De vita cum imperfectis

Abstract

T he creation of new editions of old music, an important area of musicology, usually has two goals: to enrich our understanding of history and, at the same time, to provide present musical practice with new material—a goal to which the overused notion of the “unjustly forgotten master” bears eloquent (and dubious) witness. The editorial method employed assumes the incontrovertible high quality of the work to be edited; the original, as conceived by the master, is deemed flawless. From this it follows that all the errors contained in the work as it has come down to us are due to flawed transmission and therefore have to be emended in the new edition. Similarly, all additions made to the work by another hand in the course of transmission do not measure up to the level of the master; therefore, they too have to go. This attitude leads to the ideal of the Urtextausgabe, the edition of the original text. And even though the term in recent decades has been interpreted in a considerable number of different ways, it still implies that the new edition must focus as much as possible on the evidence of the composer, and that foreign interpretation of any kind is to be excluded. There is no need to challenge the general validity of these principles. Whoever follows them, however (in the conviction that clarification of the composer’s intent is demanded by the commitment to truth, without which our discipline makes no sense), must also become aware of the method’s limits in order to use it effectively. The following observations will consider some of those limits. A work like Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which the author is currently [1971] editing, is well suited to clarify the problems, since there is no question about the quality of the work or the capabilities of the composer. Therefore, we will be able to focus exclusively on editorial problems.