Joachim Raff: Piano Four-Hands Sonatas

It was common practice in the nineteenth century for major orchestral and chamber works to be made available in piano four-hand reductions, as concert and recital-going was still a novelty and many middle-class homes had a piano, and these editions made such large works accessible to a much wider piano-playing public. What was less common was that Raff prepared his own piano four-hand arrangements, as often this time-consuming task was farmed out by composers and publishers to separate arrangers. However, Raff was also a skilled arranger himself. In addition to the original works mentioned above, he wrote a further eight works for piano four-hands which were either early pieces based on the melodies of other composers or more straightforward arrangements and transcriptions of the works of others, made at the request of publishers.