Part 13: Appendix II - Annotated Scores I (pp. 280-306)

Part 13 of chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils (pp. 280-306).

Question this unit answers

What physical documentary evidence survives of Chopin’s actual practice as an annotator of scores — whose copies bear his markings, what kinds of markings they bear, how securely each marking can be attributed to his hand, and what the pattern of those markings (especially fingerings) tells us about his working method as a teacher and would-be editor of his own works?

This is the evidentiary substrate underneath the whole book: the notes throughout Parts 01-11 cite “the Stirling scores” or “the Dubois scores” as authorities, and this appendix is where Eigeldinger discloses what those authorities actually are and how far they can be trusted. It also silently reframes the question of Chopin’s fingering: Appendix I (12-appendix-i-sketch-for-a-method) gives principles as stated; Appendix II gives fingerings as marked in ink and pencil on paper, which is a different and messier kind of evidence.

Key terms

• Annotated score — a printed edition (here almost always the OFE, the original French edition) carrying handwritten performance markings: fingerings, dynamics, pedalling, tempo/mood words, textual corrections, ornament instructions.
• Source alpha — Eigeldinger’s designation for the Jane Stirling collection: the primary, most authoritative witness among annotated scores (p. 290).
• OFE — original French edition; the print layer beneath the handwriting in all three principal collections.
• OXF — Edouard Ganche’s Oxford edition of Chopin, built on the Stirling scores, and the object of Eigeldinger’s methodological critique here.
• CW — the Polish complete edition (Complete Works), whose critical apparatus draws on Jędrzejewicz and OXF but almost never on Dubois.
• Provenance — the documented chain of ownership from pupil to present library holding; the precondition for treating a marking as authentic.
• Attribution / hand — the identification of which person wrote a given number or word; the central technical problem, since numerals carry far less individual character than script.
• Concordance — the appearance of the same marking (fingering, correction, dynamic) in two or more independent pupil scores; Eigeldinger’s chief instrument for distinguishing Chopin’s teaching from a pupil’s private invention.
• Ink vs. pencil layer — in the Stirling scores a working distinction of authorship (pencil possibly Chopin or Stirling; ink always Stirling) and of chronology (pencil first, ink as later collation).
• Agogics — markings governing local flexibility of tempo/rhythm within the phrase; the distinguishing feature of the Dubois scores.
• Crosses (“X” marks) — a recurring non-verbal annotation type listed in all three collections, whose function Eigeldinger flags without decoding.
• Ne varietur — a definitive, unalterable text; Ganche’s (over)claim for the Stirling scores.

Propositions

1. Fingering is the dominant content of the annotated scores, and therefore also the site of the greatest evidentiary risk. Numerals are graphologically poor: “a person’s handwriting is more identifiably marked by that person’s alphabetical script than by his or her numbers,” so identifying who wrote a pencilled 3 is much harder than identifying who wrote a word (p. 280).

2. Attribution proceeds by comparison with dated autographs, not by intuition. The control set for Chopin is the inked proofs of Etude op. 10/2, his fingered chart of scales and arpeggios, and his musical manuscripts, plus pocket diaries and hastily pencilled notes for the specifically pencilled numerals; for Stirling, two written declarations, her list of pupils, and dated letters; for Franchomme, facsimiles in the Kobylańska catalogue and the time signatures of pieces he copied (p. 281).

3. The attribution problem is in principle only partly soluble. Even “specialized graphological study” would not resolve the doubtful cases (p. 281), and for Mme Dubois-O’Meara the problem is structurally unsolvable: no autograph of hers is known, so nothing in her scores can be positively assigned away from Chopin by comparison (pp. 281, 298).

4. Chopin’s markings fall into a stable taxonomy across all three principal collections. Corrections of misprints; textual modifications (deleted, added, changed notes); fingerings; tempo and mood indications; phrasing, articulation, agogics; ornament instructions; dynamics; pedalling; miscellaneous performing indications; crosses (pp. 289-290, 295, 302-303). That the same ten categories recur in three independently transmitted collections is itself evidence that these are the dimensions along which Chopin habitually intervened in a text.

5. Chopin fingered pieces the pupil in question was not studying. Stirling listed 26 opus groups she played with Chopin, yet “several pieces fingered only in Chopin’s hand had no part in Jane Stirling’s lessons,” and works outside her list are annotated exclusively by him (pp. 291-292). Fingering in these scores is therefore not only a lesson artefact but part of an editorial project.

6. The Stirling collection is best explained as a Chopin-supervised attempt at a corrected collected edition, not merely as a pupil’s lesson library. Evidence: his participation in the cumulative index of incipits, his pencilled attestation in op. 47 that he corrected all the notes, and his August 1848 letter to Grzymała about putting his affairs “into some kind of order” during the summer he was in near-daily contact with Stirling (pp. 290-291).

7. Chopin wanted ornaments and grace notes struck on the beat, together with the bass. Tiersot’s 1919 note records pencil strokes in the Dubois scores aligning the attack of a grace note or ornamental figure with the bass note, “showing that Chopin wanted those embellishments or ornamental notes played on the beat and not before or after,” with several examples in the Nocturnes from op. 32 onwards (p. 294). This is a generalizable performance principle recovered purely from graphic alignment marks.

8. Density of annotation is genre-dependent. In the Dubois scores the most heavily marked works are the Nocturnes, Etudes and Concertos; then Waltzes, Preludes and Mazurkas; the Ballades, Scherzos and Polonaises have the fewest markings (p. 295). The gradient tracks pedagogical use: cantabile/technical study material and concert-preparation repertoire attract marking; the large narrative forms attract least.

9. The Dubois scores are characterized above all by agogics and ornament instruction, not by fingering alone (p. 298), whereas the Stirling scores are characterized by textual correction and fingering. The two principal witnesses thus preserve different aspects of Chopin’s teaching, and neither alone represents it.

10. Recurrence across independent scores is the test of doctrine. Where the same fingering appears in Dubois and Stirling, Eigeldinger allows two explanations: mechanical necessity (“only one fingering is practicable” — op. 18; op. 34/1; op. 57 bar 44) or “Chopin’s consistency in teaching his own fingerings, which formed the integral part of his approach to the keyboard” (p. 300). The second is the load-bearing claim: Chopin taught a repertoire of fingerings, stable across pupils and years.

11. The Jędrzejewicz-Stirling overlap quantifies that consistency. Roughly two-thirds of all written fingerings in opp. 29 and 32/1 are common to both collections (p. 306) — though this figure is partly contaminated, since Stirling demonstrably copied Chopin’s annotations from her own scores into the Jędrzejewicz volumes (pp. 292, 303, Fig. 17).

12. Textual corrections travel further across sources than fingerings do. The cut of op. 33/4 bars 87-110 appears in Dubois, Jędrzejewicz and Zaleska-Rosengardt; the added variant at op. 9/2 bars 4-5 in Dubois, Jędrzejewicz, Lenz, Mikuli and Franchomme; the added right-hand notes in op. 34/2 in Dubois, Stirling, Jędrzejewicz, Lenz and Mikuli (p. 299). Because these recur in five or six independent hands, Eigeldinger treats them as authorial corrections; fingerings, “too sporadic,” do not reach that threshold (p. 300).

13. Even the best-attested collection contains foreign hands. In the Dubois scores the left-hand fingerings of the Waltz op. 64/1 and most right-hand fingerings of the reprise after the trio are doubted; the numerals at op. 25/8 bar 27 r.h. are “assuredly not in the composer’s hand”; opp. 25/3 (bar 69), 25/6 (bar 5 r.h.) and 28/23 are suspect in a different script again — implying at least two non-Chopin hands besides his (p. 299). A candidate for one of them is Mme Dubois herself, on the evidence of a characteristic 5 recurring in Franchomme’s score of op. 58 (bar 201), Cécile Franchomme having been her pupil (p. 298).

14. Ganche’s OXF cannot be used as a proxy for its own source. It collapses the distinction between handwritten and printed fingerings and between Chopin’s and Stirling’s pencil and ink; it silently propagated single fingerings into parallel passages; and it silently interpolated readings from the Dubois scores he had seen earlier (p. 290). Any fingering principle derived from OXF rather than from the originals is therefore unsafe.

15. Published transcriptions of these sources are unreliable at a rate that matters. In Holland’s transcription of the Waltz op. 64/1, “an average of one in three of her readings is faulty” — and the piece was a poor choice anyway, since many of its fingerings are not Chopin’s (p. 296).

Arguments

From graphological limits to comparative method. Eigeldinger’s opening move is to concede that the natural approach fails. Numerals are individually uncharacteristic; the same copy contains numerals from several hands written under different conditions (hasty at the keyboard; tidily transcribed; possibly dictated); pencil fades and blurs. Since no internal feature of a numeral identifies its writer, the only remaining route is external: assemble, for each candidate hand, autographs containing numerals written under as many different conditions as possible, then compare (pp. 280-281). The insistence on varied conditions is the crux — a comparison of a hasty pencilled lesson fingering against a carefully inked engraver’s manuscript would prove nothing. This is why pocket diaries and scribbled notes matter as much as musical autographs.

From Stirling’s own declaration to a two-layer chronology, then to its partial refutation. Stirling’s tipped-in note claims a clean rule: pencil = Chopin, ink = not Chopin, some of the inked fingerings dictated to her and some copied from other pupils’ fingered scores (pp. 283-284). Eigeldinger accepts half of it and breaks the other half. The ink half holds: all inked fingerings are hers.

The pencil half does not: her own script appears in numerous pencilled numbers, “written mostly with great care and legibility” (p. 292). The care and legibility are the tell — Chopin’s pencil marks are lesson-speed, hers are copying-speed. From the coexistence of two treatments he infers that her collation “extended over several months” (p. 292), making the collection a stratified document rather than a snapshot.

From provenance and inscription to editorial intent. The argument that Stirling’s volumes are a proto-collected-edition is cumulative rather than direct: (a) they contain virtually every work engraved in Chopin’s lifetime plus the posthumous opp. 66-73; (b) Chopin himself wrote part of the cumulative index of incipits, initialling entries; (c) he wrote on op. 47 that he corrected all its notes — a statement that would be inexplicably narrow if it referred only to the third Ballade, and therefore reads as a general attestation; (d) his letter to Grzymała about ordering his affairs dates from exactly the period of daily contact with Stirling (pp. 290-291). Eigeldinger then carefully separates what Chopin can have done (annotation, correction, part of the index, by 1848-49) from what he cannot (the incipit tables of Vols. I-VII, by Franchomme and Neukomm after his death; the binding, necessarily after August 1855 and probably before 1857 on the evidence of which posthumous works are included and excluded).

From concordance to doctrine, with the confounds named. The inferential engine of the whole appendix is: a marking present in several independently transmitted scores is Chopin’s teaching, not a pupil’s invention. Eigeldinger applies it with discipline, naming three confounds. (1) Contamination: Stirling copied from the Jędrzejewicz scores (opp. 27/2, 29, 33/4, 34/2, 34/3, 47, 48/2?) and also copied her own Chopin annotations into them — so Stirling-Jędrzejewicz agreement is partly self-agreement (pp. 292, 303). (2) Mechanical necessity: some fingerings agree because no alternative exists (p. 300). (3) Indirect transmission through teaching lineages: the shared characteristic 5 in Dubois and Franchomme is explained by Mme Dubois having taught Cécile Franchomme, not by Chopin (p. 298). Only what survives all three does he promote to a finding — which is why the textual corrections (five or six concordant sources) are affirmed while the fingering concordances are called “too sporadic.”

From absence of copying-marks to independence of the Dubois witness. Eigeldinger argues that the Dubois scores are an uncontaminated witness on two negative grounds: the manuscript additions “never look as if they have been copied in,” and Jane Stirling’s writing is nowhere present (p. 300). This matters because it makes Dubois-Stirling concordances genuinely independent — worth more evidentially than Stirling-Jędrzejewicz ones — while simultaneously making the Dubois scores harder to police, since the missing Dubois autograph means nothing there can be positively excluded.

From source criticism to a warning about editions. The critique of OXF, Holland and the Urtext editions is not scholarly score-settling but a practical corollary: because every published intermediary either flattens the layers (OXF), misreads them (Holland), or ignores a whole source (CW and Henle on Dubois), a performer who takes “Chopin’s fingering” from a modern edition may be taking Ganche’s extrapolation, Stirling’s ink, or Mme Dubois’s own hand. Only Ekier’s carnet critique on the Ballades and his Impromptus/Scherzos/Nocturnes, and Badura-Skoda’s Etudes, are endorsed (pp. 296, 298).

Evidence

• The three principal collections. Stirling: F-Pn Rés. Vma 241 (1-7), seven volumes, virtually the whole engraved oeuvre plus opp. 66-73, provenance Stirling → her great-niece Anne D. Houstoun → Ganche (1927) → Marthe Ganche → bequeathed 1979 (p. 283). Dubois-O’Meara: F-Pn Rés. F. 980 (1-4), four volumes grouped by genre rather than opus, bequeathed 1919 and 1923-5 via Louis Diémer (pp. 293-295). Jędrzejewicz: Warsaw, Chopin Society Museum M/174-176, three volumes lettered C, purchased 1936 from Ludwika Ciechomska, believed to have been Chopin’s own before passing to his sister (pp. 301-302).
• Quantitative census of the Stirling fingerings. 63 pieces (counting each piece or movement singly) carry handwritten fingering; 22 contain inked annotations, 16 of them exclusively inked; 57 contain pencilled annotations, 41 exclusively pencilled (p. 292). So the great majority of fingered pieces are pencil-only — the layer where Chopin may be present — while ink is a minority overlay.
• Chopin’s autograph dedications in the Stirling scores, several dated: op. 9 (3 January 1844), op. 35, op. 37, op. 64/1 (8 December 1847), op. 65 (5 January 1848), and the Mazurka for E. Gaillard (pp. 285-286). These date the copies and anchor the chain of use.
• Non-performance annotations by Chopin that document lesson planning. Dates on title pages and at the heads of pieces (op. 24: 1845; op. 25/7: 7 juin 1845; op. 10/6: 1847); à jouer on the title page of op. 34/2; cross-references linking pieces (× 6me under the last system of op. 10/2, pointing to op. 10/6; prelude en re mineur at the head of op. 10/9, pointing to op. 28/24); Adagio on the title page of op. 11 — a piece Stirling claimed not to have studied with him; and, on the back cover of op. 9, a pencilled study programme listing eight Preludes from op. 28 and the Polonaise op. 26/2 (pp. 285-286, Fig. 13). The cross-references are direct evidence that Chopin assigned pieces in linked pairs.
• The op. 47 attestation, pencilled at the top right of the first page of music: C'est moi qui ai corrigé / toutes ces notes / Ch. (p. 286).
• Tiersot’s 1919 note in Dubois Vol. I, listing “nuances, fingerings, corrections, even additions,” naming the counter-melody added on p. 7 of the second Grande valse brillante op. 34 and the correction of Presto to Mesto at p. 2 of the four Mazurkas op. 33, and describing the on-the-beat ornament alignment strokes (p. 294).
• Marking medium in Dubois: all pencil, with purplish-blue pencil “quite frequent” (p. 295) — a physical trait that helps separate campaigns of marking.
• The op. 64/1 attribution crisis, raised independently by Holland (p. 296) and Kobylańska (K, I, p. 343), extended by Eigeldinger to the right-hand fingerings of the reprise after the trio, with the Cécile Franchomme teaching link as the proposed explanation (p. 298).
• Concordance lists. Textual modifications across Dubois/Jędrzejewicz/Zaleska-Rosengardt/Stirling/Lenz/Mikuli/Franchomme (op. 33/4 cut; op. 7/2 bar 27 variant; op. 9/2 bars 4-5; op. 24/1 bar 60 with an added mordant in Stirling at bar 58; op. 34/2 added r.h. notes) (p. 299). Identical fingerings between Dubois and Stirling at op. 9/1 bars 67-9 l.h.; op. 9/2 bars 4, 7, 30, 32 r.h.; op. 18 bars 76-7 r.h. (Stirling at the parallel bars 109-10); op. 24/1 bar 17 r.h. (Stirling at parallel bar 21) and bar 24 r.h.; op. 25/8 bars 9-10 r.h.; op. 28/15 bars 3, 11 r.h.; op. 34/1 bars 39-40 r.h.; op. 55/1 bars 69-70 r.h. and bar 71 l.h.; op. 57 bar 1 l.h. and bars 44, 48-9 r.h. (p. 300). Note the recurring pattern that a fingering marked once in one source appears at the parallel passage in the other — evidence that Chopin fingered a figure, not a bar.
• Ornament execution concordance: at op. 9/2 bar 7 the trill is preceded by a small grace note in Dubois, Stirling, Jędrzejewicz and Franchomme (p. 300) — four independent sources for one ornament reading.
• Voice-leading interventions. In op. 28/15 bar 9 the left-hand f′ is to be taken by the right hand; at bar 19 upward crotchet tails are added to the left-hand g and a to bring out the countermelody they form; at op. 27/2 bar 59 a bass octave is added on the first and fourth beats (in Jędrzejewicz also in the preceding bar) (p. 300). Compare op. 48/1 bars 72-5, countermelody emphasized in the bass, in both Stirling and Jędrzejewicz (p. 306). Redistribution between hands and the graphic promotion of an inner voice are recurrent, cross-source Chopin habits.
• “Indications facilitating performance” in the Jędrzejewicz/Stirling overlap: modifications to the right-hand pattern at op. 15/1 bars 27ff and 39ff; op. 25/7 bars 22 and 24; op. 27/1 bars 27-8; op. 28/21 bar 4 (p. 306). Eigeldinger’s separate category for these is itself a finding: Chopin sanctioned simplifications and rewrites of his own text for playability.
• Dense fingering clusters that show where Chopin worked hardest: op. 28/6 fingered at bars 1, 3, 5, 6, 7-8, 9, 10, 13, 19-20, 22, 23 (i.e. almost continuously), op. 29 at some seventeen locations, op. 32/1 including its whole final section (pp. 304-306) — the last two treated at length in Appendix III.
• Dynamic rewriting: at op. 26/2 the printed final-bar ppp is altered to ff in Jędrzejewicz and fff in Stirling (p. 306) — a reversal, not a nuance, and independently attested.

Quotes

“Fingerings are by far the most abundant material in these sources; one can immediately guess the order of difficulties confronting the researcher.” (p. 280)

“In one place, we find fingerings evidently jotted down hastily at the piano, during a lesson or at practice; in another place fingerings tidily copied out from another score – or, perhaps, even dictated?” (p. 280)

“The fingerings in pencil in these Works are from his Hand, as is everything that is written out.” (p. 284)

“Among the annotated scores – known at present – having belonged to pupils or associates of Chopin, those of Jane Stirling constitute in all respects source alpha.” (p. 290)

“OXF makes no typographical distinction between the handwritten fingerings and those tacitly taken from the OFE, nor between Chopin’s pencilled annotations and Stirling’s pencil or ink ones.” (p. 290)

“The Stirling scores assume exceptional significance not merely because of the many corrections and annotations that they contain, but above all because they constitute a unique corpus of Chopin’s oeuvre, probably assembled and corrected under Chopin’s supervision with a view to a collective edition to improve on the first French editions.” (p. 290)

“Elsewhere, pencil markings indicate to attack an ornament or a grace note together with the bass note, showing that Chopin wanted those embellishments or ornamental notes played on the beat and not before or after” (p. 294)

“The abundance of agogic indications and of instructions on playing ornaments is what particularly characterizes the Dubois scores – apart from the fingerings and just two metronome indications.” (p. 298)

“Even if a very large majority of the fingerings in the Dubois scores seem positively attributable to Chopin’s hand, this cannot be automatically assumed for them all.” (p. 299)

“In some cases the concordances result from the fact that only one fingering is practicable (op. 18; op. 34/1; op. 57 bar 44); elsewhere they can be accounted for by Chopin’s consistency in teaching his own fingerings, which formed the integral part of his approach to the keyboard.” (p. 300)

“As a statistic, roughly two-thirds of all the written fingerings appearing in opp. 29 and 32/1 are common to both Jędrzejewicz and Stirling.” (p. 306)

Tensions and links

• Against 12-appendix-i-sketch-for-a-method (Appendix I, on the Projet de méthode and stated fingering principles): Appendix I gives Chopin’s fingering as doctrine — reasoned, articulated, aimed at exploiting the hand’s natural inequality. Appendix II gives it as sediment: numerals scattered unevenly across 63 pieces, some at the parallel passage only, some contradicted by a second hand, some copied from a third party’s copy. Appendix I’s insistence that certain passages admit of one fingering only finds partial confirmation here in the practicable-only-one concordances (op. 18, op. 34/1, op. 57 bar 44, p. 300), but Eigeldinger’s own reading is that those cases prove nothing about doctrine precisely because necessity, not teaching, explains them. The real bridge between the two appendices is his claim about “Chopin’s consistency in teaching his own fingerings, which formed the integral part of his approach to the keyboard” (p. 300) — the documentary appendix supplies the stability across pupils that the methodological appendix asserts in principle.
• Against 02-basic-technique (Basic Technique): the technical chapter’s emphases — legato and suppleness, redistribution and independence of the hands, ornaments integrated into the pulse rather than snatched before it, the fingers’ unequal characters exploited rather than levelled — all reappear here as graphic traces: on-the-beat alignment strokes for grace notes (p. 294), the f′ of op. 28/15 bar 9 reassigned from left hand to right, crotchet tails added to expose an inner voice (p. 300). Where the pupils’ reminiscences report a principle, the annotated scores show its application at a specific bar. The friction is that the reminiscences are systematic and the annotations are not: the Ballades, Scherzos and Polonaises are the least-marked genres in the Dubois scores (p. 295), so for a great deal of the repertoire the physical evidence is simply silent, and technique there must be reconstructed from testimony alone.
• On the reliability of testimony generally: this appendix is the book’s most explicit statement that even the hardest-looking evidence is layered and partly unattributable. It should temper any confident use elsewhere in the book of “the Stirling scores show…” — the pencil layer contains Stirling as well as Chopin, and the ink layer contains transcriptions from now-lost pupil copies whose own reliability is unknown.
• On the pupil network as a transmission medium: Mme Dubois taught Cécile Franchomme (p. 298); Stirling collated from Jędrzejewicz and from other pupils who kept in touch with her (p. 292); Lenz, Mikuli, Zaleska-Rosengardt and Franchomme all appear in the concordance lists (p. 299). Chopin’s fingering doctrine did not survive as a text but as a network of copies cross-fertilizing each other — which is why concordance is such a powerful test and simultaneously so easily contaminated.
• Forward to Appendix III: the two most heavily fingered pieces in the Jędrzejewicz-Stirling overlap (opp. 29 and 32/1, plus op. 48/1) are deferred to Appendix III, pp. 245-247 and 262-265. The two-thirds concordance statistic (p. 306) is the bridge between the catalogue and that detailed analysis.

Open questions

• What do the crosses (“X” marks) mean? They are listed as a distinct annotation category in all three collections (pp. 291, 295, 303) and referred to footnotes not reproduced in this unit. Given that Chopin used × cross-referentially elsewhere (× 6me linking op. 10/2 to op. 10/6, p. 286), do the crosses mark passages for repeated practice, cross-references, or something else?
• Can the two non-Chopin hands in the Dubois scores be separated and named? Eigeldinger establishes that the op. 64/1 script differs from the op. 25/8 bar 27 script (p. 299), but with no Dubois autograph surviving the question may be permanently open.
• When exactly did Franchomme collaborate with Chopin on the initial index of the Stirling volumes? Eigeldinger offers 1847 as the earliest possibility and summer 1849 at Chaillot as most probable (p. 291), but does not settle it — and the date bears on whether the collected-edition project was a considered plan or a deathbed tidying.
• Does the genre gradient of annotation density (Nocturnes/Etudes/Concertos heavily marked, Ballades/Scherzos/Polonaises barely) reflect Chopin’s teaching priorities, Mme Dubois’s individual curriculum, or simply which volumes were carried to lessons most often?
• Since Stirling copied Chopin’s annotations from her own scores into the Jędrzejewicz volumes, how much of the two-thirds concordance in opp. 29 and 32/1 is independent testimony and how much is Stirling’s hand appearing twice? Eigeldinger states the contamination but does not net it out.
• The four remaining sources of the seven examined (Franchomme and others, from p. 232 onwards) are outside this unit; do they weaken or strengthen the concordance-based argument for a stable Chopin fingering doctrine?