Henle Rach 3

[Cor anglais 16]

https://blog.henle.de/en/2024/05/13/ser ... solutions/

I have to say, I’m not impressed! The editing is likely great, but in the comparison engraving between the first edition and the new Henle edition, the Henle feels sterile. The first edition captures the chaotic, dramatic nature of this music in a way that the spread-out, clean Henle fails to communicate. (To say nothing of the fingerings cluttering an “Urtext”, but Henle does this all the time anyway so that’s priced in to begin with.)

[John Ruggero]

This "spacious" score that adds 32 to pages (=16 more page turns) seems to be aimed at advanced players who are not good readers, since good readers prefer more compression in a score like this to be able to take in more music at a glance and avoid as many page turns as possible. The result is, as you said, an antiseptic look.

Fingering is a given in many urtext editions and one of the things that distinguishes them from scholarly editions. In this case, the fingering seems to be confined to tricky places. However, the editor doesn't understand how to minimize fingering so that it doesn't clutter the music with columns of numbers. Note that in the circled areas in the second example following, only the 2 need appear, not 21; only the 2 to the left of the notehead, not 52; only the 3, not 31; only the 4, not 42. Then later there are stacks of three numbers. Here only the 3 and the 2 need appear to the left of the note heads not 531 and 521.

Music editing is not accounting. Rachmaninoff's stem direction has been "regularized" and rests added in the boxed areas. In every case I prefer Rachmaninoff's solution as simpler and more musical.

Rachmaninoff Converto 3 1st ed.png (257.31 KiB) Viewed 184 times

Rachmaninoff Converto 3 Henle.png (255.96 KiB) Viewed 184 times

Later the article describes how Rachmaninoff simplified the notation by using an imprecise use of a dotted quarter note to avoid unnecessary complication, very much as earlier composers have done in keyboard music. The fact that the values don't add up is very troubling to the editor who insists on doing exactly what the composer wanted to avoid.

And so the battle between composers and editors goes on...