Settling the Score

One of the things that has made Sir Charles Mackerras the figure that he is in music today, is his meticulous attention to the composer’s written intentions. Sir Charles is not the kind of musician who will accept that what he sees in an Edited Score is necessarily the correct reading of the composer’s intentions. He prefers to verify it himself.
As a note of explanation, where the original autograph of, let’s say, a Mozart Symphony exists, there should be reliable later printed Editions, taken from that autograph. However, it may be that the early printed editions, no matter how closely they date to the original, contain errors. If later versions are taken from these editions rather than the autograph, (or if no autograph exists) then errors can be passed down, played and recorded, for generations of performance.
Hence, an entire profession of musical academics have a subject for their PhDs, and hence, as a performer, you will spend a lot of time worrying about whether to play a melody with or without a slur, with or without ‘staccato‘ dots above the notes, what do the dots really mean anyway, and are you sure that they weren‘t actually dashes written with a quill in a hurry to meet the patron‘s deadline?
In the end, you do have to make choices and interpretations, but Sir Charles insists on them being informed. He has made it his life’s work to inspect as many of Mozart’s originals as possible. This has taken him to library vaults all over the world, and the homes of collectors. We hear stories of an eccentric collector who wouldn’t allow anyone to see the autograph until she died and her collection was donated to the nation, of Sir Charles finding himself behind the Berlin Wall with access to all the collections held in Communist Europe, of discovering one of Mozart’s hairs stuck to an inserted correction made by the great genius himself.
So as a result, when Sir Charles insists that we play from his own collection of extensively corrected and constantly revised parts, we know why. [These parts were all bought by Sir Charles out of his salary from the East Berlin Staatsoper, when the East German Mark could not be spent in the West.]
And even yesterday, into his 85th year, when our viola player Brian Schiele presented Sir Charles with a score for Mozart’s 29th Symphony taken from an autograph that he hadn’t seen, Sir Charles was immediately ready to revise and correct his own parts, such is his great and lifelong passion for wanting to get as close as possible to the music.