ABSTRACT
Working as both performer and editor allows many glimpses of how parallel the two activities can run. The delicacy of the editor's position – and unavoidable part-role as interpreter – is neatly illustrated by the contrasted way two highly reputable editions treat a rhythmic question in the finale of Schubert's B flat Sonata, D960. If the tempo adopted for D960 is fast enough to match that of the finale to D958, the dotted rhythms can easily become de facto triplets without any specific decision by the performer. Single dotting in the melody would have been enough, in Schubert's time, to tell pianists to stretch the melodic rhythm to fit the sextuplets. Some issues of rhythmic balance in Schubert's B flat Sonata move to a much larger scale, specially because a particular question of rhythmic ambiguity arises from two different passages in the finale, while Schubert's manuscript throws a further question mark over this and a third passage.
