At first glance, Beethoven’s opus 19 presents few editorial problems. And yet, Jonathan Del Mar’s new edition corrects mistakes which have existed throughout all previous editions.
In one sense Beethoven’s op. 19 is the simplest of all concertos, the sources are well known, there are no new discoveries, and there should be no problem or even any necessary corrections. Beethoven’s autograph score survives in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; the solo piano staves are largely blank, but that does not matter; we also have Beethoven’s own autograph piano part (in the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn), written out in 1801 to serve as Stichvorlage for his publisher Hoffmeister. And then, as usual, there is the printed first edition, which follows both these autographs closely, with the usual exception of a few last-minute revisions which are in general immediately recognisable. What further work can there possibly be still to do, one asks.
And yet there is a mystery in the text of this piece, which derives from the fact that until now, no edition has wiped the slate clean, and founded itself exclusively on the authentic sources, but all betray their derivation from the previous edition. And if we trace this line back, we find some very interesting things. We find that today’s most authoritative Urtext edition was based closely (too closely) on the old Breitkopf Gesamtausgabe; that, in its turn, was taken from a Peters edition of 1858; and that derived not from the first edition, but from a rare second edition of 1853 which is a very strange animal indeed.
Although now we can consult both Beethoven’s autographs for this piece, this was not always the case. The autograph score was in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin by 1868, but was apparently unavailable in the 1850s; while the autograph piano part, auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1872 and in private hands for much of the 19th century, was on the other hand evidently consulted in 1853, for that second edition contains readings which (surprisingly, but without any doubt) derive from it.
This should be no problem; after all, Beethoven’s autograph piano part tells the truth. But unfortunately, in its wisdom – perhaps due to the absence at that time of the autograph orchestral score – that second edition chose to make adjustments to the orchestral parts according to Beethoven’s piano reduction o the orchestral tutti passages in his autograph piano part. And these changes of articulation – which very much suit a pianist playing an orchestral reduction, but are not true to Beethoven’s writing for the orchestra itself – have remained in (for example) the violin parts ever since.
Apart from this cleaning-up operation, a handful of mistakes remained to be corrected. Some were misreadings of Beethoven’s autograph score, which were already wrong in the first edition and have remained wrong ever since (I 275 Vc, 307 Vl 1, III 14 1. Fag): one important error, affecting the rhythm of the whole bar, was correct in both the authentic sources but wrong in all modern editions (II 28 Vla); and one depends on the identification of a revision, where the first edition reads completely differently from the Beethoven’s autograph piano part (II 76 and 79), and we have to trust the first edition to have rendered Beethoven’s last-minute revision correctly. Here the currently-used urtext edition instead invented a solution found in neither of the authentic sources; we have returned to the reading in the old Breitkopf Gesamtausgabe, which rightly followed the first edition. However, in one other place (I 43 Vls) a revision was indeed not executed correctly in the first edition, so in previous editions was ignored entirely (they returned to the autograph reading); it is easy to see what went wrong, so our edition restores the revision as was almost certainly intended.
Jonathan Del Mar
(from [t]akte 2/2013]