L’Invenzione a due voci n. 1 di Bach nelle edizioni italiane d’inizio Novecento: un modello per l’analisi della prassi esecutiva

Abstract

Performative editions have progressively been recognized as compelling sources for studies in music history, performance history, and textual bibliography since 2000s. Herein the attention is focused on four performative editions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Two-Part Inventions published in Italy during the first decade of the 20th century and edited by renown piano teachers and performers, such as Ferruccio Busoni, Edgardo Del Valle de Paz, Bruno Mugellini, and Alessandro Longo. On the one side, I reconstruct the specificities of the editorial process by identifying recurrent traits of contemporaneous piano pedagogy and approaches to Bach's compositions in Italy. On the other side, a specific analysis of performance markings in the first measures of Invention n. 1 (agogic, metronomic, phrasing, fingering, dynamic, ornamentation) shows the editor’s procedures and goals. This double approach shows that each editor’s approach to music editing was a way to disseminate their own pedagogical and interpretative models. It also shows the extent to which these methods derived from the piano traditions and cultural milieu of the own times.