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