Symphonies, concertos, string quartets, piano sonatas: Jonathan Del Mar’s Beethoven editions are convincing from the first to the last note.

Tens of thousands of scores sold, and the orchestral material in use worldwide: and even without the fact that sensational newly-discovered sources found over the last few years would have necessitated new editions, Bärenreiter’s Beethoven Urtext editions by Jonathan Del Mar have far exceeded anything which might have been expected.

Added to that, in recent years probably no new musical edition has attracted such attention – not only in the music business, but in the general press. This can be attributed to many things: Beethoven provides the abiding standard in the genres of symphony, string quartet and piano sonata, but his manuscripts are notorious for their difficult legibility. In Jonathan Del Mar, there is an editor who has embarked on the task with a combination of meticulous scholarly precision, an empirical grasp of the subject and many years’ practical performing experience which few other musicologists possess. He has found a publisher who has helped him to present his revelations and discoveries purposefully and to lasting effect both on the concert platform and in the general consciousness.


The aim: playability

In conversation, Jonathan Del Mar immediately emphasises that his Urtext editions are always created with the intention that they will be used to perform from – that they therefore do not present performers with unnecessary uncertainties and contraditions in their interpretation of the text. For him, it is the editor’s clear duty not to overload the musicians with further questions, but to supply plausible answers as far as is possible on the basis of the most thorough study of the sources.
This basic attitude, so he says, is thanks to his father, the legendary conductor Norman Del Mar (1919–1994). Conductors not only have Del Mar senior to thank for the standard textbook Anatomy of the Orchestra, but also for that unique compilation of corrections to misprints in the scores of the great masters, published in 1981 under the title Orchestral Variations. Confusion and Error in the Orchestral Repertoire, a work which has since found itself on the shelves of all well-informed orchestral conductors. But what most people do not know is that Jonathan Del Mar was his father’s most important assistant in the publication of this legacy, something which, in its inevitable incompleteness, was to form the prelude to his own detective research work: “What I also learned from my father was the importance of a general knowledge of the repertoire. As an editor, it is not helpful to study and to investigate a Beethoven symphony in isolation; it requires a highly developed knowledge of the musical environment, as well as the other orchestral works by Beethoven in particular, and symphonies by other composers before and after him.”

What is crucial above all is the additional challenge to himself which Jonathan Del Mar assumed from his father: not just to make as few mistakes as possible as an editor, but to make none. And he stresses that the aspiration of Bärenreiter Urtext editions matches this self-imposed obligation, including that it is “a seal of quality … a guaranteed musical text reflecting the current state of research … the concept of the authentic form of the work”. And Jonathan Del Mar concludes from this: “If we expect musicians, who already own performance material of these works, to invest again in a better edition, we have to devote the corresponding amount of time and intelligence to them in order to be able to make that quality available which the musicians rightly expect. And it is the publisher’s duty to produce material which is of practical use, that is, material which is absolutely accurate.”


Tried and tested in practice

But what makes Del Mar’s Beethoven editions, particularly the symphonies, so unique, is the many years of collaboration with performing musicians, as a result of which the complete material is tried and tested many times in practice before it comes to be published: “Between 1985 and 1992, Caroline Brown and Stephen Neiman of the Hanover Band commissioned me to produce new critical editions of all the works which they were recording. In this way, I was always responsible for ensuring that my decisions were acceptable in practice, that is, they had to be purposeful and practicable.”


Getting away from subjective interpretations

What now is Del Mar’s special achievement as an editor? “To get away from subjective interpretations: nobody is interested in Del Mar, everyone wants Beethoven. No other edition of the Beethoven symphonies clarifies unclear and doubtful details for the musicians as clearly and unambiguously as our editions do: where there is a doubt, what is the recommendation resulting from this, and when is it not possible to make a decision which is beyond doubt – this is all clearly listed. And therefore the Critical Commentary is an indispensible component of the score in each case. And here, as far as I can see, we have undertaken impeccable work.”

One does not have to agree with every decision which was ultimately adopted in the score. It is undisputed that in the Fifth Symphony, Del Mar was able to plausibly demonstrate that the full repeat in the Scherzo, long-held to be the correct interpretation, no longer applied, and the movement regained that compactness which characterises the whole work. In the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony, Del Mar resorted to a well-judged solution: as with a fast tempo based on the metronome marking, the Presto-Trio cannot be taken at the relationship of “whole measure = whole measure” (linked through an accelerando which achieves the acceleration of the tempo by a third); relating the metronome marking to alla breve units is ridiculously slow, so he initially followed common practice and omitted the metronome marking in the Trio from the score, listing it in the Critical Commentary. In the new 2017 edition he admittedly then adopted the metronome marking for whole bars in the score. To this end it is necessary to take the basic tempo of the Scherzo – as probably only Celibidache did – at as moderate a speed as possible, so that the Trio can be performed at the overarching tempo relationship “whole measure = whole measure”: an absolutely coherent solution in the proportion of the tempi, which simply requires the metronome marking to be disregarded. Whether this is done or not, that is – in an exemplary way – one of those “subjective decisions” which Del Mar would like to leave to the free will of the performers. He himself has little regard for blind adherence to metronome markings.


Astonishment about conductors

There is no ignoring the fact that a scrupulous editor such as Jonathan Del Mar is constantly surprised about how his Urtext editions are actually used in practice: “Some conductors and orchestras reverse the corrections, because it can naturally be uncomfortable to rehearse the old and familiar anew. They then rightly claim that they are playing from the Bärenreiter Urtext edition, but they are not playing it. And a few years ago, a highly renowned conductor made such drastic alterations in the musical text that he succeeded in making a complete recording, based on this new Urtext edition, which was about as far as possible from the Urtext in the history of recording. And for this he was awarded several critics’ prizes!” The editor bears the responsibility for the musical text, everything else is in the hands of the musicians.

Christoph Schlüren
(from [t]akte 2/2018 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)