By Cliff Hall | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings
On March 11, 1829, a 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn stepped onto the podium of Berlin’s Sing-Akademie to conduct a work no one of his generation had heard: Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. MatthewPassion. The revival was championed by the critic and theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx, Mendelssohn’s close friend and one of the leading voices in Berlin’s musical life. As editor of the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (BamZ), Marx promoted the performance through a six-issue campaign that framed it as a national artistic event. He noted that the oratorio was widely understood to have not been performed in nearly a century—its last known presentation dated to 1729. For nearly 80 years after Bach’s death, the St. Matthew Passion lay dormant in private hands until Carl Friedrich Zelter preserved its manuscript in the Sing-Akademie’s library, where Mendelssohn, working from its fragile parts, reconstructed the score for performance.
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To bring Bach’s Baroque lines to life for a 19th-century audience, Mendelssohn reimagined them through the expressive lens of his own era. He cut nearly a third of the original movements, abridged long recitatives, and re-scored the orchestra for modern instruments—replacing Baroque winds with clarinets and broadening the continuo into a lush harmonic fabric. Where Bach’s manuscript left expression to performers’ intuition—Baroque musicians were expected to infer character from context—Mendelssohn penciled in dynamic swells and phrasing to suit the sensibility of his time. The austerity of Lutheran devotion became the grandeur of Romantic oratorio.
This act of musical resurrection—favoring Romantic transformation over historical fidelity—would later find its counterpoint in the modern scholarly ideal of urtext. The term, from the German ur (“original”) and text (“writing”), describes a score restored to what the composer actually wrote, free from the expressive glosses and editorial habits of later generations. In the tension between Mendelssohn’s imaginative revival and the urtext’s disciplined reconstruction lies the story of how one starts to find the composer’s voice.
The performance at the Sing-Akademie was a cultural earthquake. Announced by Marx in the BamZ as “an important and joyous event for the musical world, and especially for Berlin . . . the greatest and most sacred work of the greatest composer,” it drew the city’s intellectual elite—including King Friedrich Wilhelm III—and left audiences awestruck. Some contemporary reports describe listeners as moved to tears. Bach, newly reborn for a new century, emerged not as a forgotten theologian but as a living moral and emotional force.
Publishers moved quickly to feed the fervor. Adolf Martin Schlesinger, the Berlin music dealer and publisher who had launched the BamZ in 1824 with Marx as editor, likely acted on his colleague’s advice in issuing the first printed edition of the St. Matthew Passion in 1830—both a full score and a piano-vocal reduction edited by Marx. His shop at Unter den Linden 34, fitted in mahogany by the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, served as both salon and printing house. There, amid the scents of ink and varnish, the oratorio took on its first printed life.
The resulting Grosse Passionsmusik nach dem Evangelium Matthaei was no literal transcription of Bach’s manuscript but a modern realization shaped by the Berlin performance. Following Mendelssohn’s cue, Marx enriched the continuo with fuller harmonies and phrasing cues, replaced Bach’s oboes da caccia and violas da gamba with modern winds, and added expressive markings where the composer’s autograph had left the page largely bare.
Yet his approach was more restrained than Mendelssohn’s. Marx’s edition reversed parts of the conductor’s abridgment, restoring movements omitted from the 1829 performance while preserving its Romantic orchestration and expressive detail. More conservative than Mendelssohn, Marx aimed to balance fidelity with accessibility—revering Bach’s structure even as he adapted its sound for a Romantic audience. In doing so, he laid a curious foundation for what would later become the urtext ideal, the belief that editorial work could bring listeners closer to a composer’s true intentions. Compared with Bach’s original manuscript in the Berlin State Library, however, the 1830 edition shows how the Passion’s first printed life reflected Mendelssohn’s sensibility tempered by Marx’s restraint—Bach’s sacred austerity filtered through the warmth and breadth of Romantic expression.
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This constant negotiation between historical preservation and expressive transformation defined musical editing for generations. In the early 20th century, that spirit found new expression both in the concert hall and on the printed page. The Kassel-based publishing house Bärenreiter Verlag, founded in 1923 by Karl Vötterle, became the institutional home of the emerging urtext ideal—editing grounded in evidence rather than embellishment.
Yet the Romantic impulse persisted. The famed conductor Leopold Stokowski carried it to its Technicolor limit, reimagining Bach’s organ works for symphony orchestra and immortalizing them in Disney’s Fantasia (1940). His orchestrations made Bach’s counterpoint glow with cinematic splendor—a maximalist expression of renewal that would, by mid-century, provoke a scholarly countermovement seeking fidelity rather than flourish.
As Bärenreiter editor Jonathan Del Mar observes, even Stokowski’s lush transcriptions possess their own kind of textual honesty. “I don’t see any reason to be sanctimonious here: It is what it is,” he says. “An urtext edition of Stokowski’s orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue will essentially be an urtext of Stokowski’s work, not of Bach’s. But then, it doesn’t claim to be an urtext of Bach. It says what it is, and that’s what it is.”
For Del Mar, the distinction lies in intent. Mendelssohn, he notes, sought to make Bach approachable for the ears and instruments of his day—a revival born of devotion, not ego. “The hauptsache [“main thing”] was that Bach should once more be played,” Del Mar says. “If you had to change it a bit to get people to engage with it, that was a sacrifice worth making.” Stokowski, by contrast, transformed Bach out of admiration rather than necessity—responding to its grandeur with creations that were, as Del Mar puts it, “new, entertaining, beautiful, and colossal in another dimension.”
As Mendelssohn’s revival enlarged Bach to fit the 19th century, Del Mar and his peers instead pare away centuries of embellishment until the line of the original emerges again. In 1988, he began what would become one of the most consequential projects in modern musicology—a new critical edition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 for Bärenreiter. The task required detective work on a continental scale. Del Mar traveled to Berlin, Mainz, Aachen, and Vienna, tracing every surviving source—the autograph, sketchbooks, copyists’ parts, and early prints—in search of the most authentic text.
In practical terms, he benefited from timing. Many of Berlin’s most valuable music autographs had been evacuated during World War II to sites in what later reemerged as Poland, with major Beethoven and Bach sources turning up at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. During the Cold War, access to them was limited or uncertain. In 1977, under an agreement between Poland and the GDR, six autograph manuscripts were formally handed back to East Germany; though many materials remained in Kraków, improved access and subsequent returns made comprehensive comparison newly possible.
“The publication, the fact that the work was needed—those were historical luck,” Del Mar says. “But the work itself was detective work.”
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That investigation yielded hundreds of revelations: missing horn entries, misread octaves, misplaced ties—and even a single note in the first movement whose correction, he recalls, was “a heart-pounding moment.”
For Del Mar, such choices test the editor’s nerve as much as his ear. Evidence can be incontrovertible, but interpretation still intrudes. “If I, as a reasonable musician, am convinced that the evidence demands it,” he says, “then I have a duty to make that change, even if it is far-reaching.”
For Del Mar, an urtext edition is not an act of worship but of accountability. “The purpose of an urtext edition today must be to get closer to the composer—to the sound he intended should be heard,” he explains, with a caveat that authenticity itself can be misleading. The danger, Del Mar adds, is believing that fidelity alone guarantees truth: No musical notation is ever literal, and every score is shaped by its conventions. The good urtext editor, he insists, must remain accountable—“every decision, however small, has to be justified in the commentary.”
Del Mar’s editions have since reshaped how orchestras read Beethoven—not by rewriting him, but by revealing what was always there. His work shows that transparency can be as radical as transformation. Where Mendelssohn revived Bach by enlarging his voice, Del Mar restores Beethoven by listening through the static of history until the composer speaks for himself.
If Bärenreiter’s editors are musical detectives, Henle’s might be described as cartographers—mapping a clear, navigable path through the same archival terrain. Founded in Munich in 1948 by industrialist-pianist Günter Henle, the house defined a new model of practical scholarship: editions engraved with elegance and precision, combining critical integrity with performer accessibility. “The urtext concept is today maybe more important than ever,” writes senior editor Annette Oppermann in an email, “because it stands for a carefully checked, reliable musical text presenting the author’s intentions and nothing else.”
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Her colleague Peter Jost, one of Henle’s leading critical editors, notes that the definition of “urtext” itself has matured. “In the early days of Henle editions, manuscripts, especially autographs, were virtually equated with ‘urtext,’” Jost writes in an email. “Modern ‘urtext’ editions, on the other hand, carefully weigh the value of all sources, with the first edition (if authorized by the composer) usually forming the main source.” Henle’s 2016 revision of César Franck’s Violin Sonata replaced the autograph as the primary source after confirming that Franck himself had proofread the first edition.
“Our editions are made for musicians in general, be it amateurs, students, or professionals,” Oppermann writes, emphasizing that accessibility is inseparable from rigor. “Playability is of course most important for our practical urtext editions, and the magic word is ‘transparency.’ We mark any addition or fundamental change so that the reader knows what is native to the source and what has been added by the editor.”
Together, Bärenreiter and Henle seek to define the modern meaning of authenticity: not an escape into the past, but a living dialogue between evidence and artistry. Nearly two centuries after Mendelssohn’s Berlin revival, the urtext ideal endures because it does more than recover lost notes—it restores lost intentions. Mendelssohn’s generation revived Bach by transforming him for its own age; Del Mar and his colleagues restore Beethoven by removing the noise of his and ours. Henle, in turn, ensures that what scholars reveal can speak directly through the hands of today’s musicians.
That circle closed again in 2009, when Bärenreiter published an urtext edition of Mendelssohn’s own version of the St. Matthew Passion, edited by Andreas Glöckner. It was not presented as Bach’s text, but as a faithful restoration of Mendelssohn’s 19th-century one—proof that transparency and honesty, not purity, define authenticity. The score that once reimagined Bach for a new century now stands as part of that same lineage of restoration: Romantic expression re-claimed, examined, and understood through modern eyes.
Authenticity, in this sense, is not a destination but a continuum—a balance between evidence and imagination, between the page and the player. The urtext edition is not the final word, but the truest starting point: the place where the composer’s voice begins to sound again.
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