Four Hands, Two Minds, One Heart

By Benjamin Pomerance

Lake Champlain Weekly, Vol. 22, Issue 11, September 22–28, 2021

By the time you read this, Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt will likely be in the car together, gradually making their way across the country. Their planned route will take them across New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania and — assuming that their automobile and their patience holds out — eventually bring them into New York State.

On the other end of this tarmac rainbow awaits Saranac, where Hill and Hollow Music will offer a pot of gold on Oct. 3 that once felt inevitable - the chance to perform a concert.

It may seem like the ultimate test of a marriage, all of these days on America's highways in the confined quarters of a vehicle. Yet the smart money is on Muller and Steigerwalt acing the exam, for the space between the two front seats of a car may feel like the Grand Canyon for the husband-and-wife team who have shared the cozy confines of piano benches for more than three decades. A couple thousand miles staring through the same windshield is nothing compared with the rhythmic gymnastics required to bring to life many of the masterworks for four-hands piano.

All of which may explain why, for the longest time, the two pianists avoided mixing music and romance. Introduced by a mutual friend at Juilliard, Muller and Steigerwalt initially partnered each other not at the keyboard, but on the streets of New York City — meeting almost daily to run from their respective residences into Riverside Park and back again. They admired one another's playing from arm’s length, and for each of them, that seemed to be enough.

It might have stayed that way, too, except for the fact that Steigerwalt still had to impress Muller’s parents. Muller’s father, an engineer, played the violin, and her mother was a gifted singer and pianist. To demonstrate their compatibility, Muller and Steigerwalt decided to put together a four-hands piano program to play for Muller’s parents. The newly engaged couple approached the instrument with trepidation. “I was petrified the first time I sat down with Gary to read music,” Muller recalls. “I was sure something would go wrong.”

For an instant, her fears seemed well-founded. Playing a sonata by Francis Poulenc, the infamously impish Frenchman who intentionally wrote his four-hands piano music so that both players would collide with each other, Muller and Steigerwalt rapidly realized that any of their physical inhibitions needed to evaporate. “We got ready to play the Poulenc, and I'm thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to stretch clear across Gary to play that opening chord,’” Muller laughs. “Even though we were engaged, it was still mortifying.”

Yet even with the choreographic challenges, something felt right — an unspoken sensation that this was more than just a gimmick to gain pre-marital family approvals. “One of the big things that you always have to be concerned about is balance,” Steigerwalt explains. “You have four hands going at once in these pieces. That means the possibility of as many as four aspects of the texture going on at once. You have to figure out what needs to be projected above the others. If you have a similar musical approach, it makes this music fun to play.”

So the fun continued. Having performed successfully for Muller’s parents, the two pianists set a new goal: playing together at their wedding. When that was done, and the artists agreed that they genuinely were enjoying their side-by-side time on the piano bench, they signed up for a series of coaching sessions. As the time and the notes flew by, their comfort increased.

In a sense, it was a period of rediscovery for the two artists, reminding each of them why they had plunged headlong into this musical existence in the first place. Steigerwalt took his first piano lesson at the age of 9, although his interest in the instrument started years earlier. “Even when I was little, I kept going over to the spinet piano at our house in small-town Pennsylvania and just creating sounds,” he recalls. “I’d make up stories — people going up the stairs, explosions going off, that kind of thing.”

When he took that first lesson, Steigerwalt saw an opening to tell stories for the rest of his life. “I realized right away that this was what I wanted to do,” he states. “I was an introverted little kid, and it seemed like this was my means to express myself.” By adolescence, he had become proficient enough that his high school choir teacher recommended him to the pianist for the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Penn., who took over the duties as his teacher. “She whipped me into shape,” he laughs, “so I was able to pass that Juilliard audition.”

Muller, by contrast, heard music practically from birth, with her Oklahoma home enlivened with the sounds of her parents playing. In second grade, her best friend started playing the piano, leading Muller to want to learn, too. “After my first lesson, the teacher played a simple accompaniment on the second piano in the studio while I played my little exercise,” she remembers. “I loved that ensemble, that feeling of us making music together.”

When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Texas. By this point, her focus was almost exclusively solo repertoire, the music that all burgeoning pianists are supposed to learn, but her fondness for chamber music remained strong. Later, when one of her teachers introduced her to a professor at Louisiana State University, reinforcement for her fascination arrived in droves. “He had such a joy of life,” she says of that professor. “He really freed me up. From that point on, I decided that I was going to teach at the college level just like him.”

She laughs. “Along the way,” she adds, “I met Gary, and the rest was history.”

Steigerwalt had been making some history of his own. In 1976, he became the first American prizewinner in the history of the Liszt-Bartok International Piano Competition in Budapest. On the North American side of the ocean, he performed Aaron Copland’s Piano Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra with the famously exacting Copland conducting. Solo recitals at Wigmore Hall in London; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and the 92nd Street Y and Weill Recital Hall in New York City garnered fine reviews.

And like his wife, Steigerwalt felt a pull to the classroom. In 1981, he accepted a post at Mount Holyoke, the college where he taught until 2016. Muller's work during those years brought her to the University of Houston, the University of Southern California, the University of Hartford, and Amherst College before joining Steigerwalt at Mount Holyoke, each time affirming what she had sensed in her first lesson: the love for ensemble playing. “l was not really comfortable as a soloist,” she says. “l did a lot of accompanying, which I liked much more.”

She also engaged in a different form of practicing, one that left plenty of people questioning whether she had developed an appetite for torture. In Massachusetts, she became involved in local politics and served a term on the board of the community where they lived. Her work inspired her to pursue a law degree, earning plenty of double takes from her fellow students. “I was probably the oldest person in the building, including the professors,” she laughs. “But I did it.” Graduating in 2009, she went on to earn admission to the bar in three states.

Throughout all of this, the repertoire for four-hands piano became an increasingly prominent part of the couple’s life. At Mount Holyoke, they became mainstays on the campus’s performing arts programs, earning invitations to play in other venues. Long Island’s Beethoven Festival welcomed them — in the scorching heat — to present all of Beethoven’s four-hands compositions. The Centaur label produced two volumes of their renditions of music by Franz Schubert, excerpts from which appear in the acclaimed film Good Will Hunting.

In their explorations of the classic four-hands repertoire, the couple became well-acquainted with three selections that they will perform in Saranac — transcriptions of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Maurice Ravel’s orchestral masterpiece La Valse and Felix Mendelssohn’s endearingly popular Andante and Allegro assai vivace. “Mendelssohn wanted to play with Clara Schumann,” Muller explains. “She invited him to play on a concert with her. He wrote the Allegro immediately.”

She pauses. “For years, that was the only part of this piece that anyone knew,” she continues. “And then the Andante was discovered. The date on it was about three days before the concert that Clara Schumann gave. It just shows that even back then, people were pressed for time. But both pieces are incredible. You can hear the friendship between these two great musicians in the way that Mendelssohn wrote. You hear the dialogue between them in the interwoven parts of the music.”

The other two works featured in Saranac represent another component of the duo’s collaborative efforts: a commitment to inspiring and promoting new compositions for four-hands piano. In recent years, their premieres have included creations by several talented writers, including Donald Wheelock, David Sanford, Anthony Burgess and Lewis Spratlan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer whose music will be showcased in Saranac. Their album In Your Head, released on the Navona label in 2018, is comprised entirely of new entries in the book of four-hands piano music, with all of the five pieces on the album written specifically for the couple.

For their Hill and Hollow Music concert, at which Spratlan will provide pre-concert remarks, Muller and Steigerwalt will perform Dreamworlds, the composer's imaginings about the dreams of three dissimilar individuals: St. Francis of Assisi, Adolf Hitler and an unnamed bureaucrat, all held together by a run of sixteenth notes that Spratlan refers to as the “dream tissue.” “The musical imagery here is incredible,” Steigerwalt says. “There is absolutely no doubt who he’s writing about in each of the sections.”

 St. Francis’ segment offers bird calls, Egyptian themes and even some quotes from Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Hitler’s music is bombastic, with nods to Wagner and Beethoven, building to a terrifying climax. The third movement opens with a little Mozart but offered in a manic fashion, as if the nameless bureaucrat were frantically typing documents and filing papers. Yet happier reveries await, and the music turns passionate, with this faceless office drone's dreamworld turning to a fanciful romance.

Joining Dreamworlds on the program will be the premiere of Spratlan’s Fantasia, another composition written for the duo. Both Steigerwalt and Muller are somewhat circumspect when discussing this piece, hoping to retain the element of surprise. “Fantasia and Dreamworlds could not be more different,” Steigerwalt allows. “These two pieces, side-by-side, really showcase [Spratlan’s] range. That’s one of the most fun things that we get to do together: explore the huge diversity in colors and sonorities that can be created for our instrument.”

For the last several months, both pianists agree that fun has been absent, robbed from them by a pandemic that turned live performance - previously a commonplace facet of their lives - into a rarity. And that is why a cross-country road trip to Saranac felt like no sacrifice at all, knowing that each mile traveled brought each of them closer to doing what they enjoy more than anything else, making music together again with their favorite piano bench partner.

“It feels like we haven’t gone anywhere in forever,” Muller states. “This all feels like a great adventure to us.” In a sense, this is what it always has been: a great adventure for an introvert who found his voice through music and a talented soloist who nevertheless drew more comfort from collaborative performances, a union with each other and with the best elements of their art - four hands and two minds, brought together with physical and metaphorical closeness by this music, poured out to the world from one heart.

This article was originally published in Lake Champlain Weekly, a publication of Studley Printing.