Grand Duo (Schubert)
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The Sonata in C major by Franz Schubert, D 812, for piano four hands (two players at one piano) was composed in the spring of 1824 at Zseliz on the Esterházy estate, probably for the two countesses he was tutoring at the time.
The sonata remained unpublished until ten years after Schubert's death, when it was printed with the title ‘Grand Duo’ – by which it is still popularly known, though there is no evidence that this was Schubert’s title. It is Schubert’s most important work for more than one pianist and one of his most important piano works altogether, lasting about 40 minutes in performance. There are four movements:
This is a mature and characteristic work by Schubert on the largest scale. The structures of the movements closely resemble those of a symphony and some passages appear to reproduce orchestral effects (though both these observations might apply to some of Schubert’s solo piano sonatas). Thus in addition to its intrinsic qualities and interest the ‘Grand Duo’ was soon believed by some authorities, including Robert Schumann, to be a transcription or draft of the missing so-called ‘Gastein Symphony’ that Schubert was thought to have written in 1824. (It is only since the 1970s that it has been proved conclusively that there was no such work.) As a result, there have been a number of orchestral realizations of the Sonata as a symphony, the best known being by Joseph Joachim (1855). Other examples are by Marius Flothuis (1940-42), Fritz Oeser (1948) and René Leibowitz (c.1965). Joachim altered the tempo of the finale to Allegro moderato.
The finale, like that of the B-flat sonata for solo piano (D. 960) from the composer's last year, opens deceptively in the wrong key, in this case, the relative minor, A minor (in the later solo sonata, after a unison G, the melody opens in the supertonic, C minor). In both cases, however, the harmonic deception is almost immediately 'corrected' by shifting to the main key.
