Abstract

This work arose out of research into the relations that occur between extant copies of a musical work, the ‘sources’ and the work itself. The author addresses issues relating to the errors and inaccuracies that appear in the vast majority of sources: the fact that every physical score of a work (every source) must be regarded as a sort of redaction of the intentional score; the impossibility of clearly defining the notion of an ‘obvious error’; the extent of the authenticity of a source, that is, an assessment of which elements of a source actually express the composer’s intentions; the place and role of particular authentic sources in the composer’s shaping and perfecting of a work. The author then characterises performers as the natural and desirable recipients of an urtext, pointing out that they do not have the possibility of independently assessing a score in terms of its sources. The task of performers is to translate the score into living music; for them, the text provided by the editor represents merely the starting point. In evaluating variants, performers should be guided by their artistic taste, while the editor’s task is to order variants in accordance with the composer’s intentions, insofar as this can be ascertained from the sources.
Presented in this text are the basic theses relating to the preparation of an urtext: the recreation of sources is best served by facsimiles accompanied by suitable commentaries, although such publications cannot form the basis for performance practice; the purpose of an urtext, as a source edition meant for performers, must be to recreate the composer’s intentions in respect to the score of his or her work, defined as the creation of an ideal fair copy of a composition; the recreation of those intentions is served by a special method of critical score analysis, taking account of all authentic sources inasmuch as they document the composer’s creative process; respect for the continuity of this process involves placing the integrity of the work above the integrity of the source in the urtext; in many cases, strict adherence to the principle of recreating in the main text a version of just one source would lead to (at times serious) distortions of the composer’s intentions.