This question might at first appear trivial. Presumably every pianist nowadays has already once accompanied baroque chamber music from a basso-continuo part. In the G. Henle Verlag – and not only at our publishing house – this part is basically a stave for the left hand. It contains the bass part, mostly with numbers indicating which chords are to be played by the right hand in each case. Continue reading
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), 1925 (Licence: PD)
Maurice Ravel’s concert rhapsody “Tzigane” is known to exist in three versions: in the original for violin and piano (April/May 1924), in the slightly-later version for violin and orchestra (July 1924) as well as in a version for violin and luthéal, (October 1924); the luthéal, only just developed and then quickly given up again, is a string-instrument device that when installed in the upright or grand piano makes it possible to generate a new sound register that Ravel used here primarily to imitate the sound of the Hungarian cimbalom. Continue reading
The last blog posting on 6 January has already let it be known: we are welcoming Sergei Rachmaninoff as a new composer in the Henle catalogue! With the expiration of copyright on 1 January 2014, works in Germany and many other countries of the EU and worldwide have now come into the public domain, so that there is no longer anything standing in the way of a new critical edition of his compositions. Continue reading
In May and June 1931 Sergei Rachmaninoff composed his famous and much-played piano ‘Variations on a Theme by Corelli’, Op. 42. Only: The theme is not by Corelli! And what do we now call the child? Better, perhaps, ‘La Folia’ Variations … Continue reading
Dear Reader,
we most warmly thank you today 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.
Today, you will find here a film that is really something. It is an old production from a full 30 years ago of the Bach Christmas Oratorio with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting. Absolutely worth hearing and seeing! Continue reading
The blue Urtext editions certainly amount to the lion’s share of our catalogue, but, incidentally, we do also still produce a completely different kind of music edition; these are facsimiles, that is, literal reproductions of especially significant manuscripts. Often enough we even stock both for a work, so that many people may ask: Why do we actually need the facsimile if, after all, we have a reliable Urtext edition that gives a scholarly evaluation of just this source and hence offers the musician the optimal foundation for performance? Continue reading
These days our latest Urtext product comes from the printer, ‘hot off the press’: an edition of the Sonata in A minor for Solo Flute by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
(HN 555). This is no place for detailing the practical characteristics of this edition (fold-out pages for making reading the music easier with fewer page turns; complete reproduction of the first edition for all of you who want to delve into this crucial flute work at the source and play if possible from it; performance-practice comments by the master transverse flautist Karl Kaiser, who with much advice tended to the edition and traced the important ideas back to the following text). The discussion below has to do with only a single note in the 2nd movement. Continue reading
In connection with the general blog post by Dominik Rahmer on ‘Setting, version, arrangement – how far may Urtext go?’ (October 2012), we are going to deal here with a special case of arrangement. Anyone searching the Internet under ‘César Franck Cello Sonata’, will get more than 80,000 results. But already from the headings on the pages we will quickly see that this ‘cello sonata’ offered is an arrangement of the famous Violin Sonata in A Major. Continue reading
For pianists and string players, especially, the name Henle stands for reliable Urtext editions of their classical repertoires – since the publishing-house founder Günter Henle was himself a pianist, the publishing house also focussed in the early years on that particular literature. Yet in the meantime the wind instruments have likewise become firmly established in our catalogue. Continue reading
As noted in the Preface to the Henle edition of Henryk Wieniawski’s Scherzo-Tarantella (HN 553), a violin and orchestra version of this work exists in an incompletely preserved photocopy of a lost autograph. This version was not published, and it presents a few notable material differences in comparison with the published violin and piano version. Unfortunately, no other autograph of the Scherzo-Tarantella has survived, and without documentation regarding Wieniawski’s editing process, we could not consider the violin and orchestra version as a source for the violin and piano version. Continue reading