Piano duet.

Piano duets are of two kinds: those for two players at one instrument, and those in which each of the two pianists has an instrument to him- or herself. Although the one-piano duet has the larger repertory, it has come to be regarded as a modest, essentially domestic branch of music compared with the more glamorous two-piano duet. The reason probably lies in the fact that the comparatively cramped position of two players at one keyboard inhibits an element of virtuoso display possible to pianists with the complete range of the keyboard at their disposal. Schubert was the one great composer to write extensively for the medium, although many composers, from Mozart to Ligeti, have added important works and a wide range of entertaining pieces.

Both types of duet began a more or less continuous history in the mid-18th century, but each had some isolated precursors. The earliest duets at one keyboard instrument are English and date from the early 17th century. A three-hand piece, A Battle, and No Battle (MB, xix, no.108), has been ascribed to John Bull; there are pieces by Nicholas Carleton and Thomas Tomkins in a manuscript that once belonged to Tomkins (GB-Lbl Add.29996). The two composers were close friends and neighbours in Worcestershire and the pieces may well have been composed for them to play together. Tomkins's duet (MB, v, no.32) is a fancy, that by Carleton an extended and finely constructed In Nomine. The superscription to this piece, ‘A Verse for two to play on one Virginal or Organ’, suggests a domestic as well as a quasi-liturgical use.

The domestic character of the one-piano duet is also brought out in the famous Mozart family portrait of about 1780 by Johann Nepomuk de la Croce. It was obviously posed for in the Mozart home, for a portrait of their mother looks down from the wall on Wolfgang and Nannerl, who are playing a duet (and exhibiting a hand-crossing technique), and Leopold, who holds a violin. Mozart and his sister played duets in London in 1764–5 and the sonata k19d dates from that time. Leopold is alleged (by Nissen, Biographie W.A. Mozarts, 1828) to have claimed in a letter of 9 July 1765 that ‘in London, little Wolfgang wrote his first piece for four hands. No-one has ever written a four-hand sonata before’. Einstein, however (Mozart: his Character, his Work, 1945), regarded the quotation as at least suspect.

The first duets to be printed were Charles Burney's four sonatas of 1777; he also wrote a Sonate à trois mains (1780). He had a six-octave piano made by Merlin expressly for duets, ‘ladies at that time wearing hoops which kept them at too great a distance from each other’ (Burney's article ‘Ravalement’ in Rees's Cyclopaedia). Burney also wrote of awkwardness and embarrassment likely to be caused initially by ‘the near approach of the hands of the different persons’. Between 1778 and 1780 Johann Christian Bach published some duets among his op.15 and op.18 sets of sonatas which, with other and probably earlier sonatas that remained in manuscript, became prototypes for those of Clementi, three each in op.3 (1779) and op.14 (1786), and Mozart, k381/123a (1772), 358/186c (1774), 357/497a (unfinished), 497 (1786) and 521 (1787). A notable feature of the duet sonatas of Clementi and Mozart is their frequent recourse to quasi-orchestral textures (ex.1); this is not uncommon in solo music, but composers naturally took advantage of the fuller sonority available from four hands. Mozart's early k358 and 381 have affinities with his divertimentos, but his later works have all the richness of texture of his mature instrumental style. The expansive k497 has two symphonic movements and one concerto-like one and begins with a portentous slow introduction, and k521 is clearly in a concertante style.

The ability of four hands to cope with rich textures probably accounted for a spate of arrangements of symphonies and other orchestral works for piano duet. About 1798–1800 the London publisher Birchall brought out all Haydn's London symphonies in this form, and duet arrangements of these and of symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven and later composers remained the chief means whereby amateur musicians became familiar with the standard orchestral repertory until the arrival of the gramophone record in the 20th century. Anything and everything was so arranged. Liszt arranged his orchestral rhapsodies, all his symphonic poems and even Via crucis; and such intractable or seemingly intractable works as Bach's St Matthew Passion, Haydn's The Creation, Verdi's Requiem, all Strauss's tone poems and symphonies, as well as complete operas (e.g. Wagner's entire Ring cycle and Tristan, Gounod's Faust), appeared in duet form. It was at one time possible to buy almost the complete works of Saint-Saëns as duets.

Mozart composed a variation set and a fugue, and Clementi some rondos, for piano duet. Beethoven composed a lightweight sonata (op.6) and a few other works, but it was left to Schubert to exploit the medium to the full. His works, which range from the tiniest of waltzes to the vast Grand Duo (op.140, d812), and which occur throughout his output from his earliest surviving composition, the G major Fantasy (d1) written in 1810 when he was 13, to several duets composed in the last year of his life, constitute a body of duet music unparalleled by any other composer. Most important are the B sonata (op.30, d617), the Grand Duo, which was once thought to be a reduction of a lost ‘Gastein’ symphony, the Divertissement à la hongroise (op.54, d818), the F minor Fantasy (op.103, d940) and the Lebensstürme duo (op.144, d947). Schubert also composed rondos, variations, sets of marches and groups of dances, including ländler and polonaises.

19th-century composers found sets of national or pseudo-national dances eminently suited to the duet medium. Schumann composed polonaises in imitation of Schubert, some of which he incorporated with his Papillons op.2. Brahms's Waltzes and Hungarian Dances are justly famous, as are the splendid Slavonic Dances of Dvořák and the Norwegian Dances of Grieg. Reger composed German dances and Moszkowski, with less native instinct, Spanish and Polish dances. Folk music lay at the root of Tchaikovsky's and Balakirev's arrangements of Russian folksongs, Busoni's more expansive Finnländische Volksweisen (op.27) and Arnold van Wyk's Improvisations on Dutch Folk Songs (1942).

Meanwhile, substantial works appeared from time to time. In the Classical era, sonatas were composed by Pleyel, Dussek, Türk, Hummel, Diabelli, Kuhlau and others, and works in sonata form were later composed by Mendelssohn (Allegro brillante op.92), Grieg (whose Symphonic Pieces op.14 were rescued from an abortive symphony), Moscheles, Rubinstein, Hindemith, Toch, Arnell, Poulenc, Berkeley, Persichetti and others. Other substantial works for piano duet include Chopin's early Variations sur un air national de Moore (cleverly reconstructed from a damaged manuscript by Jan Ekier), Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Schumann op.23, Nicodé's Eine Ballscene op.26, which owes a little to Weber and more to Schumann's Papillons, Koechlin's Suite op.19, Carse's Variations in A minor, Ladmirault's Rhapsodie gaélique, Starer's Fantasia concertante and Richard Rodney Bennett's Capriccio. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring exists independently as a duet (but for ease of execution is sometimes played on two pianos) as performed by Stravinsky and Debussy together.

Weber set a new fashion with his Six petites pièces faciles op.3 in 1801, which he followed with two further sets of short and highly engaging pieces in 1809 (op.10) and 1819 (op.60). His lead was followed by innumerable composers in the 19th and 20th centuries and sets of short pieces proliferated. Among the most significant are Schumann's Bilder aus Osten op.66, Alkan's Trois marches, Rubinstein's Bal costumé (possibly the longest single work for piano duet), Dvořák's Legends op.59, Satie's Trois morceaux en forme de poire, Debussy's two suites (one from each end of his career), the early Petite suite (1889) and the more representative Six épigraphes antiques (1914), Milhaud's Suite provençale, Rawsthorne's The Creel (tiny but characteristic pieces inspired by Izaak Walton), and duets by Wallingford Riegger. Several French suites are delightfully evocative of childhood, notably Bizet's Jeux d'enfants op.38, Fauré's Dolly op.56, Ravel's Ma mère l'oye and Inghelbrecht's La nursery.

Duets have long been recognized as educationally valuable. Haydn’s little variation set Il maestro e lo scolare is, as its title implies, one of many pieces for teacher and pupil. Others have been composed for young people with parts of equal difficulty. Czerny composed a Practical Method for Playing in Correct Time op.824, which was also the aim behind the Pianoforte Method of Annie Curwen, much used in England. Apart from specialists in the field, composers who have successfully simplified their styles in the service of education include Bruckner, Godowsky, Arensky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Dello Joio, Seiber, Walton and Thea Musgrave.

If we except an arrangement of a Crecquillon chanson for two keyboards (MME, ii, 158), duets for two instruments (as opposed to two players at one instrument) also began in England, with a small piece by Farnaby in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, and there are pre-Classical compositions for the medium by Couperin and by Bernardo Pasquini (whose 14 sonatas for two figured basses require simultaneous improvisation from the duettists). The modern history of the repertory may be said to begin with the two-keyboard works of the three Bach brothers, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian. Clementi composed two sonatas and Mozart one (k448/375a) as well as a fugue (k426), and there are some works by Dussek. In the time of Beethoven and Schubert few were written, and it was not until the Romantic era that there was an enthusiastic resumption of two-piano writing. Liszt arranged Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as well as his own Faust and Dante symphonies, symphonic poems and both concertos. Piano concertos are normally published in two-piano form to facilitate practice. They are outside the scope of this article, though they outnumber original large-scale works for two pianos, many of which exist in more than one form. Schumann's Andante and Variations op.46 originally had parts for two cellos and horn; Brahms's Variations on a Theme of Haydn op.56b has its orchestral counterpart, and his F minor sonata op.34b exists as a piano quintet. Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart op.132a also appeared in orchestral form and as a one-piano duet, and Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica as a piano solo. These, together with two other big sets of variations by Reger, Saint-Saëns's Variations on a Theme of Beethoven op.35, Debussy's En blanc et noir, with its disturbing undertones of war, Stravinsky's Sonata, Bartók's Sonata for two pianos and percussion, Rachmaninoff's two suites, Hindemith's Sonata, Messiaen's Visions de l'amen and Henri Martelli's sonata are among the biggest works for the medium. Debussy's Lindaraja of 1901 is significant as being the first of his great Spanish pieces. Among popular repertory pieces are Chopin's posthumous Rondo op.72, Arensky's suites, Milhaud's Scaramouche and short pieces by Bax, Infante and others. Curiosities are Grieg's second piano parts to Mozart solo sonatas and Ives's Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. Notable modern works include sonatas by Genzmer and Cooke, variations by Mervyn Roberts and Geoffrey Bush, Louis Aubert's Suite op.6, Vaughan Williams's Introduction and Fugue and works by Martin, Hessenberg, Tailleferre, Britten, Berkeley and Jürg Wyttenbach. The avant garde is represented by works by Cage and Cardew. In this highly professional field there is little educational music (unless Bartók's arrangements of pieces from Mikrokosmos be considered such), though Gurlitt and others composed easy pieces. On a lighter level there was a vogue for brilliant arrangements of Johann Strauss waltzes and other light classics in the mid-20th century, dispensed with skill and urbanity by the Austrian pianists Rawicz and Landauer and other specialist teams.

Some modifications and multiplications of the duet medium have occurred, many of humorous intent. Close liaison is desirable for the gentleman and two ladies required for a proper performance of W.F.E. Bach's Das Dreyblatt for three players at one keyboard; it is inevitable in Chaminade's Les noces d'argent op.13, which squeezes four players together at one piano. Czerny composed works for three players at one piano and for four at four, Smetana for four at two, and there was an arrangement of Wagner's Meistersinger overture for six players at three pianos. Willem Coenen composed a Caprice concertante for 16 pianists at eight pianos. The English pianist Cyril Smith, after an illness which left him partly incapacitated, played with Phyllis Sellick arrangements for three hands at two pianos; several original works have been composed for this combination. 31 pianists at 16 pianos were assembled on one platform at the first of Gottschalk's ‘monster concerts’ in Rio de Janeiro on 5 October 1869.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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FRANK DAWES