Advanced Sheet Music from G. Henle Verlag

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...

Liszt understood a "rhapsody" to signify the highest degree of musical freedom: a constant process of transformation and variation of themes and motifs, all bound up with constant shifts of emotion. A...

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...

Charles Valentin Alkan focused his work entirely on the piano, and one can hardly fill the page more densely with notes than Alkan did. With that he numbers among the breakneck piano virtuosos who lef...

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...

Out of admiration for the "Waltz King" Johann Strauss, Ravel had already planned a waltz composition in 1906, the realisation of which was hindered by other projects and the outbreak of the First Worl...

The Eight Etudes op. 42 by Alexander Scriabin were composed during a phase of great productivity. For many years, teaching commitments had hampered the composer. Gradually, he was able to dispose of t...

Debussy had originally planned the work with the Suite bergamasque (HN 381) in mind, but then published it separately in October 1904, with good reason. He was so taken with the brilliance and inventi...

The cycle with three movements, composed at the end of 1907 and published at the beginning of the next year, contains a singular innovation: Debussy notated the highly differentiated piano part that g...

Carl Maria von Weber's four piano sonatas, all composed in the decade 1812-1822, are considered the pillars of his not very extensive piano oeuvre. In these sonatas, Weber, who was one of the most ren...

Robert Schumann was fascinated by the violin virtuoso Nicolò Paganini, as were many composers of the time. When he was planning a piano tutor in 1832/33 that was to include his own works as well as th...

Liszt's 'Transcendental Studies' of 1852 are without doubt among the triumphs of virtuoso piano music, and their visionary language and poetic expression make them a milestone of the romantic age. Thi...

Thanks to its variety and playfulness, the so-called 'Gastein Sonata' is one of Schubert's most effective essays in the genre, posing considerable demands on technique while always lying well under th...

For half a century Henle's edition of the Beethoven sonatas - the 'New Testament' of the piano repertoire - has been universally recognized as the standard starting-point for any serious study of thes...

Beethoven's three Piano sonatas op. 2 were the first works in this genre to which he gave an opus number, thus signalling to the music world the special importance that he assigned to them. He wrote t...

Beethoven's three Piano sonatas op. 2 were the first works in this genre to which he gave an opus number, thus signalling to the music world the special importance that he assigned to them. He wrote t...