The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition from Edition Peters is firmly established as the most important ongoing scholarly edition of Chopin’s music and is a must for any discerning pianist. The world’s foremost Chopin editors, under Editor-in-chief John Rink, bring their unrivalled collective knowledge to imbue the project with unique authority, drawing upon the latest international scholarship. The Complete Chopin prioritizes the needs of the practical pianist and provides a beautifully presented performing text of each work based on a single principal source together with important variants, along with thorough critical commentaries and illuminating prefatory essays in English, French and German.
Chopin’s etudes occupy a central position in piano literature. Prized by generations of the greatest pianists as the supreme examples in the genre, their reputation rests on their not only challenging specific aspects of a pianist’s technique, but also for being great music, transcending the genre of mere ‘study’.
In this edition of opus 10 (the earlier of Chopin’s two sets of studies, ending with the famous ´Revolutionary´ etude), pianist and musicologist Roy Howat presents a new edition which addresses many of the misunderstandings created by a very poorly engraved first French edition (containing errors which were then carried over to the German and English editions) – an edition which nevertheless included many important revisions made at proof stage. Using this first French edition as a primary source, Howat produces an Urtext edition which, while recording noteworthy variants from a variety of sources, is not a ‘conflated’ version, but a coherent performing edition in its own right, ideal for all who aspire to play these cornerstones of piano repertoire in an informed way.