Pursuing Eloquence

Interviewer: How much revising do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problems there? What was it that had stumped you?”
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
—Paris Review INTERVIEW

Revising is common practice for writers—from essayists to novelists to playwrights. The more I read about revising, the more common I realized it also was among composers. J. S. Bach apparently made changes as a matter of course when making a new copy of a piece. Chopin revised habitually, even marking changes on copies of published versions of his compositions.

Several composers whose music I love reworked some of their compositions over periods lasting years. Berlioz, for example, based his Damnation of Faust on a work he had written 17 years earlier. Tchaikovsky completed the final version of Romeo and Juliet 20 years after the premiere of the first.

Such long-term decisions to revise usually stem from an obsessive pursuit of eloquence. From a rhetorical viewpoint getting your language “right” is essential—the particular way something is expressed is an integral aspect of what it communicates to others.

Just as our inflections and tone of voice convey much of the meaning when we speak, so performance details help project meaning in music. Our larger impressions are effected by particularities of spacing, articulation, rhythm, dynamics, and orchestration. After gaining more insight into this aspect of musical rhetoric, when I consider my earlier works I sometimes feel that if only I had done this instead of that, then this passage would have embodied its expressive qualities more eloquently. If an earlier work as a whole still interests me, then I will sometimes revise that passage to get the sounds right.

Such changes are often subtle, but worth making. I have demanding muses to please.