Scherzi

Frédéric Chopin’s 4 Scherzi are high points in the Romantic piano repertoire. Chopin here takes a traditional genre and fills it with radically new content. They are wild, demonic in tone, and there is little about them that is joke-like, despite the original meaning of their title. Referring to the 1st Scherzo, Robert Schumann asked: “how should seriousness be attired, when even a ‘joke’ is veiled in black?”.

Now that the Scherzi nos. 1–4 have been published in revised stand-alone editions, G. Henle Publishers is now offering all four in paperback and hardback, in an edition that reflects the current state of Chopin research. Both the footnotes and the extensive Critical Report on the Internet offer detailed information on the familiar topic of “Chopin variants” and on all the textual problems they raise. This is Chopin in top form!