15. A Bach family playlist

which is the fourth installment of the Settling Scores

A few weeks before the birth of my first child, I self-centeredly started compiling some playlists.  What music could I share with this new creature?  I knew all along that part of my motive was really to accustom him or her to the music I liked, or at least avoid overexposure to music I didn’t like.  We managed to avoid most of the baby toys that play music, although I remember a music box mobile on the Pack ’n[’] Play that had an infuriatingly incompetent harmonization of “Rock-a-bye baby.”  I used that in class to see if my students could transcribe and critique it.  Truly horrible, but at least it was worth something.

A few of my playlists were intended for bedtime and even to leave playing after Gentle Morpheus had sped his airy flight hither.  Although all sorts of pieces came to mind, one of the challenges of nineteenth-century repertoire was that many pieces that would have been perfect restful music otherwise had a loud outburst at some point.  (That disqualified the slow movement of Beethoven’s 9th, for example, as I feared the fanfares about three quarters of the way through would rouse a snoozing baby.  And for a similar reason I had to edit the applause off of the ending of a track of the Oscar Peterson Trio playing “In the wee small hours of the morning.”)  Still, there was plenty to choose from.  I suspect that my children’s familiarity with Dowland’s solo lute repertoire is probably excessive, and I wonder if in later life a lute recital would put them to sleep.  I hope not.

There was a good bit of Bach on the lullaby playlists, which gradually accumulated more and more items over the years.  One of the first items to be included was the aria “Schlummert ein” from Bach's cantata “Ich habe genung,” BWV 82.  This aria is to me the ideal musical manifestation of solace; listening to it I feel like Bach is gently cradling me in his arms.  (Hear a performance of it here.)  Of course the text is not about sleep at all, but points instead beyond the grave.  And he had stood at the graves of many of his loved ones, and fully half of his children.

Slumber on, you tired eyes,
Close softly and blessedly!
     World, I remain no longer here
     And take no more part in you
     That can serve my soul.
Slumber on, etc.
     Here I endure suffering,
     But there I shall see
     Sweet peace, quiet rest.
Slumber on, etc.

It was in the course of reading totally unrelated to all of this that I stumbled across a reference to a version of this aria found in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, where it is appears—twice!—in her hand.  This detail spurred me to look more at that source—a source that was very different from what I had assumed.  Indeed, brought up in piano lessons playing selections from “AMB,” I didn’t realize that there were actually two AMB notebooks—1722 and 1725—and that they are rather different from each other.  (As Robert L. Marshall put it, the first book seems to be compiled for AMB, while the second is compiled by AMB.)  Although selections from the AMB repertory have been published many times and in many forms, even in the Neue Bach Ausgabe the presentation of these collections is still a bit misleading.  Both books are included intact in the fourth volume of NBA Serie V, the series encompassing “Klavier- und Lautenwerke” [“works for keyboard and for lute”]  The title for this particular volume (edited by Georg von Dadelsen) is “Die Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach (1722 und 1725).” 

Indeed, Clavier-Büchlein [“little keyboard book”] appears on the title page of the 1722 collection (hereafter AMB1), as it had also for the 1720 collection Bach made for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann (hereafter WFB).  

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the title page of the AMB1, from Bach-Digital.  (This seems to be AMB's decorative script.)

There is no title page for the 1725 collection (hereafter AMB2).  Might that be significant?  (There is no evidence in the structure of gatherings to suggest that such a page is lost.)  AMB2 differs markedly from the others, both of which are limited to keyboard music. 

For AMB2, Notenbuch (notebook)—the term used in the old BG edition (and in all of the practical editions I have glanced at)—is much more apt than the NBA’s imposition of Klavierbüchlein.  First, the contents are more varied, with a substantial number of vocal works in addition to both large and small keyboard works.  The 67 leaves remaining in the notebook (with evidence that 8 leaves have at some point been removed) comprise more than fifty items:

1)  four multi-movement keyboard works by JSB:  early versions of two Partitas (BWV 827 and 830) in the composer’s hand; early on Anna Magdalena copied the first two French Suites (BWV 812 and 813), although the second breaks off in the middle of the third movement.

2)  a melange of short keyboard works by various composers (almost invariably without attribution), including nine menuets (the one made [in]famous as “A Lover's Concerto” turns out to be by C. F. Petzold), six polonaises, three marches, the C major prelude from WTC bk. I, the “Aria” theme of the Goldberg Variations (in AMB’s hand, and possibly copied from the now lost autograph of the Variations),  a rondeau by F. Couperin (unattributed; and not merely a copy, but with the left-hand figuration adjusted somewhat), a sketched rigoudon apparently by Johann Christian Bach, and an ornamented setting of “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten” (BWV 691), copied by AMB from WFB, and so much taken over into the Bach organ repertory that it appears also in the NBA volumes of individually transmitted organ chorales (Serie IV Bd. 3).  Among these are four pieces now attributed to C.P.E. Bach (including a familiar Marche in D Major, BWV Anh. 122), which appear also in the new C. P. E. Bach:  The Complete Works, classified as Juvenilia (in I.8.2).  Compiling his own catalog of keyboard works in 1772, C.P.E. remarks “I have suppressed all works before the year 1733, because they were too youthful.”  He is too harsh. This is a good tune:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 115 of C.P.E. Bach:  The Complete Works, Ser. I Vol. 8.2, Miscellaneous Keyboard Works II, ed. Peter Wollny.

3)  A number of vocal works:  probably the most famous of all is the song “Bist du bei mir,” but in addition to the recitative and aria from BWV 82 with which this post began (and to which I will return), the rather frivolous “Aria di G[i]ovannini,” the contemplative smoking song “So oft ich meine Tobackspfeife,” and several spiritual songs and chorales not dissimilar to those of the Schmelli Gesangbuch (1736).  (Indeed, one of these—“Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen”(BWV 452, but cf. BWV 299)—appears in Schmelli’s collection in a negligibly different form.)

4) Finally there is a nuptial poem in AMB’s hand (“of rather dubious taste” is Marshall's assessment) and two sets of rules regarding figured bass, 

Moreover, the accumulation of material in the source itself involved at least eight hands.  The bulk of the material appears in the hand of AMB herself (whose notation is memorably described by Spitta as “without a trace of feminine ineptitude” [“ohne eine Spur weiblicher Ungeübtheit”]—the ultimate chauvinist compliment).  JSB has a much more limited role (discussed below), and the other six hands include AMB’s sons Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, as well as her stepson C.P.E.  Two of the anonymous scribes (designated by Kobayashi as Anon. L23 and Anon. L24) apparently appear only in this source.  I speculate:  could these be among JSB’s daughters?  Certainly the book seems reserved for the intimates of the family, as the other known hand is that of Bernhard Dietrich Ludewig (in just one item, the tobacco “aria”); Ludewig was a Bach pupil who acted as tutor to the younger children as well, and that familiarity might explain his appearance here.  

AMB2 seems to have taken a much longer time than AMB1 or WFB to fill up.  Only five blank pages remain, mainly scattered among the last 30 pages.  Like Bach’s other manuscript collections, it is evident that whole sections of pages were originally left blank so that additional items could be added later (although in WFB and the Orgelbüchlein the staves were drawn on the all the pages, where in AMB2 they were not).  Consequently the sequence of items presented in such a collection is not generally an indication of the order in which they were notated in that source, and AMB’s handwriting evolved enough during the years that it the NBA editor (Georg von Dadelson) was able to conclude which items were late entries in her hand.

In AMB2, J. S. Bach’s contribution is limited:  the first 41 pages present two of the partitas (BWV 827 and 830) in his hand, but thereafter his hand appears only a few times.  Here he copied out a menuet by “Mons. Böhm.”  (Is this his one-time Luneburg teacher Georg Böhm?  David Schulenburg mentioned the possibility of one Johann Michael Böhm, who was Telemann’s brother-in-law, but deleted that suggestion in his second edition.) This is often among those pieces young piano students learn.

SOURCE:  scan of AMB2 p. 70 (f. 35v) from Bach-Digital.

This is one of the few items in AMB2 to bear an attribution, so it has long been known not to be by Bach himself.  In many editions (up to the present day) the rest of the contents are tacitly or explicitly attributed to Bach even when this is now known not to be the case.  The famous “aria” Bist du bei mir (which appears in Anna Magdalena’s late hand) is not by Bach, but since 1915 has been known to be the work of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel--a musician clearly held in high regard by JSB, who apparently used an entire cycle of his cantatas in Leipzig in 1735-36, and possibly more.  I would be eager to hear more of his work, although it seems that a large portion has been lost.

SOURCE:  scan of AMB2 pp. 75 (f. 38r) and 78 (39v) from Bach-Digital.

 A curious aspect of AMB2—and again differentiating it from both AMB1 and WFB—is the number of works that appear more than once in different versions, generally one right after the other.  Sometimes these are transpositions with other slight differences.  The chorale “Gib dich zufrieden,” BWV 511 appears again immediately below as BWV 512, transposed down a minor third—and both in JSB's hand.  The smoking song (BWV 515) appears first—or at least on the verso side, although that need not be first—in Ludewig's hand and without lyrics; it appears on the facing recto as a collaboration of AMB (melody, transposed up a fourth, and with the first stanza of lyrics) and JSB (slightly different bass line). Without the lyrics one might have assumed this piece was just a menuet; indeed, maybe it was originally, and the lyrics were only inserted after the fact—that the anonymous text existed independently of AMB2 is clear from Telemann’s (earlier?) setting of the same text (TWV 36:142).  

Most curious of all, however, is “Schlummert ein.”  It appears twice—not in immediate succession, but with intervening pages.  Both appearances are the work of AMB, in her younger hand and the transposition for both is consistent with “second version” of the cantata (catalogued in the Bach Compendium as A169b, dating from the early 1730s)  The first appearance includes the recitative, which is complete although unfigured.  (The first few notes of the bass line bear traces of corrections: evidence of transposition errors?)  Following this is the aria, although the ritornelli have been omitted so that only the vocal portions remain; and although AMB provided a staff for a bassline, she left it blank.  At some point, however, someone sketched in a bassline in the first three bars:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of AMB2 p. 105 (f. 53v) from Bach-Digital.

This bassline seems to have been newly composed, as it was not copied or transposed from the cantata itself—or if it was, it was done incompetently.  In any case, it does not continue.

Several pages later the aria appears a second time, although this time AMB did not finish the copy.  The vocal line breaks off midway through bar 60 (at the end of a page); the unfigured bassline breaks off after 28 bars.  It seems likely to me that it was added in later, as it too breaks off at a page-turn:  waiting for the ink to dry before turning the page, she was needed elsewhere and never completed the project.  (Similarly, I wondered, are the five missing appoggiaturas in her first copy merely a sign of a practical notational issue?  That is, might she have used a different pen-nib for the appoggiaturas, so that there was a reason to leave space and move on, coming back to fill them in later? I don’t know the Bach literature well enough to know if this has been explored, nor have I seen it discussed in other eighteenth-century sources.)  [On the image on the left, the vertical blemish in the middle of my red circle where the appoggiatura ought to be does not seem to be an erasure—and there is no such blemish in the other four instances.]

SOURCE:  cropped scans of "Schlummert ein" b. 40 in AMB2 p. 108 (f. 55r) [with absent appoggiatura highlighted] and 113 (f. 59v) from Bach-Digital.

So why is this aria entered twice, neither time complete?  Why write it out a second time rather than finish the first?  And how useful would they be without the bass?  (It doesn’t really matter that it isn’t figured, as the harmonies are intuitive.  I had no problem playing a passable version at sight—at least until the bass ran out.)  Was the bass not needed here because it could be read off of a separate part?  (It might be needed in the recitative to help keep the singer and continuo together, but less essential in the aria with its metrical predictablity.)  Was the bassline added to the first three bars of the first copy a pedagogical exercise for one of the children?  And does the presence of the aria here indicate a favorite of AMB’s (who never got to sing it in church), or of one of the trebles of the family?  It raises many more questions than it answers, even if it is a fascinating glimpse into domestic music-making chez Bach.  For nineteenth-century commentators, this glimpse seems to have been voyeuristic, and their writings tend to emphasize the pious contents and downplay the vulgar.

But taking it altogether, this family album is a sort of playlist—not exactly the sort I was compiling for my own family, but in its patchwork assembly still more akin to a playlist than any other of JSB’s collections.  Indeed, AMB2 really isn’t one of Bach’s collections:  his was the primary hand in the compiling of WFB and AMB1, but not this one.  The overlap between these collections suggests some particular favorites.  Although no one work appears in all three, a number of pieces appear in two of the books—in each case in different hands:

WFB and AMB1:  BWV 841 (a menuet—possibly an early work of Wilhelm Friedemann?)
WFB and AMB2:  BWV 691 (an ornamented chorale); and BWV 846 (the first prelude of WTC1)
AMB1 and AMB2:  BWV 812 and 813 (“French” Suites nos. 1 and 2, albeit incomplete)

Did other Bach family collections exist that have since been lost?  I wonder what further oddities and intimacies they might have contained.  Not that it is any of our business....

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.

13. The best and worst of amateurism

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

Having discussed descriptive and prescriptive notation in my last post, I find an opportunity to explore an example (and which is it supposed to be?) relating to Bach.  Here is a surprising recent publication:

SOURCE:  Anthony Tommasini, "Glenn Gould's Every Detail.  But Why?" nyt.com (June 1, 2016)

This curious edition presents two texts of the “Goldberg” Variations on facing pages throughout.  The left-hand [verso] pages are labelled “Original Version,” while the right-hand [recto] pages are labelled “Gould’s 1981 Version.”  I reproduce an extract of the beginning of Var. 29 below, although with the twin texts arranged here vertically rather than horizontally just to be more legible in the blog medium:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 146-147 of Hopkins, ed., Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations.

From what I can tell, Hopkins’s transcription of Gould’s 1981 performance is impressive, even if it leaves me with some questions.  (In the example above, what distinction does Hopkins intend between Bach’s triplet notation and his transcription of Gould’s performances as sextuplets? I found no explanation of this idiosyncracy, and the only thing I can imagine from it is that Gould’s performance downplays the half-beat.)   This project was clearly a labor of love for Hopkins, and the right-hand pages thus reveal the very best of amateurism—doing something for the love of it, going far beyond what might be asked or imagined.

It is the left-hand pages that leave me disturbed.  Even just the use of the word version for both the “original” (and I’m coming back to that word in a minute, too) and the performance troubles me.  I would have favored different words—maybe “text” for what Gould read, and “interpretation” for what he played.  Granted, the interpretation is filtered through Hopkins’s interpretation into score.  Whatever.  There would be great value in comparing what Gould had studied with what he played.  Of the text Gould used, Hopkins asserts that it was the 1938 G. Schirmer edition prepared by Ralph Kirkpatrick:

“We know that Gould used the Kirkpatrick edition, and only this edition, because three copies of this edition are presently housed in the Glenn Gould Archive (the official repository for Gould’s archives) in the National Library of Canada (NLC).  On the basis of Gould’s editorial markings in these scores (or lack of markings), each copy was seemingly used by him at various points in his career for various purposes.” [p. 10]

Hopkins suggests that one of these three copies (“almost entirely free of markings, such as fingerings, articulations, dynamics and tempos”) was likely the one that Gould used as he learned the work prior to the 1955 recording, and informs us that some pages have gone missing; a second copy seems to be a “reference score during the post-production process for the 1981 recording.”  (I wondered if it is a more recent printing; Hopkins doesn’t give any such information, still less any shelf-mark or locating information.)  The third copy, also incomplete but with very neat and comprehensive fingerings added for the aria and the first eight variations, belonged to Gould’s girlfriend during his conservatory years.  Hopkins concludes

“The relevance of the three copies of this edition is that they show Gould had little concern with the quality of editions that he used over the course of his career.  There is no evidence that he ever researched or consulted other editions for the purpose of critical analysis.” [p. 10]

And yet a page later Hopkins quotes Kevin Bazzana discussing films made immediately after the 1981 recording saying “in [NLC] videotape no. 50A, [Gould] can be seen with the 1979 [recte 1978?] Henle edition of the score.”  Well, what was he doing with that?  Is that not evidence—at least circumstantial, if not an actual smoking gun—of Gould “consulting” another edition?  And I noticed an instance (Var. 26, b. 14, 2nd beat, middle voice) where the note Gould plays in 1981 (D) is in the Henle text and NOT in the Kirkpatrick text (which has E; in 1955 he had played E).  As Hopkins uses these tapes to determine Gould’s fingering as best he can (and an impressive job it seems to be), clearly he deems the videos relevant to the 1981 audio recording.

If a facing-page edition is going to have some value, the facing pages need to relate to each other.  I can imagine two ways that this might have been done:  1) on the left-hand pages, provide a transcription of Gould’s 1955 recording, so that the two performances might be compared, or 2) on the left-hand pages, reproduce the Kirkpatrick text that Hopkins claims Gould used.  (Probably there would be copyright issues with that.  Did Hopkins ever pitch this project to Schirmer, who presumably holds that copyright?)

The Kirkpatrick edition is apparently still in print, and it is also very widely available in libraries (and, I imagine, in piano benches here and there)—indeed, more available in libraries than this Gould transcription will ever be—so interested individuals should have no trouble getting their hands on a copy to make the comparison.  (At a glance, WorldCat lists over 450 library copies of various printings of the Kirkpatrick edition, with just over 30 of the Hopkins/Gould score.)  Comparing the two is particularly interesting because Kirkpatrick often resorts to extra staves to realize Bach’s ornamentation or (yet more significant in this context) to modify the part-crossing to facilitate performance on a piano.  Here are two examples—the aria, where Gould’s ornamentation is somewhat slower than Kirkpatrick’s instructions (32nd-notes rather than 64th-notes), and an example of adapting the music for a single keyboard:

SOURCES:  first sixteen bars of the Aria, in scans of Kirkpatrick p. 3 and Hopkins p. 49.

SOURCES: the end of Var. VIII in marked-up cropped scans of Kirkpatrick p. 23 and Hopkins p. 75.

Instead of either of these strategies, on the left side Hopkins provides an entirely new text, which he explains thus in his introduction:

“Each of the variations [and the Aria] is presented in its original form on verso pages, accompanied by Gould's realization on recto pages, thereby allowing for ease of comparative analysis.  The original forms, labelled ‘Original Version,’ were produced from the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe edition (BGA) of 1853, the Hans Bischoff edition of 1883 and the Ralph Kirkpatrick edition of 1938.  The Handexemplar, Bach’s personal copy of the first engraved edition, was likewise used for this purpose, yet the editions produced by the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA) of 1977 and Henle of 1979 could only be consulted, due to copyright restrictions.  Discrepancies amongst these editions are noted in the Critical Notes on pp. 45-47.”  (p. 9)

Bach’s Handexemplar, corrected in many places by the composer, was rediscovered in 1975.  It was naturally the most important source for Christoph Wolff’s NBA text and its discovery also prompted Henle to issue a revised version of Rudolf Steglich’s 1973 edition (with the revisions undertaken in 1978 by Paul Badura-Skoda).  What does Hopkins mean by “could only be consulted”?  All of the sources he lists were presumably “consulted,” and as his critical notes list variants in each of these texts, it is unclear how “copyright restrictions” have impinged on his task at all.  No, what we have here appears to me to be a reinventing of the wheel:  a new edition that presumes to be scholarly, but executed, in my opinion, in an haphazard way.

Before giving some examples of this, I should note that the NBA text of the Goldbergs has not been universally acclaimed.  In particular, in a 1990 article in Performance Practice Review, Erich Schwandt took Wolff’s edition to task for a number of perceived deficiencies, concluding

“Something must be broken in the mechanism when musicological ‘overkill’ produces 27 pages of Critical Apparatus (roughly two-thirds of a page of words per page of music) and then gets the notes wrong.  I believe that the Neue Bach Ausgabe should seriously consider withdrawing Christoph Wolff’s edition of the ‘Goldberg Variations.’” (p. 69) 

I have examined Schwandt’s critique closey, and I see no warrant for such a charge.  Wolff has not gotten “the notes wrong.”  An edition is an interpretation—a performance, if you like—and although I would like to see every alteration to a source text logged in the critical report, I find only four instances where this not is the case, each having to do with an added appoggiaturas that are not clearly marked in the score as editorial additions.  Schwandt may disagree with Wolff’s and the NBA’s editorial principles (over the ornamentation symbols particularly), but in the critical report Wolff articulates those principles and the decisions that proceed from them.

It must be stressed that in a critical edition, the printed score and the critical report are equally necessary for an understanding of the textual situation.  This seems to have escaped Nicholas Hopkins as he prepared his new “original version” for his Glenn Gould project.  His basic editorial principle seems to be that the Handexemplar, bearing corrections in Bach’s hand, establishes a final text for the Goldbergs once and for all.  His “original version” thus aims to be essentially a resetting (following modern notational practices) of the corrected reading of the Handexemplar, and his critical notes detail differences between his new text and the other five published texts he cites above.  In fact, the vast majority of his critical notes list places where an accidental is missing in the Handexemplar but appears in the other editions.  There is a good reason for this:  the first edition (of which the Handexemplar is a copy, of course) is a product of different notational conventions than ours today:  an accidental was regarded as affecting only the note to which it was affixed.  As an example, in Var. XXVIII b. 23, the left-hand part is crowded with repeated sharps for the recurring note:

SOURCE: cropped scan of the Handexemplar, p. 30 (my mark-up)

This would be too many accidentals by our current standards; the following bar has one too many, while also lacking two that would now be needed:

SOURCE:  ditto

The second natural sign seems superfluous by today’s standards, but we would now expect a natural sign for the last note in both hands—no longer D-sharp but D-natural.  As Hopkins seems unaware of the older practice, he documents it as if it is news.  More than half (at a rough count, 37 out of about 70 total) of his notes deal with this, an item not even worth noting.  Several of Hopkins’s notes record details such as “a dotted tie is notated ... in the NBA.  This tie is found in no other sources.”  Exactly:  the tie is dotted because it is an editorial emendation.

A more serious problem is that—as he gives no indication that he has seen the NBA critical report—he is apparently utterly unaware that of the seventeen other copies of the original print which Wolff examined, six have corrections that Wolff is able to attribute to Bach, and no two of these copies have exactly the same corrections:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Kritisher Bericht for NBA Ser. V, Bd. 2 (1981), p. 93.

In Wolff’s table, source A1 is the Handexemplar, but not all of the corrections made it into the Handexemplar.  (This table only lists corrections found in the other six copies, noting when they are or are not duplicated in the Handexemplar; there are quite a number of corrections unique to the Handexemplar which Wolff documents elsewhere.)  Evidently not knowing of this, Hopkins re-introduces errors into this text which Bach had corrected:

SOURCE: Var. XVI, from marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 102.

As the table above indicates, in five of the seven copies with corrections traceable to Bach, this E has been changed to F-sharp.  The note is given as F-sharp already in the BG edition (1853), as the copy Wolff identifies as A5 was the source for the edition and has the correction.  Kirkpatrick was working from a different copy, lacking the correction, and so gives E.

Another instance concerns a missing accidental:

SOURCE: marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 130

The circled A is given as A-flat in all of the editions that Hopkins consulted save the original print; it had been changed to A-flat in only two copies of the first edition (Wolff’s A6 and A8)—neither of which was used as a source for editions prior to the NBA, although it did show up in an early manuscript copy (Wolff's C1) which Bischhoff and Steglich had used.  All of these editors recognized the musical sense of A-flat; even in the intensely chromatic vocabulary of Var. XXV, the A natural is jarring.  Try it for yourself.

Hopkins did catch a genuine lapse in all of the editions he used, and apparently hitherto unnoticed.  It again concerns a missing accidental in this same movement, and it seems clear how it was missed for so long:

Composite of Var. XXV, b. 10
SOURCES:  marked-up cropped scans of  (top) Handexemplar p. 25; (lower left) NBA Ser. V Bd. 2 p. 104; (lower right) Hopkins "original version" p. 130.

The natural sign (missing in the NBA and all the other editions) would not have been expected in the original print, given its conventions regarding accidentals; but subsequent editors may have missed it because 1) in the original print there is a system break before beat 2 of this measure, so that the preceding D-sharp is out of sight and out of mind; and 2) it is so manifestly obvious musically that it was implied even when not on the page.  Neither is a satisfactory excuse.  But has anyone ever played a D-sharp here?  I wonder.  Hopkins is the first of these editors to publish the work as a computer-set (rather than engraved) score, and this is the sort of detail that computer-setting captures more readily than the weary eye.

That said, Hopkins also introduces what is, in my opinion, a shocking error:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 60.

The first two notes in the right hand are a third too high.  That might be regarded as a typo, but the error is compounded on the facing-page transcription:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 61.

These are not the notes that Gould plays—he plays B-G, exactly as notated in every other edition.  And although this could be a simple copy-and-paste error if Hopkins used his own “original version” as the base text for his “Gould’s 1981 version,” it is further compounded by a footnote at the bottom of the same page, explaining the asterisk and even naming the notes (incorrectly) “D and B.”

SOURCE:  ditto

This is not a typo, but rather an editorial blunder.  That there could be an error of this magnitude—even redoubled in a footnote—suggests to me the possibility that there was no editorial oversight whatever to this production.  (Hopkins apparently set this edition himself.)  Lack of editorial oversight would be par for the course for a product that appears under a Creative Commons license on the IMSLP; it is astounding in a publication from a house of the reputation of Carl Fischer.  Granted, there is no backlist of “urtexts” at Carl Fischer, but now Hopkins’s “original” version (that is, the left-hand pages) has just been issued as a new urtext of the Goldberg Variations.  I have not examined that publication, but I hope that—at the very least—this error has been fixed.  Even so, given the rest of the concerns voiced above, Hopkins’s “original version” presumes too much.  As followers of the blog will know, I am all in favor of the proliferation of editions offering valid texts of all sorts, but I think the market has no need of this “urtext” edition of the Goldberg Variations.

The right-hand pages show the best of amateur devotion (although I think the introduction sometimes veers over into hagiography); the left-hand pages appear, in my view, to manifest ad hoc amateur naïveté presented as serious scholarship.  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

12. Recorded history

A question to which I will periodically return in this blog is “What sorts of non-textual musical evidence nevertheless bear upon the text?”  Another way of thinking of it is “Beyond the notated sources, what other sources can/should affect a new edition of a work?”  A fairly obvious non-notated source is an recording involving the composer as interpreter, or perhaps involving a performer who had worked directly with the composer.  An editor might introduce, for example, metronome marks to approximate a given recorded performance—although this might very well be misleading.  I have already remarked in this blog of an instance where the composer’s performance tempo slowed down considerably over the years; and in early recordings, where the play duration was short and unavoidably constricted by the dimensions of the playback medium (wax cylinder or shellac disc), performers are known to have opted for faster tempi just to squeeze their rendition into the time available.  As far as new critical editions are concerned, my feeling that the editor should do the due diligence of studying any recording that might have claims to be authoritative in any respect, even if none of the findings make it out of the critical report.

SOURCE:  baerenreiter.com

An interesting example of this is to be found in Jonathan Del Mar’s excellent edition of the Elgar cello concerto (Bärenreiter, 2005).  The critical commentary is a wonder to behold, containing seventeen color facsimiles comprising the whole of the solo cello part in Elgar’s hand prepared for the cellist who gave the premiere (Felix Salmond), four pages of the original short score draft, and the first page of Beatrice Harrison’s copy of the printed solo part.  Later in the commentary Del Mar carefully catalogues the pencilled instructions in this source—a significant document because Harrison recorded the work twice under Elgar’s direction (first in 1919-1920, subsequently in 1928).  These two recordings are among the sources Del Mar uses for his edition, and they feature in one of the most fascinating discussions in the commentary itself:  second movement, bb. 40-48 and the parallel passage at 78-86 (“the most severe dilemma for the interpreter in the entire work,” as Del Mar puts it).

In each of these two passages, a single idea is presented by the soloist and then the orchestra, and then the same exchanged is repeated a third higher:

SOURCE:  my resetting (with Finale) of II mm. 40-48 (using Elgar's piano reduction), reset just to fit it in a smaller space.

Of these last four bars Del Mar asks “Did Elgar intend (but not mark, assuming it as understood) the same ‘largamente   a tempo’ as four bars earlier, or did he, on the contrary (and as some soloists make a point of doing), wish these bars to make a contrast, continuing this time a tempo?”  Here Elgar’s own recordings with Harrison employ the unwritten largamente in these second exchanges, although not a single written source includes it.  (At least not a source in Elgar’s hand; Harrison has added to her copy of the printed part “largamente molto” to b. 43.)  Del Mar concludes tellingly

“Fortunately, there is at least no conflict whatever between individual sources between either group [paper or recorded], so that there is absolutely no doubt as too what we should (a) print (b) play—even if these two groups are in direct opposition with each other.”  [all of these quotations from pp. 36-37 of the critical commentary]

Even more interesting to me is that Elgar apparently took pains to erase some instruction at this point:  what was written above the cello stave here that was subsequently obliterated, distorting even the lines of the blank stave above?  This is bb. 44-46:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Bärenreiter facsimile (2007) of autograph full score (RCM ms 402), pp. 44-5.

Of this Del Mar remarks, “there is—tantalizingly—distinct evidence of deleted markings, but these are very efficiently scratched out so that almost nothing remains.  Only from the extremities of a few individual letters can we tentatively conjecture that Vers. I might have read (44 ‘largamente’ altered to) 45 ‘largamente a tempo’.”  Interestingly, the obliterations occur in both the autograph full score (above) and in the short score draft.

In any case, acknowledging this distinction between how the music is performed and how it is notated is significant.  Del Mar decided to deal with the whole issue in the critical commentary rather than in the separately published score, but at least a footnote in the score directs the user to the commentary.  A more intrusive editor might impose instructions (bracketed or not) or more extensive footnotes to indicate that the solo in bb. 44-45 should resemble bb. 40-41, etc., citing these recordings as support for that.  (I say intrusive—but is that the right word for this?  Heavy-handed?  Patronizing would be more pejorative; the positive spin might be avuncular.)

Christopher Hogwood has cited an interesting case of this sort of detail:  Aaron Copland’s 1974 Columbia recording of Appalachian Spring in its original scoring (13 players) included a bonus disc with excerpts of Copland rehearsing the Columbia Chamber Orchestra.  At this passage

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Boosey & Hawkes study score (HPS876), p. 5. 

Copland instructs the string players “Would you mark a crescendo on the [first] A—the fermata? [demonstrates]  I’m used to that; I don’t know where it came from.”  (Hear this moment of the recorded rehearsal here.)  Hogwood comments

“That, to me, constitutes something as good as written evidence.  Copland wanted it, asked for it in rehearsal and fixed it in his recording.  That crescendo can then go back into the score, but indicated differently from the crescendos he actually wrote, being one that he dreamed he had written but never had, but asked for, and if you want to explain it in the critical notes, you can.” [pp. 5f]

Hogwood's “as good as written evidence” suggests that if he were editing Appalachian Spring the crescendo would be in the score, modified in some way (brackets, dotted lines, whatever) to indicate an editorial addition, but he felt that an indication of its source is optional:  “If you want to explain it in the critical notes, you can.”  Okay, we have the composer literally on the record in this instance, and the ensuing studio recording backs it up.  The critical notes should say at least “hairpin absent from A[utograph], B[oosey published score], P[arts]....”  I think ideally the notes would be the place to document not only the 1974 rehearsal comment, but also if the crescendo is present in Copland’s other recordings of the work (in its larger scoring).  It could therefore be a task for an editor to seek an answer to Copland's “I don’t know where it came from.”  [ADDENDUM 10 June 2020:  The new critical edition of the original ballet score of Appalachian Spring cites the rehearsal recording among sources, but no mention is made of this crescendo, nor does it appear in the score.  An opportunity missed.]

Patrick Warfield documents a much more complicated situation in his edition of six Sousa marches in the Music of the United States of America (MUSA) edition.  He lays out the case for why the early recordings are not to be trusted—greatly reduced recording forces, truncations made to fit works on to a disk or a cylinder, and uncertainty of the identity of the performing ensembles billed on the record label as Sousa’s band (often conducted by assistant Arthur Pryor).  Add to this Sousa’s jealously guarded authentic sound for his own music in live performance:  the published texts of the marches lacked the details of his own performance practice.  Sousa is quoted as saying “we make some changes now and then to make it a little bit different” (p. xxxii).  At best these “authentic” recordings could document only a moment of that dynamic tradition.

Thus Warfield turns to the recollections of Sousa’s players (each keenly aware, after all, of intentional departures from the face-value reading of the printed parts) to try to establish Sousa’s performance practice as best that he can.  These changes generally involved certain groups of instruments sitting out during a repeat (or a first-time-through), getting the melody brass (cornets/trombones) or the percussion out of the way to let a mellower ensemble sound prevail; or it might be moving players to a higher or lower register—clarinets an octave higher or lower than notated.  Warfield’s edition cautiously refrains from printing these alterations directly into the score (“as no printed source includes these changes” [p. xxxviii]), although they are indicated in bracketed instructions.  For example, this bit of The Washington Post:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Sousa: Six Marches (A-R Editions, 2010), p. 10; there are further instructions at the bottom of the page as well.

Warfield has done an admirable job presenting the evidence of Sousa’s practice without imposing it.  Conductors may experiment as they like.

A more vexing sort of recorded evidence is conveyed by surviving mechanical instruments like player piano rolls or the eighteenth-century barrel-organs that preserve versions of Handel’s organ concertos.  (For the former, Neal Peres da Costa has done admirable work disentangling performance practice evidence.)  The Handel concertos are shown to be laden with what might otherwise be considered improbable ornamentations.  Of course these cannot be exact transcriptions of Handel’s—or anyone’s—performances, as they have had to be “pinned” by hand (the metal pins hammered one at a time into the wooden cylinder).  Due to the minute distances of linear travel as the cylinder turns, it is hard to believe that these can transmit very much in terms of precise rhythmic relationships, still less is there a pattern to suggest notes inégales:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of David Fuller's transcription of an eighteenth-century barrel organ [p. viii]

For pitches (for example, starting a trill with the principal note) the barrels are much more reliable.  They certainly serve to indicate something of the variety of added ornamentations known (even plausible) at the time, and what sorts of ornaments would happen on repeats while other things might be altered.  When such instruments came to be studied in the 1980s (for example this) there was great hope that they were a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding Handel’s performance style:  thus David Fuller insists that

“Here, in principle at least, there are no decisions to be made, no opportunities for interpretation.  One may like or dislike what he sees here [in Fuller’s meticulous transcriptions]; one may not dispute it....  The listener may imagine his ear pressed to a speaking tube extending without obstruction nearly 200 years into history.”  [p. v]

This was too good to be true, but that doesn’t make such evidence irrelevant by any means, and a few pages later Fuller backs down a bit to something much more useful:

“That Handel himself played this or that particular ornament on a particular note in a particular measure could not possibly be claimed; this his style of playing was wholly without effect on general English practice of mid-century and thence upon these cylinders is, on the other hand, unlikely.”  [p. x]

Beyond Handel, such barrel organs can offer us a lot about early eighteenth-century ornamentation in general.  Paul Badura-Skoda even opens his Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard with a chapter on the Handel barrel organs. But these tell us more about eighteenth-century musical culture—barrel organs in particular—than they do anything about keyboard playing or ornamentation, and they must be treated with caution.

The barrel organs are recordings of performances rather than notational instructions about music—and I think we must keep that distinction in mind.  In 1958, Charles Seeger articulated concepts of prescriptive and descriptive notation—“a blue-print of how a specific piece of music shall be made to sound” over against “a report of how a specific performance of it actually did sound” (MQ 1958, p. 184).  When we think of music in terms of composers and works, we are (almost invariably) conceptualizing written music as prescriptive:  How did the composer want this to sound?  When, instead, we think of music in terms of performers and performances, we conceptualize notation as a description of that performance:  How did the performer render this?

The notation may well look pretty much the same in either case, as (despite what Seeger argued for in 1958) descriptive notation is still very much bound to the notational elements devised around prescriptive writing, particularly if the descriptive notation is expected to be an adjunct to some sort of recording of the real thing.  Thus the curious, 1100+ page anthology The Beatles: Complete Scores is descriptive of the Beatles recordings, laboriously (although to me not always convincingly) transcribed by Tetsuya Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo, and Goro Sato.  I presume it is a labor of love, and it’s difficult to know what it is for:  a coffee table curiosity (commercial)?  A handbook for cover bands (prescriptive)?  An ancilliary resource—but a dangerous one—for scholars of the “British Invasion” (descriptive)?  We can see more rigorous approaches in the MUSA volumes devoted to (for example) transcribed recordings of “Fats” Waller (ed. Paul Machlin) or Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (trans. John J. Joyce)—fascinating volumes to peruse, even when I did not have the recordings immediately to hand.  These volumes do much to emphasize the complexity of this music, and of course the notation acts to “freeze” the improvised music to allow us to scrutinize and dissect it (... to apply, in other words, the autopsy-table analysis that has been the stock-and-trade of music scholarship).

There is much more to be said here, but this post is already overlong.  I should return at some point to some prescriptive transcriptions—that is, of transcriptions from recordings intended to facilitate new live performance of music that was originally improvised—like Maurice Duruflé’s reconstructions of Charles Tournemire’s Cinq Improvisations, or (rather differently) the Jazz Arts Trio’s “note-for-note transcriptions of historic moments in piano jazz.”  In the latter instance, when I sat through a concert in which these transcriptions were realized (and with scores available for purchase), I was left pondering what manner of performance this could be.  Somehow the music seemed to have been violated in an attempt to bring it back to life.