Muzio Clementi was born four years before Mozart and outlived Beethoven by five. Thus this Italian pianist and composer helped fashion the entire Classical era in music. However, his pedagogical tour de force, the “Gradus ad parnassum”, has tended to negatively influence the esteem he enjoyed as an artist, something that our first volume of Clementi’s piano sonatas should help to rectify. This selection of ten moderately difficult to difficult works allows a glimpse into Clementi’s sonata workshop between 1768 and 1785. His predilection for the finer points of part-writing and contrapuntal art blend here with a formal and dignified classicism. Our carefully revised Urtext edition is based on the first versions of the pieces, published in the 1770s and 1780s.
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
