Volume 33, Issue 1

Résumé D’abord, l’histoire de l’ITEM. Au départ, le classement des manuscrits d’Henri Heine (le fonds Schocken), confié à des germanistes, forcés par là à s’initier aux méthodes des archivistes. Ce faisant, ils eurent l’intuition de la possibilité d’étudier le travail créateur des écrivains à travers leurs manuscrits. Ensuite: la ‹critique génétique›. Elle ouvre un champ de recherche, fondé sur l’étude du manuscrit comme objet scientifique. Par là, elle rejoint une esthétique de la création, présente dans les lettres dès l’origine des temps modernes, mais réduite jusqu’ici au seul témoignage des écrivains. De là aussi, un nouveau rôle et de nouveaux traitements des manuscrits dans l’édition scientifique.

The article discusses possibilities and specific problems of including audio material in the realm of scholarly music editions. From this perspective, the authors propose to include the sounding manifestation of music both into the notion of the musical ‚work‘ and of the musical ‚text‘. The outcome of this thought experiment which considers music as performative art, Beethoven’s and other classical composers’ own wider notions of musical works as musical practice, phonographic recordings as text, different types of music as different types of data, programmed concordances as specific feature of digital editions, and musical interpreters as authors of musical interpretations is a theoretical model that for the first time makes record productions the object of scholarly critical edition.

The homes of poets, artists and composers are not only memorials and biographical museums but also places in which texts, pieces of art and music were created. A person’s biography is quickly revealed in these homes by looking at the original furniture and the typical objects of daily life common at the time. To make the creative work visible though, guidance and explanations are necessary. In many homes the pieces of work aren’t merely shown, instead, an attempt has been made to provide specific insight into the process of the creation of them. Not only are the relevant documents shown but also, using various media, the origins of the pieces are made comprehensible to the beholder. The origins are staged. Sometimes, with the help of drawers which can be opened, the stages of the origins can be contemplated (Franz Schubert, Wolfgang Koeppen) and then the manuscripts are illustrated in the order of their creation on a time beam (Honoré de Balzac). In Heinrich-Schütz’s home the development of a melody can be followed acoustically. But there are also homes in which their owners – mainly visual artists – even developed concepts for the keeping and archiving of the creation of their works (Gustave Moreau, Auguste Rodin) during their lifetimes, so that the observer can later experience them in all their authenticity in their original surroundings. In this article various forms of conveying the creation of works are presented, commented on and placed in the exploration context of places of creativity.

The compendium of the Polish-born Ottoman court musician and interpreter ʿAlī Ufuḳī/Albert Bobowski, MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Turc 292, is a crucial source of the history of music in the Ottoman Empire and at the same time a highly individual document. On 626 pages it contains notations of the most diverse genres, song texts and many marginal notes relating to various aspects of music. Composed between the 1630 s and 1670 s in Istanbul, it can be understood as a still image of the predominantly oral tradition. This results in special challenges to edition and performance practice. In exchange with three Turkish experts in the fields of performance, musicology and instrument building, the present contribution explores possible interpretations and inspirations for a historically informed performance practice of Ottoman music on the basis of ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s notations.

The article discusses how new developments in the notation of contemporary music were negotiated within the framework of the Darmstadt Summer Courses and which interests and actors played a role in this. The first part examines the publications and publication projects that emerged in the context of the Notation conference in 1964. The focus is on the interests of institutions such as the International Music Council and the International Association of Music Libraries, in whose name the New York publisher Kurt Stone attempted to persuade the International Music Institute Darmstadt to cooperate and, following on from the debates there, to systematically record various forms of notation together. In a second step, the content of the debates at the conference is examined, with a particular focus on the different and sometimes conflicting perspectives of interpreters and composers. Numerous connections to fundamental aesthetic discussions of the time can be worked out, in particular to the relationship between the composer’s intention and interpretation, which was renegotiated in a form of notation that was individualized to the extreme. Finally, with a view to later discussions, this topic is pointed to the question of the relationship between morphology and musical structure, exemplified by positions of Wolfgang Rihm (1982), Klaus Huber (1988) and John Cage (1990).

The paper deals with the question, in which cases hybrid editions are indeed useful and not merely a duplication of the same content. Based on brief terminological considerations it examines which arguments are generally presented for this type of edition. In addition, the exemplarily selected hybrid editions show which concepts have led to this kind of presentation. Finally, the resulting requirements for hybrid editions are collated with the approach of the hybrid edition of Kurt Schwitters. Alle Texte (http://schwitters-digital.de).

The paper discusses the problems of complex textual transmission, as is typical for the works of Goethe. The method of eclectic editing as practiced by earlier editors was ruled out by the modern concept of ‘authorization’ introduced by Siegfried Scheibe in 1971. The history of the concept of ‘authorization’ shows that Scheibe’s definition of ‘authorization’ is misconstrued on conceptual reasons alone. Besides, it is closely tied to bygone polemical purposes and does not allow complex textual transmission (as in the case of Faust II ) to be adequately dealt with. Hans Zeller, by contrast, proposed to reconsider complex textual transmissions and their consequences for editorial theory in 1989. This reconsideration, however, has failed to take place so far. The new Faust edition (2018) proposes an editorial solution to the problem with a non-documentary yet historically specific (i. e. non-eclectic) way of constituting the text. Scheibe’s primary editorial objectives may be better achieved without the concept of authorization which it is proposed should be dropped altogether.

Criteria for distinguishing between correspondences, diaries and notes are soft. Almost all elements to markup letters are needed for the description of diaries or notes and vice versa. So these document types can be grouped as personal writings and explored together rather than separately. The essay argues in favor of the similarities rather than the differences between the material and for a markup that in a portal allows scalable reading to help find new research questions and answers.

Letters as a form of communication gain their meanings not least by performative practices hints of which are clearly shown in their materiality. Vice versa, the paper discusses the possibilities of performing and making a film of correspondences using the example of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann (published 2008) and its film version Die Geträumten (‘Dreamed people’, 2016). The performative aspects of letters may also be represented by audio books or picture books. Yet especially digital letter editions should examine the phatic and conative functions of letter communication supplying specially designed kinds of metadata and their visualizations. The ‚Jenaer Romantikertreffen‘ (‘Jena Meeting of Romanticists’) in 1799 serves as a final historical example.

This article demonstrates the difficulties of the category ‘completeness’ of historical-critical editions on the basis of letters written by the sculptor, graphic artist and writer Ernst Barlach. The new edition of more than 2000 letters, which will be published at the end of 2019, takes into account that the text carriers of several hundred letters are no longer available. It is possible to distinguish between letter convoys and individual letters that can then be accessed through other letters and documents. There are also printed letters which are no longer available in their original form. In order to do justice to the claim of a (historical-)critical edition based on completeness, all these forms of exploited letters should be depicted in a specific way.