Stirling Newberry writes: >I know we have fought this thread before. Which is why I would ak that >people go back to the sources of why repeats grew rarer - expressed most >forcefully in Liszt's private letters, and in Wagner's very influential >work "on conducting". Some will not be moved by the arguments there in, >some will be so persuaded that they will se no other way. But this >artistic tradition has given us too many great performances to be ignored. >To play works in the manner which Wagner advises and not dispense with >many of the repeats would be as grave an error as playing the music in >Beethoven's age and dispensing with them, or worrying about notes over >grammar. While reading this post, I had Sandra Rosenblum's "Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music" handy. This does not directly apply to 19th century practice, but I thought some ideas mentioned in it might prove interesting: According to Quantz: "If there are two dots on each side of a double bar..., they signify that the piece consists of two parts, and that each part must be played twice." Turk, Koch, and Hummel agree. However, Clementi said: "The dotted bars [repeat signs] denote the repeat of the foregoing, and following strain. N.B. The second part of a piece, if VERY LONG, is seldom repeated; notwithstanding the DOTS." Andre Gretry: "I see almost all instrumental music chained to worn-out forms that are repeated for us without end...Hullmandel, one of the most perfect composers of this type [of music], was...the first to connect the two parts of his sonatas so that they do not repeat slavishly...A sonata is a discourse. What would we think of a man who, cutting his discourse in two, repeated each half?" Rosenblum suggests that "a performer needs to consider its [a repeat] effect on the listener's perception of the entire form and of the relationships of the parts to each other." In the case of Beethoven's music, Rosenblum believes "casual disregard of Beethoven's repeats would seem an affront to his formal designs." She cites the letter from Beethoven's brother Carl to Breitkopf & Hartel (12 Feb 1805) containing a request that the exposition ofthe first movement of the 3rd Symphony be repeated: "Before he had heard the music Beethoven had believed that the symphony would be too long if the first part were repeated; but after more frequent performance he found that it was actually detrimental not to have that repeat. Beethoven's thoughtfulness regarding repeats is observed as late as the String Quartet Op. 135, in which, surprisingly, his note at the end of the final movement, 'Si ripete la seconda parte al suo piacere' (repeat the second part if you wish), leaves the choice to the performer." All of this (and much more of such evidence) suggests that each case should be looked at individually, without a slavish devotion to a repeat sign merely because it is there. Dick Hihn