Seeing Bartók Clear

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Peter Bartók understood the importance of an improved and faultless edition for performers. Nowadays, whenever Universal Edition or Boosey & Hawkes reprint a Bartók score because the previous edition is sold out, Peter Bartók, with his assistants, prepares lists of the errors in the previous edition and spares no time, money or energy in doing so. At the moment he gives priority to this and is of the opinion that a complete edition is untimely until all the scores on the market have been revised. I tried to convince him that the function of a complete edition is different from that of a revised edition: it is a context which for a given composition shows not merely a single version, the last one, which in musicology is called even in the English-speaking world a "Fassung letzter Hand". The chronological variants, the different versions, omitted movements, etc. should be made available, partly for the future performer, partly for those interested in Bartók's compositional process.

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