Klarinet Archive - Posting 000465.txt from 2010/09

From: Oliver Seely <oseely@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Mozart concerto
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:02:32 -0400


I can think of three possibilities:

(1) Franz Krommer composed 45 Partitas for winds, of which only 13 are said to have survived and only 6 or 7 have been published in the U.S. I was able to obtain microfilms of the autographs from the State Library of Austria in Vienna. The "notes only" files on my page are transcriptions from the microfilm. The microfilms don't do anyone any good where they are now, stored in my garage. I have xerox copies of the microfilms should I ever need them, so the microfilms themselves are of no use to me, but I don't want to send them to someone who will end up storing them in his/her garage. I want some kind of guarantee that they will be used for, perhaps, a URTEXT project.

There is of course the possibility that another autograph of the 32 missing partitas will turn up in a private collection somewhere in Europe. Wouldn't that be absolutely super!

(2) Tomas Breton composed a sextet for piano and winds, but it was never published or performed. A fellow chemist in Madrid found it in the Conservatory of Music there and kindly shepherded it through the microfilm process. My "notes, articulation and dynamics" file is the result of that correspondence. There are errors which need to be corrected. I have a fantasy of playing the world premier on a marble patio on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean (with me on clarinet, of course) and the L.A. Spanish Consulate in appreciative attendance. When pigs fly, of course. Anyway, that's a possibility. After I sequenced it, my quintet played it with computer accompaniment, much to my delight, but when we had finished our bassoonist said, "You know, Oliver, I'm not particularly impressed with the Breton." "Ah," I thought, "she just abdicated her role in the world premier." So, I have the microfiche for that one as well.

(3) Il Convegno, by Ponchielli is something of a mess. My offering is from the Allesandero Vessella collection, no. 287, a copy of the original, I believe, coming from a private archive in Rome. An Italian clarinetist (also a chemist -- curious, huh?), kindly helped me to get a microfiche of the copy held by the archive. I had worked with the Italian cultural attache's office in L.A. for almost a year to pry loose a microfilm copy with no luck. So I joined the Italian clarinet discussion group and my single message, in English, with a subject line of "I beg your indulgence," asking if there was anyone in Rome who could check at the archive to find out where my request was. A couple of weeks later I received a lovely response from Dr. Cavallini apologizing that it had taken him more than a week to go into Rome. He said that it was more than an hour to find the person who had been assigned my request. I fantasized that he stood in front of the guy's desk and demanded to know had happened to his American friend's request for a microfilm of Il Convegno. Ah, the power of the Age of Information. Anyway, that's a possibility for a URTEXT, though a lot of work has been done on that one by others. (Wow! I just discovered that the preface to my edition, with additional information, can't be found at that link. I'll check into it shortly.)

I'll come up with some other possibilities as I think of them.

Oliver

> Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:12:17 +0200
> From: joseph.wakeling@-----.net
> To: klarinet@-----.com
> Subject: Re: [kl] Mozart concerto

> Though we'll probably steer clear of the Concerto for now
> given that our likely best priority (in the short term) is to focus on
> works that _need_ an Urtext treatment rather than works that already
> have high-quality editions.

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