Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire, third edition

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the First Edition No single musician can successfully encompass the entire piano repertoire. It is, in fact, by far the largest devoted to any instrument, second only in scope to that for voice. Not only is it beyond the capability of the repertoire but it is also equally dif¤cult to have even a cursory acquaintance with its scope and be able to sift out material for study and performance from the mass of works accumulated over the years without some organized guiding hand to lead the way. It is, indeed, a lengthy path to travel from the earlier keyboard works to the present creations of the avant-garde especially if, as in the present volume , one chooses to include works for harpsichord, clavichord and organ suitable for performance on the modern piano. A practicable Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire is, then, a necessity for student, performer and teacher alike. The key questions for the reader are: What is there? What is it like? Where can I get it? To date the most useful efforts in English to provide answers to these question have been attempted in Ernest Hutcheson’s The Literature of the Piano (1948, revised by Rudolph Ganz, 1964), Music for the Piano (1954) by James Friskin and Irwin Freundlich, and the Short History of Keyboard Music (1966) by F. E. Kirby. The main interest in Hutcheson’s book lies in the personal viewpoints of that distinguished Australian pianist. However, it is short on the earlier and more modern repertoire since it concentrates on the traditional pianistic literature. Those gaps are only partially repaired by Ganz’s interesting additions. The Friskin-Freundlich handbook is organized by periods and style groupings and has as its point of departure 1590, its cut-off date 1952. It includes not only the solo repertoire but also works for four hands at one and two pianos, and concertos. Kirby’s more recent volume is an historical, chronological approach, concerned with the development of style and although not a handbook (in the sense of the Hutchenson and Frisken-Freundlich volumes) contains a wealth of material for the practical keyboardist even though clothed in a musicological garb. Two rather unusual volumes in German must be mentioned: The Geschichte der Klaviermusik (1941, fourth edition 1965) of Walter Georgii and the almost unbelievable Handbuch der Klavierliteratur (1967, second edition 1977) of Klaus Wolters. The Georgii work was in a class by itself in terms of completeness, clarity, scope and scholarship until the appearance of Wolters’ monumental volume. But it was, in fact, a history of the repertoire comparable to Kirby’s opus. Wolters produced a genuine handbook of unparalleled scope in which e.g., one can ¤nd all the variant readings in all the Beethoven Sonatas in all the major editions! It also devotes much space to instructional material, methods, technical treatises and anthologies, and attempts to grade the dif¤culty of the material in a scale ranging from 1 to 15.* xv *Three other volumes worth mentioning have appeared since this Preface was written: Albert Faurot’s Concert Piano Repertoire (1974), which is a listing of the more advanced solo literature; Christof Rüger’s Konzerbuch Klaviermusik (1979), which deals with the most important solo piano works; and Jaime Ingram’s Historia, Repertorio y Compositores del Piano (1978), which presents an overview of the entire piano repertoire.—M.H. The present volume is organized along completely different lines. First of all, it is devoted completely to the solo literature. It is alphabetical instead of chronological or stylistic in emphasis, taking on somewhat the aspect of a catalogue of catalogues supplemented by a listing of anthologies, collections and bibliographical material inserted into the text and running over into an additional appendix. The bibliography includes not only books and articles but also doctoral dissertations (both published and unpublished) pertaining to the composers and works mentioned. The inclusion of such material is unique to this volume and should prove invaluable for purposes of further self-study. The problem of style groupings and national groupings (e.g., what works are there by Canadian or Bulgarian or American composers?) has been met by an indexing system aimed to solve this problem most expeditiously for the reader. It is also hoped that the inclusion of a generous number of avant-garde works and listings of more than two hundred and ¤fty American composers will ¤ll an obvious gap. Similar attention has been lavished on the entire spectrum of the...