anderson@uwvax.ARPA (04/30/84)
More about Schirmer editions: The general problem with the Schirmer editions of piano music is that they're over-edited. In other words, they add (or modify) a lot of fingerings, dynamic marks, slurs, tempo marks, etc., without telling you what they added and what was there originally. An extreme example is the Schirmer edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas, edited by Hans von Bulow, in which not only is the notation monkeyed with but also there are little "essays" by von Bulow at the bottom of many pages. Other things over-editors tend to do are move notes from one clef to another, and change the stem directions. My idea of good editions are the Schenker edition of the Beethoven sonatas and the Paderewski edition of most of Chopin's works (both are available cheaply from Dover, BTW). Both of these are based on careful study and comparison of the sources (manuscripts and early editions, which always contain discrepancies) and add only a minimal amount of extra notation (for example, if the composer wrote interpretive details only on the first occurence of a theme, these editions might replicate these to later occurences). Whatever fingerings they add are distinguished from the composer's fingerings. Schirmer (and other highly edited) editions are OK for sight-reading, but if you're going to work on a piece it's better to use an edition in which the music is not "pre-interpreted". --- David Anderson (...wisc-rsch!anderson)
chenr@tilt.UUCP (Raymond Chen) (05/01/84)
Schirmers are *definitely* over-edited, poorly edited (fingerings that many times are simply bad, dynamic markings that are wrong, and sometimes notes that are off), and basically hacked up, but when it comes to exercize books, they're not bad. In every technique book I've used by Schirmer (Hanon, Pischna, Brahms, etc.), they've left everything as marked by the composer. For normal music, though, I prefer Paderweski or Henle-Verlag for Chopin, Henle-Verlag or Dover for Beethoven Sonatas, and as for the rest, I look around. You're pretty safe, though, if you check and make sure that the editor has taken things from the original text and that deviations from the original text have been marked. -- The preceding message was brought to you by -- Ray Chen princeton!tilt!chenr