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
Nowadays we automatically associate music for piano duet with the 19th century. It is the very definition of the domestic-music genre. Many in the Biedermeier world could play piano and really make quite illustrious music in a duet with relatively little effort – that is to say with modest technical ability. It is therefore precisely in piano lessons that piano-duet playing is much and eagerly practised today. The teacher mostly plays the Secondo part (and thus ensures an orchestral foundation), while the student is taxed with the more easily managed melody-carrying Primo part (we need only think of works by the inevitable Anton Diabelli). Feeling of success guaranteed! And to make the whole thing sound still better, the teacher works the pedal on the right during the playing. Continue reading
A music-lesson scene that we all recall most reluctantly: A certain spot repeatedly goes wrong, and the teacher calls out, already nearly in desperation: “Simply play it as it’s written in the music!”
Sounds simple and obvious. If it nevertheless doesn’t work, something must indeed be wrong with the fingers, not with the notes. Especially if we are playing from an Urtext edition whose notes would certainly have been critically reviewed, and so they would have to be all right.
But is that actually always the case? Couldn’t, however, the playing problem also come from something being wrong with the notes? Continue reading
Among the most popular and successful of Edvard Grieg’s compositions are undoubtedly his “Lyric Pieces” for piano, published between 1867 and 1901 in ten separate volumes and ultimately combined into one complete volume in 1902. Yet though the editions were already reprinted thousands of times during his lifetime, many errors and oddities still remain unaltered to this day…
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Haven’t you, too, sometimes wondered in a concert why the music that the musicians on stage are using takes such strange forms? Some pianists place on the music rack a big card to which are clipped the complete movements of a Bach suite in scaled-down copies. Even at quartet evenings, pasted-together copies readily hang down off the music stands to the right and left – not to mention lieder recitals, where whole mountains of custom-made fold-up sheets are assembled. The reason for this is obvious: where the music page ends, one either can’t or won’t want to turn the page there. But as an editor of practical Urtext editions, I’m asking myself then, “Isn’t there some other way?” Continue reading
You presumably know Mozart’s A-major Piano Sonata KV 331 (with the “alla turca” rondo). One of the best-known sonatas, if not THE best-known, of the entire piano repertoire. And yet it is the bitter truth that to this day we all play this famous sonata incorrectly, not in any event like Mozart wanted it. How so? Up to now there has been no single error-free music edition of this famous piece. The 19th century had garbled the sonata almost beyond recognition: Urtext editions of the 20th century (even ours so far) have essentially had to make use of the first edition (“opus 6” in the Artaria publishing house, Vienna, 1784) as the best available basis for the text because Mozart’s autograph (up to the last page of the “alla turca”) was lost. Continue reading
Here’s a topic that pianists have been discussing since the 19th century: Is it OK to change the music text in Beethoven’s piano sonatas (and, of course, anywhere else, too) and extend the pitch range downward at several spots in the left hand? Because even though to some extent keys for the low pitches E1 to C1 were in fact available on English pianos from ca. 1800, they were clearly first “used” in Beethoven’s piano sonatas, however, only later. Up until the piano sonata op. 101, composed between 1815 and the start of 1817, Beethoven faithfully respected the limitation of the pitch-range down to F1 – his music was after all supposed to be playable on a “normal” piano. Continue reading
J.S. Bach, table of ornamentation (see below)
The topic “ornamentation” in music is truly endless. We have to do with a phenomenon that takes place on the border between notation and performance. Ornaments are in the truest sense of the word a “decoration” that the performer adds to the written-out or printed music text. Ornaments were therefore mostly not notated at all in earlier music. Performance tradition taught the interpreter at what spots he or she could fit in whichever embellishments. For instance, the flautist Rachel Brown impressively shows in our edition of the 12 Fantasias by Georg Philipp Telemann (HN 556, scroll to page six to discover the English notes on performance practice), what can be made of the music text, indeed, what must be performed to be stylistically correct. Thus at its core ornamentation always has to do with improvisation. Continue reading
In my last blog posting I reported on my current, exciting editorial work on Mozart’s string quartets. It was about a small, but yet audible correction of a “mfp” in the cello solo of the slow movement of the second “Prussian” String Quartet K. 589. To my way of thinking, all the editions misrepresent this spot. Today’s brief posting augments this: It’s about the start of the development in the first movement of the so-called “Hoffmeister” Quartet K. 499. This spot makes still more blatantly clear why to date Mozart’s string quartets are not yet available in the best possible music edition. Continue reading