This illustrates the importance of always using ORIGINAL sources for doing one's research. People who read these original sources and then write about them always change what's in the original. They can misunderstand something, or misread something, and so on.
But if you read the original, then you know exactly what's going on.
From the Wall Street Journal
Four Lost Measures Found
The principal bassoonist at the New York Philharmonic got some good news recently: The bassoon part in Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose" ballet ("Ma Mère l'Oye"), which will be performed on the orchestra's program for three consecutive evenings beginning Wednesday (and reprised Jan. 4), just grew by four full measures. "She was tickled pink," says Arbie Orenstein, the Queens College musicologist who, while examining the work's original manuscript, came across a musical line that, strangely enough, had never made it into the score that has been performed for the past 100 years.
Ravel originally composed "Mother Goose" in 1910 as a set of duets, for one piano and four hands, for the children of friends. A year later he orchestrated that piano suite for a small orchestra, subsequently expanding that orchestral transcription into a ballet based upon the same children's stories he'd previously adapted. Ravel, who died in 1937 and is, along with Claude Debussy, considered to be one of the two most important French composers of the first half of the 20th century, once said that he considered "Mother Goose" and his 1912 ballet, "Daphnis and Chloé," to be his most significant works. (Many associate Ravel with "Boléro," the one-movement, 15-minute orchestral work that the self-critical composer famously described as a piece consisting wholly of "orchestral tissue without music.")
Although the process of transferring a musical composition from a gleam in the composer's eye into a handwritten manuscript and, finally, a performance-ready score has come a long way from the days of copper-plate engraving, it's a process rife with the possibility of transmittal error. "Usually, it's a note here or there or a missing dynamic indication, which will be weeded out by conductors, musicians, librarians or musicologists," says Mr. Orenstein, a Ravel scholar of 45 years and the author of "A Ravel Reader" (1990). "Typically a composer's biggest problem is the battle against wrong notes. It's unusual to find a four-measure error such as the omission of the bassoon part in "Mother Goose's Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty." It was while studying the manuscript contained in an archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin that Mr. Orenstein first encountered the missing line: "I thought, what is that instrument doing here? But it was perfectly written, complete with dynamics and phrasing, and it makes absolute sense according to the rules of orchestration." Ravel, he explains, was a follower of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's treatise on writing for orchestras, "which very clearly says that the bassoon and cello often double each other; without the bassoon, there's no glue and it sounds wrong. A very small detail, but then music consists of detail."
The musicologist says that the dropped bassoon line was the largest error he's ever discovered in a Ravel score, though he found numerous other discrepancies between the manuscript and the published score in terms of accent marks, dynamics and tempo changes. He hypothesizes that the slip-up in "Mother Goose," which is actually one of Ravel's simpler scores in terms of harmony and orchestration, was a proofreading lapse on the composer's part. "Ravel always strove for perfection and had great confidence in his publisher's chief proofreader. But at that time in 1911, when he would have been reading the publisher's proofs, he was also working furiously on 'Daphnis et Chloé,' playing parts of that on the piano for Stravinsky and Stravinsky playing parts of his newly finished 'The Rite of Spring' on the piano for Ravel," Mr. Orenstein says.
Ravel had an exclusive lifetime publishing arrangement with Durand et Cie., the sole publisher of "Mother Goose" since 1912. While the object of music publishing is to get as close as possible to the composer's original intent, the manuscript itself is not necessarily dispositive because it, too, may contain errors. Ravel's exclusive publishing arrangement notwithstanding, it's not uncommon for musical works to be published over time by different publishers and subsequently freighted with the conflicting, sometimes overzealous or heavy-handed input of seriatim editors reflecting shifting interpretative mores. Throw in the illegible handwriting of, say, a Beethoven, or a composer who makes changes on routinely tossed publisher's proofs but neglects to enter them on the original manuscript, as well as the inevitable errors endemic to the typesetting and printing process itself, and the vagaries of the score-publishing process become manifest.
Mr. Orenstein has a publishing contract with Ernst Eulenburg Ltd. to reissue corrected scores of Ravel's major orchestral works; his "Mother Goose" edition will be published in 2012. Each work takes him about a year to complete. "Having seen and studied all these manuscripts, I kind of sense how Ravel thinks," Mr. Orenstein says. "The key, when analyzing a work such as the 'Mother Goose,' where Ravel is orchestrating his own keyboard composition, is to play what's on the keyboard, over and over, to know what the sound should be, in order to make sure the composer was achieving the very same sound, in albeit a thousand different ways, for the orchestra. Remember, he's writing parts for all these instruments with complex transpositions and key signatures with up to six sharps—all this carried in his head! It's a great head, but anyone can make mistakes with all that going on."
Mr. Orenstein's "Mother Goose" edition, a so-called urtext, will contain textual notes setting out the differences between the composer's manuscript and the existing Durand score to accompany the musicologist's corrected score. "Conductors may disagree with what I say, but they will have the information at their disposal," Mr. Orenstein says. He has presented his corrections—prepublication—to the New York Philharmonic; New York audiences will be the first to hear the corrected score performed and to attend a preconcert talk by Mr. Orenstein on Jan. 4.
Of course, the possibility for error forever looms, never to be completely staunched. "I'm on my fifth set of publisher's proofs for this 'Mother Goose' edition," Mr. Orenstein said.
Plus ça change. . .
No comments:
Post a Comment