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Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions

Co-authored by Christophe Grabowski and John Rink, the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions is the outcome of an eleven-year research initiative which began in 1998 with major funding from The Leverhulme Trust. Its chief aim was to produce an inventory of the first editions of Chopin's music held by the principal European and American libraries, and to analyse the contents of those editions in detail. The sixty institutions and five private collections that were targeted hold some 4,830 copies – representing c. 1,552 distinct impressions– most of which could be described as 'Chopin first editions' in the most general sense. Identifying, classifying and ordering these scores according to transparent and consistent criteria is the main purpose of the Annotated Catalogue, which focuses on three broad types of edition:

Newly engraved versions of these editions bearing the original plate numbers are also included.

The Annotated Catalogue is divided into four main parts. A chapter entitled 'Chopin's first editions: historical and analytical overview' provides information about the publication history of Chopin's music within each of the countries concerned, as well as observations about music publishing during the period. The legal contexts and general characteristics of Chopin's first editions are discussed, along with the publishers responsible for the various editions. This overview is followed by an 'Introduction to the Annotated Catalogue', setting out the classificatory criteria, descriptive methods, approaches to cross-referencing and abbreviated description, and policies on quasi-facsimile transcription employed throughout the catalogue, along with the methods used to date scores.

The ensuing catalogue has four main sections:

Some 222 black-and-white reproductions of title pages illustrate the transcriptions and respective commentaries. Finally, successive appendices focus on the orchestral parts, series title pages and advertisements, followed by an index of libraries and private collections in which each institution's or collector's holdings of Chopin first editions are classified by designated edition/impression codes.

The Annotated Catalogue was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

Chopin's First Editions Online (CFEO)

Chopin's First Editions Online (CFEO) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Resource Enhancement Programme) from March 2004 to August 2007. The project's chief aim was to create an online resource uniting all of the first impressions of Chopin's first editions in an unprecedented virtual collection, thereby providing direct access to musicians and musicologists to some of the most important primary source materials relevant to the composer's music. The c. 5,500 digital images in the CFEO archive were obtained from five lead institutions (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina and the University of Chicago Library) and seventeen other libraries. The full score of each first impression appears along with commentary on particularly significant textual features. In addition, there are excerpts from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions. Innovative methodologies for complex textual interlinking and web delivery of this material were devised at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) using advanced imaging techniques allied with relevant open standards for metadata and interface design.

The project was based in the Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London, with technical development at CCH. For further details, contact the project team at CFEO@rhul.ac.uk.

The Complete Chopin - A New Critical Edition

Five volumes in The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition have been published by Peters Edition London since 2004 under the direction of Series Editors John Rink, Jim Samson and Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, and Editorial Consultant Christophe Grabowski. This new edition is based on two key premises:

Accordingly, the editorial procedure is to identify a single principal source for each work and to prepare an edition of that source (which can be regarded as 'best' if not definitive). At the same time, important variants from other authorised sources are reproduced either adjacent to or, in certain instances, within the main music text, in footnotes or in the Critical Commentary, thus enabling scholarly comparison and facilitating choice in performance. (Conflation may be inadmissible for the editor, but it remains an option and right for the performer.) Multiple versions of entire works are presented when differences between the sources are so abundant or fundamental that they go beyond the category of 'variant'.