“No opus number” is what Brahms gave his astonished publisher to understand, when he offered him the Hungarian Dances for publication in 1869. He placed a great deal of importance on the fact that he had merely “set” popular Hungarian melodies and not composed new works as such. As true as this reservation is, it did not affect the success of these works. The Hungarian Dances are today without a doubt amongst Brahms’ best-known compositions. Brahms himself made an arrangement of the dances 1–10, originally for piano four hands, for solo piano. We are now publishing a revised version of these impressive pieces with the up-to-date text in the new Brahms Complete Edition. Rolf Koenen’s fingerings provide the best possible help for mastering these complex works.
G. Henle Publishers stands for Urtext sheet music of the highest quality. The Urtext editions not only provide the undistorted and authoritative musical text but are also aesthetically pleasing, optimised for practical use and extremely durable. And then there is the strong, distinctive blue profile: (almost) all of the Urtext editions are bound in the characteristic blue cardboard.
Musicians trust Henle's blue Urtext editions because they:
- provide an undistorted, reliable and authoritative musical text
- offer superb, aesthetically appealing music engraving
- are optimised for practical use (page turns, fingerings)
- are of high quality and durable (cover, paper, binding)
- contain a short preface that introduces the work (particularly useful for AMEB exams) in German, English and French, as well as explanatory footnotes for particularly interesting passages in the score
- contain a description of the sources, an evaluation of the sources, readings and a documentation of the corrections made (= "Critical Report") in German and English, and often also in French
