Brahms’s famous Horn Trio Op. 40 was composed in 1865, and, as this edition documents, intended by the composer to be played on the natural horn.

Christopher includes a newly discovered source in this Bärenreiter publication, a short piano piece written some twelve years earlier in 1853, which was adapted to become part of the Trio’s second movement.

This Urtext edition offers not only the standard instrumentation of violin, horn and piano but also the alternative scoring for violoncello or viola instead of horn. The variants found in the violoncello and viola parts are shown as ossias in the score.

The introduction describes the compositional process, includes information on the performance and publication history of the work, and offers comments on performance practice. A critical commentary with facsimile pages of the manuscript rounds off this pioneering edition.