With these two volumes, Breitkopf's new urtext edition of J. S. Bach's organ works (Wiesbaden, 2010–) continues to supersede all the competition, including Breitkopf's own Lohmann edition, volumes 1–2 (Wiesbaden, 1979) and Bärenreiter's Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA), volumes 5–6 (Kassel, 1972/1979), to say nothing of the old Peters edition and the many other versions currently available.
These volumes contain the praeludia bwv531–533, 535–536, 541, 543–551 and 566, along with some of their variants. In this the edition follows Lohmann in construing a distinction among the terms Praeludium, Fantasia and Toccata; works are collected together on the basis of which designation the sources give them. By way of contrast, the NBA only considers whether or not a work is paired with a fugue in the classic two-part form. Indeed, as Schulenberg points out in the Introduction, ‘Bach may never have settled on what to call these works’ (volume 1, page 11). Thus the distinction embodied by the plan of the edition complicates the inclusion – reasonable in its own right – of the Prelude in E major, bwv566, in volume 1, which is called ‘Preludia ou Fantasia’ in its main source (126). On the other hand, the Prelude and Fugue in F minor bwv534 is missing; it is relegated to the CD-ROM supplement to volume 2 because of the doubt which recent scholarship has cast upon its attribution to Bach. Such details are by no means faults; I mention them to illustrate some of the interesting philological questions that this edition prompts and can help to answer.
The edition raises new questions for performers too. Whereas other critical editions have striven to establish a Fassung letzter Hand, often on the basis of later eighteenth-century sources, this edition ‘examines alleged late revisions with an especially critical view’ (volume 1, page 12) and often adopts the readings of earlier sources. The musical texts thus established are often identical to those of the NBA; sometimes the readings differ only slightly but favourably, for example in bwv535 (volume 2, from page 61), while occasionally the edition presents substantial new readings, as is the case for the ‘reconstruction’ (volume 1, page 13) of bwv566 in E major based on the version in C major, bwv566a. In well-known pieces of the core repertory, for which sentimental attachments are often hard to shake, unfamiliar readings might jar at first; but Schulenberg's superb critical commentaries (printed in German only; English translations are included on the CD-ROMs) make the intricacies of such textual issues transparent. In this respect these volumes are very much superior to the Bärenreiter NBA offprints (in those pale blue covers we all know), which are printed without any critical apparatus. The fourteen facsimile plates across both volumes are also a welcome inclusion.
The physical presentation is excellent overall. The music is printed clearly on cream-coloured acid-free paper; the sewn bindings lie flat when open and will surely last. The layout of the pages features large and easy-to-read musical type and a good amount of white space; however, it is not without some infelicities. Large type and white space mean more frequent page-turns, and these are not always advantageously placed; for example, both page-turns in bwv547/1 are impossible in this edition, but the two differently located turns in the same work in the Bärenreiter edition are doable. Occasionally, the large musical type has resulted in an extremely cramped layout which some will find difficult to read (volume 1, pages 46–47; volume 2, pages 100–101). In pedaliter pieces at places where the pedals are not in use, the inclusion of the empty third staff sometimes seems pedantic, especially since the three-staff notation is always editorial anyway (6); indeed, in a few places the empty pedal staves might have been suppressed for a more spacious layout (volume 1, pages 53, 65; volume 2, page 48).
A CD-ROM that provides material not included in the printed edition supplements each volume. Score images are in a proprietary format for on-screen viewing with linked commentary, but printable PDFs are included as well. These supplementary materials are useful and interesting – and occasionally surprising, as for example with the transcription, possibly by Krebs, of bwv1029/3, which appears as a movement in the variant bwv545b. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the amount of content on these discs is slight. It is surprising that more of the material in the printed volumes was not also included in the digital format. For example, it is not clear why ‘synoptic scores’, devised to facilitate the comparison of source readings, were not included on the volume 1 disc for all the versions of bwv545 and 566, which have complicated and interesting source traditions; such ‘synoptic scores’ are included on the volume 2 disc for bwv535 and 543, and are a valuable resource.
More fundamentally, the CD-ROM medium is outdated. The installation instructions seem almost to plead: ‘it merely requires a DVD drive’. Yet such hardware is increasingly becoming obsolete. Newer, smaller computers such as tablets and some laptops do not have optical drives. Everything appearing on the disc will ordinarily be unusable to the performer who has not preloaded the PDFs onto a portable device or printed them out; but they might have been available on the spur of the moment in the organ gallery if this material were accessible from the cloud. The utility of the resource is also hampered by the Edirom environment in which it runs. (The Edirom Project is a collection of software tools that supports digital editions; see <www.edirom.de>). The ‘navigator’ is poorly designed: it does not toggle among the open windows but instead launches a copy of the selected item in a new window, even if it is already open. And because this is a Java-based user interface, system-based toggle shortcuts do not function. Thus the single essential functionality for the synoptic scores is overly cumbersome.
Nevertheless, the appearance of these two volumes – which contain so many pieces from the core organ repertory – will only increase the eagerness with which both performers and scholars anticipate the completion of this new Breitkopf edition. It is easily the best edition of Bach's organ works now available, and is furthermore accessibly priced.
