14. “Transport of Pleasure”

This post appears a day ahead of schedule; given the ... uh... nature of the material, I think the reason for this will be clear.

One of the pleasures of doing a blog is the opportunity it affords to dwell on subjects outside of my usual area.  When I was choosing grad schools, I chose Cornell precisely because of a historic strength there in eighteenth-century music:  Haydn, Mozart, and the Bach family in particular.  I ended up concentrating on much later music, but in many senses the eighteenth century still feels like home turf.  I haven’t published professionally on those repertories, and blogging is my chance to get my feet wet and my hands dirty.

Last summer, sheetmusicplus.com was having a sale of 20% off all Henle publications.  I had just run across a second-hand copy of the critical report to the first volume of songs of Joseph Haydn Werke (or JHW, the ongoing critical edition of Haydn's works), so in the sale I bought the Henle offprint of that volume aimed at the performance market.  I had stumbled across Haydn’s “English Canzonettas” while in high school, and I came to know them from the 1931 Peters edition (edited by Ludwig Landshoff), but I had never looked into the textual situation underlying them.  This seemed like an admirable opportunity to do some neglected homework.

That JHW volume appeared in 1960, edited by Paul Mies.  He died in 1976 before a critical report for the volume was issued.  The task of completing that fell to the intrepid Marianne Helms, who has done prodigious (and comparatively thankless) work for both the JHW and the NBA (the new Bach edition).  Her critical report appeared in 1983, and at the same time Henle issued the offprint of the score.  The offprint is actually preferable to the original, as it incorporates the corrections listed in the errata of the report.  These are numerous and sometimes very substantial, including the deletion of one item (discovered to be the work of Adalbert Gyrowetz).

Another revelation that only came to light after the JHW volume was published was rather racy: the text for one of the second set of “English Canzonettas” (no. 6, “Content”) had been cleaned up after the first publication in 1795.  The song in the first edition was entitled “Transport of Pleasure,” but already the second issue of the first edition presents “Content.”  That this came to light only after 1960 reveals that Paul Mies did not use the first issue of the first edition as one of his sources when he prepared the score volume; or, more likely, he was unaware that there were three distinct issues from the initial set of plates.  A scan of the uncorrected first issue is available on the IMSLP, although it lacks the last two pages; this is curious, as the source of the IMSLP scan is listed as Stanford University, but the scan available on the Stanford Library website is intact (and much better quality)—and is worth perusing just for the inscription on the flyleaf.  Here is the beginning of the song in question, as it appears in the Stanford scan:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of Image 23 (detail) of https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10580550

Uniquely (it appears) among the Canzonettas, “Transport of Pleasure”/“Content” was actually a retexting of a song Haydn had originally written to a German text (“Der verdienstvolle Sylvius”).  That song appears to have been a favorite of Haydn’s, as during his second London visit he chose to sing it himself at a meet-and-greet with George III.  (Haydn's early biographer Griesinger records Haydn's recollections of this here.)  Glancing at the text, one might imagine a nudge-nudge-wink-wink between Haydn and the king.  While not overtly obscene, the text describes the body of the (female) lover in a bizarre coded language, vaguely reminiscent of the Song of Solomon.  I paraphrase:  My flock is only two small lambs, my field only a patch of clover, but if only you understood, I am a King, because I am the most in love of all mortals on earth.   Hmmmm....  wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

(For those interested, there’s an excellent recording of this version by the incomparable Anne Sofie von Otter with fortepianist Melvyn Tan.)

The subsequent (first) English text has a similar theme, as if a loose paraphrase. It is less suggestive of the body itself, although it does give her a name—Julia—and describes his intimacies with her.  It goes on for two stanzas, saving the climax for the end.  The text is anonymous (and I don't wonder); that it is directly related to the original German seems likely because of the fleeting reference to flocks and fields in the second stanza.  Here it is in its entirety.

What though no high descent I claim
No line of Kings or race divine,
Not all the mighty Sons of fame
Can vaunt of joys surpassing mine
Possess'd of blooming Julia’s charms,
My heart alive to love’s alarms;
   Transported with pleasure
   I’m bless’d beyond measure;
Such raptures I find in her arms. 

What though no robe of Tyrian dye,
No gold of Ophir I can boast,
Nor fields, nor flocks, yet rich am I
In wealth the gods might envy most,
For mine are blooming Julia’s charms,
With love my throbbing heart alarms;
    By love transported with pleasure
    I’m bless’d beyond measure
And die with delight in her arms.

“Die with delight” is scarcely a subtle trope, particularly after the “throbbing heart.”  Is this the handiwork of Anne Hunter, the lyricist of many of the other canzonettas?  Some sources attribute it to her, but in the critical report Helms is cautious enough to say that both the poet and Haydn’s source for the text are unknown.) It seems a more reckless dry run for Hunter’s later parting lament “O Tuneful Voice.”  (Incidentally, I think JHW is wrong in that  song not to capitalize Echo; it has “In echo’s cave,” when surely this refers to the mythological nymph Echo, not something more abstract.)  Whoever penned this song, the text was deemed reckless enough to be toned down several notches for the next print run.  Its replacement, “Content,” still retains the ovine reference, but now it is down to a single lamb.  How tame!  The climactic passage is reduced to “This heart, secure in its treasure / Is bless’d beyond measure, / Nor envies the monarch his throne.”  Pure, chaste, and (dare I say?) tedious by comparison.  

Most curious to me is that this seems to be the least performed (in any version) and least discussed of any of the canzonettas, and yet there seems to be the most to say and to hear.  The coverlet of good taste thrown on it in 1796 may have done it in.  The Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon seems to have only gradually woken to the nature of the text.  In 1976, in the third volume of his massive Chronicle & Works, in the “chronicle” section he remarks merely

For some reason not immediately apparent — can Lady Charlotte [Bertie, the set's dedicatee] have thought the original text slightly immodest? — new words and a new title were soon applied to the song and the plates were altered.  [p. 315]

But he came around even before finishing the volume, as in the “works” section he continues:

...there is no doubt that Haydn has if anything accentuated the erotic content, especially towards the end, where Haydn, having acheived a rather breathless series of triplets (“transported with pleasure, I'm blest [sic] beyond measure”), drops to pianissimo and in the third-last bar, slows the tempo to “piu adagio” in what Lady Bertie might have considered a post-coital slackening.  [Ibid., p. 392]

(But who can know the mind of Lady Bertie?)  Seven years later Landon produced a facsimile of all three original editions of the song, plus Haydn's full-length sketch.  The first edition of the German version appeared in 1795, but the text was modified to transfer the voice from “Sylvius” to a “lovely shepherdess.”  (This was “Das Geständniß einer schönen Schäferinn,” appearing in the Prague periodical Die Allgemeine Musikalische Bibliothek.)  This alteration had a bowdlerizing effect, as all of the subtle Song of Solomon imagery—if that is indeed what it is—is reduced to just idle chatter about two sheep in a clover patch.  Hardly something I would expect to interest even “Farmer George,” this seems unlikely to me to be the version Haydn sang for the king.

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.