Rare piano sonatas
In his sonatas, Franz Xaver Dušek combines the lively galant style of Wagenseil and Galuppi with the emotional language of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. A still little-known repertoire for all keyboard instruments.
It is not the famous Jan Ladislaus Dussek who is meant here, but Franz Xaver Dušek (1731-1799), thirty years his senior, who left behind 28 sonatas "per il clavicembalo". He had studied in Prague and Vienna (with the imperial piano master Wagenseil) and worked primarily as a piano teacher in Prague. He had been friends with the Mozart family since 1776 and was one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's hosts in Prague in 1787 and 1791, together with his wife Josepha.
Even more than Joseph Haydn, who was almost the same age, Dušek fused Wagenseil and Galuppi's lively, gallant style with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's emotional language in his sonatas. His works are therefore a valuable addition to the virtuoso sonata repertoire between Bach and Beethoven for players of all keyboard instruments, especially the piano.
The first volume of the two-volume edition of Dušek's complete sonatas contains the careful edition of the piano sonatas printed during his lifetime, the second the first edition of the sonatas that have survived exclusively in manuscript, which are easier to play and are therefore also recommended for teaching.
Franz Xaver Dušek: Complete Sonatas for Piano, Urtext edited by Vojtěch Spurný, BA 11513/11514, € 21.95 each, Bärenreiter, Kassel and others 2016
