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
The autograph of Mozart’s piano quintet for piano and four winds K. 452 harboured a secret for more than 200 long years. I could first reveal it as part of my Urtext edition (HN 665 and HN 9665) in the year 2000. Continue reading
The strings, together with the main instrument, piano, have all along played a large role in the Henle catalogue. As early as amongst the house’s first publications from the 1940s, standard string-repertoire works can be found with Beethoven’s cello variations and violin sonatas (HN 5 and 7/8, both of course meanwhile revised according to the text of the New Beethoven Complete Edition); in the last six decades this repertoire has been systematically extended from Bach to Berg (as, incidentally, can also be gathered from our 13 video Interviews with 13 internationally renowned violinists on 13 great violin works). The double bass, on the other hand, first came to Henle with the new millennium, and for that there are many reasons … Continue reading
Sometimes a conundrum can’t be solved, even when the source situation makes abundant material available to the editor of an Urtext edition. This, for instance, is the case with Robert Schumann’s Papillons, Op. 2, for which the ‘definitive version’ can hardly likely be determined. Continue reading
The use of folk-music elements in art music has, as is well known, a long tradition reaching back to the late Middle Ages. In the 2nd half of the 19th century this practice obtained new qualitative significance against the background of rising nationalism. If it served so many composers as a demonstration of their rootedness in their homelands, and at the same time as a self-confident counterweight to the dominance of German-Austrian music at that time – we think, for instance, of Edvard Grieg or Antonín Dvořák –, then other musicians paraded with great success the exotic charm of foreign sounds.
Benefitting like hardly anyone else from the fashion for such national idioms was the violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908), who in his own compositions borrowed from the folk music of numerous European countries and regions. Continue reading