Urtext edition

[4] One common response of editors for all of these difficulties is to provide written documentation of the decisions that were made, either in footnotes or in a separate section of commentary.

The urtext edition adds value to what the performer could get from a facsimile by integrating evidence from multiple sources and exercising informed scholarly judgment.

In modern times, digital scans of the composer's manuscript or the first edition are increasingly posted on line, by institutions such as the International Music Score Library Project[5] or the Beethoven House in Bonn.

The musicologist James Webster, basing his remarks on his study of two leading urtext editions of Haydn's E flat Piano Sonata, H. XVI:49, suggests that players interested in historically informed performance ought to play from a facsimile.

In such cases, printed editions are forced to make a choice; only a facsimile can provide an unaltered expression of the composer's intent.

[8] In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many famous performing musicians provided interpretive editions, including Harold Bauer, Artur Schnabel, and Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

In the days before recorded music, such editions were often the only way that students could obtain inspiration from the performing practice of leading artists, and even today they retain value for this purpose.

Indeed they want to have the best of both worlds; for example, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe claims to offer 'an unexceptionable text from the scholarly viewpoint, which at the same time takes the needs of musical practice into account.'

Robert Estrin, a piano teacher, favors the use of Urtext editions but notes that their use can be problematic for beginning and intermediate students: If you’re a serious player, you really want to know what the composer wrote and what the editor added.

[11] Estrin advocates the type of urtext edition described above, in which the editor's markings intended to help performers are given with grey or otherwise distinct typography.