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Sydney: The curtain of the famous opera house rises on a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
London: The London Symphony Orchestra plays a Beethoven symphony. Paris: at
the Opéra Bastille, Matthias Pintscher’s Rimbaud opera ‘L’Espace dernier’ receives its world premiere. Peking:
the contemporary music ensemble ‘Klangforum Wien’ makes a stop in the Chinese capital with Beat Furrer’s FAMA.
What all these events have in common is that the musicians are all playing from scores published by
Bärenreiter-Verlag. Before Don Giovanni or the Beethoven symphony could appear in their definitive form, musicologists had to spend months poring over manuscripts, comparing first editions and sifting through documents in order to produce a definitive score, or “urtext.” Only then can the “orchestral material” be extracted - one “part” for every instrument from the piccolo to the double bass. To learn their roles the singers need “vocal scores” with all the orchestral instruments reduced to a single playable piano part. Even contemporary pieces have to go through these same procedures, the only difference being that the scores have a myriad special symbols calling for highly-trained music printers. |
| When its founder, Karl Vötterle, issued his first song sheets in 1923 the great composers of the classical, romantic and modern periods were firmly in the hands of the traditional publishing houses in Leipzig and Mainz. New trends were the order of the day, and Vötterle successfully found a market niche: music for the Wandervogel movement, pieces for recorder and organ, the burgeoning Heinrich Schütz renaissance, and above all else the plan to produce scholarly-critical editions of the complete works of Bach, Handel, Schubert and others. These projects soon turned Bärenreiter into a major force in the world of music publishing. They were joined by Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), a multi-volume music encyclopedia that heads a distinguished catalogue of book publications. Nor did Bärenreiter lessen its commitment to contemporary music, which has been a fixture in its catalogue from the very outset. Who is the Mozart of tomorrow? We don’t yet know, but only those who invest in young talent will be amongst the leading music publishers of the future. |
| German version |