It is rare to see journalists treating textual problems seriously.
from
Jeremy Eichler’s “String Theorist” in the NEW YORKER (27 August 2012. p. 35):
Tetzlaff began eying Ligeti's Violin
Concerto in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when the first soloist's exclusive rights
to the piece were about to expire. When he obtained the printed music, however,
he noticed some puzzling conflicts between the published solo part and Ligeti's
handwritten full score. Ligeti, a severe Hungarian who died in 2006, had revised
the work after the first soloist informed him that the piece was unplayable. But
for Tetzlaff the earlier version was not only playable but more effective, so he
obtained Ligeti's permission to perform the original.
Tetzlaff came to see the piece as a Janus-faced
score, shifting between an older, BartÏŒkian longing for homeland and an avant-gardist's
fierce exploratory zeal. He expressed this view to the German press around the
time of his first European performances of the piece, in 1999. Not long afterward,
a plain postcard appeared in the mail:
Dear
Mr. Tetzlaff, I've read your interview and feel very close to you. Not only do
you play my concerto PERFECTLY but you talk about it with so much understanding
and compassion. For a living composer it is the most beautiful thing to be so
understood by an interpreter. Warmly, Cyörgy Ligeti
Shulevitz says: The most
notorious, and arguably most destructive, reviser in English literary history
was Wordsworth. Wordsworth never published his great epic, ''The Prelude,''
during his lifetime. Instead, he fiddled with it for more than half a century,
making it on the whole more pious and less politically radical. The
back-and-forth over the various editions of ''The Prelude'' has had a great
deal to do with the emergence of a new scholarly movement devoted to the study
of revision, known alternately as editorial theory or the New Bibliography. The
New Bibliographers believe that scholars shouldn't try to decide which edition
is better but instead should view all editions as part of an evolving whole.
Such synoptic neutrality, though admirable, doesn't help us much. Lay
readers can't and won't struggle through page after page of variants. It is
tempting to declare that original versions are always preferable, even though
most editorial theorists dismiss such views as cheap romanticism -- the cult of
spontaneity and all that. In a 1984 book called ''Flawed Texts and Verbal
Icons,'' Hershel Parker, the great Melville scholar, explains why original
versions often do seem so superior. Parker advances a theory of the creative
process borrowed from the philosopher John Dewey, who believed that meaning is
built into a text as it is composed, step by step. Meaning is a function of all
the choices made and problems solved in the act of creation, not of prior
intentions or after-the-fact conclusions. Great artists, Dewey said, ''learn by
their work as they proceed, to see and feel what had not been part of their
original plan and purpose.''
Emily Dickinson, in a poem quoted by Oates in her afterword, called
inspiration ''the White Heat.'' For Parker this is an almost technical
description of how literature is forged. Writers do what they can while the
metal is hot, and should not attempt patch-up jobs after it has cooled. The
virtue of this position is not just that it preserves a literary work's
documentary value -- Oates's unrevised novel, with its straightforward social
realism, seems more of its time than the revamped one -- but that it keeps
writers focused on the future, not chewing over the past.
The problem with Parker's position, of course, is that it's much too
reasonable. How do we know that some writer's neurotic need to rewrite isn't
just an extension of his need to create? And who would want to deprive literature
of its more memorable second thoughts -- James transforming Isabel into an
effete creature not unlike himself, or Auden renouncing his own poetry? Writers
revise; that's what they do. In the interest of history, however, publishers
like Modern Library shouldn't issue a radically altered text unless they're
also willing to bring the original back into print. [end of quotation from
Shulevitz]
