HARP & PIANO DUOS IN THE 19th CENTURY
Harp and piano duets were a popular instrumentation in the 19th century due to the heyday of both instruments at the time, but have since fallen into obscurity. Reception contexts for this repertoire included the everyday ritual of domestic music, and from the late 18th to the early 20th century, performance in concert halls and salons. In musical Europe of the late 18th century, the advent of industrialization brought about upheavals that affected instrument making, musical forms, performance practice, and taste, all of which were linked primarily to the social renewal of the emerging bourgeoisie.
I would like to find out whether the popularity of the duo instrumentation can be attributed to a certain social class. Was it an instrumentation for virtuoso performance or rather a repertoire for amateur musicians? Were the two instruments only a means to an end to promote the opera in so-called potpourris consisting of transcriptions, réminiscences, paraphrases, etc., derived from opera themes as a kind of early PR activity? The paper also inquires into the socio-political backgrounds that pushed the popular instrumentation into oblivion with the advent of World War I.
While the piano was usually the main instrument and it thus played an important role in concerts, performances and - one could say above all - in the salons of art lovers, the harp fascinated with spherical touches of color as a mood instrument, which found its way especially into the aristocratic environment. The question arises whether Érard's revolutionary developments at the beginning of the 19th century in instrument making for both the harp and the piano enabled both instruments to present a somewhat orchestral sound image.
But what are the formal and tonal parallels of both instruments? Neither instrument, alone or as a duo, can be classified as "chamber music"; rather, they belong in the catalog of solo instruments. Formally, the grand piano approaches the harp when opened, the curved lid traces the line of the harp's neck, which shows its strings like a skinned piano, together there are 277 in number, those of the harp made of natural gut, those of the piano made of steel. The two instruments are described as different and yet very similar; in the tonal symbiosis there is almost something like a new instrument: a single, common body of sound, produced by two solo instruments with their own independence.
An interesting question also concerns the assignment of instrumental practice to certain gender roles or stereotypes. Paradoxically, the harp is associated in the collective consciousness with the female gender, although the first virtuoso harpists and composers were men. What was it really like? Was it even the men who encouraged women to devote themselves to the art?
At the center of the dissertation is an extensive catalog of works for harp&piano duo with information about publisher, date of publication and dedication.
