Sonatinas for Piano
Volume III, Romantic
Through the amiable genre of the “sonatina”, generations of piano pupils have slowly and cautiously approached its “big sister”, the sonata. With the aid of our three-volume selection of sonatinas from two centuries, intermediate piano pupils large and small can undertake an excursion through the development of piano music from the early 18th to the end of the 19th century. This third volume contains eight easy to moderately difficult sonatinas from the romantic period by composers such as Fibich, Heller, Kirchner, Raff and Schumann. A number of 19th-century composers took advantage of the generic term “sonatina” in order to evade the high demands being made on the sonata at that time. Thus the pupil will need to deal here with works that are longer and more demanding in terms of technique and content than those in volumes I and II. For advanced piano pupils!
About the Authors
Ernst Herttrich (Editor)
Dr. Ernst Herttrich, born in 1942 in Würzburg, read musicology, history, German and theology at the universities in Würzburg and Cologne. In 1970 he earned his doctorate in Würzburg with a study of the expression of melancholy in the music of Mozart.
From 1970 to 1990 he was an editor at G. Henle Publishers in Munich, after which he was Head of the Beethoven Complete Edition for over 15 years. In 1999 he took over as Head of the Beethoven-Haus Publishers, and from 2001 was made Head of the Beethoven-Archiv, the research centre at the Beethoven-Haus.
He has been a visiting professor at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and has undertaken several lecture tours both there and to Kyoto. His research interests include source studies, editorial techniques and music history. Herttrich’s publications include “Beethoven. Liederkreis an die ferne Geliebte” (Bonn 1999) and “Ludwig van Beethoven. Biographie in Bildern” (Bonn, 2000). Herttrich has edited over 100 Urtext editions for G. Henle Publishers.