Following on from the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies Jonathan Del Mar has now edited Dvořák’s Ninth. Many uncertainties have now been clarified.

If Dvořak's Eighth has always been the most error-ridden symphony in the standard repertoire, the New World has been the one with the most problems. Even a couple of Urtext Editions, one Czech from half a century ago, the other more recent, have caused more difficulties than they solved.

The dilemma, as so often, is the many discrepancies between autograph and first edition; which do we trust? Until now the answers have been more or less guesswork, editors tending (reasonably enough, perhaps) to be beguiled by the hallowed evidence of the composer's own handwriting, especially tempting due to the fact that publication was not supervised by Dvořak, who was stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean, but was left in the good hands of Brahms. But of course the autograph is not always the last word. And now at last we have a new source which can help us to sort the sheep from the goats. This was discovered about 30 years ago, and is – amazingly – almost the complete set of parts used for the first performance in New York, which still survives in the archive of the New York Philharmonic. These were copied directly from the lost Stichvorlage copyist's manuscript, and therefore give us much crucial information as to which readings that manuscript score, which included Dvořak's  final revisions, is likely to have had. From the huge number of places where these parts agree with Dvořak's autograph, we can also see exactly which readings in the first edition score emanate from Brahms.

But even the first performance parts do not provide the conclusive answer to the most important question of all: the placing of the peremptory horn call in the fourth bar. For that, we can now summon a much more recent discovery, one of just a few months ago: a sheet of manuscript paper on which Dvorak jotted down the main themes of the work for a lecture recital he gave shortly after the first performance. This at last shows unambiguously his final version of this controversial bar, which has not been heard correctly for over a hundred years.

Other long-standing problems which have now at last been solved are the dilemma of the mutes in the Largo – the surprise is to find that the cellos and basses are not muted at all – and other small melodic variants, which are in fact not problems at all, but part and parcel of Dvorak's inventive composing style.   

Jonathan Del Mar
(from [t]akte 2/2018)