Advanced Classical Music Sheet Music

Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 and 903a is one of his most fascinating works. It was apparently already greatly admired during his lifetime, for it survives in numerous copies which presen...

Schönberg’s publisher Emil Hertzka provided the impetus for composition of the Piano Piece op. 33a in 1928. In fact, he had merely asked for permission to print an older work in the collection Musik d...

This work, in two movements and dating from 1804, is clearly among the lesser-known of Beethovens 32 piano sonatas. The lack of a sonata-movement form, the old-fashioned heading 'In Tempo d'un Menuett...

Beethoven gave this sonata the unusual title 'Sonata quasi una Fantasia,' which it shares, along with its opus number, with the considerably more famous 'Moonlight' Sonata. Both sonatas - along with t...

One of Chopin's most radical compositions, the B minor Scherzo leaves hardly any listener untouched. The wild main section, interspersed with brutal dissonances, frames the intimate trio, in which Cho...

Chopin's Scherzo no. 3 was connected to his legendary winter in Mallorca in 1838/39, as were his Préludes op. 28. On 22 January 1839, the composer sent the autograph of the latter work to Camille Pley...

Given Saint-Saëns' talents both as pianist and composer, it stood to reason that he would engage with the piano concerto genre early on. But he gave a clear renunciation of the 'concerto brilliant' th...

Despite its unusual form - a structure with two sections, each comprising two movements that are to be played without interruption - this work from 1875 enjoyed great success from the start. In its ba...

Charles Valentin Alkan's cycle of variations Le Festin d'Ésope derives from his monumental series of etudes op. 39, the 12 Études dans tous les Tons Mineurs, and forms the culmination of that work. No...

In the “Nocturnes” for orchestra and women’s chorus, composed between 1897 and 1899, Debussy realised his concept that the musical form should emerge freely from the material. With the tripartite stru...

Bach/Busoni - a pairing that makes pianists' hearts beat faster. This is because Busoni succeeded in making piano transcriptions of works that Bach had originally tailor-made for another instrument in...

Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a most illuminating picture of the prematurely departed composer and of his compositional path. From the first attempts of the gifted 16- to 19-year- old musician on...

Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a most illuminating picture of the prematurely departed composer and of his compositional path. From the first attempts of the gifted 16- to 19-year- old musician on...

Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini was his last and at the same time most significant work for piano and orchestra. As a cycle of variations on Paganini's 24th Caprice from op. 1, i...

With his Études-Tableaux Rachmaninoff continued down the path that Chopin and Liszt had already set out on with their concert etudes: the most demanding technical tasks are presented in the form of ex...

In Schubert's cheerful E flat major Sonata, the listener is unaware that the composer struggled for a long time to arrive at its final version. Initial sketches date back to 1817, then still in a thre...

The B major Sonata numbers among Schubert's early piano sonatas. Composed in August 1817, it was not published until long after his death. The unusual key (for its time) shows the young Schubert's del...

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...

The epithet "English Suites" - as with the "French Suites" - did not originate with Bach himself. In contrast to the six intimate French Suites, Bach's English Suites adopt a grander tone, each one op...

Volume I of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, entitled Suisse, is based on impressions he gathered during an extended sojourn in Switzerland in 1835/36. The most important piece of the collection, first p...

The Five Piano Pieces op. 23 are a transitional work in which Schönberg made the decisive step from free atonal music to composition based on tone rows, which however did not yet necessarily have to c...

Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 and 903a is one of his most fascinating works. It was apparently already greatly admired during his lifetime, for it survives in numerous copies which presen...

In the second volume, "Italie", of the three-part "Années de pèlerinage", which was released in 1858, the great names of Italian art and poetry take centre stage. This also includes Dante with his fam...

The eighth Hungarian Rhapsody, published in 1853, treats themes that Liszt became acquainted with during his visit to Hungary in 1846: a folk song, a popular dance melody of the time and a csárdás. No...

The Hungarian Rhapsody no. 10, published in 1853, is based on a composition by Béni Egressy. At that time, the Hungarian national composer directed one of the most famous so-called gypsy bands. When L...