"I have to think myself back to the conditions under which they operated. The humble copyist – the packhorse employed to copy Beethoven’s autograph score into neat – is getting bad press here. Simon Rattle phoned me about the French horns in the same symphony, and asked: 'What am I going to tell the orchestra?'"
"But he must accept that he’s playing a note that was changed in the 1860s, some 30 years after Beethoven’s death. "There’s a note I’ve corrected in the Choral Symphony that Claudio Abbado refuses to acknowledge," Del Mar reveals. Beethoven's Fifth becomes a better piece. Beethoven’s notation – now restored – demonstrates a dramatic clash of material more vividly than the vanilla version that has existed since the copyist’s misreading. Above, the wind are stabbing away with violent staccatos. In these few bars of the Fifth, Del Mar points out just how refined Beethoven's instructions are for his strings, with regard to how they should sustain a note. The notation a composer deploys is distinctive, like a Picasso brushstroke. "You can see clearly how Beethoven has corrected and revised what his copyist wrote, but these changes have still been overlooked." Next we take a look at the Fifth Symphony, and again there are shocking discrepancies between the subtleties of Beethoven’s original and the published version. You see – there are notes tied over the barline in Beethoven's manuscript, but not in the copyist’s hand." By the time Beethoven’s copyist has produced a neat copy, the material in the French horns has become this. "There’s some weird and wonderful things here. We’re looking at the facsimile of Beethoven’s autograph score for the Choral Symphony. His upstairs den has an air of 221b Baker Street as he unearths the tools of his trade – paperweights, magnifiers and slim-line torches that illuminate manuscripts from underneath. My editions were born out of problems such as a clarinetist putting his hand up and asking 'is that an A or a G?' Orchestral time is incredibly expensive and my work allows musicians to forget about the text and get on with the music."ĭel Mar operates out of a beautiful house in Clapham, London, that’s stuffed to the ceiling with Beethoven facsimiles and first editions. I have to admit that average concert-goers might not even notice my corrections. My editions are about making life easier for musicians. "I once did an interview in Hamburg," he chuckles, "and the journalist asked 'if Beethoven symphonies are the Bible, are you the Pope?' This sort of thing is nonsense. To many, Del Mar is Beethoven’s earthly representative and his Editor-in-Chief, an awesome responsibility that he takes in his stride. Tentatively called the Music Treasures Consortium, it so far involves the Morgan Library & Museum, the Harvard University Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress and the British Library, he said.None of this comes as a surprise to Beethoven editor Jonathan Del Mar who, for the past 20 years, has been forensically unpicking manuscripts to discover where "real" Beethoven ends and historical distortion begins. Kovner, in the interview, stressed the importance of making such materials available to scholars and seemed to take particular pride in an online consortium that has begun to form around the collection. And the corresponding manuscripts will be displayed in the Tully lobby. The final scene of the opera “Le Nozze di Figaro,” for which the collection has the wind parts in Mozart’s hand, will also be performed. Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” of which the collection holds both the engraved first edition for string quartet and the composer’s autograph manuscript of a version for piano, four hands, will be played in both forms. The concert portion of the evening at Tully, meanwhile, will present performances representing some of the 2006 acquisitions. An engraved proof of the piano and vocal score of Mendelssohn's oratorio “Elijah,” with the composer's revisions visible in the upper right-hand corner.