Talk:St. Paul (oratorio)

Ophicleide?

Why does the section about instrumentation mention an Ophicleide? All the scores I have seen say Serpent, not Ophicleide (here, for instance). If nobody objects, I'll change it to Serpent. Schamschi (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:10, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

This ought to be covered in a little detail. It's too complicated for me to tackle with any confidence, but it appears the published scores reflect revisions after the first performances and of course it's far from certain that terminology was standardized. Grove (as does WP) speaks of a "Bass English Horn" as the originally intended instrument. Sparafucil (talk) 01:57, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article Ophicleide you linked to says that the "English Bass Horn" was the originally intended instrument for Elias and Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it doesn't mention Paulus in this context. Also, I've read the preface of both the Bärenreiter and the Breitkopf critical edition (the new Breitkopf edition by Michael Märker, not the old one by Julius Rietz), and the Bärenreiter doesn't say anything about the serpent in particular, but the Breitkopf explicitly mentions it, and in no way does it indicate that the work was originally scored for something other than a serpent. Also, what Grove article are you referring to? I can't seem to find one on Mendelssohn's Paulus, although, to be fair, the search function (I'm using the online version) seems to suck, so this might be the problem.

Nevertheless, even if it were true that the work was originally scored for ophicleide and Mendelssohn later changed it to serpent (which is unlikely because the ophicleide developed out of the serpent and not the other way round), then serpent takes precedence, because it is what the composer intended in the end, and there is no excuse to simply omitting this information in the article.

By the way, looking at my edit from two days ago, you might have noticed that the question of ophicleide vs. serpent was not the only problem in the instrumentation section, so the information JabbaCurrie provided on 21 April 2008 should be taken with several grams of salt anyway. Maybe he/she did it from memory and confused Mendelssohn's Paulus with another work. Schamschi (talk) 11:32, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I was indeed thinking of Elijah; the Grove article is the one on "Serpent". Your additional detail is of course welcome, and I agree that serpent seems more appropriate than ophicleide. I just think there might still be a question mark around what kind of "serpente" is meant. Sparafucil (talk) 20:05, 5 March 2014 (UTC)