Thread - Chant funèbre, Op.5 (Stravinsky, Igor)

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Chant funèbre, Op.5 (Stravinsky, Igor) ⟨User:Carolus⟩ [#33938]

This piece was first published in 2017. It was lost for over a century and then was found and received its first recent performance in 2015–16.

But everyone agrees that the piece was presented publicly in 1909. It had its premiere on January 17, 1909, at the Great Hall of the Conservatory in St. Petersburg, with Sheremetev's Orchestra conducted by Felix Blumenfeld. So the piece itself should be PD in Canada with the expiration of Stravinsky's copyrights, since it was publicly performed during his lifetime. Wonderful!

The recent score published in 2017 cannot be posted here. Another score could be, in theory.

The recent full score was edited by Natalia Braginskaya. Some marketing materials described it as a "reconstruction," but I think this is a misuse of the term. In an article in Acta Musicologica, she clearly describes (in great detail) how the complete set of orchestral parts was found and used as the basis for the new edition. The orchestral parts were all prepared by a copyist and were used at the 1909 premiere. Various images are included in the article, though only a minority of the pages are shown.

Press releases say that the full score was "reconstructed from the parts." I take this to mean little more than that the score was engraved from the orchestral parts. Accordingly, the current scores are not really a "reconstructed" work and a different engraving could potentially be posted, I think, being PD-CA (though not PD-EU or PD-US yet — in both the EU and US, the work would be PD in 2042 — for the EU, since it was first published before Life+70 was up, and for the US, since the work was published after 2003).

Posted at 16:52, 25 January 2023 by Dbmiller (administrator)
Edited at 16:52, 25 January 2023 by Dbmiller (administrator)

The biggest obstacle in getting that up on here is getting access to the Orchestral Parts themselves (which is probably very unlikely as they are locked in the St. Petersburg Conservatory and probably only use is for private seeing of the material) and scanning those alongside creating a new edition based off of those parts not related to the first edition already made.

Posted at 17:49, 25 January 2023 by Sallen112 (administrator)

So long as nothing copyrightable is taken from the new edition, there is no reason why it couldn't be used as a reference for another edition. Besides at least some partial scans of the 1909 parts being available, there is a significant amount of material left to us about the editorial process. And whatever originates with Stravinsky is not copyrightable.

For a similar case, new engravings of PD works (i.e., urtexts) are protected as "typographical arrangements" (something Canada doesn't do). But in the UK you are free to re-engrave from an urtext édition, because you are not duplicating the typography.

The original 2017 score, being an urtext-tyoe edition from what I can see, is almost surely itself in the public domain in Canada, except for the prefaces and editorial material. It's even less potentially original than most urtext éditions, as it is really just a re-engraving from a single source.

The edition was, of course, protected in Canada until 2022. But now that the work is PD in Canada there should be no problem. So long as the material copied is the same material that is in the orchestral parts, and not and substantial new material generated by the editor, it is not protected by Canadian copyright and can be used in a new engraving.

Posted at 17:57, 25 January 2023 by Dbmiller (administrator)
Edited at 17:58, 25 January 2023 by Dbmiller (administrator)

I agree that the new edition is not a "reconstruction" in the sense that the editor had to compose music to fill in missing segments of the work. I own a copy of the BH edition and Braginskaya states that the 'reconstruction' here is really the compilation of a score from the 58 manuscript orchestra parts found in the library of the St. Petersburg Conservatory on February 26, 2015 in the course of moving the entire library out of the building where it had been housed since 1895. The parts were entered into the library's inventory on May 11, 1932 and 'retired' on February 8, 1951 due to Stravinsky having been declared a non-person by the Stalin regime. Instead of being destroyed, someone at the time tucked them away into a near-inaccessible corner where they slept undisturbed until 2015. The parts were prepared by three different copyists and contain corrections in Stravinsky's hand, along with markings from the orchestra players. According to the preface, all editorial contributions to the musical text are designated by brackets, dotted-slurs and the like. There is a list of 15 items after the editor's preface where discrepancies between the parts are noted. Not all were 'fixed' as some were thought to be intentional on Stravinsky's part.

So, as long as one is careful to avoid any original contribution from the editor, by which we mean an addition which is beyond the mere correction of obvious errors, the Boosey 2017 score can be used as a source for a new engraving. Obviously the preface, etc. is off limits but there as there is clearly a well-documented performance in the composer's lifetime which is even confirmed by dating on a number of the parts, the work itself if free in Canada.

Posted at 00:52, 26 January 2023 by Carolus (administrator)

Similarly, Richard Strauss' first symphony. Well-documented performances from 1881. Published perhaps not on a full engraving until 1999. Anyway, I should be able to edit an edition of that too... eventually. Obviously such endeavors do not occur instantly, especially when one takes care to examine the sources (which I do).

Posted at 00:10, 27 January 2023 by Dbmiller (administrator)

Actually... the 1999 ed. of R. Strauss' first symphony should be PD in Europe with the rest of his works. The 25-year urtext and editio princeps rules only apply to works whose authors' copyrights in general have expired. R. Strauss' work was still copyrighted in Germany in 1999 and the EU copyright on the edition should expire with his copyrights in general in 2019.

Posted at 00:23, 27 January 2023 by Dbmiller (administrator)
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