‘Come sopra’ – clearly ambiguous!

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Norbert Gertsch

The autograph of Beethoven’s piano sonata, Op. 90, is part of the splendid collection of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn; since digitalization some years ago, it has been available for contemplation on the Internet. Even if in comparison with many other Beethoven manuscripts it is relatively easy to decipher, upon first glance at various pages the question is whether we are actually dealing here with a ‘finished’ work. Continue reading →

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Gratis, but not for nothing – the download of the Lalo cello concerto

Posted on February 18, 2013 by publisher

Whilst browsing through the Henle publishers’ catalogue you may occasionally come upon the link ‘free download’. Continue reading →

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High quality sheet music. What makes a music edition good?

Posted on February 11, 2013 by publisher

A carnival week blog contribution:

(1) You can tell a good edition of music, dear reader, by its well-planned page turns.

(2) A good edition of music is not a collection of loose sheet music, but is in a binding.

(3) A good edition of music has playable fingering.  

(4) Good musicians have good page turners.

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Composers on the waiting list – or: We’d really like to do them, but are (still) not allowed to do so

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Peter Jost

Dmitri Shostakovich

‘Why doesn’t Henle have the famous piano trio by Shostakovich?’ or: ‘When will the seventh piano sonata by Prokofiev finally come out?’ Time and again our editorial department receives such questions about our offerings. Continue reading →

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Brahms’s ‘Hungarian Dances’ – new finds in old sources

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Dominik Rahmer

In 2011 the Brahms researcher Michael Struck made a striking discovery – in a book published already 100 years ago… Continue reading →

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How much verbal text can music tolerate?

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Annette Oppermann

A serious scholarly book publication can be recognized by the footnotes – and in a way this also applies to musical Urtext editions, because here too it is imperative to base the printed music text on appropriate evidence. Where and how this is done depends though on many parameters – amongst other things, on the question of how much verbal text the music or the practicing musician will put up with. Continue reading →

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‘Silent Night’ revisited

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Norbert Müllemann

A blog entry on 24 December – how could it not have Christmas associations? Not even a Henle editor would have it otherwise. Should there really be a blog post on problems in Urtext editions on a date so emotionally charged? That does not seem quite in line to me. Yet, perhaps even in Christmas music undreamt-of Urtext questions might be napping, so that the two could be combined elegantly one with the other? Let’s give it a try in the following. Continue reading →

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Gong, tamtam or cymbal crash? – Gershwin’s ‘Concerto in F’ as work in progress

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Norbert Gertsch

You know George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and the famous place just before closing, where a percussion instrument introduces the climax of the piece with a loud ‘bang’? You don’t? Then, as an introduction here comes first of all an excerpt from the film ‘An American in Paris’ of 1951, in which Oscar Levant Continue reading →

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A manuscript conundrum – the autograph of Gabriel Fauré’s violin sonata, Op. 13

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Peter Jost

Autograph manuscripts of musical works have an aura all their own that is hard to resist: They fascinate, on the one hand, by portraying a composer’s characteristic handwriting (cf. fig. 1); on the other, they give us immediate access to the composer’s workshop so long as they’re not just fair copies, but working manuscripts with corrections, deletions and additions. Continue reading →

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Piano Trio Question: Why really are pianists ‘allowed’ to play from the score, but not string players? And since when?

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Wolf-Dieter Seiffert

Notice: There’s a prize question at the end of this piece. You’re cordially invited to participate!

The music edition of a piano trio comprises in principle, as is generally known, a piano score with two solo parts (violin and cello) enclosed. It is only the pianist who plays from the score consisting of a grand stave for piano in large print with string parts placed above in small print, violin part on top, cello part below. That’s so far nothing new. But what many musicians don’t know is that this particular score format for today’s piano-trio music is an invention (and standardisation) of the 19th century. In the original tradition up to Beethoven’s time composers were neither acquainted with the piano score nor was there a single method of notation. Continue reading →

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