Detlef Hahn discusses the new Bärenreiter edition of Beethoven’s violin concerto:
The solo violin part of the new Bärenreiter edition of Beethoven’s violin concerto is a close collaboration between Jonathan DelMar and myself. It is now available in all good music shops. My student, Bjarne Magnus Jensen, played the highly acclaimed world premier of this newly edited violin part last year, at the State Academy Oslo, with the college orchestra, with Andrew Manze as conductor.
My aim for this new edition was to wipe the slate clean and present an edition, which Beethoven might have hopefully recognized as his work, and not of generations of players adding their own idiosyncrasies. For this reason I have tried to stay as close as possible to Beethoven’s bowings and articulations. To play it in this way requires very fine bow control, but it is certainly worth the effort, since the concerto comes to life in an entirely different and musically satisfying way.
What I eradicated throughout the solo part were the ‘upside-down’ bowings, which have been made fashionable in the nineteen sixties by pedagogues like Rostal and others. Their argument was that playing in this way offers more possibilities and is more ‘violinistic’. It also asserts, quite unjustifiably, that playing in this way offers more musical possibilities. I however think that this makes many phrases and articulations sound flat and uninteresting, and is not right for Beethoven, since it interferes with the musical idiom of the composer. Good violinists can most certainly start phrases on a down-bow when the weight distribution of the music requires this – despite its occasional awkwardness. The often quoted argument that the ‘Tourte bow’, which became fashionable during Beethoven’s time, offers more musical and technical possibilities, is of course true. The development of the romantic repertoire would be unthinkable without it. But Beethoven was essentially a classical composer, indebted to a different musical idiom and technique than the romantic movement. The ‘rule of down bow’ is still clearly evident in his phrasings. A newer and better bow does certainly not justify turning bowings on their head simply because it offers other possibilities. Even with the finest bow, a down bow has a different feel than an up-bow, simply because our body and arms (and our musical imagination) respond to it in this way.
My fingerings in the solo violin part came from my experience of what I found helpful during the many times I performed this concerto. Some were taken from other editions, despite having ideas of my own, because these fingerings were excellent and nothing needed to be changed. But then, fingerings are something individual as well, not only dependent on the size of hands and fingers, which are different with every player, but also dependent on the system of scales and arpeggios (and the rules attached) with which players have grown up with. My fingerings are intended here as mere suggestions, although I have tried to do justice to the polyphonic writing as well as to the ‘one melody-one string’ technique. Both ways of playing were used during Beethoven’s time. I have also added some ‘glissando fingerings’, most notably in bars 300 etc. where Beethoven puts ‘espressivo’ as a performing instruction. In studying the fingerings of the violinists of this time, it is striking to discover how often they use the same finger to slide during expressive passages. This might shed some light on why it is assumed that they might not have used a continuous vibrato as much as violinists do today, and instead, used an expressive vibrato occasionally, and when the music required it. This inspires me to think that although the energy of a tone relies heavily on a vibrato in contemporary players, the vibrato was however only one of the many expressive ingredients used in Beethoven’s time. The age old discussion of using vibrato or no vibrato is a very black and white argument. We must not forget that every good sound produced on the violin comes from an alive and expressive left hand’s mutually integrated dialogue with the bow, not a dead hand, and so the discussion should rather concentrate on the degrees of a vibrato – from almost unnoticeable vibrato to powerful, and not from existent to non existent. The expressive scope in Beethoven’s time was obviously much richer than we imagine it today, using many other ways of musical expression apart from vibrato, of which glissando, imitating the singing human voice, was one of them.
I hope this edition will satisfy and inspire an ever growing new generation of fine violinists, who are willing to venture through different paths with this wonderful concerto.
Yesterday I received a copy of ‘Le Carnival Russe’ by Wieniawski, for which I was the performance consultant of the violin part. ‘Faust’, for which I also was the performance consultant, will be out in the shops very soon. The aim of this new edition by the Polish Wieniawski society was to publish everything as Wieniawski left behind – so, what you get are his fingerings and his bowings. This is a wonderful project and brings us as close as possible to Wieniawski and his expressive world. There are other works already published, most notably the ‘école moderne’ and ‘etudes caprices’, for which my friend, the wonderful violinist Piotr Janowski, who sadly died last year, was the performance consultant. If you do not find these excellent new editions in the shops, you might try to order them directly from the Wieniawski Society, 61-840 Poznan, Swietoslawska 7, Poland.
Written by Detlef Hahn
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