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Composer Complete Critical Editions in the Twenty-First Century: A Case Study of Béla Bartók

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2019

Malcolm Gillies
Malcolm Gillies*
Affiliation:
Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Department of Music, King's College London, United Kingdom
*
*Emails: malcolm.gillies@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

Composer complete critical editions originated in the mid nineteenth-century and remain an important contribution to twenty-first-century scholarship and performance practice. This discussion article, commissioned by the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, uses the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, inaugurated in 2016, as the basis of reconsideration of the musicological, performance-related, publishing and business aspects of today's complete editions of composers’ works. Gillies looks at the characteristics of the first two Bartók edition volumes, For Children and Concerto for Orchestra, particularly their approach to the composer's use of notation, the representation of their geneses, and some interesting issues about variants, versions, alternatives, replacements, arrangements and deletions. He also considers what a dozen Henle Urtexts, issued on the basis of this complete critical edition's research, seek to present for performers, particularly in their use of Bartók's own recordings as exemplars as well as the presentation in his folk-music treatises of melodies on which these pieces are based. Gillies's consideration also reveals some of the bases of the Bartók complete edition in the post-war ‘Neue Ausgabe’ critical series, with some later influence from Schoenberg and Debussy editions. After looking at changes in format and related products, including thematic catalogues, and the business models that underpin many complete critical editions, Gillies evaluates the risks that may face the Bartók edition in the future, and suggests how they might best be mitigated.

Keywords

BartókSchoenbergDebussycriticismformatspublishingfunding
Type
Review Article
Information
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle , Volume 50 , 2019 , pp. 153 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 At up to two kilograms a volume, many CCCEs end up weighing considerably more than their composer ever did. By 1943, poor Bartók weighed barely 45 kilograms, half the expected weight of his complete edition.

2 See, for instance, Thomas Schmidt, ‘Editing/Editions’, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music, ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 205–7. In this discussion article I frequently use short titles or abbreviations, either in English or in German, as found in recent reference works such as the recent Cambridge Encyclopedia.

3 As reflected in the Beethoven-Gesamtausgabe's title page: ‘vollständige kritisch durchgesehene überall berechtige Ausgabe’.

4 See the classic essay: Georg von Dadelsen, ‘Die “Fassung letzter Hand”’, Acta Musicologica, 33 (1961), 1–14.

5 For a statement of what ‘Urtext’ means to Henle, see www.henle.de/en/about-us/what-is-urtext/. Also, see James Brooks Kuykendall's blog entry, www.settlingscoresblog.net/p/fassung-letzter-hand.html, with its explanation of why ‘Urtext’ and ‘Fassung letzter Hand’ are, in fact, ‘conceptual opposites’.

6 The view that the critical edition can be unduly limiting to creative performance, (re)composition or the progress of (ethno)musicology has been periodically rehearsed. See, for instance, László Somfai, ‘Critical Edition with or without Notes for the Performer’, Studia Musicologica, 53 (2012), 113–40 (113–14), and Philip Bohlman's strong stance on the fundamental role of orality in many musical traditions in ‘Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music’ (www.areditions.com/recent-researches/oral-traditions).

7 James Grier, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180.

8 László Somfai, ‘Self-Analysis by Twentieth-Century Composers’, in Modern Musical Scholarship, ed. Edward Olleson (London: Oriel, 1978), 167–79.

9 See Ulrich Krämer, ‘Die Editionen der Werke Arnold Schönbergs’, in Musikeditionen im Wandel der Geschichte, ed. Reinmar Emans and Ulrich Krämer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 639–65.

10 Josef Rufer, ‘Preface to the Complete Edition’, Arnold Schönberg: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Josef Rufer, vol. 1, Lieder mit Klavierbegleitung (Mainz: Schott and Vienna: Universal Edition, 1966).

11 Schoenberg's oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter, ed. Ulrich Krämer (Mainz: Schott and Vienna: Universal Edition, 2018).

12 Paul Hindemith: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Kurt von Fischer and Ludwig Finscher (Mainz: Schott, from 1979), ‘Preface to The Edition’, p. VII.

13 Roy Howat, ‘The Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy Thirty Years On’, in Debussy's resonance, ed. François de Médicis and Steven Huebner (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, forthcoming).

14 Roy Howat, interview with the author, 8 October 2018, by email.

15 See, for instance, George Hall, ‘Usher House and La Chute de la Maison’, Opera News, 79/3 (September 2014), www.operanews.com.

16 www.chopin-nationaledition.com/?lang=en#dyskografia.

17 www.chopinonline.ac.uk, with development led by John Rink and Christophe Grabowski.

18 To December 2018 consisting of For Children, ed. László Vikárius, BBCCE, vol. 37 (Munich: Henle, and Budapest: Editio Musica, 2016), and Concerto for Orchestra, ed. Klára Móricz, BBCCE, vol. 24 (Munich: Henle, and Budapest: Editio Musica, 2017).

19 To December 2018 consisting of For Children, ed. László Vikárius (Nos. 1225–6, 2017), Allegro barbaro, ed. László Somfai (No. 1400, 2016), Sonatina, ed. László Somfai (No. 1401, 2016), Romanian Folk Dances, ed. László Somfai (No. 1402, 2017), Suite, op. 14, ed. László Somfai (No. 1403, 2017), 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs, ed. László Somfai (No. 1404, 2017), Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op. 20, ed. László Somfai (No. 1405, 2018), Romanian Christmas Songs, ed. László Somfai (No. 1406, 2018), Mikrokosmos, vols. 1–2, ed. Yusuke Nakahara (Nos. 1408, 2017), Mikrokosmos, vols. 3–4, ed. Yusuke Nakahara (Nos. 1409, 2017), Mikrokosmos, vols. 5–6, ed. Yusuke Nakahara (Nos. 1410, 2017). Editio Musica is named as co-publisher in these Henle Urtext volumes, but is to issue separately branded Urtext editions specifically for the Hungarian market.

20 Notably, the Centenary Edition of Bartók's Records (Complete), ed. László Somfai and Zoltán Kocsis (Budapest: Hungaroton, 1981), LPX 12326–33, and associated Bartók Recording Archives: Bartók Plays and Talks (Budapest: Hungaroton, 1981), LPX 12334–8.

21 Notably, four of eight planned volumes of Bartók Béla írásai [Béla Bartók's Writings] (Budapest: Zenemu˝kiadó, 1989, 1990, 1999, 2016).

22 László Somfai, ‘Manuscript versus Urtext: The Primary Sources of Bartók's Works’, Studia Musicologica, 23 (1981), 17–66.

23 Stravinsky is the other obvious omission in CCCEs from the first modernist generation. Having died in 1971, of course, his works are often still subject to copyright. Writing a review of a critical edition of L'Oiseau de feu, published by Eulenburg in 1996, Joni Lynn Steshko expostulated: ‘That a composer of Stravinsky's stature should not have a scholarly critical edition of his collected works borders on the criminal. The condition of the currently available editions is deplorable’ (Notes, 54 [1998], 997–1002 [997]).

24 Somfai, ‘Manuscript versus Urtext’, 64–6.

25 Somfai, ‘Manuscript versus Urtext’, 64. Somfai's predictions now look to being on the conservative side.

26 Unpublished BBCCE working paper, presented at Szombathely Festival meeting, July 1990.

27 See ‘On the Complete Critical Edition’, in For Children, ed. Vikárius, 11*–12*. My italicization.

28 László Vikárius, interview with the author, 2 October 2018, Budapest.

29 A landmark volume, bringing together this knowledge was László Somfai, Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).

30 As seen in Bartók's own many editions of Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Yugoslavian, Turkish and North African folk music, as well as the first volume of the projected nine-volume Complete Collection of Hungarian Folk Songs, ed. Sándor Kovács and Ferenc Sebo˝ (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993).

31 László Somfai, interview with the author, 4 October 2018, Budapest.

32 See, for instance, Part VII, ‘Performance and Notation’, of Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 319–62.

33 Bartók's educational editions of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Couperin, Haydn, Mozart, Scarlatti, Schubert, Schumann, Duvernoy, Heller and Köhler are not included in the BBCCE. However, the inclusion of Bartók's fingering on Henle's recent digital tablet format of Mozart piano sonatas is discussed later in this section.

34 Because of a faulty metronome in his earlier years, many of these tempos and durations were initially incorrect, leading to spasmodic correction work in editions appearing over the last century.

35 Vikárius interview, 2 October 2018.

36 See Peter Bartók, My Father (Homosassa, FL: Bartók Records, 2002), 30.

37 Somfai interview, 4 October 2018.

38 In interview Somfai explains: ‘We really try to reflect the basic, evolutionary steps of Bartók's notation, which are, by the way, simplified with the years.[…] We, in the Bartók edition, take the time, energy and risk to explain and decide in which details of the notation we keep strictly to the notation of the time of the composition.’

39 From interview, Béla Bartók with Denijs Dille, 2 February 1937, in French; see, Malcolm Gillies, ‘Bartók, Béla’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 2000), ii, 787–818 (803).

40 ‘Famously’, I say, because of Erno˝ Lendvai's citation of them as evidence of Bartók's compositional use of Fibonacci series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …). See The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály (Budapest: Editio Musica, 1983), 247–68.

41 Welte-US Roll No. 7767 (New York, 1928), reproduced in the Centenary Edition, ed. Somfai and Kocsis.

42 Henle Urtext No. 1402, commentary.

43 See Malcolm Gillies, ‘The Canonization of Béla Bartók’, Bartók Perspectives, ed. Elliott Antokoletz, Victoria Fischer and Benjamin Suchoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 289–302 (290).

44 For a description of the source and edition situation with Improvisations, see László Somfai, ‘The Béla Bartók Thematic Catalog in Progress’, Studia Musicologica, 53 (2012), 21–40 (26–7).

45 Márton Kerékfy, interview with the author, 2 October 2018, Budapest. Bartók's Judith in this revival, Mária Basilides, also received some transposed or alternative versions from Bartók, Kerékfy reported, but these were only used as concert excerpts not in actual performances of the opera.

46 Four of the 85 pieces in the ‘early’ edition are omitted from the ‘revised’ edition, all from the Slovak, second half of For Children. Indeed, II/33 and II/34 of the earlier edition are now acknowledged as having been composed by Emma Kodály, Zoltán Kodály's first wife.

47 Klára Móricz, interview with the author, 28 September 2018, Budapest. For a consideration of many other examples of changed endings in Bartók's output, and their replacement, variant or uncertain statuses, see Fiona Walsh, ‘Bartók's Altered Endings: Contexts, Case Studies and Constructs’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland, 2001), and ‘Variant Endings for Bartók's Two Violin Rhapsodies (1928–1929)’, Music and Letters, 28 (2005), 234–56.

48 Facsimile supplements regularly appear with volumes in the Robert Schumann: New Edition of Complete Works (Mainz: Schott, since 1995), providing the reader with the ability immediately to check, and sometimes to re-interpret, key sources in the work's genesis.

49 Perhaps the most comprehensive facsimile edition of a single work is the Sacher Stiftung's three-volume celebration of the centenary of the première of The Rite of Spring, which included the autograph full score, ed. Ulrich Mosch; manuscript of the version for piano, four hands, ed. Felix Meyer; and the collection of essays, Avatar of Modernity: The Rite of Spring Reconsidered, ed. Hermann Danuser and Heidy Zimmermann (all volumes, London: Boosey & Hawkes, 2013).

50 Examples include the evidence of the influence of French writers upon the music of Debussy, which Paul Dukas in 1926 suggested had been more important than that of other musicians. It is instructive that the last volume (vol. 26) of the New Berlioz Edition (2003) is devoted entirely to portraits of the composer.

51 See, for instance, Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), Section VII, 399–434, and Bartók Béla írásai, vol. 1, ed. Tibor Tallián (Budapest: Zenemu˝kiadó, 1989), Section II, 41–88.

52 Completed, in 12 volumes, in 2017 (Kassel: Bärenreiter), and listed among its composer complete editions (www.baerenreiter.com/en/catalogue/complete-editions).

53 See Somfai, ‘Manuscript versus Urtext’, 64.

54 http://db.zti.hu/bartok_correspondence/bmails__intr.asp.

55 The nearest approach to a critical edition of letters is found in the unpublished Bartók Letters: The Musical Mind, edited by Malcolm Gillies and Adrienne Gombocz. This volume was completed in 1995, and contracted by Oxford University Press. As with BBCCE, it was then indefinitely deferred. A glimpse of the value of Bartók's correspondence to the understanding of his works can be found in Gillies's ‘Bartók Performance Practice through Correspondence’, Studia Musicologica, 53 (2012), 103–11.

56 Studia Musicologica, 53 (2012), 15–19.

57 Werkverzeichnisse, in German.

58 ‘The Béla Bartók Thematic Catalog in Progress’, Studia Musicologica, 53 (2012), 21–40.

59 See Somfai's ‘Desiderata Bartókiana: A Survey of Missing Links in Bartók Studies’, International Journal of Musicology, 9 (2000), 385–420.

60 Somfai interview, 4 October 2018.

61 Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).

62 Somfai, ‘Desiderata Bartókiana’, 385–7. Taruskin's study, however, focuses mainly on the Russian traditions; its sub-title ‘a biography of the works through Mavra’, while nicely straddling concepts of life and works, clearly limits its detailed content to the first 40 years of Stravinsky's life. Russian-tradition works after Mavra, that is, from the 1920s until the 1960s, are touched upon only cursorily in the study's ‘Epilogue: The Traditions Revisited’. A better example might be Paul Kildea's revisionist Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, issued in Britten's centennial year, 2013, by Allen Lane (London).

63 Somfai, ‘The Béla Bartók Thematic Catalog’, 22–4.

64 The Robert Schumann: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, by Margit L. McCorkle, et al. (Munich: Henle, 2003) pushed the one-volume outer limit at nearly 1,100 pages. This Schumann catalogue achieved something of a summary ‘life and works’ outcome, as proposed by Somfai, with its aim of providing ‘a proper context for understanding the historical, descriptive, and bibliographical details’ surrounding individual works.

65 Seiffert, ‘Four Observations’, 17–19.

66 Ludwig van Beethoven: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, ed. Kurt Dorfmüller, Norbert Gertsch and Julia Ronge, et al., 2 vols. (Munich: Henle, 2014), i. 46*. The Digital Delius Catalogue (2018), at https://delius.music.ox.ac.uk/catalogue is perhaps the most recent example of a totally digital thematic catalogue, created by Joanna Bullivant and Daniel Grimley. It is, significantly, hosted by a university website. See, ‘Business Models’, later in this article.

67 A subscription app, with 30 million pages of sheet music (www.nkoda.com).

68 Seiffert, email to the author, 6 October 2018.

69 www.henle.de/en/search/?Composers=B&Composer=Bart%C3%B3k%2C+B%C3%A9la.

70 For one overview of the features of the Henle Library App, see www.key-notes.com/blog/henle-library-app.

71 Kerékfy interview, 2 October 2018.

72 See such possibilities as outlined at a recent ‘Digital Delius: Unlocking Digitised Music Manuscripts’ study day at the British Library, London (www.oerc.ox.uk/Digital-Delius).

73 Thomas Schmidt, ‘Editing/editions’, sensibly warns that while digital editions can very effectively present alternatives, ‘issues of editorial control avoiding the arbitrary conflation of incompatible readings have not yet been satisfactorily resolved’ (207).

74 See, for example, https://www.guidingtech.com/31832/best-apps-voice-reading-text-ios-android.

75 Indeed, used by many music publishers for over two decades, for high-quality in-house printing of digitally available scores, but lacking the interactivity of more recent Apps, such as Henle's.

76 See, for example, the digital versus print-on-demand availability of all publications of the Australian National University Press (https://press.anu.edu.au/publications). Cambridge University Press has been issuing print-on-demand books since 1998, now including a high percentage of its entire back lists.

77 Móricz interview, 28 September 2018.

78 With the forthcoming BBCCE ‘Piano Music, 1914–20’ (ed. Somfai) and Mikrokosmos volumes (ed. Nakahara), the pieces have already been issued as Henle Urtexts, and some corrections from that Urtext phase will find their way into the relevant BBCCE volumes before publication.

79 See ‘Elgar Complete Edition: The Full Edition’, at www.elgar/9edition.htm.

80 See http://beta.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details/?regid=1156953&subid=0.

81 Through Bristol University's Research Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth.

82 As well as subscriptions, the Elgar Society solicits part or full sponsorships of individual volumes, with various grades of volume dedications and bespoke schemes for volume dissemination (www.elgar.org/9sponsor.htm).

83 See the revised General Preface, by Adrienne Kaczmarczyk and Imre Mezo˝, found in all volumes since 2005, particularly emphasizing advances in editorial methodology, notational practice, genesis study of works, and a change from its German-English original format to an English-Hungarian-German presentation, similar to that adopted for BBCCE (www.emb.hu/en/composers/liszt_ferenc).

84 Originally conceived under a co-publication arrangement between Bärenreiter and Editio Musica, since 1985 the New Liszt Edition has been issued under the Editio Musica imprint alone.

85 In 1991, Éditions Costallat (Gaumont-Erato Group) bowed out of a co-publishing arrangement with Éditions Durand, which then continued as sole publisher from 1997.

86 http://www.schoenberg-gesamtausgabe.de/informationen.html.

87 See Richard Taruskin, ‘Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out’, Studia Musicologica, 47 (2006), 265–78.

88 Somfai interview, 4 October 2018.

89 See https://www.akademienunion.de/en.

90 https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en.

91 Vikárius interview, 2 October 2018.

92 See http://www.emb.hu/en/page/about.

93 Seiffert email exchanges, 24 September to 7 October 2018.

94 www.sheetmusicplus.com and https://www.harrassowitz.de, respectively.

95 Seiffert email exchange, 6 October 2018.

96 Seiffert email exchange, 6 October 2018.

97 See, for instance, a recent African CCCE, in Christine Lucia, ‘General introduction to the Mohapeloa Critical Edition’, South African Music Studies, 36–37 (2018), 178–236.