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
Friedrich Burgmüller’s 25 Etudes op. 100 from 1851 are an indispensable part of piano instruction. Their charm lies in the fact that they do not present themselves as mundane finger exercises, but as pieces with evocative titles such as “L’Arabesque” or “L’Hirondelle” (The Swallow). For the Henle edition, the renowned piano pedagogue Melanie Spanswick has written short commentaries to explain the character and technical particularities of the individual etudes. She has carefully supplemented the composer’s original fingerings with additional indications. This Urtext edition also presents for the first time musically expanded versions, which Burgmüller presumably wrote down only after the work had been printed. So, even with these popular exercises there is new territory to discover!
