This extraordinarily meticulous and detailed volume consists of four major sections: an introduction explaining the book's purpose and how to use it; the Annotated Catalogue itself, comprising a mostly tabular correlation of successive printings of early Chopin editions (respectively French, German and English, as well as Polish and Austrian when relevant), from the first surviving prints until well after the composer's death; Plates, comprising high-quality facsimiles of 218 title pages and four work lists; and Appendices that similarly correlate instrumental parts for chamber and concertante works, series title pages and publishers’ advertisements, and end with an index of libraries worldwide whose holdings form the basis of the catalogue.

Readers wishing to see any music should turn to pages lxxii–lxxiii, which contain the only musical examples in the entire book (seven single-bar facsimiles illustrating local variants in successive printings of the first English edition of the Nocturne op. 15/2). Not intended as a guide to musical variants in Chopin's œuvre (as we'll see, some associated websites are more suited to that), the book's raison d’être needs some explanation – a matter readers are largely left to adduce – in terms of where Chopin research has gone during the last few decades. In my own undergraduate days Chopin's status was still under debate, on the old basis his having written no symphonies or operas – a verdict countered over a century ago by Debussy, who reportedly called Chopin ‘the greatest of them all, for through the piano alone he discovered everything’.Footnote 1 Heinrich Schenker appeared to be thinking along similar lines when he admitted Chopin, along with Domenico Scarlatti, under his otherwise pan-Germanic umbrella.

A related quality, emphasised over a century ago by Paul Dukas (a pupil of Chopin's student Georges Mathias), was Chopin's unprecedented suppleness in terms of harmony, musical structure and tactility at the instrument.Footnote 2 Almost by default, that marks an effective base line for the various analytic, stylistic, performance-related and documentary studies by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Jeffrey Kallberg's analytic probes into Chopin's creative processes and compositional ideals, various multi-author surveys compiled by Jim Samson, and John Rink's combinations of stylistic study with source and editorial issues.Footnote 3 Sooner or later all these approaches find themselves facing, or at least noting, a core aspect of that suppleness that has long been a thorn in the side of critical editing: the impossibility of establishing a definitive text of nearly any Chopin work in terms of older scholarly norms. Via either his pen or his fingers, Chopin's music remained in textual flux as long as he lived – albeit within bounds of taste that he carefully ring-fenced – so that editions published in different countries often pushed a work in quite independent directions (‘horizontal’ variants), while reprints of those editions through his lifetime sprouted new (‘vertical’) variants, as did the exemplars he marked up for his pupils, often in different ways for each pupil (comprising both ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ variants).

In the 1990s, Eigeldinger, Rink and Samson combined forces over this dilemma, and they persuaded Peters Edition to undertake a new complete Chopin edition that would be both scholarly and performer-friendly. Five volumes are now in print (Waltzes, Ballades, Preludes and the two concertos, with Impromptus soon to follow), Christophe Grabowski having meanwhile been co-opted as fourth series editor. The editor's policy is to choose one preferred source, importing material from others only to remedy perceived problems, but otherwise to show all viable variants as ossia readings, in ways that clarify what relates to what. This remedies the ‘cherry-picking’ approach of earlier editions such as the staple ‘Paderewski’ (edited mostly by Józef Turczyński and Ludwik Bronarski), completed in 1949: with the best intentions, it presented readers with musico-textual composites that Chopin never contemplated. Aspects of the Peters initiative were somewhat anticipated in a handful of Wiener Urtext Chopin volumes edited around 1980 by Paul Badura-Skoda and the Polish scholar-pianist Jan Ekier: without being as methodical about source selection, they similarly set out from the stated premise that no single text could be definitive. Ekier then established the recently-completed new PWM National Polish Chopin Edition, a project considerably boosted by the rediscovery in the early 1980s of a prime overall source, the almost complete collection of Chopin scores showing Chopin's corrections as collated by his pupil Jane Stirling, with the help of Thomas Tellefsen, Auguste Franchomme and Chopin's sister Ludwika.Footnote 4

For reasons that will become clear below, the present volume's main usefulness is for editors, librarians and dealers in, or devotees of, old editions. It functions reciprocally to scholarly editions and two online resources recently masterminded by John Rink: Chopin's First Editions Online (www.cfeo.org.uk) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (www.ocve.org.uk). While the latter shows various early prints of just a few Chopin works, CFEO allows access to every page of the first traced French, German and English prints of Chopin's music (including the posthumous works), enabling ‘horizontal’ comparison across them. Readers can rapidly see, for example, that the G minor Nocturne op. 37/1 is headed Andante sostenuto in the first German edition and Lento in the earliest surviving English and French prints. Such ‘horizontal’ correlation is outside the scope of the book under review (which otherwise would balloon to many times its present size); instead it reciprocally flags ‘vertical’ variants that allow identification of successive printings of any one edition, as defined by an individual engraving or set of plates. A ‘vertical’ variant the book thus flags in the same op. 37/1 Nocturne (noted under the heading DMF, for Distinguishing Musical Features) is that reprints of the first traced French print (which in fact was a late proof) append the word sostenuto to the original tempo heading. Readers, however, still have to consult CFEO or a good critical edition to ascertain whether that initial word was Andante or Lento. (Such correlation can also be made online between CFEO and the related website devoted to the University of Chicago's large collection of early Chopin editions: http://chopin.lib.uchicago.edu.)

As it is, DMF listings in the book under review are mostly limited to features that assure identification of a particular print: also unmentioned is a musically telling ‘horizontal’ variant in that same Nocturne, concerning the indications across bars 11–15 (crescendo – diminuendo in the first German edition, as opposed to presto then Riten---poco--a--poco in the first English edition). The book even leaves unmentioned the associated ‘vertical’ variant (other identifying features being deemed sufficient for the purpose), that the earliest French print (as shown on CFEO) contains just that initial presto at bar 11, which disappears from subsequent reprints. In short, the book's exhaustiveness lies not in musical detail but in its complete transcription and correlation of all traced title pages, amplified by the copious facsimiles thereof.

For the same reason the book provides just passing glances at some far-reaching editorial issues in the outer movements of the B≅ minor Sonata op. 35, whose first English edition – most unusually – offers some of the most viable or interesting readings, sometimes solving problems common to the French and German editions. An almost incidental explanation for this can be found in the book's introductory ‘historical overview’ of Chopin first editions, which notes (p. xli) a crisis in Chopin's relations with his French publishers Pleyel and Maurice Schlesinger at just the time of op. 35, and explains the hasty circumstances in which the publisher Troupenas took over until op. 43, hurriedly submitting legal deposits of op. 35 and op. 37 in the form of proofs (as shown on CFEO).

Musically, this extended introductory essay is the book's informative core (pp. xxi–lxi, comprising three main sections: ‘Legal contexts’, ‘General characteristics of Chopin's first editions’ and ‘Chopin's publishers’). Starting by showing how the legal copyright situation in each country affected how, where and in what order Chopin sent works to be published, it progresses logically to how all that affected and sometimes decided his relationships with publishers in each country. Chopin carefully proofed French editions and continued to update their reprints, whereas proofing of the German and English editions was left to house editors, with German reprints (in particular) amended very rarely: Table 1 on p. xxxiv shows this graphically. After Chopin's death the situation virtually reversed, amendments tumbling over into the German and English editions to an extent that suggests their belated scrutiny of competing prints. The essay also explores the differences in printing processes detectable across different prints, such as direct plate impression versus lithography – an important piece of reading for anyone involved in editing, it well justifies the authors’ remark, on p. xxi, that ‘Although focused on the Chopin first editions, the conclusions presented here potentially apply to the music of contemporary composers, most of whom worked under similar conditions and often with the same publishers.’

Pages lxiii–lxxxiv (Introduction to the Annotated Catalogue) are devoted essentially to instructions on how to read the rest of the book. These are sometimes oddly wordy: how many readers of such a book will need the 15 supplied explanatory lines (p. lxvi) to the effect that terms such as ‘Op. 15/2’ and ‘Op. 35/3’ denote respectively the second piece from op. 15 and the third movement of op. 35, or detailed Glossary explanations (pp. lxxix–lxxxiv) of such items as ‘Bar(s)’ (4 lines of explanatory text), ‘Bifolium’ (7 lines), ‘Cover’ (9 lines), ‘Label’ (5 lines), ‘Plate number’ (11 lines), ‘Printed’ (3 lines), ‘Shelfmark’ (4 lines) or ‘Staff’ (8 lines)? Three Glossary definitions, though, are crucial, distinguishing ‘First edition’ from ‘Reprint’ (a reimpression from the same plates, amended or not) as opposed to ‘Second, third, etc. edition’ (involving re-engraving of the music), even if the joint case could arguably have been made in less than their 78 lines of text (almost three-quarters of a page). Trimming just the Glossary could instantly have made the book eight pages thinner (given the seven blanks that follow its last few line entries on p. 909); other minor tightening could have edited out redundancies such as ‘It goes without saying that’, ‘not to mention’ or ‘It should be noted [/] pointed out that’ (pp. xxi, xxiii, xli and xlviii).

That said, the prose is mostly lucid, given the staggering degree of detail, even if it more often than not bypasses the music, and only a few small errata emerge. The main one (kindly confirmed in communication by Dr Grabowski) concerns the commentary (p. 288) on two redundant bars in the finale of the op. 35 sonata that appear in the first French print then vanish from reprints: for ‘(p. 18: systems 4 & 5 contain 5 bars each, with two statements of bs 46 and 47 respectively; system 6 contains 4 bars)’ we should read ‘(p. 18: systems 4 & 5 contain 5 bars each; system 6 contains 4 bars (bars 47 & 48 are redundant))’. This is one of the places where only the first English edition presented the correct musical reading from the outset, unlike the first German edition, which never corrected the fault; Mikuli's 1879 edition reports in a footnote that Chopin marked the correction in some pupils’ exemplars that are now lost. Again, this larger ‘horizontal’ aspect to the reading is left unmentioned in the book under review, lying outside its remit. A few minor editing or stylistic blips affect nomenclature (BnF competes with F-Pn on different pages as a location label, the anglicized ‘Milan’ is used, but the Italian ‘Roma’ on p. 901, and there is an apparent confusion of usage between ‘England’ and ‘Great Britain’ on p. xxii column 2); and on column 2 of p. xxiv the phrase ‘the Songs’ would better accompany the first rather than second mention of Op. 74. For a book of this size, though, the general accuracy is remarkable. Although its relevance to performers is limited, the book is an essential tool for anyone involved in editing either Chopin or chronologically related repertoire.