They did!  And in fact they were the pianists at the Vienna premiere of Brahms’ Liebeslieder waltzes Op.52 which was written for a piano duet with a vocal quartet “ad libitum“.

This is an interesting clip of a piano student’s recollection about Clara Schumann and Brahms playing the piano together – a lot of fun (thanks to Miss Wong for sharing it)!

And Brahms’ love affair with dance German, Austrian and Hungarian was a life-long one.  We like this: Karin Lehner playing the 2-hand version of the Hungarian Dances op.39.

Brahms wrote much music for the small vocal quartet (some specifying “for 4 soloists”) and here’s one of our favourites currently in our playlist written on Goethe’s text and intriguingly pitting the alto and the bass as “the indifferent ones” and the soprano and the tenor as “the tender ones” (having a “Dialogue at the dance” which is the song’s title): the first of the 3 quartets of Op.31.