Brahms completed his Violin Sonata in d minor op. 108 in 1888. It was the culmination of several years of work, and his final contribution to the genre. This Third Sonata is his only one in a minor key, and stands in stark contrast to its two predecessors, the cheerful and lyrical Sonatas in G major and A major. Cast on a large scale, its four movements are full of tense drama, technically and musically demanding in equal measure and crowned by a brilliant finale that Brahms’s contemporaries admired for its “tempestuous” character. Reason enough for G. Henle Verlag to offer this sonata in a separate edition.
The musical text of this revised Urtext edition is based on the recently-published volume within the New Brahms Complete Edition, which guarantees the highest degree of scholarly precision. The helpful, well-thought-out fingerings are provided by the established chamber duo Frank Peter Zimmermann and Martin Helmchen.
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
