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.

26. Moving targets (Episode #4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADDENDUM  21 June 2021

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

21. Moving targets (Episode #3)

Two Settling Scores projects intersect in this post—the ongoing series of “moving targets” and the seventh installment of my

Even the exact boundaries around Bach’s oeuvre are a perpetually moving target, and the best illustration of these is the very notion of the “complete” organ works.  A review of the contents of the standard complete editions of Bach's organ works is a good introduction to the disputed borders of this repertoire.  Those editions, all widely in use today, are (in roughly chronological order)

Peters = the first attempt at a complete edition of the organ music, edited principally by Friedrich Conrad Griepenkerl (1782-1849); seven volumes were issued by C. F. Peters 1844-1847, with an eighth following in 1852, when the series was regarded as complete.  In 1881 the ninth volume appeared, and that gradually morphing ninth volume is my principal concern in this post.  Despite its age, the Peters edition is not to be discounted by any means, as some important manuscript sources available to Griepenkerl have subsequently disappeared. This edition had a splendidly ostentatious title page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of title page of a copy of Peters Vol. XVIII (1852, but this copy must be printed between 1881 and 1904, as the first version of Volume IX is listed in an advertisement on the back cover)—cropped because of the huge tracts of nineteenth-century margins that would take up too much real estate on my blog.  Subsequent reprints significantly reduced the margin size.  The changing dimensions of different printings of a single edition would be an interesting topic, if one had but time.

BG = although Griepenkerl beat them to it, of course the first attempt at publishing the complete works eventually got around to the organ works.  These appeared in five volumes during the years 1853-1893; these became the text underlying a practical edition issued by Breitkopf & Härtel, but the original BG is still used today because of (for example) Dover’s reprints of much of it.  It also became the main source text for a number of other practical editions—particularly those issued by G. Schirmer (the Schweitzer edition), Novello & Co. (early volumes were based on Peters, and some volumes have subsequently been re-edited), and Bornemann (the Dupre edition).  

20th B&H = In the late 1930s, Bärenreiter had started an edition of the organ works, edited by Hermann Keller; this project as aborted because of the Second World War after only two volumes.  After the war, two new editions capitalized on the recent explosion of Bach textual scholarship.  Heinz Lohmann edited this ten-volume set for Breitkopf & Härtel, with the first volume appearing in 1968, but with the set completed scarcely a decade later.

NBA = The other edition which began to emerge after the war was that of the Neue Bach Ausgabe, the new complete works.  Series IV (organ works) had eight planned volumes, but a ninth was necessary because of the 1985 discovery of the so-called “Neumeister Chorales,” now attributed to Bach's early years; much later came the appearance of two additional volumes featuring works from the Bach circle that could plausibly (if doubtfully) be attributed to him.  All told, it took fifty years for Series IV to be completed.  This expansion of the series indicates a tendency to cast the net ever wider—an understandable temptation when the NBA project as a whole is an obligatory expense at many libraries around the world.  The sales numbers may be comparatively small, but they are pretty much guaranteed.  (Bärenreiter issues offprints of the musical text of all eleven volumes, and it is in this form that the NBA shows up on the music racks of organs.)  Now a new revision (NBArev) promises at least two volumes of organ chorales, which I assume will essentially replace the flawed Ser. IV. Bde. 2-3, the earliest of the original volumes to appear.

Truly, of the making of many Bach editions there is no end.  Two very interesting editions are ongoing as I write:

Leupold = This is a very serious scholarly edition that does a very good job of catering to the very serious student.  All the volumes that have appeared so far have been edited by George B. Stauffer, certainly a prominent name in the last generation of Bach scholarship, and Stauffer does his best to make the editorial issues clear to the user.  It's not clear to me how many volumes this edition will eventually comprise, as some are to be issued in two very distinct versions (“Standard Urtext” and “Practical Urtext”—a concept which seems a little dubious to me).

21st B&H = And now Breitkopf & Härtel is at it again, with an entirely new edition planned to comprise ten volumes.  With so many accumulating, it seems odd to call this one a “welcome addition,” but in my estimation it is just that—and the edition I would recommend to organists wanting a chance to look anew at works they have played for years (although in my experience using any unfamiliar edition will force that new glimpse).  This is certainly an edition for the new century—taking advantage of digital advances (with online resources and enclosed CD-ROMs which allow users to print out the variants they want while avoiding the bulk and waste of paper for those who don’t require them).   To quote the Preface, “In addition to presenting the musical text with comments, this disk allows synoptic depictions and a cogent search process for specific measures, thus providing a better and faster overview than would be possible with a printed version.”

And surely that’s enough to be getting on with.  But here I want to focus just on the oldest of these, and just its last volume, which appeared in three substantially different manifestations—first in 1881 (three decades after the rest of the set), then again in 1904, and finally again in 1940.  Each issue was the work of a different editor—in 1881 by Griepenkerl’s successor Ferdinand Roitszch; Max Seiffert’s 1904 revision coinciding with his important discovery of new sources; and Hermann Keller's in 1940 at the moment that his Bärenreiter set was abandoned.  Even from the start, Vol. IX was something of a catch-all volume, with a mixture of chorale-based and free works.

Between them, the three different versions of Peters Volume IX contain some 38 individual works, but only twelve works appear in all three.  Several of the works included by Roitszch in 1881 were later ruled to be misattributions.  Seiffert excluded three of these (BWV 692; BWV Anh. 57 and 171), and three that escaped the 1904 purge were tossed out by Keller (BWV 561, 580, and 587).  Further, seven of Seiffert’s twelve new additions were deleted by Keller (BWV 742, 743, 747, 752, 754, 757, and 763), although five of those have subsequently found a place in the NBA.  (Only one of Keller's seven additions was not retained in the NBA (BWV 1027/4a); the music is not printed, but it is given its own section in the critical report to Ser. IV, Bd. 11.)

Excluding the thorny question of which Clavier pieces were not intended for organ anyway, if one takes the Bach organ repertoire at its widest breadth (as does the late, lamented Peter Williams, for example, in his excellent survey, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach—and really his second edition doesn't completely supersede his first) I find that there is actually no single “complete” edition that comprises the repertoire in toto.  Even if one has ready access to the BG and NBA, there are still missing works (not likely to appear in either Leupold or 21st B&H).  I note, for example, two works that have appeared only in Seiffert’s 1904 version of Peters Vol. IX (BWV 752, and 763) and you will search in vain for them elsewhere (unless you are content with homemade editions posted on the IMSLP).  As more and more performers perform the whole corpus as Bach organ “marathons” [Google it ], it would be nice to know exactly how the placement of the finish line is determined.

As Williams has astutely remarked, “[i]t is a curious irony that the uniform appearance presented by any edition of Bach’s organ works distorts them in that it does not give a true impression of the disparate nature and origins of the pieces themselves....  In giving pieces of edited music to the public, editors misrepresent them, despite earnest endeavors to do the opposite.” [p. 274].  The impressive bindings of such series conceal the bewildering array of textual situations for the repertoire contained therein.  Even that repertoire won’t stand still for a generation.

3. Handel with care?

The blurb on the back of the recent Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (2013) begins

Absolutely.  And although the focus of this blog will generally be sources written down and printed before the digital age, increasingly our access to such sources is through some digital means—an image on the screen, whether or not it ever makes it on to paper in our hands.  Inevitably this blog will often deal with the IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project—a massive database of musical sources, mostly printed editions, but some manuscript copies or and even “born digital” files that need not necessarily ever have made it to paper.  There are full scores, vocal scores, parts, arrangements and transcriptions, and more recently even recordings.  The idea behind it is to make public domain material accessible globally—although of course what is in the public domain varies across the globe according to the copyright laws of any given jurisdiction.

There is much good to be said about the IMSLP, but I think many of its users have little sense of the problems inherent in this sort of resource.  Principally, as a wiki there is tremendous inconsistency in the quality, quantity, and reliability of the information it makes so readily accessible—even when the contributors to the site include major research libraries.  As an example, here is what the IMSLP currently displays at the head of the section marked “Full Scores” for Handel’s oratorio Messiah (which Handel was in the middle of writing exactly 275 years ago):

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of http://imslp.org/wiki/Messiah,_HWV_56_(Handel,_George_Frideric) (accessed 30 Aug. 2016)

These first items seem to present two different digital images of the autograph manuscript (the “composing score,” as it is generally called).  The second of these items (it currently appears in two different scans—IMSLP #18920 and #296169) is a scan of a facsimile published in 1892 as Vol. 45a of the German Handel Society’s complete edition.  The bulk of the project was the work of an individual, Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901).  For his Messiah facsimile, Chrysander sought to draw together all known autograph material for the work.  This volume thus contains not only the whole of the composing score (British Library R.M.20.f.2), but also a few settings in Handel’s hand in the “conducting score” (held in the collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford), as well as two settings of the text “How beautiful are the feet” which Chrysander mistakenly thought related to Messiah (amounting to some 25 pages from yet another manuscript in the BL—whose Handel holdings have all been digitized and made available), and a few sketch leaves at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.  This facsimile is therefore not intended to represent a single source:  it is an anthology of sources.

The first item listed on the IMSLP (divided into four files—#414200-414203) has a very misleading description.  Despite the claim that this is the “holograph manuscript,” these files together comprise a color scan of the same (black-and-white) 1892 facsimile that appears in black-and-white scans immediately below.  It troubles me that the scan omits the title page and front matter of the 1892 facsimile, and thus presents itself to be a scan of the autograph itself.  There are plenty of tidbits to reveal its true identity.  The source is indicated as being “State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg (D-Hs):  M/B/1722.” A user familiar with Handel sources would know that D-Hs has a very important collection of Handel’s conducting scores, the bulk of it coming to Hamburg through Chrysander himself.  The composing score of Messiah, however, is not in that collection, but in the British Library, as noted above.  D-Hs has made available a digital scan of M/B/1722, and it is much more honest than what is in the IMSLP:  there is the front matter for all to see—and indeed we see from the book plate on the inside front cover that this copy was originally the property of its editor.

Source:  cropped screenshot of http://gcs.sub.uni-hamburg.de/PPN818310642/2000/0/00000002.tif

IMSLP #414200-414203 does not include that image.  But Chrysander’s printed page numbers are there, which should arouse some suspicions.  There is no signal to the user, however, that these files have pages from several different documents—anthologized in print in 1892.  Anyone turning to these files to do their Handel research will get a false sense of the document(s).

That would be bad enough, but Chrysander’s facsimile is false in another important respect—no matter which scan is consulted.  In his efforts to produce as clean a facsimile as possible, Chrysander doctored the images.  In his preface, he complains of an earlier facsimile issued by the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1868:

“Handel’s music paper is always the best of his age, but yet the ink often shows through.  In the printed photograph, the ink of these passages appears on the wrong side of the page with the same thickness and blackness as real notes, if it has not been previously carefully removed.  In the London [1868] facsimile the photographic plate is generally printed off rudely without any such cleansing.  The result is that the notes that show through seem to have equal value with the written ones, and make the page not only ugly, but in numerous places illegible, and even give rise to false readings.  I have removed more than ten thousand such blots from the London edition by comparison with the autograph.”  (Preface, p. v)

In his removal of “ten thousand such blots,” Chrysander sometimes went too far.  Here is a glimpse of Chrysander’s facsimile:  the tenor staff of bb. 111-122 of the chorus “And the Glory of the Lord”:

Source:  cropped screenshot of IMSLP #18920

http://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/7/7f/IMSLP18920-PMLP22568-HG_Band_45a.pdf p. 21 (pdf p. 41)

Here is the same excerpt as it appears on the scan available on the British Library website:

Source:  cropped screenshot of http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=r.m.20.f.2_f012r

 And, for good measure, the same selection as it appears in the new facsimile issued by Bärenreiter in 2008:

Source:  cropped from a digital scan (600 dpi) JPEG of the printed facsimile.

It appears to me that these last two are identical—and I would guess that the scans that appear on the BL website are the same digital files used in the production of the Bärenreiter volume.  (I gladly acknowledge that it was Donald Burrows’s commentary in the new Bärenreiter facsimile that drew my attention to the doctored Chrysander facsimile, and to these details particularly.)  The text in the new BL scan is replete with the blotches and blains that Chrysander so painstakingly removed.  But in his clean-up, Chrysander changed the text:  his fourth note is clearly on the fourth line (a C# in the tenor clef), where the blotted version reproduced in the later scan extends well into the fourth space—and that D is confirmed by the doubling in the viola line (which had no blot and so did not need to be cleaned):

Source:  viola line of Chrysander facsimile, as above; this is in alto clef

This D is the reading Chysander ultimately adopted in his edition of the work, with no comment about the apparent discrepancy in his facsimile.

Speaking of the blotchiest bar in the tenor line here (b. 119), Max Seiffert (who, after Chrysander’s death in 1901, brought the edition of Messiah through the press) comments

Source:  screenshot of http://petrucci.mus.auth.gr/imglnks/usimg/0/0b/IMSLP17693-Handel_Messiah.pdf, p. x (pdf p.8).  Seiffert’s A = Handel’s composing score; O, G and H are copies by John Christopher Smith (O is the copy in the Bodleian, G is at the Morgan Library in New York, and H a subsequent copy that was acquired by Chrysander for the Hamburg library.  Why doesn’t Hamburg scan THAT for the IMSLP?).

Compare the two images of the composing score here (bb. 119-120 from “And the glory of the Lord”—Chrysander from IMSLP #414203 on the left; BL scan on the right):

John Tobin (who edited Messiah for the new Handel complete edition, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe—a project to which I will have cause to return in later posts) reads Handel’s procedure here differently than Seiffert—but then again Seiffert may have only seen the score via the already doctored facsimile.  According to Tobin (who translates this into the treble clef):

Source:  scan of John Tobin, Handel’s Messiah:  A Critical Account of the Manuscript Sources and Printed Editions (1969), p. 190

“Obviously in error,” and it is easy enough to see how Handel’s copyist could make such an error.  Tobin’s putative original reading fits the blots which the BL scan shows, but would be less clear from the 1892 facsimile’s reading (even blotty as it remains in this instance).  Seiffert complete misses out the E.

Just as another example of Chrysander’s tidying up, here is the 1892 facsimile’s presentation of something out of the Bodleian conducting score (which he included because it was in Handel’s hand); note particularly the annotations at the top of the page.

Source:  screenshot of IMSLP #18920 http://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/7/7f/IMSLP18920-PMLP22568-HG_Band_45a.pdf p. 281 (pdf p. 301)

Here is the page as reproduced in the 1974 facsimile of the conducting score:

Source:  a digital scan (600) JPEG of the printed facsimile (f. 57 of part II).

Not only has Chrysander eliminated a lot of the marginalia, as Donald Burrows points out, he has misread “Miss Young” and converted it into “Mißion.”  Note also his tempo marking:  allegro Larghetto.  (Whatever that means.)  In the original, is it allegro, that is, struck through—or is that just a stray smudge?  (In Chysander the smudge is eliminated.)  Its placement to the far left suggests to my eye that it was added after Larghetto, and thus maybe less likely to be a cancelled (earlier) marking.  But the sources are inconsistent for the tempo marking of this movement:  the version (for bass) preserved in the composing score is marked NBallegro; another version reads Andante.  Yet another lacks any instruction.

And so on.  With a work as textually well-documented as Messiah, the problems posed by these IMSLP items (and what they claim to be) scarcely do any real harm.  Indeed, by the time you read this, it may have been fixed.  (Check here.)  Even so, there have been tens of thousands of downloads of these files—if the IMSLP figures are to be believed—so somebody is using them.  This is surely the tip of the iceberg, and caution is advised.