Even though the majority of Beethoven’s wind chamber music works were composed for specific occasions with prescribed scorings, their importance is not limited by their functional nature. Beethoven always aspired to treat the various genres in the most original way possible. Horn players can thus enjoy Beethoven’s Horn Sonata op. 17, which the composer wrote in 1800 for a concert in Vienna’s Hofburg Theatre for the most famous horn player of his day, Giovanni Punto (Johann Wenzel Stich). At that time, an alternative instrumentation was necessary for successful dissemination of the work, so this Urtext edition, like the first one, includes a violoncello part in addition to the one for horn.
