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.

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.

20. The chord that should get lost

So far I have generally avoided posting about my own work, but as it is only with my own work that I have really been able to be “behind the curtain,” I thought I would give an example where the reading I (as editor) wanted wasn’t what eventually made it to print, and where even the textual note about it didn’t ultimately satisfy me.  I don’t think this is a case of “telling tales out of school,” but a reminder (to myself, at least) that all sorts of hidden factors may stand between the editor’s intended text and that which is published.  I know that there must be many cases like these, but how can we know unless people share their experience?

I have the highest regard for my general editor on the William Walton Edition—the English conductor David Lloyd-Jones.  His path-breaking edition of Boris Godunov in the 1970s has had long-lasting effects on the way the opera was performed, restoring the quirkiness of Mussorgsky’s text, and he has produced critical editions of a wide range of works—principally nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and British works, but with a distinguished foray into Berlioz, too—all moonlighting alongside a distinguished conducting career.  By offering me a Walton volume to edit, he gave me my first big break professionally; by offering me a second volume, he shored up my confidence to continue.  I owe him an incalculable debt; and yet here is an instance where we disagreed—in this case just a single chord, but a chord I would so much like to lose.

The second of the volumes I did for the edition was an unusual one, consisting of concert suites derived from Walton’s film scores, including those for the Laurence Olivier Shakespeare films Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955).  These suites were made in the 1960s by Muir Mathieson (1911-1975), who had conducted the recording sessions for each of these films.

SOURCE:  1946 78s; scan of  US release front cover

There seems to be a critical consensus that the most successful of these films (and of these Walton scores) is Henry V.  Right after the release of the film, a four-movement concert suite was prepared (credited at the time to conductor Malcolm Sargent, although I have not found the slightest evidence that Sargent had any hand in it), but Walton’s publisher never offered it for sale, so it had only a marginal impact.  (The two movements for strings only were put on sale and were more widely circulated.)  A more successful commercial re-use was a recording of musical excerpts paired with Olivier reciting newly-recorded speeches on four 78 rpm discs [shown at right].  This recording had a good bit more music than the suite.  Significantly, it included the dramatic “Charge and Battle” music, a musical and cinematic climax of the film.  As the title indicates, these are actually two different musical cues—separated in the film by the launch of a volley of arrows.  (Walton marked the end of his autograph of the charge with the caption “Bombs gone!”)  The charge sequence is tremendously exciting to watch—particularly the virtuoso tracking shot lasting some fifty seconds as the French horses trot, then canter, then gallop across the field.  (A contemporary reviewer noted that the audience at the press-screening gave a spontaneous ovation at this moment, even though “they were applauding t’other side.”)  The whole charge sequence is analysed shot-by-shot and bar-by-bar in the 1957 Roger Manvell and John Huntley text The Technique of Film Music.

SOURCE:  Manvell & Hartley, The Technique of Film Music, p. 91 (the very end of the “Charge”); I have reformatted the page here to better fit a wide rather than tall aspect-ratio.  The penultimate bar is incorrectly transcribed:  Walton writes this as two bars of 3/4, with each 8th-note here really a quarter.

When Mathieson set about producing a new suite, he used the “Sargent” suite as his starting point, but deleted the choral parts (and consequently the music requiring a chorus) and reduced the scoring to double-wind, hoping to make it more attractive to smaller orchestras.  He also inserted the “Charge and Battle” music (plus another section, appended after the battle—but thereby hangs a tale for another time) as the centerpiece of a five-movement suite—and very effective it is, too.

Mathieson has skillfully spliced the cues together, but in doing so he added a chord.  The “Charge” cue ends abruptly on a downbeat—just an eighth-note chord.  (It was followed on both the film and the 1946 RCA recording by the launch of the arrows; to hear those, click either of those hyperlinks.)  The “Battle” cue continues in 3/4 time although with an eighth-rest on the downbeat.  Mathieson elides the two, so that the downbeat chord that ends “Charge” takes the place of the eighth-rest on the downbeat of “Battle.”  The problem comes in the second bar, which Walton indicates only by a ditto mark:

SOURCE:  detail of Walton's autograph of the beginning of the “Battle” cue (147c) of Henry V, taken from a screenshot of the page at the website of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University [http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1237439].  The measure numbers in red ink across the top were added by Mathieson as he prepared his suite.

Mathieson applies this ditto sign to everything in his newly-elided bar, so the downbeat chord appears a second time.

I sought to remove this extraneous chord from the new edition, as it forms no part of the film or any of the early sources, even if it was unambiguously a part of Mathieson's arrangement.  David Lloyd-Jones’s response—reasonable as ever—was that as Walton had conducted a recording of the Mathieson arrangement at the time of its publication, the appearance of the chord on that recording could be taken to be Walton's acceptance of the variant reading.  (Hear him conduct it here; listen closely and you might hear my teeth grinding in the background.)  Given that this recording was made twenty years after the music was composed, and that Walton was hardly the most detail-conscious of composers, I was not persuaded that the presence of the chord indicated that he had even noticed it, let alone endorsed it.

And so the offending chord appears in the William Walton Edition, over the objections of the volume editor:

 

SOURCE:  marked-up digital scan of William Walton Edition vol. 22, p. 48 (detail).

The corresponding textual note documents that this was Mathieson’s addition, but does nothing to suggest—as I wanted to—that one should at least consider eliminating it.  I believe our volume is an improvement over the first edition of Mathieson’s arrangement (especially because ours restores Walton’s original triple-wind scoring), but here is one place where I think we didn’t go far enough in restoring the composer's text.

10. Xmas speedbumps

There is a truism in text criticism that when variant readings do not seem to be a scribal error the editor should prefer the harder reading as more likely closer to the original.  The reasoning is that—all else being equal—it seems less likely that a scribe would intentionally produce something more awkward.

Of course, it must be exceedingly rare that anyone can assert “all else being equal.”  Sometimes the harder reading is so awkward that one must wonder what was behind it.  I can remember the experience even as a child of puzzling over the variant I discuss below.  It seemed so unlikely—so unmusical—that I wondered who could possibly have produced it.  In later years I felt gratified to see my childhood bewilderment justified.

The Rev. Thomas Helmore was a Victorian antiquarian and musician who was in the forefront of the musical revival of the Oxford movement.  He was a precursor to Ralph Vaughan Williams in the breadth of historical sources that he wanted to bring into active use in Anglican worship.  (For an interesting account of his on-site inspection of the chant manuscript universally known as St. Gall in 1875, see that in his brother’s memoirs, p. 99ff..)  It is a pity that for this post I dwell on one of his mistakes, as there is much good to be said about the man and his efforts.

Almost by chance, in 1853 Helmore came into possession of an extremely rare 1582 Scandinavian songbook entitled Piae Cantiones.  (That date—whenever it was—ought to be a red-letter day in music history, as the consequences of Helmore's acquaintance with Piae Cantiones would shape Anglo-American hymnody in far-reaching ways.)  The book was given to Helmore by John Mason Neale, another antiquarian cleric, whose part in the Oxford Movement is much more widely known—particularly because of his verse translations of ancient hymns.  Piae Cantiones was exactly Helmore’s cup of tea, and he collaborated with Neale to produce two publications the following year using the tunes he found there: Carols for Christmas-tide and Carols for Easter-tide (both available here).  Although these publications describe Neale’s lyrics as “principally in imitation of the original,” he sometimes departs very far from this—sometimes astonishingly brilliantly, as with his translation of Prudentius’s “Corde natus ex Parentis” (“Of the Father's love begotten”) matched by Helmore with an entirely independent medieval tune, never to be prised apart.

Another example is Neale’s text “Good Christian men, rejoice,” which he devised to go with the 14th-century German macaronic carol “In dulci jubilo.”  Although he didn’t know it, there was already an English translation that stuck pretty closely to the original—even preserving the macaronic mix with Latin tags from the liturgy.  That translation was devised by Robert Lucas de Pearsall for his 1834 part-song arrangement of “In dulci jubilo,” a mainstay of the Oxbridge Carols for Choirs repertoire, and an almost annual feature in the King's College carol service:

(For more, see Pearsall’s note about his composition, as it appeared in Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961).)

Neale’s text is entirely his own.  He was faced with a challenge, however, because Helmore’s transcription of the melody produced an irregularity after the third line of text.  Here is what Helmore had before him:

SOURCE:  cropped from screenshot of Piae Cantiones (1582) available as IMSLP #89383

The Swedish text in Piae Cantiones introduced an extra syllable, and thus an extra note.  What in the German original had been only “leit” became “ligger.” Helmore then interpreted the notes I have circled in red to be not minims (i.e., half the length of the diamond-shaped semibreves) but rather longs (i.e., longer than the square breves).  His version of the melody thus introduces two speedbumps in the middle of the second line, and Neale had to accommodate these in his text:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of Helmore’s Carols for Christmas-tide (1854), p. 20

Helmore’s harmonization is pedestrian in the extreme, but his misreading of the melody became the standard reading for the English-texted carol when it was included in the popular Christmas Carols New and Old, ed. Henry Bramley and John Stainer (Novello, 1871):

SOURCE:  cropped page scan from first edition of Bramley & Stainer.

Stainer’s harmonization has appeared in many English and American hymnals, although some wised up to the mistake and eliminated the seventh bar.  (I’m not sure who spotted it first.  As “In dulci jubilo” became more familiar to Anglo-American audiences through its use in concerted music by Bach and others, the speedbumps in “Good Christian men, rejoice” were bound to be noticed eventually.  Helmore’s error had already been eradicated by the Episcopal Hymnal of 1916, although glancing at Hymnary.org, I see that it persists in books published as late as 1995, 1997, and even a Korean hymnal of 2001.)  The neat thing is that simply excising the error does no damage at all to either the lyrics or the tune, as the repeated exclamations in each verse are gratuitous, and the melody has some phrases that begin with a pick-up and some that begin on the beat.  The New Oxford Book of Carols (1994) asserts that Neale’s lyrics were devised before Helmore transcribed the tune (p. 198), attributing the extra exclamation to Helmore, but no evidence is offered to support this.  I wonder if, rather, Neale had his doubts about this hiccup in Helmore’s transcription, and produced something which could be cut without harm.  Maybe Helmore himself had doubts about it; scholar that he was, he would doubtless prefer the hard reading.  And that’s what he gave us.