Selected Piano Works for Four Hands


Book Description

Franz Schubert's piano pieces for four hands are among the most varied and significant works in the entire repertoire. Schubert wrote more of these works than any other major composer, and generations of teachers, students, and concert musicians have enjoyed their enduring beauty and vitality. Included in this volume are 15 of Schubert's best and most popular titles, taken from the definitive Breitkopf and Hartel "Schubert-Gesammtausgabe." Composed between 1818 and 1828, they include the tremendously popular Military Marches, Op. 51 (of which the D Major is a striking and familiar melody); the famed "Grand Duo" Sonata in C Major, Op. 140; the Fantasia in F Minor, Op. 103 (written only a few months before Schubert's death, it is one of the most famous and elegantly expressive works in the genre); Variations in A-flat Major on an Original Theme, Op. 35; Andantino Varie in B Minor on French Motifs, Op. 84, No. 1; Fugue in E Minor, Op. 152; and a delightful array of landler, polonaises, and variations. The 23 separate pieces have been selected so that pianists of virtually any level can find works to match their needs. They range in difficulty from beautifully sculpted marches that beginners can play, to works requiring maturity and great technical skill. This volume has been specially designed as a playing edition. The noteheads are large and easily readable at the piano, and wide margins allow plenty of room for written notes, fingerings, analysis, etc. Of special importance is the addition of measure numbers, placed on alternate staves, which allow the pianists to find their place quickly while rehearsing. For playing, study, or simply listening along with records, this volume will be an admirable addition to your music library."




Schubert's Music for Piano Four-hands


Book Description

This text is a critical and historical guide to more than 70 works by Schubert.




Shorter works for pianoforte solo


Book Description

This affordable edition contain all of Schubert's music for pianoforte solo except for the dances and a few unfinished pieces: the ever-popular "Wanderer" fantasy, Opus 15; the 8 impromptus (Opp. 90 and 142; the Moments Musicals, Opus 94; the Adagio and Rondo, Opus 145; and numerous variations, scherzi, and other short pieces.




Allegro Brillant


Book Description

Felix Mendelssohn's Allegro brillant, Op. 92, for one piano, four hands, was written in 1841 and dedicated to Clara Schumann. The expressive Andante theme alternates between the Secondo and Primo, segueing into the virtuosic Allegro assai vivace movement with a rush of scales. All fingering, metronome marks, and notational omissions have been supplemented by the editors. Allegro brillant is considered one of the most challenging pieces in the entire piano duet repertoire.




Beethoven Symphonies: Complete for 1 Piano, 4 Hands


Book Description

(Piano). This volume includes all nine of Beethoven's symphonies, arranged for piano duet. Unlike the challenging solo piano transcriptions by Franz Liszt, these are more manageable, with most at an upper intermediate level. Spiral bound to lay flat.




Polovetsian Dances


Book Description

Ann Pope's piano duo arrangement captures the rhythmic drive of the original orchestral setting, and also offers each performer an equal opportunity with the dance melodies. A real crowd pleaser! A Federation Festivals 2020-2024 selection.




Four-Handed Monsters


Book Description

In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that could afford not to invest in them. Duets echoed from the student bedsit to Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical phenomenon, it could cross national, social, and economic boundaries, bringing together poor students with the daughters of the bourgeoisie, crowned heads with penniless virtuosi, and the nineteenth century often regarded it with extreme suspicion for that very reason. Four-hand piano playing was often understood as a socially acceptable way of flirting, a flurry of hands that made touching, often of men and women, not just acceptable but necessary. But it also became something far more serious than that, a central institution of the home, mediating between inside and outside, family and society, labor and leisure, nature and nurture. And writers, composers, musicians, philosophers, journalists, pamphleteers and painters took note: in the art, literature, and philosophy of the age, four-hand playing emerged as a common motif, something that allowed them to interrogate the very nature of the self, the family, the community and the state. In the four hands rushing up and down the same keyboard the nineteenth century espied, or thought to espy, an astonishing array of things. Four-Handed Monsters tells not only the story of that practice, but also the story of the astonishing array of things the nineteenth century read into it.




Schubert's Song Sets


Book Description

This title was first published in 2003. From 1821 until his death, Schubert compiled or specially composed for publication 42 song sets, yet during his own lifetime, and until now, their integrity and importance as sets have been virtually ignored. In this book, Michael Hall asserts that these songs sets are not arbitrary collections, as so often assumed, but highly integrated works in their own right. Approaching these songs as sets the book throws light on Schubert's largely undiscussed intellectual preoccupations. They reveal that he was au fait with most of the philosophical concerns of his time, especially those which touched on Romanticism. But although the sets reflect Romanticism in their topics, Hall maintains that they are the epitome of classical balance. In encouraging students and performers to approach these songs as sets, this study aims to alter perceptions of this important repertory.




Schubert


Book Description

An insightful biography of the great composer, revealing Schubert’s complex and fascinating private life alongside his musical genius Brilliant, short-lived, incredibly prolific—Schubert is one of the most intriguing figures in music history. While his music attracts a wide audience, much of his private life remains shrouded in mystery, and significant portions of his work have been overlooked. In this major new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into Schubert’s life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of thirty-one. Drawing on extensive archival research in Vienna and the Czech Republic and reconsidering the meaning of some of his best-known works, Bodley provides a fuller account than ever before of Schubert’s extraordinary achievement and incredible courage. This is a compelling new portrait of one of the most beloved composers of the nineteenth century.




Rethinking Schubert


Book Description

In Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years. With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven. What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a contemporary portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national and complex.