Accenting the Classics: Editing European Music in France, 1915–1925 by Deborah Mawer, et al. (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Accenting the Classics: Editing European Music in France, 1915–1925 by Deborah Mawer, et al.
• Peter Asimov

Accenting the Classics: Editing European Music in France, 1915–1925. By Deborah Mawer, Barbara L. Kelly, Rachel Moore, and Graham Sadler. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2023. [xviii, 364 p. ISBN 978-1-83765-032-3. £85.00/$125.00 (hardback)]

Right around the time of the first installment of the Durand publishing house’s Édition classique, the French music critic, Jean Marnold suggested that famous composers lacked the requisite skillset to produce worthy musical ‘editions’: if appending their names helped to boost sales, the commercial gains were, he argued, but a short-sighted reward for a compromise in quality and integrity. Marnold was right to distinguish musicological from musical authority—and Saint-Saëns’s reply to Marnold (‘Tout ce qui, dans l’édition en question, ressort de la “musicology”, comme les dates, n’est pas de mon fait’ [Everything that, in the edition in question, emerges from ‘musicology’, such as the dates, is not my doing]) illustrates the limited awareness of leading musicians about what constituted musicological expertise. Marnold was prescient, too, in foreseeing the waning appeal of scores that traded on the imprint of a contemporary composer in favor of ‘Urtext’ editions premised on philological methods and authentistic ideals. But a century on (and a few French Theories later), the illusion of textual fixity has yielded its preeminence to the allusions of intertextual interplay: ‘Saint-Saëns’s Mozart’ has become as valid (or more valid) a site of inquiry, and even performance, as Mozart’s Mozart, and Durand’s instincts proved, once again, keener than most.

The core subject of Accenting the Classics— the Édition Classique A. Durand & Fils (hereafter ÉCD), misleadingly named after Auguste Durand, who despite hatching the idea died before his son Jacques brought it to fruition— is a terrain both fascinating and innovative for research. Instigated by a wartime ban on German imports and a gap in the market for affordable French editions of the European ‘classical’ canon, the ÉCD, initially encompassing core repertory by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Schumann, and a disconcerting amount of Czerny, was progressively stretched to accommodate works by composers as unclassical as Wagner and as alive as Maurice Emmanuel (himself also an editor), not to mention editions of Couperin and Rameau published before the inception of the series but retroactively incorporated into it. (Apparently Durand was less precious about the boundaries of ‘classic’ than he was attuned to the commercial potential of that moniker.) He recruited at the highest level a network of composers (including Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, and Saint-Saëns) and performers (including Isidor Philipp, Louis Diémer, and Marguerite Long) to serve as ‘revisers’—a literal translation of the French term, since ‘éditeur’ refers to the publisher— although in the event, the scope of ‘revision’ ranged from proofreading to instrumental rearranging. The roster of illustrious revisers not only enhanced the prestige of the editions, but also provided gainful work to musicians at a difficult time, and given the pedagogical profiles of many of his editors, banked on a steady stream of students to bolster long-term distribution (p. 273). The series ultimately counted over 850 titles, a complete catalogue of which was compiled by the authors and exists as an open-access online appendix—a precious resource, which would be further enhanced if entries could be sorted by composer and date rather than just reviser.

Accenting the Classics is the principal output of a three-year project funded by the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and was based at Birmingham City University. The four authors share equal billing on the book cover (with Mawer listed first as principal investigator), although individual chapters (aside [End Page 339] from the Introduction and Afterword) are divided among members of the team, working individually or in pairs. The two chapters that make up Part One provide background and an overview of Durand’s project. If the ÉCD was not the only project of its kind in wartime France, the size and longevity of Durand’s series set it apart from the analogous productions of competing firms...