I am writing a blog posting about this topic and was hoping to hear of some "infamous" examples of pieces you have played (orchestral parts come to mind) where a mistake in the part is very well known and has been in there for decades or longer, never corrected.
This won't help your project, but I had to pass this along: someone I know runs a small, but excellent music publishing house. He once told me that there was a term in the industry for an edition that had no errors, or needed no errata sheet: an accident!
Seriously, if I think of any examples I'll pass them along.
Related: in many older editions of the Well Tempered Clavier by JSB, there is an extra measure that was added to the Prelude in C, book 1. I hvae edition by Faure, and the measure is marked with an asterisk - the text states (loose translation) "this measure is consecrated by tradition, but is not found in the original".
I had a Brahms score in college with Bruckner's picture on it. :)
Barber of Seville overture, First fiddles: At the Allegro (around measure 25-27) There are 3 famous pickup notes. The next phrase should have 2 pickup notes, and it has 3. I'm not a musicologist, so I consulted the greatest musicologist in history= Bugs Bunny. The Rabbit of Seville does two notes.
There are plenty of examples in keyboard music. I have a Russian edition of Scriabin printed with some incorrect clefs! Even the ABRSM Tovey edition of the Beethoven sonatas has a few accidentals missing - I'm quite sure Beethoven never meant to write the chord C-sharp E A C-natural played with one hand.
I had a teacher in college that had us hunt for errors in scores as an exercise (the idea being to question and asses the importance of every marking). One year it was the Dover score of L'apre Midi, and it was a doozy. Wrong key signatures on transposing instruments - missing rests, too many rests, con sord with no senza sord following.... we had a list that ran 3 pages long.
--
Jay Vilnai
Macbook Pro 2.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, 750GB 7200RPM HD, OS 10.7.5, Sibelius 7.1.3 and 6.2, Kontakt, Vienna Strings, too many guitars
Vivaldi 'Beatus Vir' for two choirs and two orchestras in the Ricordi edition. There is a short Antiphon, 10 bars to the words 'Beatus Vir'. This is repeated several times as the work progresses. Very simple harmony in C major. I conducted this many years ago, and, because of the pressure of time, didn't rehearse the final appearance. Big mistake! In performance, the final C major chord was 'jazzed up' by a rogue A in one of the violin parts.
Ricordi publish two editions of the Vivaldi Gloria. In the vocal score of one of them, the tenors, at the end of the 'Et in terra pax' movement, are expected to sing a G in a B minor chord!! Neither of these, nor the one in my previous post, are particularly old editions. I don't know whether they've been corrected.
Interestingly, the two Gloria editions, at first glance appear identical - certainly in terms of cover / typeface etc. There are however, several significant differences. I have taken part in a number of performances where both editions have 'been in play', leading to a whole series of interesting harmonic collisions.
Re jazzed-up baroque harmony, the old (19th century) Novello edition of Handel's Messiah (with Mozart's additional parts) has an "interesting" moment (I forget exactly where) when Mozart's clarinets in A are written at concert pitch for a few bars, instead of transposed.
The new Novello editions of some Stanford liturgical works are error-riddled - however, they are quite small. Things like a wrong note for the organ pedal for just one beat (not a clashing note, but one that makes a different inversion of the chord). Trouble is, this is 'corrupting' the music for future generations, as these are the errors that will not be noticed by many.
Having said that, the new Novello edition of Stanford's Evening Service in A (published 2011, I think) contains some very obvious misprints in the organ part, which is a pity as it is otherwise a much clearer edition than the original (although, some would say, of course, that it loses its charm when the organist no longer has to struggle to play it off two staves!).
--
MacBook Pro, OS X 10.10.2, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 16GB RAM, Sibelius 7.5.1
As a guitar teacher, I find plenty of errors in guitar methods and correct them.
Obviously for classical music of the last century or so it can be much more difficult to determine what is an error. For example, the web site http://www.stanleyyates.com/articles/hvl/hvl.html discusses in detail many questionable notes in Villalobos' solo guitar music. Since Villalobos is dead, we'll never know for sure what he intended.
The conductor James Ross has a "score errors" page on his website (which I have contributed to) at http://www.james-ross.com/score-errors.html - a quite long list of musical works.
It also includes references to some of the musicological works cited above, as well as others.
--
Chris Crawley (horn-player and composer) using mainly Sibelius 6.2 (also Sibelius 7.1.3), Windows Vista Home Basic 64-bit SP2, Intel Core 2 2.8GHz, 3GB RAM, Audiophile 192/DacMagic 100
