If the glory of Bach's music is primarily in his cantatas and Beethoven's in his symphonies, quartets and piano sonatas, that of Mozart's is surely in his operas and piano concertos. Until the 1960s or 70s the piano concertos were always played from the Breitkopf & Härtel Gesamtausgabe of 1878–79, but it was known that this had flaws (one of the worst was the omission of an entire 7-bar passage after bar 46 of the first movement of K.595), and by the 1930s Friedrich Blume was editing new printings of the Eulenburg miniature scores in which mistakes began to be corrected. This work was continued by Hans Redlich in the 1950s, and culminated in the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA) published by Bärenreiter between 1959 and 1976. However, for the piano concertos alone six different editors were employed, and it is hardly surprising that the approach was not consistent, nor Mozart's handwriting always deciphered correctly. Over succeeding decades certain errors have been exposed, and the aim is to bring these together here.

corrections to bärenreiter neue mozart-ausgabe

Corrections to the Mozart piano concertos are essentially of two opposing kinds. The first is simply: this is what Mozart wrote; we need to restore the reading in A. The second, on the contrary, is: NMA (and, usually, preceding editions too) prints what Mozart wrote, but for the stated reason this can only have been Mozart's own oversight, and needs to be corrected. Both these categories stray into the controversial. “This is what Mozart wrote”; is it? – is that really g, or maybe f? – noteheads are sometimes spidery, their placing indistinct. Then “this is intolerable; must be Mozart's oversight” is an accusation often levelled at instances of consecutive fifths or octaves, but these occur more often in the works of all the great composers than some harmony professors would care to acknowledge, and it is by no means certain that they “must” be corrected. Only when we can reconstruct the specific process by which an oversight occurred, is it sometimes defensible to alter what the composer wrote. Very often the answer is that Mozart notated the orchestral parts first, leaving the solo staves blank because he would of course be playing this himself from memory, then much later came back and filled in the solo part, but largely from memory, without checking exactly what he had written in the orchestra, resulting in conflicts.