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Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations and Reconstructions: From Bach's The Art of Fugue to Beethoven's Tenth Symphony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert S. Winter
Robert S. Winter*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

The assumptions that lie behind what have variously been called ‘realizations’, ‘completions’, ‘restorations’ or ‘reconstructions’ of unfinished works are generally unarticulated. Over the last few years such ‘realizations’ have become media events that threaten to blur the line between scholarship and public relations. Since for most of the general public these projects represent the sole contact with the discipline of musicology, the issue of ‘realizations’ is one that affects all members of our scholarly community. If you look to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians or any other standard music reference work for guidance on the subject of ‘realizations’ or ‘completions’, ‘restorations’ or ‘reconstructions’, you will find no such article. Indeed, I am not aware of any study that examines the conceptual basis of ‘realizations’ in the arts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 116 , Issue 1 , 1991 , pp. 96 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1991

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References

I wish to thank Prof David Rosand of the Department of Art History, Columbia University, and Profs. Frederick Hammond of the Department of Music and Anne Mellor of the Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, for stimulating conversations concerning issues of ‘unfinishedness’.Google Scholar

1 ‘Quod Titianus inchoatum reliquit / Palma reverenter absolvit / Deoq. dicavit opus’ See Rosand, David, Titian (New York, 1978), 154Google Scholar

2 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar

3 The protracted genesis of Christabel is detailed in Paul Magnuson, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville, 1974), 94–6.Google Scholar

4 Wordsworth's contemporary, William Hazlitt, described The Excursion as ‘one of those stupendous but half-finished structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty’ Quoted from Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, 1981), 20.Google Scholar

5 Turner, for example, left behind more than 20,000 sketches, many of which are quite detailed. Other presumably finished paintings pursue what Matthew Brennan calls ‘indeterminate forms’ (Wordsworth, Turner, and Romantic Landscape, Columbia, SC, 1987, 99–108) that create a purposeful sense of incompleteness. About one of Turner's most important early paintings, Fisherman upon a lee shore, in squally weather (1802), a contemporary journal, The Star, found it an ‘admirable sketch, but we have doubt whether Mr. Turner could make it a good finished picture’ (quoted from Gerald Wilkinson, Turner's Early Sketchbooks, London, 1972, 14)Google Scholar

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12 Unless stated otherwise, all quotations are from Barry Cooper's recorded lecture.Google Scholar

13 Winter, Robert, ‘Noch einmal: Wo sind Beethovens Skizzen zur zehnten Symphonie?’, Beethoven Jahrbuch, 9 (1973/77), 536–7.Google Scholar

14 Zu Beethoven II, ed Harry Goldschmidt (Berlin, 1984), 88–129Google Scholar

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21 These materials have been surveyed in Jenny L. Kallick, ‘A Study of the Advanced Sketches and Full Score Autograph for the First Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Opus 125’ (Ph D. dissertation, Yale University, 1987). The transcriptions are, however, riddled with errors; fresh transcriptions have been made for the present article.Google Scholar

22 For a description of these drafts and the sketchbooks in which they are found, see Johnson, Douglas, Alan Tyson and Robert Winter, The Beethoven Sketchbooks History, Inventory, Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1985), 275–303, 345–6 and 397–414.Google Scholar

23 Rule, Sheila, The New York Times, 20 October 1988Google Scholar

24 For a detailed discussion of the structure of Aut 11, bundle 2 and the De Roda Sketchbook, see relevant chapters in The Beethoven Sketchbooks.Google Scholar

25 ‘Beethoven played the Tenth Symphony complete at the piano, all parts of it in sketches were at hand, but for no one but him to decipher.’ Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven Erne Kunststudie (Leipzig, 1868), iv, 368.Google Scholar