Simon McVeigh and Peter Lynan's edition of Thomas Arne and Isaac Bickerstaffe's oratorio Judith (1761) forms the hundredth volume of the venerable Musica Britannica series. Their work exemplifies the merits which have come to characterize the series, and richly deserves its place of honour. This is true both in the quality of the editorial work and in the choice of subject. Judith was recognized by eighteenth-century critics as one of the most effective large-scale works composed by an Englishman since the death of Henry Purcell. In an oratorio performance culture in which it increasingly came to seem that, as John Stanley wrote in 1784, ‘there [was] little reason to suppose that any other than Mr Handels musick would succeed’, Judith was revived on numerous occasions, coming as close as any new work in the genre to joining the canon of Handel works in permanent repertoire (letter to Charles Burney, 21 April 1784, quoted in The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, five volumes, volume 1: 1751–1784, ed. Alvaro Ribiero, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 417). Modern critical assessments have reaffirmed the work's quality and significance. In McVeigh's own earlier definitive survey of concert life in London in the second half of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, Judith emerges in the book's closing paragraphs as a symbol of the music of singular quality produced by English composers during these years (Concert Life from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 166). Surveying a greater sweep of history still, Todd Gilman and Peter Holman declare Judith ‘the finest oratorio by an Englishman before The Dream of Gerontius’ (‘Arne, Thomas Augustine’, Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com). Judith therefore represents a fine choice for this milestone volume of a series of editions which has since its inception set out to publish scholarly editions of music of international quality written by British composers before 1900. One's surprise that the work has not appeared earlier is offset by the knowledge that the series began in 1951 with an edition of Arne's Masque of Comus (1738), the first major commercial and aesthetic success of his career; it is perhaps appropriate that this product of the pomp of Arne's professional life should have been held back to crown half a century of scholarly endeavour.

The editorial policy McVeigh and Lynan have selected is eminently appropriate for their subject. The Introduction includes a clear-eyed survey of the contents and context of the surviving sources, supported by a detailed bibliographic analysis of those sources. Four major musical sources survive: an autograph manuscript score (GB-Lbl Add. MSS 11515–11517), a printed collection of the overture and airs, published by John Walsh in 1761, and two manuscript scores copied in the early nineteenth century (GB-Lcm MS 738 and GB-Ob MS Tenbury 985). The autograph score is a complex document: it originated as a composing score, and was subsequently used in directing the premiere in 1761. It was probably also used for several revivals under the direction of Arne and his son Michael throughout the second half of the century, and cuts, rewrites and newly composed material related to those performances, in Arne's and others’ hands, are all included in the score. The transmission of distinctive errors makes it clear that Walsh's print was made from Arne's autograph, but the print is valuable since it testifies to the 1761 state of the material excised or reworked for subsequent performances. Significant variant readings occurring in the Royal College of Music and Bodleian manuscripts suggest that they were both copied from a now-lost source independent from the autograph; they may thus preserve details of a performance tradition separate to that under Arne's supervision, or, following his death, that using his autograph score. The Royal College of Music and Bodleian scores themselves, however, provide no clue to when or where such performances might have occurred. The significant literary sources consist of printed librettos produced for the premiere and subsequent performances in 1764, 1766, 1769, 1773 and (probably) 1784. These usefully provide evidence for the order and nature of the movements used in each performance, and allow the editors to link up changes in the musical sources with specific occasions. McVeigh and Lynan's approach is therefore to ‘present Judith in a version as close to its original as possible . . . while acknowledging that the changing form of the eighteenth-century oratorio in fact precludes the presentation of a single definitive version’ (xxxvi). The unlikely confluence of poststructuralist theorizing and new bibliographical findings which transformed literary editing in the 1980s – emphasizing the interest and value of multiple ‘texts’ and dispensing with the recovery of authorial intentions as an editorial goal – has by now begun to exert a strong influence on musicological editing. The editors’ ‘original’ version of Judith is therefore, happily, the work as premiered on 27 February 1761 rather than the evanescent intentionality which musicological editors long sought to capture. The aim of the edition is historical – to reconstruct an event, the premiere, in which Judith left the purely aesthetic realm and entered the social world – not psychological. McVeigh and Lynan take Arne's autograph as their copy-text, regarding this as the most direct route to reconstructing Judith in its 1761 version. Where cuts, revisions or new movements obscure the text of the premiere in the autograph, recourse is made to the Walsh print to supply the missing material. New movements and significant revisions made for revivals notated in the autograph are printed in an appendix, and variant readings the editors regard as significant in the other two major musical sources are collated in the apparatus. While the edition's main goal is to present the 1761 version, performers and scholars are also thus able to reconstruct, in broad brushstrokes, the details of other early performances. The only inconsistency I could detect in the implementation of this approach concerns the oratorio's closing chorus: at the premiere this was a repeat of the final number of Act 1, but for the 1773 revival this was replaced by a substantial, newly written stile antico movement. Rather than printing the 1773 version in the Appendix, it appears in the main text of the edition. While clear rubrics leave the readings of the sources in no doubt, printing the (unquestionably fine) new chorus in the body of the edition might be understood as an implicit encouragement to perform this version instead of the 1761 finale, and could thus weaken the edition's otherwise admirable effort to distinguish clearly between the work's distinct eighteenth-century iterations.

As the current chairman of the editorial committee, Julian Rushton, has observed, Musica Britannica editions have consistently taken pride in an ‘unflagging attention to clarity and elegance of presentation’. The approach has always been pragmatic: ‘it was planned from the outset as an edition of early music’, with lucidity and ease of use preferred to the philological precision of the Continental musicological tradition (www.musicabritannica.org.uk/planning.html). This volume is as handsome as its predecessors, with its musical notation, in particular, meticulously and intelligently typeset. The critical apparatus also typifies the series’ style, featuring a generous mise-en-page and plentiful entries typeset in musical notation – far easier and more pleasant to use than such sections often are. This approach, of course, has its demerits too. Too much information, for my taste, that ought to be present in the apparatus of a scholarly edition is omitted to streamline the volume. Part names, for instance, are regularly supplied throughout the edition, but only occasionally are square brackets used in the text to signal editorial intervention; the readings of the sources are not recorded in the apparatus. In this fairly important case the user of the edition cannot be sure of the readings of the sources. Fortunately, the choice between clarity and accuracy is no longer a zero-sum game. The edition already possesses an online supplement to its Introduction with further details of eighteenth-century performances. A similar resource could be provided for the apparatus, with a fuller version – perhaps containing a greater number of collations with the other major sources, as well as a more meticulous record of the readings of the copy-text – available online for those who wish to consult it. The considerable benefits of the edition's clarity and ease of use would not be lost, and much might also be gained.

Alongside its survey of the surviving sources, the introduction's greatest strength is its comprehensive record of Judith’s recorded eighteenth-century performances. The circumstances of the premiere are richly detailed, and include a memorably evocative anecdote concerning Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, the soprano castrato soloist: he was released from the King's Bench debtors’ prison just days before the premiere, resulting in breakneck-speed rewrites from the composer and hasty alterations to the advertisements. A more thorough discussion of the work's possible intervention in contemporary political debates would have been welcome. The suggestions made are intriguing, but are too brief, especially without any substantial recommendations in the footnotes for further reading to which interested readers could turn. Such observations are, however, minor set against the editors’ achievements. A monument of eighteenth-century English culture has been made accessible to scholars and performers, in an intelligently prepared, comprehensively researched and strikingly elegant volume.