Debussy Pelleas full score with revised interludes

[sbeckmesser]

Both the Dover score (and therefore the score now on IMSLP) and my RECENT (purchased 5 years ago for many Euros) "official" Durand copy of the study score of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande (plate # 6577) DO NOT contain the revisions he made to the orchestral interludes. These revisions have been in print as they are visible in the shots of a real score that serve as visual interludes in the Pierre Boulez performance on a Deutsche Grammophon DVD. Most frustrating is that the detail in the DVD is just blurry and incomplete enough to make it impossible to transcribe the revisions directly from the screen. Does anybody out there have access to the revised score? An easy way to tell is that Its pagination is likely to be different over the course of the entire opera than the Dover version, and therefore would not end on page 409. Perhaps the version now being sold (in the USA) by Hal Leonard, at 420 pages, is the one to get. I don't feel like placing yet another special order to end up with a copy of what I already have (and that is available at IMSLP).

It is the revised version that is almost univerally performed and recorded. While Dover has been known for choosing the wrong score to reproduce (such as their 1812 Overture with the Czarist hymn replaced by a communist anthem, and their early version of Debussy's Nocturnes, both preserved at IMSLP too), it is surprising that Debussy's own publisher, after more than a century, hasn't made the revised version the subject of their study score. Then again, Durand has been notorious for its long-term preservation of misprints in Debussy's works, a situation only now being resolved with various new critial editions from other publishers.

--Sixtus

[Carolus]

I was under the apparently mistaken impression that those revisions had been incorporated in later printings by Durand - after about 1930. From your description, this must not be the case. I think the critical edition of Pelleas - part of the Debussy Complete Works - is out by now, but I'm sure it is very expensive. The clothbound volumes usually run into hundreds of USD. Needless to say, they can't be uploaded to IMSLP. I somehow doubt that an offprint from the critical edition would run to only 420 pages (versus 409 for the original). I'll have to do a little research on this. I expect the Hal Leonard is just another print of the original Durand with some additional frontmatter.

[sbeckmesser]

Durand's critical edition of La Mer is indeed a thing of beauty -- and of considerable expense. At considerably lower cost one can now get a good critical edition study score (minus a critical report) from Breitkopf (#5516). As of the Durand catalog I looked up online right before my post -- if one can trust a catalog from Durand to be accurate -- Pelleas is not yet out in a critical edition. Plus I'd expect a re-engraving of the music to result in a considerable change in page count, not merely from 409 to 420. This has happened, for example, in the Schott critical editions of Wagner operas that are considerably longer than their first-edition full scores (The current Eulenburg octavo study scores being drawn from this Wagner edition are well worth the money, BTW.)

As far as I know, the only critical edition Debussy study score yet to be issued by Durand is of the Nocturnes, which incorporates Debussy's revisions of orchestration (easy tell-tale moment: the opening chord of the 2nd movement has much a fuller wind scoring than the original version available at IMSLP). But at least at that moment in the piece, even copies of the former Durand non-critical-edition that are several decades old have been accurate. Durand clearly has been selective as to which revisions have gotten into which compositions.

--Sixtus

[sbeckmesser]

I was under the apparently mistaken impression that those revisions had been incorporated in later printings by Durand - after about 1930. From your description, this must not be the case. I think the critical edition of Pelleas - part of the Debussy Complete Works - is out by now, but I'm sure it is very expensive. The clothbound volumes usually run into hundreds of USD. Needless to say, they can't be uploaded to IMSLP. I somehow doubt that an offprint from the critical edition would run to only 420 pages (versus 409 for the original). I'll have to do a little research on this. I expect the Hal Leonard is just another print of the original Durand with some additional frontmatter.

I today came across a copy of the Durand study score of Pelleas (as distributed by Hal Leonard) at the Juilliard Bookstore in NYC and it is the same as the previous Durand score I already have (and therefore identical to the versions published by IMP and Dover and therefore also to the score at IMSLP). They all lack Debussy's revisions to the orchestral interludes. Hal Leonard just adds the frontmatter pages into the page count. It is possible that the revised score is only available on rental. Is it legal to scan and upload a score that is definitely in the PD but which as been obtained on rental? Desperate situations call for desperate measures!

--Sixtus

PS: I also saw at that store the new Breitkopf critical edition of Ravel's La Valse. It looks wonderful and is far more legible than any of the Durand printings (and therefore the version available at IMSLP). It's fascinating that the new engraving somehow looks spit-and-polish Germanic, as opposed to the comparatively fluid-looking (and error-prone) Durand original. The Ravel work that needs re-engraving most is the orchestral version of Alborada del Gracioso, which has lacked clarity in all of its incarnations.

[Carolus]

The Dover score is out of print, BTW. The IMC (International) is still available at around $85 USD. The Durand/Hal Leonard is available but once again it's the same old thing. I've come across 2 plate numbers used by Durand for the score. The latest one I saw is 7018. The problem is, Durand would assign a new plate number when they issued a study score which was simply a photo-reduction of the large score (not a new engraving). So, it's entirely possible they have continued to reprint the 1904 Fromont engraving for the past century. Ugh!

[sbeckmesser]

The Dover score is out of print, BTW. The IMC (International) is still available at around $85 USD. The Durand/Hal Leonard is available but once again it's the same old thing. I've come across 2 plate numbers used by Durand for the score. The latest one I saw is 7018. The problem is, Durand would assign a new plate number when they issued a study score which was simply a photo-reduction of the large score (not a new engraving). So, it's entirely possible they have continued to reprint the 1904 Fromont engraving for the past century. Ugh!

What puzzles me is that David A. Grayson, in an article called "The Opera, it's Genesis and Sources" in the excellent Cambridge Opera Handbook on Pelléas edited by Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0 521 311446 1) states on page 60, about the majority of the revisions, that

"at first, the changes were copied by hand into the large scores in the Durand hire-library. Only later were they incorporated into the plates of the published scores: the study score (first published in 1908) was amended in 1950, but the conductors score not until 1966, which was the first reprinting of that score since 1904! This 'second edition' represents the 'standard' Pelléas, which is generally heard today in the opera house."

But my copy of the Durand study score that I ordered from Europe in 2003 does NOT contain the revisions, nor does the copy I saw last week at the Juilliard Bookstore (same 6577 plate number.) So has Durand reverted back to the original 1908 study-score plates? What has happened to the 1950 plates? What IMSLP really needs is a copy of that 1966 conductor's score, which, being large-format, will scan much better. But does its 1966 printing date make it ineligible for copyright reasons?

And this is not the end of it. Grayson continues, "Still, it [the 1966 conductor's score] does not represent the composer's final thoughts, which are contained in his personal annotated score (Bibliotheque National, F. Lang, Royaumont)." So at this rate we are not likely to see a widely available textually reliable version of this masterpiece until a critical edition is published -- and it will probably cost far too much for personal libraries. I'd settle for that 1966 conductor's score.

For the record, the same CUP book contains on p.200 the following list of editions of the full score [my comments are made without having seen original Durand copies of any of these editions]:
1. conductor's score, Fromont, 1904 (E.1418. F.) [This is the source of the Dover and the IMSLP scores.]
2. conductor's score, Durand, 1905 (D.&F. 6577 on p.1; E.1418.F. on pp. 3-409) [This is one candidate for the source of the IMC score, which differs in the typeface for some of the tempo modifications but does not contain the revisions. The IMC score also contains added-in non-Durand English translations of some staging directions.]
3. conductor's score, Durand, revised edition, Durand, 1966 (D.&.F 6577) [Note the retention of plate number, which is confusing for everybody. This is probably the version of the score shown during the interludes of the DVD production conducted by Boulez.]
4. study score, Durand, [1908] (D.&F. 7018) [this is the other candidate for the IMC score]
5. study score, revised edition Durand, 1950 (D.&.F. 6577) [Again note the lack of a change of plate number from item 2, above. This is what I thought I'd be getting when I ordered my Durand study score of Pelléas. What I received probably a photo-reduced version of #1 above (at least that's what it looks like). Or it could be #4. Quelle stupidité!]

--Sixtus

[Carolus]

Unless the 1966 printing makes an explicit copyright claim as a new edition, which is possible but not likely, it would be perfectly eligible for posting here. Here's the bizarre thing about Durand's use of plate numbers - they assigned a new one for the study score (7018), which is probably simply a photographic reduction (not a re-engraving) of the large score they issued in 1905 (6577). (They did this a lot in the early 20th century, assigning new plate numbers for photo-reductions of old Saint-Saens scores, etc.) However, when they finally make the needed corrections in Pelleas six decades later, they retain good old D. & F. 6577 - not even changing the prefix to D. & C. (which they did for new issues sometime after 1960)! I guess it's time for me to attempt to find something on inter-library loan. I'll definitely try to get a copy of 7018, but it's going to be guess work to find one from 1966 or after. Do you happen to know if there is any difference in the page count between the 1905 and 1966 scores?

Also, it would be very helpful if you could post what you know of the differences between scores on the wiki discussion page attached to Pelleas ( http://imslp.org/wiki/Talk:Pelléas_et_Mélisande_(Debussy,_Claude)#Versions_of_the_Full_score_.2F_Study_score ). This is one of the great things about IMSLP - we can likely get to the bottom of what changes have been made a lot faster thanks to the collaborative nature of the whole project. I had no idea that Durand assigned a new number when they issued a score in reduced-sized format until I started hanging out around here.

[sbeckmesser]

I have revised my discussion of the versions of the Pelleas full score at the discussion page for Pelleas:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Talk:Pell%C3%A9as ... _Claude%29

There, I have indicated an easy way to find whether a score contains the revised orchestration, which is not isolated to the interludes, as the title of this message string seems to imply (my fault).

--Sixtus

[sbeckmesser]

Somebody with access to this article might be able to clarify things further. I myself would like to see a copy of it.

Debussy's Emendations to 'Pelléas'
Howard Ferguson
The Musical Times, Vol. 129, No. 1746 (Aug., 1988), pp. 387-388
(article consists of 2 pages)

There is also a book-length (PHD thesis) treatment by David Grayson The Genesis of Debussy''s Pelleas et Melisande that probably would also clarify these issues. He was a Teaching Fellow of mine in college. I'll try to track him down.

--Sixtus

[Carolus]

Much appreciated. I'll track down the Kalmus reprint and other scores. I discussed the issue with a retired orchestra librarian of a major orchestra, who did not know if Kalmus has the score with the revised orchestration or not. He did tell me that the Kalmus score and parts match, however.

[sbeckmesser]

Wow! A piece from Durand in which the score and parts match! What is this world coming to?

--Sixtus

[Carolus]

Well, he didn't say they matched perfectly. Just enough to not give rise to the usual "&@#$%! Durand and their non-existant editing" rant.

[Carolus]

More info: Checked out James Briscoe's Claude Debussy: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1990) today. On page 25, under entry 21 for mansucript full score sources he lists the following:

Coll. of Editions Durand, Paris. Durand 1905 score with corrections and revisions by Debussy and copyist as basis for correction of parts (Aug. 1905) and full score (pl. corr. Apr. 1949, used to create new plates for study score printed in 1950, and used for imprint of full score only in 1966.

This appears to establish the basic sequence of events. By August 1905, Debussy and a copyist inserted manuscript corrections and changes to a full score which was used to correct the parts. However, these corrections and changes appear only in 1950 for the study score and 1966 for the large score. It would appear from this citation that an unspecified number of new plates were prepared to account for the corrections and revisions for the 1950 printing. Durand probably didn't re-engrave the entire 409-page score, simply because of the expense involved. At any rate, I've made an inter-library loan request to (hopefully) obtain study score printed in either 1950, 1964, or 1971 or the large score issued in 1966. It will be interesting to see what actually materializes.

[Carolus]

The mystery deepens. Just obtained a copy of a 1964 printing of the Durand study score "Imp. Roland Père et Fils - Paris, Mars 1964". It's the unrevised version!! The opening of Act II is for 2 flutes in unison, no violins to be seen. Additional scores (different printings) are on order via the local library. Hopefully they got it right sometime after 1950. We'll see..... This is turning into quite a circus.

[sbeckmesser]

I've doing some careful listening to a couple of 1970-era recordings and have been making comparisons among my three scores: 1. the Dover/IMSLP first edition, 2. the IMC reprint, 3. a recent (purchased in 2003) Durand study score. I have determined that the latter score IS the revised version. It contains the following three easy-to-hear differences between scores 1. and 2 (these corrections are not the only differences, only three of the ones most easily heard on a recording and visible in a score).

A. p.5, system 1, bar 1 (1 bar before [3]): timpani roll on low B-flat (2nd B-flat below middle C)
B. p. 87, system 2 bar 2 (3 bars after [11]): Pelleas sings: "oui, oui, la bas"
C. p. 326, last bar of 1st system, first bar of second system (the 2 bars before [39]: the "Golaud rhythm" in the horns (similar to the woodwind rhythms in bars 5-6 of the first act)

In all three instances, the other two scores contain full-bar rests for the indicated performers at these points. These locations are thus sure-fire indicators as to whether a score is the revised 1905 orchestration or not. The violins doubling of the flutes at the opening of the 2nd act is apparently one of those corrections that Debussy entered even later into his personal copy of the score and which, as far as I know, have yet to see official printed (engraved) status from any source. I presume it will be included in the critical edition of Pelleas being edited by David Grayson. Those with X-ray hearing might be able to find some more of them by listening to the soundtrack of the Boulez video performance on DVD, which does contain the violin doubling and may contain further later unprinted revisions. Other recent CD recordings may have them too (such as Abbado's and Dutoit's, which I have not heard yet).

I trust that this clarifies matters and hope that a full score of the 1905 revised orchestration is already at hand, ready for scanning.

--Sixtus