The history of the piano duo

Piano Duet is a form of chamber music played by two pianists, and unlike other chamber music forms, there are many instruments, and the piano duet has only one instrument.

The piano duet consists of two forms of collaboration: one is the piano quadrilateral, which refers to two pianists playing simultaneously on a single piano. Among them, the first piano is played on the right side of the piano, and the second piano is played on the left side. The first piano mainly plays the treble zone, which is usually responsible for expressing the melody of the piece; the second piano mainly plays the bass zone, focusing more on harmony and rhythm, and also needs to be responsible for the use of pedals.

The other is the double piano, which is different from four-hand playing, which refers to two pianists playing on two pianos at the same time, usually according to the stage situation, the two pianos are side by side or arranged face to face.

In the works of double piano, the first piano and the second piano are not as clearly distributed as the four-hand combination, but because the texture of the work played is larger than that of the four-hand joint, the control of the acoustic effect is more difficult to grasp.

Whether it is a four-handed playing or a double piano, these two combination forms require the mastery of certain piano solo skills, and at the same time, for the uniformity of the rhythm, the proportion of the voice level and the overall acoustic effect of the music, etc., they all put forward different requirements from piano solo, that is, a certain team spirit is required.

Since the day the piano was born, countless composers have dedicated countless piano solo works to it. At the same time, the composition of the piano duo also unfolded almost simultaneously. According to the data, the earliest piano duets appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when British composers composed two Virgils. During the Baroque period, Bach wrote concertos for two keyboard instruments. In the classical period, with the development of the piano as an instrument, a large number of piano solo works emerged. Among them, the musical giants of the classical period, Mozart and Beethoven, left us some piano duets. This can be seen as the beginning of the piano duo in the history of music.

Mozart has contributed a number of piano four-hand sonatas, including sonatas in D major (K.381) and Sonatas in C major (K.521), as well as a wonderful double piano sonata in D major (K.448). These works continue the consistent style of his solo piano works, fresh and lively, the melody is elegant and charming, and the harmony is simple and bright. In teaching, these excellent works are the best choice for training students to master the style of classical works.

Beethoven's piano duos are small in number, but the quality of their works is extraordinary. The Four-Hand Concerto sonata in D major (Op.6) is vibrant, and the two movements reflect Beethoven's early positive and enterprising spirit. The late fugue four-handed version is a final adaptation of his String Quartet in B flat major (Op.130), which is grand and profound.

In addition, Schubert is also very accomplished in the four-hand piano, he used a lot of folk materials, and created a large number of dance music, including the army march that we are very familiar with. Schubert also composed Fantasia in F minor (D.940), in which he creatively combined four movements, requiring the player to play it continuously. This compositional structure also influenced later generations of Liszt, who drew on Schubert's creative ideas and wrote a single-movement sonata-style masterpiece, "Sonata in B minor".

Although at this stage of the classical period, the number of piano duets in creation is far less than the number of piano solo works, but we can find in these few works, whether mozart, Beethoven or Schubert, to a certain extent, are very conscious to explore and expand the expressive space of piano art, that is, through the cooperation of two or two pianos (instruments), in order to achieve a certain desired acoustic effect in the heart, so that the original thin piano solo works are enriched by piano duels. Make it more chamber music, even symphonic.

Schubert also incorporated folk materials into his musical works, making it poetic. It can be said that the efforts of these composers in the piano duet in the classical period provided more creative possibilities for composers in the following Romantic period.

Entering the Romantic period, more and more piano duets sprung up. Composers such as Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and Brahms have contributed many outstanding works in this field. Chopin wrote the Double Piano Melody in C major (Op.73), which has a beautiful melody. Schumann also wrote a number of piano four-handed works, and the musical image and temperament of the works are like the composer's solo piano works, delicate and extremely sensitive.

During this period, such a noteworthy event occurred - Liszt's adaptation of Beethoven's nine symphonies into piano solos in 1866 further prompted other composers of the period to change their creative ideas, that is, to diversify their creative ideas, and a work could be presented in different forms.

These events led brahms directly to the beginning of twenty-one Hungarian dance songs. The work was originally composed for a piano four-hand play, then adapted into an orchestral version, and later as a solo piano version. Brahms's Hungarian dance music inspired Dvořák to compose the first episode of Slavic Dances in 1878, which also had two versions of piano four-hand playing and orchestral music.

Coincidentally, in addition to the piano four-hand playing, there are also some examples of using the double piano genre to present or enrich his original works. Brahms's Piano Quintet (Op.34), originally a string quintet composed by composers between 1861 and 1862, was praised by Clara Schumann and the violinist Joachim. However, both felt that the weave was relatively thin, and Brahms based on these suggestions to compose a double piano sonata, which was later rewritten as a piano quintet.

Another orchestral masterpiece, Variations on Haydn Themes (Op.56), also has an outstanding double piano version. It should be noted that these works, no matter what form or genre, are written by the composer himself and belong to original works. All this illustrates that the form of composition with the piano as the core ran through the entire Romantic period. Some works, because of the basic appearance that the composer hopes to convey for the work, is no longer enough to show the whole grand acoustic effect through solo piano, and these obvious weaknesses can be completely compensated by the form of four-hand playing or double piano, thus setting off a similar symphonic and orchestral texture structure and acoustic effect.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, we can find the influence of the exploration of the piano duet by the ancestors of the Romantic period on later composers. The Impressionist composer Ravel once adapted the Russian composer Mussorgsky's piano solo work "Picture Exhibition" into an orchestral version, which greatly enriched the sense of color of the original work, and also expanded the expressive space of the original music, and strengthened the dramatic contrast between paragraphs. Ravel's own work, The Mother Goose Suite, is even more similar, with a piano four-hand version and then a band version. It can be seen that in the composer's mind, to a certain extent, there is a prototype similar to piano solo, which may be for some reason, such as the limitations of piano soloism, and the two hands cannot carry out the reasonable distribution of multiple voices, so the composer's creative ideas and intentions are fully reflected in the way of four-handed playing. Ravel's other double piano work, The Great Circle Dance, was incredibly effective and required extremely high playing skills and the tacit cooperation of the two pianists.

The Russian composer and pianist Rachmaninoff also left many masterpieces in the field of piano duets. His two double piano works, Op.5 and Op.17, show his superb writing technique, with grand melodies, colorful harmonies, full textures, and a high challenge to piano playing skills.

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Phantom of the Opera Suite Piano Duet

Duo Mozart Sonata in D major K.448