Frédéric Chopin’s 4 Scherzi are high points in the Romantic piano repertoire. Chopin here takes a traditional genre and fills it with radically new content. They are wild, demonic in tone, and there is little about them that is joke-like, despite the original meaning of their title. Referring to the 1st Scherzo, Robert Schumann asked: “how should seriousness be attired, when even a ‘joke’ is veiled in black?”. Now that the Scherzi nos. 1–4 have been published in revised stand-alone editions, G. Henle Publishers is now offering all four in paperback and hardback, in an edition that reflects the current state of Chopin research. Both the footnotes and the extensive Critical Report on the Internet offer detailed information on the familiar topic of “Chopin variants” and on all the textual problems they raise. This is Chopin in top form!
Critical Commentary
(replaces HN279)
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
