Rachmaninoff wrote his well-known piano cycle in 1931, at a time when his great works for piano solo and the piano concertos had already made him very famous. Yet it is by no means the “work of an old man”. The composer’s variations on the theme “La folia” (taken from a sonata by Corelli) are like a series of fireworks on the piano.

He once drily said to a friend, “All this mad running about is necessary in order to efface the theme”. Did Rachmaninoff succeed in silencing “la folia” – i.e. the “madness”? Why not see for yourself!

G. Henle Publishers stands for Urtext sheet music of the highest quality. The Urtext editions not only provide the undistorted and authoritative musical text but are also aesthetically pleasing, optimised for practical use and extremely durable. And then there is the strong, distinctive blue profile: (almost) all of the Urtext editions are bound in the characteristic blue cardboard.

Musicians trust Henle's blue Urtext editions because they:

• provide an undistorted, reliable and authoritative musical text
• offer superb, aesthetically appealing music engraving
• are optimised for practical use (page turns, fingerings)
• are of high quality and durable (cover, paper, binding)
• contain a short preface that introduces the work (particularly useful for AMEB exams) in German, English and French, as well as explanatory footnotes for particularly interesting passages in the score
• contain a description of the sources, an evaluation of the sources, readings and a documentation of the corrections made (= "Critical Report") in German and English, and often also in French