To this day, Brahms’ Hungarian Dances number among his most popular works – although he didn’t even write them! As he expressly noted on the title page of the first edition, he “only compiled them for piano duet.” What he meant was that he had taken Hungarian dance tunes, fused them into a larger entity and then had the results published, first in an arrangement for piano duet, since the performance of such duets was extremely popular back then. The first two volumes containing the Dances 1-10 were printed in 1869, and two further volumes with the Dances 11–21 were added by Brahms in 1880.
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
