156 ❧ chapter fifteen
to supplementing. One of the fi nest examples is Franz Kroll’s edition for the
Bach-Gesellschaft of the Well-Tempered Clavier.^5 Although its preface is dated
1866, it stands up very well to the subsequent accretions of knowledge, includ-
ing the rediscovery of the London autograph of Book Two.
The availability of reliable texts for earlier music, when fi rst it attracted my
attention more than forty years ago, was absolutely minimal. It was exceed-
ingly diffi cult to get even major works of Bach in unadulterated texts. For
years the only unaltered text of the Well-Tempered Clavier was that of the Bach-
Gesellschaft, but it had long been out of print. The same was true for many of
the chamber music volumes, and even for such well-known keyboard works as
the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. To this day, except for the recent volume of the
Neue Bach-Ausgabe, no edition of the Bach Inventions and Sinfonias exists that
does not suffer at least from the addition of editor’s fi ngerings. It was impos-
sible to get Rameau in a decent text, except in the old Trésor des Pianistes of
Farrenc as published in 1861.^6 I suppose that even by 1937, only somewhat less
than a tenth of the important early keyboard literature was available in usable
editions. Now, what has not been published in scholarly or so-called urtext edi-
tions is readily available through microfi lm and xeroxing of original editions
or of manuscripts.
The word urtext has acquired magic, and like all magic words it has been
extensively misused. Strictly speaking, an urtext is not even necessarily the
best; it is the fi rst text, it is the oldest extant draft, and that may not be at all
what one wants. This is particularly the case with nineteenth-century works in
which composers did not always complete their manuscripts but put fi nishing
touches to the proofs as they received them from the publishers. Very often a
manuscript of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, or Chopin has less value as a text
than does an early edition. Nineteenth-century music often poses far greater
problems in establishing a “defi nitive” text than that of the eighteenth century.
But in the current parlance of publishers, anything which has nothing but edi-
torial fi ngerings in it is usually called an urtext. Sometimes they even dare to
designate as an urtext edition one which has very little relation whatever to any
of the sources. This magic word offers no guarantee of editorial excellence.
All of what I have been saying makes it perfectly clear that the ideal editor
is the performer himself. If he is serious about a work and feels any obligation
toward its text, it is up to him to make certain that he is working from the best
possible sources, but in the average concert performance, I do not think that
small details make very much difference. I have never really cared much about
- Franz Kroll, Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, Band 14 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1866).
- Aristide Farrenc, Le trésor des pianistes (Paris, 1861; reprint, New York: Da Capo,
1977).
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