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Continuous slur suggested by the editors |
When interpreted literally, the musically and pianistically unjustified slurring of the sources raises serious concerns as to its authenticity. Divisions of slurs in such homogeneous passages do occur in Chopin's pieces, including autographs; however, it is generally easy to indicate extra-musical reasons for such state of affairs:
- inaccuracies of notation, e.g. between lines or when combining slurs,
- difficulties in drawing a longer slur, e.g. due to lack of space, when subsequent great staves are written with no spaces between, on adjacent staves,
- corrections and deletions.
Slurs were also changed by copyists, and particularly by engravers. Both common mistakes and intentional changes were involved, resulting from, e.g. their own manners in this respect or the will to avoid too long slurs, which often did not allow them to use ready-made curve templates (cf. the Concerto in F minor, Op. 21, the description of GE1). One also has to remember that slurs encompassing subsequent, rhythmically homogeneous groups compliant with metric divisions of a bar (e.g. halves of a bar or entire bars), unless they separated clearly shaped melodic structures, were often treated as equivalent to a continuous slur.
Taking into account the above factors, in the main text we encompass the entire passage with one slur in order not to suggest divisions, whose position and number could be accidental.
category imprint: Editorial revisions
notation: Slurs
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