4 - Schubert’s Four-Hand Piano Music

Summary

Schubert was fond of writing four-hand music to be played by two pianists sitting on the same piano bench. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from the earliest extant composition in his hand (a Fantasy penned in 1810) to his Rondo in A Major finished in the summer of 1828. No composer ever approached the piano duet with the seriousness Schubert did, and his corpus of four-hand pieces stands as the apex of the genre. The four-hand configuration seemed ideally suited to his temperament, as it was a congenial form of music-making that was emblematic in Biedermeier culture as an activity of friendship and sociability. It is thus not surprising that these works were a staple in his Schubertiads and ranked among his most successful publications during his lifetime. But the four-handed configuration was also a critical medium for the transmission and reception of much of his orchestral and chamber music. The many piano transcriptions of Schubert’s instrumental music arranged for four-hands issued by publishers over the course of the nineteenth century allowed any two decently practised amateur pianists a chance to get to know his music by reproducing it in the domestic space of the bourgeois parlour.