Richard Strauss Online

Abstract

In an era when historical statues can be toppled and reputations smashed, critical editions remain one of the more durable monuments to the significance of a composer. Initiated by the nineteenth-century Bach-Gesellschaft and Händel-Gesellschaft editions, the practice of trying to produce a ‘correct’ text of the complete musical works of a single composer reached its apogee in the decades after World War II, leading to marquee projects like the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (1954–2007) and the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (1955–91). So pervasive was edition-making in this era that it led Joseph Kerman to complain ‘there is something wrong with a discipline that spends (or spent) so much more of its time establishing texts than thinking about the texts thus established’. But despite such criticisms and amid the proliferation of alternative forms of musicological research in the last 40 years or so, the making of critical editions has continued, with new projects taking in figures such as Janáček (1978–), Verdi (1983–), Donizetti (1989–) and Bartók (2016–), among many others. Even if it may be nowhere near as dominant a part of musicological endeavour as it once was, edition-making has survived, a tacit refutation of the challenges that the canon has met with.