A Recent Edition of Schumann’s ‘Cello Concerto in A Minor’ Is a Fascinating Study in “Definitive” Texts

By Miranda Wilson | From the March/April 2025 issue of Strings

While composing his cello concerto, Robert Schumann sought the input of several cellist friends on matters of technique. One was a well-known cellist, composer, and pedagogue named Robert Emil Bockmühl (1812–81). Over the course of a lengthy correspondence, Bockmühl—effusing about a work he thought “magnificent, daring, noble, full of pathos”—sent Schumann suggestions for tempi, fingerings, and bowings. Schumann added some but not all of these markings to the final versions of the cello part and piano reduction, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1854. Before publication, Schumann offered to include a string quartet arrangement of the orchestral accompaniment, but Breitkopf rejected this on the grounds that it wouldn’t sell. The full orchestral score remained unpublished until 1883, when Breitkopf released a version edited by Clara Schumann.

For many years, Breitkopf’s 1995 edition by Joachim Draheim and Heinrich Schiff was considered the urtext of the Schumann concerto. In 2021, Peters published a new editionby Josephine Knight that also claimed urtextstatus. In her preface, Knight stated that she had removed many of Bockmühl’s markings, which she believed had “led to future generations of performers adopting bowings and other significant changes that ultimately diluted Schumann’s original conception of the work beyond recognition.” The main source for Knight’s edition is Schumann’s autograph manuscript, housed in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków (and downloadable as a high-resolution facsimile from their website). Knight claimed to have restored “the original composition, to be a true representation of what Schumann envisaged.” (The fingerings and some of the bowings are Knight’s own.)

Bärenreiter, a publisher known for scholarly attention to historical source materials, has now released another urtext for the Schumann concerto. The editor is Kate Bennett Wadsworth, an expert in 19th-century cello performance practice. If Knight is skeptical of Bockmühl’s contributions, Wadsworth treats them as integral to Schumann’s creative process. She acknowledges Schumann’s exasperation with Bockmühl in the last stages of preparing the score for publication but notes that he still accepted many of his suggested changes to clefs, bowings, and fingerings for the first-edition cello part. 

In the extended introduction to this edition, which draws upon multiple early sources (including sketches, the Kraków manuscript, Schumann’s correspondence with Bockmühl, and the first printed edition), Wadsworth examines the performance practices of several musicians close to Robert and Clara Schumann. She starts with Bockmühl himself, quoting the instructions for bow strokes and articulations in his pedagogical études and editions of other Schumann works. This reevaluation of Bockmühl’s work creates the impression of a thoughtful musician whose markings we should take seriously as a primary source for historically informed performance. Comparing Wadsworth’s edition side by side with Knight’s raises some interesting questions about the composer-performer relationship, and which version comes closest to the “composer’s intentions.” Are editorial suggestions by a performer essential to a composition if the composer himself has sanctioned them? Or are they little more than the know-it-all meddling of a lesser musician? Which version, if any, should be considered an urtext?

With this in mind, I placed Wadsworth’s edition next to facsimiles of the first edition and the autograph manuscript on music stands and played through the concerto using Bockmühl’s fingerings and bowings. For cellists raised on 20th-century editions (I’ll admit to a guilty fondness for Leonard Rose’s heavily edited version of 1960), fingerings of the 1850s may come as a surprise. Bockmühl favors crossing strings in high positions rather than shifting up and down the A string, sometimes even going over to the G string. He’s a fan of using the fourth finger in thumb position, especially to avoid shifting in the middle of a phrase. Elsewhere, however, he seems to recommend multiple shifts within one phrase, using fingerings that make a portamento trajectory from note to note inevitable. In shifting, he often uses a same-finger slide, with similar results. When it comes to bowing, his slurs are often a lot longer than those a present-day player might use to project their sound over an orchestra in a large concert hall. Of course, as Wadsworth points out, a cello soloist’s experience in the 1850s would have been different with the period instruments and smaller orchestra size. (Ironically, the long slurs work perfectly if you play at Schumann’s original tempo of 144 to the quarter note, which Bockmühl insisted he take down to 130.) Trying out Bockmühl’s markings is like trying to learn a half-forgotten dialect that our grandparents spoke—familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Aside from the inclusion of measure numbers and a few modern notation and typesetting conventions, Wadsworth’s piano reduction version is almost identical to the first edition of 1854. Other than the addition of fingerings, her orchestral score is also comparable to Clara Schumann’s. An interesting difference is the insertion of a handful of ossia options from early sketches of the concerto. Cellists who have spent hours practicing the two-octave arpeggios in 32nd-note septuplets that whiz up into the high register early in the first movement will be overjoyed to learn that Schumann originally wrote one–octave arpeggios in 16th notes that only go up to middle D. There’s another place like this in the last movement where arpeggios going up to a high F appear an octave lower in the ossia.

An additional volume in Wadsworth’s edition contains her arrangement of Schumann’s orchestral accompaniment for string quartet, as the composer had proposed. Several such arrangements already exist (most notably the one by Ka-Wai Yu for A-R Editions); Wadsworth’s is also excellent. As a cellist, I was selfishly sorry to see most of the magical solo for the orchestral principal cello in the second movement outsourced to the viola, but it’s an understandable compromise.

Seeing such different editions described as urtexts provokes the question of whether any editor can claim to have arrived at a definitive edition of any composition. One thing is for certain: we are much richer now that we have several to choose from. These beautifully presented and reasonably priced new volumes are an essential addition to the cellist’s library.