Klarinet Archive - Posting 000014.txt from 2004/11

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Looking for an early printed edition of the Mozart Concerto
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:21:28 -0500

Marc, a copy of the first edition of 622 (which was published by
B&H in 1803) can be found at Vienna's Gesselschaft der
Musikfruend. I suspect, but do not know, that copies of this
first edition are also available at the Austrian National
Library, the Salzburg Mozarteum, and other places. It's
relatively easy to get a copy of this edition. But I mention the
Gesselschaft becase I got a set of those parts there about 40
years ago.

Now, having done my duty to the question you answered, I'm going
to turn around and speak to the wisdom of your plan, even thugh
you didn't ask.

There is not an edition of 622 available today that is not, in
one way or another, descended from the 1803 edition. Some use it
unchanged under the assumption that, as a first edition, it must
be accurate or authentic in some way. Others modify it on
general principles of not like this dynamic here or that phrasing
there. And still others modify it to try and restore it to the
form that it had at the time of its composition, namely by
finding places to put low notes in (under the assumption nothing
else was changed).

But every one of these efforts, while well intentioned, are based
on a false premise; i.e., that the first edition, being the first
edition, must be accurate or reasonably authentic, and there is
some cause to question that premise.

Considering how 622 first appeared in printed form, it is
impossible to tell how much of it is accurate. Let's examine the
circumstances that led to the production of the 1803 B&H.

By sometime in 1791 Mozart had completed the manuscript of 622.
In fact, there is a dated letter in which he speaks of completing
the orchestration of Stadler's rondo. So the first assumption
that I am going to ask you to make (actually two assumptions) is
that there was a manuscript score, and that, for all intents and
purposes it was an accurate representation of what Mozart had in
his mind. Are those reasonable assumptions? If we can't agree on
that, we'll never agree on anything.

I can offer only few facts about what happened after that point,
but I will speculate and you can throw out that which you don't
like. (If you had bought my book and read it, you wouldn't need
to undertake this, so I hope you feel guilt.)

Second assumption: somehow, somewhere, and by someone, a set of
performance parts were made and that would include the solo part.
There are no letters, documents, concert announcements, etc. that
guarantee that the work was performed until Stadler played the
work in Riga, Latvia just before the turn of the century. I
suspect that he did play it earlier, but I can't confirm that
with historical evidence. Maybe someone else can confirm this.
But there is no evidence that Mozart heard this work in his
lifetime. In any case, when Stadler did play it, the performance
parts spoken of at the top of this paragraph were used. Is that
a reasonable assumption? Now let me add two more.

Primo, the copyist who created these performance parts corrupted
them by making copying errors. I can't be sure, of course, but
that sort of thing happened all the time then, and happens all
the time today. As a rule of them, every set of performance
parts created by hand has errors in it. Those errors could be in
note pitches, rhythms, phrase shapes, articulation types and
patters, etc. Is that a reasonable assumption?

Secondo, those parts were used both by Stadler (who had the solo
part) and the members of the orchestra who had the orchestral
parts. And if their behavior parallels the behavior of
contemporary performing musicians, they owned pencils, the pupose
of which was to make changes to the performance parts (1) as they
needed, and (2) as they were directed to do. Is that a reasonable
assumption?

Third set of assumptions: eventually the autograph disappeared.
According to Mozart's wife (whose statements on anything factual
have to be examined very critically), Stadler either had his
portmanteau stolen or pawned by 1799. And in that bag were some
music manuscripts. They are not defined or even explained, but
the general concensus is that they were the autographs of the
concerto, K. 622, and the quintet, K. 581. This is not really an
assumption because those things did disappear, though we have no
idea if they disappeared in that way. (Actually your are reading
my book right now, so send me money.)

Finally, in 1803 B&H decides that they want to produce an edition
of the concerto. So they go to the only guy who has a source,
namely those performance parts made from him way back when but
some between 1791 and the performance of the work in Riga. They
may have been used 100 times. We don't know. But the more times
they were used, the more musician's pencils modified and further
corrupted those parts.

B&H gets the parts, including the solo part of course, from
Stadler, and gets a shock, if they did not know it before hand.
That piece, at lovely as it is, is useless to them. It calls for
a solo instrument that produces notes that nobody but Stadler's
instrument can.

"OK," they say. "We'll fix it. We'll get an editor to modify
the solo part, using the performance part as the source,"
(because the autograph is gone), "and we'll publish it that way."

The first thing the editor does is make a working score. You
can't create a set of engraved parts (which is what B&H needed)
without a score. Making a set of parts from a set of parts is a
very difficult and almost impossible task. The editor needs to
know what every player is doing at any instant.

So the editor makes a working score that will eventually be used
to create the engraved plates. He copies the orchestral parts
into the working score, and then sets about to create a solo part
for that working score. Mind you, he is being paid TO CHANGE that
solo part so that it can performed on an instrument of
traditional compass. So here are two sorts of corruptions taking
place: (1) the copying of the orchestral parts in the working
score has some errors, and (2) the creation of the solo part from
the original with no audit trail about what he did or where he
did it. That last item is not an assumption. There is a review
of that first edition that remarks on the fact that the editor
changed the solo part. As I remember, there are also references
to the fact that the source from which the editor worked was the
manuscript, but that is an assumption of the part of the reviewer
that cannot be correct.

Now, the parts are engraved from the working score and you are
looking for a set of them. If it is your intent to show what
kind of a salami the editor created out of the corruptions that
came out of all the work done between the autograph of 1791 and
the engraved plates of 1803, that is a good thing. It shows you
how you can make something that may or, much more likely, may not
resemble the original after all these stages.

But if it is your intent to show this first edition as a paragon
of authenticity, you are in big trouble, and you will have to
send me more money to get you out of it.

You don't know, I don't know, and no one knows how adding all
those corruptions onto the original impacted the first edition,
which, in turn, impacted all other editions in use today.

So to conclude, I said I was going to speak to the wisdom of your
plan. What are you trying to do? Show the salami? That's
interesting as long as everyone knows it's a salami of uncertain
provenance.

But if you think you are giving something authentic to the world
of clarinetdom, a pox on you and your offspring for six
generations. And if you think that giving something to players to
make further changes to so that they too can contribution to the
confusion, you won't be able to buy your way out of that one.

Now send money, or a pizza.

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Cookson [mailto:markcookson@-----.com]
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2004 11:03 AM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: [kl] Looking for an early printed edition of the Mozart
Concerto

Hi everyone,
 
I've been getting to grips with the open-source music
notation program Lilypond (www.lilypond.org) over the
last few weeks and as a bit of a learning project I'm
thinking of entering the Mozart Clarinet Concerto (or
to start with, the solo clarinet part) for the Mutopia
Project (http://www.mutopiaproject.org/)
This site makes public domain music available to
download for free.
Anyway, I need to find a public domain edition of the
Mozart to enter, and I think that the first published
edition would be the most historically interesting to
enter (of course, once entered, anyone would be free
to create their own edition by editing the lilypond
source code).
I'm wondering if anyone on the list has a copy of the
first printed edition (which would by now well and
truly have entered the public domain...) and might be
able to send me a scanned copy of this. I own the
Breitkopf & Hartel edition from the 1880s, which is
also public domain now, but doesn't seem to have been
improved by the additional editing, so I'd rather
start from something a little nearer to Mozart's time.

Thanks in advance

Mark Cookson

 
 

http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

-----------------------------------------------------------------
----
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc.
http://www.woodwind.org

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org

   
     Copyright © Woodwind.Org, Inc. All Rights Reserved    Privacy Policy    Contact charette@woodwind.org