Ludwig van Beethoven: The secrets in his Violin Concerto Op. 61

Beethoven’s Violin Concerto Op. 61 is today among the most frequently played works for violin and orchestra, and it was the first piece I studied at the beginning of my master’s degree at the Mozarteum Salzburg with Professor Igor Ozim. Professor Ozim somehow managed to obtain a copy of the manuscript and brought it into a lesson one day.

As I discovered, a facsimile had appeared in the 1960s reproducing in great detail every entry made by the composer. When I then received my first — and by no means last — engagement to perform this concerto with symphony orchestra, in Albania with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra there, I began to compare the customary Urtext edition meticulously with the manuscript.

Unfortunately even Urtext editions make many mistakes. If you trace the common editions of Mozart’s sonatas and concertos back to the manuscript and the first printing, you would very quickly be disappointed by their accuracy. Editors add dynamics where they considered them sensible, without indicating that these are not the composer’s markings. Appoggiaturas too are altered. I had already examined this when recording my CD Dialog mit Mozart — and most recently with the piano trios.

But compared with what I found in the Beethoven concerto, the “Urtext” errors in Mozart’s works were fairly insignificant. Although mentioned in no edition, it turned out that in many places — particularly in the first and second movements — Beethoven wrote an additional ossia violin part. When Beethoven did not want to use something he had written, when he began a melody and decided to write it differently, he crossed it out. With great passion. But in this concerto he very often left two possibilities standing.

This other version does not always offer new musical material — mostly it shows different possibilities for the same material. Whether a repeating arpeggio in A major is played as a triplet or divided into four makes no musical difference. I therefore suspect that Beethoven — who wrote this concerto for Franz Clement, concertmaster and orchestra director at the Theater an der Wien — chose together with the soloist which version should go into the first printing. Many passages would also have been too high, too difficult.

On the other hand, some alternatives really do offer new musical material — such as the beginning of the development of the first movement, where at one of the most transparent and magical moments in classical music a different scale follows, far more playful and inquisitive, with more strained harmonic combinations. Unlike what we are used to; a different atmosphere arises.