Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (review)

Over the last dozen years, Christophe Grabowski and John Rink have collected, arranged, annotated, and synthesized over four thousand separate copies of more than fifteen hundred unique impressions of "first editions released during Chopin's lifetime, posthumous first editions published between 1850 and 1878, [and] successive reprints of these editions until their eventual disappearance from the market" (p. ix). The result is the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions, a true labor of love that runs more than nine hundred oversized pages and offers the most complete picture of Frédéric Chopin in the robust marketplace of the long nineteenth century. More importantly, its fulsome historical overviews, overall clear presentation, ambitiously exhaustive scope, and rigorous yet flexible methodology make it an ideal blueprint for those seeking to better assess an element of nineteenth-century life that—for better or worse—affected almost every notable musician: the world of music publishing.

Chopin is an ideal lens through which to view this world, since he was one of the most commercially sensitive composers of his generation. As Jeffrey Kallberg first explained nearly thirty years ago ("Chopin in the Marketplace: Aspects of the International Music Publishing Industry in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Notes 39, no. 3 [March 1983]: 535-69, Notes 39, no. 4 [June 1983]: 795-824), the almost nonexistent state of copyright in Chopin's day forced composers to devise creative ways of getting the most compensation out of each composition. In Chopin's case, this meant sending multiple copies of a composition to different European publishers—usually in London, Paris, and Vienna—for publication or archival deposit on the same day, in the hope that first publishing rights could be asserted simultaneously, thus discouraging piracy. Yet Chopin rarely sent the same reading of a composition to all of his publishers, resulting in multiple first editions that were all authorized but rarely identical. Grabowski and Rink argue that "[w]ithout thorough analysis of these sources as well as the nineteenth-century practices that gave rise to them, Chopin's output cannot be understood in its historical context nor its content accurately reproduced in any modern edition. The very identity of the Chopin work is at stake" (p. xxi).

Each entry in the "Annotated Catalogue" (pp. 1-583) illustrates the snowball effect that then took place: Chopin's first editions begot new imprints, a small selection of which suffered various degrees of alteration. The three Nocturnes op. 9 are a case in point. Grabowski and Rink identify thirty-eight different impressions of either the set or a part thereof. The first French edition was published by Maurice Schlesinger in 1833, who published it two more times with changes only to the pagination. Schlesinger's successor, Brandus, republished the piece four more times, although his second printing—the fifth printing overall of the work in France—introduced three different readings in the music of the first and second nocturnes. Also in 1833, Friedrich Kistner, based in Leipzig, began issuing opus 9, and—in what Grabowski and Rink describe as a "highly complex" (p. 58) situation—would eventually publish three engravings of op. 9, nos. 1 and 3 and five engravings of op. 9, no. 2. To be sure, some of these engravings introduced errors, which were often later corrected, but some contain readings that may come from Chopin himself. Kistner's title pages obscure this complex transmission of opus 9 by routinely reprinting the same title page. Such detailed analysis of the source situation means that basic information about each composition—such as incipit, date(s) of composition, references in correspondence, early reviews, etc.—is not given in the Annotated Catalogue; rather, reference is made to Józef Michał Chominski and Teresa Dalila Turlo, Kata log dziel Fryderyka Chopina / A Catalogue of the Works of Frederick Chopin (Cracow and Warsaw: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne and Towarzystwo im. Fryderyka Chopina, 1990).

As impressive as the "Annotated Catalogue" is, even...