Auditivierung des textkritischen Apparats

Abstract

Abstract Since their emergence in the 19th century, the aim of critical editions has not only been to publish philologically reliable texts, but also to make the decisions on the basis of the editorial process as transparent as possible. In the specific case of the music edition, however, the formulation of editorial decisions in a critical apparatus is complicated by the semiotic discrepancy between the sign system of musical text and its verbalised annotation in the fundamentally different sign system of linguistic text. This unbridgeable medial gap between the musical text and its verbal account caused the original editorial object to be split apart within printed editions of the 20th century: between the edited text and the critical report on the one hand, and again between practical editions for the general public and scholarly editions for the small circle of qualified musicologists on the other hand. Using the Digital Mozart Edition as an example, this article shows how a digital format can, through its audio-visual multimedia, both create spaces for the integration of the critical apparatus into the edited text and enable a ‘deverbalization’ of the critical vocabulary that conveys the documentation of editorial decisions in musical form more intuitively and more precisely. The digital medium makes it possible for critical editions of music to come closer to the ideal of an open edition in the sense of an ‘edition of the edition’, in which not only the text itself, but also the editorial process that led to this text is, in turn, edited and made immediately accessible to the user.