11. Dart’s Brandenburgs

...which is the second installment of the Settling Scores

I am never in Manhattan over New Year’s, but years of following the concert listings in The New Yorker and The New York Times indicate that in NYC there is a holiday tradition of programming all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.  (Okay, so that’s a nineteenth century name for these works, but I think we’re stuck with it, so I’ll dispense with the scare quotes.)  Somebody—the Chamber Music Society of of Lincoln Center, the NY Phil, or St Luke’s, or a visiting group at Bargemusic, Symphony Space or somewhere—presents these six exquisite pieces as an essential secular holiday event.  With that in the back of my mind, this seems like as good a time as any to look at textual issues relating to these works.

Bach’s 1721 fair-copy dedication manuscript survives to this day, and one might assume that it should settle any textual questions about the music.  It served as the sole source for Wilhelm Rust’s 1871 Bach Gesellschaft edition, except for the fifth concerto, for which Rust also consulted an autograph set of parts.  Rust’s edition is readily available in inexpensive reprints, and that is a good thing:  with really just one source, the edition is quite faithful to that dedicatory manuscript.  In one important respect, the BG edition is closer to Bach’s notation than that of the Neue Bach Ausgabe (ed. Heinrich Besseler in 1956):  the BG preserves the transposing notation, not converting everything to concert pitch as the NBA does (although determining “concert pitch” in Bach is an issue I must return to later this year).  This affects not only the brass:  importantly, it affects the violino piccolo (conc. no. 1), whose triple-stops appear completely unidiomatic when rendered in concert pitch.  (Granted, the BG changes the clef of the recorders (if that’s what they are, in nos. 2 & 4), which the NBA does as well.  The NBA goes further, and changes the clef of the violas da gamba in no. 6 from tenor to alto.)  It’s nice when the cheap and convenient editions are also good ones.  The Dover reprint even includes an English summary of Rust's preface, which at least makes users aware that there are textual issues to consider.

I describe Rust’s edition as “good” because it is so close to the reading of the dedication score, although Besseler was right to question what value that source should have:  “The numerous errors show that Bach was careless.  As only some have been corrected, the dedication score does not have the value that a manuscript made for his own use would have.”  [NBA Krit. Ber. p. 12.]  This would mean that the dedication score is “authorized” (i.e., in Bach’s hand) while not really being “authoritative” (i.e., his intentional definitive presentation of the text)—an interesting distinction—although, as I discussed last month, “definitive” is not the most useful term in such contexts.  The search, then, is for the parent texts from which Bach (carelessly) prepared the dedication score.  That search led Besseler to some manuscript copies made by Christian Friedrich Penzel some ten years after Bach’s death.  Penzel was one of Bach’s very last students—not quite 13 when the old man died in 1750.  As the readings differ a bit from the dedication score (and, as that score would not have been available to Penzel in Leipzig anyway), these sources seem to be a useful point of departure in understanding a “first version”—even if, at best, Penzel’s source postdates Bach’s re-use of some of the material in cantatas (BWV 52, 207, and 207a), and it cannot be regarded as an uncontaminated earliest [i.e., Ur-] text.  Other Leipzig copyists transmit material we associate with the Brandenburg Concertos, but these too are disconnected from the dedication score, and so also likely transmit early readings—most famously, perhaps, the much shorter version of the harpsichord solo in concerto no. 5, transmitted in only one source.  Indeed, that source is eccentric in other ways, for example its description of the concerto as a “Concerto Quadruplo,” elevating the cello into the concertante group:

SOURCE:  Bach Digital, detail of title wrapper for parts of  Concerto no. 5 copied by J. C. Farlau.
To my eye, the word Quadruplo is clearly a later addition, as is the insertion Violoncello Concertato,
but even then it's not clear that both of those are written in the same hand:  look at the r in each.

(The cello part transmitted with that set—but in the hand of yet another copyist—is rather different than the traditional reading, adding it as continuo in the second movement, and doubling or adapting the left-hand harpsichord part in other places.  If you want to see something crazy, look at the first movement, bb. 95ff., where this cello is included with the six-bars of trills from the soloists.)

SOURCE: The Music Parlour blog

The most powerful way to become aware of musical textual variants is to hear them, and no one brought these audibly to our attention more than the short-lived but remarkable English musician and musicologist Thurston Dart.  Already in 1959 he released a recording of the Brandenburgs which was a veritable shot across the bow of conventional musical wisdom.  These recordings—available for download via this interesting post on The Music Parlour blog—seem  to borrow the rhetoric of the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard it said..., but I say unto you....”  You think Bach’s corni da caccia are horns?  Dart says they should be Jagdhörner sounding an octave higher, so he does the first concerto using trumpets instead.  He inserts the slow movement of BWV 1021 to provide the Phrygian half-cadence between the two movements of the third concerto.  It is a provocative recording.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Dart wasn’t finished with the Brandenburgs.  He prepared an version for the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields for their 1971 recording, conducted by Neville Marriner.  (Although the Phillips release refers to “Dart’s edition” it was never published in score. Perhaps “version” or “reading” is a more accurate term?)  Here again the same I’ll-show-you spirit prevails in Dart’s interpretations of the evidence, and the album cover has the audacious claim “FIRST VERSION—FIRST RECORDING.”  He follows Penzel's text for the first concerto, so that the third movement is gone, as is the polonaise (both appear in an appendix) and the accompaniment to the horns in Trio II is a rather different unison line for strings rather than oboes.  In this recording the corni da caccia parts of the first concerto are restored to the horns in their usual octave, but the tromba of the second concerto is allocated to the horn rather than the trumpet, down an octave, no longer at the very top of the texture.  His evidence for this is a copyist’s part annotated (by whom?) “ô vero Corno di caccia”—and this alters the soundscape in a remarkable way.

Dart expended a lot of scholarly energy on Bach’s description Fiauti d’Echo in the fourth concerto:

SOURCE:  Bach Digital, cropped page scan from the dedication score, f. 38r. 

His conclusion was that these were really flageolets, sounding an octave higher than notated, so that on the 1971 Marriner recording these are performed on sopranino recorders.  You can’t miss them. Much more could be said here, and this issue has generated a literature of its own.

Dart died before the 1971 recordings were issued; he participated as a continuo player in only six movements (including all of Conc. no. 3, including the interpolated movement from BWV 1021).  Although Philips re-released the 1971 Marriner recording on CD at least as late as 1989, these recordings seem utterly unavailable today through newer releases or streaming/download services (other than Concerto no. 4 as part of a 2004 Marriner tribute collection).  I only ran across them because I married into a copy.  Dart’s approach—if not precisely his conclusions—has become much more widely known through the output of his former Cambridge student Christopher Hogwood, who was also always ready to perform a variant for the sheer excitement of hearing something new.  His 1985 recording of the Brandenburgs retains some of Dart’s ideas, as well as some new departures (particularly regarding the choice of instrument for the bass line).  The Dart attitude is clear in Hogwood’s liner notes:

[Bach’s] desire to impress the Margrave with variety above all is apparent, alarmingly in Concerto 1 where the revised version addas a new concertante third movement for the violino piccolo to a work that opens with a strongly ripieno movement; and in Concerto 5, where a harpsichord episode of nineteen bars is inflated out of all proportion to produce what is currently mistermed a ‘cadenza’ of sixty-five bars.  [Notes to Decca 414-187-1, p. 2]

SOURCE:  allmusic.com

How alarming!  How disproportionate!  How tasteless!  Add to this Hogwood’s characterization of the dedication score's “specious authority stemming more from its Dedication and calligraphy than from its value as source material,” and we may perceive that we are receiving Dart’s spirit through Hogwood’s hands.  At every turn he offers something different.  For the first concerto, Hogwood follows Penzel’s text strictly—no violino piccolo, no Allegro 6/8 and no Polonaise.  Marriner had conceded to the 1971 public with an appendix, but Hogwood’s public in 1985 was ready to be shocked by difference.    To differ from Dart he scraps the idea of interpolating a movement from BWV 1021 as a slow movement to Concerto no. 3; he restores alto recorders as the Fiauti d’Echo in no. 4; and the horns and trumpet are back in their usual places (nos. 1 and 2 respectively) at their usual octave.  With admirable restraint—or is it marketing savvy?—he eschews the lengthy harpsichord solo in no. 5 for the more abrupt version.  I can remember hearing this recording of no. 5 on the radio in about 1987, as I was about to shell out some cash for the Brandenburgs.  Hearing the short variant, I recall reacting “Aw, man! No!” and buying Trevor Pinnock’s recording instead.  And—much as I admire Hogwood and his work over the decades—I can’t say I’ve regretted that youthful investment.  As well-played as these recordings are, are they (and Dart’s) not just a little too eccentric to become standards?  As Richard Taruskin wrote thirty years ago, after quoting the same Hogwood passages I quote above,

In his recording, Mr Hogwood has rectified Bach’s lapse by reinstating the original nineteen-bar solo.  Let me suggest that this conglomeration of shallow fireworks and harmonic barbarities, however ‘in proportion’, and however it may conform to the performer’s idea of the stylistic norms of the day, is poor music by any standard, and that by replacing it Bach judged it so.  As a snapshot of Bach the improviser, it has human interest to be sure, but it is unfinished composition at best.  It is amusing to hear it as a once-only curio, but to offer it as a viable substitute for what Bach offered as representative of his best and most fully elaborated work is manifestly to devalue both that work and the critical sensibility that impelled its revision....  I see here the ultimate perversion of the idea of authenticity:  the elevation of what amounts to a rejected draft to the status of a viable alternative—and even a preferable one—because it is earlier, more in keeping with ex post facto historical generalizations, and less demanding on the listener.  [pp. 192f; later included in Text & Act, p. 139]

Indeed, as Taruskin goes on to insist, the label Brandenburg on the Hogwood (and Dart) recordings is false advertising, as that can only be used to describe the texts contained in the dedicatory score.  Certainly those Leipzig copyists would have been mystified if someone requested one of Bach’s Brandenburg works.  Was ist das?  The alternative texts really ought to be called something different.  “Dart’s Brandenburgs” don’t exist.

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.

9. Q & A, but few answers

Two weeks ago, I gave a solo recital—something very unusual for me, as I’m really a musicologist rather than a musician.  Although I am regularly involved in various performance activities—most usually as an accompanist or church musician—I cannot recall any solo recital I have done since my senior recital in college.  Indeed, that event is the impetus for this one, as this recital fell intentionally on the twentieth anniversary of that senior recital, in the same hall, on the same instrument.  I decided it would be a good chance to revisit some of the same repertoire; and as I did I was reminded of how I got bitten by the musical text criticism bug to begin with.  (My hitherto unstated goal in this blog has been “writing about very technical points in a non-techical way,” and I fear the technical details of this post will mean that it necessarily falls short of that goal.  I don’t blame anyone for not bearing with me to the end of this post; nevertheless, it will be for me a stroll down memory lane.)

The central item on both recitals was the same:  J. S. Bach’s Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’ BWV 769—or rather BWV769a, and that brings up the textual point for this post.  The Canonic Variations is a late work, composed in 1746-47 as far as can be determined.  It is transmitted in a number of sources, including two authentic sources—the first edition print (usually allocated the siglum Q, as it will be here) and an autograph manuscript generally described as a fair copy (ditto A).  Both are now freely available on the web.  I have taken the images below from the scans available via the Berlin Staatsbibliothek website (print and autograph), but similar reproductions can be found on Bach Digital and the IMSLP, and other places too.

The relationship between Q and A is not as obvious as one might expect.  It would be reasonable to assume that the fair-copy score came first, and the printed edition later—and, indeed, that the fair-copy score might even have been prepared for the engraver of the print.  In fact these two authentic sources present very different versions of the piece, so that in Wolfgang Schmieder’s Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis we find the version of Q designated as number 769 while the version of A is 769a.  The issue of how Schmieder designated different versions of a work (and the consequences of such designations) deserves another post; some day I’ll come back to it.

Both versions contain five movements, but the sequence and presentation of those movements varies significantly.  (For convenience I will use the abbreviations devised by Walter Emery in his study of the work.)  In A the movements are:

• I.  C8    2-voice canon at the octave in the manuals, chorale cantus firmus in pedal
• II.  C5  2-voice canon at the fifth in the manauls, cantus firmus in pedal
• III.  CF  the cantus firmus in 2-voice inversion canons at the sixth, third, second and ninth, followed by the entire chorale in a stretto coda; the movement starts with three voices, adds an additional voice at the midpoint, and the coda adds two more voices.
• IV.  C7  2-voice canon at the seventh (pedal and left hand), cantus firmus + free cantabile line in the right hand
• V.  CA  2-voice augmentation canon at the octave in the manuals (+ free left hand line), chorale cantus firmus in pedal

A is notated throughout on three staves (conventional for organ music now, but not a default for Bach and his contemporaries).  In Q the movements appear in a different sequence, and are laid out differently:

• I.  C8  on two-stave puzzle notation (giving only the first few notes of the trailing canonic voice)
• II.  C5  ditto
• III.  C7 ditto.  These first three variations fit together on one “opening”—that is two printed pages, the verso of the cover page on the left, the recto of the next sheet on the right.
• IV. CA  in open score (4 staves), requiring two pages—the next “opening” of the print.
• V.  CF on three staves, requiring two pages, the final “opening.”

The BG edition gives only the version of Q (BWV 769), leaving discussion of BWV 769a to the critical commentary.  Largely due to the work of Friedrich Smend, in the first half of the twentieth century the scholarly consensus shifted, and A came to be regarded as the later source—and thus the Fassung letzter Hand [definitive version].  That it has never become the preferred version among performers is probably due to the apparent anticlimax:  the showy stretto which concludes BWV 769 comes at the end of only the third movement of BWV 769a.  (Not that either version is performed all that much!)  Gregory Butler, who has done extensive studies of Bach’s original prints, demonstrates that the first three variations of Q were engraved first (and very likely the only parts of Bach’s original conception of the piece), and that when CF was composed it could not be inserted between them without a considerable waste of labor.  As Bach’s conception of the work changed, he made a virtue of necessity (eventually adding CA), thus producing two very different versions of the same basic material.  By default Q is the more “public” version—that’s what published means, after all.  And it is no surprise that the version of Q was the more widely disseminated version.  We don’t know how many copies of Q were printed, but at least twenty survive now, and the Stemma devised by Hans Klotz for his edition in the NBA indicates many manuscript copies derived from the print.  See the tree on the left side—although, as my pencil scrawl indicates, “O” on the left is a very unfortunate typo—it surely must be Q; the “O” listed on the lower right is an entirely different source, transmitting BWV 769a.  (There are other problems with this Stemma not worth going into here.)

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Kritischer Bericht for NBA Ser. IV Bd. 2, ed. Hans Klotz (1957), p. 88.

It may seem odd to copy out printed works by hand, but in the centuries before photocopiers it was extremely common.  In this work it was particularly necessary, as the puzzle notation of the first three variations of Q would make them virtually unplayable without realizing them in notation.  Some of the manuscripts descending from Q (Klotz’s J4, E1, and B2, for example) transmit only movements that needed to be realized.  Thus rather than being bootleg manuscript copies of an out-of-print or otherwise inaccessible piece, these might have been used along side a copy of Q to play the complete work.

There are a plentitude of textual differences between Q and A, in and his comprehensive studies of this work Butler also convincingly argues that the very concept of a “definitive” version is meaningless in this piece.  Butler’s chronology is essentially this:

1. Initial conception:  C8, C5, and C7 composed and subsequently engraved.  Indeed, these seem at first to have been engraved without even indicating (beyond the signum S) the incipits of the canonic entries:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots of Q as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN614768373, pp. 4 and 5.

Especially in variations 2 and 3 the incipits have been crowded in with the utmost awkwardness.  Butler suggests that these might have intended to look more like the puzzle notation of Bach's other published canons, lacking any incipits at all, but that these were added as the concept of the work shifted.

2.  A new phase:  possibly inspired by his work on BWV 1087 (the fourteen extra canons based on the first eight notes of the bassline of the Goldberg Variations), Bach employed the chorale tune itself canonically, thus producing the series of 4 canons + stretto that make up CF.  At this point Bach started writing out a clean copy of the work—A—placing this new variation before the cantabile C7.  It is possible, indeed, that he considered the work complete after writing out C7, as he drew some final flourishes after the double bar at that point:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of A as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN812577051, p. 106.  The three flourishes which I have encircled in red) appear only at the end of the fourth variation (C7).

If one were pursuing “definitive” readings, this would suggests that variants readings contained in A would supercede those in Q for C8, C5, C7, and CF, as A is the later source for these movements.  Certainly Bach was making revisions even as he was preparing A, a source which Butler notes combines the characteristics of a composing score, a clean copy, and a revised copy.  For example, in C7 bb. 6-7, Butler posits a revised reading that initially appeared in A, subsequently modified, but faintly visible now:

SOURCES:  composite cropped screenshots of Q and A (as above) with my transcription from Butler B-Jb 2000, p. 18.

3.  The final phase:  despite the apparent final flourishes that conclude C7 in A, Bach revisited the work to produce CA, the most complex of the canons.  While this could be put nowhere but the end in A, in Q it could be placed either at the end or in between C7 and CF.  Butler has demonstrated that CA was certainly the last to be engraved, and analysis of the variant readings supports the argument that Q is the later source for this movement.  Walter Emery had raised this possibility some fifty years ago (without the benefit of Butler’s meticulous study of the printing of Q):

As a performer, I had to commit myself to one version or the other.  (As Susan Hellauer once memorably expressed it, “You can't sing a footnote.”)  I opted in this recital for the version of A basically using the text as printed in the NBA, but with a few alterations imported from the critical report (and a fistfull of wrong notes scattered here and there, too).  Scholars don’t have to commit, though, and as Werner Breig puts it in his new edition of the work for Breitkopf,

What is an appropriate type of close?  Whether it is a contrapuntal concentration such as the six-part stretto or a canon in augmentation that points beyond itself, so to speak, through the unfinished canonic imitation in one part—Bach would certainly not have wanted to commit himself to any particular solution. (p. 20)

Moreover, as Bach’s habit of not commiting himself was so pervasive throughout his career—and Bach editions in the last three centuries have had to deal with some perplexing variants—with this post I am launching a

For the first post of each month from now through November 2017 (approximating the liturgical year that generated Bach’s own Jahrgänge of cantatas in his first years in Leipzig) I will deal with some textual issue relating to the works of J. S. Bach.  While the quantity of text-critical work that has been done on Bach cannot rival that done on Shakespeare (still less the Bible), it is a massive body of literature and editions.  Needless to say there is no shortage of things to talk about—and I hope that these posts won’t be as tedious as this one might have been.

8. The right tools for the job

Although it isn’t unusual to find players disregarding a composer’s instructions about what instrument to use—frequently the specified instrument simply is not available—it is profoundly irritating to find editions that beat the player to it.  An example of this is the supposedly scholarly edition of Bizet’s Carmen edited by Fritz Oeser (Alkor [Bärenreiter], 1964), where the parts Bizet wrote for cornets-à-pistons are labelled trumpet instead:

SOURCE:  scan of Oeser ed., p. 1 (detail, with emphasis added)

I say “supposedly scholarly”:  the use of trumpets is the least of this edition’s faults—and some of these will certainly feature in future posts.  In any case,  Winton Dean made this point fifty years ago, demonstrating that the Oeser edition “goes disastrously off the rails” from sound editorial practice (p. 284).  Dean also remarks on the trumpet/cornet issue, pointing out that this mis-allocation had already happened in the Peters edition edited by Kurt Soldan (on the IMSLP here) although at least Soldan had the courtesy to add “Pistons” parenthentically underneath.

The instruments are regarded as interchangeable, probably because the cornet  (properly with accent on the first syllable, which makes it easily distinguished from the cornett) is virtually an endangered species, particularly in the USA.  A hundred years ago it was the other way around, and the trumpet seems to have taken over in the 1920s (with perhaps the coup de grâce being Louis Armstrong’s conversion to trumpet).  Thus we find Cecil Forsyth, writing in his Orchestration (1914/rev. 1935):

We must not forget that the contempt which is usually bestowed on the Cornet by those who have never heard it properly played is mainly a contempt because it cannot equal or beat the Trumpet in Trumpet passages.  These simple and straightforward phrases were always consciously designed by the old masters to produce their somewhat oppressive effect by the mere weight of the instrument’s tone.  In course of time we have come to associate that type of tone with that type of passage. (p. 107)

Erring on the side of oversimplification, the conical cornet is a melody instrument; the cylindrical trumpet is a rhythmic instrument, with a tone better able to cut through an ensemble.  To best illustrate the timbral difference between conical and cylindrical brass I suggest this performance of the piece we usually call “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” (from BWV 147) by the German Brass.  The arranger has cleverly divided the ensemble into a two distinct consorts.  For most of this arrangement, the 4-part chorale is played by cylindrical instruments (one trumpet and three trombones), while the rest is played by conical instruments (two flugelhorns, two horns, tuba—although at a two points a piccolo trumpet joins in, and in the final measures everyone is playing together).

Here is a handy diagram, from Anthony Baines’s Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (1992), which compares the profile of several brass instruments, although it warrants a few comments below.

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Baines, p. 43 (entry:  Brass instruments). 
Baines does not clarify this, but this diagram must assume that no valves are depressed, nor is the trombone slide extended; 
V then would indicate the passage through the valve section of the instrument, but not diverted through the crooks the valves would engage.  
Otherwise the proportions don't make sense, as (for example) nos. 4 and 5 at their full length would be much closer to #1.

A mountain out of a molehill?  Profiles 4 and 5 do not appear vastly different from each other.  Indeed, but the modern B-flat trumpet is significantly shorter—and thus proportionally more conical—than its predecessors in the Renaissance and Baroque, and indeed even down to the early twentieth century.  The old valved F trumpet of the late Romantic orchestra (an instrument which will figure in a later post) really would sound noticeably different from today’s ubiquitous B-flat, as the F trumpet has a narrower bore and is about half-again as long.  (Its profile would most resemble #1 in Baines’s diagram, although a little shorter.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard one live, although it can be heard on some of the recordings of the (new) New Queen’s Hall Orchestra; otherwise it is essentially extinct.)  If Bizet had been asking for trumpets in Carmen, he would have been expecting something of that sort—not the instrument we see and hear today.

Note that profile 6 above is only the shorter portion of the standard “double” horn today (F/B-flat); the F side would extend off well to the right, and would thus be proportionally more cylindrical.  For orchestral horns, the principle that the longer the instrument is the more cylindrical its profile has always been true:  even before valves, with the crooks players would use to change the key of the instrument, the low crooks produce a very different sound from the high crooks.  Listen, for example, to these recordings of the opening chorus of Bach's cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen (BWV 65) with either C alto or C basso horns:

• C alto:  Gabrieli Consort (dir. Paul McCreesh)
• C basso:  Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (dir. Ton Koopman)

It isn’t just the pitch, but the whole timbre of the instrument that is changed.  At the extreme:  the shortest horns of which I am aware are the E-flat alto horns in Mozart’s K. 132 (the higher pair of two pairs of horns), which make a very round, bugle-ish sound.

In the ensembles that put pairs of cornets and trumpets together—as so often in French nineteenth-century literature, or in military band music—one may frequently find composers observing a distinction between the writing appropriate for one or the other.  Thus in his wind band piece Sea Songs, Ralph Vaughan Williams neatly distinguishes between cornet solos and trumpet solos, and (as below) demonstrates how to keep trumpet punctuation from overwhelming cornet lyricism, while still sometime needing either instrument to function as the other:

SOURCE:  scan of Sea Songs full score (Boosey & Co, "corrected edition 1991"), pp. 20-21 (composite details)

Likewise, Emamanuel Chabrier knew when to let the trumpets do the heavy lifting in a thick texture, relegating the horns and cornets to filling in the harmonies:

SOURCE:  scan of pp. 112-13 of 1997 Dover reprint of 1884 first edition of España (composite details; accolade added)

Working on this post got me wondering of any instances where a composer calls for a player to switch between the two instruments.  It seems like an obvious expedient, but it is curiously rare.  The published full score of Bernstein’s Candide reveals that for the Parisian waltz the first trumpet player takes up the cornet (an allusion, perhaps, to the showy cornet part that Berlioz added to the Valse of his Symphonie Fantastique?)  In the last movement (Marcia funebre) of Bartók’s Four Orchestral Pieces, op. 12, the four trumpet players switch back and forth between trumpets and cornets, although it would be hard to demonstrate that he is absolutely consistent with the sort of idiom he gives to one or the other instrument.  

But in other instances where one might expect such a practice, it just doesn’t happen.  In Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, for example, the fanfares which begin the chorus “Loudly let the trumpet bray” are played by cornets, Sullivan’s default in the Savoy Theatre orchestra.  (Like Bizet’s Opéra Comique, this may have been a balance issue more than anything else; when Sullivan wrote his grand opera Ivanhoe, he called for trumpets—and even a Wagnerian bass trumpet.)  Seldom do I hear cornets in performances of the Savoy operas.  The rare cornet solo does strike my ear as odd on the trumpet, though.  Compare the solo in the overture of The Pirates of Penzance (by Sullivan's assistant, Alfred Cellier) in these two performances, one with trumpet (at least to my ear, although the player is trying to compensate with a fair bit of vibrato) and the other with cornet.  I note that the Kalmus score (apparently scored from parts) gives no indications that the cornet was what Sullivan had in his ensemble:

SOURCE:  scan of undated Kalmus full score of The Pirates of Penzance, p. 3 (detail)

I started this post remarking on performers disregarding the instructions of a composer, and have given a few examples of editors doing it.  I have been wondering if we could imagine an editor imposing cornet where a composer wrote trumpet?  Has this ever been done—outside of brass band transcriptions?  I can think of a place where I’d like to do it:  the “Tango-Pasodoblé” movement of Walton’s Façade.

SOURCE:  scan of William Walton Edition vol. 7, Façade Entertainments, p. 42 (detail)

This seems to my ear to be begging for a cornet (with its quotation of “I do like to be beside the seaside”), but Walton’s tiny ensemble calls for trumpet.  Changing that is the sort of liberty a conductor is free to do, but not an editor.

7. On second thought

In the Christian liturgical calendar, today is All Saints’ Day, which prompts me to consider small textual point about a hymntune that will be much in use today in Anglican services.  Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his tune SINE NOMINE for the text “For all the saints who from their labors rest” as a processional hymn in The English Hymnal (1906), for which he served as music editor.  This book revolutionized the music of Anglo-American hymnody, incorporating a wealth of traditions (chorales, Genevan Psalms, plainchant, folk music) into a new mainstream.  In addition to many hymn arrangements of folk tunes, Vaughan Williams contributed a several original tunes to the book.  SINE NOMINE is probably RVW's best known hymntune, but there are a handful of other contenders for that distinction.  

Some fifty years after the fact, RVW described his work on the hymnal partly as one of purging the Victorian hymntune repertory:

Whilst trying to include all the good tunes, I did my best to eliminate the bad ones.  This was difficult, because I was not entirely my own master.  My committee insisted that certain very popular tunes should be retained.  The climax came when my masters declared that I must myself write a fulsome letter to a prominent ecclesiastic asking for leave to print his horrible little tune.  My committee and I finally settled our quarrel with a compromise by which the worst offenders were confined to an appendix at the end of the book, which we nicknamed the “Chamber of Horrors.”  (p. 3)

In his preface to the volume itself he is somewhat more restrained:  “...a short appendix is added of alternative tunes to certain hymns for the use of those who do not agree with the choice of the musical editor.”  (p. xii).  Joseph Barnby's tune for "For all the saints" was clearly one not to RVW's taste, as it is confined to the Appendix.  Charles Villiers Stanford's stirring tune ENGELBURG (1904) was under copyright in the new edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern, and thus not available for The English Hymnal.  So Vaughan Williams wrote his own.

Below on the left is the beginning of the hymn as it appeared in the first edition.  The hymnal appeared in a second edition in 1933, and the image on the right is how it appears there.  Ignore the difference in formatting:  the textual variant is bb. 4-6.

Source:  cropped digital scans (600 dpi) of (L) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826; and (R) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1933 ed., p. 832.

The harmony of b. 4 is identical (tonic) in both versions, but in the later edition the walking bassline of the pedal is changed in order to accommodate a new harmony (V/V) in b. 5.  This, in turn, allows a suspended E on the downbeat of b. 6, resolving back to the 1906 text in the middle of that measure.

I have wondered about this passage for years.  This hymn is always in the service when I am on the organ bench on All Saints’ Day—or on the Sunday nearest to it.  It appears in many American hymnals, some with the 1906 text (as I first came to know it), and some with the revised text.  Why and when was the change made?

It is hard to date when it was changed, but earliest example I have found with the revised reading is another hymnal which RVW edited, namely Songs of Praise (OUP) which appeared first in 1925:

Source:   cropped digital scan Songs of Praise (OUP) 1925, p. 162.

If anyone can locate this reading in any printing of the first edition of The English Hymnal, I would be eager to know about it.  (A number of separate pamphlets of hymns from The English Hymnal were published over the years, including one in 1921 that included “For all the Saints.”  The only copy I have located is in the British Library, and for this post I haven't been able to check the reading there.  Perhaps the alteration was made at that time?)  Hymns are often the victims of cavalier and arbitrary musical alterations, as often the music editors of a hymnal are not really editors at all; at least in this instance, where Vaughan Williams was the musical editor and this is his own hymn tune, we can rule out the arbitrary and cavalier as a factors.

As to why the change was made, I can only suggest a possible reason.  Over the first notes of the hymn are instructions:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826.

Verses 4-6 are given a four-part harmony setting:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 828.

There we note that the “original” harmony is used for bb. 5-6, and that all that is lacking of the original in b. 4 is  the walking bass of the organ pedal line.  My suggestion is that, as this harmonization would appear in three verses already, RVW made an alteration for the other five just for the sake of variety.  I can’t prove it, and I’ve never been convinced that is an improvement.  But while I’m on the subject of this alternate four-part setting, I think the counterpoint for the Alleluyas is gorgeous, the tenor line in particular:

Source:  ditto

Here is a performance from York Minster; it uses the 1906 reading through verse 7.  At verse 8, the revised reading is used.  I’ll remember that idea the next time it is on the service list when I am on the bench.

6. ex silentio

I found this score on my shelves a few months ago.  I’m not sure when or where I got it.

SOURCE:  cropped scan (600 dpi) of p. 1; Edition Peters no. 4894 (Pl no. 30053), pub. 1959.

Although this appeared as recently as 1959, it is—as the note says—the first time this work was published in score.  It was published in parts by Artaria in March 1785.  As with many Haydn symphonies, the autograph score is lost.  Here, from H. C. Robbins Landon’s monumental tome on Haydn’s symphonies, is a list of the autographs whose whereabouts were known at that time (1955):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Landon, The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn, pp. 27-28

Comparing this list with those volumes of JHW (the critical complete edition) devoted to his symphonies, one recognizes a cautious editorial strategy:  works which existed in autograph comprised those symphony volumes that appeared in the 1960s and 70s, and (the “London” symphonies excepted) the rest have waited as much as four decades to see publication.  (That said, even in 1955 Landon’s list wasn’t quite accurate:  Landon lists symphonies 98, 99, and 101 as being in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, but these three were actually part of the “lost” cache of scores hidden by the Nazis that ended up eventually in Krakow; they were not returned to Berlin until the 1980s.  Nigel Lewis’s journalistic account of this, Paperchase, is excellent beach reading, and at the moment there are a few cheap secondhand copies on abebooks.com.)

To return to Symphony 79:  when I found this score on my shelf, I had just acquired an excellent new recording of this symphony.  I was home one day when the kids were out at lunchtime, so I set the score on the table and put on the disc.  I hadn’t even taken a bite before I was interrupted by a textual discrepancy.  Here is the whole of the first page in Lassen’s edition:

SOURCE:  as above, less cropped

What arrested my sandwich halfway to my open mouth was the last half of bar 4.  In Lassen’s edition, there is a brief silence here before the next phrase, but on the recording I heard a horn playing the dominant on repeated eight-notes.  That isn’t really my story here:  I think this is a straightforward error in transcription, although I don't have adequate resources on hand to tell whether the error was already in Lassen’s sources or was new in his edition.

Here are the horn parts of the first few bars in a composite, comparing Lassen’s edition with the only other two (scpreditions this work has yet received—the Philharmonia edition which followed it by a few years, edited by H. C. Robbins Landon, and the much more recent JHW:

Although I think it is clearly an error, the rest at the end of bar 4 is plausible:  there is such a silence in the recapitulation at b. 105, although in that instance the next phrase is given in the parallel minor.

SOURCE:  Landon's edition, because Lassen has a page-turn that would obscure my point.

Nonetheless, the other similar passage is a false recapitulation (at b. 68) which has the repeated eighth-notes in place, this time allotted to the violas. Very unlikely, however, is Lassen’s reading in b. 5, in which the repeated figure in Horn II makes no sense.

Lassen lists only two sources, but gives no detail about how these were used, nor any variant readings:

By the time of the Philharmonia edition, Landon had to hand four sources, although he explicitly excludes the two that had been used by Lassen:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Critical Commentary to Landon's edition, vol. 8, p. LXVI, with my emphasis added.

Landon does not mention Lassen’s edition, and it is possible that he had not seen it.  The JHW editors jump to a different conclusion, however, because of editorial adjustments in other passages which agree in both the Lassen and the Landon editions:  post hoc ergo propter hoc, JHW surmises [p. 290 and n. 263] that Landon not only knew it but indeed used it for his working copy (that is, a copy of a prior edition marked up with any changes to be made in a new edition, saving the effort of writing out the score anew).

But I think they are wrong on this point:  Landon could very easily have devised the same editorial adjustments that Lassen had reasonably made.  Moreover, editors always go out of their way to point out how their edition is better than their predecessors.  Landon doesn’t mention bar 4 at all in his commentary; JHW does mention bar 4, but has nothing to say about Horn II.  I argue from silence here, but it seems clear to me that neither of them ever noticed the erroneous reading that Lassen transmitted in b. 4.  If they had, they would have told us.

Lassen’s edition is not an authoritative source, and there’s no reason that either Landon or JHW needed to consult it.  Clearly JHW did consult it, and I submit that the lack of a comment on b. 4 suggests that they did not do the due diligence required to make the assertion that Landon had cut some editorial corners.  The silence is telling.