Dittersdorf, Carl Ditters von (1739-1799)

Unlike the narratives concerning the death of Hercules, and his transformation into a god, and the dispute between Ajax and Ulysses over the weapons of Achilles, the story of Jason's capture of the Golden Fleece provided Dittersdorf with few opportunities for genuine pictorial writing. His explanation for the piano second theme in the first movement seems a little glib – it is, after all, a favourite device of his in non-programmatic works as well but Medea's beautiful soliloquy in the second movement, assigned here to the primo part and in all probability to a wind solo in the original, is as effective as anything in the extant orchestral scores of the Ovid symphonies. His choice of a Ciaconna for the Finale is not only highly appropriate given the heroic theme of the work, but also neatly solves the problem of how to end the symphony unconventionally in the absence of a transformation scene of the kind found in the other symphonies. Yet again, one marvels at Dittersdorf 's powerful creative imagination. The parts are marked carefully although Dittersdorf is not over-detailed in his instructions to the performers. The occasional copying errors provide insufficient evidence to determine whether the parts were copied from a piano score or prepared directly from the composer's full orchestral score. Little editorial work has been necessary to prepare this edition. The style and notation of articulation and dynamic markings have been standardised throughout and, where missing from the source, markings have been reconstructed from parallel passages. These are indicated by the use of dotted slurs or brackets where appropriate. Like most eighteenth-century sources, the manuscript is at times inconsistent in its notation of appoggiature ; these too have been standardised to minimise confusion. Obvious wrong notes have been corrected without comment; editorial emendations with no authority from the source are placed within brackets. Allan Badley