Urtext

Urtext ( German Urtext ) is the publication of a musical work (mainly in the field of academic music ), whose tasks include the most accurate reflection of the original composer's idea in all its details - especially in the area of ​​tempo and phrasing . To do this, during the preparation of the urtext edition, the experts refer to the author's manuscript of the musical text, as well as to other sources as close as possible to the composer (records of his assistants, printed musical editions with the author's litters, etc.).

The Urtext edition differs from facsimile (in which source defects are inevitably reproduced) and opposes the interpretive editors of the researchers and performers who are later in relation to the author — in certain periods of the history of music, such editors, on the contrary, could go quite far away from the original additions to the original musical material (see, for example, Chaconne Vitali ). The preparation of an urtextscript can be a non-trivial research task: the composer’s record may be careless or poorly preserved, there may be several of its variants with alternative solutions. Moreover, early composers (at least until the beginning of the 18th century) did not mean that the instructions from their musical notation would be performed with perfect scrupulousness. Therefore, as the author of the article “Urtext” in the Grove Music Dictionary, Stanley Burman , notes, the urtext edition, like any other, remains a phenomenon of its time ^[1] .