Le 02/08/2022 13:15, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
As for my copy of ODM, it is not pirated, it appears to be one I once
downloaded from IMSLP.
Again, I disagree. In the meantime, it seems it was removed from IMSLP.
Most likely because it was illegal.
Le 02/08/2022 14:30, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
No, I am not “absurd”: the only thing I don’t have is ODM’s Introduction
And the Editorial Policy, and the nearly 30 pages of music after p. 177,
and the 17 pages of critical notes on two columns, and the Bibliography.
L. Couperin - Sarabande in a minor, p. 13 in HAC, p. 160 in ODM.
This is my “comparison of the day”. 
As I said before, I do not intend to compare sources or printing quality, but just the scores as printed in both editions.
This is surely one of the most beautiful 17th century Sarabandes, and I have played it in public quite a few times.
I have failed to find errors in either HAC or ODM, but different they are indeed.
The comparison confirms what Curtis wrote: Parville carries many more ornaments, which Curtis finds them in agreement with L.Couperin’s style, and they have as much claim to authenticity than Bauyn.
Let us see the examples:
One of those additional ornaments in Parville, e.g. the slide before bar 9, just mimics the slide two bars later, and therefore it makes perfect sense. I find it a pity (I know you diverge, Dennis) not to have it printed as a suggestion in ODM.
Vice versa, there are a few ornaments that are in Bauyn but not in Parville, e.g. the trill in bar 4.
HAC shows that Curtis is not dogmatic: he realises that in this case Bauyn is better and prints the trill between brackets.
Finally, Parville (thus HAC) has also a different, more ornamented Petite Reprise.
This is also lacking in Bauyn-only ODM.
Conclusion: in this piece I absolutely prefer HAC, which puts together the best of both sources.
Needless to say, we will never know with certainty which source is nearer to the composer’s intentions.
Le 02/08/2022 14:25, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
CDV https://jackrail.space/u/cdv Claudio Di Veroli
August 2AFAIK the Pavane has Bauyn as its only source.
Curtis’s “ribattuta” makes stylistic sense: we find written-out
ribattute elsewhere in non-Italian works, even in a few pieces from
the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.
However, in this case I fully agree with Dennis.
Curtis could have suggested in a footnote that the player should feel
free to add a ribattuta here, but he was wrong in writing it between
brackets in the score: there is no evidence whatsoever that the
composer meant a ribattuta here. As it stands, and because of the
ensuing trill termination, the simple crotchet in the source should
just have a suggested trill.
Actually, the ribattuta is not added, but, much worse, it REPLACES what
Couperin wrote. There is no note indicating what Couperin originally had
there, and one can only guess, or look at the manuscript…
Le 01/08/2022 20:07, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
For a confirmation, let us look at a Prélude, e.g. the Prélude à
l`'imitation de M. de Froberger: 7.3 pages in HAC, only 5 pages in ODM.
This is hardly praiseworthy, since it gives you 4 bad page turns
compared to none in Davitt’s layout.
The truth is that DM’s edition is carefully thought out for performers
(by a performer), whereas Heugel doesn’t give a toss.
Le 02/08/2022 15:08, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
Conclusion: in this piece I absolutely prefer HAC, which puts together
the best of both sources.
There are not two but three extant sources for this piece. And Davitt
consulted all three for his edition.
My observations are valid regardless of the existence of a third source.
HAC also consulted several sources other than Bauyn and Parville.
You also openly implied that Davitt Moroney was a performer, while Alan Curtis “couldn’t care less” about performance. This is absolutely unfair. Curtis may have recorded less, but he also produced some very fine and stylish records of French Baroque music: I still have a few of them.
Hope I get some interesting and constructive comments on my comparison.
If so, within the next few days I will proceed with a few more comparisons.
Le 02/08/2022 16:02, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
You also openly implied that Davitt Moroney was a performer, while
Alan Curtis was not.
This is absolutely unfair. Curtis may have recorded less, but he also
produced some very fine and stylish records of French Baroque music: I
still have a few of them.
I implied nothing of the sort. I’m implying that DM obviously had his
word to say in the layout of his edition, whereas AC didn’t. I still
have AC’s Louis Couperin LP, so I am aware that he played the harpsichord.
I am bound to say that I am not in favour of mixing sources. Doing so can lead to the results printed in the recent Bärenreiter Froberger Edition, edited by S. Rampe. This makes plotting a path through the variants in the almost illegible printed text highly tedious and reminds me of a remark in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, concerning the portions of scripture to be read on a given day, which may be paraphrased: *that many times there was more business to find out what should be played, than to play it when it was found out"…
One may legitimately make a different choice of which ms source to use for different pieces, but I am all for staying with one source for one piece, unless all are clearly defective. (This, of course, does not preclude adding one’s own ornaments tastefully and in the style of the composer.)
David
Hi David, I see your point, and when the versions are very divergent, it does not make sense to “merge” them, but to make a decision.
However, in the case of the Sarabande I just compared, indeed both sources appear to be defective, but only in the ornaments.
Both Bauyn and Parville have very “reasonable” or “likely” ornaments that the other source does not have. Therefore, it appears reasonable to print from one of the sources, yet referencing (in either footnotes or between brackets) ornaments from the other source.
This, by the way, is the policy adopted by many modern editors, given that usually no single source is error free.
Even comparison between highly divergent versions of the same work is useful, and may produce worthy changes, better approximating the author’s intentions. A well known case is Bach’s French Ouverture in B minor, based on an earlier version in C minor. Everybody plays from the latter version, which also has a few improvements in a few passages, so “prima facie” we may as well forget about the C minor version .Yet some useful features in the earlier version are missing in the later version. These are some I have found:
Ouverture, bar 13: C minor carries an interesting mordent over the dotted c’ quaver. In the B minor version it is not found: probably an oversight, as it makes no sense to delete it.
Bar 16: the initial appoggiatura to the middle voice is missing in the B minor version.
Bar 161: the mordent over the b’ is missing in the B minor version.
Bar 162: in the transcription, Bach omitted the GG, because it would have resulted in the FF# that most harpsichords in his milieu did not have. But if your harpsichord has it, it is better to play the C minor version transposed down a semitone: it has the additional benefit of ending on BB rather than B.
Edit: by the same token, he also transposed one octave up the first bass note in bar 77. Yet to play the low FF# is a very nice touch there: it provides punch and contrast with the ensuing “piano”, it avoids the “silly” repetition of F#, and it represents the original intention of the composer.
This reminds me of one of the well-known “source conundrums”. Will open a new topic for it, as it is not directly related to Louis Couperin.
I will allow your example and your following arguments, but… It is a different case, from a different period and environment, involving a composer about whom we have much more detailed information, and cannot be used as a backwards precedent for performance practice in the works of Louis Couperin.
David
Le 02/08/2022 13:15, Claudio Di Veroli via The Jackrail écrit :
At this point, I have quite a few reasons to prefer HAC.
As a constructive remark, let me say you’ve stated only one of these
reasons in your comparison (more ornaments, either from Parville or
added by Curtis), which, as I said, happens to be one of the many
reasons why I much prefer ODM (did I mention page turns?). We are waiting
for a few more good reasons.
L. Couperin - Sarabande in a minor, p. 13 in HAC, p. 160 in ODM.
I am pleased to fulfil Dennis’s request for more reasons to prefer HAC in this particular Sarabande.
The number of ornaments and their significance is great, especially in a small piece with actually few notes on the page. Let me post scans of both editions.
Please note that both pages have been scanned reproducing the print with the same scale. For some reason, Jackrail shows them with the same height in pixels, producing a wrong comparison of printed pages. To compare printed sizes I suggest to download each image and compare them separately in the screen.
Let me add an interesting detail: HAC (Parville) appears to be later than ODM (Bauyn), as it adds ornaments for consistency with others that are already there (and vice versa are unlikely to have been omitted by Bauyn). This is however inconsistent with their dates, c1670 for Parville, c1690 for Bauyn. Louis Couperin had been dead for a while, and therefore arguably both are copies of earlier (now lost) sources.
For interest, it is still possible to buy the DM Oiseau-Lyre edtion of the LC.
It’s PDF only, but it is a legitimate edition from the press. [It’s still in copyright so any copies that appeared on IMSLP must have been illegitimate.]
Sadly Oiseau-Lyre, even though having transferred to University of Mlebourne, is no longer reprinting any editions, but have some new old stock still for sale.
I live in Melbourne where Louise Hansen-Dyer was born. She of course started Oiseau-Lyre, named after our Australian Lyrebird. A superb full length oil portrait of her hangs in the foyer of the University of Melbourne Music Faculty.
Eccellent news, Andrew, for years it was not even possible to find the PDF on sale.
I understand Andrew’s use of the word ‘sadly,’ but I only partially agree. It would be truly sad if they let the music remain unavailable since it is no longer economically viable to produce it in book form. There seems to be a commitment to digitize the volumes where print stock has run out. The prices are reasonable (USD 18.00 for L. Couperin; compare that to some of the Heugel volumes still in print that go for $50 or more).
Many people will want only selected pieces anyway; those who do want the full book can take the PDF to a local print shop and get it printed and bound. A bit of a nuisance and expense, but far better than not having the music at all. And of course many (younger) people are happy to play from PDFs anyway. So I applaud what the University is doing.
I got my copy as a download a couople of years ago; it is complete with introduction and critical notes.
A new edition is on the way from Lyrebird Music and will hopefully be available in September. There has been a need for this for some years, not least because Curtis is a bit out of date and relies on the Parville manuscript a little too heavily. Moroney’s masterwork is not readily available and has a few ambiguities and flaws that need addressing.
The problem with the two primary sources is in deciding which has the authority. Like Claudio, my suspicion is that Bauyn is of a closer generation to the autograph for several reasons:
Watermark analysis demonstrates that Bauyn is the earlier of the manuscripts by several years, though neither is likely to have been copied from the autograph: each has the same mistakes which means they share a common ancestry, though this was obviously corrupt in places.
Neither Curtis nor Moroney’s editions are anything other than excellent, though one is nearly 40 and the other 50 and it is time for a new look at things. Bruce Gustafson did this in his masterful edition of the Bauyn manuscript (Broude, New York, 2014), though this is no longer commercially available. One problem that needs redressing in Moroney’s edit is the diagonal lines found in the preludes of Bauyn, which were added because the copyist misaligned various melodic strands and needed to demarcate them. They are a distraction and, since they don’t appear in Parville, we may be sure they are of the Bauyn scribe’s making. Curtis tends to group notes in the preludes in clusters which is a little interpretative.
Oddly, neither have thought that some of the notes in the preludes might be wrong. The 12th LH note of the first prelude is a case in point. It is clearly an error and should have been fixed by both editors. F makes more sense than A, which is banal and lacks a rhetorical punch: with F we have a lovely augmented chord that is very characteristic of both Couperin and Froberger and it also follows a pattern that Couperin follows time and again. If we think in terms of a diapason course, F provides a strong bass line that progresses from to F#, G and then sets up the dominant for the first important cadence:
https://lyrebirdmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-03-at-18.36.56.png
While the dances are quite fine in both editions, there are problems. Curtis relies too heavily on Parville –– understandably given his situation at the time; Moroney relies a little to much on other sources. Gustafson, for example, gives a list of over 25 sources for the Hardel gavotte, though most of these are in individual manuscripts and so late that they cease to have any particular authority. For example, Moroney incorporates aspects of the same gavotte in GB-Lbl, Add. Ms. 39569 –– the Babell manuscript, which is from 1702. However, this is a very late source in comparison (LC had been dead four decades by that point), so unless someone wants to play the music as it would have been played at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Babell’s ‘improvements’ should have been ignored.
I have both editions and think them to be excellent. I have mentioned Gustafson and there are also good editions of the preludes by Colin Tilney (The Art of the Unmeasured Prelude, Schott) and Glen Wilson (Bärenreiter). Only the latter, though, is commercially available.
Anyhoo, just a little addition to the debate.
JB
Oiseau-Lyre are still producing music but ‘not euro-centrically based’ as a member of the board informed me. The cost of printing is remarkably cheap in comparison with 40 years ago. Rather, the problem is in having stock, which is more expensive, especially given that it is (incorrectly) perceived as a niche market.
