Communications.(Letter to the editor)

This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of this journal, and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity.

To the Editor:

In regard to the review of various Kurt Weill editions (Notes 62, no. 2 [December 2005]: 481-86), Scott Warfield makes the sweeping generalization that "there is no such thing as a 'full score' for ... any of the dozens of ... classics of American musical theater" (p. 482). In fact, in the years that I was editor for the estate of Leonard Bernstein, the full score of Candide was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1993 and that of West Side Story in 1994. Each of these scores is available at Hal Leonard online (http://www.halleonard.com/ ([accessed 22 February 2006]) for the truly affordable price of $100.00 (comparing favorably to the Kurt Weill editions). Also available through the hire library at Boosey & Hawkes are full scores for On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Mass. Meanwhile, any work of the musical theater which has been performed in the Encores series has a newly edited full score. All one has to do is ask, when renting the materials from one of the various music-theatre libraries.

CHARLIE HARMON

New York, NY

The reviewer responds:

I thank Mr. Harmon for bringing to my attention a few items previously unknown to me. Yet while musical theater historians and aficionados might initially be pleased to learn of the availability of full scores to several of Leonard Bernstein's Broadway shows (and of his "theater piece" Mass), a close examination of those scores, specifically their prefatory materials, shows that Mr. Harmon is comparing apples with oranges. Attractive as those Bernstein scores might seem--especially at prices significantly lower than that of a volume in the Kurt Weill Edition--the simple fact is that the Boosey & Hawkes scores of West Side Story and Candide cited by Mr. Harmon are neither critical editions nor are they "authoritative" editions in any way near the same sense as is Joel Galand's edition of Weill's Firebrand of Florence.