April 2010 News Archive
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Bärenreiter to issue new Urtext Edition of Dvořák Symphony No 7 edited by Dvořák Society member Jonathan Del Mar
First posted 16 April 2010
Bärenreiter is to issue a new Urtext Edition of Dvořák’s Symphony No 7 in D minor, Op 70 (B 141), edited by our member Jonathan Del Mar.
In Dvořák Society Newsletter No 91 (April 2010) Jonathan writes —
“Bärenreiter asked me to do a new edition of the Dvořák Cello Concerto, a hugely important but also problematic task, with so many crucial discrepancies between all the different authentic sources. Dvořák was a new area for me (I’ve been occupied exclusively with Beethoven for the last fifteen years) so I thought I’d better cut my teeth, find out how Dvořák worked, on something a bit simpler first. Knowing that Symphony No 7 was relatively simple textually (we’ve all been playing the Artia edition for decades without any significant problems) I decided to start on that. And indeed, my new edition will have no startling new revelations; readers will be delighted to know that it is still exactly the same piece as it was before.
Jonathan Del Mar
“And yet: the new edition will bring two things that are new. Firstly there will be a full and detailed Critical Commentary, in which all textual discrepancies and controversies are discussed; secondly &mndash; now here is something exciting! — we are resuscitating, in an appendix to both score and parts, the First (London) Version of the slow movement. Many readers may not be aware that, as first performed at St James’s Hall on 22 April 1885, the Poco Adagio was called an Andante sostenuto, and was 40 bars longer than the final, published version. Much of the development section comes round twice in different keys, culminating in a full recapitulation, the opening melody given gorgeously in A major on divided cellos. After the performance Dvořák decided it was too long, cut the 40 bars out, and wrote to his publisher Simrock: ‘I now feel certain that there is not one note too many.’ But the original version also has many moments of beauty… .
“Ever since the Velvet Revolution, conductors and orchestras have been hampered by the non-availability of performing materials of the Dvořák Symphonies, and now at last a start is being made to rectify this. Full score and orchestral parts of Symphony No 7 [are expected to] be available on sale in September 2010, and in due course a study score will also appear.”
