Previous editions of Antonín Dvořák’s VIIIth Symphony have errors in many details. Jonathan Del Mar’s new edition now offers a very high degree of reliability.
Dvořák’s sunny, cheerful Eighth Symphony has long been notorious for being the most error-ridden in the entire orchestral repertoire, and this unfortunate situation was hardly ameliorated either by the 1955 Czech edition or by a more recent critical edition which bristles with misprints.
But the task of editing this glorious piece was not merely one of correcting all the obvious mistakes. Now that the manuscript graveur has come to light (it was discovered literally in a rubbish bin at Novello’s in 1964), and we can see the words “Copy from my original” in Dvořák’s own handwriting on the title page, it becomes evident that many readings, familiar from the first edition and accepted on trust by all subsequent ones, are mistakes by the copyists, and this has a more serious effect on the text of the work.
Most of these, predictably, concern small details. But sometimes even quite a small detail can greatly alter the effect of a passage, as in the two bars which introduce the B minor second theme of the first movement, where the rocking triplet/duplet figure in flute and clarinet gives way to subsiding slurred octaves in first violins followed by seconds. In the final bar (bar 76) this is echoed by the violas, and we have always heard this, too, slurred; this was merely an assumption by the engraver, made because the copyist had forgotten to notate the staccato Dvořák had marked. This now provides a delightfully piquant launch into the theme itself, with its similarly bouncing octave upbeat in flutes and clarinet.
But the most startling discovery occurs towards the end of the development section of the same movement. In a fortissimo E minor section (starting bar 207) violins give out an urgent, emphatic version of the previously tranquil flute theme, rising by a tone every two bars. The second of each pair of bars, with its choppy dotted rhythm, has always been heard with the same notes in the second half of the bar as in the first; and indeed this is how that motif has always been, ever since the flute first announced it in bar 19. Yet here Dvořák wrote something else and the familiar version was merely a lazy assumption by the copyist. Yet not only does what Dvořák wrote seen surprising, subverting the otherwise universal shape of the motif, but we know that Dvořák himself conducted the work twice using the published material.
It is known that composers, conducting their own music, are often more concerned with the overall effect and sweep of the piece than with small details, and it remains entirely possible that Dvorak did not notice, or was not unduly concerned about, the discrepancy in these notes that he was in fact hearing.
Jonathan Del Mar
(from [t]akte 1/2018)