Reicha 36 Fugues for Piano

The Czech composer Antonin Reicha (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 typeof “Well-Tempered Piano of the new ages”, basing the traditional Baroque fugue on radical new fundaments. The first edition of this unusual collection was produced in 1803 in Vienna by Reicha’s ownpublishing 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 compositionalstyle.The second edition (Vienna 1805) included a short theoretical text “Über das neue Fugensystem” (“On the new fugal system”) in the form of a polemic, reacting to his critics, one of whom wasBeethoven. 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 Václav Jan Sýkora 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).