By guest author Alex Ross[1]
“What other work is so full of silence?” (András Schiff)
The other day, I sat with Sir András Schiff, the Hungarian-born, British-based pianist, in a practice room at Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, contemplating a great musical mystery: the trill in the eighth measure of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960. Continue reading
That Chopin variants can be exasperating to an editor – who has to do everything possible to provide the musician with one valid text – is well enough known. The idea that we are not alone in our exasperation can, however, be comforting. This in any case happened to me when I began to prepare a revised edition (HN 1334) of the 1st Scherzo in b minor. I came across a document by the famous Chopin pupil and editor Karol Mikuli that shows considerable perplexity. Continue reading
Among the just about one hundred compositions that the violin virtuoso Henry Vieuxtemps left to posterity, the 5th Violin Concerto in a minor op. 37 is certainly regarded as his by far best-known and best-loved work. It owes its popularity not only to its brilliant violin part, but also to its original form in three movements passing seamlessly without pause from one to the other. Continue reading
So when did the penny finally drop at the publishing house that Henle editions can be more than just print editions? In my case this happened in March 2011 when I gave a talk about what Urtext means at the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) conference in Milwaukee. And all anyone wanted to talk to me about was the iPad! Continue reading
Carnival, Mardi Gras, Fasching: Today, Carnival Monday (“Rosenmontag” in German) is also being celebrated in Munich – although somewhat less exuberantly than in Cologne or Mainz.
So, just for fun in today’s blog posting we are zooming in on our Urtext catalogue since you’ll find several “silly” compositions stashed away even there. You want to know which ones? Continue reading
As of today we can put all rumours to rest. It’s true: Henle Urtext has gone digital. The global launch of the “Henle Library” app, in German, English and Chinese, for Apple’s iPad, is 3 February 2016 (for Android tablets it’s May 2016). Our app will be a valuable tool for musicians when practising, rehearsing and performing.
Here’s a brief overview, an “appetizer”, exclusively for our blog readers:
Right from the start it was clear to us at Henle Publishers that it wasn’t enough just to offer our Urtext editions in digital form for PDF readers. Continue reading
If the ideal goal of a critical Urtext edition may be said to be finding out and representing what the composer “actually intended”, then consulting all the relevant sources for the work, comparing them and evaluating their differences is above all its fundamental task.
Yet this alone is as a rule not enough. For a composer to have a slip of the pen or to forget a sign by mistake (accidentals, typically) is not unusual, and then all subsequent sources such as copies and first prints may take this mistake over blindly. Such errors throughout cannot be detected, though, by merely comparing all the sources with each other. So it is always necessary in addition to check the music text for consistency in itself, regardless of what the sources show. (The edition must also be to a certain extent “critical” towards the composer.)
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
"Finale furioso" from: Wilhelm Busch: Ein Neujahrskonzert (A New Year’s Concert)
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