Abu Hassan, and: Preciosa (review)

Whereas sketches, autograph scores, librettos, and various sorts of performance materials have long fascinated scholars interested in the genesis and performance histories of operas, the lowly piano-vocal score has received scant music-historical attention, despite its role as a principal vehicle for spreading the repertory of the era from theatres to homes, from composers to singers, and from one country to another. Wholly welcome, therefore, is the decision of the editors of the complete works of Carl Maria vonWeber to devote a series within the critical edition to the piano-vocal arrangements (Klavierauszüge) that the composer himself prepared for publication. The volumes under consideration here, piano-vocal scores of the one-act comic opera Abu Hassan and the incidental music to Pius AlexanderWolff 's play Preciosa, are the first two instalments in a project that potentially will lead to a better understanding of Weber's role in the development of this ubiquitous type of source.

To be sure, Weber's arrangements cannot be understood as entirely representative for their day. For one thing, it was somewhat untypical for a leading composer of the time to make his own arrangements, but Weber cultivated this area of activity from early in his career—as a teenage student of Abbé Vogler in 1803 he helped prepare the piano-vocal score of his teacher's opera Samori—until his death in 1826. Weber's motivations for engaging in a kind of work frequently undertaken by hacks are unclear, although one may speculate that they involved not only an understandable wish to earn additional income from his completed works, but also a desire to control the forms in which his operas and larger vocal works—which betray the emergence of a strong 'work' concept—would reach the growing base of music consumers outside the theatre and concert hall. Exactly what kind of consumer Weber had in mind and what functions these arrangements served once they were purchased are also questions that cannot easily be answered. His particular approach to arrangement, however, which was understood even in his own day to stand apart from the more routine types of piano-vocal scores (the editors of both volumes cite comments from 1822 to this effect by E. T. A. Hoffmann), seemingly aimed at accommodating not only the wishes of amateurs for music that could be played at home or in the salon (by making arrangements that were not too difficult) but also the needs of professionals for study and rehearsal materials (by providing all of the pieces with a fair degree of completeness with respect to the rhythmic-contrapuntal detail of the original orchestration).

As noted in James Garratt's review ofWeber's masses (Music & Letters, 81 (2000), 498), the editorial policy of the Weber complete edition takes a rather conservative approach to Textkritik, preferring to rely in each volume on a single primary source, reflective of a specific stage or point in time in the history of a piece, rather than attempt to hypothesize from multiple sources an 'ideal' version that may have hovered before the mind's eye of the composer. This policy results in limited editorial intervention in the body of the musical text; editorial suggestions for the most part are confined to the extensive critical notes at the back of the volume. The editors of these two volumes of piano-vocal arrangements, however, self-consciously depart from the complete edition's underlying philosophy in a number of ways that betray a certain ambivalence about the nature and/or function of piano-vocal scores. Despite repeated claims in both volumes that the piano arrangements ought to be viewed as autonomous versions of the works in question—translations from one medium into another that enjoy a certain independence from the versions for full orchestra (particularly in the application of dynamics and articulation markings...