Four new volumes of the Brahms Complete Edition
The Research Center of the Johannes Brahms Complete Edition (JBG) at Kiel University has completed work on four new volumes of the JBG. Among other things, they are correcting incorrect readings of the Second Piano Concerto.
In the new four volumes, three of the four members of the Kiel Brahms Research Center - Katrin Eich, Johannes Behr and Jakob Hauschildt - as well as the US-American George S. Bozarth as external editor, present the results of their philological research in the following editions: Piano reduction of the 2nd Piano Concerto in B flat major op. 83, piano sonatas, piano arrangements of the three string quartets op. 51 and 67 as well as organ works by the composer.
Examination of the piano reduction of the Second Piano Concerto has shown that some erroneous readings of the composition are still being performed today. The new edition contains for the first time the changes and corrections to the score and solo part which Brahms made late in his life and which were mistakenly not included in later editions of the piano reduction, which was published particularly early.
The reappraisal of the piano sonatas proved to be very difficult: Compositionally relevant subsequent handwritten changes in Brahms' manuscript copies could not always be clearly traced back to the composer himself, nor could their validity be clearly determined. While such variants were sometimes widely disseminated in practical editions of the 20th century, in the present volume they are not reported in the main musical text but in footnotes.
The Research Center of the Johannes Brahms Complete Edition is part of the Institute of Musicology at Kiel University (CAU). Since 1991, its work has been funded equally by the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the Federal Republic of Germany and coordinated by the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. It is designed as a scholarly edition and research project and is intended to replace and considerably expand the inadequate old complete edition of 1926/27 by 2026. The new complete edition will draw on all available sources. Even fragmentary compositions, drafts and sketches by Brahms will be collected, their significance examined and appropriately documented.
