Is the sheet music I am looking at original?

[Ollyrotten]

first of all thanks very much to IMSLP, great idea and very useful.

the question I had was about how to find out if a particular piece of sheet music was written exactly how the original composer intended?

For instance I've recently been looking around for sheet music on the internet for Ave Maria - Bach/Gounod and found several different versions. The differences are very small but enough to make me wonder what it first sounded like.

I usually try and find old copies (like the 1910 version here at IMSLP) but I was wondering if there was any way to be sure a piece of sheet music has been un-edited by someone else, and is only the work of the original composer?

[Yagan Kiely]

Early editions can also be unreliable, as errors often sneak in.

[Generoso]

The earliest version of any piece would probably be the handwriting. And depending on the composer (Mozart's scores are very clean whereas Beethoven's scores are very messy with things crossed out and arrows to here and there) you could see what he originally wrote. Some pieces were written and then changed by the composer for various reasons. There is no set way in which all composers wrote(write).

Cheers

[Ollyrotten]

ok, thanks very much

[Carolus]

The Bach-Gounod we have isn't really that early. Gounod wrote his arrangement in the 1850s and it was issued by Choudens or one of the other Paris publishers shortly afterward. As Yagan said, early editions can be problematic, too - especially if they were published without the composer's knowledge or if the composer was careless or too busy with writing new music to spend time correcting the proofs from a publisher.