Centre for Eighteenth-Century Music

The Centre for Eighteenth-Century Music specializes in the publication of scholarly performing editions of works by major contemporaries of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Its growing catalogue of publications includes theatre music, keyboard music and chamber music.

The Centre's editions are published by Artaria Editions.

For more information about the Centre's publications, please contact Allan Badley: allan.badley@nzsm.ac.nz

NEW RELEASES

Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838)
Edited Uwe Grodd
‘Variations on a Portuguese Hymn,’ 152 No.1
Series 4 No.1

Solo works for piano – and chamber works based around the instrument –occupy a central place in Ries’s output. Many of the smaller works are popular in style and include pieces such as fantasies, sets of variations on popular operatic tunes and other works alongside larger and more serious works. This pattern holds as true for Ries’s music for flute as it does for his numerous piano works. The Variations for Pianoforte & Flute on a Portuguese Hymn was composed in 1826 and published two years later in London, along with another set of variations, by Clementi, Collard & Collard. The theme is the famous hymn Adeste Fideles which Ries’s English public would have known as O Come, All Ye Faithful. These sparkling variations include both a beautiful slower variation and a rousing reworking of this famous tune à la hongroise.

Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838)
Edited Uwe Grodd
‘Sonate Sentimentale’ for Pianoforte & Flute, Op.169
Series 4 No.2

The place and date of composition of the Sonate Sentimentale is uncertain in spite of the apparently conclusive evidence to the contrary: Ries’s autograph score is headed “7me Sonata pour le Piano Forte avec une Flute obligée composée par Ferd: Ries. Godesberg 1814 / op.169”. It is extremely unlikely that the work was composed in Godesberg as by 1814 Ries was living in London.
    One of the most intriguing aspects of this work is the difference between Ries’s original conception and the work as it appeared in its first published edition in 1834.
Among the most striking of these changes is the inclusion of a brief introduction to the first movement; but other passages are extensively rewritten and in some instances lengthened by the inclusion of additional material.
   This new edition is based principally on the autograph score with the first printed edition providing the authority for the revised text. The edition identifies the ‘new’ material with asterisks; these allow the performer the option of playing the work either in its original or revised form.

Ries, Ferdinand, (1784-1838)
Pianoforte Sonatas, Op.1
Edited by Allan Badley
Series 5 No.1

In 1806 Ferdinand Ries dedicated his first published compositions, a pair of piano sonatas, to his former teacher, Beethoven. These extraordinary works, composed between 1804–1806, at once signalled to the musical world that Beethoven had produced not only a pianist of the first rank but also a composer of immense talent. Technically difficult, and musically ambitious, these two sonatas bear immediate comparison with Beethoven’s  composed around 1800. If anything, Ries’s piano writing is even more adventurous, particularly in the C major Sonata which although placed first in the publication was in fact composed second. This publication is the first in a projected edition of the complete piano sonatas.

PUBLICATIONS

THEATRE MUSIC

Series 1 No.1
Samuel Arnold: ‘Polly’—An Opera
Edited by Robert Hoskins
Wellington, Artaria Editions 2004 (AE100)

Samuel Arnold was a prolific composer of operas for the London stage and one of the most important figures in English musical life. The ballad opera ‘Polly’ has an unusually interesting theatrical history. Written by Gay and Pepusch as the sequel to the phenomenally-successful ‘Beggars’ Opera’, ‘Polly’ was banned before it reached the stage and remained unperformed for fifty years. When it finally reached the stage in 1777 it did so in a radical revision by Arnold and George Colman, manager of Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Arnold replaced half of the music in the opera with new material composed by himself, changed half of the remaining ‘borrowings’ and composed a very clever overture based on themes from the ‘Beggars’ Opera’. Arnold’s orchestration is thoroughly modern and his skill at arranging tradition English and Scots songs evident at every turn. ‘Polly’ is one of only a handful of fully-extant English operas of the period and occupies a doubly important place in the history of English music.

Series 1 No.2
Thomas Linley: The Pantomime of Robinson Crusoe
Edited by Robert Hoskins
Wellington, Artaria Editions 2006 (AE447)

On 29 January 1781, a new pantomime entertainment was staged at Drury Lane. This was Robinson Crusoe, an afterpiece in two acts, the first of which was an adaptation of Crusoe’s island adventure, the second a Harlequinade unrelated to Defoe. The material from Defoe’s famous novel was collated by theatre manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan whilst the Harlequinade may have been devised by Sheridan’s wife Elizabeth. Act 1 of Robinson Crusoe, the sole focus of this edition, is remarkable as the first English pantomime set to a realistic story. Defoe’s fast moving narrative was mimed by actors (Carlo Delpini played Robinson Crusoe and the seventy-one year old Guiseppe Grimaldi was Friday) to continuous orchestral music by Thomas Linley, house composer at Drury Lane, along with spectacular scenic effects designed by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. Staged following a performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Robinson Crusoe was a hit success, playing 84 times in the first three seasons and enjoying revivals in the mid-1790s and early 1800s as well as a sustained vogue in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Like most English theatre music of the period, Robinson Crusoe survives only in a published arrangement for piano.

KEYBOARD MUSIC

Series 2 No.1
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart: London Sketchbook—London Notebook
Edited & Completed by Hans-Udo Kreuels
Wellington, Artaria Editions 2005 (AE309)

This remarkable series of short works sketched and in many cases completed by the eight-year old Mozart while staying in London provide a fascinating glimpse into his astonishing development as a composer. Beginning with miniature keyboard pieces Mozart soon moved on to more ambitious works and by the time he abandoned the Sketchbook he was clearly turning his mind to the composition of sonatas and even symphonies. Perhaps nowhere else in his output can his evolution as a composer be seen so clearly. Professor Kreuels’s magnificent edition includes a bilingual foreword and appendix (in German and English), an urtext edition of Mozart’s pieces as well as a parallel text which has edited, completed and expanded for performance.

CHAMBER MUSIC

Series 3 No.1
Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint Georges: Thee Sonatas for Fortepiano &
Violin, Op.1(b)
Edited by Allan Badley
Wellington, Artaria Editions 2004 (AE430)

Virtuoso violinist, composer and swordsman, Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was one of the most remarkable figures of the late 18th Century. Although Saint-Georges’s output is relatively small in comparison with some of his contemporaries, it contains a number of extremely fine violin concertos and a small but interesting body of chamber works.The Three Sonatas for Fortepiano and Violin are comparatively modest works in scale but contain some exceptionally beautiful writing for the violin and an elegance of construction that is the equal of that found in many of his concertos.

FORTHCOMING TITLES

Series 2 No.2
Ferdinand Ries: Two Pianoforte Sonatas, Op.1
Edited by Allan Badley

Series 1 No.3
Charles Dibdin: Sadlers Wells Dialogues
Edited by Peter Holman
Joseph Martin Kraus: Critical Edition of the Complete Works
General Editors: Bertil Van Boer & Hans Åstrand

Volume 9: Ballet Music
Edited by Bertil Van Boer

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