Any consideration of Fauré as performer is inextricably bound up with how he edited and marked up his scores for performance. A central concern of this chapter is, therefore, how we may read through his notation, its quirks and its variants, to sense Fauré the performer. Most immediately, can doing so shed light on works that have long been neglected or regarded as problematic? The issue needs confronting if Fauré is not to remain peripheral in the repertoire except for a few works, mostly earlier ones. I, too, found many of Fauré’s later works initially impenetrable, until rehearsing and performing them made sense of each one – provided their narratives are coherently articulated and paced in performance. It often involved interaction with critical editing, through reciprocal processes of source discoveries, on the one hand, and practical experiment with extant readings on the other, particularly when these revealed ambiguities.

When the Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy were set in train in 1982, we could hardly have foreseen how extensively the project would affect the lives of the main participants or our understanding of the composer—even if our perceptions in 1982 of Debussy's printed scores and manuscripts had played a major part in motivating the enterprise. In an existing chapter and article I have already recounted the project's early history and some of the initial decisions concerning editorial philosophy and method. Thirty-six years after inception, it seems appropriate to consider how the edition is interacting with the musical world, and how these interactions may influence volumes still to come. (In 2018 the edition is over halfway to completion, twenty-one volumes issued out of a total of thirty-seven, with the piano music entirely covered—a state of affairs that bears witness to the complexity of the editorial task.) Has the edition motivated perceptible shifts in performing and editorial practice? If so, are they desirable ones, and on what grounds do we decide that?

Three categories of answers can be offered. An immediate answer comes from repertoire the edition has made available (or available in reliable texts), much of it now recorded more than once from the new edition. It was a thorough surprise, but a happy coincidence, that Debussy's hitherto unknown and apparently last piano piece, Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon of early 1917, surfaced at auction late in 2001, just in time for publication in 2002 in volume four of the piano works, and as a separate Durand offprint. (I say “apparently last piano piece” because we will never really know: that label had previously been attached to the Élégie of December 1915, whose rediscovery in the 1970s had usurped it in turn from the Douze études.) Volumes 2 and 4 of the piano works also present several other mature pieces unavailable until the late 1970s: the three Images of 1894 (one of them an early version of the “Sarabande” of Pour le piano), the Morceau de concours of 1904 (first printed in the magazine Musica in a January 1905 spot-the-composer competition), and the aforementioned Élégie, now furnished with some vital accidentals hitherto missing.

Ravel, that master of tender irony, has left in his wake two supreme ironies: of being viewed as archetypally French, and of his musical forms often being viewed as conventional. French though he was, his temperament, humour, expression and technique are all distinct from French habits and stand out, by their incisiveness and bursts of raw sensuality, even from his contemporaries Fauré and Debussy. Besides the technical daring inherited from his Swiss-born engineer-inventor father, the foreign element that most strongly colours Ravel's character and music is the Basque-Spanish heritage of his mother. In a letter of 1911 to Joaquín Turina, written from Spain, Ravel signs himself off, ‘A thousand friendly greetings from your (or my) motherland’, and his letters from the Basque region or to relatives there are peppered with Basque phrases as well as Basque forms of place names.

Viñes and the early piano music

Ravel's closest and most influential childhood friendship, from the age of thirteen, was with Ricardo Viñes. A month older than Ravel, Viñes arrived from Barcelona with his mother in 1887 to study in Bériot's Conservatoire class (which Ravel joined in 1889); apparently it was the two mothers who first met, in 1888, with Mme Ravel delighted to discover a fellow-Spanish-speaker. In their teenage years, Viñes introduced Ravel to the prose poems of Gaspard de la nuit and then, in 1907, introduced him to Manuel de Falla (just before Ravel repaid Viñes handsomely for that introduction to Gaspard); above all, it was Viñes whose brilliant and subtle piano playing first brought a whole series of piano masterworks to the public.

What is the ‘music’ that we play or study? Other languages are more explicit than English, with words like partition and Musiknoten, in defining that musical scores are not music per se. The relationship between notation and music is well illustrated by Stravinsky's claim that he could play the ‘Danse sacrale’ from the Rite of Spring for some time before he was able to write it down (Stravinsky and Craft 1962: 141). Although this distinction may seem hairsplitting to performers, we can hear all around us the results of regarding music as the symbols on the page, which one must then ‘make interesting’. ‘Put some expression into it!’ is still a ubiquitous cry even at conservatories, notwithstanding the contradiction in terms.

Ravel's request that pianists should ‘just play’ rather than ‘interpret my music’ (Long [1960] 1972: 21) focuses the question for performers: can we actually ‘interpret music’? Surely not, except by distorting it. What we can interpret – indeed, can only interpret – is its notation. Since notation, to quote the ever-literal French, ‘partitions’ music (that is, represents or encodes it in a welter of mostly binary symbols, involving variable conventions and shorthands), it cannot avoid distorting it, and our task is to ‘read back through’ the distortions on paper, employing aural and visual awareness, skill and sensitivity.

Although scores are the most fixed point of reference for our classical repertoire, far from being absolutes they rest on sand, and what we scientifically trust least, our musical feeling, remains the strongest and final link to what the composer sensed and heard before subjecting it to notation.

While Chopin's influence permeates many countries and traditions, this chapter concentrates mostly on his adopted country of France. In addition to the direct effect of his own compositions, Chopin left an enormous influence there through his piano teaching. To take a few examples, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Fauré, Debussy and Dukas were all immediate recipients of the ‘Chopin tradition’ through teachers or close musical contacts.

Fauré, Debussy and Ravel in particular are regarded as Chopin's natural musical heirs, being fundamentally pianistic composers and innovators. Support appears to come from the genres of nocturne, barcarolle, ballade, impromptu and prelude (and a single mazurka) taken over by Fauré, plus the piano Mazurka, Ballade and Nocturne of Debussy's early years, as well as his later Preludes and Etudes. On closer inspection, though, the title connections yield limited musical insights. Indeed, Fauré had little interest in those genre titles, which were often pressed on him by publishers. Debussy's early Chopinesque titles often conceal different sources, his later Lisztian use of picturesque titles is quite different from Chopin's practice, and with Ravel such titular connections are almost non-existent. From that point of view it could well be argued that all these composers grew farther from Chopin as they matured. Yet their music tends to tell the opposite story, as we shall see, with the most potent links lying under the surface of their mature music, and in less obvious contexts.

Anonymous Scottish lady

Descended from a distinguished Scottish family, this person identified herself only as a distant cousin of Jane Stirling, who introduced her to Chopin in March 1846. A relative beginner, she none the less received a few lessons from Chopin: ‘The majority of his pupils, I always understood, were already excellent and even distinguished musicians before they went to him […] whereas I was but a young amateur with only a great natural love for music, and very little previous training,’ she wrote in a letter of reminiscences, dated 27 March 1903, to J. C. Hadden who published it in his monograph (pp. 157–9). These detailed reminiscences are corroborated in various respects in the accounts by other eminent pupils of Chopin, such as Gretsch, Mikuli and Streicher. There seems no reason, therefore, to dismiss their trustworthiness in the way that Hedley does (C, p. 106). In her biography of Jane Stirling, A. E. Bone, quoting from these same recollections, makes no attempt to establish the identity of this student, who from the first wished to remain anonymous, as Hadden reported.

Cheriemietieff, Countess Elizavieta Sergueïevna

Chaperoned by her elder sister Anna, this young Russian aristocrat spent the winter of 1842–3 in Paris, where she was introduced as a listener to Chopin's lessons by Marie de Krudner, a compatriot pupil of Chopin. Cheriemietieff describes her first impression in a letter to her mother: ‘He is very highly-strung.

The authentically minded interpreter who wishes to do justice to masterpieces of the past faces a multitude of complex problems. Musicology, established now for a century as a positive science, has seen its objectives broaden and diversify. Performance practice, without being altogether a new sphere, is now a field in which musicology is proving itself to the greatest effect. In recent times musicological studies have contributed towards revitalizing or reconsidering the interpretation of gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony and concertante style, also shedding a clearer light on the realization of continuo, ornamentation and improvisatory elements of Baroque music. The combined efforts of organologists, instrument makers and performers enable us to-day to enjoy all the sumptuousness of Monteverdi's instrumental colouring; in Mozart the woodwind take on a new savour, emerging with unaccustomed clarity.

But with the music of the last century, and with Romantic piano music in particular, only recently have we begun to realise that they too present the performer with problems analogous to those encountered in the music of more remote periods. This new preoccupation arises from an awareness that our epoch, no longer comfortably attached to the end of the preceding century, has broken away from it altogether.

This appendix is not so exhaustive that it could constitute a separate study independent from the orientation of the present book. Its purpose here is, on the one hand, to provide fuller information on the sources and topics quoted from in the above notes; and, on the other hand, to project outlines for a properly specialized study that has yet to be carried out. Indeed, the thorny problems raised by the annotated scores of Chopin's students and associates have not hitherto been subjected to any systematic or comparative approach. The present appendix, as up-to-date as possible, makes no claim to definitive conclusions, particularly since other annotated scores, at present unknown, inaccessible or presumed lost, may well surface in the course of time.

Of the seven sources examined, the first three (Stirling, Dubois-O'Meara, Jędrzejewicz) are of prime importance, as much by virtue of their provenance as of their contents. The specific character of each one, together with the different working conditions under which each of them was marked, have sometimes made it convenient to present them here in different ways. If this study has managed to solve some hitherto unsolved problems, it has also inevitably raised some new ones, or had to suggest probabilities in some cases rather than definite answers.

To complement the chapters on Chopin's teaching, the opportunity is taken here of quoting the main accounts of Chopin's own playing as described by his contemporaries: the teacher Chopin is indissolubly linked, after all, to the pianist, simply reflecting the latter in the didactic medium. The quotations are grouped under four headings, according to the categories (often flexible) to which their authors belong: Composers and Pianists; Pupils; Associates; Music Critics. Despite their diversity of date and origin, many of these accounts exhibit remarkable concordances, contributing generally towards a unified impression. Two sub-headings are entitled respectively ‘Chopin playing Beethoven’ (under Pupils) and ‘Chopin as improviser’ (under Associates). Liszt's main text on this subject has already been quoted virtually in its entirety (p. 51 above). The second main category of contributors is intentionally restricted here since it has already been the main subject of our book: it nevertheless includes passages which, except for a few fragments, have not been quoted above. The passages given in this Appendix may serve to fill out any somewhat mosaic feeling inherent in the main texts above, an unavoidable consequence of their reorganization of the source material. Here, however, the aim is purely descriptive; the texts are left to speak for themselves and for one another.