I’m starting a new topic here for fingering, worthy of consideration in its own right, and better not to be buried in the thread on diverging sources.
I admire Claudio’s book. But personally I abhor fingerings in scores. I particularly dislike the piano fingerings in Henle and Peters Bach for example. It’s just so wrong, and I find the numbers distracting and noisy. I believe you can now get digital Henle editions where you can apply different editors’ fingerings. That’s nice for some people but to me it seems the main advantage is that you can turn them off (probably not exactly what Henle had in mind).
I am so annoyed by fingerings that I am currently engraving and preparing an edition of the two books of the JSB WTC (recently switched over to Dorico from Lilypond) which will be a commercial project. I’ll also be making an edition with original clefs, as an alternative. I strongly believe that if 17c musicians could fluently read seven clefs we should be able to also. [A hobbyhorse of mine.]
As to ornaments and divergencies in my edition, that’s a talk for another day! For WTC I I am going off the autograph copy. I am not aiming for this to be a breakthrough in musicology, just a nice, clear, affordable ebook version. [Try finding print on demand services that will do Klavierformat paper!]
I’m starting a new topic here for fingering, worthy of consideration
in its own right, and better not to be buried in the thread on
diverging sources.
I admire Claudio’s book. But personally I abhor fingerings in scores.
I particularly dislike the piano fingerings in Henle and Peters Bach
for example. It’s just so wrong, and I find the numbers distracting
and noisy. I believe you can now get digital Henle editions where you
can apply different editors’ fingerings. That’s nice for some people
but to me it seems the main advantage is that you can turn them off
(probably not exactly what Henle had in mind).
I am /so/ annoyed by fingerings that I am currently engraving and
preparing an edition of the two books of the JSB WTC (recently
switched over to Dorico from Lilypond) which will be a commercial
project. I’ll also be making an edition with original clefs, as an
alternative. I strongly believe that if 17c musicians could fluently
read seven clefs we should be able to also. [A hobbyhorse of mine.]
As to ornaments and divergencies in my edition, that’s a talk for
another day! For WTC I I am going off the autograph copy. I am not
aiming for this to be a breakthrough in musicology, just a nice,
clear, affordable ebook version. [Try finding print on demand services
that will do Klavierformat paper!]
Both Henle and Bärenreiter (and perhaps other publishers) offer paper
editions of both books without fingerings.
Indeed, Bernard, Henle’s fingerings (e.g. those by Walter Lampe) are quite bad even for pianists. They are also inconsistent. In some passages (e.g. where in the r.h. you play two voices and your thumb is busy playing the lower voice) they cross-finger, the baroque way. Elsewhere they pass the thumb at all costs, even when this implies ridiculous hand contortions.
Le 05/08/2022 15:20, Andrew Bernard via The Jackrail écrit :
Shows how out of date I am! My Henle is 40 years old at least!
Mine is even older… bought in the 70s. Of course, there was no
fingeringless version at the time. And though published by Henle as an
Urtext in 1972 (im speaking of Book II here), it has been replaced by a
new Henle edition by Yo Tomita. (Also sold as a digital version.)
According to their site: “This edition by a leading Bach scholar is a
vast improvement of the previous Henle “Urtext” edition …”
[Harpsichord & Fortepiano, 2008]
I’m hanging onto my old edition, because I don’t want to have to learn
everything from scratch again at my age.