which must now supersede Maurice Brown's earlier Thematic Index, ¹⁰
though this too was of immense value in its day. Other source study has
been undertaken by the Swiss scholars Bertrand Jaeger and J. J. Eigeldinger
and by the Americans Thomas Higgins, Ferdinand Gajewski and Jeffrey
Kallberg. Kallberg's work has been especially valuable. He has looked in
particular at the sketches and rejected public manuscripts of Chopin's later
music for the information they yield about his musical style and working
methods, and his continuing work on the sources will certainly prove of
the utmost importance for later Chopin research. ¹¹

Even where the primary focus of study is analytical, as in my own book,
manuscript research is an essential tool, conveying a wealth of information
about compositional process. Its most concrete achievement, however, has
been to facilitate the preparation of reliable texts. Many of the notorious
uncertainties about Chopin sources have now been eliminated, thanks to
recent scholarship. Yet problems will always remain, for they are an inevi-
table by-product of the flexible composer-performer relationship which
obtained in early nineteenth-century piano music. Any attempt to prepare
a source-chain for a Chopin piece will involve difficulties at almost every
stage, due to the multiplicity of sources, including autographs, and the
substantial variation among them. Where editions are concerned the
sketches need present relatively few problems, but often there are several
'public' autographs for a single work (including rejected manuscripts,
engraver's exemplars and presentation manuscripts) and stemmatic analysis
is often complex as to chronology. In relation to copies much has now been
clarified. Kobylaiiska has distinguished no fewer than seventy-four separate
hands other than Chopin's, so there can be little excuse for the mistaken
identifications which dogged earlier editions, especially with Fontana
copies. Further difficulties arise, however, over the extent of Chopin's
contribution at the proof stages of a work, over divergent 'simultaneous'
first editions and over the significance of his glosses in editions belonging
to students and friends. ¹² Faced with a plethora of material, the most an
editor can do is to seek a uniform basis of sources for each work, and even
here there will be ample room for disagreement. Of the various complete
editions, the best all-round contenders are the Henle Urtext, edited (mostly)
by Ewald Zimmermann, and the Polish National Edition (not to be confused
with the older Paderewski Complete Edition), under the general editorship
of Jan Ekier.

However we evaluate the Urtext editions of Chopin, we may be grateful
that the blatant errors and fanciful inventions of nineteenth-century editors
need no longer trouble us. Yet these early editions are well worth examining
for other reasons. They are a fascinating cypher to changing fashions in
nineteenth-century performance practice and more generally to changing
patterns of reception. Chopin reception has been a fruitful area of research in
Polish musicology, much of which, like its German mentor, is devoted to the
aesthetics and social history of music. Under the guidance of Zofia

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