Klarinet Archive - Posting 000534.txt from 2003/05

From: Dan Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Basset Clarinet
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 08:34:41 -0400

James Hobby wrote:
> Reading this last group of discussion of the Mozart Concerto and raised
> notes and lowered notes started me thinking, I don't even remember, now,
> what version I played back in the old days. (It's been 30 years since I
> played it, I'm sure.) Was there perhaps a Carl Fisher edition in the
> fifties that left the clarinet notes the same for the Bb as were written for
> the A and then transposed the piano part into something terrible? <g> (I
> know it was naughty, but I didn't have an A clarinet in high school.)
>
> Jim Hobby

Jim,

The edition to which you refer, as edited by Simeon Bellison, did
exactly that. It also changed some of the clarinet text from the
traditional version to what I presume was Bellison's personal
perferences, which is exactly what some part of this discussion is all
about. Whatever sources are suggested as having some degree of
authenticity, one can never be sure that that text was not modified by a
person who simply liked the music played a different way.

The first edition of 622, which I think dates from 1801 and was
published by Breitkopf and Härtel was, in theory based on some earlier
source that might even have been the original manuscript. But it could
also have been a set of performance parts (including the solo part) that
was marked up, changed, altered, had inventions, and added to.

That is why I say that without the original manuscript for clarinet (not
even the Winterthur fragment as important as that is), we can be
absolutely sure of nothing. I certainly do want to be a nihilist and
throw everything out, but I also do not want to exhault a particular
edition whose authority cannot be established unquestionably.

Let me give you a very much to the point parallel because I'm playing it
in three weeks. The manuscript of the Gran Partitta -- the one in
Mozart's hand that currently resides in the Library of Congress, and I
have a copy of it -- was used to make a single set of performance parts
for a concert managed by Anton Stadler and given on Mar. 23, 1784.
Then, the manuscript disappeared for 150 years and all that we had was
the first edition made from Stadler's performance parts.

Those performance parts were used to make the first edition of the Gran
Partitta in 1803, an edition that is notoriously full of doo-doo.

OK. So the chain of events is (1) Mozart's head to his hand to create
the manuscript, (2) the use of that manuscript to make a set of
performance parts, (3) the use of those performance parts to make the
first printed edition.

Simple enough. What happened was this. The first printed edition
differs from the autograph in the following specifics: (1) almost 900
differences in the place and/or the intensity of dynamics; (2) about 60
wrong notes; (3) about three dozen changes of rhythm; (4) changes in the
articulation types and patters and phrase shapes that are so vast I
never bother to count them, maybe 1000 cases, maybe more.

And that, dear sirs and ladies, is what happens when the simplest
process is followed. You get musical chaos in the two steps between
Mozart's manuscript and the first printed edition.

You can trust NOTHING other than the original manuscript and first
editions are notoriously untrustworthy.

--
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**Dan Leeson **
**leeson0@-----.net **
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