What is an Urtext edition? What is an Urtext published by Bärenreiter, and prepared by Jonathan Del Mar? And what does all this do to Beethoven's music in 2022, how, why and for whom? One finds these questions answered – in general terms, meant for the whole series – on the Bärenreiter website and, in a nutshell, on the editions’ back covers: ‘Bärenreiter Urtext: the last word in authentic text – the musicians’ choice.’ Here I want to offer a more specific answer, arising from my handling of this particular edition of the Archduke Trio. First, though, a quick Google search reveals which other scores of this piece are available. Notably, the dedicated volume of the new Beethoven Gesamtausgabe (published by Henle since 1961 under the auspices of Beethoven-Haus Bonn) is yet to appear. IMSLP permits one to download free the first edition of the trio (Vienna: Steiner, 1816), a later one issued by Breitkopf und Härtel in 1864, an Urtext published by Henle in 1955, and even the colour reproduction of a single page with sketches, one of many Beethoven prepared while composing this piece in 1810–11.Footnote ¹ One way to understand what the Bärenreiter edition in my hands accomplishes (just as the Gesamtausgabe volume will) is by imagining that someone has compared all these different sources and versions of the trio, and the many more not available on IMSLP, to understand how they are related. After such comparative work, Del Mar is able to tell us, for instance, that the 1864 Breitkopf edition likely reproduced the musical text as it is found in a 1831 print, one that in turn was transcribed with very few changes from the 1816 first edition. Why is this kind of information important? Because, on this basis, one can attempt to determine who added or changed what at what point in time, with the ultimate aim of distinguishing Beethoven's instructions from those of others.

Which others? Music is never one's person doing.Footnote ² Composers do not work in a vacuum: they collaborate, negotiate and interact with many others in their networks, including publishers, engravers, performers and publicists. All these interactions shape what different musical sources look like and do.Footnote ³ But there is an additional historical contingency to consider for a piece like the Archduke Trio. European and colonial chamber music in the early nineteenth century existed, in the vast majority of cases, as separate parts. Aside from the composer's composition material, parts were what was produced and expected. Creating parts – from the composer's score, from manuscript parts into engraved plates, etc. – creates errors, statistically many more errors than when copying a score into another score, because at some point with parts one no longer has the benefit of easily cross-checking the other instruments’ notation. This is already an excellent reason to compare sources bar by bar, to find out, say, that in preparing the first edition of the Archduke Trio an engraver extended a slur backwards to the previous note (cello, between bar 7 and 8), although Beethoven's autograph score (in an imaginary timeline, two acts of copying before this moment) shows the slur starting from bar 8.

It can seem particularly fitting to carry out this investigative work for Beethoven's music, as he was keen on re-controlling copies for mistakes, while also perfecting at every step the fine details of his notation. A sense of how unusual this was at the time is well illustrated by the fact that Beethoven asked for proofs from all the publishers he worked with, but almost no one allowed it.Footnote ⁴ This was a musical culture that did not value the idea of reproducing the composer's instructions to the letter. So one can think of the various editions of the Archduke Trio as a fascinating, but admittedly messy stratification of very different people's tastes, priorities, knowledges (of music in general, and Beethoven's style or notational habits in particular) at various times. Imagine an engraver working for Steiner in 1816, used to working through vast quantities of chamber music, but likely not much of Beethoven's own; their hand might have slipped into conforming the slur of the cello to that of the violin at bars 7–8, whereas Beethoven had originally plotted two different phrasings. Or imagine the professional violinist and educator Ferdinand David, who in 1868 published an edition keeping cello and violin in bars 7–8 slurred as in Steiner, while adding his own fingerings and bowings throughout the piece.

Making sense of this stratification is Jonathan Del Mar's key contribution. The strata are difficult to ascertain until someone has done the abovementioned comparative work. Each layer offers invaluable insights into different cultures of, and individual desires while, handling music; but exploring them in their individuality is less a priority of this Bärenreiter Urtext.Footnote ⁵ Rather, Del Mar's work is meant to facilitate today's musicians in having new, close encounters with Beethoven. He has been sifting through the ‘chorus of hands’ contributing to the stratification and erased traces left by anyone else but the composer. For instance, in the first movement, at bar 7 (piano) and bar 20 (violin), Beethoven wrote no Nachschlag (the auxiliary notes at the end of a trill) for the second trill, but David filled it in in bar 7. Del Mar mentions that the composer might have implied the Nachschlag, although it is remarkable that he did not specify it in these bars whereas from bar 22 he did. Knowing what Beethoven notated can open new creative possibilities. In 2019, the Trio Metamorphosi played these two trills without Nachschlag, which in their rendition has an almost time-stopping effect, delaying only slightly the following downbeat. (This is audible when compared, for instance, with the 1970 recording by Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré and Pinchas Zukerman who also play the Nachschlag where Beethoven didn't write it.)Footnote ⁶ The Metamorphosi took the opportunity to encounter Beethoven's notation afresh, starting as if from a clean slate, which is in essence the idea of the Urtext. An Urtext promises the performer, as far as possible, unmediated access to ‘just Beethoven’, without seeing his notation mixed with traces of what David or Barenboim did. In keeping with this promise, Del Mar's name is not mentioned on the edition's cover. He is duly acknowledged inside, of course; but the cover sets up the expectation that the edition gets closer to Beethoven's text, even though Del Mar is the indispensable medium providing this proximity.

To present Beethoven ‘untouched’ is appealing, too, in that it leaves more ‘room’ for a performer to appropriate it anew. In an interview on the Bärenreiter website, Del Mar mentions that an Urtext should be published ‘on good, robust modern paper so that you can rub out bowings and fingerings without making a hole’ in it. Editions like his make space for these new reworkings. And, in this respect, Beethoven's Archduke Trio is truly treated as a classic, presented as if outside history's messy contingencies. The paper used by Bärenreiter not only feels good to the touch; it has also a distinct coloration. The choice is said to prevent a blinding effect for musicians playing under the limelight.Footnote ⁷ But the yellowish colour is also closer in shade to that of Beethoven's own manuscripts and other early nineteenth-century sources, thus reinforcing even on a purely visual level the time-travel celebrated by the Urtext.

Del Mar's previous experience with Beethoven's music – he published all nine symphonies as Bärenreiter Urtext – is the selling point of this edition of the Archduke. His familiarity with Beethoven's notational habits comes across in statements like ‘Beethoven never in his life wrote rfz’, and in the care he takes to evaluate every scratch on the composer's score. In reading through the Critical Commentary, one can see Del Mar ponder, for instance, whether a scratch is just that, or perhaps the remains of a slur; or about the length of a slur notated in one way in Beethoven's score but differently in the parts he corrected. Did he forget to correct it? Did he change his mind? These kinds of questions are asked diligently, bar after bar, and thanks to the Commentary one can even consider alternative answers to those Dal Mar put down as the Urtext.

However, I can see room for improvement in the accessibility of the accompanying texts. The description of the sources mentions in abbreviated form (PR, P, Q, etc.) manuscripts or editions that have not yet been discussed. So one has to jump between paragraphs, and risks getting a somewhat fragmentary picture of who did what. For example, a passage about Beethoven's autograph (A) reads: ‘the substantial revisions and alterations in A (nothing in I, but increasingly from at least II 74), simply followed in PR (below, copied in 1811) without problem or deletion, are stronger evidence that A was written at the time of Beethoven's dating, in 1811.’ Abbreviations cannot be omitted in the Commentary, but here they constitute a barrier. As an alternative, I envisage a less condensed prose, accommodating a reader who is not yet familiar with the compositional process of the trio. Similar issues pertain at times to the historical introduction by Misha Donat, a senior music producer at BBC Radio 3. While Donat sketches some relevant context, he assumes a reader already quite knowledgeable:

This is from the introduction's very first paragraph, but the reader is given no background on Archduke Rudolph, nor told why Beethoven was reluctant to teach him and yet dedicated him this trio. By comparison, an introduction that takes care to explain all this in a very cogent and accessible manner is Julia Ronge's Preface to the Henle 2020 facsimile edition of this trio.Footnote ⁸

Nonetheless, this Bärenreiter Urtext champions accessibility in other important ways. It makes available high-standard textual-critical work at an accessible price and in a slim, portable format. As I type, I have on my desk also the two-volume edition of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ Sketchbook, an amazing musicological feat but expensively bound with a thick hardcover and heavy in weight (about 500 pages in total). It is no object to slip into a violin case or studied en route to a rehearsal. But that's just what our Bärenreiter Urtext allows. For this reason, too, Del Mar's edition remains an excellent ‘musician's choice’.