Urtext, que me veux-tu?

Extract

For the last 40 years and more I have been haunted (and hampered) by two spectres that were wished on me—as they have been on many others—with the assurance that they meant well: like two stray Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they go by the names of Urtext and Fassung letzter Hand. Although the ‘Urtext’ concept has now been so diluted that such a generic tagline often promises little more than ‘no editorial fingering’ and (maybe) a Critical Commentary which need not be read, it still has (for me at least) a dictated sterility, almost Corbusian in its constraint—not a ‘machine for living in’ but a ‘text for playing from’. Also, as many writers have pointed out, a strictly Ur-text edition is a semantic impossibility, except in the case of works for which there is only a single autograph source that requires no transcription, commentary or explanation; in all other situations, opinion and personal judgement must make an early entry. But the more deadening challenge of the Fassung letzter Hand (‘last manuscript version’, hereafter FLH) only really came home to me during the start-up stages of a recent Bärenreiter project to reassess Mendelssohn’s overtures and symphonies.