18th And 19th Century Sonatas & Fantasias, For Organ 4 Hands – Rodolfo Bellatti

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the practice of playing pieces for four-hand duet on the piano became increasingly widespread, due to a number of reasons. The ascent of the bourgeoisie implied a growing literacy and musical education; indeed, the bourgeoisie started to appropriate practices and habits which had previously been aristocratical privileges, including the concept of music as a fundamental aspect of Bildung, the spiritual “building” of a person’s and a society’s culture. With bourgeois men increasingly working in offices distinct from their houses, the female members of the family spent most of their times in their homes and in those of their friends, and, since they could normally afford domestic help, they had more time for leisurely activities: music-making was one of the favourite pastimes and social activities. Moreover, the bourgeoisie also crowded theatres and concert halls, and they liked to reproduce at home the famous motifs and themes they had heard on the operatic stage. The preferred system for this reproduction was, of course, playing the pieces personally; for amateurs and music-lovers, the piano transcription of an orchestral/vocal score would have been far too complex to play, and the possibility of dividing the “notes” between two keyboard players was a particularly welcome one.
While this practice created a positive habit and the specific compositional and technical traits of four-hand keyboard playing, it remains strictly bound to the instrument of the piano and to the domestic context of Hausmusizieren, the music-making of the educated bourgeoisie. The leisurely and almost “cozy” style of this kind of chamber music appears to be dramatically distant from the features of a seemingly similar instrument, the organ.