Part 15 of chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils (pp. 334-350).
Question this unit answers
What did Chopin’s own fingerings and performance annotations actually look like on the page, in the concrete scores his pupils played from — and how does a modern editor present four independent annotated sources simultaneously without collapsing them into a single “authentic” text?
This unit is the opening stretch of Appendix III, and it answers that question almost entirely graphically: it is a run of engraved music plates carrying superimposed fingerings from four sources, not a discursive chapter. The only connected prose in range is the appendix’s own preface (p. 333) plus four short footnotes (pp. 339, 344, 348, 350).
Key terms
- Appendix III — Eigeldinger’s plate-based supplement, “Fingerings and annotations in the scores of pupils and associates”, which reproduces whole works or extracts overlaid with annotations from pupils’ copies (p. 333).
- The four principal sources — Stirling, Dubois, Jędrzejewicz, Franchomme. Each is assigned a geometric symbol drawn around the fingering digit so the reader can see, note by note, which pupil’s score a given fingering comes from (p. 333).
- Source sigla (graphic) — read from the plate legend on p. 333: circle = Stirling; upward triangle = Dubois; downward triangle = Jędrzejewicz; square = Franchomme; dotted/broken circle = all four sources agreeing.
- Dubois as default for non-fingering markings — phrasing slurs, breathing points, attack of ornaments, 8va signs and arpeggiation signs are taken from the Dubois scores unless a footnote says otherwise (p. 333).
- Breathing points — listed alongside phrasing slurs as one class of added indication, i.e. treated as a notatable performance annotation rather than a metaphor.
- Bass octave doubling (‘8’) — the figure 8 written under a bass note in a pupil’s score, meaning double it at the lower octave (p. 344).
- Redistribution between the hands — a left-hand note taken over by the right hand, recorded here as a concordance between two independent scores (p. 348).
Propositions
- The selection of works in this appendix is not arbitrary but governed by three criteria: the characteristics of the fingerings, their frequency, and their provenance (p. 333).
- Some of the selected extracts were chosen specifically because they show agreement across independent pupils’ scores — “correlations of ideas or correspondences between various sources” (p. 333).
- Annotations other than fingerings are editorially attributed by default to the Dubois scores; deviations from that default are flagged at the foot of the page (p. 333). This makes the Dubois copy the appendix’s baseline witness for phrasing, ornament attack, octave signs and arpeggiation.
- Pedalling and dynamics can come from a different witness than the fingerings on the same plate: on the Prelude op. 28/6 plate these are supplied from the Jędrzejewicz score (p. 339).
- A pupil’s annotation can be corroborated by an autograph: the bass octave doubling marked ‘8’ in the Waltz op. 18 is confirmed by Chopin’s autograph at Yale University (p. 344).
- Independent pupils’ scores sometimes transmit the same practical solution: the same left-hand-to-right-hand redistribution in the Prelude op. 28/15 appears in both the Stirling and the Dubois scores (p. 348).
- Where the Stirling score alone supplies a marking (a crescendo, a slur), that is stated explicitly rather than silently merged (p. 350).
Arguments
The appendix’s stated purpose is extensive rather than argumentative: it exists “to maximize the scope of the musical examples given in the main text above” (p. 333) — i.e. the body of the book quotes fingerings piecemeal, and this appendix gives them in continuous musical context so the reader can see how a fingering behaves across a whole phrase or whole piece.
The underlying methodological argument is visible in the notation system rather than stated. By assigning each of the four sources its own symbol and by declaring a default source for non-fingering markings, Eigeldinger keeps the four witnesses distinguishable on a single staff. The reader can therefore tell a fingering attested once (one symbol) from one attested by all four (the dotted circle) — which is what makes the plates evidence about Chopin’s practice rather than merely about one pupil’s habits. The footnotes on pp. 339, 344, 348 and 350 are the escape valve for this system: whenever a marking’s provenance departs from the declared default, it is named.
Evidence
The works reproduced in this stretch (titles read from the plate headings; the plates themselves are scanned images and do not extract as text):
| Pages (PDF) | Work | Bars |
|---|---|---|
| 334-336 | Impromptu op. 29 | 35-82 |
| 337 | Mazurka op. 7/3 | 56-72 |
| 338, 340 | Prelude op. 28/6 | 1-26 (complete) |
| 340-341 | Mazurka op. 7/1 | 1-30 |
| 342-343 | Mazurka op. 24/1 | 1-33 |
| 344-345 | Waltz op. 18 | 1-31 |
| 346-347 | Waltz op. 18 | 124-150 |
| 347, 349 | Prelude op. 28/15 | 1-27 |
Notable features visible on the plates:
- The Prelude op. 28/6 plate (p. 338) is dominated by downward triangles, i.e. Jędrzejewicz fingerings, consistent with the footnote assigning its pedalling and dynamics to that same score.
- The Waltz op. 18 plates (pp. 344-347) are dominated by upward triangles, i.e. Dubois fingerings, including long uninterrupted chains of Dubois fingerings over running passages (p. 345, bars 22ff.; p. 346, bars 124ff.).
- The Waltz op. 18 opening (p. 344) carries boxed pairs of digits over the first four bars — Franchomme’s siglum — giving alternative fingerings for the same repeated figure.
- Metronome marks appear at the head of some extracts: Mazurka op. 7/1 “Vivace” with a metronome figure of 50, Mazurka op. 24/1 “Lento” with 108 (pp. 340, 342).
- The plates preserve verbal performance indications in the music: sostenuto, ritenuto, leggier[o], mezza voce, con forza, dolciss[imo] in the Impromptu op. 29 (pp. 334-335); marcato in the Mazurka op. 7/3 (p. 337); sotto voce in the Prelude op. 28/6 (p. 338); rubato in the Mazurka op. 24/1 (p. 342); leggieramente in the Waltz op. 18 (p. 345); sostenuto in the Prelude op. 28/15 (p. 347). I have not verified which of these are printed in the original editions and which are pupils’ additions — the plates do not distinguish them by symbol.
Quotes
- “To maximize the scope of the musical examples given in the main text above, this Appendix offers some works and extracts furnished with the fingerings and other annotations from the most important scores used by Chopin’s pupils and associates.” (p. 333)
- “The selection of these here has been dictated by the characteristics and frequency of the fingerings, as well as by their provenance; some of them illustrate correlations of ideas or correspondences between various sources.” (p. 333)
- “The four principal sources are represented by the symbols” (p. 333)
- “Unless otherwise mentioned at the foot of the page, added indications other than fingerings (phrasing slurs, breathing points, attack of ornaments, 8va signs and arpeggiation signs) are taken from the Dubois scores.” (p. 333)
- “Pedalling and dynamics according to the Jędrzejewicz score.” (p. 339)
- “specifies a bass octave doubling of the” (p. 344)
- “The autograph at Yale University gives the same version” (p. 344)
- “taken over by the r.h. in the Stirling and Dubois scores” (p. 348)
- “Crescendo according to the Stirling score.” (p. 350)
- “Slur in the Stirling score.” (p. 350)
Tensions and links
- Editorial layering vs. source purity. The appendix superimposes four independent witnesses on one staff and then declares one of them (Dubois) the default for everything except fingerings. This is a legible and honest system, but the composite plate is a page no pupil ever played from. It sits in tension with the strand of Appendix II that criticises Ganche for silently transferring readings from one place to another in the Stirling scores.
- Concordance as an argument for authenticity. Both p. 344 (pupil’s marking confirmed by the Yale autograph) and p. 348 (same redistribution in two independent scores) use agreement between sources as evidence that a marking goes back to Chopin. The dotted-circle siglum for “all 4 combined” builds this inference into the notation itself.
- Links back to the body of the book. Appendix II’s endnotes cross-refer explicitly into this appendix (e.g. op. 28/6 pedalling, and the redistribution and rearrangement in op. 48/1), so the plates are the intended illustration for claims made in prose there.
- Repertoire chosen. The works here are mostly short and pedagogically central — Mazurkas op. 7/1 and 7/3, op. 24/1, Preludes op. 28/6 and 28/15, Waltz op. 18, Impromptu op. 29 — i.e. teaching repertoire rather than the virtuoso Études or Sonatas, which fits the appendix’s provenance criterion (these are the pieces pupils actually annotated).
Open questions
- The bulk of this unit is not text. Pages 334-350 are scanned engraved music plates. Plain-text extraction from the PDF yields only 359 characters across all 17 pages: three footnotes. Everything reported above about the plates’ contents (work titles, bar ranges, which siglum predominates, tempo and expression markings) was obtained by rasterising the pages and reading them as images, and the fingering digits themselves — the actual substance of the appendix — cannot be transcribed faithfully in a text note. Anyone using this unit must consult the plates directly.
- The symbol legend on p. 333 is itself a graphic, not text: the shapes are not extractable and my mapping (circle = Stirling, upward triangle = Dubois, downward triangle = Jędrzejewicz, square = Franchomme, dotted circle = all four) is read from the rendered page image. Worth confirming against a physical copy before relying on it.
- The Janis reference on p. 344 is given only as “Janis, p. [30]” — presumably Byron Janis’s facsimile publication of Chopin waltz autographs. The full citation is not in this page range; it would be in the book’s bibliography.
- The four footnotes in this range use letters (a), (b), (c) restarting per plate, and the PDF places some of them on their own page (pp. 339, 348, 350) separate from the plate they annotate (pp. 338, 347, 349). Whether that is an artefact of this PDF’s reflow or the printed book’s layout is unclear from the file.
- No prose here explains why a given fingering is good — the appendix is deliberately mute on interpretation, leaving the reader to correlate the plates with the principles argued in Part I of the book.