I'll have one stab at this and that will be that.
jocelyn Wang insists that a repeat sign is an unambiguous indication of
the composer's intentions and must therefore be followed in all cases.
Something is wrong with that reasoning. Of course a repeat sign is
unambiguous in the sense that it allows no gradations, unlike a dynamic
or other expressive marking. You either repeat a section or you don't.
Nevertheless, I would suggest that there are different kinds of repeat.
Some are purely conventional; some, as in Beethoven, are special effects,
occuring only in some works. Some, as often in Haydn or Mozart, may be
conventional but the compositional substance is specially designed to
exploit that convention. What I am suggesting is that some repeats appear
to be more important to the compositional, structural integrity of the work
than others. Now as Stirling Newberry pointed out, that is no hard and
fast thing. We have to guess as best we can given our knowledge. In the
Romantic era, when people took a narrative, psychological view of musical
structures, repeats seemed unnecessary and unnatural. A more structural,
classical approach may lead to different conclusions. We are lucky to have
a broader historical outlook than 19th century musicians, and that brings
with it a greater responsibility to look into the compositional aesthetic
both of the composer himself and the style he wrote in when deciding
whether to play a repeat or not. Often doing so will reveal a sense behind
the repeat that was not obvious beforehand. But in each case we owe it to
ourselves and the music to make an intelligent enquiry ino the musical
substance, as opposed to blindly following the marking on the page, however
'unambiguous' it may look. What happens, for instance, in the case of
composers like Schubert who continues to routinely include repeats in the
first movements of his late piano sonatas, even though they no longer
Clearly follow the classical aesthetic that gave life to those repeats?
Do these repeats contribute to the structural interest and meaning of
the movement or do they just make it longer? If the latter, is the length
itself a virtue, contributing to the epic 'heavenly length' of the work, or
is it just tedious? Those are valid questions that I would not find easy to
answer. Alfred Brendel is a highly conscientious musician, but after much
thought on those lines he chose to leave out the exposition repeat in the
B flat sonata D960, and I think he had the right to make that judgment.
Another example: in the first movement of Chopin's sonata in B flat minor,
there is a clear exposition repeat. The problem is that as that repeat
stood in many editions (going back to the Doppio Movimento rather than the
very beginning) it made no harmonic sense. Now IIRC Charles Rosen shows
in his 'Romantic Generation' that the familiar version is a misprint -
the repeat was in fact meant to go back to the 'Grave' opening - and
furthermore that understood like this, the repeat works perfectly well,
provided that we also take the instruction to play the 'doppio movimento'
twice as fast as the opening literally. This example is meant to show
two things: on the one hand it supports Jocelyn, because it shows that
frequently there is a lot more detailed structural thought involved in a
composer's directions than we may think at first. On the other, there are
many recordings that follow the 'old' repeat (going back to the 'Doppio
movimento') because it says so 'unambiguously' in a score that happens to
be corrupt. They do so even though it clearly makes no musical sense!
Now who is better: the interpreter who can see the musical nonsense of
the repeat as it stands and ignores it, or the one who follows the wrong
repeat against his own better musical judgment? Both, of course, are not
as satisfactory as an interpretation that takes the 'true' (according to
Charles Rosen, at least) repeat into account. But having to choose between
the two (as one would have had to several decades ago) I know the answer I
would give.
Felix Delbruck
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