Antonin Dvorak: from the point of view of contemporary musicology and the New Complete Edition of his works.

It was at the beginning of 2002 that we first provided brief information on the pages of this magazine about the planned project for a New Complete Edition of the Works of Antonin Dvorak. After more than five years we now have an opportunity to write on the theme once again. What is the state of play now with regard to Dvorak's music, the reactions of audiences and musicologists and the critical edition?

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On the one hand we are very pleased to be able to say that Dvorak's fame is truly immense and goes far beyond the frontiers of today's Czech Republic, that his music has travelled throughout the world and made an impression on the public in the German-speaking lands, Great Britain, the United States, Japan and Australia. On the other hand, it remains true that the composer's fame rests--today as it did a hundred years ago--on a small number of "evergreens" like the New World Symphony, The Slavonic Dances and Humoresque in G flat major, while many of his chamber works, songs, choral songs and especially operas continue to be overlooked. In the past few years and decades the interest of specialists (musicologists) has tended to fluctuate, with waves of comment and analysis occurring around the jubilee years of 1991 and 2004.

In 1991, when the Czech and world music public commemorated the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth, three major international conferences were organised for the occasion: in New Orleans (Louisiana, USA), Saarbrucken (Germany) and the Chateau of Dobris (CR). The published proceedings of these conferences brought us a colourful mosaic of views on Dvorak the composer and the man, and also new and ground-breaking research findings on Dvorak's work and activities as a musician. At the same time two remarkable treatments came out in German. These were Klaus Doge's monograph Dvorak. Leben-Werke-Dokumente, designed for a broader reading public, and Hartmut Schick's doctoral dissertation on Dvorak's string quartets.

From the 8th to the 11th of September 2004, to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer's death, a major international conference was held in Prague entitled The Work of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904). Aspects of Composition--Problems of Editing--Reception. The active participation of more than 40 musicologists from twelve countries and four continents was convincing proof of the durability of Dvorak's creative legacy and the lasting interest in his life and work. The collection of papers from this conference should be ready for the press at the end of this calendar year (2007). Among domestic publications of recent years we should highlight the second, substantially enlarged edition of a Dvorak Thematic Catalogue from Jarmil Burghauser, which alas came out shortly after the author's death at the beginning of 1997, and the ten-volume critical edition of Dvorak's correspondence and documents produced by Milan Kuna et al. and published over the years 1987-2004. Among foreign publications, lively interest has been aroused by the American musicologist Michael Beckerman's book New Worlds of Dvorak. Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life, which came out in 2003.

The existence and accessibility of reliable printed editions of his or her works is the fundamental and essential prerequisite for the performance and dissemination of the music of any composer, and for its specialist musicological study and interpretation. Collected critical editions of the classics of European music--J.S.Bach, G.F.Handel, W.A.Mozart, L. van Beethoven, F. Mendelssohn, R. Schumann and others--were produced as early as the 19th century, but Czech composers rather lagged behind in this respect. In the case of Antonin Dvorak the first complete edition project, under the Editing Board for the Works of Antonin Dvorak (its members were Otakar Sourek, Frantisek Bartos, Jan Hanus, Jiri Berkovec, Jarmil Burghauser, Antonin Cubr, Antonin Pokorny and Karel Solc), was officially launched in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the composer's death (1954), when his works had come "free" in accordance with the then law of copyright. In the course of the next thirty years the greater part of Dvorak's musical legacy was published in the framework of this project, but from the end of the 1980s critical voices were increasingly to be heard pointing out that some of the volumes of this collected edition contained a number of inaccuracies and mistakes, and that in fact the whole edition as originally conceived no longer met contemporary standards. In 1999, therefore, a fundamental decision was taken not to carry on in the same way, not to try to finish the original edition and instead to start again, on a qualitatively different level and using different methodological principles.

The aims and principles of the New Complete Edition of the Works of Antonin Dvorak can be summed up in the following main points:

-- The New Complete Edition of the Works of Antonin Dvorak is being produced in Prague and will also be published in Prague by the publishing house Editio Barenreiter Praha. From the outset, however, it is conceived as an international project and assumes substantial involvement on the part of foreign specialists and institutions in several European countries and the USA.

-- The aim and ideal that the edition strives to achieve is the compilation and publication of note material that will embody the highest possible level of authenticity, i.e. will represent the intentions of the composer as these are contained in surviving sources as well and as faithfully as possible. The earlier complete edition had set itself the same goals in a general sense, but its results had only gone half way to meeting them--either because it did not take into account all the important sources and circumstances, or because it deliberately tried to "remedy" supposed inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the composer's autographs. In contrast to the earlier edition project, the New Complete Edition of the Works of Antonin Dvorak is working with an essentially broader range of primary and secondary sources, including many that the editors of the earlier edition left entirely unnoticed. One typical example are period manuscript and printed performance materials, i.e. orchestral and vocal parts for symphonic, chamber and operatic works.

-- In some cases, including for example the Piano Concerto in G minor op. 33 or the cantata Stabat mater op. 58, the New Complete Edition has unique newly discovered or newly accessible sources to hand. Everywhere that it has to work with the same range of sources as its predecessors, it will compare and evaluate them again with a view to uncovering and understanding the composer's intentions. As a result the edition will present some editorial approaches to and readings of Dvorak's note material that differ from those we know from the earlier editions.

-- Priority attention is being directed to those of Dvorak's works that have never yet been printed or for which there have as yet existed only unauthorised and unreliable printed piano arrangements. Naturally, this situation relates mainly to operatic works. Titles that are due to be prepared for publication within the next five to six years include for example the composer's first opera Alfred, his one-act comic opera The Stubborn Lovers op. 17 and his last completed opera Armida op. 115.

-- For the very first time ever, the New Complete Edition is systematically dealing with the composer's surviving versions and arrangements of his own and other people's compositions, which it is presenting as an integral part of Dvorak's output as a composer. These include for example the Stabat mater op. 58 in a version for soloists, choir and piano, the piano trio Dumkas op. 90 arranged for four-handed pianio, or Dvorak's orchestral arrangement of Brahms's Hungarian Dances.

-- The New Complete Edition of the Works of Antonin Dvorak also reflects the contemporary trend towards digital reproduction and presentation of critical note material. In collaboration with the EDIROM project (academic EDItions on cd-ROMs), developed since 2005 at the University of Detmold-Paderborn (Germany) it is planning to use this form to publish for example the autograph version of the piano Silhouettes op. 8, which differs markedly from the more commonly familiar printed version, the composer's school works from the years 1857-1859, and what is known as the American Sketchbooks of 1893-1895, containing sketches and outlines for the New World Symphony, Cello Concerto in B minor op. 104 and other pieces later to be completed as well as those that remained just ideas.

In the preparatory phase represented by the last few years (2000-2006), extensive heuristic work has been carried out with the aim of creating an internal catalogue of sources for individual Dvorak compositions and building up an archive of copies of Dvorak sources. Despite many obstacles and difficulties it has proved possible to establish and secure several years of advance funding for the Dvorak Editorial Centre that now operates at the Cabinet (Department) for Music History of Institute of Ethnology of the ASCR, p.r.i, and in addition to its heuristic and editing work has a primarily managing and co-ordinating role for the New Complete Edition of the Works of Antonin Dvorak. The international Editorial Board, which has a supervisory and consultative function for the New Complete Edition, was set up in September 2004 and has met once a year since then. The preliminary phase of the project has also seen the proposal and approval of the division of the New Complete Edition into seven main series and 65 volumes, and binding editorial principles and other instructions valid for all current and future editors have been drafted and published. August 2006 saw the launch of the web pages of the New Complete Edition www.antonindvorak.org where anyone interested can find more information and details in Czech and in English.

On the current projected schedule, the first volumes of the New Collected Edition, which will for example include the Slavonic Rhapsodies op. 45, the String Quartets op. 96, 105 and 106 together with Cypresses for string quartet or Poetic Moods op. 85, the Suite in A major op. 99, Humoresques op. 101 and other pieces for two-handed piano, will be sent to press and then published in the course of the years 2007-2009. In the next period (2010-2012) the plan is for preparation and publication of the operas and cantatas mentioned above, and also Dvorak's symphonic poems based on ballads by K.J.Erben (The Water Goblin op. 107, The Noon Witch op. 108, The Golden Spinning Wheel op. 109, The Wild Dove op. 110), A Hero's Song op. 111, overtures and music for the play Josef Kajetan Tyl op. 62 and other volumes of piano and chamber pieces. Today it already looks almost certain that the whole project will be the work of several generations of musicologists. If it could possibly be finally completed in 2041, the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the composer, by today's standards it would be an extraordinary scholarly and organisational achievement and a remarkable contribution to the treasury of the Czech and European cultural heritage.

Commented Examples

Example 1: "The Wild Rose" from Moravian Duets op. 32

In the four-bar passage (bars 43-46) from a six-bar piano interlude, we can clearly see how Dvorak's original differentiated instructions on the dynamics in the first prints are progressively changed by shift and location in the space between the staves. For reasons not further explained, in this passage the collected critical edition of 1955 presented a reading that is not to be found in any of the sources given above.

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Example 2: Slavonic Rhapsody in G minor, op. 45, no. 2

Bars 35-36, 2nd bassoon: The accent on the last note of bar 35, recorded in the autograph, has either been interpreted in the editions to date as a decrescendo sign, or has been entirely omitted (the preceding collected edition).

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Example 3: String Quartet in A flat major, op. 105

1st movement, bars 23-27, 1st Violin Part: An example of the different approach to the dynamics in the autograph and the first printed version (Berlin, N. Simrock 1896), which generally appears to be much more "standardised"; the individuality and plasticity of Dvorak's autograph often gets lost in it. The preceding collected edition adopted the reading of the first printed edition without commentary. In the critical section of the NDE such variant readings will receive detailed commentary and the evidence made accessible in note examples.

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Example 4: String Quartet in A flat major, op. 105

2nd movement, bars 105-108, autograph and first print (Berlin, N. Simrock 1896): Here we can pose the question of where the 2nd Movement ends (in the da capo form), which no one has yet considered. The answer is not clear, but on the basis of a reading of the autograph and its layers, the variant of the "earlier" end of the movement in bar 107 is entirely acceptable. In this case too the preceding collected edition adopted the reading of the first print and gave no indication of the different reading of the autograph. In the critical section the NDE will provide a proper commentary on this passage.

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