Chopin Early Editions, and: Chopin’s First Editions Online (review)

By engaging different publishers in France, Germany, and England, Fryderyk Chopin ably navigated early nineteenth-century European copyright laws, and this savvy combined with variations of source materials and Chopin’s apparent lack of control over the publishing process outside of Paris effectively resulted in three ‘first editions’ of most of his compositions. The textual discrepancies between the three editions naturally problematized ensuing published collections, making posthumous attempts at collected and/or critical editions profoundly inconsistent. Beginning in 2004, two different online projects were created to address this quagmire of editing woes: Chopin Early Editions and Chopin’s First Editions Online.

Content and Scope

Chopin Early Editions is a digitized version of the Chopin collection at the University of Chicago Library, which comprises over 400 first and early printed editions, preserved in the Special Collections Research Center. The collection’s scope includes individual works, as well as collected editions published before 1881 (identified as a cutoff date due to the 1878–80 Works, published by Breitkopf & Härtel). Information regarding the collection’s production time-line is not provided on the site, but a copyright year of 2004 on the main page suggests that no extensive amount of content or design has since been added or changed.

Originally funded by the Arts and Humani ties Research Council (Resource Enhance ment Programme) between 2004 and 2007, the aim of Chopin’s First Editions Online is to unify all of the first impressions of Chopin’s first editions from five main institutions (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, and the University of Chicago Library) and seventeen other libraries. As of 14 September 2011, the collection boasted around 5,500 digital images. In addition to digital representations of the physical items, text-analytical commentary and online catalogue excerpts are included to highlight the major differences between various first editions, contrasting their chronological and filial relationships.

Interface Design

The interface for Chopin Early Editions is a clean, spacious design that favors lighter colors and hence reduces visual noise, encouraging the user’s eye to focus on the content. Simple buttons for main navigation offer a search button and browsing options of titles, uniform titles, genres, and dedicatees. Lists for the latter three categories fit on one Web page each, whereas titles are subdivided alphabetically underneath the main navigation. Each subdivision contains listings that include publication information and uniform titles, sometimes indented inconsistently, due to varying lengths of text. When any given title is clicked, the default view shows a bibliographic description tab that contains standard, un-hyperlinked cataloging fields.

Images are accessed by clicking the “view score” tab, which provides the user a view of the scanned pages that in general is easy to visually skim. Users also have the option to view a higher-quality image by clicking a hyperlink at the bottom of the page. The high-resolution images are zoomable JPEGs (enabling the user to save them to the computer or some other form of storage), and all images include rulers on the side. An expandable menu in the upper right-hand corner of the viewing window enables quick navigation of the item’s pages, whereas “previous” and “next” buttons for page-by-page browsing are somewhat curiously located underneath the images.

Probably due to its later genesis, Chopin’s First Editions Online appears to have a more updated interface within the larger site’s design template. A tab on the main navigation called “View Chopin’s First Editions” defaults to a collapsed browsing list for the works, organized first by opus number and then alphabetically by title for those without opus numbers. Expanding each piece’s entry within the browsing list results in links for publication history and...