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In late 1814 and early 1815, Beethoven spent a good deal of time on a project that never reached completion: a piano concerto in D major, which would if completed have been the sixth. He made about seventy pages of sketches for the first movement. He even started writing out a full score (MS Artaria 184 in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), which runs almost uninterrupted from the beginning of the movement to the middle of the solo exposition-although the scoring becomes patchy as the work proceeds and there are signs of indecision or dissatisfaction on the composer's part. For whatever reason, Beethoven abandoned the work, and this torso of a movement (known to Beethoven scholars as Hess 15) remains one of the most substantial of Beethoven's unrealized conceptions.
Making sense of the abandoned full score, and of the sketches that go with it, is a challenging task. One reason for this is that the score has at some time been bound with its pages in the wrong order, resulting in erroneous interpretations of the music. But there are other, more basic challenges. The score starts confidently enough, posing little more than standard editorial problems. But as it continues, the difficulties multiply. Sometimes this just means that the score is incomplete, as in the second (solo) exposition, where there is little more than the piano part (itself sometimes telegraphic). That's not too hard: you can quite easily come up with a plausible realization, based on the parallel passages in the first (tutti) exposition as well as Beethoven's style as represented in other works. But there are times when Beethoven has written down alternative and incompatible versions of the music without choosing between them, or crossed something out without writing in a replacement, or piled corrections on top of one another to the extent that they become impossible to read. On such occasions you have to make compositional decisions, selecting some of Beethoven's alternatives as against others, or working out the consequences of ideas which Beethoven toyed with but then rejected.
And there you have the central dilemma of a performing edition like this. You cannot ‘complete’ the work in the sense of ending up with what Beethoven would have ended up with had he completed it himself. It is impossible to know what compositional decisions he would have made, and the fact is that, for whatever reason, he abandoned the work. In other words Beethoven's Sixth Piano Concerto does not exist. But when you read the score it is possible to form a clear impression of what Beethoven had in mind as he was working on it. The aim of this performing edition is to translate that impression into a performable state and so make it accessible to listeners.
From the start to bar 182, the music corresponds bar by bar to Beethoven's score: though many of the notes are not Beethoven’s, especially as the movement proceeds, the music is as he mapped it out. But at bar 182 Beethoven's score breaks off. There is some evidence in the sketches to suggest-what you might in any case expect-that, at one stage at least, Beethoven was intending a relatively conventional concerto form movement. But this performing edition does not attempt to reconstruct such a movement, and instead takes a pragmatic approach. The aim is to create something that can be programmed in a concert (maybe at the beginning, like an overture), that contains as high a proportion as possible of Beethoven's own music, and that gives listeners a snapshot of what was in Beethoven’s mind before he gave up on the project. It also contains some attractive music.
The original version of this performing edition dates back to 1987, and was the joint work of Nicholas Cook and Kelina Kwan, both at that time of Hong Kong University. A major revision was made by Nicholas Cook in 1989, and a series of smaller revisions over the following years. In 2015 a further significant revision was made in collaboration with Hermann Dechant; in particular the coda (from bar 432 to the end) is Dechant’s work, while the original cadenza was replaced by one jointly composed by Dechant and Margit Haider-Dechant, who played the solo part at a performance in Bonn during April 2015.
A recording of this performing edition in its 1989 form, played by Maurizio Paciariello with Sassari Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Roberto Diem Tigani, was released in 2005 on ‘Beethoven Rarities 4’ (Inedita PI 2352).
For further information....
Lewis Lockwood, `Beethoven's unfinished piano concerto of 1815: sources and problems'. Musical Quarterly, 56 (1970), 624 46
Nicholas Cook, 'Beethoven's unfinished piano concerto: a case of double vision?', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 38-74
Nicholas Cook, 'A performing edition of Beethoven's Sixth Piano Concerto?' Beethoven Newsletter 8/3-9/1 (1994), 71-80
Nicholas Cook
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