Affiliated projects

 

Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions

Co-authored by Christophe Grabowski and John Rink, the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions is the outcome of a nine-year research initiative which began in 1998 with major funding from The Leverhulme Trust. Its chief aim was to produce an inventory of the first editions of Chopin's music held by the principal European and American libraries, and to analyse the contents of those editions in detail. The fifty-four institutions and three collections that were targeted hold some 4,700 copies – representing c. 1,200 distinct impressions – most of which could be described as 'Chopin first editions' in the most general sense. Identifying, classifying and ordering these scores according to transparent and consistent criteria is the main purpose of the Annotated Catalogue, which focuses on three broad types of edition:

  • publications released during Chopin's lifetime
  • the first editions that appeared posthumously, between 1850 and 1878
  • successive reprints of all of this material up to the point of their disappearance from the market.

Newly engraved versions of these editions bearing the original plate numbers have also been included.

The Annotated Catalogue is divided into four main parts. A chapter entitled 'Chopin's first editions: historical and analytical overview' provides information about the publication history of Chopin's music within each of the countries concerned, as well as observations about music publishing during the period. The legal contexts and general characteristics of Chopin's first editions are discussed, along with the publishers responsible for the various editions. This overview is followed by an 'Introduction to the Annotated Catalogue', setting out the classificatory criteria, descriptive methods, approach to cross-referencing and abbreviated description, and policies on quasi-facsimile transcription employed throughout the catalogue, along with the methods used to date scores.

The ensuing catalogue has four main sections:

  • works with opus numbers
  • posthumous works with opus numbers
  • works without opus numbers
  • posthumous works without opus numbers.

Some 222 black-and-white reproductions of title pages illustrate the transcriptions and respective commentaries. Finally, successive appendices focus on the orchestral parts, series title pages and advertisements, followed by an index of libraries in which each institution's holdings of Chopin first editions are classified by designated edition/impression codes.

The Annotated Catalogue will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.

 

Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE)

The Online Chopin Variorum Edition is currently in its second phase and has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from November 2005 to April 2008. Its principal aim is to facilitate and enhance comparative analyses of disparate types of source material, attaining a level of manipulability outstripping that manifested in extant printed editions of Chopin's music and indeed that of any composer to date. The research has exploited emerging technical capacities for text/image comparison as well as recent musicological advances. Phase 2 is concerned in particular with extension of OCVE's content, and with building the technical tools and frameworks for the display and manipulation of that content. The end result will be a new type of 'musical edition'.

The project is based in the Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London, with technical development at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. For further details, contact the Project Director or Project Manager.

 

The Complete Chopin - A New Critical Edition

Four volumes in The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition have been published by Peters Edition London since 2004 under the direction of Series Editors John Rink, Jim Samson and Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, and Editorial Consultant Christophe Grabowski. This new edition is based on two key premises:

  • there can be no definitive version of Chopin's works, in that variants form an integral part of the music
  • a permissive conflation of readings from several sources − in effect producing a version of the music that never really existed − should be avoided.

Accordingly, the editorial procedure is to identify a single principal source for each work and to prepare an edition of that source (which can be regarded as 'best' if not definitive). At the same time, important variants from other authorised sources are reproduced either adjacent to or, in certain instances, within the main music text, in footnotes or in the Critical Commentary, thus enabling scholarly comparison and facilitating choice in performance. (Conflation may be inadmissible for the editor, but it remains an option and right for the performer.) Multiple versions of entire works are presented when differences between the sources are so abundant or fundamental that they go beyond the category of 'variant'.