With the 5th Piano Concerto Jonathan Del Mar concludes his edition of the five piano concertos by Ludwig van Beethoven. Here, too, mistakes had to be removed which have remained unchallenged for two centuries.
Beethoven’s Emperor’ Concerto is the glorious summit of his output as a concerto composer, and its textual problems are commensurately the most complex. Though it had been promised to Beethoven’s Leipzig publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, offers from other countries were by no means excluded, and a visit to the composer from the London publisher Muzio Clementi resulted in the English publication of the concerto already in November 1810, a few months before Breitkopf’s edition appeared, so that strictly speaking, Clementi’s is the first edition.
But until the work had been published by Breitkopf, it remained on Beethoven’s desk as work-in-progress, continuing to develop. The work Clementi published therefore falls short in many respects of Breitkopf’s, which we properly recognise as the final version. Yet in some other small respects, Clementi’s is uniquely correct, errors having crept into the Leipzig edition that have survived until now. Indeed the publication by Breitkopf caused one of Beethoven’s famous outbursts: he complained bitterly about the number of errors, writing to Breitkopf in May 1811: “Mistakes – mistakes – you yourself are a unique mistake”, and insisting on a corrected reprint. Beethoven must have bombarded Breitkopf with a series of correction lists, for one survives (now in the Juilliard Manuscript Collection, New York) which fascinatingly authenticates most of the corrections made to the piano part alone in the revised Breitkopf printing. All the orchestral parts, too, were corrected (doubtless with similar lists from Beethoven) and reprinted. At the same time, Beethoven also slipped in a few changes such as a new tempo marking for the Finale which are, frankly, new revisions rather than corrections.
The list of sources, all carrying different texts, is thus quite complicated. The autograph score survives in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and both "First" Editions exist in two printings, for Clementi also found a few corrections to make. In examining and evaluating all these sources it is obviously crucial to distinguish between discrepancies deriving from Beethoven`s own revisions and corrections, and those which are due to errors; surprisingly, however, it is the autograph itself, although this has been combed on various occasions as the basis for new editions, which has remained the most fruitful source of new discoveries. Despite two recent “urtext” editions, more than a dozen notes in the orchestral parts have remained wrong to this day, and even in the solo part one wrong note has been corrected, and one note added.
One instruction Beethoven gave in the autograph was observed by Clementi, but has remained ignored ever since. In the Rondo, he asked for a subtly different texture to accompany the opening phrase at its first reappearance: instead of placing three pizzicato chords, the strings this time are silent in preparation for their own hushed echo of the piano’s pounding motif.
Jonathan Del Mar
(from [t]akte 1/2015]