Fauré’s exquisite Fantaisie is one of the jewels in chamber music for which we are indebted to his time at the Paris Conservatoire. The flute professor there, Paul Taffanel, had asked his colleague for a virtuoso examination piece. Fauré presented him with the manuscript in 1898 with the explicit indication “to modify unplayable passages” before using it in the exam. As the autograph score no longer exists, we do not know what and how much Taffanel might have changed; however, the result is a brilliant recital piece. In our edition we have added a little Adagio without opus number that Fauré also composed in 1898 for the exams at the Conservatoire as a sight-reading piece.
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
