During his youth, Richard Strauss composed a large number of works for piano solo, among them numerous sonatas. Yet it was only the Sonata in b-minor that he obviously considered important enough to want to see in print. It was composed in two versions, presumably between winter of 1880 and spring of 1881, and published one year later. Here, Strauss still plainly follows his compositional forebears from German Romanticism. The two middle movements of this demanding sonata in particular directly recall Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” and scherzi. This is the first Urtext edition of this piano sonata.
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 optimized for practical use (page turns, fingerings)
- are of high quality and durable (cover, paper, binding)
- contain a short preface that introduces the work (particulalry 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
