Steve Schwartz wrote:

>No, but you could say that van Gogh's green would be better blue.

And you can say to yourself, listening to a work, that it would be better
without the repeat.  That's different than entering the composition itself
and changing it.

>...  I would agree that the artist's original thoughts must be
>available, but I don't think anybody seriously argues that Beethoven as
>written/edited for as close to accurate as we can get is unavailable
>exactly.  Why not play?

Not quite sure what you mean, but you can't use the possibility of error
as license to change what you will.  "There *may* be a discrepency from
the orginal hand of the author in this edition, so I'm going to radically
change the structure of the entire work because I feel like it." Not
logical justification, to me.  Besides, the urtext of Beethoven isn't
exactly hard to get, and that is pretty close to as accurate as we can get.

>This really doesn't answer the question.  Why shouldn't these works be
>abridged if abridgement improves them and as long as we have the full text?

Because we simply don't have the authority to abridge them.  No-one does.
Whether or not a work is "improved" by abridgement is also to subjective
to justify changing the composer's intention.  If a conductor chooses to
essentially rewrite or edit a Beethoven Symphony because s/he thinks it's
better, what does that conductor say to me in the audience who think it is
cheapened and distorted? And if I want my money back because I didn't
receive the full product I was expecting?

>Actually, nobody except Beethoven knows why he put in a repeat or whether
>a fly dipped its legs in some ink and alighted before a double bar.
>Unfortunately, we can't ask Beethoven.

That is just silly, and again tries to justify mutilating the composer's
intention because of imagined faults in the edition.  I also still haven't
seen a legitimate artistic justification for eliminating repeats.

>Unfortunately, we can't ask Beethoven.

Fortunately, we don't have to.  The repeat signs are there.  There's
nothing to ask.

That said, I must insert something here.  In the reality of performance,
sometimes for various reasons, I will go along with the elimination of
a repeat.  Sometimes the program must fit in the space of an hour, not
a minute over.  Sometimes I'm tired and just want to go home.  Sometimes
I take into account a certain 20th century performance practice of
eliminating the second repeat in a first movement.  I have sinned,
and every time this happens I quietly apologize to the composer.
Philosophically, however, artistically, I firmly believe in observing
what the composer wrote regarding repeats.

David Runnion
[log in to unmask]
www.mp3.com/serafinotrio