About five years ago, I put together a series of libretto booklets for Wagner's Ring operas, intended mostly as a means of providing an English translation for anglophone opera fans. After reviewing a variety of texts that were available to me, I settled upon one that I considered respectable, and that was that. My decision was based more on my estimation of the reliability of the source than on my own (limited) knowledge of German. A certain amount of rearranging was necessary for the format of the booklet, but the spellings I left alone.
It looks like I might be going back to the file to redo some technical things in the booklets, so I wondered if it was worth revisiting the question. I know that some sources I've seen use no ß ligature at all. Perhaps that was just due to limitations of the typographical process, I don't know.
It had been suggested to me that perhaps it was worth changing the spellings to make them more "correct" for current usage, but I'm now satisfied that to do so is perhaps a bad idea altogether and certainly not worth the extra effort it would require to do it right, so I intend to leave the spellings alone. If anyone here is sufficiently interested to look at the texts I used the first time, you can see them online at <http://home.earthlink.net/~markdlew/shw/Ring.htm>.
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On Feb 14, 2005, at 2:13 AM, Urs Liska wrote:
*If* this "modernized" edition exclusively uses "ss" then it certainly is no good edition!
As others pointed out, 'ß' is still used along with 'ss'.
The one source I have here on my shelf is the current Schirmer vocal score of Walküre, it's a reprint of Schirmer's 1904 edition, which was itself based on Schott's 1899 English/German edition. This score uses "ss" exclusively, with no "ß". On the other hand, it preserves all the "th"s. The Peters score -- which I don't have on hand, but I remember well -- does use the ß but converts "th" to "t".
BTW: Do you know how "original" your "original" edition is?
Alas, my notes are incomplete. I have a vague recollection of the process I went through, and I know I could reconstruct my process if I had the access to the same library materials I used before, but I'm in a different city now. I can safely say that my "original" source was not intended as an exact rendering of Wagner's actual manuscript, but it was a standard text provided by a respectable publisher.
Every text I can find online right has ß but no "th", like Peters. I'm pretty sure I didn't type all the German from scratch (though I did type the Jameson translation), and I wouldn't have made spelling adjustments on my own unless I was following a source I considered reliable, so at this point I'm honestly not sure where my text came from. I do know that my intention at the time was to be true to Wagner and not modernize (hence, preserving "th" while most current sources use "t").
That brings another question to mind: What purpose is your publication intended for? Is it as a reference to the music, something to work with or just a matter of curiosity?
Just a simple aid for English-speaking opera fans. As someone else noted on this thread, such people probably don't care a bit about details.
mdl
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