Deciphering Beethoven with Jonathan Del Mar
A three-part interview series with the world famous Beethoven scholar.
Interview part 1 – Editing Beethoven’s masterpieces
Jonathan Del Mar (born January 7, 1951) is a British music editor, conductor and musicologist.
He studied at Christ Church, Oxford and the Royal College of Music in London. Jonathan Del Mar edited Beethoven’s nine symphonies for the German publisher Bärenreiter, followed by all the concertos, string quartets and piano sonatas. These urtext editions are characterized by their expertise and accuracy, coming as close as possible to the composer’s final intentions. They have become the preferred editions of many of the world’s leading conductors.
In the first of this three-part interview, we ask Jonathan Del Mar to give us an insight into the work of editing Beethoven’s masterpieces:
Jonathan, I am aware that you began studying Beethoven’s scores with your father, the conductor Norman Del Mar. Would you tell us more about your introduction to editing the great composer’s autographs?
Yes, my father was fascinated by the differences - the many discrepancies - between different editions. He enjoyed documenting them in thousands of pencilled footnotes at the bottom of the page in his scores - he had a huge music library - and loved talking about them and even writing about them. But how far could he go to solve them? He had a busy career as a conductor. But he did love collecting facsimiles of composers' manuscripts, and we would pore over these together, trying to fathom what the composer wanted and what had gone wrong when, where and why.
One of the first that he bought - before I was born! - was Beethoven's Ninth, and we often looked together at one spot or another, comparing both with modern editions and with the first edition score of which he also had a copy. You soon learn that the autograph manuscript is not always the last word!
That long D in the violins at the end of the Trio (II 491-524) was evidently revised later - the version in the first edition is so different that it cannot possibly be a misreading! - though in our drawing-room at home we lacked the missing link to be able to trace the full development of this passage.
Thus, I learnt to read composers' handwritings, and especially to decipher Beethoven's writing which at first looks like a fearsome scrawl but actually only needs a little patience, plus maybe a magnifying glass, good light and plenty of time! - to see that in fact Beethoven has been incredibly meticulous: it is all there in every tiny detail. You just have to look, see, and learn.
How interesting! What were Beethoven’s unique notations like?
Every composer has his own personal language, his conventions of notation, his short-cuts, his abbreviations. You soon learn that when Mozart writes a note that to us looks like a quaver (eighth) acciaccatura, with a little slash through the stem, as at the beginning of the Zauberflöte overture, this is not a grace note; that is how Mozart wrote single semiquavers (16ths). When Brahms writes pf, that does not mean piano forte (some editors, evidently scratching their heads, have even "corrected" it to mf!), but poco forte. Dvořák sometimes writes fm when he actually means mf - it's the same thing.
Beethoven also has his own symbols which you learn: siml plus a sort of diagonal line - that's his own personal ditto mark, which he often used for whole bars in order to save himself valuable time, but he might even use just for a part of a bar where a figure is being repeated - you have to learn what he means, how much of the bar it applies to. You see an apparently perfectly good note there, but it's smudged; that was his way of deleting something, so it is no longer perfectly good - it's rejected! Then you see a melody marked dolce, but there's no dynamic! - so some editors have thought "we'd better add an editorial [p] here!", but after a bit you learn that that's wrong; so often it happens that the melody is dolce but all the other instruments are p that he must have meant it, so we can only conclude ("learn"!) that for Beethoven, dolce is a dynamic in its own right (though not always; p dolce also exists). The same thing applies to cantabile and even Solo (Symphony No.5 I 254, the oboe solo).
However, sometimes we do have to add a dynamic: it was evidently at the time assumed, taken for granted that pizzicato meant piano; it just naturally would be; if you wanted anything else you had to specify it.
Now that's all very well, but it's not how notation works now. If you write a passage in forte, you can alternate arco notes with pizzicato ones without problem; the pizzicato notes are of course played forte as well. But now look at the end of the slow movement of the Ninth! Would you, then, play that last note forte? No, of course you wouldn't. But why not - nothing else is specified! So, I judged that here we do have to add an editorial pp to match all the other instruments (but maybe I was wrong and p would have been even better?). But now look at the C# minor Quartet op.131, bar 161 of the scherzo; here quartets have always played those notes fortissimo for no other reason than that ff was the last notated dynamic. It makes an awful noise and Beethoven would have been horrified. And so, in many places, some obvious but others less so, I have had to add an editorial [p].
Another very interesting problem is this: if Beethoven crosses a whole bar out with a big X, that's clear enough; if then he writes gut, or bleibt on top of that X, then that's clear enough too (it's valid after all, or stet); but sometimes instead he writes a wiggly line over the top of the bar, and that's less obvious, but also means stet. There's an important example of that in the Fifth, where I was able to restore two bar-pairs in the first violins (I 325-6, 329-30) because the first copyist overlooked that wiggle and no one had noticed it ever since.
Keep an eye out for part 2 of our conversation with Jonathan Del Mar in - The story of a music editor!
(Beethoven Beats is the substack of Popular Beethoven Magazine)
Recommended reading
Stephen Malinowski and his Music Animation Machine
Landsberg 6 – Beethoven’s most famous sketchbook
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Thank you!
Fascinating stuff! I look forward to the next part!