Klassische Klavierstücke

Five famous sonatas by Beethoven - all bearing a popular epithet known the world over - are presented to advanced pianists in this attractive volume of selected works from the new three-volume Urtext...

Bartók's Rumanian Folk Dances, composed in 1915, are among his best-known works. They exist in multiple forms, since as well as several piano arrangements and a later orchestral version of his own the...

Bartók's Mikrokosmos is one of the milestones in the pedagogical piano repertoire - and yet it is also far more than a 'classical' piano primer. These 153 piano pieces, organised in ascending order of...

Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a very illuminating picture of the prematurely departed composer's compositional path. From the first essays of the gifted young 16- to 19-year old, one can trace a...

Sergei Rachmaninoff embarked on his compositional career with five short piano pieces, which he presented for the first time in December 1892 in a concert in Charkow (now Kharkiv). The second piece, w...

Ravel’s plans for a piano concerto can be traced back to 1906, but it was only in early 1929 that the composer seriously started work on one. He later stated that he wrote it “in the spirit of the con...

One of the answers found by Schönberg's circle to the question about how musical processes could be shaped without a tonal context was in the extreme streamlining of the form. With Schönberg's Six Lit...

This last of the surviving C major sonatas was written during Haydn's second London sojourn in 1794/95 for the pianist Terese Jansen, Mrs Bartolozzi. It seems to have been a very personal expression o...

The toccata genre has undergone great change since Bach’s time. Originally denoting works of recitative or improvisatory character, since the 19th century the emphasis has been on a continuous pulsati...

Liszt's piano rhapsodies are in the same tradition as his transcriptions of opera or song themes, but in this case the point of departure is folk dances and songs. Liszt described no. 2 of his Hungari...

One of Scriabin’s best-known piano pieces is also one of his very first compositions. He wrote it when he was only fifteen years old; when it appeared in print in 1893, the twenty-one-year-old was sti...

Johannes Brahms twice chose a theme by his friend and mentor Robert Schumann as the basis for piano variations. While the Variations op. 9 were composed for piano solo, as an exception he wrote Opus 2...

The three piano sonatas K. 330-332 were probably written in Vienna or Salzburg in summer 1783, thus many years later than previous Mozart scholarship had assumed. This F-major sonata K. 332 was publis...

Like many other nineteenth-century musicians, Robert Schumann wanted to settle down in the musical capital of Vienna. Though these plans came to naught, his stay in Vienna in 1839 gave rise to an enti...

Schumann's turbulent love-affair with the barely eighteen-year-old Ernestine von Fricken, though strong enough to lead to a secret engagement, lasted only a few months. Nevertheless, it managed to giv...

The polonaise made its first appearances in stylized dance music in the late 16th century. With his own polonaises, Chopin also declared his allegiance to his native Poland. In a way, the genre had fa...

The 'Davidsbund' - a group of artists who had joined forces in a revolutionary struggle against the backward structures in the artistic world, amongst whose members he counted both real and imaginary...

Teaching the piano was an important source of income for Brahms, as it was for many nineteenth-century composers. This gave rise to collections of exercises which at first he only occasionally wrote d...

Schumann's great C-major Fantasy, op. 17, was originally intended to be published as a 'Sonata for Beethoven' entitled 'Ruins, Trophies, Palms. Grand Sonata.' Although he eventually abandoned this pla...

Schubert composed the Wandererfantasie in November 1822. Though generally designated as a year of crisis, an entire series of Schubert's important works were created precisely at this time, when the W...

Eighteen piano sonatas survive from Mozart's pen, composed during his mature years between 1775 and 1789. They are usually grouped according to their first editions: (1) six sonatas K. 279-284 (2) thr...

Mazurkas, nocturnes, waltzes and polonaises constitute the core of Chopin's expressive world. However, he also moved comfortably beyond such genre cycles, and pieces of this sort are brought together...

Scholars have long been trying to figure out the mystery of Chopin's one and only solo Fantasie. The highly individual form is a puzzle to all who prefer more traditional genre concepts. Is it a sonat...

George Frideric Handel's powerful musical personality reveals itself not only in the large forms of opera, oratorio, and orchestral suite, but also in his compositions for keyboard. The focus here is...

Through the amiable genre of the sonatina, generations of piano pupils have slowly and cautiously approached its 'big sister', the sonata. With the aid of our three-volume selection of sonatinas from...