Programme — Sonata in F major for piano duet, K.497, Adagio - allegro di molto, Andante …

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

One of the most familiar of Mozart images is a family portrait painted by Johann della Croce in Salzburg in 1780. It shows the 24-year-old composer and his sister sitting together at the keyboard, Wolfgang at the bass and Nannerl at the treble, his right hand crossing her left in what has since become a characteristic piano-duet manoeuvre. According to Nannerl, in a letter written several years after her brother's death, he had been writing keyboard duets since the age of four. The earliest surviving example - and the earliest known work of its kind by any composer - is the piano-duet Sonata in C major, K.19d, which was written in London in 1765 (and which at one point causes the pianists to cross hands in just the way shown in the portrait).

For Mozart at that time, and for another twenty years or so, four hands at one piano was a family affair. The two piano-duet sonatas he wrote in Salzburg in the early 1770s are delightfully intimate, often brilliant but structurally and expressively unenterprising. When he wanted something more sensational for himself and a star pupil to play at a concert in Vienna in 1781 he called for two pianos and wrote the splendid Sonata in D major, K.448. The duet Sonata in F major, K.497, on the other hand, was a breakthrough for two pianists at one piano in that it at last entrusts them with full-scale sonata responsibility. Indeed, in its expanded structures, it anticipates Schubert's extraordinary achievements in the same medium.

Sonata in F major for piano duet, K.497
Adagio - allegro di molto
Andante
Finale

The greatest of Mozart's works for piano duet, the Sonata in F major, was written in Vienna in 1786, possibly for Franziska Jacquin, one of his favourite pupils. Certainly, he wrote much for the Jacquin household in the mid-1780s, including the fifth and last of his piano-duet sonatas, in C major, K.521. The Sonata in F major is the only one of the five to be awarded a slow introduction, which is an immediate indication of the importance he attached to it. The main theme of the Allegro di molto is more urgent than playful and the second subject scarcely relaxes the tension, least of all when it turns to the minor. For the first time in the piano-duet sonatas, moreover, there is a serious and extended development of the main thematic material. Mozart has not, on the other hand, suppressed his sense of humour, which finally resolves the emotional ambiguity in a delightfully witty coda.

The slow movement is an imaginatively written dialogue in B flat major. Although the first subject is basically the property of the first pianist, who is even more the soloist on its elaborately decorated return in the recapitulation, the second subject is a delightful example of close contrapuntal relationship between the two pairs of hands.

Mozart omitted to give the last movement a tempo heading but it is obviously meant to proceed quite briskly. It is a brilliantly tuneful sonata-rondo with most of the enterprise to be found in the upper part but with the occasional surprise reserved for the other pianist, like the syncopated entry just after the introduction of the main theme and, later, the eruptive scales which become such a dramatic feature of the development section.

Sonata in D major for two pianos, K.448
Allegro con spirito
Andante
Allegro molto

Mozart's only sonata for two pianos was written for a private but none the less important concert in the home of his piano pupil Josepha Auernhammer in Vienna in 1781. "The young lady is a fright," Mozart told his father, "but plays enchantingly." He had reservations about her cantabile playing - "she hasn't got the really delicate singing style" - but, as the music he wrote for her confirms, she he had a highly accomplished technique.

The Sonata in D is a kind of concerto in which both pianists are soloists, even though one of them is given rather more opportunity to shine than the other. Melodic interest, it seems from the conventional beginning, is less important than the virtuoso element represented by the semi-quaver scales and arpeggios initiated at an early stage by the first pianist and promptly imitated by the other. The second subject is more engaging but the semi-quavers are almost immediately set rolling again and - except in the brief development section, which is devoted to different material in a different kind of texture - the scale and arpeggio figuration remains prominent to the end.
Less than perfect though Josepha's cantabile might have been, Mozart entrusted her as first pianist with the introduction of the legato main theme and, indeed, of every new idea in the melodically abundant exposition of the Andante. The second pianist, who sets out in a new direction at the beginning of the middle section, is by no means upstaged here but it is the first pianist who has the more decorative part to play in the reprise. The first pianist also takes the thematic initiative in the spontaneously motivated sonata-rondo structure of the Allegro molto last movement. Even so, although her partner is restricted to an accompanying role whenever it comes to the minor-key second subject, the second pianist shares most of the melodic interest and all the bravura.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

One of the more amusing Ravel images is a photograph taken (probably by Alfredo Casella) in his avenue Carnot apartment in 1912. It shows Ravel and Nijinksy sitting together at the piano, the composer at the bass and the dancer at the treble, the latter crossing his left hand over his right. As Ravel's slightly satirical expression seems to confirm, Nijinsky was not a serious pianist, but the very fact that they chose to amuse themselves in this way - as a diversion from their preparations for the first performance of Daphnis et ChloÇ - indicates how widespread the piano duet had become as a domestic entertainment in the century and a half since Mozart had, so to speak, invented it.

Like most composers of his generation, Ravel in his youth had got to know much of the orchestral repertoire by means of piano-duet arrangements. He was so familiar with the medium that the children's piano duets he had completed in 1910, Ma Märe l'Oye, are as effective as anything written for four hands at one piano. As a student he had also enjoyed playing duos with his pianist friend Ricardo Vi§es. His first masterpiece, Habanera, was written for two pianos. Much of his orchestral music exists in two-piano versions made by the composer himself: La Valse was actually first performed in the two-piano version by Ravel and Casella in Vienna in 1920. How much music by other composers he arranged for four hands no one knows but, judging by something he said when he was first asked to transcribe a movement from Debussy's Nocturnes in 1901 - "having revealed some skill in this kind of work" - it was probably more than a little.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Nocturnes arranged for two pianos by Maurice Ravel
Nuages: modÇrÇ
Fàtes: animÇ et träs rythmÇ - modÇrÇ mais toujours träs rythmÇ

When Ravel agreed to collaborate with two other young musicians, Lucien Garban and Raoul Bardac, in a two-piano arrangement of Debussy's Nocturnes in April 1901 he took on much the most difficult task of the three: "Siränes is certainly the most perfectly beautiful," he wrote, "but also the most dangerous, not least because it hasn't been heard yet."Nuages and Fàtes had been performed by the Lamoureux orchestra in December 1900 but, because of the difficulty of assembling the voices for Siränes, the complete work would not be heard until October 1901.

In 1908, however, Ravel returned to the Nocturnes to tackle the two movements previously but unsuccessfully assigned to Garban and Bardac. This time the arrangements proved to be brilliantly effective. Obviously, Ravel could not accurately reproduce the Whistlerian study in grey represented by Debussy's innovatory string-writing in Nuages but much of the poetry of that piece - inspired by clouds reflected on the smooth surface of the Seine on a moonless night - is still there in the piano harmonies floating so weightlessly on the 6/4 metre and in the firmly defined but mysteriously meaningful melodic figure projected along the surface at structurally strategic intervals. The hint of gamelan-style heterophony introduced in the pentatonic middle section is a particularly imaginative aspect of the present arrangement. Fàtes - inspired by a torchlight procession of the Garde RÇpublicaine in the Bois de Boulogne - is no less sensational as arranged by Ravel than as scored by Debussy. In fact at the climactic point two thirds of the way through, where the opening jig-like tune is superimposed on the fanfares of the march, the two-piano version is actually clearer than the original.

Rapsodie espagnole
PrÇlude Ö la nuit: träs modÇrÇ
Malaguena: assez vif
Habanera: assez lent et d'un rythme las
Feria: assez animÇ _ träs modÇrÇ _ assez animÇ

The two-piano version of Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole, his first major orchestral work, is not a an arrangement in the ordinary sense of the word. The third movement, Habanera, was first performed as a two-piano piece in 1898 and it must have been partly to make use of that early but still unpublished masterpiece of musical impressionism that the composer conceived the idea of the Rapsodie espagnole in 1907. So it is the orchestral rather than the two-piano version of Habanera which is the arrangement. As for the other three movements, Ravel would have worked on them at the keyboard and would almost certainly have written out a piano version before orchestrating them.

Certainly, the Rapsodie espagnole is little less convincing on two pianos than it is in its orchestral colours. The four-note descending motif which runs through PrÇlude Ö la Nuit, and which recurs in both Malaguena and Feria, is just as effective in creating a nocturnal atmosphere and the snatches of languorous melody are just as suggestive of the Andalusian setting of the piece. If the two-piano version lacks a little in personality in the cante jondo episodes in both Malaguena and Feria, where the soulful voice of the cor anglais is such an asset in the orchestral version, Habanera could not be more evocatively scored than it is here. And, of course, there is no reduction in the seductive authenticity of the dance rhythms in Malaguena and no loss of festive brilliance in Feria, the ending of which is as exciting as the demands on the two pianists are excessive.

Gerald Larner

Gerald Larner's study of the life and music of Maurice Ravel was recently published by Phaidon Press