Advanced Sheet Music from G. Henle Verlag

Among the priceless treasures of the music department at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is its collection of Bach autographs. The manuscript of the Flute Sonata in b minor BWV 1030 is a particularly b...

This masterpiece's famous nickname 'Appassionata' (the passionate) does not stem from Beethoven, but was assigned to the sonata by posterity. However, it could hardly be more appropriate! Beethoven's...

Franz Liszt not only wrote a series of opera paraphrases during his virtuoso years, but also composed some in his Weimar years from 1848 onwards. He did not, however, write them for himself but for th...

Johan Halvorsen’s virtuoso "Passacaglia" for violin and viola, freely adapted after Handel, is an indispensable encore in the concert halls. The Norwegian composer, conductor and violinist wrote this...

This middle piece of the early set of three early sonatas op. 2 dedicated to Joseph Haydn was probably composed in the winter of 1794/95. To this day it stands - unjustly -- in the shadow of its more...

As with the three sonatas that form opus 2, the trio of works forming opus 10, written between 1796 and 1798, offers a collection of three sonatas with entirely different characters. With its distinct...

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...

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...

In the second volume, Italie, published in 1858, of the three-part Années de pèlerinage the great names of Italian art and poetry occupy centre stage. Among these was also Petrarch and his collection...

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...

Isaac Albéniz understood his "Iberia Suite" as "Spanish music with a universal touch". He succeeded perfectly with the colourful piano cycle, even though at the end, plagued by serious illness, he had...

The eleventh Hungarian Rhapsody, published in 1853, is based on four themes of Hungarian character whose origins have not yet been determined: Liszt may have noted them down by ear during his trip to...

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...

Obermann', the epistolary novel by the French Romantic Senancour, inspired Liszt to write the first volume in his collection 'Années de Pèlerinage' (HN 173). A wanderer is searching for his ideals in...

Every classically trained saxophonist knows and plays this work: with his Saxophone Quartet, composed in 1932, Alexander Glazunov established virtually out of nowhere a new genre and helped the then u...

As if looking back on his youth toward the end of his life, Richard Strauss wrote a second concerto for horn and orchestra, again in Eb major, around sixty years after his first concerto for horn. Thi...

Scriabin's ideal of music as part of a synthesis of the arts, raising people to a higher level of consciousness, is particularly apparent in his late work 'Vers la flamme' op. 72. The poème opens with...

In 1891, the year before his final exam at the music conservatory, Alexander Scriabin injured his right hand due to his ambitious practising. This seriously jeopardized his career as a pianist and the...

Scriabin's two movement Piano Sonata no. 2 in g sharp minor was composed over a relatively lengthy period of time. He first began work on it in 1892, but in the summer of 1896, after Scriabin had perf...

'A great poem for the piano' was how Scriabin described his fifth piano sonata. It was indeed composed at the same time as his great poem for orchestra 'Le Poème de l'extase', and both works are based...

Kapellmeister Kreisler, the ingenious and eccentric conductor created by E. T. A. Hoffmann, served as the inspiration for this composition of 1838. Schumann set out to recreate this fictitious charact...

Who does not know Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne, the final piece from his Partita in D minor for solo violin? Time and again, composers have been inspired to open up this exceptional work for other...

In 1841, at the height of his mastery, Mendelssohn wrote three variation cycles for piano in quick succession. The first of them, the 'Variations sérieuses' op 54, should probably be regarded as his m...

The first book of Albéniz' four-part cycle 'Iberia' has already been published in an acclaimed Henle Urtext edition and many pianists are now eagerly awaiting the remaining ones. The second book in th...