Ravel Pavane rhythmical question

[NeeraWM]

I'm re-engraving Ravel's Pavane pour une enfante defunte.
In bar 51 there is this:

Screenshot 2025-01-09 at 14.21.02.png (184.73 KiB) Viewed 946 times

Trying to respect the RH gives this:

Screenshot 2025-01-09 at 14.23.35.png (84.44 KiB) Viewed 946 times

Of course one can fake it by artificially enlarging the bar to have one extra 8th but the problem is that the 8th-note rest in the RH hand should in theory happen at the same time as the first G-D dyad of the LH.
What would you suggest here?
Preferable if you have played this.

[John Ruggero]

It was apparently intended to be a normal sextuplet and the high A should fall with the G-D fifth in the left hand. The reprinted version of the first edition has this correction:

https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks ... Piano).pdf

Note that the same situation occurs four measures later and the last note is correctly placed over the left hand fifth in the original and reprinted 1st editions.

This is the way I have seen it in later editions and the way I play it. The first editions (and later ones based on it) of Ravel's piano music are filled with errors. I see an urtext edition of the piece in the list of editions at IMSLP. I am not sure about the legality of opening it in the US, however, so I can't check it. There might be some explanation about the spot.

[RMK]

You have an error in your engraving: The last note of the grace note arpeggio is A, not f (natural).

[NeeraWM]

Thank you John for your kind input and RMK for spotting the error. I’m actually still in the process of cleaning the Photoscore XML, a nightmare of the worst kind. Possibly slower than writing everything from scratch…

I will create a sextuplet but, in your linked version you can see that:
1) the top A is a 32nd grace note, not an 8th
2) the 8th-rest is still offset to the left for unknown reasons
What would you do with the 8th-rest?

[John Ruggero]

It looks like the classic case of correcting something and making yet another error in the correction. There are many of these in the literature on the part of the composer and engraver. So the high D should be an eighth note as in the following passage, and so it appears in good editions.

I believe that the eighth rest was placed where it is in desperation. Actually, it should have appeared over the final eight note of the run, but perhaps that appeared strange, and the engraver tucked it in a more convenient place.

In the measure in question, the bass D (at X) should have been a quarter note, as in the analogous passage four measures later, to show that it holds in the pedal, but this was not possible because the note repeats immediately an eighth note later. Ravel then decided to make the D in the soprano, which should also have been a quarter note, an eighth note to match the bass note, which required the eighth rest. Then in the following passage someone added an analogous but erroneous eighth rest to match. Oh my! And there is also a sextuplet that should be a quintuplet between the two passages And so it goes.

Ravel was not the best proofreader, at least at the time this early piece was written. Perhaps he didn't have access to proofs at this stage of his career. Engraving Ravel is perilous if one doesn't have access to the latest scholarship. You might want to use an edition that lists all the errors etc.

It is possible to make a academic career out of the errors in Ravel and Debussy!

Ravrel Pavanne.png (393.82 KiB) Viewed 888 times

[NeeraWM]

A superb read, John! Thank you!
Could you suggest a modern scholarly edition of this piece?

[John Ruggero]

Thanks so much, Neera. Glad to help. It's an interesting spot.

I have several piano works of Ravel in the Peters edition edited by Roger Nichols, but not of the Pavane. The ones I do have have critical commentaries in the back. Some of the other major publishers probably have such urtext editions as well. You might check around (and report back?) because I believe there are even better ones.

I just noticed an error in my example above. The second ped. mark should be omitted. So I conformed to the pattern of making an error when correcting other mistakes!

[NeeraWM]

Through the nkoda app I could browse the 2008 Barenreiter edition and the most recent Max Eschig one, this last claiming to be the only true updated source from the composer manuscript. Due to nkoda policies I could not take screenshots but one thing is certain: both editions keep the same mistake present in the edition I first posted above (Peters). Even Barenreiter reproduces the wrong positioning of the 8th-note rest.
I will read the critical notes tomorrow to see if they justify it in some way, I could just glance at them today.
So far, though, no sign of an existing edition that renders this correctly.

[John Ruggero]

Henle has an urtext that one can look through:

https://www.henle.de/en/Pavane-pour-une ... te/HN-1260

They seem to have made the corrections but kept the eighth rest in the original location.

[NeeraWM]

I see ...
I believe in my re-engraving I will put the rest where it rhythmically belong.
Thank you for all the precious feedback!