1 - The Original Duet: Composition, Publication, Performance, and Reception

Summary

Music for four hands: that was music with which one could still interact and live, before musical compulsion itself commanded solitariness and secretive craft…. Its true master is Schubert.

—Theodor W. Adorno

Dating the Composition: Time and Place

We do not know with certainty exactly when Schubert wrote the three Marches militaires, D. 733, for piano four hands. The composer's indefatigable chronicler, Otto Erich Deutsch, assigned a date of ca. 1822. Deutsch posited that, as op. 51, the set was one of eight opus numbers in the possession of the publisher Cappi & Diabelli at the time Schubert broke with the firm over a dispute about fees in April 1823. The composer requested, without apparent success according to Deutsch, that as-yet-unpublished manuscripts be returned to him. Beginning in 1825, professional relations were rekindled to the extent that the firm, now run solely under Diabelli's name, produced the works piecemeal, but grouped according to genre. The D. 733 set stands somewhat isolated in the chronology: sacred works (opp. 45–48) were published in September, the solo piano pieces Galop and Eight Écossaises and Valses sentimentales (op. 49–50) came in November, and the song “An die untergehende Sonne” (op. 44) appeared in January 1827. Only on August 7, 1826, was there an announcement for op. 51 in the Wiener Zeitung. With these documentary details in hand, Deutsch did not entertain the possibility that Schubert composed any or all of the three military marches closer to the date of this public notice, nor did the historian take into account other circumstantial evidence that suggested a date of composition earlier than 1822.

In 1861, Schubert's first biographer Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn wrote of the composer's stay in 1818 at Count Esterházy's Hungarian estate in Zseliz, where he served as music teacher to the Count's two daughters: “From there, he came back to his home laden with new compositions. The four-hand Variations on a French Song dedicated to Beethoven, four-hand marches, the Divertissement [à la] hongroise, the vocal quartet ‘Gebet vor der Schlacht’ by [Friedrich] de la Motte Fouqué and the well-known Fantasie in F Minor, their origin indebted to that sojourn.”