Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Music publishers Bärenreiter have rightly received loud applause for their recent scholarly performing urtext editions of Beethoven’s music.
Of particular interest to Pianodao readers, Jonathan Del Mar’s edition of the complete Piano Sonatas (reviewed here) was a milestone that was soon joined in the catalogue by Mario Aschauer’s landmark Diabelli Variations edition (reviewed here).
Aschauer has now brought as an exhaustively Complete Bagatelles edition that further consolidates the publisher’s lead in this repertoire.
A Bagatelle (French, “trifle”) is by definition a “short piece in a lighter style”, and Beethoven’s, which include the evergreen Für Elise, are surely among the most famous of all. Indeed, it is probably not overstating their importance to say that they set the musical scene for the character pieces which became such a popular staple of the domestic piano repertoire in the Romantic Era.
For the developing pianist, meanwhile, these pieces offer an important bridge between Beethoven’s easy dances and his monumental Sonata cycle. No wonder that they have long been recognised as an indispensable part of the early advanced repertoire, essential for players at around UK Grades 6-7.
Complete, for the first time…
A quick check of the Henle urtext edition (HN 158, which I have relied upon over the years) reminds us that Beethoven published three sets of Bagatelles in his lifetime, Op.33 (published 1803), Op.119 (1821-22) and Op.126 (1825), as well as leaving a couple of unpublished works.
Henle inexplicably don’t include Für Elise in their edition, an annoyance or a relief depending on your perspective. In contrast, Bärenreiter include not only the version that we know and love, but also Aschauer’s fully performable completion of the composer’s later version of the piece, recently published for the first time as a single edition which I have reviewed here.
That second version of Für Elise was discovered after Beethoven’s death in an envelope labelled “Bagatelles”, alongside nine other pieces and two further revisions of bagatelles. These pieces all now appear in the new Bärenreiter Complete Bagatelles volume, and for the first time ever, indisputably thereby establishing this as another important landmark in the publishing of Beethoven’s music.
Another notable (if less consequential) innovation of this new edition is that Aschauer has presented the eleven Bagatelles of Op.119 as two separate sets with five and six pieces respectively, as Beethoven originally intended.
In addition to the 92 pages of the music edition itself, Bärenreiter’s handsome 132-page publication includes a thorough 17-page Preface (19 in German) outlining the history and provenance of all these pieces, and including five pages outlining suitable performance practice, covering legato, pedalling, articulation, dynamics and embellishments.
The Critical Commentary at the rear of the book is, as expected, rich in detail, and will be useful to anyone digging deep into this music and wanting to compare with previous editions used.
The publication itself appears in Bärenreiter’s usual house style; the music engraving offers superb clarity, is generously spaced, and is presented on the best luxury cream paper for ease of reading.
Concluding Thoughts
As the publishers remind us,
“The Bagatelles reflect Beethoven’s diverse compositional cosmos in miniature and span almost his entire oeuvre from 1801-2 to 1824-5.”
Those who wish to explore this cosmos as never before, enthusiastic to encounter previously undiscovered constellations while digging deeper than ever into established nebulae, will need no further convincing.
Aschauer’s landmark Bärenreiter edition will surely be an essential purchase for performers and scholars alike. For students and younger players however, it is worth mentioning that no fingering is included. For the more established works here, there are of course plenty of alternatives.
But Aschauer’s edition sets a higher bar for this music, and is exactly the sort of music scholarship that we should welcome, equally enlivening our curiosity and enlightening our understanding of these miniature masterpieces, while reasserting their importance both within Beethoven’s keyboard output and the piano repertoire of the nineteenth century.
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