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
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