Introduction
Kuhlau’s 38 sonata works for piano consist of 19 sonatas and the same number of sonatinas. The latter (op. 20, 55, 59, 60, 88) have been famous for almost two hundred years throughout the piano-playing world.  The former, which are contained in this new edition, are totally unknown but at least as valuable as the sonatinas and are, thus, a welcome contribution to the sonata literature from the transition between the Classical and Romantic periods at the beginning of the 1800s.
   Even though they constitute half the corpus in terms of sheer numbers, these sonatas, as proper sonatas, loom much larger – especially since Kuhlau began with some very comprehensive works.  Some of them came out later in several new editions – particularly, Danish ones – in the 1800s (op. 6b, 26 no. 1, 34, 46, 52), but the rest are only available as the first editions that are the basis for this publication.
Gorm Busk