Etudes - Piano

The Chopin Etudes present a repertoire of pianistic technical challenges, but clearly go beyond this strictly practical task. They are lyrical miniatures in which technical performance formulae, given depth and sophistication, become a means of musical expression.

The National Edition is a complete source-based edition - it takes into account all the available sources of Chopin's text: autgraphs, hand-written copies corrected by the composer, first editions and also "teaching copies" used by Chopin for his pedagogical work, in which we may find his original fingering. Secondly, the National Edition is a critical edition, which means that the authencity of sources has been veified and their relation to one another examined. The editors of National Edition, Professor Jan Ekier and Pawel Kaminski, put a special emphasis on the analysis of numerous existing sources instead of reproducing the notation of a given work on the basis of a single source, or just a couple of them. Therefore, each volume of the National Edition is published with an extensive and comprehensive Source Commentary explaining the editorial intentions an the manner of interpretation of particular scores.