Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Is Mikuli reliable...

...for Chopin? Have you ever had a bad experience with Chopin/Mikuli?

Thanks.

Why not just get the Henle?

I love Henle, don't get me wrong. But I don't want to spend 3x the money for something if it isn't absolutely necessary. The sole purpose of sheet music isn't to look nice and be of quality construction. It is to produce a good performance. If the Schirmer's will provide me with a good end result, I will buy the Schirmer's.

Something to keep in mind: I don't care at all about given fingerings.

Have you had any bad experiences with Chopin/Mikuli? Wrong notes, added octaves, etc. ?

Henle is not (only) about looking nice and be of quality construction. It's the scholarship that goes into it.

As far as I'm concerned I'm still holding on to any Henle scores I have and don't care one bit about other scores of mine, from other publishers...

You're asking as though there's any one "right" version. There isn't. The different Chopin editions go mainly on different manuscripts -- yes, with perhaps some opinion and 'tradition' mixed in, but mostly on different manuscripts. To my knowledge there's nothing in any of the editions with sins like what you're saying.

To the extent that anyone is suggesting another edition, I don't know why it would be Henle. That's good, but so is Mikuli, and it seems the current predominant view is that if there's any one edition that's best, it's the National Edition (also called the Polish edition), the one edited by Jan Ekier.

Are you saying that if I buy the Schirmer's, my performance will by poorer than had I bought the Henle?

Mikuli was my first edition of Chopin, but now I have the Paderewski. Mikuli is not bad though. I do remember a wrong note in the Mikuli edition... but I don't remember where. It was a while ago.

Second (or third or fourth) the motion for the Henle...

I can't tell, since I don't know you and even if I did know you, you still wouldn't be me.

BUT I do know that depending on the paper manuscript I have, and especially the pencils I use, my compositions change for the better (or worst), if you can believe that.

To analyse a bit:

1. A poor page turn could wreck a piece for you.
2. Poor fingering can also do the same.
3. A score falling apart (after quite some work on it) should be a turn away factor.
4. But mostly it's what you're used at. I'm very used to henle editions and find that the Wiener Urtext (for example) are too spacey for my taste. I'm also used to our own scores (EMF I mean). If you bring me other editions (especially some older ones) I might cringe so much, as to don't care for studying that particular work any more.

Anyhow, that's just me...

Since I assume you're not auditioning for Juilliard or entering some big competition, no one you play for will know or care at all about some wrong note in some edition. Even in those cases, how you play in infinitely more important than if the edition has some minor error. 99.999% of how well you play has nothing to do with the edition unless you choose a heavily edited edition (and especially if the editor makes bad choices).

If you're personally interested in an up to date urtext type edition or are looking for an edition that doesn't contain a lot of the editor's own ideas and includes only Chopin's markings that's a different question.

Since my impression is you have no teacher, getting a good teacher is at least 10,000 times more important than which edition you choose if you want to improve. Even if you take only an occasional lesson.

I bought all of the Henle volumes after having all the Schirmer Mikuli and Joseffy editions in place, mostly on recommendation from those on this site. My conclusion is that they are way overhyped. You will find differences to Mikuli, but they are very minor. Some examples:

In 48/1 m10: left hand Eb3-Ab3-Eb4 in Mikuli = C3-Ab3-Eb4 in Henle.

In the last measure of 9/1: there is an addition of Bb2 in the left hand in Mikuli.

In op. 35 first movement: the repeat of the introductory section starts on the doppio movimento in m5 in Mikuli (and Chopin's ms ... and the B&H first edition) instead of at the beginning in Henle.

The best thing about Henle is the legibility and quality of construction. I don't think it justifies the added cost.

One of the reasons I go on and on is that some people have pre-conceived notions, which have emanated from the Urtext brainwashing, that what is printed on the page is the real deal. It is not.

However, as is shown in the following link stating Karol Mikuli's bio, this man took it to the next level before he made his edition. And, what that link also shows is the name of Moritz Rosenthal as one of his students.

The point is if you want to know how to play Chopin, you get the Mikuli score, and then you lower yourself to my level (Pogo?) and you get a recording of Moritz Rosenthal playing the music of this composer.

All of this is said, ad nauseum, in Neal Peres Da Costa's book, "Off The Record," but then again, a lot of posts here get off to blowing a whole lot of smoke when it comes to music interpretation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Mikuli

I am of the belief that all questions are asked for a valid reason - which reason is sometimes only perceived by the one asking the question - and that there is really no such thing as a stupid question. However ....

If you don't like or can't afford the expense of the Henle, you won't "suffer" from buying the Schirmer Mikuli, although my recent experiences with Schirmer have been variable - but so have they been with Peters, another once-respected edition.

I happen to like Henle for the quality of print, the durability of the bindings, their ability to lie flat on the music stand and the (relative) absence of really awkward page turns.

While all tout the scholarship of the New Polish Edition (Ekier), and I don't deny that scholarship I think it is overpriced for three reasons :
- the bindings are not nearly as good as Henle's (and maybe others I don't have experience with,
- page turns are often more awkward than they need be and don't seem to be planned well, and
- they publish the posthumous works separately from those published during Chopin's lifetime, so if you want all the Nocturnes, all the Polonaises, etc., you have to buy two volumes. That to me is simply a cash grab to which I will not add my dollars.

Regards,

The Mikuli edition was originally published in large format by Kistner. Schirmers re-engraved most of it for the American edition, and some things were changed slightly in the process: Bars that were on different lines might have ended up joined, and phrase marks that crossed from one line to the next might have been separated in the process, as a friend showed me in one of the Kistner volumes.

The Mikuli edition is based on his studies with Chopin, as well as other students that he knew, and are pretty reliable, once you understand that Chopin himself was not always reliable.

One of the treasures in my collection is the Kistner edition of the chamber music. Mikuli consulted with Franchomme while editing that.

It's probably best just to stop playing Chopin until it's determined, without a doubt, exactly what he wanted.

As I've read someone on this forum (I believe it was Thrac) so eloquently put it; I'd rather have an edition from someone who had heard and studied with the composer than someone coming 200 years later who's probably never even touched a piano in their life.

No edition will make you performance any better or worse. THAT is up to you, because it is what you DO with what is in the edition(s) you use that makes the performance.

Which is exactly the point I was making with the wink face. Apparently no one is getting it.

This is the edition I primarily use. The first thing I noticed is that many ties that we take for granted were not written in by Chopin in several sources, and it's still a mystery exactly what he intended. There are also many, many different notes compared with the Mikuli, Paderewski, and Henle editions I grew up with.

Other than that, the main quirk of the National Edition is that if you order the Impromptus, you only get the ones that were published during his lifetime.. and similarly with the Preludes, Mazurkas, Valses, and so on. The posthumous works are published separately.

Yes, it will be. But correlation isn't causation.