Dear Reader,
we most warmly thank you for your interest in the Henle Blog. We also look forward to your visits in the coming year and promise interesting postings on musical questions concerning music texts. Continue reading
Dear Reader,
we most warmly thank you for your interest in the Henle Blog. We also look forward to your visits in the coming year and promise interesting postings on musical questions concerning music texts. Continue reading
The fact that the winds first found their way into our catalogue in 1972 after a delay of two and half decades was already once before a topic of our blog. Typically enough, this happened with Beethoven’s Opus 16 (HN 222) – that odd hybrid work that’s come down to us as both a piano quartet with three strings and a piano quintet with four winds (as you can see from the cover of the first edition). Continue reading
With barely concealed exasperation Clara Schumann writes on 25 May 1854 in her diary: “Liszt sent Robert today a sonata dedicated to him and several other things with a friendly letter to me. But the things are dreadful! Brahms played them for me, but they made me utterly wretched…. This is nothing but sheer racket – not a single healthy idea, everything confused, no longer a clear harmonic sequence to be detected there! And now I still have to thank him – it’s really awful.” Continue reading
Antonín Dvořák, director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, 1892–95, composed the String Quartet in F major op. 96 early in the summer of 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, where he went to spend his vacation. Continue reading
Regular readers of the Henle blog will recollect: My last post covered the sensational Budapest find of the autograph double leaf of Mozart’s famous A-major Piano Sonata K. 331 as well as the announcement of my new Urtext edition of it, published meanwhile. Continue reading
Having written in May this year about the low tones, I’d like to strike a balance today and write about Beethoven’s efforts towards greater heights. Did he suffer from the constraints of the 18th- and 19th-century piano keyboards going up to only f3 (today, after all, they go up to c5)? Upon closer inspection we might almost get that impression. Continue reading
Dynamics are in a way the salt in the musical soup: without them even the most interesting composition would seem bland. So it is that in preparing a musical Urtext we must give top priority to the strict observation not only of the notes, accidentals and articulation, but also of the composer’s dynamic directives. Continue reading
In our blog we have certainly already discussed the Urtext principle at length, and we can assume that it is familiar as such – but are you also acquainted with the Urcontext? This also plays a particularly large role at the Henle publishers (even if we don’t put it on the cover…). Continue reading
During my assistantship this past year as Henlean, I was allowed to take on all kinds of tasks in the G. Henle publishing house, everything from discovering something new, being creative, reading the most beautiful music, celebrating events, to learning much and editing my own blue Urtext edition: HN 1260. The Pavane pour une infante défunte [Pavane for a Dead Princess] is a small composition by Maurice Ravel that he wrote in 1899 for piano and later reworked for orchestra. As a nice addition to our Ravel repertoire and with a supposedly “simple” source situation, this project was also to have been for me a good introduction to the work of an editor, but with every reading of the sources new questions kept surfacing. Even now after the publication of the edition I am still thinking about one of them, for I have not found any conclusive answer to it: At what tempo does Ravel’s Pavane “die”? Continue reading
We’re getting ready to travel and of course our Urtext-editions should not be missing in the suitecase! And where are you taking your music?
Our Blog is taking a brief summer rest. Please look forward to the next post on 31. August 2015!
G. Henle Verlag