Talk:Urtext edition
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It seems to me that we could do a little more to make it clear that in many cases, "Urtext" is little more than marketing hype. A couple of obvious examples come to mind: Buxtehude, where the available sources are so poor and the differences among them so great that a good deal of editorial adjustment is necessary to produce anything usable, and Chopin, where there are several available authoritative sources that conflict, since Chopin was wont to revise music even after publication.
Also deserving mention is the more recent concept of the "performer's edition" that strives to be as faithful as possible to the original sources without compromising usability. In these editions there is less emphasis on variant readings, and greater willingness to correct mistakes and notate documented performance practices of the era - trills at cadence points, for example, or accidentals that would have been added by the performer.
It may also be worth mentioning a few of the notoriously bad 19th century editions that led to the call for "urtext" in the first place, the usual sin being re-interpretation of baroque or classical masterworks in a romantic idiom.—Preceding unsigned comment added by UninvitedCompany (talk • contribs)
[edit] Urtext in literary and historical-critical contexts
The main article negelects to mention that the term "urtext" (or its variant, "ur-text") has often been used in non-musical contexts to denote a hypothetical source text from which known or extant texts were derived but that is now lost to us. Perhaps the most widely known example is the so-called "Q-text" that some biblical scholars argue is the common source of the synoptic gospels. Of course the use of the term is as controversial in the literary (especially biblical) arena as it apparently is in the musical. It seems to me that for completeness, the main article ought at least to refer to non-music related uses. Or perhaps a separate article would be appropriate, with a cross-reference to this article. 75.72.191.179 (talk) 16:59, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
