Talk:Urtext edition

It seems to me that we could do a little more to make it clear that in many cases, "Urtext" is little more than marketing hype. A couple of obvious examples come to mind: Buxtehude, where the available sources are so poor and the differences among them so great that a good deal of editorial adjustment is necessary to produce anything usable, and Chopin, where there are several available authoritative sources that conflict, since Chopin was wont to revise music even after publication.

Also deserving mention is the more recent concept of the "performer's edition" that strives to be as faithful as possible to the original sources without compromising usability. In these editions there is less emphasis on variant readings, and greater willingness to correct mistakes and notate documented performance practices of the era - trills at cadence points, for example, or accidentals that would have been added by the performer.

It may also be worth mentioning a few of the notoriously bad 19th century editions that led to the call for "urtext" in the first place, the usual sin being re-interpretation of baroque or classical masterworks in a romantic idiom. —Preceding unsigned comment added by UninvitedCompany (talk • contribs)


 * i agree, urtext is just a term of art in textual editing generally, whether the holograph is a novel, a musical score, the instructions for a conceptual work of art, a leger of pilgrim accounts and debits, the lyrics of a folksong. the various attempts to derive the urtext of james joyce's "ulysses" or the christian bible are legendary, and more recently we have the political disputes around the establishment of an urtext of nietzsche's complete works. and while "marketing considerations" may influence the pressures on an editor (or indeed the choice of editor as a "brand" or editing methodology), in general an urtext is a faith product: it depends on our faith in the accuracy of the editorial description of procedures, the consistency with which the editor has followed their procedures, the full availability of all texts and the accurate identification of all variations in all those texts, and so on. this how it is possible that there can be more than one urtext of the same work ("Ulysses" again).


 * newmann's complaint about urtexts creating student confusion is misjudged. Most musical compositions before 1800 come down to us in just one copy or print edition, so the latitude of editorial judgments is circumscribed. even complex editorial tasks present the difficulties as endnotes where they can amaze but also remain safely tucked out of view. (the schnabel performance edition of beethoven, which relies on copious footnotes, is an exception.) this does not inhibit readers or performers from interpreting the text in their own way, but does indicate the fundamentally subjective process of reaching back to something "definitive" once the difference becomes imperceptible to the most acute reader or listener. in this sense the urtext is simply the authorially intended text brought into the sharpest possible focus. Drollere (talk) 16:50, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Urtext in literary and historical-critical contexts
The main article negelects to mention that the term "urtext" (or its variant, "ur-text") has often been used in non-musical contexts to denote a hypothetical source text from which known or extant texts were derived but that is now lost to us. Perhaps the most widely known example is the so-called "Q-text" that some biblical scholars argue is the common source of the synoptic gospels. Of course the use of the term is as controversial in the literary (especially biblical) arena as it apparently is in the musical. It seems to me that for completeness, the main article ought at least to refer to non-music related uses. Or perhaps a separate article would be appropriate, with a cross-reference to this article. 75.72.191.179 (talk) 16:59, 17 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree, and feel that a separate article Urtext would be best for this purpose. Opus33 (talk) 21:31, 17 February 2008 (UTC)


 * i disagree that it needs to be a separate topic. this is just throwing sand in the eyes of a reader. setting aside the origin of the term, the concept of an urtext goes back to classical philology, the greek bible prepared by erasmus and spinoza's trenchant critiques of the hebrew text. in what substantive way is a musical urtext, either in editorial procedures or as a document created to specific scholarly standards and usage expectations, different from a literary urtext? name them. you have the same political wrangles as to whether this or that person should be the editor of the mozart ausgabe or the nietzsche ausgabe, or what the editing standards should be, or how the editing is done, or how it is printed. it's an urtext, and the definitional issue is the faith we place in it as such because of how we believe it was created, not in what it is an "urtext of". Drollere (talk) 17:04, 7 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Regardless, this entry remains highly misleading for focusing exclusively on musicological usage. No reader who doesn't check the disambiguation warning would have an inkling that the term is used more broadly than in the editing of musical scores.--98.115.255.240 (talk) 00:39, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

German term?
I've deleted the "German loanword" category; it isn't a loanword, and there's no indication in the text that it is even a German term. Can anyone shed any light on this? Moonraker12 (talk) 16:45, 3 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Hello, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us: "[Ger[man]., f[rom] ur- UR- + text TEXT n.1]".  Their first reference in English is only 1932, which makes is clear that it's a recent loan from German.  Opus33 (talk) 20:53, 3 July 2009 (UTC)