IMSLP Forums

Hi, everyobdy !

I have noticed lately something about the editions of the piano sonatas.

The edition of Louis Köhler and Adolf Ruthardt, engraved by Peters looks very much like the edition of Max Pauer, revised by Carl Adolf Martienssen, engraved by Peters too. Have a comparison between these two.

Here's Opus 2 no 1 edited by Louis Köhler and Adolf Ruthardt : http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/9 ... o1_Op2.pdf

Compare now with the edition of Max Pauer, revised by Carl Adolf Martienssen : http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/1 ... 2_no_1.pdf

Besides the title page and the index, can you see any difference between the two editions ?

I have posted the Pauer-Martienssen edition. It comes from the Piano.ru Library. I didn't know which edition it was. An administrator wrote it was the Pauer-Martienssen edition.


Opus 2 no 1 is just an exemple. It's the same problem for the other Ruthardt-Köhler files of this edition.

I don't think it is a coincidence. There must be a mistake in this. Can anyone help ?

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the crazy world of C.F. Peters (and some other German publishers). Germany has a limited term on urtext editions even now (25 years from publication). This is actually one of the more admirable and well-reasoned features of the German copyright law. The term was probably even shorter back in the early 1900s, and not limited to urtext editions but applied to any edition. Apparently most editions did not meet the standard of originality to qualify for a full term of life-plus x years. So, the enterprising German publishers, C.F. Peters especially, thought of a way that they could keep their scores from being reprinted by a competing publisher: issue the same score with a new editor's name and editorial claim whenever the previous issue was getting close to expiration. Köhler and Ruthardt's edition was done in the late 1800s, the Pauer around 1920 and Martienssen's revision of Pauer in the late 1930s. The plate numbers and page-counts for Pauer and Pauer/Martienssen are identical. I expect some parts of the Kohler/Ruthardt editions were re-used (perhaps with some minor changes) for Pauer, or maybe Peters just decided to re-engrave Kohler/Ruthardt around 1920. The scanners over at piano.ru aren't exactly meticulous about giving detailed descriptions of what they're scanning - assuming they even scanned them in the first place. We're lucky we can figure out it's Peters. Good luck telling the various Peters versions apart unless you happen have originals to compare the scans with.

Ok, this explains everything. I was not aware of these editorial politics.

Do you know if the new Peters edition by Barry Cooper is a "reprint"' of an old edition ?

I can say that, as far as I know, it is not.