Take Note

Jonathan Del Mar

For a conductor music starts with Beethoven. And for the son of a conductor both can start very early, as they did for Jonathan Del Mar, Beethoven scholar and editor of the new edition of Beethoven’s nine symphonies for Bärenreiter.

In 1949 Del Mar’s father, conductor Norman Del Mar, purchased a copy of the 1924 facsimile of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, which he studied with Jonathan when he was still a child. The younger Del Mar, whose career also began as a conductor, remarks, “Had it not been for our possession of this endlessly fascinating document, it must remain doubtful whether my interest in Beethoven’s handwriting, and my work on his autographs, would ever have begun.”

Jonathan Del Mar’s edition of the nine symphonies for Bärenreiter, completed in 2000, has become the preferred edition for many renowned conductors worldwide.

“We all are amongst those of gratitude to Jonathan Del Mar who simply did the work to give us the first, really true edition of what this music was.”

— Sir Simon Rattle

The most monumental symphony of them all, the Ninth, was the first of the new edition to be published, and it was in preparing this edition of this very special symphony that Del Mar made one of his most thrilling discoveries. Aware of the many mistakes that had been included in previous editions, Del Mar went over every detail once more, paying careful attention to the horn ties in bars 532-40 of the final movement — those very horns that call out to help us transition from the “Turkish” march into the choir’s famously triumphant declaration of the central theme of the movement: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium” (“Joy, beautiful spark of divinity / Daughter from Elysium”). Del Mar describes this revelatory moment:

“When I looked at those Horn ties again, I saw nothing. And then I looked a third time, and thought I saw something. And then, heart palpitating madly, I looked very carefully a fourth time, and at last saw what Beethoven had actually written. It was so extraordinary, so unexpected, that I could not believe what my eyes were telling me — because this changed the music of such an incredibly well-known passage so completely.”

Listen to the Berlin Philharmonic play this section: