Re: 19th-cent. accidental notation

[Urs Liska]

Am 19.02.2013 13:24, schrieb Joseph Rushton Wakeling:
> On 02/18/2013 03:17 AM, Luca Rossetto Casel wrote:
> > Yes, in most cases brackets are indeed unnecessary. But I know some
> > over-accurate editions that aim to reproduce the original text as 
> > faithfully as
> > possible, giving evidence to every critical intervention - for 
> > example, the
> > Ricordi critical edition of Verdi's works.
>
> Well, Ricordi have a karma debt to pay after some of the very 
> unfaithful editions they produced in the last century ... ;-)
>
> Generally I think it's a good thing to be as clear as possible about 
> editorial interventions, but I'm not sure that modernizing the _style_ 
> of accidental placement really counts as an "intervention" in that sense.
I think that it is especially important to give the interested user the 
_possibility_ to know as exactly as possible what has been done to the 
score.
When I make an edition I can't really know which aspects may once become 
important to a user of the edition. Sometimes small issues that may seem 
totally neglectable prove to be a key observation for important 
interpretations.
But OTOH it is impossible to make a perfect edition. No matter how 
detailed one declares everything, there may always be someone who misses 
an explanation. The other way round I have quite often found issues in 
Schubert's manuscripts that were barely or not at all noticeable through 
the material of the New Schubert Edition (as good as it generally is).
Sometimes this is really complex. Right now I am investigating a song 
from "Winterreise" (which is fortunately available as facsimile edition 
by Dover). In the fair copy (written as "Stichvorlage", whatever the 
English term is) Schubert left out many articulations, so it obviously 
has to be completed. The engraver of the original edition did this, but 
in a way that seems _very_ wrong to me (too complicated to elaborate on 
here ...), and Schubert probably didn't have the opportunity to 
proof-read (as he handed out the manuscript only a few weeks before his 
death).
So the original edition has more articulations than the manuscript, but 
it is far from complete (and sometimes wrong IMO). The first Schubert 
Edition basically used this version, just 'correcting' a few awkward 
issues. The New Schubert Edition completes the score systematically 
(i.e. propagating the articulation of the prelude throughout the piece).
Now to the editorial problem (we are talking about): Of course the New 
Edition marks all editor's addition typographically. But a) printing 
staccato dots and accents smaller than normal is a quite unnoticeable 
style. And b) (much more important) the New Edition takes the manuscript 
and the original edition as its main sources. So additions by the 
original engraver are taken as _original material_ and thus not marked 
in the New Edition. While I realized (through the study of the 
manuscript) that the original edition presumably made a lot of 
problematic additions this isn't visible in the New Edition at all. I 
can only hope that this fact is described in the Critical Report (which 
I haven't inspected yet). But as the Critical Report isn't actually part 
of the books and only available in some libraries, the information in it 
is really buried quite far away.


To finally share some thoughts on the original question (although at a 
different historic point): In a current edition project we face the 
problem of reminder accidentals. The original sources (turn of 19/20th 
century but completely tonal) use them quite inconsistently and 
generally far too often.
We decided to handle them quite freely, taking the expectations and 
needs of a 'modern' player as our guideline (i.e. which reminder 
accidentals help me or prevent me understanding the meaning at a 
glance). As this doesn't change the musical text we decided not to mark 
these interventions in the score (which would have made it far too 
crowded), but make a complete list of added/emended reminder accidentals 
in the appendix. This is along the line of one of my first comments: 
While I'm quite happy with the solutions and know that we don't change 
the musical text, I can't know if the (originally used) reminder 
accidentals might become meaningful to someone who later studies the 
edition. On the other hand we decided to mark the accidentals that we 
identified as musically wrong by parentheses. (BTW any idea how one 
could highlight the _emendation_ of an accidental (or any other grob) 
typographically???)
[And of course I'm aware that this is the same position as Joseph's]

Best
Urs
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