The longest and at the same time most complex of Bartók’s six string quartets was composed in the summer of 1934 as a well-paid commission for the renowned Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in Washington. Bartók wrote it in a few weeks in Budapest. The substantially reworked autograph shows us how hard he laboured on the elaborate five-movement form. In the run-up to the premiere, he clarified numerous questions concerning the execution – including specific practice instructions for the “Bulgarian rhythm” of the third movement – with the first violinist of the Kolisch Quartet.
László Somfai and Zsombor Németh present this and other essential information for the performance practice of the quartet in their Urtext edition, which is based on an extensive group of sources. It also includes Bartók’s own analysis of the work. Together with clearly engraved notation and convenient page turns in the parts, it provides an optimal basis for playing this masterpiece of modern quartet literature.
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
