15 Etudes for Viola. Opus 116: URTEXT EDITION: Fingering and bowing by the composer

The Czech composer Hans Sitt (1850-1922), a specialist in the pedagogy of the violin and viola, his extensive experience as a teacher in the conservatories of Europe and the United States can be seen in the 15 Etudes for Viola Opus 116. Composed of semiquavers of scales and arpeggios with slurs, trill practice, it is centred with stacatto exercises, chromatics, changes of intervals of sixths that are ideal for the use of the bow. Sitt takes into account the sound register and the timbre possibilities that the viola possesses, he takes advantage of all this to compose beautiful melodies, it could be said that it is not a book designed only for amateurs and intermediate students, as the Etudes are progressive in terms of their technical difficulty until they reach very complex challenges at an advanced level. We have used as our main source Leipzig: Ernst Eulenburg, No.198 Eulenburg Educational Series, 1913. Plate E.E. 4020. Reprinted edition of 1913, possibly Sitt got his hands on the latter copy. We added in our urtext edition Roisber Narvaez Verlag, the composer's fingerings and bowings. We have arranged the page turns in a more convenient way to offer greater comfort to the performer and have eliminated the overload of warnings of musical accidentals, over-understood or redundant fingerings that were possibly erroneously placed, avoided the excessive use of the G clef, so that the C clef prevails within the possibilities of the musical spelling.In addition, the editor had to make complicated decisions in favour of and in function of the music in order to arrange the crescendos and diminuendos hairpins and thus avoid misspellings in the musical phrases. Possible solutions have been added in grey. Read more