Four Hands, Once Again

That music we are accustomed to call classical I came to know as a child through four-hand playing. There was little symphonic and chamber music literature that was not moved into home life with the help of those oblong volumes, bound uniformly green in landscape format by the bookbinder. They appeared as if made to have their pages turned, and I was allowed to do so, long before I knew the notes, following only memory and my ear. Even violin sonatas by Beethoven were found among them in curious arrangements. Many a piece from that time in my life, such as Mozart's Symphony in G minor, became so imprinted in my memory that even today it seems to me as though no orchestra could ever produce the tension of the introductory movement of eighth notes as fully as the questionable touch of the second player. Better than all others, this music befitted the home. It was brought forth from the piano, a piece of furniture, and those who went at it without fear of faltering and false notes were part of the family.

Four-hand playing was the gift the geniuses of the bourgeois nineteenth century placed at my cradle at the beginning of the twentieth. Music for four hands: that was music with which one could still interact and live, before musical compulsion itself commanded solitariness and secretive craft. Something is said by this not merely about performance practice but also about what is played. For the music that was available here as classical is from an era of less than a hundred years: itself predestined for four-hand playing. This period begins with Haydn and ends with Brahms. Bach is strangely unsuited to be arranged for four hands, and I cannot recall Bach being played in my childhood; the post-Brahmsian modern, already eliminated for its manual difficulty alone, is further excluded by the autocratic nature of its timbres. It is therefore the symphonic in the narrow sense that is, or was, accessible to four-hand playing. This period stems, however, from the era of authentic bourgeois musical practice. If Bekker's¹ theory of the community-forming force of the symphonic is correct, then this community is at the same time also one of individuals. That every individual finds himself reaffirmed in the great whole of the symphony is demonstrated to him by the fact that he can admit it into the family without surrendering any of the latter's binding quality, just as he hung pictures of his classics on the walls. Yet four-hand playing was better than the Isle of the Dead² hanging above the sideboard; at all times, he had to truly earn the symphony in order to own it: to play it. And he did not play it entirely in private. He was not allowed to modify the tempo and dynamics according to capricious inclinations, as he was accustomed to do with his lyrical pieces by Grieg. Rather he had to orient himself according to the text and the instructions of the work, if he did not want to "come out of it," to lose the connection to his partner. More than this: within the works themselves there appeared to dwell something of the secret of four-hand playing.

It is no coincidence that the literature of "original compositions" for four hands is limited to this period. Its true master is Schubert. The most important of his works for four hands, the Sonata 'Grand Duo,' the Fantasia in F minor, the Divertissement à la Hongroise, the Rondo in A major, and the military marches as well, are all stylistically close enough to the orchestra; perhaps written for piano simply due to a lack of orchestral performance possibilities or haste, these pieces clearly demonstrate that equivocal relationship between objective symphonicity and private musical practice, which on the whole may yield important rules for the compositional praxis of the nineteenth century. Conversely, if one plays four-hand reductions from the symphonies of Schumann and Brahms, one will be amazed at how well this form seems to suit...