Brahms composed a whole series of chamber music works, including his Second Violin Sonata in A major, during a summer visit to Thun in Switzerland in 1886. This wonderfully lyrical work is one of his most cheerful creations; his biographer Max Kalbeck once cryptically called it a “sonata of love and song”. The second subject of the first movement quotes the principal motif of Brahms’s own song “Wie Melodien zieht es mir”, and the other movements are similarly characterised by a melodious intimacy. The close structural cohesion of the sonata was immediately acknowledged by the music critic Eduard Hanslick, who noted that “The three movements form a pure triad of uniformly soothing moods”.
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. Frank Peter Zimmermann and Martin Helmchen, masters of their respective instruments, provide helpful fingerings.
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
