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Prelude. |
7 |
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which tunes and traditions pass, before we arrive at another, never to be forgotten—the possible and frequent inexactness of notation. Many of the specimens of national melody we possess have been set down by persons of the slenderest possible technical acquirement, totally unable to perceive what is accidental or what is essential in this or the other chain of sounds and phrases. And who is there that will venture to vouch for the accuracy of manuscript when the same has passed into print, let the care taken to ensure correctness have been ever so exquisite? Think of the disputed readings of the Shak-speare text—think of Hayley deliberately printing Lord Bacon for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury—of a modern historian setting down Sir Peregrine Pickle instead of Sir Peregrine Maitland as one of the pallbearers at the Duke of Wellington's funeral! The character in which music is noted is obviously one more tempting to inaccuracy than any verbal alphabet. We have seen in a work so modern as Beethoven's C Minor Symphony, two bars in the scherzo cancelled by the master's own hand, while correcting the proofs, overlooked by the printer and the public, till the fact was incontestably proved by Mendelssohn: the error in the meantime having |
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