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From: anderson@uwvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Editions of piano music
Message-ID: <232@uwvax.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 30-Apr-84 13:56:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: uwvax.232
Posted: Mon Apr 30 13:56:37 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 1-May-84 08:22:43 EDT
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 26

More about Schirmer editions:
The general problem with the Schirmer editions of piano music is that
they're over-edited.  In other words, they add (or modify) a lot of
fingerings, dynamic marks, slurs, tempo marks, etc., without telling
you what they added and what was there originally.  An extreme example
is the Schirmer edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas, edited by
Hans von Bulow, in which not only is the notation monkeyed with but
also there are little "essays" by von Bulow at the bottom of many pages.
Other things over-editors tend to do are move notes from one clef to another,
and change the stem directions.

My idea of good editions are the Schenker edition of the Beethoven sonatas
and the Paderewski edition of most of Chopin's works (both are available
cheaply from Dover, BTW).  Both of these are based on careful study and
comparison of the sources (manuscripts and early editions, which always
contain discrepancies) and add only a minimal amount of extra notation
(for example, if the composer wrote interpretive details only on the
first occurence of a theme, these editions might replicate these to
later occurences).  Whatever fingerings they add are distinguished from
the composer's fingerings.

Schirmer (and other highly edited) editions are OK for sight-reading,
but if you're going to work on a piece it's better to use an edition
in which the music is not "pre-interpreted".

---  David Anderson (...wisc-rsch!anderson)