'Jean Barraqué's Piano Sonata' (sic)? Why the italics?
The Member has worried us a little on this point; we feared we might have been falling into foreign ways. Our practice has been to write "Delius's '
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring'" (quotation marks for a name applied to an individual work), "Liszt's
Piano Sonata" (capital letters for an individual work lacking a particular name but identified by its description - such as the composer might write on its title page) and "Liszt's piano sonata" (small letters, used when we are not so much concerned with the individuality of the work, perhaps in a context where we are comparing and contrasting a number of different piano sonatas).
Well! that agrees with neither Hart's
Rules nor the printed works of Sydney Grew the Elder.
So suspecting the aforesaid foreign influence we examined this:
It does not really assist us.
Five Orchestral Pieces, a descriptive title rather than a name, is printed in italics, as is the "Gurrelieder" (a name we would think) and the
Chamber Symphony (descriptive again). A little lower down, though, the descriptive title of Berg's orchestral songs appears unitalicized but within quotation marks, as does that of the "
Waltz Dream" (a name is it not).
More interesting perhaps to Members is the fact that the Daily Mail printed a review of Schoenberg's pieces, saying that he was a composer who "super-straussed the application of the laws of harmony." Would the Daily Mail review contemporary music to-day? Would it even review Schoenberg? Schoenberg himself amusingly describes his own intercourse with the orchestra during that 1912 London première: "Bliss, tchentlemen, nember fifffe" is according to him the sort of thing he said, which Sir Henry Wood would with the utmost delicacy quietly correct to "Please, gentlemen, number fi-eve." The whole occasion must have been fun for the orchestra!
Still seeking foreign examples we turn to a little book about Webern, where we find "Schönbergs Bläserquintett und seine
Orchesterstücke op. 10 . . . und Mahlers «Klagendes Lied»." We do not see any distinction between the first two - Wind Quintet and
Orchestral Pieces, yet one has italics and one not.
Let us finally return to an example in English:
It is a page from Mark Morris's book about twentieth-century composers, and there we see the
Piano Sonata once italicized and once not.
Our conclusion of course is that pending further clarification it will be best if we persist with our current practice.
[Corrected "quintett" (thank you Mr. Sudden) and added Schoenberg anecdote.]
