Klarinet Archive - Posting 000164.txt from 2010/10

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] An Urtext "Grrr...."
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:37:41 -0400

On 10/17/2010 08:42 PM, Martin Baxter wrote:
> Surely if the thing is sold as an Urtext edition and it obviously isn't one that is an offence under the "sale of goods-misrepresentation" laws. I'm pretty sure that would be so in the UK.

I'm quite looking forward to the court case. "Well, M'lud, the editors
took some notes and, well, they wrote them differently. Except that
they sound the same. But they are different. Really, M'lud. Why are
you looking at me that way, M'lud?"

A copy of an earlier published score is available from IMSLP and a
comparison of this with the Baerenreiter edition is quite striking. The
editors clearly had no easy task as the source material is quite
convoluted: besides the autograph score, there is a second manuscript
score by a copyist which includes corrections in multiple hands, some
possibly Janacek's; the same score includes numerous alterations made by
the Moravian String Quartet based on their performance practice, which
made it into the first-published score (which appeared 10 years after
Janacek's death).

Those changes by the quartet were extensive -- lots of tempo changes,
pauses that Janacek didn't write, and even alterations to the
instrumentation -- e.g. in the last bars of the last movement, the
dramatic viola part that Janacek wrote was handed to the 1st violin.

The enharmonic changes made by the Baerenreiter editors seem to be to
remove Eb's, Cb's and double-flats that show up where Janacek does an
odd thing of sometimes writing one or two of the parts in a "sharp" key
and the others in an equivalent many-flats key. For example, the last
enharmonic change is made in a passage where a harmonic figure in Gb
major is repeated in a key that is essentially A major: Janacek notates
the cello and viola as having E-natural and A-natural, has the 2nd
violin playing a Db-Eb tremolo and has the 1st violin repeating its
Db-Bb phrase from the bar before but this time being Db-Bbb (i.e.
B-double-flat). The editors of the Baerenreiter edition have rewritten
the 1st violin's notes as C#-A.

It's an alteration that I suppose you can justify on ease-of-reading
grounds, but it seems to me quite striking that Janacek wrote this (and
other passages) as he did. If you take the melodic line of the 1st
violin alone it makes more sense written with the double-flat -- it
stresses the relationship with the previous bar, and those that follow,
and reflects the fact that at this point you're essentially in a
multiple-flats key with A being a transitional harmony. I also find it
quite striking that Janacek has made this odd kind of "different but
equivalent key" notation in multiple places throughout the piece.

Anyway, some editor thinks he knows better and I guess the only real way
to fight it is to produce an alternative edition. I think I'm going to
make a salsa version ... :-)
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