Performers, Composers, Scores and Editions: Commentary on Huisman, Gingras, Dhondt, and Leman (2017)

Reflecting on a study that examines the impact of various editions on the speed of learning and performance errors, this short paper notes the crudeness of western music notation and how musicians cope with deciphering the composer's musical intentions. Drawing on parallels with practitioners who specialize in historically informed performance and tend to favor playing from manuscripts and facsimiles, I argue that although performing editions are useful, proper education regarding the meaning of notation practices and compositional styles might better serve musicians. This enables each generation to construct its own understanding of the music, and of the contradictory and insufficiently specified demands of the score.

Haydn's (?) Cello Concertos, 1860-1930: Editions, Performances, Reception

While there exist numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century annotated editions of repertoire such as the violin sonatas of Beethoven, the repertoire for the cello was in general edited significantly less frequently. The cello concertos by or attributed to Haydn constitute an exception, both in the number of versions and the degree of editorial intervention. Three cello concertos were associated with Haydn's name: the well-known concerto in D Hob.VIIb:2, another concerto in D Hob.VIIb:4, and a concerto in C Hob.VIIb:5. The first is now known to be a genuine work of Haydn's although this attribution was not universally accepted in the nineteenth century. The second is an unattributable eighteenth-century concerto claimed to be by Haydn and accepted as such at its publication in 1895. The third was compiled by the cellist David Popper who claimed to have based it on Haydn's sketches, providing orchestration and linking material. This article discusses aspects of the five performing editions of Hob.VIIb:2 by Bockmühl, Servais, Becker, Klengel and Whitehouse, the two editions of Hob.VIIb:4 by Grützmacher and Trowell, and Popper's concerto, considering these texts, the reception of the concertos as compositions, and the reception of individual performances. This article surveys the period of the greatest diversity of editions, a period whose later limit is determined by the eventual entry of this work into the cello canon. It will be suggested that this diversity is a consequence of non-canonicity.

EDITORIAL

Although musicology as a discipline has expanded enormously over the past few decades, many of its core interests remain much as they were a century ago, when the primary task facing scholars was to take stock of what had been written and by whom. We now possess good if not yet definitive catalogues of many composers’ oeuvres and in some cases complete or near-complete critical editions. Less systematically organized performing editions of works by non-canonical composers have also begun to appear in increasing numbers in recent years to complement the pioneering surveys in publications like Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich and Musica Britannica. Systematic studies of contemporary documents relating to individual musicians and musical establishments have proved exceptionally useful, though much of the picture remains obscure. Thus, after a century of unremitting labour, we have a musical chart that is extravagantly detailed in some areas yet frustratingly blank in others. The chance survival of documents enables us, for example, to know how many coffee spoons Leopold Hofmann owned at the time of his death, yet few if any documents survive that shed light on his personal and professional life. None the less, in spite of the incompleteness of our knowledge we possess an incomparably more detailed understanding of music in the eighteenth century than seemed possible even twenty years ago.