Melvin Unger's new edition of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's ‘Herr Gott, dich loben wir’ is welcome, and we can be grateful to him and to A-R Editions for making available a good piece by a prolific and well-regarded composer whose output is largely inaccessible today. This addition to Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era does invite us to consider, though, what an edition that is both practical and scholarly might include, how it chooses its sources and how modern its rendition of the work should be.
The question of scope arises in the edition's Introduction, whose biographical section essentially paraphrases the New Grove entry on the composer. Its source is fully acknowledged and cited, but the Introduction also raises more pressing issues of background that might have been pursued. Unger calls Stölzel's setting an early work and assigns it to probably the Reformation anniversary of 1717. He does not say why he thinks the piece (whose only precisely datable source is from the late 1750s) might have been for this occasion. One hopes to read more about the dating, origin and context of this work and the evidence for its being assigned to that year.
The Introduction also compares Stölzel's concerted setting with Luther's monophonic tune. But much of the work is in four-part choral homophony, so that we may wonder whether Stölzel drew on one of the well-known harmonizations of the German Te Deum by Johann Hermann Schein, Melchior Vulpius, Seth Calvisius and others. These pieces could provide a richer background for understanding Stölzel's composition, and it would be good to see them taken into consideration.
The choice and treatment of the work's sources are also worth thinking about. The edition is based on what the Introduction calls a ‘score and original parts’ (viii), but the Critical Report identifies them as materials from Sondershausen, where Stölzel's music was performed but where the composer was not himself employed. It is not evident, then, in what sense the parts are ‘original’; this term is typically understood to mean a composer's own performing materials. Still, if the editor believes that the parts were prepared for use in Sondershausen, hearing more about the conditions of church music performance there would be illuminating.
The choice of a score and a set of performing materials presumably derived from it (though the relationship is never directly addressed) as the basis for the edition raises some issues, too. A set of parts documents a performance at a particular time and place and is an entirely plausible choice for an edition. But there is a risk of confusing features of the work with aspects of its particular realization in a set of parts. The Introduction speaks, for example, of the ‘use of Tief Kammerton’ (low chamber pitch; viii). This claim evidently stems from the presence of two organ parts in that set, one at the pitch of the other parts and one notated a minor third lower. If these are indeed both organ parts then they suggest multiple performances, one with an organ at a particularly high Chorton pitch and one at Cammerton. But this is not a feature of the piece – it is a feature of the realization in parts and of the performances in Sondershausen.
The larger risk here lies in regarding performing parts as simply an element of the documentation of an abstract work. Even assuming that there is such a thing as the ideal form of a composition, performing material definitely does not represent it. Although we often assume that a critical or scholarly edition should present the idealized text of a composition, it is sometimes desirable to render a work as it was performed in a particular time and place; this edition, though, pulls in both directions.
The sources not directly used for this edition potentially have a lot to offer. According to the Critical Report, Stölzel's work is also transmitted in two manuscript scores beyond the one from Sondershausen. One of them (D-B Am. B. 372) is described as a ‘duplicate’ (111) of the Sondershausen sources. The RISM catalogue suggests, in fact, that it is a copy made at the instigation of Johann Philipp Kirnberger for the Amalienbibliothek, the library of Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. What was Kirnberger's source, and what role did this copy play in the transmission and circulation of this piece? How closely related is it to the Sondershausen materials, which are said to have a direct connection to the composer? This remains to be investigated.
The other source, D-B Mus. ms. 21410, is described as a ‘reduction/transformation of the Sondershausen copies’, and as a ‘simplified version’ (111). This manuscript is available online (<http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/dms/werkansicht/?PPN=PPN672478234> (14 March 2013)), and it is potentially very interesting. It came to Berlin through the collector Georg Poelchau and evidently stems from the collection of Gottlob Harrer, J. S. Bach's successor as Thomaskantor and City Music Director in Leipzig. Between Harrer and Poelchau the score appears to have been in the hands of the Breitkopf publishing house, which is known to have used music from Harrer's collection as models for copies it offered for sale. This is surely a provenance worth investigating, particularly now that we know about the strong presence of Stölzel's music in Leipzig in Bach's time – indeed, that Bach performed cantatas and a poetic Passion setting by the composer in the 1730s. For better or worse, interest in Stölzel's music will often be connected to interest in Bach's, and the possibility that this work circulated in Leipzig – one hesitates to claim a connection to Bach himself, but it is not out of the question – might well have been pursued here.
The version represented in the Harrer–Breitkopf–Poelchau manuscript is also of interest because of the nature of its arrangement. A principal change is a rescoring for more up-to-date four-part strings in place of the original five-part disposition (a scoring that might better be regarded as old and German rather than as French, as is suggested here). Trumpet parts are partially recomposed, and the ending of the work is different. What is the origin of this version? Is it connected to the composer? To the work's use in Leipzig? Both? I would be interested in knowing.
There are some features of the new score that might make us think about the differences between older and more modern ways of laying out an edition, and whether certain kinds of updating of notation are useful. The edition claims that ‘modern score order has been adopted’ (111); here this means that fully scored movements are rendered with oboe at the top, then trumpets and drums, then voices, strings and basso continuo. This is conventional for nineteenth-century works – think of a Beethoven symphony in modern score – but not always for ensemble pieces from the early eighteenth century. (The Telemann edition appears to prefer this layout; the Neue Bach-Ausgabe does not, putting trumpets and drums at the top.) If one is accustomed to eighteenth-century practice it is strange to see the oboe placed above trumpets and drums, and I wonder whether this detail of modernization serves a purpose.
This is not just a matter of convention but also of musical construction. The oboe line in Stölzel's composition is bound tightly to the first violin line throughout most of the work; indeed, early manuscript scores (both the one from Sondershausen represented in the edition by plates 1 and 2 and the one in Berlin available online) indicate the participation of oboe by cues in the first-violin line rather than by putting the instrument on its own staff. As the edition points out, this doubling of the violin results in some notes that are unplayable on oboe, some (but not all) of which are adjusted in the surviving oboe part (which appears to have been copied from the score). But aside from one movement, there is no distinct oboe line in the work; the instrument is primarily a ripieno doubler of the first violin. The added staff devoted to the oboe in the modern edition – wherever placed in the score – has the potential to imply something different about the role of the oboe from what the early sources suggest. I do wonder what editorial goal this serves.
On the internet one can now find a recently posted modern score and set of parts for Stölzel's German Te Deum available for free download. The edition there (if ‘edition’ is the right word) is transposed from D major to C major for some reason, and was evidently copied from the volume under review here without acknowledgement. There are no references to sources or any other information about the piece – just the notes and text. The existence of this version throws into sharp relief the expectations we have of a scholarly edition, and why we are willing to pay for it: the expertise its editor brings to the explication of context and background, the thoroughness of its investigation of sources and the thoughtfulness of its decisions about the modern presentation of a work. This is all the more reason to want scholarly editions, like Unger's as published by A-R, to pursue these matters as fully as possible, even as we are thankful they make available a repertory we would probably not otherwise encounter.
