It is said that in a recital given on 23 March 1783 with the celebrated composer Christoph Willibald Gluck most likely in attendance, Mozart improvised variations on the song Unser dummer Pbel meint from Glucks Singspiel Die Pilgrime von Mekka. He later put them to paper and had them printed three years later. It is quite possibly Christoph Willibald Glucks celebrity that was responsible for K. 455 being one of Mozarts musically most demanding variation cycles.

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