In the days before recorded sound, people usually learned their orchestral music at home, playing it in piano transcriptions for two or four hands. Two German-Jewish composers took that idea a stage further: Ignaz Moscheles, protégé of Beethoven, wrote a symphony for four hands at a single keyboard, and Ferdinand Hiller, friend of Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt, went a step further yet, following Moscheles’ symphony without an orchestra with an opera without singers – both works bold genre-busters well before the term had even been invented.