{"id":5819,"date":"2020-03-23T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-03-23T07:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.henle.de\/blog\/en\/?p=5819"},"modified":"2020-03-23T06:51:11","modified_gmt":"2020-03-23T05:51:11","slug":"from-the-beginnings-of-the-beethoven-complete-editions-in-the-19th-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/2020\/03\/23\/from-the-beginnings-of-the-beethoven-complete-editions-in-the-19th-century\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d yesterday and today \u2013 from the beginnings of the Beethoven complete edition(s) in the 19th century"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With kind permission by the Beethoven-Haus Bonn<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Only what we have as whole, do we truly have \u2013 that, of course, also applies to Beethoven, so it\u2019s hardly surprising that there are an astonishing number of hits in the Beethoven year when googling \u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d. Searching by key terms such as \u201cComplete Works\u201d or \u201cComplete Edition\u201d quickly teaches us, however, that today Beethoven is more likely to be heard than read or played. Coming up as first hits long before Henle\u2019s well-known scholarly complete edition<\/a> are large concerto cycles or huge CD productions covering his entire oeuvre \u2013 and with Beethoven going viral over the entire world. That\u2019s natural today \u2013 and in a time of coronavirus it is at least an opportunity to deal with \u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d despite closed museums, concert halls and opera houses. But what was it like before? And since when has there been this interest in \u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d?<\/p>\n

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The perhaps surprising answer is: as early as Beethoven\u2019s lifetime. After all, the fact that we view the legacies of a great artist as a whole work and commemorate it after his death may indeed still be viable. But that the creator himself pursued this idea shows first of all a fair degree of self-confidence, though it also reflects a certain zeitgeist<\/em>. The idea of a classical artwork outlasting time became popular in the age of the classics. Authors such as Christoph Martin Wieland or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe felt compelled to publish correct editions of all their works. This led in music at the end of the 18th century to the emergence of series called Oeuvres Complettes<\/em>, in which publishing houses, from small firms like Spehr\u2019s \u201cMagasin de musique\u201d in Braunschweig or C. F. Lehmann in Leipzig, to giants like Breitkopf & H\u00e4rtel, above all, acknowledged the piano and chamber-music works of such well-known and successful composers as Mozart, Haydn or Clementi.<\/p>\n

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No wonder that in his desire for \u201ca collected edition of my works\u201d in August 1810, Beethoven also first turned to Breitkopf \u2013 whereupon the publisher made it clear to him that this project was hardly realistic. Not least because, on the one hand, many of his compositions had already been printed by so many and various publishers that legal problems existed, and on the other, because large sales were not to be expected. This was the target of the really \u201ccheap\u201d Breitkopf series of Oeuvres Complettes.<\/em><\/p>\n

For these reasons Beethoven\u2019s further attempts to have a complete edition of his works published by Simrock, Peters, Haslinger or Schott remained unsuccessful \u2013 though this does not mean that there was no complete Beethoven edition during the composer\u2019s lifetime! For other publishers were less scrupulous, for example, the versatile musician and entrepreneur Carl Zulehner in Mainz. Between 1802 and 1809 he had already succeeded in \u201crealising the idea of a complete Beethoven edition in a respectable approach thanks to the safe exploitation of the territorial conditions of his time as the first publisher\u201d \u2013 as Kurt Dorfm\u00fcller, grand seigneur of Beethoven publishing research, so beautifully worded it.<\/p>\n

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Wiener Zeitung, 1803. With kind permission by the Beethoven-Haus Bonn<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

That means, plainly: In his Collection complette des oeuvres de musique pour le piano forte compos\u00e9es par Louis van Beethoven<\/em>, Zulehner simply reprinted the composer\u2019s works that had already appeared in far-off Vienna, Leipzig or London, without concerning himself about Beethoven\u2019s consent or taking into account the original publishers\u2019 rights! Beethoven was, accordingly, \u201cnot amused\u201d and published explicit \u201cwarnings\u201d in the Vienna and Leipzig press in the autumn of 1803 about this \u201ccopycat engraver in Maynz\u201d.<\/p>\n

Zulehner\u2019s edition did not of course offer \u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d: Since, as was customary at the time with Oeuvres Complettes<\/em>, it was limited to piano and chamber music, together with lieder accompanied by piano, and since no previously unprinted works were included. And \u201clacking\u201d, of course, were ultimately the future works of this composer who was at his creative zenith in 1809.<\/p>\n

As is hardly otherwise to be expected, after Beethoven\u2019s death in 1827, numerous publishers came on the market with \u201ccomplete editions\u201d of the most various sorts: whether \u201cBeethoven\u2019s symphonies\u201d, arranged by Carl Czerny as piano duets for domestic consumption (published by Probst in Leipzig) or arranged by Johann Nepomuk Hummel for piano quartet (published by Chappel & Co in London), or Haslinger\u2019s large-scale undertaking of \u201cAll the Works by Ludw. Van Beethoven\u201d, announced in December 1828 as available by subscription. That edition, to be organised in 12 sections from piano music to chamber music, with and without piano, to solo concertos (in score) and symphonies (in parts), did not de facto get beyond 66 works in nine sections, but was definitely the attempt coming closest to our present idea of a complete edition. Since Haslinger included only works in his edition whose rights he either owned or was given by other publishers, he was doomed to fail: of the concertos only Op. 15 was published in full score, the symphonies were discontinued after three editions (Opp. 36, 55 and 60).<\/p>\n

The single successful, systematic project of a complete edition at that time could only be realised by a more unscrupulous publisher: In his Collection Compl\u00e8te des Oeuvres pour le Pianoforte […] compos\u00e9es par Louis van Beethoven<\/em>, published from 1829, Franz Philipp Dunst, who seems only to have given the original publisher rights little consideration, managed within a few years to produce a complete edition of the piano and piano chamber music as well as a \u201cComplete Collection of all the Songs with Piano Accompaniment\u201d in 4 sections and 127 single volumes. With this edition he delivered for the first time the \u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d that could be realised at home on and around the piano. Included were first editions such as the piano trios WoO 38 and 39, whose authenticity and origin Dunst explained on a specially inserted leaf and had signed by Anton Diabelli, Carl Czerny and Ferdinand Ries.<\/p>\n

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Beethoven, title pages of the first edition of WoO 38
\n<\/em>With kind permission by the Beethoven-Haus Bonn<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

So, by the way, Dunst also introduced another not insignificant innovation in chamber music works: the piano part as a full score, which considerably facilitates making music together and also allows the work to be read. It is nice that this type of presentation has prevailed over the long term \u2013 so that even today, despite currently limited cultural offers and opportunities for making music together, we can at least enjoy \u201cBeethoven Complete\u201d by reaching into the music cabinet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only what we have as whole, do we truly have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[276,3,272],"tags":[7,729,728,730,731,732],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5819"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5833,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5819\/revisions\/5833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.henle.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}