detail” to be ameliorations made after the fact to an original that was already sufficient in itself, then these details manifest that sort of corroboration.  Neither “Three Little Maids” or Guilmant’s organ sonata is “bald and unconvincing” in its original version, but I think the addition of a little corroborative detail paid off in both cases.

33. Off the deep end

With this twelfth post, it is time to retire my logo for the

My plan (starting in December 2016) was to start each month for a year with a Bach post.  Life got in the way of that, so it has taken me eighteen rather than twelve months to complete.  In any case, this will not be the last Bach post.  As I have already written, the pre-history of this blog was a Bach episode; more than that, as I have been acquiring cheap secondhand copies of the critical reports of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe in the last two years (now 56 and counting), I expect to return to Bach textual issues for years to come.

For this post, though, I want to puzzle over some of Bach’s impossible notes.  I don’t mean notes that are unplayable (that is, that the technique that is required is truly prodigious, like Schoenberg’s claim that he was willing to wait for evolution to produce a violinist with a little finger long enough to play his concerto properly), but rather notes that are beneath the range of the instrument.  For most instruments, it’s difficult to say there is an upper limit to the range; along comes a player who can top it.

One of these impossible notes has puzzled me for years—the low B in b. 94 the Pièce d’orgue (a.k.a. Fantasia in G Major), BWV 572.  It is a note which did not exist on the pedalboard of any organ Bach is known to have played.  (Linked here is a great resource about the organs of Bach’s milieu, and also access to free recordings of the whole corpus on preserved instruments of Bach’s time.)

BWV 572, bb. 89–95a; SOURCE:  cropped scan of NBA Ser. IV Bd. 7 (ed. D. Kilian, 1984), p. 133. 

Indeed, that B doesn’t exist on any pedalboard I have ever played either.  Apart from some old English organs that might have pedals down to the G below, or French instruments extending down even to F (pedalboards which are, to say the least, rather different animals than those in Germany), you would need something like the Marshall & Ogletree “international touring organ” made for Cameron Carpenter to play Bach’s low B as written.  Carpenter’s is an instrument that figuratively goes “up to eleven” (. . . and literally goes down to G).

The extended pedalboard of Marshall & Ogletree Op. 8 (2013); SOURCE: photo cropped from Cameron Carpenter’s website; my highlighting added.

SOURCE:  P 288 Fas. 2 f. 3r; cropped from Bach-Digital

No manuscript of BWV 572 survives in Bach's hand.  Most, but not all, of the early copyists transmit the low B apparently without question.  Johann Peter Kellner’s copy moves the B up an octave [at right]—an emendation to a text that seemed to him manifestly erroneous?  (Kellner is known to have taken liberties with the texts he copied.)  My sense when I play this piece is that some sort of rhythmic articulation is needed in the bassline on the midpoint of that bar, so that I will at least strike the B again (as Kellner’s copy indicates) if not actually to add another 16’ stop in the pedal (to suggest the effect of the lower octave).

The Kellner copy—indeed all of the eighteenth-century copies, and Bach’s default layout in his organ works—transmits the work on only two staves (rather than the three staves we expect of organ music now).  Often these sources will indicate “Ped.” at certain points, although the absence of the instruction to play on the pedals need not imply that an organist wouldn’t use them.  I am intrigued, though, to see the suggestion in Breitkopf & Härtel’s new edition of the organ works that—despite the title Pièce d’orgue, transmitted in many early sources—this music may have been originally intended for the harpsichord, which by Bach’s time generally had a compass extending down to the G or F below the bottom C of the organ [p. 18].  The five-part writing is playable with two hands alone (albeit awkwardly at times), but—in my hands, anyway—becomes unplayable at about b. 178.

Peter Williams (p. 170) reports the startling fact that this low B is not unique in the texts of Bach’s organ works.  It appears, for example, in Kellner’s copy of the C major transposition of the E Major Toccata, BWV 566—and doubtless it is the downward transposition that explains its presence there.  Indeed, Kellner writes the B almost apologetically in parenthesis, and doubled the octave above [below left, for example].  A low B is called for in the manuals in a copy (also Kellner’s?) of the C major Toccata, BWV 564, where it is the last note in the final cascading figure before the final chord [below right].  In that instance it makes good musical sense; it just can’t be played—even by Cameron Carpenter (unless he took the whole piece up a half-step--a gimmick he has been known to use).

SOURCE:  cropped scans of two pages from D-B Mus.ms. Bach P 286: (L) from Fasc. 3, BWV 566 bb. 209b–210a, cropped from Bach-Digital; (R) from Fasc. 5, BWV 564/iii bb. 140-41, cropped from Bach-Digital

What makes the unapologetic presence of an impossible low B in BWV 572 so perplexing is that at two other moments in the same piece Bach ostensibly writes his way around notes that were unavailable to him on the organ.  For example, the climax of the movement is a prolonged march up the pedalboard, both beginning and ending with a deceptive motion from D to E.  The top E was not within the compass of the majority of organs Bach knew.  Is it significant that he deftly avoids it in b. 172?

BWV 572, bb. 157–175; SOURCE:  cropped scan of NBA (as above), p. 135; my highlighting added.

Maybe, but not necessarily.  Satisfying as it is to play that long scale up, I find something even more satisfying about the leap down in b. 171:  it suggests that a cadence is imminent (in a way that just another whole note would not), yet once more the resolution is avoided—and the downward leap enables Bach to reach the lowest(?) note of the pedal (b. 175) pretty quickly by means of another scale down.  The overuse of the word awesome has made it trite, but I think this is a passage that deserves the adjective in its truest sense.  Whether or not the high E was available to Bach, he has made a virtue of not calling for it here, and brings the manual tessitura down at precisely the same moment, so that it can expand outward again.

This expansion happens over a long dominant pedalpoint, and again the register change in the pedal appears as if Bach might be avoiding an impossible note:

BWV 572, bb. 176–185; SOURCE:  cropped scan of NBA (as above), p. 135; my highlighting added.

Marienkirche in Rötha; SOURCE:  www.blockmrecords.org

Because of the economic use of the so-called “short octave,” many German instruments in Bach’s time lacked the rarely-needed bottom C-sharp—and sometimes the D-sharp as well.  (The huge pedal pipes were, after all, the most expensive to build.)  This might explain Bach’s leap up an octave in b. 184 . . . or then again it might not, as the octave motion again intensifies the advance of a cadence which is then rudely interrupted.  In any case, the low C-sharp is not there—as, for example, it is not on this 1722 Silbermann pedalboard [at right].  Curiously, though, the earliest known copy of BWV 572—a copy made by Bach’s cousin Johann Gottfried Walther—has a low D whole-note throughout b. 184, even though the ensuing C-sharp is thus a dramatic leap up.

Browsing through the sets of performing material for the much-revived early cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis,” BWV 21, I note that the various sets of performing material are inconsistent about this sort of problem:  in an early version, a cello and organ are both given a non-existent low B-flat [top row, left and right respectively, the last note in the images]; in a later transposed version, the copyist of the cello part (transposed up) has an erroneous D when C would have been reachable [bottom row, left—the wrong note is circled]; and a copyist of a basso continuo part (transposed down for Chorton pitch) replaced corresponding non-existent low A-flat up an octave [bottom row, right].

SOURCE: Composite of original parts for BWV 21/viii b. 14 (and context) all in D-B Mus.ms. Bach St 354 (sigla from the NBA Ser. I Bd. 16 critical report  linked to corresponding Bach-Digital image): top left A12; top right A13 (autograph); bottom left A19; bottom right A26

For a bona fide example in which Bach was compelled to devise a creative solution to accommodate a melody that would otherwise go below the range of the instrument consider these two versions of the conclusion of the opening ritornello of the “Deposuit” from his Magnificat.  In its original version (BWV 243a—the Magnificat in E-flat), the unison violins end powerfully on their lowest note, the open G; when the work was revised in a downward transposition to D major (BWV 243), the needed low F-sharp wasn’t available, so Bach conceived a dramatic swoop up two octaves in compensation:

SOURCE:  composite of cropped scans from NBA Ser. II Bd. 3 (ed. Alfred Dürr, 1955); top, BWV 243a (p. 46); bottom, BWV 243 (p. 108)

The cantata “Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?,” BWV 155, yields a puzzle that would truly flummox us if we lacked contextual evidence.  In the bassoon obbligato for the second movement duet (a movement that always has me thinking that Horace Rumpole is about to enter), at one point Bach reaches down for a low G, fully a minor third below the B-flat that is conventionally the bottom note of the instrument.  Notice here—the very last note of the top staff—that in the autograph score Bach has taken pains to clarify what note he has written, marking it “G” directly above the note with the three ledger lines:

SOURCE:  f. 2v. of D-B Mus.ms. Bach P 129, the autograph score for BWV 155/ii bb. 34–37, cropped from Bach-Digital

You can find references here and there positing a “semi-contrabassoon,” but that instrument as such is unknown for Bach.  (There is an extant Thuringian contrabassoon dating to 1714, but much of this solo is too high for it.)  Nonetheless, as Bruce Haynes has emphasized, “Bach consistently distinguished the ‘Fagotto’ from the ‘Bassono’ by key/pitch . . . [with] the latter a m3 lower” (p. 139).  The “Bassono” is thus, if not a semi-contrabassoon, in effect a “sub-bassoon.” Although the NBA volume for BWV 55 makes no comment at all regarding any of this,  the curious low G in the passage above must be a consequence of that most vexing subject, the difference between Kammerton und Chorton pitch.  It would help, of course, if the original performing parts for this cantata survived to confirm this; in this case they don’t, but in another pre-Leipzig cantata, BWV 31, we have woodwinds parts notated a minor third higher than the rest of the ensemble.  (BWV 150 is preserved with a similar transposing bassoon line in a score apparently copied from parts.)  BWV 55 must thus have been conceived for a low-pitch bassoon so that the sounding G (in terms of the rest of the ensemble) would be just its bottom B-flat.  The highest note of the solo, the sounding D (two and half octaves higher), would be then just the high F—high but well within the normal playing range of the instrument.  Problem solved.

Or not.  None of this answers the most important question for the player hired for the gig:  How do I play this?  The advice in the NBA regarding BWV 31 seems almost absurdly obvious:  “die zu tief liegenden Töne . . . des Fagotts müssen durch Stimmknickung umgangen werden”  (p. vi). Roughly “you have to get around the bassoon notes that are too low by tampering with [more literally bending] the part.”  So we bend the truth just a bit.  My guess is that only the conductor needs to be told that.