Am 19.02.2013 13:24, schrieb Joseph Rushton Wakeling:
On 02/18/2013 03:17 AM, Luca Rossetto Casel wrote:
Yes, in most cases brackets are indeed unnecessary. But I know some
over-accurate editions that aim to reproduce the original text as faithfully as possible, giving evidence to every critical intervention - for example, the
Ricordi critical edition of Verdi's works.

Well, Ricordi have a karma debt to pay after some of the very unfaithful editions they produced in the last century ... ;-)

Generally I think it's a good thing to be as clear as possible about editorial interventions, but I'm not sure that modernizing the _style_ of accidental placement really counts as an "intervention" in that sense.
I think that it is especially important to give the interested user the _possibility_ to know as exactly as possible what has been done to the score. When I make an edition I can't really know which aspects may once become important to a user of the edition. Sometimes small issues that may seem totally neglectable prove to be a key observation for important interpretations. But OTOH it is impossible to make a perfect edition. No matter how detailed one declares everything, there may always be someone who misses an explanation. The other way round I have quite often found issues in Schubert's manuscripts that were barely or not at all noticeable through the material of the New Schubert Edition (as good as it generally is). Sometimes this is really complex. Right now I am investigating a song from "Winterreise" (which is fortunately available as facsimile edition by Dover). In the fair copy (written as "Stichvorlage", whatever the English term is) Schubert left out many articulations, so it obviously has to be completed. The engraver of the original edition did this, but in a way that seems _very_ wrong to me (too complicated to elaborate on here ...), and Schubert probably didn't have the opportunity to proof-read (as he handed out the manuscript only a few weeks before his death). So the original edition has more articulations than the manuscript, but it is far from complete (and sometimes wrong IMO). The first Schubert Edition basically used this version, just 'correcting' a few awkward issues. The New Schubert Edition completes the score systematically (i.e. propagating the articulation of the prelude throughout the piece). Now to the editorial problem (we are talking about): Of course the New Edition marks all editor's addition typographically. But a) printing staccato dots and accents smaller than normal is a quite unnoticeable style. And b) (much more important) the New Edition takes the manuscript and the original edition as its main sources. So additions by the original engraver are taken as _original material_ and thus not marked in the New Edition. While I realized (through the study of the manuscript) that the original edition presumably made a lot of problematic additions this isn't visible in the New Edition at all. I can only hope that this fact is described in the Critical Report (which I haven't inspected yet). But as the Critical Report isn't actually part of the books and only available in some libraries, the information in it is really buried quite far away.


To finally share some thoughts on the original question (although at a different historic point): In a current edition project we face the problem of reminder accidentals. The original sources (turn of 19/20th century but completely tonal) use them quite inconsistently and generally far too often. We decided to handle them quite freely, taking the expectations and needs of a 'modern' player as our guideline (i.e. which reminder accidentals help me or prevent me understanding the meaning at a glance). As this doesn't change the musical text we decided not to mark these interventions in the score (which would have made it far too crowded), but make a complete list of added/emended reminder accidentals in the appendix. This is along the line of one of my first comments: While I'm quite happy with the solutions and know that we don't change the musical text, I can't know if the (originally used) reminder accidentals might become meaningful to someone who later studies the edition. On the other hand we decided to mark the accidentals that we identified as musically wrong by parentheses. (BTW any idea how one could highlight the _emendation_ of an accidental (or any other grob) typographically???)
[And of course I'm aware that this is the same position as Joseph's]

Best
Urs


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