ABSTRACT
Four-hand playing was the gift the geniuses of the bourgeois nineteenth century placed at the author's cradle at the beginning of the twentieth. Music for four hands: that was music with which one could still interact and live, before musical compulsion itself commanded solitariness and secretive craft. For the music that was available as classical is from an era of less than a hundred years: itself predestined for four-hand playing. This period begins with Haydn and ends with Brahms. If Bekker’s theory of the community-forming force of the symphonic is correct, then this community is at the same time also one of individuals. That every individual finds himself reaffirmed in the great whole of the symphony is demonstrated to him by the fact that he can admit it into the family without surrendering any of the latter’s binding quality, just as he hung pictures of his classics on the walls.
