{"id":3044,"date":"2015-09-14T08:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T06:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.henle.de\/blog\/en\/?p=3044"},"modified":"2015-09-14T09:09:22","modified_gmt":"2015-09-14T07:09:22","slug":"urtext-and-urcontext","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/2015\/09\/14\/urtext-and-urcontext\/","title":{"rendered":"Urtext and Urcontext"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"leinen<\/a>In our blog we have certainly already discussed the Urtext principle at length, and we can assume that it is familiar as such \u2013 but are you also acquainted with the Ur<\/em>context? This also plays a particularly large role at the Henle publishers (even if we don\u2019t put it on the cover\u2026).<\/p>\n

In the concept of the Urtext edition we take into account not only the individual work, but also its (original) context. That is, in our editions we present in a volume not only as many of a composer\u2019s works as possible for a certain scoring (so that then all the piano trios by Mendelssohn or the violin sonatas by Beethoven are in our catalogue), but we also consider the original context, the circumstances of the work\u2019s composition or original publication: The familiar Faur\u00e9 Fantaisie<\/em> for flute and piano<\/a>, for example, is published by Henle together with the relatively unfamiliar Morceau de lecture<\/em> for the same scoring, composed jointly with the Fantaisie <\/em>in the summer of 1898 for the annual Concours de fl\u00fbte<\/em> at the Paris Conservatoire. (With these, incidentally, all the works by Gabriel Faur\u00e9 for flute and piano are presented at the same time \u2013 and it becomes clear, by the way, that this is an excerpt from his \u0153uvre of pure commissioned compositions from his period at the Conservatoire.)<\/p>\n

Our editions of Robert Schumann\u2019s lieder give another example of our publishing his songs in their original keys and as he himself compiled them in his opera<\/em>. Don\u2019t you think then that this is logical? That may perhaps apply to the \u201clarge\u201d cycles such as the Dichterliebe<\/a> <\/em>op. 48 or the Eichendorff Liederkreis <\/em><\/a>op. 39, but just try sometime to find a current edition of the Zw\u00f6lf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner<\/em><\/a> op. 35! Over the course of the last hundred years these songs in particular have gotten scattered in the various volumes of large anthologies offering for practical usage Schumann\u2019s lieder (as well as those by Franz Schubert or Hugo Wolf) and, in the process, not only transposing them, but sometimes even destroying the coherence of the original work(s).<\/p>\n

The historically-informed reader may now argue that breaking up such cycles is though no problem, since these were never in fact completely heard all at once even in Schumann\u2019s lifetime, but publicly performed were only individual lieder. At times, furthermore, Schumann himself was fond of copying this or that song from a cycle into another context or publishing it, even in so doing, transposing it \u2013 as, for example, the \u201cFr\u00fchlingsnacht\u201d from Opus 39 was transposed into G major which is simpler to manage on the piano (cf. the rendering of both versions in our Urtext edition HN 550).<\/p>\n

\""Fr\u00fchlingsnacht"<\/a>

"Fr\u00fchlingsnacht" (beginning), original key<\/p><\/div>\n

\""Fr\u00fchlingsnacht"<\/a>

"Fr\u00fchlingsnacht" (beginning), transposed to G major by Schumann<\/p><\/div>\n

To this day there are also at least as many single recordings of \u201cMondnacht\u201d from the same Eichendorff cycle as complete recordings of Opus 39. And finally: Isn\u2019t the grouping of several lieder generally the fault of the publishers who didn\u2019t want to produce any expensive single editions, but entire volumes instead?<\/p>\n

\"schumann<\/a>

First Edition (Brahms-Institut, L\u00fcbeck)<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Kerner\"<\/a><\/em>

Justinus Kerner<\/p><\/div>\n

All this is quite correct \u2013 but misses the essential point of the \u201cUrtext\u201d question, which aims, in fact, at the composer\u2019s creative intention. And this also concerns Schumann\u2019s lieder cycles and exactly the organisation of the texts \u2013 which is also no great wonder in the case of a composer so cultivated and engaged in literature. It clearly follows from Schumann\u2019s copies of texts and autographs of compositions that he refined at length the selection and ordering of the texts for a cycle. Thus, in November\/December 1840 he set altogether 14 poems by Justinus Kerner whom he admired; these he repeatedly sorted and resorted, rejecting even again two lieder, before \u201ca short cycle of Kerner poems\u201d became the \u201cLiederreihe nach Justinus Kerner\u201d (Set of Lieder on Texts by Justinus Kerner) op. 35. Only in the last revision before publication did he still decide to transpose the first lied (\u201cLust der Sturmnacht\u201d) from G major to E-flat major \u2013 resulting in this truly stormy start to the set of lieder being in a dominant-key relationship to the subsequent \u201cStirb, Lieb\u2019 und Freud\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such specific efforts by the composer towards the finished form of an opus are sufficient cause for us to edit the Kerner cycle in its original form \u2013 and hence to offer musicians for the first time a modern practical Urtext edition where the lieder can be studied in their Ur<\/em>context. Whether then musicians deliberately choose to perform just one of them or to do perhaps the entire cycle can happily be left up to them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our blog we have certainly already discussed the Urtext … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[281,3,327,287,349],"tags":[26,487,59,61,97],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}