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August 10, 2022Read More
By Alexander Dean
A “critical” edition is concerned with faithfulness to a source, and its authenticity, along with the probity of the editors involved, is bound to an understanding that the source material has been adequately and conscientiously accounted for. But any source will present elements that fall into a gray area, not at once sliding into their place in even the most carefully constructed pre-transcription editorial methodology. Prime among these are layout-specific elements: those numbers, directives, and graphical notations that serve in manuscripts and early music prints to guide readers and performers safely from one page to the next. Since, in the translation to a modern edition, the layout will necessarily change, one might be tempted to dismiss any such marking out of hand, along with the source page numbers and other obvious candidates for tacit removal. While this is not a bad rule of thumb, at least to start out, each type of notation will need to be evaluated on its own.
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February 22, 2018Read More
By Jane Schatkin Hettrick
Six oboes, four clarinets, ten bassoons, one contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, and two timpani—such are the extra instrumental forces that Salieri added to the Vienna Hofkapelle orchestra for an extraordinary occasion in 1804: the inauguration of an empire, when Holy Roman Emperor Franz II became Emperor Franz I of Austria. For this event, Hofkapellmeister Antonio Salieri created his most monumental work of liturgical music, the twelve-movement, double-choir Plenary Mass with Te Deum, published here for the first time. The complete work took shape in stages over several years, being based on a mass Salieri originally composed in 1799, as well a single-choir Te Deum dating back to a setting from 1790. For the 1804 version, Salieri used his original scores but devised letter codes to indicate the new instruments and only sketched out some sections. This historic composition stands apart from all Salieri’s other liturgical music, showing the composer at his grandest.
