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Writer's pictureHeather Wade

The beauty of Urtext (Grosse Fuge part 1)

Updated: May 2, 2022

ur·text /ˈo͝orˌtekst/ noun an original or the earliest version of a text, to which later versions can be compared.


In a couple of weeks at the symphony I will be playing the Beethoven Grosse Fuge with my string principal colleagues. This is a fairly enormous undertaking, and one that I plan to write a few more blog posts about, but I thought I'd start with the actual printed parts...


The Grosse Fuge is a truly fantastic compositional feat (more about this later), it is also complex and rather difficult, both to play and to understand as a listener. Anything that makes the experience more accessible is very welcome! When I started working, I had an edition that looked like this...(obviously this is just the first page). The annotations in blue are my own notes and markings.

After living with this edition for a bit, our concertmaster Jae Lee sent an email saying that we would be using the Henle edition. Henle is a music publisher based in Germany that does lovely work. All of their music is urtext, meaning that it includes only what the composer wrote. There are no other publisher's markings, no fingerings or phrasings that can often seep into published music as it passes through various hands. Because of this (and because the engravers at Henle are so good at their jobs), the music is much easier to read. I also like urtext editions because they clean out the score and allow me to start making decisions without being influenced by someone else's ideas. Sometimes I will work with one edition and then consult the Henle or some other edition, just to get someone else's thoughts, but if urtext parts are available, they are so much more preferable. So just to give you a reference point, here is the first page of the Henle edition.


Doesn't that look a whole lot friendlier? Sometimes the good stuff is worth the extra money. Also I feel like Ludwig would approve. (Although I'm not actually sure how much he approved of anything, given that in every portrait he is making this face...)


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