Citius, altius, fortius – faster, higher, stronger! Beethoven’s Olympian efforts in the treble

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Norbert Gertsch

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 →

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“Smfz” – On some unconventional dynamic markings in our Urtext editions

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Dominik Rahmer

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 →

Posted in Monday Postings | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Urtext and Urcontext

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Annette Oppermann

leinen cover UrtextIn 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 →

Posted in Fauré, Gabriel, Monday Postings, piano + voice, Schumann, Robert, Urtext | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

At what tempo does Ravel’s Pavane “die”?

Posted on August 31, 2015 by publisher

Maurice Ravel (1906, source: PD)

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 →

Posted in first edition, Monday Postings, Pavane (Ravel), piano solo, Ravel, Maurice, tempo | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Summer rest

Posted on August 3, 2015 by publisher

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

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Who does the pedalling? On the use of the pedal in music for piano duets

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Norbert Müllemann

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 →

Posted in autograph, first edition, Monday Postings, notation | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

“Please don’t play it as it’s written in the music!” – Urtext and playability

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Peter Jost

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 →

Posted in Mahler, Gustav, Monday Postings, notation, Piano quartet (Mahler), Urtext | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Tristan at Troldhaugen – interesting finds in Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces”

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Dominik Rahmer

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…
Continue reading →

Posted in autograph, Grieg, Edvard, Lyric Pieces (Grieg), Monday Postings, piano solo, sketches, variant reading | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Does it work or doesn’t it? About page turns in the music

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Annette Oppermann

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 →

Posted in Bach, Johann Sebastian, Monday Postings, Reger, Max, Schubert, Franz | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The music world will sit up and take notice! On the new Urtext edition of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A Major KV 331

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Wolf-Dieter Seiffert

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 →

Posted in autograph, Monday Postings, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, new source, piano solo, Piano Sonata K. 331 (W.A. Mozart), revision, Urtext | Tagged , , | 8 Comments