John Field: the 'Hidden Manuscripts' and Other Sources in the British Library
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JOHN FIELD: THE 'HIDDEN MANUSCRIPTS' AND OTHER SOURCES IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY ROBIN LANGLEY JOHN Field's manuscripts, both epistolary and musical, are rare, a dozen letters, of which two^ are in the British Library, and twenty-two autograph manuscripts, of which only the Pastorale in A H.14,^ Nocturnes nos. 5, 6, and 14, and Concerto no. 7, are complete. Field's reputation as the creator of the piano Nocturne and his influence on early Romantic style is assured. It is perhaps less widely recognized that his habit of rewriting his compositions not only refined details of both melody and harmony but on occasion altered the original conception fundamentally, while providing an additional and fascinating insight into a developing style.^ Further, not only his manuscripts, but especially his reworkings, contain detailed fingering, articulation, realization of ornaments, and pedalling. Regarded by many of his contemporaries as perhaps the greatest pianist of his time,'* Field imparted in these annotations more than one important lesson in early Romantic piano technique and performance practice. These reworkings take the form of ink or (more generally) pencilled alterations to printed copies, either on slips of paper pasted over the engraved text or (again, more generally) crammed into any available space within the music text or in the margins. It is in these 'hidden manuscripts' that the British Library holdings are particularly rich. Born in Dublin in 1782, Field (fig. i) left his native Ireland for good eleven years later, to be apprenticed to Clementi in London. A fully-fledged virtuoso and experienced, if not fully mature, composer by the age of eighteen. Field accompanied Clementi to Paris, Vienna, and St Petersburg in 1802. Finding Russian cultural society congenial. Field remained there, alternately in St Petersburg and Moscow, as pianist, composer, and teacher, apart from a concert tour (1831-5) to, most notably, London, Paris, and Vienna. Returning to Moscow in late 1835, he died there on 23 January 1837. Thus, much first- hand source material remains in Russia; the other two chief repositories of Field's music are the Library of Congress, Washington, and the British Library. Indeed, of the total of sixty-eight works (excluding the many and various transformations of a single seminal piece) printed in Field's Hfetime or posthumously through the composer's immediate circle, the British Library lacks copies of only H.ii, 232 ^. /. John Field; from a lithograph. By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum 12, 41-3, 57, 63-4, and 67, and H. deest 5-7 {Fantaisie stir un Air favorit de mon Ann N.P., Quatre Danses, Prelude in C minor). The small number of omissions makes this the most comprehensive collection in any of the world's great hbraries. In large measure, this is due to the long and distinguished career in the Music Library of Tim Neighbour, a committed and perceptive Fieldian beside his better known work on Byrd and Schoenberg.^ Turning first to the earliest known printed editions without annotations, the majority of them are single surviving exemplars and the most important fall into two groups, one of English, the other of Russian issues. With the publication of Hopkinson's Catalogue in 1961, incipits for five entries remained unknown: the Rondos 'Go to the Devil' H.3 and 'Slave, bear the sparkling goblet round' H.5, the Variations on 'Logie of Buchan' H.7, the song 'The Maid of Valdarno' H.47, and the Andante H.64. H.5 has not yet been found (it may well have been confused with the similarly entitled Rondo on 'The Two Favourite Slave Dances' H.6) and H.64, "^^st likely Field's last composition, is as one would expect in Russia (Tchaikovsky Conservatoire, Moscow). The British Library has since acquired H.3 (two issues: pressmarks h.3465.aa.(5.) [1797], g.352.0.(2.) [1800]) and H.7 (g443.mm.(5.) [1799]), and a later solo piano arrangement by Haigh of H.47, besides the earliest known editions of Del Caro's Hornpipe H.2 (h.3465.aa.(4.) [1795-6]), and 233 Variations on 'Since then Vm doomed' H.4 (g.352.s.(i5.) [1798]) and *Speed the Plough' H.23 (H.i2i.(3.) [1800]). Some of these prentice works are by no means neghgible, but give little hint of either Field's later development or the more sustained assurance of the Three Sonatas H.8 (1801), his official Opus i. Conversely, the group of Russian editions acquired from the early 1970s onwards is of the utmost importance to Field scholarship. For the first time outside - and indeed within - Russia came datable evidence of Field's style as it developed towards and beyond the issue of the first three Nocturnes in November 1812,^ at the head of a sequence of twelve editions by his most consistent and longest-serving Russian publisher Dalmas (h.3465.x.(i-i2.)). They are listed here with the publisher's plate-numbers: (i.) Nocturne no. i H.24, pn5o8 (2.) Nocturne no. 2 H.25, pn5O9 (3.) Nocturne no. 3 H.26, pn5io (4.) Fantaisie [sur l'Andante de Martini] H.i5, (5.) Exercise module dans tous les tons H.33, (6.) Divertissement no. i H.13, (7.) Divertissement no. 2 H.14, (8.) Grande Valse H.19, pn584 (9.) Polonaise en Rondeau H.19, pn6o6 (10.) Kamarinskaya H.22, pn683 (11.) Nouvelle Fantaisie H.35, pn684 (12.) Romance H.30, pn685 To the above were added later: Rondeau H.18, pn575 (pressmark h.3465.y.), Quintetto H.34, pn663 (h.3465.z.), and the first editions of Nocturne no. 4 H.36, pn8i4 (h.3465.m.(8.)) and Nocturne no. 7 H.45, pni2i3 (h.3465.m.(5.)). Besides providing hitherto unknown texts and a chronologically useful sequence of plate-numbers, this group of Russian editions gives further evidence of Field's gradual rather than decisive crystallization of his developing style by means of revision. Items (4-6.) are described as 'Seconde Edition', to which (7.) adds 'revue et corrigee par l'Auteur^ while this edition of (12.) is Ma seule avouee par TAuteur'. One may add that (10.) is also a 'second edition', after the original published by Schildbach in 1809. Patrick Piggott^ was the first to draw attention to this important aspect of Field's creative process, and recent research in Russia into his Moscow publishers, especially Elbert, has provided further confirmation that it was not only his piano technique which was subjected to constant scrutiny and refinement. While a number of such revisions may be traced from one printed edition to another, many more survive as autograph annotations on printed copies, and a number of the most representative are grouped under one pressmark (f.34.b.). Within that assembled volume items (1-2.), (4-6.), and (11-15.) provide fingering for the Fantaisie H.35, Nocturnes nos. 4, 6, and 8, and Sonatas nos. 1-4 respectively.^ But the most telling indication of the interest to be found in the fullest of these reworkings is the delicate, 234 seemingly improvised, ornamentation (shown in small notes) of the original rests in bar 14 of Nocturne no. 6 (ex. i), or the added inflection to the repeated harmony in bar 56 (ex. 2). Ex. 1 Ex.2 In 1812, Field had moved from Moscow to St Petersburg at the start of what was to become his most productive decade, and, after he accepted in 1815 Breitkopf & HarteFs offer of publication of all his new works, knowledge of his music, and editions of it, proliferated throughout Europe. In 1821, he moved back to Moscow and the next ten years marked a shift in emphasis from new music to comprehensive revision, judging by the dates of the printed editions on which he worked, and the range of the piano keyboard used (ascending to f" from 1819, and descending to CC by the end of the next decade). This may have been dictated by circumstance, for Field became increasingly ill from what appears to have been a form of cancer, took increasing refuge in (perhaps pain- killing) drink, and gave fewer concerts with orchestra - hence the most important corpus of'hidden manuscripts', the revisions of Concertos nos. 1-5 and the Quintetto H.34 for solo performance founded on the annotated printed copies bound as Add. MS. 47855, part of the bequest of Edward Meyerstein in 1953. The printed piano parts of Field's concertos contain both the solo part and the orchestral ritornelli (often imaginatively arranged for piano and at variance in detail with the orchestral parts). In his conversion from what doubtless served as a short score from which the soloist could direct an orchestral performance,^ Field was resourcefully ruthless with both the original formal proportions and the detailed matter of the musical argument. Each concerto is much shorter in its version without orchestra and the amount of new material - enriched texture or harmony, melodic ornamentation, cadenzas and thematically or technically developing passagework to tide over excised bars (or pages) - can sometimes be considerable. He published mature revised versions for solo 235 ' V. wmmmrmm JOHN FIELD. ST FETEJi SB OUR a Fig, 2. Title-page of the first edition of Field's Concerto no. 4. Music Library, h.346s.v. 236 performance of only the slowmovement of Concerto no. i (pressmark h. 110.(5.)) ^^d the Rondo of Concerto no, 5 (g.270.k.(6.)), after his return to England in 1831.^^ A full analysis here of this quantity of largely unpubUshed material would be out of place.^^ Nonetheless, an idea of the formal revisions can be measured from the differences between the earliest known source of the Third Concerto's Rondo (Saltikov- Shchedrin Library, St Petersburg) and the solo version in Add.