Franz Schubert: Works for Piano 4 Hands

Album Notes

By Marco Beccari. English revised for the website.

Throughout his short life, Schubert wrote more music for piano duet than any other great composer. His unsurpassed achievements in this field include dances, marches, variation sets, overtures, fantasies, divertissements and sonatas.

Schubert wrote his greatest piano duets in the miraculously productive last year of his life as he continued his compositional experimentation. There is no doubt that Schubert's duets place great demands on their performers’ sense of timbre, intelligence, speed of reaction and concern for detail.

All the works presented on this CD date from the composer’s final year except the Sonata D 617 and the Three Marches D 733.

The Grand Sonata in B-flat major D 617 is the first of two sonatas for piano duet the composer wrote in his lifetime; the other is the famous Grand Duo of 1824.

This work probably dates from 1818 while Schubert was at Zseliz on the Esterházy estate, while teaching the two countesses. It was one of a number of works for piano four-hands he composed while resident there. The work was published in 1823 as the composer’s Op. 30 with a dedication to Count Ferdinand Palffy d'Erdöd, proprietor of the Theater an der Wien. Max Harrison speculates that the dedication may have been connected with the performances of Rosamunde that took place there in the same year.

With its charming youthful energy and melodic writing, it bears a passing likeness to the composer's Fifth Symphony, also in B-flat major. The brilliant opening, with its cheekily ascending thirty-second note broken chord followed by a diminuendo sixteenth-note passage that creates the impression of an opening solo cadenza, has its counterpart in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony.

The “Allegro ma non troppo” in A minor D 947, published in 1840 by the publisher Diabelli as Lebensstürme (Storms of Life), was completed in May 1828, just one month after the Fantasie in F minor. It is a full sonata movement opening with an emphatic dramatic establishment of the key with an almost violent theme and rich in modulation as it proceeds, a work of symphonic dimensions and tension. Scholars have speculated that it may have been intended as the first movement of a never completed four-hand Grand Sonata for which a third late duet, the Rondo in A Major, D 951, may have been the finale.

In this Allegro Schubert experiments with sonata form again. Instead of the expected two-theme exposition in closely related keys, he creates contrasting tonal areas each with double themes. The first group in A minor consists of the dramatic introductory gesture, orchestral in nature, quickly followed by a softer, more lyrical response: a meditative second theme in the form of an exquisite chorale. The second group, beginning in the unexpectedly distant key of the flattened tonic (A-flat major), projects an almost religious procession of very soft chords that lead to C major, relative major of the tonic key. The development section uses only the first group, and the return to the fury of the opening gives the piece a rondo-like character. This is a theatrical composition in the best sense of the term. Schubert’s astonishing mastery of modulation and transitions creates a mosaic of dramatic contrasting feelings with the most surprising changes in atmosphere possible. Lebensstürme goes far beyond Schubert's earlier works in A minor in terms of its power and symphonic drive, surpassing its predecessors by virtue of the concentrated energy of its pounding chords, its harmonic brusqueness and polyphonic density.

The Three Marches militaires D 733 are among the best known of the composer’s duets; the first remains one of his most popular pieces. It is impossible to calculate the number of times that it has been parodied or arranged. It is not certain when the Marches militaires were written, probably in 1818 during Schubert's stay at Count Johann Karl Esterházy's summer home in Zseliz in Hungary. He had accepted a job there as music teacher to the Count's daughters, and these and similar works were written for instructional purposes.

The Three Marches were published by Anton Diabelli in 1826 in Vienna.

Schubert was one of the most prolific composers of ensemble piano music, and these three marches demonstrate his mastery at writing for piano four hands. All three marches are in a simple ternary form, with a central trio leading to a reprise of the main march, but they impress through their striking inventiveness. The first March in D major evokes Hungary and Vienna. The second, in G major, is especially notable for its surprising contrasts and the third, in E-flat major, is notable for its blend of polonaise-like vitality and the carefree nonchalance of popular Viennese music.

The extraordinary Fantasie in F minor D 940 (Op. posth. 103) was composed in 1828. Schubert began the work in January and finished it in April a few months before his death. The complete manuscript was in fact dated April 1828, but published posthumously the following year as Opus 103 by Diabelli. The Fantasie was dedicated to Caroline, Countess Esterházy, the younger of the two daughters of Johann Karl Count Esterházy to whom Schubert had given piano lessons. Probably the finest of Schubert’s piano duets, this work marks the height of his achievement in this genre and it can be easily regarded as the peak of piano duets ever written.

Schubert’s works conceived for domestic music cover a wide emotional range. In this piece the blend of tragedy and sweetness makes it particularly affecting. A hidden sense of tragic fate, a testament. It is the breath of a desperate hope. The Fantasy in F minor is a work of great stature, demanding a more than usual degree of sensitivity and pianistic skill.

Though conceptually extremely different from the pyrotechnic virtuoso display of the Wanderer fantasie, these two pieces have formal similarities. Like the Wanderer, this composition was written in four linked movements, and the basic structure of these movements is essentially the same too: allegro, slow movement, scherzo, allegro with fugue. The originality of Op.103 is its exceptional unity: it is a tightly constructed work in which four interconnected movements are fused into one, to be played without pause, creating the impression of four single movements blended together into one large one. At the same time all sections of the piece are subtly related through the recurring appearance of dotted rhythms, the prevalence of the rising interval of the fourth, the characteristic Schubertian shifts between major and minor, and the use of ornamental trills. The fantasie represents a stylistic bridge between the traditional sonata form and the essentially free forms of the Romantic age, exerting an influence on the work of Romantic composers such as Franz Liszt.

The first movement is an Allegro molto moderato. Schubert abandons the explosive bravura of the "Wanderer" in favour of an elegiac lyrical theme in a poignant F minor, with the opening melody soon briefly transformed into F major, before the reassertion of the original minor key.

The grandiose second movement is stylistically similar to Handel and Bach; it opens with a fortissimo theme in F sharp minor. While marked Largo, the frequently double-dotted first theme lends a great deal of tension to this movement. Eventually the first theme gives way to a quiet, lyrical second theme opening the lyrical middle section. The first theme is reprised, ending on the C♯ major dominant.

The following third movement also in F sharp minor is a Scherzo (Allegro vivace). A bright, lively movement, reminiscent of the scherzos of other works Schubert wrote at this time, like those of his piano trios. After a delicate D major trio filled with Viennese grace and charm, the scherzo returns shifting between A major and F♯ minor, ultimately ending on C♯ octaves that drive into a transition back toward F minor for the finale. The finale is a sort of recapitulation of the Allegro molto moderato bringing a return of the poignant F minor melody and with the second theme serving as the subject for a fugue. The restatement of the first movement's primary theme ensures the coherence and cohesion of the structure as well as the characteristically Schubertian cyclic form. The fugue builds to a climax, ending abruptly on the C major dominant, instead of resolving into either F major or minor. After a bar of silence, the first theme briefly returns, building rapidly to concluding chords that echo the second theme before subsiding into a quiet end. The theme appears once more, in the coda, a final gesture of intimacy and longing before the heartwrenching dissonances of the closing measures. It has been called “the most remarkable cadence in the whole of Schubert's work” as he manages to condense the dichotomies of the two themes into the final eight bars of the work. The four parts of this fantasy are less rigorous in their construction than the preceding fantasies, the Sonata D 894 and the Fantasie D 934, but the work is surrounded with something like the echo of an inner richness to which one cannot remain indifferent. Schubert played the piece himself with his good friend Franz Lachner on May 9, 1828.

Recording and production

Milano Piano Duo: Luca Ciammarughi and Stefano Ligoratti, piano four hands. Recorded at ClassicaViva Studios, Dorno, Italy, July–August 2016. Sound engineering: Stefano Ligoratti. Piano: Steinway Model D-274.

Album notes: Marco Beccari. Production, design and art direction: OMK-Da Vinci. Printed with the support of S.P.L.M. and ClassicaViva. The original inlay credits ownership of the sound recording and artwork to OMK-Da Vinci, with ℗ and © OMK-Da Vinci Classics. DDD; manufactured in Japan.