We publish music by permission of the US Government
NewsThe head of the Urtext publisher G. Henle Verlag gives an entertaining account of how the company came into being, and how no-one can agree what Urtext really means.
Wolf-Dieter Seiffert is talking to our partner Zsolt Bognar on Living the Classical Life.
An interesting if (understandably) somewhat self-congratulatory interview. Mr. Seiffert notes that “Urtext” is “a very clever marketing term” as well as a scholarly ideal. I recall as a teenager wondering whether these cool-blue Henle volumes with the “Urtext” imprimatur had superseded my Peters (and other) editions.
A fascinating interview/discussion. I have Henle ‘Urtext’ editions of the Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn piano sonatas as well as some works by Schumann – to which I refer reasonably regularly. My playing days are over but my scholarly interest in music and all things publishing continues as strongly as ever.
The simple fact that we can choose between “rival” Urtext editions itself suggests that the word is more flexible than its definition would suggest. In an old Saturday Review issue largely dedicated to articles about Mozart, Jascha Heifetz never used the word Urtext but said that he preferred the editions “that have been the least tampered with.” Certainly that can be said of the Henle edition of the Mozart sontatas for keyboard and violin.