Identity of a Musical Work

[aleazk]

I realize the following is not addressing the context to which you were responding, but....

The best reason for an urtext edition is there are no other directives by any other editors; any and everything therein is from the composer and no one else. 

One can ignore anything or any part of directives of a score (ignoring the composer's directives is at the performer's peril), but there is always a subliminal effect of seeing those other edits that are not the composer's, or if nothing else, they are more clutter to ignore, lol.

Ha, I thought that too... until the following happened. I started to study Ravel's Miroirs piano suite some months ago (actually, the more technically difficult movements, I already studied the slower movements years ago.) I used the score that one can download for free from IMLSP, which corresponds to the first edition. But I started to notice quite a lot of problems. Some notes had rhythms that didn't fit in the bar (in une barque, an extra note in certain rapid passage made it virtually unplayable), some harmonies didn't sound like that in the recordings, there was a very confusing convention of using, simultaneously, different time signatures (e.g., 2/4 and 6/8, where, actually, the eightnotes from the second where just triples in the first one... but still they used the tuplet notation if the tuplets appeared in the 2/4 layer... when both layers juxtapose, the result is just visual and notational schizophrenia!)...

So, I decided to buy two newer editions (one urtext and the other commented). It took a month for them to reach this corner of the world. I was particularly interested in the unplayable passage from une barque. To my relief, and as I guessed, that extra note was either an error or it was deleted from later editions at Ravel's request. But, to my surprise, now some other notes from that same passage were changed in relation to the first edition! And each edition had its own take! One editor said that his option had to be the correct one because Ravel's orchestration of the piece suggested this version. The other just said it was just for symmetry with previous bars. Ravel's manuscript, one is told, is in a private collection and not open to consult (and, even in the other pieces where the manuscripts are avaiable, there are still disagreements!) . So, the pianist is confronted with three different options! The one I play is a fourth one (!) which I built based on all the other ones and which I think sounds like the ones played by, e.g., Perlemuter, who studied these pieces with Ravel.

All in all, it was a fun and curious nightmare.