Henle Ensemble Sheet Music in premium Urtext editions

'In the evening we played Robert's E-flat major Quartet for the first time ... and I was once again truly delighted at this beautiful and so youthful work', enthused Clara Schumann in 1842. In prepara...

This is Mozart's only piece of chamber music for the oboe - and no oboist would want to be without it! Like the Clarinet Quintet, the Oboe Quartet of 1781 was written for a friend: Friedrich Ramm, a m...

No serious musician and no serious orchestra can ignore this new Urtext edition of a major work of concerto literature, since the music text frequently diverges from that of previous editions. All the...

At certain points it will be like a serious song, at others like a happy dance …” This was how Dvo?ák described the work which he was composing at the time to a friend in 1890. The word 'Dumka” (plura...

Max Bruch composed these eight, highly romantic pieces for his son Max Felix, a talented clarinettist. In order to enable the work to be played more widely, Bruch arranged the clarinet part for violin...

No romantic poetry and no concrete fairytale figure occasioned Schumann to write this composition. Today, we can assume that the title of the pieces, originally entitled 'Romances', was merely suppose...

When he was a mere 18 years old, Richard Strauss composed the highly Romantic, one-movement Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 7. Extremely popular among wind players to this day, this work recalls in...

What might have occasioned Mozart to rework his original Serenade for sextet into a version for octet (with two oboes) only a few months after he had completed it? Was there an 'external” cause? Once...

Reicha published a total of 24 wind quintets for the 'classical' scoring of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon; op. 88 no. 2 is one of the best-loved and most played. 'If it were possible to surp...

Beethoven's Opus 71 is one of a series of works for mixed wind instruments, which he composed in the 1790s. In 1805 at a performance of the dance-like, lively work in Vienna, the audience praised its...

Leoš Janá?ek composed his Suite for wind instruments Mládí (in English youth) in 1924, so when he was over 70. Numerous sources still survive for this work, making it difficult to establish the defini...

When Dvořák suddenly became internationally famous in 1878 with his Slavonic Dances, he received, among other things, a request for a new string quartet from Jean Becker, the first violinist of the re...

In autumn 1895, after returning from New York once and for all, Dvorák took up his former position as teacher at the Prague Conservatory. This clearly had an inspiring impact on him because in the spa...

This volume brings together Mozart's youthful attempts at this later so central genre of the string quartet: the astonishing 'Lodi Quartet' K. 80 by the only fourteen-year-old composer, the three 'Qua...

Redolent of the work of Dmitri Shostakovich in its musical language, Evgeny Kissin's String Quartet op. 3 comprises four strongly contrasting movements: on the heels of the stately 'Adagio liberamente...

In 1919-20 George Gershwin was making a name for himself with Broadway songs and a first show of his own in New York. But he was already attracted to the world of classical music - a world he would en...

Dvorák composed his Terzetto op. 74 in 1887 as the result of a spontaneous desire to write some domestic music. Inspired by neighbourhood violin lessons, he wrote these four little movements for two v...

Alexander Zemlinsky's music was long unjustly overshadowed by what was regarded as the 'more progressive' Second Viennese School. Although Zemlinsky was close friends with its protagonist Arnold Schön...

Composed in autumn of 1881, Opus 61 is the last of Dvořák's 'middle' quartets by chronology for which Beethoven and Schubert served as the most significant models. Beethoven's influence, from thematic...

Béla Bartók's six string quartets, composed between 1908 and 1940, are 20th-century milestones of the genre. His First String Quartet is closely linked to his unhappy love for the violinist Stefi Geye...

Bartók's Second String Quartet was composed - with several long interruptions - between 1915 and 1918, after he had spent several years almost solely devoted to collecting folk music. The melody and r...

The String Quartet no. 3 is the shortest of Béla Bartók's six Quartets, and was also composed in a remarkably short time. He wrote the score in September 1927, and in the following December it won him...

Even before his String Quartet no. 3 appeared in print in 1929, Bartók was already working on a fourth in the summer of 1928. This five-movement work is arranged symmetrically around a highly expressi...

The longest and at the same time most complex of Bartók’s six string quartets was composed in the summer of 1934 as a well-paid commission for the renowned Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in Was...

Bartók began work on his Sixth String Quartet in the summer of 1939 as a guest of Paul Sacher in the idyllic Swiss mountain village of Saanen, before the impending outbreak of war drove him first to B...