Like Elgar’s Salut d’amour, the two “chansons” are amongst his most popular melodies. The dreamy Chanson de nuit and its cheerful counterpart Chanson de matin are often performed together.
Composer and publisher already sensed that this “evergreen” would build on the success of Elgar’s Salut d’amour, and they similarly planned arrangements of this pair of works for various instruments. Not all of them came from Elgar’s own pen, although the cello arrangement probably does, for he himself wrote to the publisher “A cello arrangement should be useful: I have written it where necessary in the tenor clef: I understand that amateurs of small attainments prefer the treble clef”. He was thus consciously aiming his arrangement at amateurs, something that should not prevent advanced and professional cellists from revelling in these charming melodies in Henle’s Urtext edition.
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
