Through this window was pouring a stream of music—oh, such music as was never before heard! I sat up in bed and listened. Bang! Slam! Thump! Stamp! It was a four-hand—quatre-mains they call it—piece by Mendelssohn and Moscheles arranged from Weber’s “Preciosa.” I recognized the airs, and remembered well that both players had arranged their own part. In other words, three ordinary hands were required by each player to get out the effects these master-players had set down on the paper. Talk about Leotard on the trapeze, and a tree full of monkeys quarreling over one cocoa-nut! Much more than this would not equal the effects produced by the agile fingers that swept that unhappy keyboard.
Letter to the editor, reprinted as “Piano Playing a Nuisance,” New York Times, 23 July 1882
Since its advent the piano duet has served a multitude of purposes—artistic, academic, social—but perhaps the predominant reason it has stood the test of time is a simple one: it’s undeniably, almost impossibly, fun. For centuries, the art form has allowed pianists to break free from their lonesome and insular dominion, uniting two distinct personalities in a physically interactive and intrinsically social musical conversation, by turns cohesive and combative, playful and passionate, recreational and risqué. At its most virtuosic, four-hand piano playing can embody the spirit of dance or the terror of a multi-limbed monster; at its most hilarious, the two players grapple for pianistic real estate while compressed on a single piano bench (“a tree full of monkeys quarreling over one cocoa-nut!”); and at its most intimate, four-hand piano playing is a uniquely powerful conduit to interpersonal communion.
Playing together their hands had found each other. Eva, who had at first been reluctant to play together, but then had gotten a taste for it, had giggled and blushed, and the rest followed quite quickly. By the end of the lesson they presented themselves to her horrified mother as fiancées.
Fritz Anders, “Sketches from Popular Life”1
Throughout history, composers and performers have adapted the genre to suit their own sensibilities and objectives, finding value in its modest domesticity, pedagogical potential, or latent sensuality (or in the example above, all three at once!). The nineteenth-century public was particularly captivated by the infinitely amorous, blush-inducing circumstances presented by the medium, as is manifest in the fiction, theater, paintings, anecdotes, and music of the day. Two individuals, seated together at the same piano, were granted the rare social blessing for public, non-marital intimacy, grazing hands, whispering musical requests alongside sweet nothings, breathing in synchronicity, laughing as one mishap after the next bonded them as potential lovers. Edvard Grieg first confessed his love to his duet partner while rehearsing with her; the two eventually married.2 And as Robert Schumann poetically stated, “A four-hand piece allows us reveries together with our beloved, provided she plays the piano.”3 While singer and accompanist look one another in the eyes, piano duet partners create music while physically intertwined; it is arguably the most intimate form of chamber music.
On the other side of the spectrum, the duet genre has coaxed the inner child from even the weightiest of composers. Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Georges Bizet, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Gabriel Fauré all wrote duet music for the young ones in their lives, and the results amount to a treasure trove of delights for children and adults alike. Schubert gifted a duet (Children’s March) to his friend’s young son on the occasion of his birthday; it is quaint to imagine Schubert arriving at the birthday party with a gift-wrapped musical score in hand, ready to place alongside a mound of toys. Then there was Ravel, who dedicated his Mother Goose suite to his dear friends’ children, Mimi and Jean, who must have been filled with glee—or bewilderment—to open the sheet music and find a movement entitled “Little Ugly Girl.” Beyond these works dedicated to children, it should be noted that a large portion of the four-hand repertory is meant expressly for beginner pianists. Such pieces make it possible for a pair of neophytes to execute music of complexity and fullness that would otherwise be too challenging for a mere ten fingers (especially ten inexperienced ones!) to perform.
The genre’s inherent silliness and sensuality, its didactic capabilities, and its family-friendly appeal have lent itself naturally to the drawing room environment. And indeed, throughout its history piano duet playing has been widely considered a decorous, pleasurable, and convenient means of making music in the home. Cameron McGraw, in his preface to the first edition of this very book, wrote, “The one-piano, four-hand medium was obviously more popular for home entertainment than two-piano playing . . . more intimate and less spectacular than its sister art.” This assessment need not be viewed in a negative light; on the contrary, there is something quietly marvelous about the nature of music composed for the privacy of the home, wherein the act of musical creation becomes intensely personal and customized. Without the need to dazzle a mass of hundreds or more, piano duet playing in the living room materializes for the purest of reasons: to share the wondrous delights of music; to draw people together in a communal, inviting experience, fostering and enhancing social interaction; and to grant the players themselves a safe space for diary-like, confessional levels of expression.
If the living room is the perfect setting for private musicking, it has also become an ideal venue for informal performances; the cozy, tactile nature of the piano duet handily befits this milieu. History is riddled with countless scenes featuring four-hand exploits in domestic settings, with the listeners partaking in ways unimaginable in traditional concert venues. Schubert and his friends approached his piano duets with a mirthful, reckless merriment during the now legendary Schubertiades of the early 1800s, replete with booze and narcotics. Then there was Eliza Wille: “I happily remember an evening when Liszt and Chopin played waltzes four hands, for a small, intimate circle, and us young girls were allowed to dance to the music.”4 Or Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy at a house party, navigating Part I of The Rite of Spring in its four-hand arrangement (included for the first time in this expanded edition of Piano Duet Repertoire), prior to the work’s official premiere. Such an unrehearsed, casual performance would have been inappropriate on the concert stage, but for a game audience of dinner guests, this behind-the-scenes perspective was likely the musical treat of a lifetime. The host’s account of the scene is most evocative: “Debussy agreed to play the bass. Stravinsky asked if he could take his collar off. His sight was not improved by his glasses, and pointing his nose to the keyboard and sometimes humming a part that had been omitted from the arrangement, he led into a welter of sound the supple, agile hands of his friend. . . . We were dumbfounded, overwhelmed by this hurricane.”5
Ah, to be a fly on the wall.
If it appears that the lion’s share of piano duet lore stems from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is no coincidence. Piano duets after the advent of the phonograph were an entirely different ballgame. The convenience of modern recordings supplanted the need for four-hand transcriptions of symphonic music and at-home music making, and the complex compositional style of many avant-garde composers was ill suited to the needs of young piano duettists. Nevertheless, various composers still found inspiration in the genre, creating a substantial body of pedagogical material and concert repertoire (the sonatas of Paul Hindemith, Francis Poulenc, and Harold Shapiro among them), all of which are detailed in this volume.
In the years since Cameron McGraw wrote Piano Duet Repertoire, however, the four-hand piano landscape has undergone an enormous transformation. A dozen years ago, before we formed our own duo, four-hand piano music was hardly considered worthy of the grand concert stage. Yet in the intervening period, we have witnessed a remarkable shift in the perception of piano duet playing. This phenomenon may be due to various factors: duos such as ourselves and others have made it a mission to revive and reimagine the genre through creative programming, original arrangements, and inventive presentation; technology has played a crucial role in the global dissemination of the four-hand spectacle, with YouTube videos effectively showcasing the wild excitement of this medium (from every visual vantage point imaginable); and piano duos are steadily commissioning more works for four hands at a single piano, compelling composers to investigate the rich potential of duet writing and stretch it to unprecedented extremes. Beyond the growing number of duet-based music videos and commissions, new duo festivals and competitions are emerging each year. There are even a handful of concertizing piano duos that devote their attention exclusively to repertoire for four hands at a single piano; in the past, this practice has typically been reserved for two pianos.
Contemporary audiences are bound to find a four-hand piano team displaying a mash-up of the aforementioned themes catered to a 2,000-seat concert hall to be an acrobatic free-for-all wherein the duettists are engaged in an ever-evolving dance: a game of mischievous musical twister, then an erotic dalliance with pounding heartbeats, then an epic duel between fierce rivals, then a dazzling interplay of virtuosity, bravura, and exhilaration. A single wrong note (have mercy!) yields torn knuckles and bloodied keys. A misdirected arm leads to a black eye. (We should know—we’ve done it ourselves, repeatedly.) Then suddenly, without warning, one of the pianists dashes inside the piano, an explorer of the forbidden, plucking strings and grabbing harmonics, while the other raps the fallboard of the instrument, throws a knowing glance at the audience, and swivels around her partner to reach that impossible note in the blink of an eye.
All the while, the audience is aghast and elated by the frenzy . . .
The overall effect of such displays has impelled audiences to reconsider the genre as something truly valid and valuable, eroding negative stereotypes of duets as being exclusively precious, archaic, juvenile, or lacking in artfulness. The popularity of four-hand playing is roaring back with a vengeance: as that adage goes, everything old is new again.
Throughout our career as a piano duo, we have repeatedly revisited McGraw’s original Piano Duet Repertoire, searching for works to balance or unify a recital program, to discover forgotten musical gems, or to fill in gaps within our knowledge of the repertory. Considering the enormous amount of compositions devoted to this unique instrumentation, we are indebted to McGraw’s comprehensive resource.
However, a revised version of Piano Duet Repertoire could not be more welcome. With hundreds of new composers (and composer updates) and nearly 1,000 new work entries, this revised and updated edition by Dr. Christopher and Katherine Fisher finally accounts for some of the most significant contributions to the genre ever composed: John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances, George Crumb’s Celestial Mechanics, Paul Schoenfield’s Five Days from the Life of a Manic Depressive, plus music of David Lang, György Ligeti, Terry Riley, Carl Vine, and many others. The list goes on and on, an embarrassment of riches certain to excite any curious pianophile. This compendium provides a highly convenient and indispensable resource for musicians exploring the latest works for the medium.
With this revised edition at hand, we encourage all budding piano duos to embrace the vibrancy of this medium’s history and to draw inspiration from the qualities that has made four-hand playing so potent—the romance, intimacy, physicality, theatricality, and, most importantly, the fun!—but we also encourage pianists to reappropriate these elements in a contemporary context, to keep the marvel of four-hand playing fresh and illuminating. Thanks to the adventurous and imaginative spirit demonstrated by the latest generation of classical musicians, duet playing seems poised to evolve with the times and flourish as a timeless art. Ultimately, duet playing can serve as an essential reminder of the harmony to which all of humanity can aspire.
May the singular sphere of piano duets continue to bring beauty, surprise, and joy to the vast reaches of the musical cosmos.
Greg Anderson & Elizabeth Joy Roe
April 2015
1. Fritz Anders, “Skizzen as unrest heutigen Volksleben,” Die Grenzboten 62, no. 2 (1903): 421.
2. Ernest Lubin, The Piano Duet (New York: Grossman, 1970), 3.
3. Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1891), 2: 204.
4. Eliza Wille, Richard Wagner and Eliza Wille—Fünfzehn Briefe des Meisters nest Erinnerungen von Eliza Wille (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912), 58.
5. Louis Laloy, quoted in Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 181.