24. Against the muddy tide

SOURCE:  scan of Dirk Stoop's engraving Aqua Triumphalis (Aug. 23, 1662, preceding the wedding of Charles II) at the National Maritime Museum; available at http://www.historyextra.com/river

Images like the one above are a healthy reminder to me that George I was not the first to have elaborate festivities on the Thames.  And yet the date that will always be most associated with such water parties must surely be 17 July 1717—the impending tercentenary of which I simply must mark with this post.  As musical water parties are known to have happened in each of the three preceding summers, the eye-catching 7/17/1717 date may not be the first performance of Handel’s Water Music, but it is the earliest documented performance—and it is very well documented indeed.

Water Music fits into a long tradition of music for a social occasion; but as a musical structure itself, the work is shockingly innovative—an orchestral piece of unprecedented length and variety.  Are there any predecessors to rival it?  In a way, Water Music represents the first maturity of the orchestra—and, maybe except for occasional performances of Corelli concerti grossi, it must be the earliest music that can be said to fit into the established orchestra repertoire.  While modern symphony orchestras have largely abandoned the Baroque, edged-out by their HIP rivals, Water Music is still performed by all sorts of ensembles, and seems to be a perennial crowd-pleaser.  New recordings (and cheap reissues of old ones) emerge year after year, and twice in recent years (2003 and 2012) there have been conspicuous performances on the Thames itself—conspicuous enough for me to have noticed, anyway.

SOURCE:  Daily Mail image of the 3 June 2012 Jubilee flotilla on the Thames; the Academy of Ancient Music website has some entertaining videos concerning their part of the festivities.

Probably the work seldom gets performed intact.  The 22 movements that comprise what we call Water Music do not cohere in any traditional pattern, and that has caused problems for Handel scholars in the past.  Lacking an autograph, it was assumed that the strange sequence of movements indicated that something had been garbled in transmission.  Here is a handy index from Christopher Hogwood’s Cambridge Music Handbook:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of pp. 18-19 of Handel:  Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (2005)

As indicated by the catalogue numbers of the Handel Werke Verzeichnis (HWV), Water Music has been allotted three entries—the movements in F (and two in D minor) are HWV 348; those in D major are HWV 349; and those in G major/minor are HWV 350.  HWV thus presents three “suites” together making up a larger collected work.  Lacking any further evidence, this division would be wholly reasonable—and it is more practical in performance, as each suite is unified not only by key but by instrumentation (with trumpets appearing only in the movements on HWV 349, and no brass at all in HWV 350, which instead features flute and recorder).  The idea that the conglomeration of movements that we think of as “Handel’s Water Music” actually comprise three separate works goes back to Handel’s time: some manuscript copies dating from the late 1730s and early 1740s, together with  the 1743 Walsh keyboard arrangement presents the movements grouped together into the three suites.  That sequence took over the received history, and thus the three catalogue numbers.  The work had appeared as three suites in the Hällische Händel Ausgabe (HHA) in 1962, and that imprimatur led to a myriad of recordings that present Water Music so allotted.  And it works:  I was at a concert not that long ago that had the F major suite at the beginning of the program, a smattering of Bach and Telemann in the middle, and the last two suites as the conclusion, the whole making a very satisfying musical experience.

SOURCE:  scan first page of score (f. 2) of 1718 ms.
in the library of the Royal Society of Musicians [no shelfmark];
scan from https://museums.eu/event/details/120375/handels-water-music

Given Handel’s default modus operandi, it would seem a little unusual if Water Music wasn’t to some extent a thing of shreds and patches.  Terence Best points at the solo violins in the fugal section of the French overture, suggesting that that sort of writing would have been inaudible in the open air, and thus likely to have been retained (unthinkingly?) from some preëxisting work.  And yet, as Best is also at pains to point out, all of the earliest manuscript copies not only mix movements of the D and G “suites” together, but in fact they all preserve most or all of the 22 movements in very nearly the same order.  The 2004 discovery of the earliest known manuscript copy (datable to 1718 [and the first page is shown at right])—which gives the 22 movements in precisely the same sequence as the first published full score (ed. Samuel Arnold in 1788), a sequence familiar to us because Arnold’s edition was the primary source for Chrysander’s in the old complete works volume (1886).  We do not know Arnold’s source (although Best [p. 102] argues reasonably that it was indeed this source), but the newly-discovered copy is enough to verify that this sequence of movements was known within a year of the supposed 1717 premiere.  The HHA has thus now issued a new volume (2007, co-edited by Best and Hogwood) to supersede the old.  (This pair of editions would make an ideal topic for my series of “moving targets,” but I haven’t done sufficient homework comparing them to write that up yet.  Eventually.)

So what about that unusual sequence, now being restored to favor?  It is a curious hybrid of suite and concertante forms, and it doesn’t even settle down to just one sort of suite.  It opens with a French overture, interrupted before a final cadence by a solo oboe number; following that is really an Italian overture (fast-slow-fast) featuring the horns; then a series of conventional dances or dance-like numbers (menuets, bourrée, hornpipe, “Air”).  After all the F major movements are done, there follows a d-minor number displaying Handel’s orchestrational technique at its most forward-looking—but which is hardly either a closing or an opening to a suite.  Thereafter, in Hogwood’s words,

“From this point in the suite both the scoring and the changes of tonality become more varied, a strategy that seems designed to maintain attention through an hour-long performance—the length of time of a full act in an opera, but no other musical form to date.”  [p. 35]

The brilliant brass writing that follows is closer to Handel’s (subsequent) concerti a due cori than to anything else—in other words concertante writing again  The remaining dances are diverse and diverting, but there is no conclusion as substantial as those of Telemann’s Tafelmusik; the “Trumpet Menuet” that de facto brings the whole thing to a close seems perfunctory, and to my ear the weakest part of the whole set.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Given his later scholarship on this work, I was curious to revisit Hogwood's own recording (1978).  It is inevitably a product of its time.  Hogwood not only followed the three suite model of the original HHA, but also interpolated two much later F-major reworkings of the two central D-major trumpet/horn numbers.  Wonderful music as these are, their inclusion here only muddies the textual waters.  And to confuse things further, Decca several times reissued only either the “horn suite” or the “trumpet suite” from these sessions.  Hogwood’s dominance in the recording market place in the 1980s and 1990s has surely meant that—for better or worse—these performances have played a large role in shaping our sense of the work.  (Or works?)  I’m not even sure that it is a problem, but it is worth acknowledging.  (A similar issue came up in a post concerning Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.)

I tried an informal experiment for this post:  listening to a recording with the CD or MP3 player set on SHUFFLE, hoping to see if any resulting sequence of movements would be viable.  It won’t, at least for me, but if we were to view the whole thing as a sort of compendium of music to keep the party going, a number of routes might work.  A crucial difference is to have a musical intelligence making the decision, rather than just a mechanical randomization.  In other words, it requires a deejay.

18. Moving targets (Episode #2)

Although I meant to get back to this a long time ago, this is only the second in a series considering different editions of the same work issued by the same publisher but without any notice of textual discrepancies between them.  Sometimes these changes are hardly more than cosmetic, but sometimes they are real nuisances, and sometimes inexplicable meddling.

SOURCE:  scan of 2013 printing

The example in this post will be the two Alphonse Leduc editions of Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto (1934), and I will be considering only the versions issued “avec accompagnement de piano” rather than the full score.  The first edition appeared in 1936, bearing the plate number “A.L. 19,256.”  A scan of a 2007 reprint of this edition (judging from the imprint date on the last page, anyway) is available on the IMSLP.  I cannot date the second edition, but the terminus ante quem is 2013, the imprint date of the copy I have to hand, and would roughly coincide with Leduc’s acqusition by the multinational Music Sales Group.  (Worldcat doesn’t help much to date this second edition:  all of the Leduc printings listed there are said to be 19 pages, while this is 22pp.)  The copyright date on the second edition remains 1936, and indeed both the cover (at right) and the plate number (AL 19 256) also remain the same.  I strongly oppose their re-use of the same plate number when the editions are manifestly different productions.  In any case, my use of plate number is not really accurate:  even if the first edition was engraved on copper plates, the second edition is a re-setting via computer notation software.  It is the tell-tale short cuts typical of computer-setting that I want to highlight here, as I think the earlier version makes for a clearer read.  Here is an example from the very first page:

SOURCES:  bb. 6-7; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 1 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 1 (right) 

Crowded as the first edition may be in b. 7, the five voices of the counterpoint are quite clear, and the pianist understands which notes belong to which line.  In the second edition, there is no delineation of the five voices, and the beaming in the new top “voice” even obscures that on beat 2 there is an entry—the highest, and thus arguably a climax—of the main motive of the introduction.  The viola and cello lines are subsumed into a sort of new “tenor” voice.  Most troubling is the movement of the f marking ahead by a beat, which suggests even a bringing out of the inner voice at beat 2.  The orchestral score presents the opposite situation—the f appears first in the first violins (beat 2) and in the rest of the ensemble a beat or more later.

What is frustrating about this is that it is merely the product of laziness:  it would take a little more time at the computer to arrive at the configuration of the first edition, and the setter apparently didn’t think it was worth it.  The version on the right is marginally easier to play, but I think that is the only thing I can say in its favor.

There are a number examples where to me the changes in the notational configurations in the two Leduc editions do not amount to improvements, but I will consider just a few here.

SOURCES:  bb. 47-48; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 3 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 4 (right) 

That one is hard to explain.  To my eye, the first edition is clearer, although I grant that the reading on the right makes the crossing of the upper parts more obvious.  Still, the lower stave looks curious, with the stem-down downbeat and no rest above it.

SOURCES:  bb. 131-32; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 7 (left) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 9 (right) 

This one is my favorite, a true comedy of error.  I think I can reconstruct what happened in this instance.  I think the computer-setter set the lower staff first, then—while setting the upper staff and converting it to the bass clef—decided to move the mano destra line also into the upper staff.  The comedy is that the setter never deleted this line in the lower staff, so it is duplicated erroneously, uselessly—indeed meaninglessly.  Maybe it’s just me, but I chuckle to myself about such absurdities.

SOURCES:  bb. 227-28; cropped digital scans of first ed. Leduc piano score, p. 12 (top) and second ed. Leduc piano score, p. 14 (bottom) 

Here I would argue that both versions are unplayable as notated (at least at the 100-beats-a-minute tempo).  The second edition moves the bass-line up an octave—something a player might do anyway—even when Glazunov scores this for cellos and basses an octave and two octaves below this register (but not at all in the register notated here).  As an accompanist often playing these sorts of orchestral reductions, I generally prefer to know what the general texture is (even when unplayable by me) and adapt as I have to than to have someone else attempt to much simplification for me.  The first edition just gives more.  It is instructive to compare this passage as it appears in the recent Bärenreiter edition:

SOURCE: bb. 227-28 of piano reduction by Martin Schelhaas (Bärenreiter 8732a), p. 13; the bar numbers are different because this edition counts the cadenza as one bar.  (It includes three different versions of the cadenza, and an interesting tale it is.)

Throughout the Bärenreiter edition the piano reduction has been entirely rethought with an eye toward simplifying it down to something reasonable—even though the editors acknowledge that the Leduc first edition piano reduction seems to have been the work of Glazunov himself rather than “A[ndre] Petiot,” to whom the Leduc editions have given the credit.  Thus the Bärenreiter “Urtext”—and a very good edition it is in many respects—has jettisoned the authentic piano part.  Although the “Urtext” label appears on the cover, the title page is more accurate:  “With an Urtext Solo part... Piano Reduction based on the Urtext.”  (There is a critical report included in the corresponding urtext full score, but there is of course not one for the new piano reduction, which also lacks a description of the sources.  Martin Schelhaas seems to have used the second Leduc edition as his starting point, but the result is a wholly new and worthy reduction.)  This piano reduction also includes an additional soloist part (i.e., non-urtext), edited for performance by Carina Raschèr, daughter of Sigurd Raschèr, for whom the work was written.

This publication is not the strongest in the Bärenreiter catalogue (as even without hunting for them I found small errors in both the musical text of the full score and the critical report), and it is even more curious for its mixture of urtext and practical approaches.  (I will return to that particular dilemma in my next post.)  Nonetheless, it is not the focus of this post, and it is in any case better than the second Leduc edition.  I find it extremely irksome that Leduc would reissue the work, bearing the same plate number as the first edition but with an inferior presentation of the text.  The Leduc standard has been lowered, although perhaps not to half-mast.

5. “What's the best edition of ________?”

Every now and then a student will come down the hall to my office—away, that is, from the mire of applied studies and into the transcendent world of musicological speculation (... or so I sometimes would like it to seem)—and say:  "Prof. X told me to ask you what edition I should get of _________."

It doesn’t happen all that often.  Usually Prof. X tells the student what edition to buy, so they never come to see me.  As before in this blog, I turn to the words of Walter Emery:

The ordinary musician does not buy an edition because it is good; as he does not know how editing is done, he cannot tell whether an edition is good or bad.  He buys an edition because its title-page bears a famous name or the magic word Urtext:  or because it has a pretty cover:  or, more likely, because it is sixpence cheaper than any other:  or again, because his teacher has told him to (which means only that the teacher was told to buy it by his teacher, has used it for twenty years, and has got used to the look of it).  [pp. 7f.]

In a very interesting and useful article that deals with edition selection as a teaching moment, Rachel E. Scott gives an anecdote which fulfills Emery's worst fears:

As a freshman vocal performance major, my voice teacher assigned me “Le Violette” by Alessandro Scarlatti. The following week I naively showed up for my lesson with my shiny new 26 Italian Songs and Arias: An Authoritative Edition Based on Authentic Sources. I quickly learned that my “Le Violette” was not her “Le Violette.” My professor rejected my anthology, pulled out Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and declared that the accompaniment in my edition was “just awful.” Not only are the accompaniments very different, but the vocal line is also slightly different. In short, the two editions presented two very different pieces.  While this experience certainly opened my eyes to the existence of different editions, it did not provide a solution to the problem. I did not understand that my teacher’s preference was based on tradition and not on the quality of the editorial work....  [pp. 133f.]

No doubt this scenario has repeated itself countless times.

Sometimes a teacher might think they are recommending the best edition simply because the publisher has a good reputation.  (See for example this recent post by violinist Phillipe Quint (“Usually I rely on two editions:  Henle and Barenreiter”).)  Certainly when I was studying piano 20+ years ago, Henle seemed to have sewn up the market, despite a wide variety in the quality of their backlist—a problem that has been rectified to a significant extent as new editions have superseded many old ones.

Judging from Google searches, the perennial question of which edition to buy has migrated to various internet forums.  Typical of many hits that came up was this one:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/22938/good-non-henle-urtext-edition-of-bach/23012
(accessed 30 Sept. 2016)

There is much to read between the lines here.  The teacher said “urtext” so that a student would have a text free from interpretive interpolations (mainly, I imagine, slurs); the teacher didn’t specify which, as the various urtexts of the Bach English Suites do look pretty much the same.  The student knows the word urtext has to be on the cover and has noticed that this increases the price—money which it would probably be more enjoyable to spend elsewhere.  The first responder points out that the BG edition is “urtext” in the sense that the teacher probably wants.  The estimate of the quality is attributed to they (“they say”—a vile phrase), followed by recourse to Wikipedia.  There is no assertion of an edition being good for x reason or bad for y reason.  And who can say?

Indeed, who can say?  Very few people actually spend their time looking at multiple editions of the same works, still less comparing multiple editions to their sources and (if present) the editorial remarks.  As has been brought home to me when reviewing editions, I simply don’t have enough information to verify that the editor has done the work properly.  Unless I have all the sources in front of me and can do the editor’s work over again, I have to take the editor’s word that the edition is what it claims to be.  True, I can talk about methodological problems (particularly sources not consulted) or editorial policies that I find disagreeable, but otherwise I am only barely qualified to offer an opinion.  And I suspect this is the case for most professionals (except perhaps for the repertoire at the very center of our interest).

Musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason calls her admirable blog Not another music history cliché!  I wish someone would write one called Not another uncritical review!  These are easy to spot, as they are almost invariably glowing reviews, and they usually conclude with a formulation like “It is handsomely bound and will make an attractive addition to your shelves.”  While these tend not to be by musicologists, they do tend to be published in sources more readily available to the average musician, and thus are much more significant in terms of their influence.  There are some, however, who have dealt explicitly with comparing editions, not just reviewing a new edition in a vacuum.  Judging from my RILM and Google searches, many of these are in practical periodicals (The Strad, Clavier, and the like), where they would be most useful to teachers.  This topic also seems to be a frequent topic for DMA dissertations.

I don't believe in “best” editions, but I've certainly seen some bad ones.  I also am familiar with the gnawing sense that I don't know enough to evaluate what is in my hands.   And so I  propose a crowd-sourced bibliography.  I welcome citations for articles/chapters/blogposts/etc. that compare different editions (i.e., not just reviews of a new edition).  With the rise of the IMSLP and students’ use of it, these need not necessarily focus on new editions.  The old editions are ever with us—and I think that is a very good thing.  Many are superb.  (They also have the virtue of printing more music per page, and so have fewer page turns.  If a requirement for best edition is practicality, page turns might rank pretty high.)  I have put a new tab on the blog for this project so that it will be readily available; send me citations through the contact form and I will gladly add them to the list:  articles, books, blogposts, webforum posts, whatever.

4. Moving targets (Episode #1)

As will be gathered from the title, I will be doing an occasional series of “moving targets” posts.  In these posts, my targets are not the musical works so much as the editions of them—editions which change while under cover; sometimes under the same physical cover without any notice from publisher of the nature of the changes.  Sometimes the ISBN or ISMN remains the same, so that the alterations might only be discovered by accident when they are not advertised as “corrected.”  But even when they are so advertised, it isn’t always immediately clear what we hold in our hands.

For a while in the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of the Fassung letzter Hand held sway in scholarly editions of music, particularly those of 18th and 19th century music.  To a certain extent it still does.  It doesn’t really translate well:  “the version of the last hand” doesn’t convey much.  It really means something more like “the last authorized version.”  The concept has even been stretched to mean the version the composer indicated in some way that (s)he preferred, even if (s)he never documented it precisely.  (A good example of this is William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida.  The version that appears in the William Walton Edition is not one the composer ever heard or even put down on paper, but it is consistent with the comments he made about the 1976 Covent Garden revision:  he preferred the cuts, but he didn't like the transpositions and other alterations to accommodate Janet Baker's lower tessitura.)  And of course the idea of “new and improved” is a good marketing tool for selling another copy of something to someone who already owns it.  So even if some musicologists have moved on to “process editions” which document a piece in various stages of its existence, commercial publishers love it when a composer’s final thoughts can boost sales in an already established work.

In the course of looking into something for quite a different post appearing months hence, I stumbled across an interesting example of this.  I knew already that Leonard Bernstein's Candide has a complex textual history.  The show has been different things at different times, not only with lots of music scrapped and then resurrected (sometimes with entirely new lyrics, assigned to a different character), but the whole book replaced and then later patched and re-patched.  A good sign of this textual confusion is the copyright page of the only published full (i.e., orchestra) score of any version of the show—billed on its title page as “”SCOTTISH OPERA EDITION OF THE OPERA-HOUSE VERSION / (1989).”

And of course this doesn’t account for the further vicissitudes this work has undergone since Bernstein’s death in 1990.  I don’t expect to live to see a comprehensive critical edition of Candide.  It would probably take at least four volumes:  the 1956 version, the 1973 version (in which Bernstein took no active part, but which had great consequences for the subsequent manifestations), the 1988 version, and a huge appendix of all the other material, including details of at least the 1971 and 1982 versions.  The only project I have run across that seeks such comprehensivity in a work with such textual complications is this edition of Bizet's Carmen, but I don't know how much of it has actually come to fruition, as all of the information detailing what it was supposed to encompass has disappeared from the web.  [Here are scans of a few pages I downloaded a few years ago.]

Regarding the 1994 full score, the Bernstein website acknowledges:

While this publication encompasses the complete score, it by no means reflects a final, frozen show. Like its hero, Candide is perhaps destined never to find its perfect form and function; in the final analysis, however, that may prove philosophically appropriate.

Fine.  But Boosey & Hawkes seems to want to have it another way.  In this self-same 1994 score, we find the following notice:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. [i] of 1994 score

And yet, when the overture was included in Leonard Bernstein Orchestral Anthology, vol. 2 (1998), we find a notice that at first glance would amount to pretty much the same thing:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. viii of 1998 score

These two scores cannot present identical readings, however, because the instrumentation is substantially different.  The 1998 score presents what must be called—although it isn’t anywhere that I can see—the “concert version” of the work, scored for full symphony orchestra (basically triple wind with three percussionists, in addition to timpani).  This scoring seems to be Bernstein's own, as here is the first page of his manuscript (according to the Bernstein website).  This orchestra is too big for a theater pit, and always was.  The original 1956 Broadway recording is for a smaller ensemble, and from my listening it seems to correspond closely to scoring of the “Scottish Opera” version.  (The two aren’t quite identical, at least to my ear:  the most prominent differences are in the percussion.)  The reduced scoring—and reducing also the expense of remunerating musicians—cuts and redistributes the music of one flute, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, a trombone, and a percussionist.  That saves 10 players, not counting shrinking the string sections too.

Listening to the 1989 recording, one finds that Bernstein actually used the full symphonic scoring for the overture, and the reduced scoring for the rest of the show.  (Just listen to the percussion at the beginning.  If in doubt, watch the live performance given a few days before the recording was made.)  Thus, despite the apparent contradiction because of the different scoring, both statements reproduced above could be true, as both texts do relate to the 1989 recording.  But it seems more complicated than that.

Although the 1994 publication is the only edition of the orchestral score of the complete show, the overture has been published in score three other times (not counting arrangements for band, etc.): in 1960 (G. Schirmer), reprinted with a few alterations in 1990 as “corrected edition” (Boosey & Hawkes), and newly computer-generated in 1998 as “corrected edition” (in the Boosey & Hawkes Anthology mentioned above).  I do not want to bog down this blog with all of the textual variants of these three editions, but the findings of my somewhat hasty collation of these sources are here, for the most indefatigable of readers.

A few of the most audible differences are worth mentioning.  One is the tempo:  the 1960 version is quite a bit faster (half-note = 152 at the beginning; whole-note equals 96 at the coda) than the subsequent editions (half-note = 132 at the beginning; half-note equals 152 at the coda), although the original metronome marks appear in the 1976 vocal score of the 1973 version.  This slowing down of the whole piece is consistent with Bernstein's own recordings.  His recording with the New York Phil made on Sept. 28, 1960 is at the tempi published in 1960; his 1989 London Symphony recording is at the tempi published in 1990.  In this respect at least the scores published in the 1990s can be said to reflect his performances in 1989.

This is not always the case.  The 1998 score (which claims to reflect changes made in 1989) includes an interesting change made at some later point.  Bernstein's performance 1960 recording, 1989 recording (and indeed the 1989 concert performance) all give this reading for the cymbals.  Note particularly the two clashes in b. 51

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1960 G. Schirmer score, p. 10, bb. 47-53

The 1998 score—and only that score—prints this:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1998 Boosey & Hawkes anthology, p. 9, bb. 47-53

Sensible though this is (i.e., aligned with the brass pattern), it is nowhere to be heard on Bernstein's recordings, nor indeed on any recording I have located before the 1997 “New Broadway Cast” recording.  It is not in the 1994 score, which claims to be based also “on the manuscripts of Leonard Bernstein at the Library of Congress.”  One wonders on what authority this change was made.   I haven’t seen those manuscripts, but even if the 1998 reading accords with the original notation, do we know enough—does anyone know enough, that is—about how the 1960 reading came about to know it does not have an authority superceding the original?  Is it an accident that has been performed faithfully for decades (and recorded by the composer), or is it the correct reading?  Are Bernstein’s recordings of it evidence of at least tacet acceptance?  And if the 1998 score is going to interpose such a change, should there not at least be some indication of how and/or why?  (The battle scene in Act I of the 1994 score (no. 5f) has at one point cymbals matching the reading of the 1998 score of the overture, and that might have been the source of the change; but I would like to have been told.)

I think the most curious variant reading is one that was revised at some point before the 1989 performance and recording.  The 1960 reading of the horn line in the final canon before the coda was this:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1960 G. Schirmer score, p. 38, bb. 225-230

Note the lack of a syncopation at the end of b.227—and it is to be heard thus in the early recordings, even though this departs from the strict canon with the other upper parts.  For me the puzzle is why it was ever this way at all—but it upholds the old maxim of philology that the more “difficult” reading is more likely the original.  (Who would think to modify it to this reading?)

The three scores printed in the 1990s all give the syncopated figure, yielding a more conventional strict canon:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1998 Boosey & Hawkes anthology, p. 34, bb. 225-230

And, until now, that was the way I thought it had always gone.


I will return periodically to instances of publishers accumulating more confusion than clarity.  That works exist in multiple versions doesn’t trouble me in the least.  Indeed, I find such differences to be of consuming interest.  But I am irked when a publisher makes a text more difficult to access, and particularly so when the information is ambiguous or misleading.  Still, it does give me something to write about.