ISBN 9790260105591. With Language: Czech/English/German. 31 x 24.3 cm inches.
The Czech composer Antonin Reicha, also Antonin Rejcha (1770-1836) was famous as both an experimental composer and as a teacher and theorist. His 36 Fugues for Piano testify to this experimentalism; they can be seen as a type of "Well-Tempered Piano of the new ages", basing the traditional Baroque fugue on radically new fundaments.
The first edition of this unusual collection was produced in 1803 in Vienna by Reicha's own publishing company Au Magasin de l'Imprimerie chimique. It included both a dedication poem to Joseph Haydn and a comprehensive foreword in which Reicha identifies the characteristics of his compositional style. The second edition (Vienna 1805) included a short theoretical text Ueber das neue Fugensystem ("On the new fugal system") in the form of a polemic, reacting to his critics, one of whom was Beethoven. Six fugues are based on the themes of other composers (Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti, Frescobaldi, Handel). The musical text is a corrected reprint of the edition by Vaclav Jan Sykora from 1973, which itself was based on the referred-to edition from 1805 as well as on the later edition by Tobias Haslinger (Vienna, c. 1828).
