A wonderful little devilry to start with

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Andreas Pernpeintner

On the left Maurice Ravel at the Paris Conservatoire 1895

When you’re new to an enterprise, it’s very agreeable when your colleagues kindly prepare the ground for you. The idea of placing the manageable Sérénade grotesque by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) on my desk as my first edition when I joined the G. Henle publishing house was thus a sign of great caring and attention – and served at most secondarily to test me a bit on how I go through all the steps involved in producing an Urtext edition of this piece within a relatively short time. What nobody suspected was that the piece would soon turn out to be a bit of devilry, coping with it requiring the entire editorial toolkit. Although the source comparison can be largely limited to the autograph and the posthumous first edition, the two texts are overflowing with different readings needing to be brought under control. Continue reading →

Posted in autograph, Fingering, first edition, Monday Postings, notation, piano solo, Ravel, Maurice, variant reading | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Le Maître des Charmes’ – On the 100th anniversary of Gabriel Fauré’s death

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Peter Jost

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)

Which compositions are associated with Gabriel Fauré? For certain, the Requiem and probably the Pavane as well as the orchestral suites Pelléas et Mélisande and Masques et Bergamasques, also some chamber music works such as the first Violin Sonata in A major op. 13, the Berceuse op. 16, the Élégie op. 24 or the Sicilienne op. 78 – but beyond that? Considering his complete oeuvre of some 200 works, it is no exaggeration to speak of Fauré as a largely unknown composer, even if every classical music fan is likely to be familiar with his name. He belongs to the group of composers increasingly overshadowed by their contemporaries. That the new French music of the 20th century’s first two decades is so firmly linked with the names Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel has obscured the view of other pioneers of this new music – of which to this day, Fauré is undoubtedly one. Continue reading →

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The elders’ errors tenaciously persist. On the violin solo entry in Mozart’s D-major Violin Concerto, K. 218

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Wolf-Dieter Seiffert

Mozart, Violin Concerto D-major, K. 218,
ed. by Ferdinand David,
A-Sm Rara 218/5

As Urtext editors, we could sometimes despair: we’re offering the music world a reliable music text, but those for whom all our work is devoted go on ignoring the new findings in their playing and teaching.

You’d like an example? I recently heard a young, very talented Korean violinist play Mozart’s D-major Concerto, K. 218 (HN 680). Apart from the fact that he unfortunately dispensed with the ‘common sense’ standard, at least in historically informed performance practice, of playing the tutti passages and conducting the orchestra as primarius, we heard in detail all those little note errors and subjective editorial additions ultimately going back to Ferdinand David’s first edition of 1865. Continue reading →

Posted in arrangement, articulation, autograph, dynamics, first edition, Monday Postings, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Urtext, variant reading, violin + orchestra | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Arnold Schönberg on his 150th birthday – the truth in the music (and in the edition)

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Norbert Müllemann

For me, this Arnold Schönberg quotation expresses the composer’s attitude towards music – not just towards his own, but towards music in general. The seriousness with which he was striving for truth in music is without parallel. The fact that this attitude also meant a certain lack of compromise will be further discussed below…

In a few days the world will be celebrating Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday – and the G. Henle publishing house will of course also be joining the celebration! Reason enough to pause for a moment to highlight Schönberg’s significance for our catalogue. Continue reading →

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If we hadn’t had the chance… the rediscovery of a new Prokofiev source

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Peter Jost

Fans of so-called ‘true crime’ formats, reporting, that is, about real criminal cases, know only too well what a major role chance plays in solving crimes. Clues leading nowhere are followed for weeks or months – but then a cross-connection emerges that becomes a hot lead. Or when witnesses are re-questioned, a previously unknown or unnoticed detail turns up, shedding new light on the course of events. In any case, there is often talk of ‘Inspector Fortuity’ when it comes to the breakthrough in solving a criminal case. Although the Henle editorial team’s source research cannot be compared with detective investigations, there are contact points in that sometimes a detective instinct is needed to make the decisive query. Or even – and this is what we’ll be discussing below – Inspector Fortuity is deployed. Continue reading →

Posted in engraver’s copy, Monday Postings, new source, piano + violin, Prokofiev, Sergei | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Summer break

Posted on July 8, 2024 by publisher

Summer is here and our composers need a short break!

Here, for example, Sergei Rachmaninoff, recovering from his strenuous anniversary year in 2023, is on a boat tour of Lake Lucerne, together with daughters Tatiana and Irina. Continue reading →

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Once again, a tight squeeze – the joy and sorrow of the Urtext cover

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Annette Oppermann

If you quickly want to describe a Henle edition, one sentence is enough: it is the pigeon-blue music score, showing on the cover merely composer and title without any ornamentation. For where other publishing houses employ a large graphics department and select the most diverse fonts, designs and illustrations for different composers, eras or scorings, or at least vary the colour of the card stock cover, holding sway at Henle are the strict rules of B&B: blue cover stock and Bodoni font. Can a blog post be written about something like that? Of course! For first of all, knowing where this minimalist design originated is of interest, and then we editors can tell you a thing or two about how difficult it sometimes really is, to say everything in the few lines stipulated by our strict layout – or at least enough to make the content instantly recognisable. Continue reading →

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Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano concerto – extraordinary works involve extraordinary solutions

Posted on May 13, 2024 by Dominik Rahmer

First edition, A. Gutheil, reprint

Probably no other work in recent years has brought us so many enquiries from musicians, customers and dealers as to when the Henle edition will finally be published…. We are speaking, of course, about one of the greatest ‘warhorses’ in piano history, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano concerto in D minor op. 30.

The monumental concerto’s edition of 1162 bars took quite a while to achieve, but our Urtext piano-score edition (HN 1452) has now been on the market since August 2023 – high time for a short tour of its extraordinary features! Continue reading →

Posted in App, autograph, Fingering, first edition, Henle Library, Monday Postings, piano + orchestra, Rachmaninoff, Sergei | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

On Mozart’s ‘second naïveté’ (Alfred Einstein)

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Wolf-Dieter Seiffert

Alfred Einstein
*1880 München – †1952 El Cerrito
© Smith College Archives

I can’t recall when I first read Alfred Einstein’s Mozart biography.[i] Most probably during my first semester in Munich at Ludwig Maximilian University’s Musicology Institute, in the very same rooms where Alfred Einstein had also studied musicology about 80 years before me. As a Jew, he had to flee Munich with his family at the end of the 1930s and emigrate. I found on the Internet a moving biographical memoir by Einstein’s daughter Eva. The Mozart biography is dedicated to her, as well as to Einstein’s wife Hertha and his sister Bertha: ‘To My Three Ladies’ is the Mozartian title on the frontispiece. Continue reading →

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Schönberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” in a special kind of Urtext edition

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Annette Oppermann

Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday is duly being celebrated by Henle: Promptly scheduled to start the year is one of his most popular works, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for String Sextet (HN 1565), now also finally published in a blue Urtext cover. Assisting me with this edition project has been one of the Schönberg specialists par excellence, Henk Guittart, violist of the former Schönberg Quartet, who has also conducted many performances of Verklärte Nacht. Even before I had begun work on the edition, he had already presented me with long lists of questions and corrections to the score resulting from his decades of familiarity with the work. We then exchanged over the past year countless emails reflecting on the source situation in general and on many score details in particular – because it was precisely in this area of tension between fidelity to the sources and practicability that we had to create a music text not only fulfilling the Urtext criteria but also providing performers with an optimal basis for making music. In the following interview we look back at why this was not so easy. Continue reading →

Posted in App, chamber orchestra, Digital, Henle Library, Instrumentation, Monday Postings, Schoenberg, Arnold, string sextet, variant reading, versions | Leave a comment