This new Urtext edition of Beethoven's 12 violin sonatas, edited by Clive Brown, contains what Bärenreiter describes as ‘The Pinnacle of Violin Music’. Many other publishers, performers, listeners and scholars have agreed, so that there are numerous editions available to choose from today. As Clive Brown points out in his introduction to Volume I, these works’ early popularity is demonstrated by the many editions of individual sonatas by German, British and French publishers in the decades immediately following their composition. The later nineteenth century then saw the publication of a plethora of editions with numerous performance instructions by well-known violinists of the era such as Ferdinand David, Jean Delphin Alard and Joseph Joachim. The 1860s brought not only the beginnings of the Beethoven Complete Works edition, but also published volumes dedicated to the complete sonatas for violin and piano. Nor are Brown's volumes the first Urtext editions of these works. The Henle Urtext of Beethoven's violin sonatas, edited by Sieghard Brandenburg, appeared in two volumes in 1974.Footnote ¹ So the question naturally arises as to what Clive Brown's volumes have to offer that is new.

The short answer is: a great deal, especially for the performer and anyone interested in nineteenth-century performance practice. The two volumes (BA 9014/BA 9015) contain much more than their purely musical contents, the five sonatas in each. Volume I has the Sonatas in D major, A major, and E-flat major Op. 12, nos. 1–3; the Sonata in A minor Op. 23; and the Sonata in F major Op. 24 (“Spring”). Volume II contains the Sonatas in A major, C minor and G major Op. 30 nos. 1–3; the Sonata in A major Op. 47; and the Sonata in G major Op. 96. In addition, in the piano parts one finds detailed introductions with historical background (on the works' context, early performance and publication); the chapter ‘Reading between the lines of Beethoven's notation’ (German and English); and information on historical metronome markings and the Critical Commentary (English).

So extensive are Brown's comments on performance practice that the editor and publisher wisely decided to publish these partly online, on a specially dedicated website.Footnote ² The section on performance practice appears in a digital chapter of some 134 pages, for PDF download. Whereas violin techniques are well covered in the editions themselves, this digital document includes in-depth discussion of piano matters (arpeggiation and asynchrony, instruments, pedals); a great many insights derived from the 12 nineteenth-century editions that Brown has consulted in depth in preparing the two volumes; and further information on these late nineteenth-century editions in terms of metronome markings and tempo. Most of this digital document is taken up with a detailed commentary, containing notes on performance keyed to the relevant bars in each movement. These notes on performance draw heavily on Brown's findings in the early editions. So the overall effect of this website material is to give what we have traditionally considered ‘secondary sources’ a much more prominent role than they had previously been accorded.

Sceptics will want to know why one might accord these nineteenth-century editions any status at all, let alone allowing them to inform such a detailed (if ultimately ancillary) commentary. But it is here that Brown is breaking a new path – and indeed furthering a new paradigm – in editorial method. As Brown cogently argues in the Introduction to Volume I, after the spate of what we today often consider over-annotated editions of the later nineteenth century, twentieth century editors executed a clean-up job, scraping away the perceived editorial accretions to get back to some kind of ‘original’. But, as Brown also notes, that ‘original’ is oftentimes far from helpful for the modern-day performer. Speaking of early nineteenth-century performance he observes: ‘Spontaneity and variety were aspects of music-making in the Viennese Classical period … It was much more an aural culture than today, with greater dependence, especially in chamber music, on listening and responding, than upon conscientious observance of the notation’ (xii). Beethoven was a composer who pushed music notation to a new level of detail, including more, and more diverse, markings (articulation, dynamics, performance indications) than many of his contemporaries. Yet there are still many gaps and ambiguities that the modern editor needs to address before the modern performer will have a good idea of the range of viable historically informed performance options for any given work.Footnote ³

As Brown has argued, both in these new volumes and elsewhere, late nineteenth-century editions give us insights into this range of performance options.Footnote ⁴ One needs to keep in mind that the idea of an unbroken and unchanging performance tradition stretching back to Beethoven – or even of an ‘organic’ development in concepts of stylish performance as Brown has it (x) – is hard to justify, especially given that new generations of performers have sought to add their personal stamp to their Beethoven editions and performances. Brown's scrutiny of multiple nineteenth-century sources allows him to provide guidance on how performers of Beethoven's day would have understood and responded to the composer's notation in ways different to those that have become usual since the twentieth century (xiii).

Perhaps most enlightening of all in the online material is a series of six short YouTube clips, found in the ‘Multimedia’ section, which contain six snippets from rehearsals of the sonatas using Brown's editions by Viktoria Mullova (violin) and Alasdair Beatson (fortepiano). Mullova and Beatson bring the editions to life not just through playing, but also in their discussions of revelatory passages. For example, in the first clip they discuss the ending of the ‘Spring’ Sonata (Volume I) in which Clive Brown has provided a different bowing to that found in most other editions (finale, bars 229–232), and some suggested changes to the ornaments as a footnote.Footnote ⁵ He observes that the engraver of the first edition was sloppy here, and he restores Beethoven's bowing. The result is much less foursquare and makes this ‘afterthought’ into an exuberant lilting dance, entirely appropriate to the sonata's affect.

Several other aspects of the autograph are also taken into account for the first time here. One example is found in the Tempo di Minuetto second movement of the Sonata in G major, Op. 30 No. 3 (Volume II). In this movement Beethoven uses a stroke above two notes (dotted quaver–semiquaver) to denote a rest, as found in the eighteenth-century keyboard treatise Über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen by C.P.E. Bach. This notational symbol was included in the first edition published during Beethoven's lifetime; in this edition Brown restores and explains its significance, and also, for example, the use of a score through a note to denote an arpeggiated chord.

Richard Kramer's review of Brandenberg's 1974 editions of these sonatas addresses another significant notational matter. Kramer took exception to Brandenburg's blanket use, with one exception in Op. 23, of dots where Beethoven's manuscripts show various gradations of accents from clear-cut dots to large daggers.Footnote ⁶ Brown uses strokes throughout, except under slurs where Beethoven, and other composers of the day, almost invariably used unambiguous dots to indicate portato (especially in the context of chamber music). This is surely the right approach to this notation in an era in which theorists and composers alike disagreed as to the meaning of dots and strokes in terms of weight and degree of detachment. Theorists often referred the performer to the larger context – to take into account tempo, dynamics, key and overall affect in determining how to read articulation markings.

In short, Brown provides an almost overwhelming amount of relevant information on how to ‘read between the lines’ in these Urtext editions, to arrive at performances that Beethoven's contemporaries might have recognized, enjoyed and found ‘beautiful’. And there is more such information to come: in preparation is Brown's new Bärenreiter book, Performing Practices in Viennese Chamber Music from Haydn to Beethoven. Only the scholar interested in genesis and compositional process is less well served by these volumes, as Kramer also found with Brandenburg's editions. For those wishing to explore the works’ genesis there are, increasingly, facsimile editions, such as that for Op. 96; and a great deal of material available online through the Beethoven-Haus Digital Archives, among other places.Footnote ⁷ Brown's edition looks not backwards into genesis, but forward into the Beethoven sonata's reception and performance, leaving the performer interested in historically informed performance extremely well endowed.