THIRTY FINGERS FOR EIGHTY-EIGHT KEYS
by Piero Rattalino
Let’s be honest, even blunt: composing a piano piece for six hands, first hearing it in your head and then writing it all down, is a real dilemma. Let’s consider the writing. Music for solo piano, i.e., for two hands, is written on rectangular paper measuring about 35×24 cm. Since it’s on bound pages, the pianist looks at two vertical rectangles. Old and venerable rules require the pianist to sit at the piano with his/her navel opposite middle C on the keyboard, corresponding to the line where the two pages are joined. So the pianist can easily read the music by gracefully moving his/her head to the right or left. Likewise, the foot pedals, easily reached, are at the center of the piano, under the keyboard. The solo pianist is therefore physically very comfortable when performing.
Music for piano four hands considerably reduces the solo pianist’s familiarity with the instrument. First, the two pianists’ navels aren’t aligned with middle C because this key is at the point where their elbows make contact. The pedals can’t be moved and, since they’re in the center, the pianist on the left (whose job it is to use them) has to sit a bit obliquely to reach them.
Actually, certain hedonistic sybarites once maintained that the left pianist’s position offered numerous unexpected advantages – when, of course, there was a man on the left and a woman on the right: to reach the pedals, the left pianist, sitting obliquely on his chair, pressed his right thigh against the right pianist’s left thigh. And this generated a continuous and irrepressible erotic thrill which, even more than the music and its performance, sent them both into rapture. Not to mention the fleeting touches of hands (foreseen by the composer or invented by the performers) that augmented these delights. And let’s not forget that the man (usually taller than the woman) was offered the blissful (if only partial) view of his partner’s luxuriant breasts.
The piano four hands gave rise to secret, ephemeral love affairs, marriages, full-time adulterers. And it also led to the “Magdalena format,” which made reading easier: the vertical pages were made horizontal (35 cm wide x 24 cm high), set comfortably on the stand, and the players’ eyes bulged a lot less. The piano four hands: what a great invention!
The piano six hands ruined all of the delights of the piano four hands. The player in the middle has his/her navel opposite middle C and uses the pedals without any obstacles, while the other two have their belly buttons wherever their bodies allow. But how do you write music for three players on just one keyboard? The Magdalena format is too low. You have to go back to the vertical pages: the first pianist’s part is on the right page, the third pianist’s is on the left page, and the second pianist’s part is in a space left at the bottom of each of the two pages. It makes reading complicated, to say the least. But other possible ways would be even messier.
These are the problems involved in writing music for six hands. But as I said, composing also has its obstacles. The piano four hands easily covers the entire sound space of the orchestra and makes use of the traditional three-layer structure: melody, or theme, in the right half of the keyboard, bass, or countermelody, in the left half, and connective tissue between the melody and countermelody. This is the typical arrangement, with numerous variations that never cause any problems for the four hands. With six hands, the ten fingers of the pianist on the right are limited to very high notes that not many orchestral instruments can reach, and that therefore are used only occasionally. If music for six hands were written as usual, the pianist on the right would have very little to do. To keep him from looking like a spare tire, you have to invent embellishments or doublings or comments that enhance the melody, i.e., you have to add a fourth layer. And this is the hardest part, because anyone can add a flounce or two, but very few can design a flounce that makes the dress more elegant.
On this cd by the Trio Pianistico di Bologna, both the original works and the transcriptions do their best to give the pianist on the right something to play. I think Carl Czerny’s pieces are the best and most clever in this respect: his Rondeau brillant and Fantaisie sur ‘La sonnambula’ de Vincenzo Bellini, Op. Posth are models of six-hand writing. The Victoria Quadrille Quadrille pour les Noces de S.M. la Reine Victoria is less balanced, because the need to respect the five phases that form the structure of this dance generates very frequent interruptions in the flow. Second place in this efficiency contest goes to Angelo Panzini (1820-1886), much less famous than Czerny, but whose name appears on the record of Puccini’s diploma. A flautist and composer, Panzini taught at the Milan Conservatory and specialized in paraphrasing opera melodies: he wrote 19 for piano and 19 for flute and piano. The bronze medal goes to Johannes Nicolaj Hansen for his transcription of Swendsen’s Fest-Polonaise.
An all-around composer from Sweden, Swendsen, just like many of his colleagues – and this includes even Brahms! – didn’t disdain from offering lighter fare. Serious and light music were separate after Beethoven, but composers of serious music weren’t immune to the allures (especially financial) of light music. And so the sub-category of light classical music was born. All of the works on the cd, except for the famous ones by two specialists (Strauss, father and son), are light music that express an ineliminable human need: the pleasure of play. This is how they had fun in the 19th century: listening to light music played by three pianists who inevitably squirmed and therefore also provided visual entertainment. Can we still have fun this way? I certainly think so.
Translation by Eric Siegel