mistake in General Information Mendelssohn's Infelice

[maryellen]

There is a mistake on the page for Mendelssohn's piece, "Infelice" for orchestra and solo soprano. At the top of the page, under "contents", it says it is the 1843 version. But two sections lower, under "General Information", and then "alternative title" it has the first words in the first Andante, i.e. "Ah, ritorna, eta dell'oro", but those are the words that are found only in the 1934 version.
There is a lot of confusion about this piece by Mendelssohn. The truth is actually that he wrote a piece in 1834 and then wrote a piece in 1843 that shares some material with the 1834 work. But they are substantially different. The 1834 work has a lengthy solo violin part and it has timpani. The 1843 does not. There are differences in musical themes and in the texts used, but there is also some overlap in both music in words between the two "versions". For more info on this issue of two versions/two distinct pieces, see John Michael Cooper's excellent essay http://riviste.paviauniversitypress.it/ ... 2-INT01/36
I have examined the score that is available here on IMSLP and it is the 1843 version. It would be great to have both versions available on IMSLP, but in the meantime, the wording in "General Information" should say "Ah ritorna, eta felice" to match what is actually in the score.

[steltz]

The general information section is specifically for information on the original work, so the 1834 information would be correct there. However, if the alternative title is a title only for an excerpt or section, then it shouldn't be there - it would have to be an alternative title for the whole work.

What seems to be more of an issue is whether the two are separate enough to warrant different pages, although usually that would be for works with different opus numbers. If they aren't that different, then we have headers for "Version A", "Version B", etc.

[Carolus]

It appears that maryellen's point is that the 1834 and 1843 "versions" of the piece aren't really versions at all, but two independent pieces which happen to share a small amount of the same material (related works). It this is indeed the case, it would justify having two separate work pages for the pieces. This will take a little research, but thanks for raising the issue!

[panda]

Cecilia Bartoli has recorded the 1834 version and, as maryellen says above, it is very significantly different to the later one - not just orchestration but structure, themes etc.

[mchlcooper]

The first posthumous performance of the 1834 aria Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, eta dell' oro was given in 1997, using an edition I had prepared in 1994 on the basis of my comparison of the two versions: they have substantially different texts and very little musical overlap, and thus by the conventions of musical nomenclature are autonomous works. It was first recorded in 1999, by Dutch soprano Francine van der Heijden and the Chemnitzer Robert-Schumann-Philharmonie (cond. Oleg Caetani); see http://www.amazon.com/Mendelssohn-Barth ... er+heijden. I explained the identities of the two arias at length in a 2003 essay in my co-edited volume The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and again, more succinctly, in the 2004 essay mentioned earlier in this thread. In response to these findings, the two works have been assigned different catalog numbers (MWV H4 and MWV H5) in the Mendelssohn-Werk-Verzeichnis prepared by Ralf Wehner and published by Breitkopf & Haertel in 2009. The relatively few musical overlaps that exist are a matter of borrowing from one unpublished work to another, not rehabilitating and revising. There have since been numerous performances of MWV H4 using my edition; my personal favorite is by Simone Kermes and Frans Brüggen (2010; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XksIMmBJd6s ).

In brief, the musical and scholarly verdicts are in: to view the two arias as two versions of a single work is to violate all the conventions of musical identification and distort the compositional history of the works. These are not one aria with a variant text and "variant" music, but two discrete arias written with different texts and different music. MWV H4 is even less a "version" of MWV H5 than BWV 213 is a "version" of BWV 248/I.

[Davydov]

What is not clear, to me at least, is which version we already have on this page:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Infelice,_Op.94_( ... hn,_Felix)

Is it H4 or H5?

Further to that, are the respective details for H4 and H5 correct on our Mendelssohn work list?

http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_ ... endelssohn

Once this can be cleared up, the details can be amended accordingly.

[panda]

The current score on IMSLP is H 5. I'm not sure why the work list has H 4's title in German rather than Italian.

[Davydov]

Thank you Panda, I think the German title was the confusing factor. I've just updated the work page and Mendelssohn work list, but let me know if anything else needs changing.

[markgebhart]

The first posthumous performance of the 1834 aria Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, eta dell' oro was given in 1997, using an edition I had prepared in 1994 on the basis of my comparison of the two versions: they have substantially different texts and very little musical overlap, and thus by the conventions of musical nomenclature are autonomous works. It was first recorded in 1999, by Dutch soprano Francine van der Heijden and the Chemnitzer Robert-Schumann-Philharmonie (cond. Oleg Caetani); see http://www.amazon.com/Mendelssohn-Barth ... er+heijden. I explained the identities of the two arias at length in a 2003 essay in my co-edited volume The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and again, more succinctly, in the 2004 essay mentioned earlier in this thread. In response to these findings, the two works have been assigned different catalog numbers (MWV H4 and MWV H5) in the Mendelssohn-Werk-Verzeichnis prepared by Ralf Wehner and published by Breitkopf & Haertel in 2009. The relatively few musical overlaps that exist are a matter of borrowing from one unpublished work to another, not rehabilitating and revising. There have since been numerous performances of MWV H4 using my edition; my personal favorite is by Simone Kermes and Frans Brüggen (2010; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XksIMmBJd6s ).

In brief, the musical and scholarly verdicts are in: to view the two arias as two versions of a single work is to violate all the conventions of musical identification and distort the compositional history of the works. These are not one aria with a variant text and "variant" music, but two discrete arias written with different texts and different music. MWV H4 is even less a "version" of MWV H5 than BWV 213 is a "version" of BWV 248/I.

Dear mchlcooper,
I am looking for the orchestral material for the 1834 H4 "Infelice". Can you point me in the right direction where I can find an edition?
Thanks so much and best wishes,
Mark