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Communications.

Article Excerpt
This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of this journal, and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity.

To the Editor:

I respond to Ronald Broude's review of my edition of Lully's Armide (Notes 62, no. 3 [March 2006]: 797-802). While we can disagree on matters of editorial presentation, his interpretation of my text-critical argument misrepresents it. First of all, my description of "ideal copy" as "a hypothetical copy containing all published states of every page" is not, as Broude claims (p. 802), "a phrase that makes no sense"--though by omitting the word "hypothetical," he certainly renders it senseless. Here I simply paraphrase G. Thomas Tanselle's definition ("The Concept of Ideal Copy," Studies in Bibliography 33 [1980]: 46). Tanselle's characterization belongs to the field of descriptive bibliography, not to editorial procedure; an editor must perforce choose among the states of each page. As for my "intentionalist" position, Broude is quite right that I cannot possibly establish Lully's intentions from the extant sources. That is a given of traditional textual criticism: the omega at the top of the stemma will always be an unattainable goal, toward which the editor strives. Yet surely a text-critical stance is a set of values as much as a set of possibilities. The traditional text-critic sought to strip away the contributions of editors and censors (and in the case of music, performers, and impresarios); recent theory argues for embracing those contributions as part of the work. My position on Armide is that the distinction barely exists. Apart from matters limited by the printer's technology, Lully controlled virtually everything that we might notate in the edition--and here I include the compositional revisions made in the publishing house, for there is clear evidence that these were made in the manuscript parts used for performance as well, at roughly the same time. This argument in no way depends on the presence (or, for that matter, absence) of an autograph score. Lully's "intention" encompassed the authorized contributions of others, certainly his secretary Pascal Collasse, whatever those contributions might have been.

LOIS ROSOW

Ohio State University

The reviewer responds:

I am sorry to find myself responding, as I must, to a communication from a scholar whose work I have long known and respected. In her communication, Lois Rosow raises specific questions, which I shall address first, and, by implication, more general questions to which I shall turn later.

I stand by my assertion that Rosow's definition of an "ideal copy" as "a hypothetical...

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