Settling Old Scores by Beethoven

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January 20, 2008

Settling Old Scores by Beethoven

By MICHAEL WHITE, NYTimes

MANCHESTER, England

FEW would ever think to count the notes in Beethoven’s 30-odd piano sonatas. And were you to throw the arithmetic at even a seasoned pianist like Daniel Barenboim, who has been playing Beethoven sonata cycles for nearly half a century and begins another at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Jan. 28, you would probably get a blank response.

Like most musicians Mr. Barenboim would rather discuss the impact of these magisterial works on the listener, their status in the history of Western art and the light they shed on one of Western art’s greatest minds. “There is hardly another output from any composer in any form,” he said recently, “that gives such a clear picture of a composer’s development and transformation.”

But Prof. Barry Cooper, the chairman of the music faculty at Manchester University, ranks among the world’s leading authorities on Beethoven and has lived with the piano sonatas more intimately, perhaps, than anyone since Beethoven himself. So when he gives the note count as “half a million, roughly,” you can believe him. And even if he hasn’t kept a precise running total of the notes, he has certainly pondered every last one, long and hard, together with every slur, bar line, accent, dot and dash that ever found its way into the scores.

His pondering began 12 years ago. And what he has to show for it is the encyclopedic critical edition of the sonatas just published by the Associated Board in London to replace the revered one Donald Francis Tovey made for the same publisher in 1931.

In scholarly circles such things resemble assaults on Everest: not without precedent but still momentous, especially if you find a new route up. The crucial difference is that the objective is truth, not novelty.

“The whole point of a new edition,” Professor Cooper said in his small, cluttered office on the university’s Victoria Park campus, not far from where Rutherford split the atom, “is to understand the composer’s original intentions, which get corrupted over time, not least by other editors in their attempts to understand.

“When a text is corrupted, it places a barrier between the composer and listener that shouldn’t be there. You’re not hearing a Beethoven sonata but a Beethoven sonata adapted by someone else. So the ideal is to get back to what the Germans call an urtext, an authoritative statement of what the composer wanted us to hear. And to get that you have to track down and interpret as much as you can in the way of original sources.”

The problem with establishing a Beethoven urtext is that the original sources are so many, varied and conflicting. Beethoven would usually begin by sketching out a sonata, either in a book or on loose pages that tended to separate, and write so close to illegibly that only a practiced eye could make sense of it. “I served a long apprenticeship deciphering Beethoven sketches,” Professor Cooper said.

An autograph manuscript in Beethoven’s hand would be followed by a fair copy made by an assistant to send to the publisher. The publisher would produce a first impression (a trial run of, say, 100 copies), then a second impression of many more. After that — the world of 18th- and early-19th-century publishing being cowboy country — it was not uncommon for rival publishers to issue their own editions, sometimes at Beethoven’s request. In other words, he double-sold, even triple-sold, his work.

At every stage in this chain came opportunities to change the text, either by accident or by design. But the difference between an error and a correction or improvement is not always clear, so you can end up with five or more variants of the same text with no conclusive proof of which one represents finality.

To increase the confusion, some of this source material survives intact, some does not, and time and history have caused it to be scattered across the world. Many of Beethoven’s most important manuscripts have been collected in Bonn (his birthplace), Berlin or Vienna. But it is a continuing process. (The Beethovenhaus in Bonn is raising funds to buy the “Diabelli” Variations autograph from an undisclosed private source.) And there is still plenty of material elsewhere, including sonata sketches in London; the complete Opus 109 Sonata autograph in Washington; and a whole consignment of documents sent from Berlin to Poland for safekeeping during World War II, lost until they turned up recently in Krakow, where they remain.

The detective work was aided in 1989 by a collated facsimile publication of every known first printed edition. But the facsimiles are themselves fallible (“Details have disappeared in the process of reproduction,” Professor Cooper said), a further reason for his huge undertaking of the last dozen years.

“It’s not that others haven’t re-examined these sources,” he said. “There was a new Viennese edition of the sonatas issued by Schott around 1999-2001. It’s just that the examination hasn’t been carried out as well as it could, so there was still work to do.”

Professor Cooper’s work over all these years has been microscopic. It involves minutiae. And for the most part it doesn’t affect the notes themselves, merely the way they are to be played. But then in scholarship (and in performance at the highest level) there is no “merely.” Everything counts. And although Professor Cooper acknowledges that “you’d need to know the sonatas quite well to hear the difference a new edition makes,” he insisted that pianists would find new things and listeners will detect them.

“The notation of music has changed since 1800, and we have to stop and think about what Beethoven means when he writes a slur, a grace note, a staccato,” he said. “A lot of this is already in the academic books, but it hasn’t necessarily followed through to performance, partly because most pianists are not period specialists, and they’ve developed their own ways of playing core repertory like this over many years, but also because you don’t find the information in the printed music itself.”

Professor Cooper’s new edition comes with copious notes (and inserted CDs) expounding on the state of knowledge about all these things, including double bar lines, which are one of his special interests.

“Everyone,” he said, “knows what a double bar is” — the two perpendicular lines that conclude a section of the score — “but there’s no literature on double bars, nothing to tell you what they signify to the player. And though it’s a marking you can’t actually play, it does sound in performance because when pianists see it, they tend instinctively to slow up. So it’s significant.

“But Beethoven’s double bars don’t look like those of other composers of his time, and the ones in his manuscripts don’t match those in later printed editions. So there’s something to be investigated here. And I’ve done some investigation that I think will have real, practical consequences for how this music is played and received.”

Of more obvious consequence for the lay listener will be Professor Cooper’s views on speed. In only one sonata, the “Hammerklavier,” does Beethoven supply metronome marks, and most players find them too fast. When Tovey edited the sonata, he dismissed the first-movement marking altogether as impossible.

“We appreciate now that Beethoven’s speeds were surprisingly fast,” Professor Cooper said. “And it’s significant that when Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny wrote about the speed marking in the ‘Hammerklavier,’ he didn’t think it was impossible at all. He just said, ‘Work at it.’ Now I don’t think Czerny was always right, but I’ve taken the view in my edition that he was often a good guide.”

Professor Cooper’s edition does throw one blindingly obvious change at the music world. There are no longer 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, as books and performers will tell you, but 35. Not that Professor Cooper has discovered three more. Rather, he has reconsidered and admitted to the canon three early sonatas written when Beethoven was 12, usually set aside as juvenilia.

“I can find no reason why they shouldn’t be counted,” he said, “and indeed they were in the first complete edition of the sonatas, published just after Beethoven’s death by his friend Haslinger, who presumably knew what Beethoven wanted. They are fully fledged, three-movement works, and if they lack something in quality, you could say the same of some of the Opus 49 Sonatas, and you surely wouldn’t exclude those from the canon.

“A complete edition has to be complete, and if you ignore early works, you don’t show the longer trajectory of the composer’s development. There are ideas in the second one that resurface much later in the ‘Pathétique,’ ideas that Beethoven first expressed at the age of 12. I’d say that’s part of the story, wouldn’t you?”

One result of including these juvenile works is that the old numbering system for the sonatas, familiar to generations of musicians, no longer holds. Professor Cooper suggests that it is time to abandon those designations and just use opus numbers.

But the idea of 32 Beethoven sonatas is so embedded in public consciousness that it won’t easily be dislodged. Mr. Barenboim’s “complete” cycle in London remains at 32. But three extras may have an interesting effect on the wider world if a scientific study recently undertaken in (of all places) Tehran, Iran, can be believed.

According to this study, reported last November to the American Society for Neuroscience, prolonged exposure to the Beethoven piano sonatas has a quantifiably positive effect on people with depression. Whether more sonatas would make for even greater happiness was outside the study’s scope. But for what it’s worth, Professor Cooper, after an exposure more prolonged than most, is noticeably cheerful.