Tondauer
In 2020 I started a project called Tondauer, to make Creative Commons licensed editions of sheet music. It happened because of the Covid-19 lockdown that year: I was learning to play Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude Op. 104a, No. 2 (MWV U 123), because it suited my mood of restless frustration at the time.
I started with a 19th-century edition that could be downloaded for free. Then I bought an edition with fingerings, and wondered why it had different notes. I looked in vain for the composer’s manuscript, but found only an earlier draft. I had been reading R. Larry Todd’s biography of Mendelssohn, so I emailed him to ask if he knew where the manuscript of the final version was, and he replied that it hadn’t been found. This meant that the only sources were the first editions, which were published after the composer’s death.
I had learned something about how critical editions are made while working in the field of digital humanities. So I decided to make my own critical edition. Over several months, as libraries and archives gradually reopened, I got digital reproductions of the first German and British editions. The two editors had worked together to publish them simultaneously, but they didn’t have the same notes, either. In my edition, I tried to make a plausible explanation of what had happened, and reconstruct the composer’s intentions as well as possible. In the end I tried to make the edition I wished I had had, and added fingerings with the help of Penelope Roskell.
More recently I’ve been working with musicologist Florence Launay on editions of forgotten works by female composers, starting with Armande de Polignac’s Preludes for Piano, which had survived only in a single copy of the first edition, preserved by her descendants. Florence had photocopied it, and pianists had been recording the pieces using photocopies of that photocopy. Now that we’ve published a corrected edition with Florence’s preface, I hope more pianists will enjoy playing these Preludes.