classics, has substituted in their places new editions where
professors have eagerly striven to perfect in their own manner the music
of the masters. When this great house wished to make a complete edition
of the works of Mozart, which are prodigiously numerous, it appealed to
all who possessed manuscripts of Mozart, and then having gathered these
most precious documents, instead of reproducing them faithfully, that
house believed it was doing well to leave to the professors full liberty
of treatment and change. Thus that admirable series of concertos for
piano has been ornamented by Karl Reinecke with a series of joined
notes, tied notes, legato, molto legato, and sempre legato which are the
very opposite of what the composer intended. Worse still, in a piece
which Mozart had the genial idea of terminating suddenly with a
delicately shaded phrase, they have taken out such nuances and
terminated the piece with a _forte_ passage of the most commonplace
character.

One other plague in modern editions is the abuse of the pedal. Mozart
never indicated the pedal. As purity of taste is one of his great
qualities, it is probable that he made no abuse of the pedal. Beethoven
indicated it in a complicated and cumbersome manner. When he wanted the
pedal he wrote "senza sordini," which means without dampers, and to take
them off he wrote "con sordini," meaning with dampers. The soft pedal is
indicated by "una corda." The indication to take it off, an indication
which exists even now, was written "tre corde." The indication "ped" for
the grand pedal is assuredly more convenient, but that is no reason for
making an abuse of it and inflicting it upon the author where his
writing indicates the contrary.

As it seems to me, it is only from the eighteenth century that authors
have indicated the movements of their compositions, but the words which
they have employed have changed in sense with time. Formerly the
difference between the slowest movement and the most rapid movement was
much less than at present. The "largo" was only an "adagio" and the
"presto" would be scarcely an "allegro" to-day.

The "andante" which now indicates a slow movement, had at that time its
original signification, meaning "going." It was an "allegro moderate."
Haendel often wrote "andante allegro." Through ignorance of that
fact the beautiful air of Gluck, "Divinities of the Styx," is sung too
slowly and the air of Thaos in the "Iphigenia in Tauris" equally s