Readers of Classical Review might be surprised to find this intriguing work, a new edition of a collection of songs written by four French composers at the peak of the European Anacreontic movement, assessed in these pages. Straightaway it should be stated that Stachon and Naumann’s attractive and thoughtfully edited volume contains plenty to entertain not only the musical classicist and the classically inclined musician, but others too: scholars of Anacreontic verse, of translation, of classical reception, of the history of classical scholarship, and those who study and perform the songs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will find aspects of this collection interesting and useful.

The greater part of the volume comprises the ‘Neuf odes d’Anacréon’ of the title, which are settings of seven Anacreontic texts, all scored for a single (high) voice with simple accompaniment for piano or harp (see below). The first four songs – settings of Carm. Anacr. 23, 33, 21 and 35 by Jean-François Le Sueur, Luigi Cherubini, Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and François-Joseph Gossec respectively, and all in Greek – were originally published as an appendix to Jean-Baptiste Gail’s 1799 edition of Anacreon. These are followed by three further works in French by Le Sueur, which were published separately in 1817, including a second version of Carm. Anacr. 23, and settings of Carm. Anacr. 22 and 21. Lastly, we have settings in Latin of Carm. Anacr. 15 and 50 by Cherubini and Méhul, which were also published in 1817 in a collection that included the preceding seven songs. To these last items the editors add, for the first time, ancient Greek lyrics that were promised on the title page of the 1817 edition, but curiously omitted.

Stachon and Naumann explain in a very short preface, in German and English, the origins of the collection and give brief biographies of Anacreon, of Jean-Baptiste Gail and the four composers. They do not dwell on details of the Anacreontic movement or on the wider corpus of musical settings of Anacreon. A case in point is Cherubini’s opera Anacréon, ou L’amour fugitif (1803), which is mentioned only in passing: that production, written between the composer’s two contributions to this collection, garnered praise for its masterful score, but was ridiculed for its atrocious libretto and salacious plot, to the extent that the Grand Opéra’s audience were moved, for the first time ever, to hiss – a landmark in French cultural history. More detail about the environment in which these songs were commissioned would make plain to readers and musicians, many of whom will be discovering this music for the first time, the extent to which these composers were, by working with Gail, taking a creative risk and active within a rich tradition.

The preface is followed by ten pages of texts and translations, setting out each of the seven relevant Carmina in Greek, alongside Stephanus’ Latin version, Gail’s French, Mörike’s German and Bourne’s English renditions. This section alone is worth the entry fee. At the end of the book there is a short bibliography covering Anacreontic verse, European Anacreontism and the four composers. A concise critical report in Latin (but introduced in German and English) details the editors’ subtle and diligent work to make this coherent modern edition from four extant sources.

That, in a nutshell, is the volume’s purpose: to present these songs in a way that ‘makes them available for practical purposes after two centuries of neglection’ (sic, p. 6 – the English translation of the editors’ notes is, in every other respect, very elegant). In this aim it is successful and a welcome (re-)introduction to the repertoire of material which, though in the public domain – the critical report helpfully directs us to online sources for scans of earlier editions –, will certainly benefit from being so conveniently presented. The scores are cleanly typeset and easy to play from. Editorial interventions, usually to update archaic or ugly notation, are sensitively undertaken, although there remain some moments where they might have gone further: for instance the cross-staff beaming in bars 77 and 80 on p. 27 – in the tender closing moments of Cherubini’s L’amour mouillé –, albeit faithfully transcribed from the source and technically correct, looks odd and could easily have been respelled.

The songs are all interesting: taken as a whole, they offer a tantalising snapshot of creative response to ancient poetry at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Musically, they are a mixed bag: Le Sueur’s contributions are dramatic, declamatory; Gossec’s L’Amour piqué par un Abeille is more reflective, evoking the intimate atmosphere of the salons, where these pieces were first performed; Méhul’s drinking songs are sweet, rather than rowdy (for a sense of this, see the supplementary material, which includes a recording of the first of these, Tout boit dans la nature); Cherubini’s two attractive songs are perhaps the likeliest of this collection to reclaim a place in recital programmes alongside Anacreontic settings by Loewe and Lawes, or more recent compositions by Eisler and Maconchy.

The accompaniments, designed for competent amateur pianists, are approachable, and the clarity of this edition makes them more so. On first play-through, only one page turn (during the energetic piano interlude in Le Sueur’s Tout boit dans l’universe on p. 45) was impossible. While the title page asserts, following earlier editions, that these songs were written for ‘voice and harp or piano’, harpists should beware that the accompaniments are not especially harp-friendly. As so often, runs in thirds and some dense chords in the right hand will require further adaptation for effective performance on the harp. The vocal writing is largely lovely, but presents occasional challenges, particularly with regard to range – one wonders whether a transposed edition, though less straightforward or authentic, might make these songs even more accessible to (especially) students keen to deepen their understanding of the Anacreonta through song.

The editors are evidently mindful of the opportunity to bring this neglected music and the ancient songs that inspired it to a wider audience. Accordingly, they have updated the transliterations of the Greek text on the score. For the most part these are clear, although the inclusion of accents on the transliterated text feels fussy, if not redundant: the use of macrons – ō for ω, ē for η, and so on – is sensible, and now widely accepted as a convention for indicating vowels that are formed differently in the mouth to their shorter equivalents (ο/o and ε/e). Other diacritics are typically eschewed when transliterating Greek for musical performance, and with good reason: information about pitch is contained within the score, so no longer needs to be encoded in the text; those who wish to refer to the accentuation can do so in the Greek, which is adjacent; best practice is to remove any markings that do not hold meaning or instruction for the singer, in order to promote the most direct communication between composer and performer and to ensure that songs such as these, which should interest many beyond the world of Classics, are presented in a manner as accessible as possible to non-Hellenists.

The reduplication of diacritics – a small but important detail – typifies the editors’ rigour and the care they have taken to make these pieces stand up to the scrutiny of philologists, too. The same is true of the critical report, presented as an apparatus criticus in Latin. Stachon and Neumann address this eccentric choice directly, explaining that it was arrived at ‘due to equal international (un-)intelligibility and [is] appropriate to the subject matter’. As space was apparently not an issue – p. 60 and p. 61 are only half filled –, it is a shame not to have printed this section in German and English instead, especially when such care has been taken to present and translate all of the Greek and Latin lyrics in the book, and both modern languages are widely used by Classicists and musicians. For instance, a valuable discussion (p. 60: 5.22) of Le Sueur’s use of the notation ‘8va’ in Sur la lyre, which has real implications for which notes are to be played, will frustrate any accompanist who forgets to bring their Latin dictionary to rehearsal. These few quibbles speak to a publication that serves multiple audiences impressively, though not always equally or simultaneously.

In its best moments this volume, through a combination of philological scholarship and sensitivity to musical performance, provides real insight. The finest example comes in Méhul’s Les plaisirs d’un buveur, where the composer, faced with a corrupt text, had to fashion a separate melody for the shorter first verse. Stachon and Neumann present the song as it was originally published, but also provide, as an addendum, (p. 58), M. West’s reconstruction (Carmina Anacreonta [1993], pp. 36–7) of the first strophe, showing how it could be sung to Méhul’s melody for the remaining verses. This solution generates two results: the republication of Mehul’s work documents how the nineteenth-century musician dealt with a problem familiar to artists across the ages who have encountered precariously transmitted or fragmentary texts; and recent scholarship is leveraged to facilitate a more satisfying performance than was possible in the composer’s lifetime.

This feat alone makes the new edition a significant achievement. It is executed with admirable restraint, as the editors allow the music to speak mostly for itself, in some places even stripping back the original: they omit from nos 2, 3 and 4 the French literal translation found in the 1799 edition, on the grounds that it is ‘non bene cum melodia conveniens’. This decision arguably leaves more room to focus on the songs themselves and is one example of the balance that Stachon and Neumann strike: they invite us to focus on the music and the ancient text, bringing the four composers’ work out from the shadow of Gail by uncoupling the songs from his commentary. As a consequence, we miss something of the context for the songs. Gail’s justification (1799, 196) for commissioning and publishing these works in the first place was that he saw ancient and modern musical practice as ‘presque les mêmes’. Modern readers (and performers) will see these songs not as recreations of ancient music, but as products of their own time. This excellent new edition allows us to appreciate them, the fruits of Gail’s innovative efforts to marry criticism and performance, in their own right. They are a timely reminder of how much can be achieved when scholars and artists collaborate, and how long the results of that work may resonate. It is hoped that Edition Gravis, who focus chiefly on contemporary composers but have also published Stachon and Naumann’s edition of songs after Horace, Catullus and (of course) Anacreon by C. Salaman, will pursue more projects of this sort – musicians and Classicists alike will surely welcome it.