Beethoven’s third cello sonata was composed in early 1808, apparently between the completion of the Fifth Symphony and the main work on the Sixth, and its first movement has been the subject of much scholarly attention. This is partly because of the numerous alterations that appear in the autograph score, which differs in many details from the final version. Beethoven presumably wrote out a fair copy of the first movement afterwards, before publication, to go with the remaining movements, but this entire source has disappeared. The surviving autograph of the first movement, therefore, can be regarded as a composing score, and a published facsimile is enormously useful for studying the evolution of the movement and the difficulties he had in creating satisfactory textures.

The present facsimile, however, is by no means the first – in fact there are four precursors. The first appeared with a one-page introduction by Lewis Lockwood in 1970.Footnote ¹ A second one appeared in reduced size the same year along with a journal article by Lockwood, and both article and facsimile were reprinted in a separate volume in 1992.Footnote ² That same year the manuscript, by now owned by the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, was published in full colour for the first time, with commentary by Sieghard Brandenburg.Footnote ³ The manuscript can also now be consulted online through the Beethoven-Haus digital archive.Footnote ⁴ One might therefore question why yet another facsimile of the same item is needed. Would it not be more useful to publish at least one reproduction of what is arguably the most important source for the sonata – the corrected manuscript used for the first edition? Such corrected copies, which also survive for many other Beethoven works, deserve more attention in general, for very few have yet been published although they often contain the best text for the work in question. The copy of op. 69 was lost for many years, but it resurfaced in Amsterdam and has been known to the musical world since its discovery was announced by Albert Dunning in 1998.Footnote ⁵ Some of it has even been published in facsimile: in addition to 16 bars reproduced here, 12 of these and 39 others from the first movement (plus the start of the second movement) have been reproduced in Jonathan Del Mar’s edition of the Beethoven cello sonatas,Footnote ⁶ and they show that Beethoven’s revisions still continued even at this late stage. It would have been good to include this entire manuscript here, and perhaps a reproduction of all known sketches (as has been done for a few other works), so that all the known composing material from start to finish could be viewed in a single volume.

Nevertheless, the present publication must be welcomed, and it is remarkable that Lockwood has been able to add to his original study of this manuscript nearly half a century later. The volume contains fresh and detailed examination and analysis of certain aspects of the changing versions within the manuscript, and such commentary would be hard to grasp unless published alongside a facsimile. In addition to the facsimile itself there are two articles: ‘The Autograph of the Cello Sonata, op. 69, and its Role in the Creative Process’ by Jens Dufner (pp. 21–36); and ‘On Beethoven’s Revision of the First Movement of the Cello Sonata in A Major, Opus 69’ by Lockwood (pp. 37–54). The articles appear in both German and English in parallel columns, translated by J. Bradford Robinson and Bernhard R. Appel respectively. The full-colour facsimile is supplemented by some artificial colour in some of the additional music examples, to highlight particular notes in the facsimile.

Dufner provides a useful overview of the origins of the manuscript and how it underwent stages of correction, and he includes detailed comments on a few specific passages. Although the final reading in the manuscript is generally clear, deciphering the various changes underneath it to see how it was arrived at is more challenging. Mostly Dufner is very perceptive at sorting out the various layers, but occasionally he could have gone further. In bars 71–72, for example, he says: ‘There is no definitive answer as to whether the second note (g♯ ²) or the third note (b ²) in each measure was intended to replace the one that was deleted’ (p. 32). Close inspection, however, leaves no doubt that Beethoven originally wrote the first three notes in each bar as e b a♯, before changing the figure to e g♯ b. Both versions superseded an even earlier version that was smudged out. This version was ‘intended to be heard intermittently’, in Robinson’s translation (p. 32), but Dufner’s German text correctly indicates that it was actually just intended for a time (‘zeitweise’); Beethoven rapidly changed his mind even before the ink had dried. The left hand at the same point shows changes that ‘cannot be unraveled at all’ (p. 33). Again, it is in fact possible to be fairly confident about the sequence of alterations, although this is slightly less clear than for the right hand. Noteworthy here, too, is the appearance of two ‘Vi=’ marks without any corresponding ‘=de’. Such an omission is not unusual in Beethoven’s manuscripts, and so it is improbable that the ‘=de’ here ‘might equally have been located on a separate leaf’ (p. 38), when a perfectly good continuation is already present on the adjacent stave.

Dufner’s transcriptions, too, are not always very precise – for example, stem directions may be altered or spurious rests inserted, and there is occasional inaccuracy (left-hand dots are omitted in Fig. 4b, bar 41, on p. 29). As he rightly points out, however, the importance of the revisions lies not so much in precise details as in the overall effect. They relate to textural and registral elements, with the structure remaining absolutely fixed apart from the late insertion of one extra bar (bar 139). The cello sonata was still such an unusual genre in 1808 that Beethoven had not fully explored all the textural possibilities of the relationship between the two instruments, and could do so only in a composing score where the whole texture was visible, rather than in single-stave sketches such as he normally used in his preparatory material.

Lockwood’s account builds on his earlier one of 1970, and inevitably there is some duplication of ideas. He suggests that there were many more such composing scores from Beethoven’s middle period, which is plausible if rather lacking in firm evidence. He also notes that his aims are slightly different from those of Brandenburg, who created an ‘earliest version’ of each bar of the movement, regardless of whether these versions were necessarily intended to fit together at any one time. Lockwood instead focuses on the development section, where the revisions are most extensive. He had already described these in his earlier article, and so the present one addresses two main questions – the significance of the changes to the development section, and what compositional problems they solve. His ingenious analysis of register by means of labelling five different octaves that are available for both instruments enables some important new insights about these revisions, which create within the development a sense of ‘registral climax’ not present in the early version (page 43). Lockwood’s excellent parallel transcriptions of the earliest and final versions of this section, from bar 99 to bar 154, are enormously helpful here. This part of his discussion complements that in his 1970 article, where he compared the earliest version to the latest one in the manuscript, which differs considerably from both the earliest version and the published one. It is perhaps a little surprising that he does not draw attention to this, or put all three versions side by side. The text here gives no hint that the latest version in the manuscript shows any differences from the final one, and so his claim that the development ‘shows only one basic layer of corrections’ (p. 44) is liable to be misinterpreted.

The volume as a whole, then, is of considerable use, especially for those who do not have the facsimile edited by Brandenburg (now out of print). It would, however, have benefited from a more careful study of the passages addressed by Dufner; a more detailed account of the middle of the development section, with a transcription of the intermediate version as well as the earliest and latest; and ideally a reproduction of the copyist’s score used for the first edition.