Hoffmeister Viola Concerto in D major: Teaching & Playing. Masterclass

Knowledge of Classical style, technical proficiency and musical creativity are keys to making this movement successful beyond audition preparation, says violist Louise Lansdown.

History has handed down this concerto to us in the form of a single set of handwritten orchestral parts preserved in the Dresden Library. The parts were prepared by three copyists and were formerly in the possession of Joseph Schubert, a composer and violist in the Dresden Court Orchestra. He also added a cadenza in his own handwriting for the first movement. The parts were housed in the Dresden Royal Public Library.
We have no way of knowing when these copied parts were made or even when Hoffmeister wrote the concerto. It must have been before 1799 as this was the year in which the work appeared in the catalogue of a Vienna music shop “in writing”. No print is known to have appeared in Hoffmeister’s lifetime and the first edition, initially a piano reduction did not appear until 1941 when it was published by Paul Günther in Lepizig.

According to Norbert Gertsch and Julia Ronge in the Preface from the Henle Urtext Verlag (739) from 2002-3 “The circumstances for a modern edition of Hoffmeister’s work are as inauspicious as can be. There are, in essence, two basic problems. First, we do not know how accurately the copy reflects the text of the lost autograph score; indeed, some passages suggest that it is highly inaccurate. Second, the solo viola part was reworked several times in the source and now presents a text which, in articulation and dynamics, is more beholden to the performance philosophy of various nineteenth-century viola players than to the intentions Hoffmeister set down in his score.”