My first introduction to Servais was an old copy of Souvenir de Spa that I bought when I was around eighteen, I believe at an estate sale.

It is the Peters edition, no. 2236, plate 8345, edited by Friedrich Grützmacher. Grützmacher has a reputation for heavily altering some of the music he edited, but this is not one of those editions. The cello part is a faithful transmission of Servais’s music, with only a few added performance directions such as fingerings and bowings.

I never learned the piece. At the time, I also had no idea that this particular copy had a history of its own.

The name Stanislas Bem is stamped in four places: on the cover of the piano score, inside the cover, and on the first page of the cello part. Someone later scratched out three of the stamps in pen. The one on the outer cover is much lighter than the others and may have escaped notice, since it is still fairly easy to read.

There may also be an old price written by hand on the cover: “1.50.”

At the bottom of the piano score is a music-shop stamp, arranged in this order:

E. Wende i Ska
Skład Nut
Warszawa

In other words, the score passed through the sheet-music department of E. Wende and Company in Warsaw. An advertisement from 1913 gives the same business as “Skład Nut, E. Wende i Ska, Warszawa,” then located at Krakowskie Przedmieście 9. The shop sold concert and salon music and regularly received new foreign publications.

The stamp does not date the Peters printing itself. Peters could continue printing from the same plates for years, and a Warsaw dealer could sell copies printed earlier. But it does place this particular copy in the Warsaw music trade, probably during the first decades of the twentieth century.

That becomes more interesting because Stanislas Bem was himself from Warsaw.

Bem was born there on December 17, 1887, and died in Berkeley, California, on December 9, 1956. By the 1916–1917 season, he was well established in San Francisco as a professional cellist and teacher. He taught cello and chamber music at the Arrillaga Musical College, played in the Minetti String Quartet, and appeared in the Shavitch-DeGrassi-Bem Trio. Contemporary advertisements simply identify him as “Stanislas Bem, violoncellist,” available for concerts, recitals, and instruction.

He later taught cello at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Bonnie Hampton remembered that one of her early teachers had studied with Bem and recalled his studio upstairs at the Conservatory.

Bem also became a conductor and orchestra leader. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Stanislas Bem Little Symphony Orchestra played regularly at the Hotel Whitcomb in San Francisco and was frequently broadcast over the radio. In 1924, he was described as the musical director of KFRC and as already known to listeners through earlier broadcasts on KGO.

So this was not merely a score with the stamp of an unknown amateur. It belonged to a working Polish-born cellist, teacher, chamber musician, and conductor.

The Warsaw shop stamp and Bem’s Warsaw background raise an obvious possibility: perhaps he bought the score there and later brought it with him to California. That would provide a very natural explanation for the combination of the Wende shop stamp and Bem’s ownership stamps.

But it is still only a possibility. He could have acquired an older Warsaw-stamped copy from another musician after coming to the United States. The handwritten “1.50” might be a Warsaw retail price, an American secondhand price, or something added much later. The copy gives us clues, not a complete travel itinerary.

The really unusual feature of the copy is not the pencil writing in the cello part. It is what someone did to the piano score.

The piano score was permanently altered with glued pasteovers. These are not simply suggested cuts marked in pencil. Sections of printed music were covered up, and handwritten replacement passages were pasted into the score so that the shortened version could be played directly.

The first cut goes from Variation 1 to Variation 3, the F-major variation. A short passage was recomposed to connect the two sections.

This particular cut was not unique. Nikolay Yusupov’s arrangement of Souvenir de Spa, published by B. Schott’s Söhne in 1855 as plate 13640, also goes from Variation 1 to Variation 3. The transition in Yusupov’s version is entirely different, however. His arrangement also includes so many other cuts and alterations that it feels more like the “greatest moments of Souvenir de Spa” than an arrangement of the complete piece.

The similar cut does not prove that the person who altered the Peters score knew Yusupov’s edition. It may simply have been an obvious place to shorten the piece. Still, it shows that the omission of Variation 2 already had a published nineteenth-century precedent.

The second major cut in my copy comes near the end. It begins in the transition leading to the recapitulation of the finale and jumps directly to the final seventeen measures. Once again, whoever made the pasteover wrote a short new passage to connect the two sections.

What is especially strange is that neither cut is marked in the separate cello part.

The pianist was given a permanently reconstructed score, but the cellist was apparently expected to know where to jump. Perhaps the cuts had been rehearsed often enough that no markings were needed. Perhaps Bem or another cellist simply memorized the two places. It is also possible that the piano score and cello part were altered or used at different times.

I do not know who made the pasteovers. The copy belonged to Bem, but an ownership stamp does not prove that every pencil mark, cut, or recomposed passage is his. The alterations could have been made before he acquired the score, during his ownership, or after it left his library.

I have also not yet found a concert program showing Bem performing Souvenir de Spa. He performed widely and appears frequently in San Francisco musical and radio sources, but none of the indexed programs I have found connects him directly with this piece.

So I cannot say, at least for now, that this is the version of Souvenir de Spa that Stanislas Bem performed. What I can say is that it was a working musician’s copy and that someone went to considerable trouble to turn the complete Peters score into a practical shortened performance version.

At eighteen, I knew none of this.

I did not know who Stanislas Bem was. I did not recognize the Warsaw shop stamp. I knew nothing about the differences among the original edition, Grützmacher’s edition, or Yusupov’s arrangement. I did not examine the pasteovers as evidence of performance practice. I just bought an old cello score, probably at an estate sale.

And I never learned the piece.

My next encounter with Servais came through the caprices in Alwin Schroeder’s 170 Foundation Studies, Volume 3. Then came Airs russes, partly because of its connection to “The Red Sarafan.” Later, when I was in graduate school, I encountered the Barber of Seville fantasy.

Eventually, Servais became one of the central figures in my research, editing, and publishing work.

Looking back, it is funny that my first Servais score already contained so many of the questions I would later spend years dealing with: faithful and unfaithful editions, added performance markings, provenance, old music shops, performing cuts, recomposed transitions, and the difference between a piece as published and the version musicians actually placed on their stands.

I bought it when I was around eighteen and never learned Souvenir de Spa.

But in another sense, this is where my Servais project began.