I

‘HONOUR TO BEETHOVEN.’ Turning to page 263 of The Musical World for 29 May 1845, the reader would have encountered this eye-catching heading to an advertisement in the top left-hand corner. The notice, dated 8 May, was placed by the publisher R. Cocks and Co. to

By ‘the Beethoven Society of London’ was meant the Beethoven Quartett Society, founded in 1845 by Thomas Massa Alsager, although one of its chief purposes, to introduce the almost unknown and unappreciated late quartets to a discerning audience, was already in his mind some three years earlier.Footnote ¹⁰ Each of the five late quartets – the Grosse Fuge, op. 133 went unplayed – was programmed along with an early and a middle-period work in the series of five fortnightly concerts in 1845 that constituted the first complete Beethoven quartet cycle ever to be performed:

• 21 April: op. 18 no. 1; op. 59 no. 3; op. 127

• 5 May: op. 18 no. 3; op. 59 no. 1; op. 131

• 19 May: op. 18 no. 4; op. 74; op. 132

• 2 June: op. 18 nos. 2 and 6; op. 95; op. 135

• 16 June: op. 18 no. 5; op. 59 no. 2; op. 130

An important element in Alsager’s quest for performances that would be truly worthy of the greatness of these works, and the late quartets in particular, was consistency of personnel; as he had expressed it in a letter to Mendelssohn of 14 June 1842, ‘The obvious & direct mode is that of inducing four players to make a careful study of those wonderful quartetts & then to collect an audience of professional musicians to hear them performed.’Footnote ¹¹ Thus The Musical World could announce already on 1 May 1845 that ‘Mr Alsager has secured the services of Messrs. [Henri] Vieuxtemps, [Camillo] Sivori, [Henry] Hill, and [Scipion] Rousselot, for a series of five seances; the performance to consist of the quartets of Beethoven’, noting in addition that Prosper Sainton had substituted for Sivori, who was yet to arrive in London, for the already concluded first concert.Footnote ¹² And implicit in the project to raise awareness and appreciation of the little-known late quartets was their performance from an accurate musical text; thus, given the short period of time between the first of the five ‘seances’ and the 8 May advertisement placed by Cocks and Co., it may be assumed that the plan to produce a new, authoritative edition of the quartets was part of Alsager’s plan for the Society from the outset.

That Beethoven’s late quartets were regarded not merely as works to be performed – and performed accurately – but as objects of study and intellectual enquiry was recognized by their earliest reviewers, and marked by their unconventional (near-)simultaneous publication in both parts and score. ‘We must be aware of great gratitude toward the Schott music firm for making the works of our Beethoven available to us in score’, runs an anonymous 1828 notice in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung zur Beförderung der theoretischen und praktischen Tonkunst for the newly published score of the Quartet in C♯ minor, op. 131, ‘for such works must be studied most urgently by prospective artists. But such a score is likewise very welcome for works that present such great difficulties in performance’. Even earlier, and allowing for commercial interest in boosting sales, Schott emphasized in a notice in Cäcilia the benefit they were providing in issuing the Quartet in E♭, op. 127 in score in 1826: purchase was recommended ‘not just to students of harmony but to all those […] who wish to study the quartet itself and perform it genuinely well’. Writing in the same journal that same year, Gottfried Weber agreed, praising the fact that the quartet ‘is also given to us in score, in which form it is both accessible for study and also a most rewarding aid and facilitation for performance, particularly in view of the significant difficulty of execution’.Footnote ¹³ For Beethoven Quartett Society audiences and others, study could be combined with the simultaneous experience of performance thanks to the pocket-sized miniature scores of the quartets published by the Mannheim publisher Karl Ferdinand Heckel during the 1840s and 1850s, and distributed in London through firms such as J. J. Ewer and G. A. Augener.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, a fortnight before the announcement of Rousselot’s complete quartet edition, The Musical World on 15 May 1845 carried an advertisement for Ewer’s scores of ‘Beethoven’s, Mozart’s, Mendelssohn’s, and Onslow’s Quintetts and Quartetts in Score’, at prices beginning at 2 shillings and sixpence.Footnote ¹⁵

The timing of the Ewer advertisement may have been influenced by the enthusiastic reception of the first two Beethoven Quartett Society concerts. Its main purpose, however, was to promote a new edition of Haydn’s eighty-three string quartets in score, complete with ‘Thematic Catalogue’. In describing this edition as not only ‘NEW’ and ‘COMPLETE’ but also ‘CORRECT’, the advertisement heading pre-empted the most prominent element in the 29 May 1845 announcement by Cocks and Co., with its promise of a Beethoven quartet edition of surpassing correctness and elegance at the hands of the cellist-editor Rousselot.Footnote ¹⁶ In the wake of the unprecedented complete series of concerts, the Cocks announcement reappeared in a more extended and elaborate form in The Musical World for 17 July. ‘Amateurs and Professors of Music’ were now invited to subscribe at a cost of three guineas, ‘to be paid when the whole is delivered’; moreover, ‘a short Biographical Notice will be given of Beethoven with the first Quartet; and, at the close of the Series, a copy of each programme of the five performances of the Beethoven Quartet Society will be given.’ The publishers hoped to deliver op. 18 ‘by the end of July, and the remainder as soon as practicable’.Footnote ¹⁷ In the event, the process would take a further year to complete. A notice ‘to the subscribers to M. Rousselot’s edition of Beethoven’s Quartetts’ issued by Cocks and Co. on 7 March 1846’ announced

By 21 March it was announced that the final quartet, no. 17 [op. 135] ‘is already engraved, and the whole, ere long, will be ready for delivery’.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, the second performance cycle for the Society, scheduled weekly rather than fortnightly between 4 May and 1 June 1846, might itself have been expected to furnish some of the careful playing over projected by the publishers.

As the 17 July advertisement suggests, it was not the intention to release all seventeen quartets together in a single publication. Rather, each quartet was issued, individually priced, with a separate plate number, each part provided with its own title page headed ‘Rousselot’s Edition’, as a fascicle of unbound parts formed of a combination of gathered bifolia and single leaves. Each part was separately paginated at the top left- and right-hand corners; however, an additional pagination in brackets was added centrally, to run continuously through the seventeen quartets, so that each of the four parts might in due course be bound into a separate, fully paginated volume. Additionally, Cocks and Co. produced a wrapper for each fascicle, ornately styled (Figures 1–2):

Figure 1. Beethoven, String Quartet in C♯ minor, op. 131 (Violin I), Rousselot’s edition, title page. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Mus. 177 c. 137 (15).

Figure 2. Beethoven, String Quartet in C♯ minor, op. 131 (Violin I), Rousselot’s edition, wrapper. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Mus. 177 c. 137 (15).

Given that the total cost of the edition if each quartet were purchased separately would have amounted to £8 15s 6d, the subscription price of three guineas (£3 3s) was something of a bargain. Moreover, the prefatory matter supplied with op. 18 no. 1 included not just a reproduction of the 1824 Steinmüller portrait of Beethoven, complete with signature, and a four-page ‘Brief Memoir of Beethoven’, but a tribute (in French) from Rousselot to Alsager; a ‘Notice’ by Cocks and Co. (this and Rousselot’s tribute bear the date 1 August 1846); a list of subscribers extending from Prince Albert and the Duke of Cambridge through London conservatories, provincial music sellers and individuals as far away as Bermuda and India; and a thematic catalogue (‘Catalogue thématique’) of the seventeen quartets.Footnote ²⁰ The question of accuracy still loomed large in the publisher’s mind: in describing the publication as ‘an undertaking far surpassing in difficulty any of a similar kind which have been attempted in this country’, Cocks’s ‘Notice’ offered thanks to the Council of the Beethoven Society and above all to Alsager ‘for the loan of his corrected copies of the scores and separate parts of those unrivalled compositions, which had previously been prepared, at great expense and trouble, for the performances of that Society’. Despite the unfortunate delay that had occurred in bringing out the edition, ‘it is hoped that its correctness (owing to the great care and unwearied attention of M. ROUSSELOT) will in some measure compensate for the time which has been devoted to it’. For his part, Rousselot assured Alsager of his efforts to render the edition ‘as perfect as possible for the execution of the composer’s intentions’;Footnote ²¹ and referring specifically to the ‘posthumous Quartetts’, the author of the ‘brief memoir’ argued that

Reviewing the edition on 5 September 1846, The Times – no doubt in the person of J W. Davison, concurrently owner and editor of The Musical World – was convinced:

II

Even allowing for a degree of hyperbole in the interests of commercial sales, the repeated emphasis on the superiority of this new edition over all previous ones demands attention: exactly how justifiable were these claims, and what kind of editorial scrutiny had Rousselot, and Alsager before him, applied to their task? Cocks’s ‘notice’ refers to Alsager’s ‘corrected copies of the scores and separate parts’; and Henry Hill’s prefatory ‘short account’ of the Beethoven Quartett Society, published in 1846 together with a new edition of the 1845 programmes, recalls that

It is natural to assume from Hill’s text that the abounding errors in existing editions that had so long marred performances and comprehension, especially of the late quartets, were principally pitch-based, although it will be suggested below that this claim was exaggerated. Indeed, Hill’s ‘short account’ reprises the then common narrative ‘relative to the later works of Beethoven, which were pronounced crude, and wild, and discordant; as indications, in fact, that, with the loss of the faculty of hearing, the monarch of modern musicians had lost the power of producing just harmonies, and works at once truly great and original’.Footnote ²⁵ However, it is notable that the ‘brief memoir’ prefacing the new Cocks edition adds to the avoidance of ‘wretched incorrectness’ the need also to observe ‘all the effects, and all the nuances, following a good edition’.Footnote ²⁶ This implies attention to matters of phrasing, dynamics, and other non-pitch-based elements in the text.

Neither Alsager’s nor Rousselot’s own scores and parts are known to survive. In the case of the late quartets it is highly unlikely that they could have had access to Beethoven’s autographs or the several corrected manuscript copies available to modern editors.Footnote ²⁷ It is reasonable to assume that they would have had access to the first editions published variously by Schott, Artaria, and Schlesinger. But their most immediate source is likely to have been the Collection complète DES Trios, Quatuors et Quintetti … PAR L. VAN BEETHOVEN published in parts by Maurice Schlesinger in Paris in 1827 and succeeded two years later, in May 1829, by a ‘Nouvelle Édition très soigneusement corrigée’. As Emil Platen has pointed out, Schlesinger’s announcement that this second edition incorporated corrections carefully made by those in Vienna who had performed the quartets ‘under the direction of Beethoven himself’ can refer only to the Schuppanzigh Quartet, and above all to Karl Holz, who had been deeply involved in the negotiations for and publication of the late quartets. Platen accordingly considers Schlesinger’s 1829 ‘Nouvelle Édition’ to be ‘the most authoritative of all early prints’ of these six works.Footnote ²⁸

That Schlesinger’s edition was well known to Alsager and to the Beethoven Quartett Society is evident on at least three fronts. In his 14 June 1842 letter to Mendelssohn, lamenting the widespread ignorance of ‘some of the greatest works the art of music has ever produced’, Alsager specified ‘the quartets of Beethoven N^o. 12 to 17, Schlesinger’s Edition, published after his death’.Footnote ²⁹ And in the 1845 Quartett Society programmes, not only are the late quartets numbered as they appear in Schlesinger’s edition (Table 1) but opp. 95, 130, 132, and 135 are specifically listed as being played in ‘Schlesinger’s edition’, which implies that the other works were played from some other text.Footnote ³⁰ It is reasonable to assume that Schlesinger’s edition – presumably the later, 1829 ‘Nouvelle Édition’ – was the ‘base’ text from which Rousselot, and perhaps Alsager before him, worked; although no part of Rousselot’s edition had been issued by Cocks before the first season of concerts ended on 16 June 1845 (recall that Cocks and Co. had hoped to issue op. 18 by the end of July that year), the performers might reasonably have played from copies of Schlesinger’s edition already edited by Alsager and/or Rousselot in preparation for their subsequent publication. That no. 17 (op. 135) was reported as being near readiness for publication only in late March 1846 (see earlier) is also consonant with its documented performance in ‘Schlesinger’s edition’ almost a year prior to that date.

Other factors strongly suggest the influence of the Schlesinger edition upon that of Rousselot. In their front matter both include the 1824 Steinmüller portrait of Beethoven, complete with signature, and a ‘Catalogue thématique’ with the seventeen quartets individually numbered.Footnote ³¹ Contrary to their (Schlesinger) numbering in the 1845 Quartett Society programmes, however, the late quartets now appear in a new numbering in Rousselot’s edition (Table 1).

As is evident, Rousselot’s numbering corresponds to the sequence of opus numbers, with the exception that op. 133 is placed next to its ‘parent’ opus; moreover, a footnote to the ‘Catalogue’ not found in Schlesinger clarifies that ‘This [op. 133] was Composed as a Finale for op. 130 and was published afterwards as a separate Quartett.’ With this exception – which might be considered a kind of ‘correction’ – Rousselot’s numbering corresponds to that of Haslinger’s 1832 ‘Systematische Verzeichniß der […] Originalwerke von Ludwig van Beethoven.’Footnote ³²

Another respect in which Rousselot’s edition reflects that of Schlesinger is to be seen in the presentation of the ‘mottos’ at the head of the finale of op. 135. In both editions the principal language employed in the underlaid text is French, rather than German: ‘Le faut il? il le faut! il le faut!’. Beethoven’s German, ‘Muss es sein? es muss sein! es muss sein!’, appears in smaller print underneath. Schlesinger gives ‘seyn’ rather than ‘sein’, and even places a French heading, ‘Un effort d’inspiration’, in relatively large print above the German original, ‘Der schwer gefasste Entschluss’. In this respect, the two editions do differ slightly, in that the French heading is not present in Rousselot’s edition.

Finally, the presence of Schlesinger’s Collection complète DES Trios, Quatuors et Quintetti behind the aspirations of Cocks and Co. is made clear in the publishers’ ‘Notice’ to Rousselot’s edition, in which they

This edition was being advertised by Cocks and Co. by December 1848.Footnote ³³

Writing of the performances of late quartets led by Henry Blagrove and Nicolas Mori in London in the late 1830s, Bashford writes that ‘both sets of musicians played from published parts (Schlesinger’s Paris edition seems to have been used), which, in spite of Scipion Rousselot’s later claims to the contrary, were probably reasonably accurate texts’. And while noting that ‘the validity of the claims [of Rousselot] has never been systematically examined’, she notes that ‘spot checking reveals minor differences of articulation and dynamic placing rather than of pitch or rhythm’;Footnote ³⁴ a more thorough cross-checking of the entire quartets in the two editions shows this assertion to be broadly correct. Bashford was writing well over a decade before Emil Platen’s exhaustive textual apparatus supporting the new Henle edition of the late quartets became available, and although Platen does not consider Rousselot’s edition, his tables of principal variants (Leitvarianten) between the manuscript and early printed sources for each quartet on which his edition is based make for a useful comparison with the fruits of Rousselot’s ‘great musical knowledge, and research, and industry’, as Henry Hill had described it.Footnote ³⁵

The results are mixed. In the case of op. 127, for example, Platen cites five variants in the second and third movements that are unique to the original March 1826 Mainz and Paris editions of the parts (his sources C and D); of these five, three are found in Rousselot’s edition, while the other two readings are in agreement with Schlesinger’s edition (Table 2).

Of six further variants, Rousselot and Schlesinger share their readings in four cases, while in two they differ: in the first movement, Violin II, bar 123, 4th note, Rousselot’s edition lacks the natural sign before a′ present in Schlesinger, while in the third movement, Violin I, bar 53, 5th note, Rousselot’s edition again lacks the necessary flat sign before the printed d′.

Similar examples can be found in the other quartets. Particularly interesting, in view of the arguments made earlier for the likelihood that the Schlesinger edition was Rousselot’s ‘base’ text, are those cases in which Schlesinger’s 1827 edition differs from that, ‘très soigneusement corrigée’, of 1829 (Table 3).

As can be seen, Rousselot’s readings tend to favour the 1829 Schlesinger edition, but not consistently. In other cases where both Schlesinger editions agree, Rousselot’s may offer a different reading, as in the case of op. 132, second movement, Violin I, bar 177, the fourth note: a′ appears in all early sources with the exception of the original Berlin edition of the score (Adolph Martin Schlesinger, ?October 1827), which gives b′; and b′ proves to be the reading in Rousselot’s edition.

Needless to say, the fact that one or more editions adopt a particular reading does not of itself argue for the ‘correctness’ or otherwise of that reading. There is at least one case, though, in which it is clear that Rousselot succeeds where Schlesinger erred. Platen points out that the 1827 and 1829 Schlesinger editions, uniquely among the early sources, give the tempo marking Allegro ma non troppo at the head of the first movement of op. 130, in the Violin II part only. This was presumably a straightforward printing error; it is not found in Rousselot’s edition, which correctly, one can be confident in this instance, gives Adagio ma non troppo in all four parts.

All in all, then, the evidence is not unequivocally in favour of claiming that Rousselot’s edition provided a text that was notably closer to ‘the composer’s intentions’, as he had put it, than those already available to quartet players at this time; certainly, the claims of the ‘wretched incorrectness’ of previous editions made in the edition’s ‘Brief Memoir of Beethoven’ seem exaggerated. Moreover, just three instances are sufficient to counter Hill’s surmise that ‘probably not a single fault remained’ when the Beethoven Quartett Society performed from these scores. The first can probably again be ascribed to a simple printer’s error. In op. 130, first movement, the change of key signature to six flats is missing before bar 71 in the Violin I part. Bars 71–7 2 are the last two bars on the first page of this part, and the correct new signature appears at the top of the following page, before bar 73. The error is unique to this part; if played as written, the result would indeed have been, in Hill’s words, ‘crude, and wild, and discordant’.

The other two instances, both from op. 135, are more significant. In the first movement, Viola, bar 95, the second triplet group reads a–b–c′. As Platen shows, this reading is common to all editions consulted other than Beethoven’s autograph, which reads c′–b–a. Considering the Viola part alone, one can see that a–b–c′ would appear consistent with the figure on the first and third triplet groups in the bar; but as Platen notes, it produces parallel octaves with Violin II and doubtless must be incorrect for that reason, so that Beethoven’s autograph reading should stand.Footnote ³⁶ It might be thought that such a contrapuntal solecism would have been discovered in the ‘careful playing over’ that Sivori, Sainton, Hill, and Rousselot were due to give the latter’s final corrected versions. Even more is this the case with the third instance, from the final movement of op. 135. Rousselot’s edition perpetuates here an error found in the Berlin parts and score editions as well as the 1827 Schlesinger edition, namely the absence in the Violin I part of bars 133–34, which are compensated for by two extra bars (bars 146a/b in Platen’s numbering) between bars 146 and 147 entered by Beethoven in his autograph but then cancelled; the error is corrected, though not without a ‘compensating’ textual corruption, in the 1829 Schlesinger edition.Footnote ³⁷ Again, the barely disguised parallel octaves in Violin I and Cello resulting from this incorrect alignment of parts (Example 1) ought alone to have raised suspicions.

Example 1 Op. 135, fourth movement, bars 124–50, Rousselot’s edition.

A different kind of absence from Rousselot’s edition, although not from Schlesinger’s 1829 one and others, are the ritmo di due, tre, quattro battute indications found in the third movement of op. 127 and nos. 5 and 7 of op. 131. And suspicions might also be aroused in the mind of Rousselot’s modern reader or player on turning to the Cavatina from op. 130 and finding the beklemmt direction missing at the beginning of the central C♭ major section at bar 42. But this is in fact an omission that is shared by all early sources, including the first editions and Schlesinger’s Edition complète, other than the autograph score, where it was a later addition rather than part of the initial writing out.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, prior to some time after the mid-nineteenth century, this highly suggestive marking that has been so influential in the reception of this particular movement was simply unavailable to inform performers’ approaches.

III

Alsager’s insistence, in writing to Mendelssohn on 14 June 1842, on the need for quartet players ‘to make a careful study’ of the late quartets has been noted earlier. An emphasis on preparedness for performance, in precisely Alsager’s words, is also communicated in the account of the Beethoven Quartett Society in The Times for 6 June 1845, where the ‘undertaking’ of the ‘London Beethovenists’ is held to be ‘the performance of the best music by the best artists diligently trained for the purpose, in the presence of an audience […] able to appreciate it’. Thus,

Hill’s account of goals of the Society likewise pointed to the reciprocal relationship between audience and performers when he noted that ‘under such circumstances alone can the art of the accomplished player, employed in rendering the inspirations of a genius like that of Beethoven, be truly brought out and developed’.Footnote ⁴¹ But while the individual performer is emphasized in these cases, Hill’s earlier attention was on ‘careful study’ of a somewhat different kind:

Here it is not individual competence and artistry that is the target, but rather the matter of accomplished ensemble playing. Successful performance of the ‘posthumous Quartetts’ required not merely four players, each addressing his individual part, but rather the combination of all four playing as one.Footnote ⁴³

This aesthetic of string quartet playing had been vividly articulated in 1828 by Adolph Bernhard Marx, in a review of the Schlesinger scores of op. 132 and op. 135. For Marx, Beethoven’s late quartet writing effectively reconfigured the genre. Silently referencing the conversational metaphor favoured by Goethe and others, Marx understood the individual instrumental parts of op. 132 as ‘no longer four happy brothers in art who make music for us for their, and our, enjoyment; they are four deeply affective creative spirits who soar up into magnificent freedom and wondrous sympathy in a brotherly embrace intertwined fourfold’. Likewise,

It is against this background that the repeated praise for the ‘perfection’ of the ensemble in the Beethoven Quartett Society performances is to be understood.Footnote ⁴⁵ And it is likewise against this background that we may consider two features of Rousselot’s edition of the late quartets that clearly set it apart from Schlesinger’s and other early editions. Both can be traced to Karl Holz’s close involvement in the publication process of the quartets, particularly that of op. 132 and op. 133; and both are directed towards cultivating that ‘great attention’ and ‘very careful execution’ for which Rousselot and his quartet partners were so highly praised.

Rehearsal Letters II: The Case of Op. 131

The idea that Rousselot’s edition captures a trace of a specific performance tradition – or better, perhaps, the repeated musical interactions of a specific group of performers in a particular context – finds especial resonance in the case of op. 131. Once again, though, we begin with Karl Holz. In a conversation with Beethoven in late August 1826, Holz set down the following concerning op. 131:

Must it be played right through without stopping?

But then we won’t be able to repeat anything!

When are we supposed to tune?

Before the Presto.

We must play it on a cool evening.

Some decades later Holz corroborated this exchange in material from his diaries supplied to Wilhelm von Lenz. It had been Beethoven’s intention, he wrote, that the seven Stücke of op. 131 were to be played without a break, irrespective of the need for the players to retune or of potential audience fatigue. All that Beethoven would concede was the possibility of a short break following (and certainly not preceding) the Presto, no. 5, in which case the two transitional bars (497–98) connecting this to the following Adagio quasi un poco andante, were to be left out.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘Before the Presto’ in the 1826 conversation might seem to contradict Holz’s later account, although there is no way of knowing the context of the earlier remark, or Beethoven’s reaction to what may have been a suggestion by Holz, whose later insistence that the break must be after and not before no. 5 is perhaps telling. However, he went on to lament that Viennese audiences were not yet up to experiencing the whole quartet without the usual breaks between movements, so that the Hellmesberger Quartet divided it into four sections (nos. 1–2; nos. 3–4; no. 5; nos. 6–7).Footnote ⁶⁰ To this, von Lenz added that in St Petersburg Ferdinand Laub’s quartet played op. 131 with a break both before and after the Presto; the former of these was particularly disruptive, he felt, and he was insistent that the only proper performance of the work was one with no breaks whatsoever.Footnote ⁶¹

Von Lenz’s remarks, along with Holz’s contribution, appeared in 1860 and thus have no direct bearing on Rousselot’s edition of op. 131. Nonetheless, Rousselot’s rehearsal letters tell their own story. As in the Schlesinger 1829 ‘Nouvelle Édition’ and earlier editions, the seven Stücke are not numbered, something which can only have emphasized the unconventional continuous appearance of the quartet for its earliest performers.Footnote ⁶² Uniquely, however, the sequence of rehearsal numbers does not always commence from A at the beginning of each Stück. Instead, the sequence A–L (I is omitted, as in Holz’s sequence for op. 133) spans nos. [1]–[4], after which no. [5] is lettered A–D, no. [6] is clean, and no. [7], finally, is lettered A–G. The two new beginnings at A suggest the arrangement later favoured by Laub, as reported by von Lenz. But that suggestion is contradicted by Ivan Mahaim’s claim that at the Beethoven Quartett Society performances op. 131 was ‘played without interruption from beginning to end’. Mahaim gives no evidence for this claim, which he makes in connection with an observation about the Beethoven Quartett Society programme: ‘for Op. 131, the excerpts from each movement are extremely lavish, with a total of twelve illustrations’.Footnote ⁶³ In fact the original lithographed programme (Figure 3) includes thirteen excerpts, separated from one another by double bars and laid out on five systems. System 1 presents a seven-bar incipit for no. [1], followed by the closing bar (121), with crotchet upbeat, and then an eight-bar incipit for no. [2]. System 2 gives incipits for no. [3] and the theme and Variation 2 of no. [4]; representation of this number continues with incipits for Variations 3, 4, and 5 on system 3, followed on system 4 by incipits for Variation 6 and the C-major Allegretto (bb. 231ff.), and then the final bar (277). Attacca, written vertically across the system, follows the double bar; after a brief space, a nine-bar incipit of no. [5] completes system 4. System 5 then presents the opening and concluding bars of no. [6], and lastly a five-bar incipit of no. [7]. Systems 1, 2, and 3 are all supplied with a concluding marginal ‘Segue’ direction.

Figure 3. The Beethoven Quartett Society [Five programmes] ([London]: 1845). London, British Library, M. d. 54.

It is difficult to know exactly how to interpret all this. The layout of systems 1–4 clearly points to the continuous performance of nos. [1–4], as suggested by Rousselot’s sequence of rehearsal letters; meanwhile, the attacca (of course not present in Rousselot’s or other editions) following that latter number clearly speaks for immediate continuity with the Presto, no. [5], in line with Mahaim’s claim but contradicting the new letter sequence in the edition. Moreover, one begins to wonder why it was felt necessary to include the attacca following no. [4] at all rather than allowing the Presto to follow on immediately, as for example in the case of nos [1–2]. There is even a visual contradiction of sorts between the attacca and an ensuing gap before the Presto, which must have contributed to the necessity of extending this fourth system a little beyond the length of the first three: the sense of a new beginning with the Presto is hard to avoid. As for the Presto itself, it is notable that whereas care was taken to indicate the opening and closing bars of nos. [1], [4], and [6], in order to direct the listener from one number to the next, the same opportunity was not taken here, so that Beethoven’s own explicit attacca direction in the score goes unrepresented. The lack of a ‘segue’ at the end of the fourth system further gives the impression of a break between this and no. [6]. Reading the programme ‘précis’ of the quartet together with Rousselot’s rehearsal numbers, the evidence seems to point reasonably towards a performance that allowed a break either side of the Presto, even if an ideal of continuous performance was conveyed by the performers’ indicated attacca on one side and Beethoven’s identical instruction on the other.Footnote ⁶⁴

IV

In his prefatory tribute to Alsager in the Violin I part of his complete edition, Rousselot had emphasized his efforts to render the edition ‘as perfect as possible for the execution of the composer’s intentions’. And as we have seen, Cocks and Co. lost no opportunity to trumpet their own intention to publish an edition of the Beethoven quartets ‘in such a correct and elegant form as will surpass all other editions’, so that performers and audiences might have untrammelled access ‘to the perfect knowledge of Beethoven’s exalted genius’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The contested nature of such claims from the perspective of twenty-first-century performance aesthetics (at least Rousselot and Cocks avoided the fraught term ‘authenticity’) need not concern us here;Footnote ⁶⁶ but we might nevertheless note that Rousselot’s project was effectively the creation of something like an Urtext edition in all but name, even if, despite his ‘great musical knowledge, and research, and industry’,Footnote ⁶⁷ he could not in 1846 have been in a position to carry out such a task.

Over a century and a half later, in the Preface to the Henle study score of op. 132, Emil Platen could write in terms almost identical to Rousselot’s: his edition follows the ‘stated precept’ of the new Beethoven Gesamtausgabe in ‘producing a musical text that “reflects Beethoven’s intentions as accurately as possible.” The degree to which a text can approach the composer’s intentions depends on the number and the value of the surviving musical documents.’Footnote ⁶⁸ If one were to choose a single detail of Platen’s edition as a litmus test for accuracy, it might be bar 246 of the first movement in the Violin I part, which reads c′′–e′′′–e′′′–f′′′. This reading corresponds to the corrected state of Beethoven’s autograph: having at first written c′′–e′′′–g′′′–a′′′, Beethoven corrected the third and fourth pitches to e′′′–f′′′ in pencil, supplied the letter names beneath the notes, and made a marginal note, ‘X Berlin’, indicating that the correction should be incorporated into the edition being prepared there by Adolph Martin Schlesinger. But the Berlin Schlesinger edition somehow mangled Beethoven’s instruction to give the reading c′′–e′′′–g′′′–f′′′, which was then adopted in virtually all published editions (including Maurice Schlesinger’s 1827 Collection complète, 1829 ‘Nouvelle Édition’ and the ‘old’ Breitkopf & Härtel Gesamtausgabe of 1862–65), performances, and recordings down to Platen’s edition of 2002: all this despite the fact that Holz had drawn attention to the error as early as 1857.Footnote ⁶⁹

It is hardly surprising that in this instance, as in the others discussed earlier, Rousselot and Cocks and Co. failed: their edition, dependent as it must have been on ‘the number and the value of the surviving musical documents’ to which Rousselot could have had access, is not error-free. In the case of op. 132 only the autograph score (or Holz himself) could have revealed the correct reading in bar 246 of the Violin I part in the first movement. But honour where honour is due: what Rousselot actually achieved was not a proto-Urtext edition but something else. His edition of the late quartets may be regarded as a particular kind of performers’ edition, not in the later nineteenth-century sense of the ‘great pianist’ edition of the Beethoven sonatas, for example, but rather in the sense that, as alluded to earlier, its unique provision of instrumental cues and rehearsal letters preserves a trace of the interactions in extensive rehearsal and performance of himself, Henry Hill, Prosper Sainton, and Camillo Sivori.

‘The nature and quality of the actual performances – lost to thin air, unlike ones of the gramophone era – can of course never be recovered’;Footnote ⁷⁰ but in Rousselot’s edition is preserved something of the unrelenting work that made those performances not only possible but convincing to their audiences, and in so doing entrenched for ever the ‘hono[u]r’ due to Beethoven’s late quartets.