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Four-Handed Monsters

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and

Nineteenth-Century Culture
Adrian Daub

Print publication date: 2014

Print ISBN-13: 9780199981779
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2014
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199981779.001.0001

Four-Handed Monsters
Adrian Daub

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199981779.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter deals with the consequences of four-hand transcription practices for
everyday consumption. The question is no longer what the voracious piano enthusiasts
did with four-hand transcriptions but, instead, what four-hand transcriptions did to their
consumers. In this context, the pianos voice emerges as a central category; many
nineteenth-century theorists and practitioners insisted that the instrument had such a
voice, but in four-hand playing this voice sang not according to the wishes of one but,
rather, of two subjects. Moreover, since pedaling was usually left to the secondo-player
(the player seated in the instruments lower octaves), while the primo-player produced
the melody, one player sang while the other determined the quality of that voice doing
the singing. This uncanny arrangement was commented upon, above all, by E. T. A.
Hoffmannhimself a composer and music critic; in his stories, this view asserts itself in
the guise of musical doppelgangers, monstrosities with extra limbs, and signing automata.

Page 1 of 29

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2014.
All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a
monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: St.
Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory; date: 07 November 2014
Four-Handed Monsters

Keywords: E. T. A. Hoffmann, consumerism (musical), pedaling, voice, monstrosity

I am in Lady Agathas black books at present....I promised to go to a club in

Whitechapel with her last Tuesday, and I really forgot all about it. We were to have
played a duet together....I dont know what she will say to me. I am far too
frightened to call.

Oh, I will make your peace with my aunt....And I dont think it really matters about
your not being there. The audience probably thought it was a duet. When Aunt
Agatha sits down to the piano, she makes quite enough noise for two people.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

At first glance, the passage from Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Grey is little more
than a trifle: the image of Lady Agatha making enough noise to convince her listeners that
shes playing a four-hand duet is indeed a deft, and amusing bit of characterization. But
we have encountered the image on which this characterization relies too often now to
leave it at that. Franziska von Reventlow relied on the same joke in a different version: in
her novel, playing four-hand piano by yourself meant having a secret affair with the other
pair of hands. Wildes joke implies something else: the fact that Lady Agatha is loud
enough by herself to convince her listeners she is two duettists points to something
monstrouswhat by rights, by nature, should take two, for her takes only one.

Playing four-hands means being monstrouseither merging ones own ego with another
or else inflating ones own ego to the point that it can pass for two. There is something
unnatural in either process. Lady Agatha represents these two discomfiting processes in
personal union: her solo four-hand playing is part of her bluster, her liking to take up
enough space for two. But she also usurps (and here Wildes joke coincides with von
Reventlovs) both roles at the piano, and unites the latent sexual division of labor
Reventlov relies on in one person. Aunt Agatha transcends, or perhaps transgresses, her
status as single individual; she is somewhere between being one person and being two.
Her four-hand playing doesnt so much transform the (p.106) music as it transforms
the player. All humor aside, Wildes description of this piano amoeba has something
demonic about it. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed to the fact that fathers and mothers
are rarities in Wildes comedies, and that uncles, and in particular aunts, seem to be
everywhere. They are non-mothers and non-fathers, parents only around the corner.
And there is some of this in Agathas four-hand playing: she is matronly without being
motherly; in the play, as on the keyboard, rather than assert authority she asserts
dominance.1

But what exactly makes Lady Agatha a monster? What makes an organism a monster in
the first place? In the case of Lady Agatha it seems to be her usurpation of an activity that
is intended for two subjects. But is a single person playing four-hand really still a single
person, and are two people playing four-hand really still two? Edward Cone answers that
question as follows: The aim of four-hand music should be to invoke a single persona, not
by the interaction of two agents, but by the blending of the two players into a single four-

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handed monster. 2 Indeed, four-handed Agatha and Cones four-handed monster may
point to a preliminary definition of monstrosity: from the quasi-theological theories of
monstrosity offered by Ambroise Par (15101590) to the nineteenth-century interest in
the Elephant Man Joseph Merrick, monstrosity has to do with too much or too little
body. Either the monster was lacking organs or extremities, or those organs and
extremities expanded past the bounds of the normal bodily schema.3

Consider the example of a four-handed creature depicted in figure 4.1: Fipps, the
Monkey, protagonist of German humorist Wilhelm Buschs picture poem of the same
name, which appeared in 1879. A monkey, granted, is not a monster, but rather the rule.
And Buschs musical monkey goes through a number of positions at the piano that would
be impossible for a human in his place, but that seem eminently reasonable for a monkey.
He eats an apple while playing the piano, uses his tail to depress the keys during a
moment of laziness, or plays flute and piano at once. But in another picture, which
accompanies the following lines about Kattermng (Buschs semi-serious Germanization
of quatre mains), is different:

All Kattermng requires two,

But for himself he alone will do.4

Fipps successfully manages in reality what Lady Agathas domineering behavior

accomplished on metaphorical grounds alone: he plays four-hands by himself. (p.107)
And yet the picture of the feat that Busch provides has something rather disturbing
about it (fig. 4.2): unlike in Fippss other exertions at the piano, there really isnt a monkey
visible at all here. If it werent for the title, if it werent for the other pictures in the series,
the observer would be left to wonder what strange horrific creature is digging into the
keys here. The monkeys body is obscured by the back of his seat, and the gaze upon the
keyboard reveals only two isolated, almost disembodied-seeming pairs of hands. Its
clear that they all hang together somehow, but theres no bodily schema that would make
sense of them. The whole thing seems unnatural in pose and position, even for a monkey.
A creature that is self-sufficient in playing Kattermng, we gather, is a good deal more
uncanny than a monkey that eats an apple while playing piano with his feet.

Page 3 of 29

Figs. 4.1 Fipps, the Monkey (1879), from the picture poem by
Wilhelm Busch.

Figure 4.2 Fipps plays piano all by himself.

From E. T. A. Hoffmanns mouse king to the real-life Elephant Man, the monster was that
which undercut or transgressed the still-emerging identity of subject, body and person.
As such monsters were a constant source of fascination for the nineteenth century.
Monstrous births, mixed creatures were a frequent and popular subject in the press
and in literature. They were photographed, sketched, exhibited in traveling shows. There
exists since St. Augustine an etymological connection between the Latin terms monstrum
and monstraremonstrosity and its display were linked in the West for millennia.5
Whether the monster was a (divine or (p.108) natural) sign, or whether it was simply a
curiosity its discoverer endeavored to share with the rest of the world, the monster had,
or needed, a public which analyzes and interprets the monster.

In the first chapter we quoted Robert Musils description of the piano as a pagan idol, a
cross between dachshund and bulldog. 6 But Musil thought the piano monstrous
because it brutally subjugated the bourgeois interieur. It wasnt monstrous in the sense
explored above. For the physical schema of the piano had, if anything, gotten firmer in the
course of the nineteenth century: the carnavalesque carousel of forms of the turn of the
nineteenth century gradually stabilized into the one, the true, the reliable pianoforte. Far
from being monstrously unstable in its shape, then, the pianos contours if anything got

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more stable and pronounced as the century wore on. It is the four hands playing on the
piano that became monstrous, became one monster. It was the players whose bodily
schemata suddenly seemed to fail, who seemed to fall somewhere between being a self-
possessed subject and being an executing organ of someone elses body; who seemed to
oscillate wildly between polite collaboration with another and Fipps-like dissolution. Four-
hand players are somewhere between being one and being two: the boundary dissolves,
but not entirely. They play duets, but they are not as safely dualistic as, say, a singer with
an accompanist six feet away. (p.109)

The second chapter asked what the bourgeoisie did with the thousands of transcriptions,
potpourris, and arrangements they could buy from catalogues, could collect in matching
sets, and could rush through in various configurations in an afternoon. This chapter will
turn that question on its head: what did those scores (and particularly the transcriptions)
do with those who played them? It deals with different forms of monstrosity in four-hand
piano playing, different configurations of not fully one, not fully two. In the first
configuration, it is the merging of hands, arms, and wrists that constitutes the monstrous
element of four-hand playing. As we shall see, the transcription and composition practices
of the nineteenth century in many cases provoke or at least necessarily create such
moments of monstrosity. The second configuration concerns the monster behind the
hands: the hands remain distinguishable, but the bodies behind them seem to merge in
often obscene ways. This leads to a third configuration, the equally obscene chiasmus of
two players in one voice. If four-hand piano has a voice, it is one in which the body
producing the sound is not simply bisected down the middle but, rather, one in which
one party controls and manipulates the voice of the other. Finally, we will turn to the
configuration that constitutes the reverse image of the obscene imbrication described
earlier: the fact that the two bodies also give each other a law, and that not just
transgression but also censorship function according to the principle not fully one, not
fully two.

Transcribing for Monsters

Franz Schubert composed his Rondo in D major (op. 138, D. 608) in 1818, but it wasnt
published until 1835. It is, according to Ernest Lubin, hardly one of Schuberts more
serious compositions, 7 but its subtitle is significant, Notre amiti est invariable, often
understood as a dedication to Schuberts frequent duet partner Josef von Gahy (1793
1864). We have already remarked on the close connection the nineteenth century
postulated between friendship and four-hand playing; the analogy between the two had
to do with the melding of the subjects in four-hand playing (a melding that Schubert
remarked upon repeatedly, both when it came to duets generally and four-hand duets in
particular). As Dallas Weekly and Nancy Arganbright have pointed out, at the end of
Schuberts Rondo the two players hands are supposed to crossand in fact they finish
the piece interlocked with one another.8 Here, then, the surrender of subjectivity (under
the sign of amiti) is equated with the surrender of personal space on the keyboard. If
there is something (p.110) monstrous about the new being created in this way, it has to
do with the way hands and arms interlace on the keyboard.

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A twenty-first-century film pushes this strange corporeality of four-hand playing, in which

limbs and bodies seem to meld, much further. Still, as we shall find, it only makes more
explicit a way of viewing four-hand playing that was already prevalent in the nineteenth
century. Tim Burtons animated film The Corpse Bride (2005) tells the macabre story of
young Victor, who is married of to a princess of the underworld, the corpse bride of the
title, and is whisked away into a sort of Hades by her. Even though he rebuffs the
advances of his supposed wife, Victor quickly develops an understanding for the tragic
situation his cadaverous mate finds herself in. She is madly in love with him, still lingers in
romantic girlhood fantasies of a white wedding, but nevertheless has the one problem
that she doesnt have a pulse, or a lot of skin left. In a remarkable scene, Victor surprises
his postmortem fiance at the piano, sits down next to her, and begins picking up her
melody (fig. 4.3). Before long, the two are playing the same theme quatre mains, and
their newfound understanding, their newfound affection for one another becomes
evident when one of her hands comes loose and sprints down the keyboard toward his
hands (fig. 4.4). First it caresses his hand, then it climbs up his arm, and finally nestles in
on his shoulder. She bats an eyelid and would probably blush if she werent dead.
Pardon my enthusiasm, she says, and he replies I like your enthusiasmand
tenderly returns her hand (fig. 4.5).

Figure 4.3 The four-hand scene from Tim Burtons The Corpse
Bride
( 2005 Warner Brothers Pictures)

Figure 4.4 Pardon my enthusiasm: From Tim Burtons The

Corpse Bride
( 2005 Warner Brothers Pictures)

Page 6 of 29

Figure 4.5 I like your enthusiasm: From Tim Burtons The Corpse
Bride
( 2005 Warner Brothers Pictures)

The four-handed monster is the heraldic animal of our investigation of what exactly
four-hand transcription does to the body that performs it. In four-hand (p.111) playing,
primo and secondo form a single Gordian knotlike a single kraken, they lay into the keys;
their hands, wrists, and arms entwine. But the visual interlacing is only one way in which
the two players seem to erase the boundaries between each other. After all, the four
hands follow a law that, for the observer, remains obscure but for the mere listener, is
completely unintelligible. Primo and secondo have (p.112) roles to play, which refer
them back to one another as two aspects of the same phenomenon, neither of which can
be experienced in isolation. These kinds of roles, and the characteristic crossing of the
hands, have their origins in particularities of nineteenth-century composition and
transcription practices. The two players are not just physically interlaced; they are also
inextricably cross-linked by virtue of the roles that they take vis--vis one another.
Neither these physical crossings nor the cross-linked roles are primarily or usually owed
to the whimsy of individual composers or arrangers but, rather, cut to the very formal
core of four-hand piano music in the nineteenth century.

This formal core becomes visible when one leaves behind the two players at their
keyboard and the suspicious members of the household, 9 and instead turns to the
anonymous producers of that musical yard ware called transcriptions. While much of the
repertoire that entered the bourgeois household was original rather than transcribed,
the moment of translation from one medium to the other shines a spotlight on those
aspects of a work that only an orchestra can create, and conversely those that only
appear when the same piece is set for the piano. For in each transcription, transposition
and interpretation have to somehow balance each other out: which sound figures, which
instruments are transposable to the keyboard. How such transposition and interpretation
work exposes the dynamics that four-hand transcriptions found around the instrument in
the nineteenth century, and which they in turn institutionalized.

We do not know very much about how commercial transcribers working for the big
music publishing houses went about their business. Many of them are unknown to us or
hide behind pseudonyms. If they are famous, they are famous for other work, and their

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biographers are tight-lipped about their work as arrangers. Even letters, diaries, or
memoirs, which would shed light on their solitary craft, are hard to come by. A lot of the
transcribers who have survived as household names were also famous for writing
etudes. But even Carl Czernys memoirs make hardly any mention of his transcription
work. Henri Bertini (17981876) likewise was a prolific four-hand transcriber and
composer of etudes, and he is, if at all, remembered today only for the latter. The many
diligent scribes who labored to sate the publics hunger for new arrangements,
variations, and potpourrisHugo Ulrich, Frdric Kalkbrenner, August Stradel,
Friedrich Mockwitz, Robert Wittmann, and othersleft few testimonials about how they
went about their work.

It is therefore a true stroke of luck that one of those scribes became world famous as a
composer. Young Johannes Brahms earned his keep doing transcriptions before he
became famous with his own compositions, and he kept transcribing his works (p.113)
even once successful. In January 1855, Brahms, then still completely unknown, sent a
four-hand transcription of Robert Schumanns Quintet op. 44 to the publisher Breitkopf &
Hrtel in Leipzig.10 Clara Schumann seems to have made the introduction. The publisher
play-tested the piece, checking on its spirit and its playability; two music professors
performed the piece for the publisher and his staff. In February, the publisher decided
not to publish the manuscript: Unfortunately listening to and watching the performance
has convinced us that the piece cannot and must not be published in this form. For two
very seasoned players, who are very interested in Schumanns music, encountered such
difficulties that we have to assume the wider public would be scared off [by the
arrangement]. 11

This episode makes clear how publishers scrutinized the four-hand scene: four-hand
arrangements were supposed to hew to the spirit of the originaland that spirit was
largely the composers intent. This, it seems, is why Breitkopf & Hrtel turned to
professors interested in Schumann. At the same time, the publisher insisted on
observing play. The reason was that the public, even those with an interest in Schumann,
might be scared off by the difficulty of the arrangement. Though he seems to have missed
the mark in this arrangement, Brahms himself had similar aims in transcribing his own
work: in letters to his various publishers, he makes clear that he cares more about the
pianistic, about playability than about whether the integrity of each part has been
maintained. 12 And to the publisher Rieter he writes that he made the transcription of his
piano concerto (op. 15) for playing and not (as is the fashion these days) for reading 13 )
for, as he writes to Simrock, I really hope people like playing it. 14 Ease of play and
appropriateness for the piano were thus central coordinates in Brahmss transcriptions of
his own works. A few decades later Max Reger would write to the publishing house of
Lauterbach & Kuhn that he wanted to transcribe a work for piano four-hands, and that
his aims were threefold: (1) that it be fully pianistic and fully four-handed, (2) that it
sounds good, (3) and that it becomes easy to play and becomes house-music. After all,
thats what this kind of 4hand arrangement is supposed to be. 15

However elusive the spirit of a piece or a composer, it is no accident that it came to play

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such a large role in four-hand transcriptions. As Theodor Adorno pointed out, only four-
hand piano can seriously attempt to simulate the sym-phonic qualities of the orchestra.
And even Franz Liszt wrote in the foreword to his 1839 (two-hand) transcription of
Beethovens Fifth Symphony: Within the compass of (p.114) its seven octaves [the
piano] can, with very few exceptions, reproduce all aspects, all combinations, and all
formations of the most thorough and deepest sonic creativity. It leaves to the orchestra
no other advantages than the wider palette of tonal colors and mass effects. 16 While
Liszt praises the piano in general, nineteenth-century observers emphasized that Liszts
encomium of pianistic sound applied a fortiori to four-hand piano. Groves Dictionary of
Music and Musicians of 1879 writes that four-hand piano can reproduce the
characteristic effects of [orchestral] works more readily and faithfully than arrangements
for pianoforte solo. 17

Purely in terms of anatomy, the two pairs of hands can play twenty different notes at the
same time. That means that quantitatively all the notes of the Schumann quintet that
Brahms transcribed for Breitkopf could be transposed, one to one. Any restrictions are
not logistical in nature but, rather, depend on the ability and ambition of the duettists
themselves. This means, on the one hand, that four-hand arrangements can ensure that a
good deal more of the spirit (Liszts foreword speaks of the inspiration of the master 18
) survives in translation than in other forms of transcriptioneven though this made the
choices, transpositions, and omissions the transcriber did include all the more significant.
The compositional spirit had to do with the orchestral sound of the original, which, as far
as many nineteenth-century observers were concerned, many two-hand transcriptions
could not simulate sufficiently. A musical encyclopedia from the 1860s remarks that four-
hand transcriptions were more complete in reproducing details, and richer, stronger
and more differentiated in their sonic effects 19 than those for two hands.

Composers were keenly aware of this. Hector Berlioz, notoriously recalcitrant when it
came to the piano, wrote as one of his few piano works a four-hand transcription of
LEnfance du Christ.20 Entrusting the fullness and differentiation of his orchestral sound
to a mere ten-fingered mortal seems to have been anathema to him. And in 1825, Ludwig
van Beethoven found himself in the position of having to defend the spirit of his original
composition against an unauthorized transcription. In a Viennese music journal, he wrote:
I take it as my duty to alert the musical public against a four-hand piano transcription of
my recent overture, which misses the mark entirely and departs completely from the
original score. Instead, Beethoven recommends the absolutely faithful transcription
which will soon appear in a legitimate edition with B. Schotts Sons in Mainz, which, as it
happened, had been (p.115) arranged by none other than Czerny.21 The sound
available to four-hand playing thus allowed the public, the publishers, and the composers
to insist on greater fealty to the spirit of the orchestral original.

At the same time, Breitkopfs letter to young Brahms makes clear that four-hand
transcriptions are objects of use, and therefore have to be useable for their consumer
(rather than scaring them off). It was above all the playability of four-hand transcriptions
that made them such runaway successes. In his 1906 biography of Tchaikovsky, Edwin

Page 9 of 29

Evans (18741945), music critic and the author of the guide How to Accompany at the
Piano (1917), welcomed the fact that more of the composers works were available in
four-hand arrangements than for piano solo. A few exist also for piano solo, but generally
speaking, they are almost unplayable in this form. For instance, to the ordinary pianist
only one movement of the Pathetic symphony, the last, is accessible. The Casse
Noisette suite is an easy and effective solo, but in most arrangements the waltz is
stripped of the varied counterpoints which are one of its principal charms in the
orchestral version. 22 In the interest of playability, orchestral sound normally had to be
reduced somehow: harmonies were transposed, parts were combined or left out
entirely. This is mostly required by the partition of the keyboard or, rather, the
transposition of the orchestra onto the keyboard. In order to simulate orchestral sound,
the keyboard is subdivided: the lower registers are given to bass and tenor, the middle
and upper registers to alto and soprano.

But the sonic reduction of the orchestral score doesnt just require a parceling out of the
keyboard, but also of the scorein other words, the arranger has to decide what is
melody and what is mere accompaniment. While the melody is, of course, the epitome of
what Breitkopf in his letter to Brahms calls the spirit of the piece, the accompaniment can
and has to be reduced. Priority was normally given to counterpoint, then instruments
were left out that were essentially impossible to simulate on the piano; the rhythm they
created had to be retained, which meant that the parts of certain rhythmic string or wind
instruments had to be included. They are usually given to the secondo, since the primo is
usually given fewer voices to bundle.23 In classical transcriptions, the divisions of score
and of keyboard are performed in a way that keeps melodic lines as intact as possible.

That means that both players usually busy themselves in their own corner of the
keyboard, but the logic of the melody drives them again and again into the center of the
keyboard. It is just as impossible to divvy up the spheres of activity of the individual
players as it is to hand one motif or one melody fully to one player. Crossings of the hand
are thus completely inevitable, as is the handover of a melody from one player to the
other. Arrangers frequently tried to avoid crossings in the interest (p.116) of
playability, but this was where the composers spirit raised its recalcitrant head. Anton
Halm adapted Beethovens Grand Fugue (op. 133) by consistently keeping primo and
secondo in separate spaces, which required sacrificing musical logic to avoid crossings.24
This aroused Beethovens ire, who heavily criticized this disregard for the composers
spirit, and eventually went so far as to draft his own four-hand version of the piece, which
only resurfaced a few years ago in manuscript form.

Just as Beethoven criticized Halms reduction of his score for supposedly disregarding
the spirit of the composition, there were music critics who had the opposite problem and
who charged that transcriptions did not separate enough chaff from the wheat. While
Beethovens letter to the editor praised Czernys arrangement of his overture for its
accuracy, Czernys student Louis Khler (18201886) criticized his teachers Beethoven
arrangements only a few decades later in Dwights Journal of Music. Czerny, Khler
charged, overburdened all four hands, leaving the players little room to put their own

Page 10 of 29

spin on the music. No note could be emphasized, the intimacy of individual moments was
drowned in a constant fullness of sound, and the scherzos, according to Khler, felt
hulking and massive, miles away from the elegance and frailty of the originals. In general,
Khler argued, Czerny strove to keep all hands and all parts of the keyboard busy (so
that none of the four hands had too much downtime), which departed rather starkly from
the true Beethoven sound, since the master didnt constantly lean on piccolo flutes, the
highest registers of the violin, and the lowest of the basses.25

Adolf Bernhard Marx expressed a similar view of Czernys four-hand transcriptions of

Beethoven. He generally applauded Czernys achievement, but criticized the play
mania (Spielseligkeit)Czernys tendency to keep every part of the keyboard busy at
all times:

We cannot approve of the fact that he, in order to make room for figures and
fullness of parts [Stimmflle], or also in order to humor the play-mania of the piano
in order to find replacements for the irreplaceable orchestral effects [of the
originals], changes and transposes registers, loses himself in the highest registers
and in general sacrifices the orchestral quality of the original and the loyalty to it, up
to the point where the player may well get an entirely wrong impression of the
original work.26

The user experience of four-hand transcription was that of holding an orchestral work in
ones own four hands. At the same time four-hand reduction, precisely (p.117) because
it had to keep all four hands busy at most (if not all) times, tended to spread out the
textures of the original over the length of the keyboard like so much chewing gum.

For this reason, the tendency to split unisono passages by doubling the octaves was both
central to transcription practice and not without its detractors. There were debates as to
when it was appropriate enough, which intersected (though it by no means coincided
entirely) with the debate over whether playability or spirit were to be treated as
paramount.27 Whatever the case, there was no denying that doubled octaves often
rather drastically altered the character of a piece. When Mendelssohns Hebrides
Overture (op. 26) was arranged for four-hand pianofirst by the composer himself, later
by Gustav Friedrich Kogel for Peters publishing housethe strikingly tender woodwind
solos were usually doubled. The effect surrenders the naturalism, the pictorial quality of
the original; we do not hear Fingals Cave, we do not hear the sea and its birds; the
pianistic sound becomes both more abstract and more arbitrary than the orchestral
textures.

The logic of orchestration that predominates in classical music necessarily pushes the
melody to the primo-player, while the secondo is usually more of an accompanist. The
secondo is the one determining the rhythmin particular, in the many dances that
dominated the four-hand repertoire in the nineteenth century. So long as the
arrangement doesnt rely on a contrast between the two players (for instance, if an etude
has the teacher provide simple chords to guide the pupils play), the secondo of course
wont play just rhythm and accompaniment. In most arrangements, depending on how

Page 11 of 29

complex a field the primo has to attend to, the secondo might be asked to take over for
bass, cello, and violastrange the piece that would relieve all of them of melodic duties!

But especially in the comparatively less complex pieces discussed in the second chapter
(the marches, waltzes, potpourris, and variations), the two players were rather starkly
divided: the primo got to show off the crystalline shimmer of the upper registers of the
piano while the lower register (played by the secondo) was generally relegated to
playing uninteresting and inferior accompaniment figures. 28 This schizophrenia
predominated not just among the musical day laborers who churned out the endless
stream of arrangements and dances but also among some of the most renowned
composers for four-hand piano. Kathleen Dale, for instance, has pointed out that in
Schuberts simpler pieces, such as the dances and the marches, the secondo is often
little more than an accompanist, while primo luxuriates in the cream of the melodic and
decorative passages. 29 (p.118)

The secondo keeps rhythm, comments on the melody, and also does the bulk of the
pedaling. Generally, then, the secondo is responsible for sound and rhythmthat is to
say, he or she takes on a more orchestral function compared with the soloist-like role of
the primo. When concertos were arranged for four hands, the soloists part was often
almost entirely handed to the primo. When it came to the transcription of songs, the primo
usually took over the role of songbird, whether it was a song written for soprano or
alto.30 When it came to translating the human voiceits continuity, its subjectivity, and its
personalityto the keyboard, four-hand arrangements invariably turned to the primo.

Far from an equitable side-by-side, the two pairs of hands thus often presented
something far more lopsided. They busied themselves not just in distant parts of the
keyboard but they also did very different work there. The secondo was the accompanist,
and was tasked with regulating and modulating; he or she more frequently strayed into
the contested territory at the center of the keyboard. The secondo determined the
voice, both his or her own and that of the primothe secondo in many respects was the
public face of the four-handed monster. The primo, meanwhile, stayed fairly content in
the soprano range. He or she left its proper sphere only rarely, and depended on its
voice and its rhythm on the other. The primo player thus carried the subjective melody,
while the secondo took up a position of collectivityin the first instance, the collectivity of
the orchestra, but also the collectivity of citizens, of humanity as such.

In transcribing his own Symphony no. 2, Johannes Brahms seems to have interpreted his
orchestral score with this kind of division of labor in mind. In the first movement (Allegro
non Troppo), the second lyrical theme (Walter Frisch calls it a lullaby 31 ) is introduced
by the secondo (in measure 82) and picked up by the primo. During this first run-
through, the secondo plays the theme and the primo plays the accompanist. But the primo
doesnt provide a rhythm; rather, the primo luxuriates in a coloratura (which is repeated
once more in measure 156). The moment the two switch roles, this playful accompaniment
drops out and the secondo simply keeps the beat. In the orchestral score, melody and
accompaniment simply switch sides in a kind of chiasmus.32 This symmetry vanishes in the
four-hand arrangement. The primo, it seems, is not allowed, or is incapable of keeping the

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beat; it has to flutter around the melody with a songbirds playfulness. The secondo,
conversely, is not permitted any such playfulness; the moment the secondo lets go of the
melody, it is condemned to take control, to keep measure, to create order. The relative
symmetry of the orchestral version thus gives way to two starkly divided (p.119) roles.
To some extent this division is born of the necessities of transcriptionbut not entirely.
There are other reasons why Brahms leaves out rhythmic chords that could easily be
transposed into the primos sphere of influence, or lyric passages that ought to go to the
secondo-playerreasons that have little to do with pragmatism and more to do with
ideology.

What is the nature of this ideological charge? It may bear pointing out that in English,
primo and secondo were long known as top and bottom (even though it was common
practice to print the two parts on opposite pages). Composers, arrangers, players, and
observers understood primo and secondo as gendered actors. Common transcription
practice turned the secondos control over rhythm and voice into a cypher for
masculinitythe secondo becomes the head of the musical household. The primo,
meanwhilehighly subjective, far more tender, and of a kind of fragile privacyoccupies
the kind of domestic position the nineteenth century usually assigned to women.

This sexual dichotomy seems to have enabled a whole chain of associated pairs of
concepts. Charles de Bernards novel Gerfaut describes a keyboard-bound flirtation and
runs through a number of them: heroic Gerfaut plays the manly basse, the pretty
baroness plays le chant; the narrator takes care to note that his play is full of
aggressive nergie, while hers is characterized by une lgre indcision. Her
indecision is amplified when his hands begin to imprison hers. At last his hands, and his
role, are turned into a bass clef while she becomes a treble clef. If writers like
Charles de Bernard neatly separate roles, each element of these pairs clearly depends on
the other; they are not just distinctthe two pairs of hands are complementary. Neither
of them makes sense without the othersomething else that would have reminded the
nineteenth century of the sexual relationship.

This understanding of the complementary roles of songbird and accompanist as a kind of

code for the relationship between the sexes, as well as the relationship between publicity
and privacy, drew on another form that thematized these two pairs of concepts: the Lied.
Franz Schubert wrote to his brother Ferdinand: The way in which [Johann Michael]
Vogl sings and the way I accompany him, how we seem to be one in such a moment, that
seems to strike people as something new, something remarkable. 33 What makes the
configuration of singer and accompanist remarkable in this manner is the way in which two
people seem to be unified and referred to one another in their activity. This same
ideology of unification and latent eroticism seems to have been projected onto the four-
hand keyboard, where the logic of song and accompaniment was less natural and thus
more visible.

So fraught was this dichotomy in the nineteenth century that we can trace it even into the
philosophy of music. In the third book of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur
Schopenhauer equates melody with the intentional striving (p.120) of the will, and thus

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individual subjectivity.34 This highest objectivation of the will finds its expression in the
sopranos voice. But if Schopenhauer seems to assign the highest dignity to a vocal range
usually associated with women, he is sure to temper his praise: the sopranos melody
objectifies the will without being conscious of it, and Schopenhauer genders this
unconsciousness as female. Just as a magnetic somnambulist explains things that she has
no idea about when awake, so the soprano expresses the many different forms of the
striving of the will. 35 Schopenhauer relies on oppositions and associations that crystallize
into the roles of primo and secondo: soprano, subjectivity, and melody on the one hand;
lower registers, objectivity, and harmony, on the other. The primo is subjective, private,
individual, while the secondo is objective, legislating, public, and collective. Only together,
according to the ideology of four-hand pianism, can they create the unheard-of oneness
of which Schubert speaksto create sym-phonic music in their tiny intimate community.

The way the gender dynamics play out in the tiny keyboard household is anything but
accidental. Given how the nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity thought of gender
almost made it necessary. From Rousseau onward, conceptions of community, and
especially those accounts of community that contrasted it with more elective and looser
forms of human coexistence, were inspired by and closely linked to the sexual
relationship. The reason Rousseau, for instance, insisted on normative gender roles was
not primarily that he held certain prejudices or preconceived notions (which in other
areas he was able to demolish like no other); instead, he was guided by the idea that men
and women are naturally referred to one another, naturally depend on one another, and
that this kind of interlocking complementarity of roles has to be true for any community.36
Since then, the sexual relationship was almost obsessively adduced as the paradigm for
human community. This was as true for Rousseau as for the propagandists of organicist
states, the Romantic generation, and finally Ferdinand Tnnies, who first introduced into
the discourse of sociology the distinction between the closeness and intimate
community and the elective and far looser society.

In this context, the fact that the differential roles that structured four-hand playing in the
nineteenth century were gendered is anything but surprising. The four-handed monster
was thus not just an individual; it was also a kind of embryonic community. For
nineteenth-century thinking, the kind of co-dependence that transcription and
composition practice brought to the keyboard was never fully separable from questions
of sex and gender. The moment you put a community to work on the keyboard, you
sexualized it to some extent and you created a community only insofar as it had an erotic
component, however sublimated. (p.121)

But matters were more complicated still. After all, the way four-hand transcription
created a community on the keyboard, and the way this community was shot through
with erotic concerns, was a matter of how four-hand music was written or written about.
But it says nothing about how it was actually played. We have no evidence that women
usually played the primo part or that men tended to regard the secondo part as their
prerogative. Literary couples (such as de Bernards Gerfaut and his baroness) certainly
tend to shake out in this way, but whether this springs from writerly conceits or from an

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unwritten law is not clear. Here, too, the analogy to the Lied is instructive: songbird and
accompanist are likewise coded in gendered terms. But as the example of Schubert and
Vogl shows, there is little to suggest that this gendering has practical consequences in
performance. After all, the relative positions in both singing and four-hand playing have
primarily to do with the relative skill level. For instance, it is unlikely that a female piano
teacher (or a mother) assigned her charges the secondo position or if a correpetitor took
over the melody.

And this is where a second complication arises. Any accompanist knows that if the soloist
drives or drags, he or she can easily dictate rhythm to the accompanist. While the
subjective voice of the soloist indeed falls to the primo, and its objective frame falls to
the secondo, the question of who leads and who follows depends much more on the
individual players. And unless the duettists are a well-seasoned team (and even then only
if they are equally matched in their abilities), there will be one player who leads and one
who follows. The keyboard plays host to a veritable tug of war which can concern
minutiae like speed or expression, but can also touch on deep questions of interpretation.
Ossip Schubin (Aloisia Kirschner, 18541953) includes the following episode in her novel
Im Gewohnten Geleis (1901): Countess Klotilde tries to avoid playing four-hand piano
with her cousin. For it was rather tiring to play four-hands with Leontine. [Her cousin]
constantly referred to her sense of a piece, in particular of Beethovens Ninth
Symphony. It was certainly a very good sensebut it was nevertheless tiring. 37

The very good sense is in some ways a distant echo of the composers spirit that
Beethoven and others so insisted on. By reference to the spirit of the composition, the
composer claims power over the work as it threatens to dissipate in moving between the
different media; by reference to her sense, cousin Leontine claims power over a
performance that threatens to get lost in the space between the players. Richard
Hoffmann, a student of Arnold Schoenberg and his assistant during his Californian years,
reports that he played four-hands with the master, until I hurt him. Well, he played the
primo partwhat else could Schoenberg have played?I was the secondo, and at some
point I bruised his thumb with my little finger, during some crossing or other. So we
stopped. 38 (p.122)

There is something wonderfully catty about Hoffmanns recollections: on the one hand,
Hoffmann seems to remember Schoenberg as a bit of a tyrant (what else could
Schoenberg have played?), but on the other, his insistence that he bruised
[Schoenbergs] thumb with nothing less than his little finger makes the composer come
across as quite prissy. Four-hand playing, it seems, is always also about struggles for
superiority; on a space as fraught as the four-hand keyboard, even a couple of serious
and professional musicians like Hoffmann and Schoenberg readily slip into the cattiness of
Klotilde and cousin Leontine. Of course, the categories Hoffmann uses to poke fun at his
teacher are themselves thoroughly gendered; the statement that what else other than
primo Arnold Schoenberg could have played reads differently in light of previous
chapters than it might to the uninitiated.

The gendered code the nineteenth century applied to the relationship of primo and

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secondo was, by necessity, overlain with another, one that tried to answer Humpty
Dumptys question from Lewis Carrolls Through the LookingGlass, which is to be the
masterthats all. Primo and secondo are about masculinity and femininity, but
femininity is not the same as subservience, nor is masculinity the same as dominance. The
four-hand keyboard is strongly charged with sexual signification, but this signification is
quite unstable. The man might find himself as a primo and has to let himself be voiced by a
woman; or he plays the secondo part but still is dominated by his songbird. Men and
women may try on each others traditional roles or they may forgo such roles entirely;
they may be impossible to place in gendered binaries in much the same way as a more
alluring monster with a long tradition in the West, the androgyne.

Monstrous Bodies
Until now we have sought the monstrosity of the four-hand monster primarily in the play
of the hands: the androgyny with which the two sets of hands meld together, the
embryonic community they form, and the way the two pairs of hands manage to both
become one and remain separate. But this monstrosity also concerns the part of the body
that doesnt have a voice, that doesnt bespeak its meanings on the keyboard. Four-hand
playing isnt just structured by means of gaze and handthat is to say, by the
interactions of two separate automata that sometimes seem to blend. What Edward Cone
describes as the aim of four-hand playing is a blending of two players. 39 This blending
is not just motivated by the score. After all, while players may occasionally find
themselves crossing hands, or complementing one anothers exertion, their bodies
interact far more continuously, and in fact start doing so the moment they sit down at the
instrument. Their torsos will touch, their shoulders (p.123) may rub against each other,
and they will sense each others breath from the first measure on.

This kind of bodily interaction almost by necessity had something monstrous for the
nineteenth century. After all, while the body was allowed to spread itself like an amoeba
before the piano, it was forced into ever tighter corsets off the keyboard. The impetuous
corporeality of four-hand playing, the excess of body which was allowed to splay itself
across the keyboard, was a local antidote to the sublimation of physicality elsewhere.
Reports of Schubertiades, Liszt evenings, and the like from the first half of the nineteenth
century again and again remark on the relationship between four-hand playing and
dancing. The many four-handed waltzes that were sold early in the century were not
exclusively intended for communal playing and listening, but also were meant to allow an
audience to dance. Eliza Wille, for instance, relates how she danced to an orchestra
composed of Liszt and Chopin: I happily remember an evening when Liszt and Chopin
played waltzes four hands, for a small, intimate circle, and us young girls were allowed to
dance to the music. 40 Similarly, the Schubert evenings that took place in the home of the
Spaun family didnt just feature four-hand playing, but also frequent dancing.41

Interestingly, this is a constellation we largely seek in vain in nineteenth-century

literature: four-hand playing abounds in literature, but no one dances to it. One possible
reason is that most of these scenes come from the second half of the centurythat is to
say, a time when scenes of dancing to four-hand music disappear from diaries, memoirs,

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and letters as well. As the piano got larger, as it started to move into the center of the
parlor, and as it colonized more of the domestic sphere, it became harder to dance in the
piano room. The morality of the age must have done its part to drive dance from the
parlor, and to divorce four-hand piano playing from bodies moving across a dance floor.
The fact that within one generation the dancing body disappeared from the four-hand
scene (in particular the emphatically physical waltz) must have been recognizedperhaps
with a sense of nostalgia, perhaps with a sense of guilt. By 1884, in Edmond de
Goncourts Chrie, the analogy between dance and four-hand playing has become simply
thatan analogy. Grand-father promised me that every Sunday wed dance on the piano
together. 42 Literal dance, once an organic relationship between bodies, has become
mere metaphor. The melding of limbs, the close bodily embrace of the dance becomes
the even more persistent closeness of the two players sitting side by side at the piano. In
the figure of the four-handed monster, the body gets its revenge: banished from the
social pursuits around the piano, it instead hijacks the instrument itself. The (p.124)
decorporialization of the listener finds its analogue in the corporeal overdetermination of
the players.

Cones four-handed monster is thus monstrous not because of its four hands but,
rather, because of the body that lies behind them. Monstrous here also means
obscene. After all, in the nineteenth century, hands and faces had the right to speak
about women or for women, while the rest of the body most certainly did not. Obscenity
lies in the fact that a body part appears without being animated by the subject, without
being used by the subject to communicate; rather, it appears for its own sake, creating
meaning without the subject having any say in it.43 Face and hand, in other words, are
media or means of communication, while a bare breast, a carelessly exposed leg, or even
a carefully covered backside signify with brute immediacy and without the subjects
input.44

In Adolph LArronges comedy Mein Leopold (1873), young Anna is certain that her
piano teacher will propose to me because he keeps invading her space while they play
four-hand piano. And it isnt the motion of his hands that has Anna convinced: When my
right hand was busy in the discant, his left hand found the bass, and if I pushed the pedal
with my foot he too found the forte pedal with his other foot. Her mother responds that
none of this is particularly decent, but she too is unconcerned with the hands: she is
upset that you dont just play four-hand, but also four-foot. 45 But the feet are not the
only body parts that may find each other in four-hand playing, although a good bourgeois
daughter might be forgiven for not mentioning them. The feet, the arms, the legs, the
torsos, and the backsidesall of them are in close proximity in four-hand playing, and all
of them may touch, often for extended periods of time.

Enter Sandman
But there is another body the two four-hand players share, a body that is at once more
physical and more metaphysical. This is the body bespoken by the voice. Of course, the
pianists themselves do not vocalize; they do not produce any bodily sound themselves
unless they breathe loudly or whisper to one another. But the two bodies that find

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themselves in such obscene agreement on the piano stool communicate through a third
bodya metaphysical, transubstantiated body of sound. And the two players partake of
this third, shared body in a manner that is itself obscene. The form of four-hand playing
forces upon the players certain kinds of (p.125) bodily communication: on the one hand,
insofar as body parts that arent supposed to speak have to communicate, but on the
other, because the body that produces the pianos sound is a shared one.

This is because four-hand playing doesnt just distribute notes, chords, and roles
between the two players; it distributes a whole array of ancillary activities. Some of them
are contingent and can be performed by either one of the players (for instance, turning
the pages), but there is one activity that four-hand piano practice to this day usually
assigns to the secondopedaling. Unlike turning pages, pedaling turns out to be anything
but ancillary; for what we earlier referred to as the subjectivity and the voice of the piano
is centrally determined by the pedals. What is paradoxical about this situation is that the
player who usually plays the role of songbird (le chant) doesnt actually get to determine
what this voice sounds like.

The fact that primo and secondo share the same pedals, and the fact that the secondo
usually controls them, isnt strictly speaking a dictate of the score. Still, it is clear that the
modulations demanded in the score can be created only through this strange
arrangement. Even professional pianists require some practice to pedal for another
person. And indeed, pedaling in four-hand playing is a unique configuration, as a
comparison with the configuration singer/accompanist makes clear. Of course, the pianist
determines the singer to a certain point, but this determination is entirely external and
mostly a matter of rhythm and speed. The primo, however, surrenders far more to the
secondo. Imagine a singer whose sound could be manipulated by the accompanist just by
pushing down a pedal! This is the role of the primo: a songbird, but a mechanical
songbird. When it opens its mouth, the other player determines what kind of sound
emerges. The fundamental uncanniness of this arrangement was thematized by E. T. A.
Hoffmann in The Sandman, where the automaton Olimpia plays duets by herself in a
more uncanny anticipation of Wildes Aunt Agatha.46

Olimpia, it turns out, is a gifted pianist and a unique vocalist. Her preferred means of
expression is no accident, for Hoffmann seems to have given much thought to the
uncanniness of the pianos voice. Four-hand scenes are very rare in his oeuvre, but
Hoffmann is almost obsessive in investigating the central terms that make the four-hand
voice so strange. The question of how body, voice, and subject relate is central to much
of his work. And again and again, Hoffmanns investigations proceed by multiplying one of
these factorsthat is to say, Hoffmann asks what happens if one body has several voices,
or one voice has several bodies, or one body houses multiple subjects. And it is precisely
this kind of asymmetrical multiplication (two subjects, one voice) that creates the strange
vocality of four-hand piano playing. (p.126)

The fact that the inventor of creatures like Olimpia himself wrote music for piano suggests
that for Hoffmann the doppelganger was linked to the mechanical voice of the piano.
Consider the famous scene in The Sandman, in which little Nathanal hides in his

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fathers study in order to witness his fathers nighttime meeting with the mysterious
sandman. Nathanal witnesses his father and evil Master Copplius hunched over a
work. 47 The boy cannot see what their four hands are working on, but the narrative
suggests that it is indeed Olimpia, the lifeless doll who ensorcels grown-up Nathanal,
and who bedevils him with her mechanical voice. The scene in which Nathanal fully falls in
love with her unfolds at a piano evening: Olimpia played the grand piano with great
facility, and sang a bravura aria with her bright, almost cutting glass bell of a voice. 48
The Sandman presents Cones four-handed monster as a robot woman: the mechanical
songbird accompanies herself on the piano. The unification of Schubert and Vogl is
realized here as a technological featmelody and accompanist enter a personal union,
just without a person.

Hoffmann was quite familiar with the process of transcribing and arranging pieces for
piano; most of the works Hoffmann reviewed for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
were either piano transcriptions or piano Auszge with additional parts for voice. And he
was particularly well versed in four-hand transcriptions. In the summer of 1810, he not
only reviewed Beethovens Symphony no. 5, but also its four-hand transcription.49
Hoffmann, one of the promulgators of what Carl Dahlhaus has called the romantic
metaphysics of instrumental music, 50 consistently emphasized the importance of the
voice as opposed to the semantic content of song, and tried to apply this logic to musical
instruments. And yet, the voice does not function in Hoffmanns fictions as a sort of
unisonoit is never an index of the unity or singularity of the individual or of its body.

Another story of Hoffmanns which deals with mechanical constructs come to life (as well
as one such construct that turns out to be a human being under a spell) is Nutcracker
and Mouse King (the basis for Tchaikovskys Nutcracker). On Christmas Eve, the
nutcracker commands his armies in the living room, in a war not against a four-handed
monster but against a seven-headed, and thus fourteen-handed onethe mouse king.
This mouse king is a variation on an old German legend, the rat king. This mythic creature
was supposed to consist of an entire mischief of rats whose tails and hind legs have grown
together. The mouse king thus consists of one body that is shared by several individuals.
The mouse king reverses the uncanny corporeality of the doll Olimpia: instead of several
bodies with (p.127) one voice, the mouse king has one body, but several voices:
Squeaking in triumph from seven throats, the mouse king approached. 51

Can a creature that squeaks from seven throats speak with one voice? And wouldnt a
multiplicity of voices raise the question of which one squeaks for the creature as such?
These were the questions that occupied an author like Hoffmann, fascinated as he was
with subjects who were not quite identical with themselves. In a letter he wrote to Carl
Schall in 1822, Hoffmann complains about the kind of mechanical writing he has to do:

Youd have to have four hands like a flea, and since four hands require two heads,
it would be necessary that the head appoint a vice-head as its viceroy, as its
lieutenant, or at least as its careful director of a department.52

This letter points to a central aspect of Hoffmanns characterization of four-handed

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monsters generally: four hands require two heads. Four-handed monsters, as much as
they are about unification and indistinction, have something schizophrenic, since the head
has to appoint a vice-head as its viceroy, lieutenant. Just as in Lady Agathas bizarre
four-handedness monstrosity, it is a question of power; but in Hoffmann, that question is
far more vexed than in Wilde, for all the comparisons Hoffmann invokes in his letters imply
an asymmetry of power between the four hands and their two heads. In reporting on a
concert by the pianist Sigismund Thalberg from 1838, the Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung invokes many-handedness as a sign of the subjects mastery over its own body,
as well as the body of the instrument (and by extension of music itself): Parisian news
claimed that he was four-handed, but we should be inclined to concede to him sixso
awesome and amazing his ability. 53 Hoffmann by contrast insists that four hands need
two heads: many-handedness doesnt symbolize the omnipotence of the subject; instead,
it points to the internal fracture of this subject. After all, who is head, who is vice-head?
Who is whose lieu-tenant, who stands in for the other as a mere placeholder? Who is to
be masterthats all?

In a fairy tale included in Prinzessin Brambilla, Hoffmann raises the question of what
exactly happens to the subject when it sits as a four-handed mouse king before a piano
sonata. There, a princess gives birth to two most darling princelings, although they were
twins [Zwillinge], should have been called ones [Einling], for they had grown together at
their bottoms. 54 The way the narrator vacillates between twinning and oneness in many
respects encapsulates the scandal of the four-handed (p.128) monster. What is
particularly vexing in the fairy tale is that the four-handed monster is a prince, or perhaps
two princes. Just as a pianist, a successor to a throne ought to be single, a soloist; sharing
the instrument of state with another seems to play havoc with sovereignty. When the king
grows a bit concerned with this double blessing, his ministers try to calm him down by
positing that in general the entire governmental sonata would sound fuller and more
magnificent when played quatre mains. 55 Hoffmann took the figure of the double
prince from a parable by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (17421799), who had intended it
as a commentary on the absolutist state.56 Hoffmann turns them into a psychological
cypher; two princes of exactly opposite disposition become a symbol for the a priori split
subject.

The composer Carl Reinecke (18241910) wrote a piece that brought this entire
menagerie together: a suite about the seven-throated monster for the four-handed
monster and its governmental sonata quatre mains. His suite Nutcracker and
Mouse King for four-hand piano based on Hoffmanns fairy tale (op. 46) appeared with
Breitkopf & Hrtel in 1865 (the overture appeared separately in 1855). Reineckes
success as a composer was mixed, and he was active mostly as a piano pedagogue and as
an author of piano transcriptions. Reineckes suite follows Hoffmanns plot quite closely
and thus also depicts the climactic battle between the mouse army and the automata of
Godfather Drosselmeyer.

Reinecke includes an interesting joke in the piece. For much of the piece, primo and
secondo together simulate the mechanical stride of the army of automata, but toward the

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end of the piece the automata wind down and run out of energy. Primo and secondo slow
down in unison, then slow down further, and then pause for a moment altogether. The
primo stays silent for two full measures while the secondo plays five identical groups of
four quick (molto piu animato) sixteenth noteswe are listening to the mechanical tin
soldiers being rewound. Once the secondos wind-up work is done, the two players
return to the main theme and to the old tempo. The piano, or perhaps better, the four-
handed monster at the piano, becomes for a moment a wind-up toy that needs to be
rewound. And it should no longer come as a surprise that it is the secondo who has the
job of rewinding it. In assigning the roles in this way, Reinecke mixes the content of the
piecethe automatonwith the form of the piece: four-hand playing. The rewinding of the
automaton is at once a rewinding of the piano, a rewinding by the party that controls the
voice. Reinecke equates the uncanny march of the automata with the relationship
between primo and secondoand thus musicalizes the way of thinking four-handedness
Hoffmann had pioneered in his prose.

Hoffmanns uncanny mechanical doublingsthe songbird who accompanies herself, the

automaton that rewinds itselfpoint to the central scandal in (p.129) four-hand vocality:
there is simply no other musical arrangement where one subject intones a melody while
the other gets to decide on the intonation. The primo opens its mouth and moves its
tongue, but it is the secondo who decides what comes out. This arrangement dislodges
and unsettles what Roland Barthes has called the grain of the voice. This grain is to be
found at the intersection of voice and speech: it cannot be reduced to either the
expression of the subject, the lexicon of the language it uses to express itself, or to the
phonemes of the voice. Rather, the grain refers back to the materiality of the body; it is
the body in the voice as it sings. 57

Mladen Dolar has put the same idea in a similar way: the voice, he writes, is the material
element recalcitrant to meaning, and when we speak in order to say something, then the
voice is precisely that which cannot be said. 58 When Theodor Adorno undertook a
physiognomy of what he calls radio voice, he meant something analogous: just as the
physiognomy of a face has as its objects that part of the face that doesnt intend to mean
(an extension of the body parts that do not mean in themselves), so Adornos
physiognomics of the voice focuses on that which isnt supposed to be intrinsically
meaningful, that which is just supposed to be a vessel for information, communication, or
melody.59 As Adriana Cavarero has shown, the reason why this vessel is traditionally
understood as secondary is that it is tied to the animal zoe, while whatever is carried
depends on logos.60 Dolars conception of the voice, Barthess grain, and the Greek
phone are all physicalthey speak the body.

In four-hand piano playing, one player thus manipulates the grain of the others voice.
And because this is an unusual arrangement for pianists, even seasoned players tend to
switch roles only rarelyone usually acts as the manipulator while the other is
manipulated.61 It would go too far to claim that there is something emphatically sexual
about this. But it is clear that the monster into which the two players meld concerns the
shared voice of the instrument as well; once again, there seems to be something

Page 21 of 29

uncanny, something threatening about the way boundaries between individuals break
down in four-hand playing, something monstrous about the way the new entity behaves.

The two young duettists Elizabeth Joy Roe and Greg Anderson have put a
characteristically ironic spin on this configuration. These two Julliard graduates are one of
the most successful piano duos active in the United States at the moment, mostly
because of their inventive, frequently pop-inflected repertoire (a few years ago they
premiered a four-hand transcription of the Star Wars soundtrack), and their ironic
(p.130) emphasis on the eroticism of four-hand performance. In 2007, the two first
performed their arrangement of Astor Piazzollas Libertango, which the composer had
originally written for the Octeto Nuevo de Buenos Aires. The danger in transcribing a
piece like Libertango is that the sound of the guitar cannot be translated for the piano and
that its characteristic vulnerability is hard to reproduce on a grand piano. Anderson and
Roe sidestep these pitfalls by means of a fascinating trick: the primo plays both guitar and
accompanying instruments; the secondos contributions on the keyboard are
comparatively meager. That is because the secondo is busy in the piano itself, in the
sounding body of the instrument. While the primo takes charge of the keys, the secondo
reaches into the belly of the instrument and muffles those piano strings that would
correspond to guitar notes in the original score. This indeed creates a sound strikingly
reminiscent of plucked guitar strings.

Anderson and Roe take the idea of the secondo as voice-giver and voice-regulator to the
extreme. The primo is responsible for almost all the notes in the score, but the sound of
the instrument is created by the secondo. The scandalous way in which the secondo
interferes with the primos sound is pushed from the twilight of the pedals to the main
stage. The secondo disappears into the instrument up to his elbowslike the protagonist
of David Cronenbergs film Naked Lunch, whose hands disappear into his typewriter. In
each case, the boundaries of the subject dissolve, but so do the boundaries of the work
of art this subject creates. Instead, the work itself becomes scandalously physical; it
impinges on the creative subject in ways that feel improper, immodest, monstrous.

The implicit eroticism of this arrangement is heightened by the two duettists themselves
helped by the fact that they are both quite good-looking. They present the manipulation
of the others embodied voice not just as a scandal of sound but also as visually
scandalous. That is because the secondo has to lean rather closely over the primos
hands in order to cover the guitar notes quickly enough. The pose at times actually
resembles tango moves: the two sets of arms and hands interlock, the bodies almost at a
right angle. The metaphoric dance of the hands on the keyboard becomes literalized into
an actual tango. The artists themselves have remarked that they were struck by the
parallel qualities between tango and four-hand piano playing, the elements of sensuality,
intimacy, and drama, and thus we created our arrangement...to demonstrate this
connection. 62

Machine Voices
The previous sections of this chapter have celebrated the four-hand arrangement (both
as an arrangement on the printed page and as an arrangement in domestic (p.131)

Page 22 of 29

space) as an instance of anarchy, as a melting away of boundaries of all kinds. But even in
this blooming confusion of genders, subjects, and subject positions, there is a censoring
agent. This is all the more remarkable since, on first glance, it would seem like mutual
censorship and regulation are much more prevalent in other arrangements. What soloist
and piano accompanist, or members of a quartet, negotiate by means of glances and
nods, four-hand players seem to adjudicate in a far more organic and instinctual fashion.
But if visual regulation falls away in four-hand playing, the question of how to coordinate
the two sets of hands becomes all the more important when a rhythmically complex
orchestral piecea piece that is, after all, premised on the possibility of visual
coordinationmakes the awkward transition onto the piano keyboard. The orchestra
relies on its flamboyant visual reference point, the conductor; where does he go when a
symphony is transcribed for four hands, but its complexity is maintained?

Given the gendered dynamics of four-hand arrangements and four-hand playing, it is

actually surprising that it is not the masculine pole of the duothat is to say, the secondo
who is usually entrusted with the task. For one thing, both players get to slow down or
rush through the proceedings; and for another, speed is not the same as complexity. For
what would a leader-follower arrangement do with triples, syncopation, or tremolando?
Instead, it is clear that both players have their own internal conductor, a kind of musical
superego. Adorno points to the fact that in playing four hands, tempo and dynamics
cannot unfold freely subject only to capricious inclinations; instead it must be regulated
by text and instructions. 63 But how are these instructions communicated? Unlike in the
quartet, where visual intuition can register swaying instruments or the movements of
players feet, this superego cannot be communicated visually at all. The moment the
others hands move, it is already too late.

If, for instance, the initial chords of Beethovens Eroica are supposed to sound crisp in a
four-hand arrangement, the duettists, especially if they are not professionals, cannot rely
on visual cues to coordinate. They will most likely rely on breathing to communicate
rhythm. The inner conductor gets the body to communicate with another, but it
bypasses the hands in doing so. The torso moves, the lungs inflate, the spine straightens,
and by the time the hands move, all the important information has already been shared.
They arrive late to their own party.

That is, if the players have good timing. Adorno claims in his essay that in many ways the
lack of such timing is characteristic of four-hand playing. All four-hand playing is
unreliable and fallible. Even two piano soloists with the highest rhythmical training will
find it more difficult to play precisely than an average orchestra. 64 Adorno is not alone in
his assessment; we have encountered similar (p.132) judgments again and again in
earlier chapters of this book. Mistakes were part of the program for this quintessentially
dilettantish form of music, and Adornos assessment in the rearview mirror not only
celebrates the utopian moment of togetherness and communal movement but also points
to the opposite moments, in which the others movements are reminders that we are
messing up, are indeed bound to mess up.

Not only the voice is shared in four-hand playing; so is the agent of control and

Page 23 of 29

censorship. The four-handed monster does not constitute itself simply by way of a
scandalous and libidinous manipulating and being manipulated. Somewhere between the
bodies lies a metronome, a code, maybe even a law. Just as four-hand playing almost by
necessity creates moments of transgression only to punish them forthwith, so the
perverse melding of the four-hand voice always also carries in it a moment of
accommodation to an external law. Its a law that comes, like the four-hand voice, from
nowhere, but that nevertheless demands complete adherence from both players, even if
it does not originate with either of them. Four-handed monstrosity thus is not just
something alluring and scandalous, its something that would need to be domesticated
and controlled from the outside. It also has a petite bourgeois element; it accommodates
itself to the world as it is, without questioning or chafing. The pedantic utopia of absolute
synchronization is both a fantasy of complete community and a desire for total mimicry.

Tracing this pedantic utopianism requires turning to a piece that isnt really four-hand
music in the strict sense, and it also requires a leap outside of the timeframe of this study.
For while the fantasy of absolute synchronization is in evidence throughout the
nineteenth century, it was the late twentieth century that brought it to a head. What if two
pianos played an absolutely identical melody? Two pianists face one another, or sit side by
side, and press the same keys at exactly the same moment. On the one hand, such an
arrangement gets rid of the concrete corporeal strangeness of the four-handed monster;
a piece like this requires perfect, almost machine-like automatism, not the careful sifting of
signals and motions. On the other hand, the uncanny corporeality of the four-hand voice
is finally completely realized herethe two duettists share one sounding body, albeit on
two instruments.

Steve Reich composed his Piano Phase for two pianos in 1967, an example of so-called
process music. The piece starts with precisely the configuration just described, with two
pianos repeating the same short fragment of melody. But the phase that gives the piece
its name derives from the fact that, with each repetition, the two pianos separate ever so
slightly from their unisono figure. Difference enters into repetition. Reich discovered this
technique by accident when trying to loop two tapes with the same sound fragment
synchronously. One of the two tape decks slowed down and the phase effect was born.
In the final composition, two tapes play the same brief sound bite (Its gonna rain, a
snipped Reich recorded from the tirade of a San Francisco street preacher)
synchronously, until one of the tapes (p.133) slows down.65 The two initially
synchronous voices start sliding vis--vis the other, at first imperceptibly but soon
creating a whole range of interesting sound effects.66 Eventually the slower tape has
fallen back enough that the canon-like relationship between the two voices stops and the
two tapes repeat Its gonna rain in unison.

In interviews, Reich claimed that he at first thought it impossible that instruments and
actual musicians could create this effect. He proved himself wrong with his Piano Phase,
which applies the same idea to human players and a simple melody. Two pianos repeat the
same twelve-note figure in unison, then one of the two players will accel. very slightly.
The two sound figures begin their canonic slide; they pass each other almost tectonically,

Page 24 of 29

until eventually the slower piano has fallen back enough to restore unison. Reich first
experimented with the concept by recording himself playing the little melody fragment,
looping the tape, and playing a duet with his recorded loopan idea he would later
repurpose in a piece called Video Phase. In this piece, a marimba player duets with a
video image of himself in a similar technological canon.

Piano Phase in many respects represents the terminal moraine of the voice of four-hand
piano playing. As the composer notes, in the piece it doesnt matter whether a musical
process is realized through live human performance or through some electro mechanical
means. 67 Whether we are hearing two pianists, a single pianist paired with a audio or
video tape, or two tapes looping, it doesnt make the voice we hear any more or less
impersonal. Piano Phase is an echo of the scandal embodied by Hoffmanns doll Olimpia: a
machine that accompanies itself on the piano, mechanical playing and a glass bell of a
voice.

For Piano Phase doesnt have two different parts or voices at all. The acoustic effect is
quite the opposite: before the phasing starts, the audience hears only one voice
unisono. As the shift begins to become perceptible, it does not create an impression of
polyvocality but, rather, seems to change the resonance, as though the acoustics or even
the shape of the room had suddenly changed.68 Once the two parts separate further, this
resonance effect is replaced with a veritable echo. Only fairly late in the phase does an
actual rhythmic effect set it.

Piano Phase is not really a duet, with two parts. It is not a dialogue of any kind but,
rather, a monologue that is technologically replicated and manipulated vocally. But, all of
the differences notwithstanding, the voice that the two pianos share is essentially that of
four-hand players. In both cases, one player manipulates the voice of the other (by
simulating effects of resonance, of echo, of rhythm); and in (p.134) both cases, it is hard
to tell apart the voices or to speak of one apart from the other. Four-hand playing and
Piano Phase really know only one voice, albeit one that is co-produced by two players.

But there is another element that four-hand piano playing and the two keyboards of
Reichs Piano Phase have in commonthat of training. In the interview mentioned earlier,
Reich seems genuinely surprised that two tape players can be simulated this easily by
two human beings. In Piano Phase, humans simulate what machines have done before.
And as human being duets with machine, adjusts to and emulates the machine, all
semblance of expression, subjectivity, and emotion falls away. The point of Hoffmanns
characterization of Olimpia is that the mechanical doll cannot express anything either by
playing or by her voiceshe can merely spit out what has been fed into her. And in
extreme cases, four-hand players can only regurgitate the dexterity, the practice that he
or she has been fed over the years, rather than something that would count in a deeper
sense as his or hers. Four-hand playing, on one extreme, does not express or celebrate
communication, emotion, and content, but simply what nature and incessant drills have
wrought. Four-hand playing as a display of natural dispositions, and of gymnastic
dexterity, will be the topic of the next two chapters.

Page 25 of 29

Notes:
(1) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tales of the Avunculate, in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993), 5272.

(2) Edward Cone, The Composers Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California, 1974), 135.

(3) Marie-Hlne Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1991), 1.

(4) Wilhelm Busch, Werke (HKG) (Wiesbaden: Vollmer, 1959), 2:33136.

(5) See, for instance, Augustines The City of God (De Civitate Dei), ed. Whitney Jennings
Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), 577.

(6) Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: Knopf, 1995), 45.

(7) Ernest Lubin, The Piano Duet (New York: Grossman, 1970), 59.

(8) Dallas A. Weekley and Nancy Arganbright, Schuberts Music for Piano Four-Hands
(London: Kahn & Averill, 1990), 67.

(9) Philipp Brett, Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire,
19th Century Music 21 (1997): 154.

(10) Johannes Brahms, Briefwechsel (Tutzing: Schneider, 1974), 14:17.

(11) Brahms, Briefwechsel, 14:18.

(12) This is according to a report by Hentschel, quoted in Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms
(Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1911), 3:80.

(13) Brahms, Briefwechsel, 14:86.

(14) Brahms, Briefwechsel, 9:23.

(15) Max Reger, Briefe an die Verleger Lauterbach & Kuhn (Bonn: Dmmler, 1993), 70f.

(16) Cited in Zsuzsanna Domokos, Orchestrationen des Pianoforte: Beethovens

Symphonien in Transkriptionen von Liszt und seinen Vorgngern, Studia Musicologica
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 37, nos. 25 (1996): 250.

(17) Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1879), 79.

(18) Quoted in Domokos, Orchestrationen des Pianoforte, 250.

(19) Arrey von Dommer, Musikalisches Lexikon (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1865), 172.

Page 26 of 29

(20) Berlioz never finished the transcription. Lenfance eventually appeared in a

transcription by Mraux and Ritter (Albi Rosenthal, Music Manuscript in Basle,
Musical Times 116, no. 1588 [1975]: 537).

(21) Quoted in Albert Dreetz, Czerny und Beethoven (Leipzig: Kirstner, 1932), 24.

(22) Edwin Evans, Tchaikovsky (London: Dent, 1906), 189.

(23) The author is indebted to Tim Ribchester for this point.

(24) Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Thayers Life of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1967), 975.

(25) Dwights Journal of Music 4, no. 6 (November 12, 1853): 41.

(26) Adolph Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, Dritter Teil
(Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hrtel, 1845), 574.

(27) Domokos, Orchestrationen des Pianoforte, 273.

(28) Douglas Townsend, Program notes for the Musical Heritage Society recording MHS
3911/12/13.

(29) Kathleen Dale, The Piano Music, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), The Music of Schubert
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1947), 124.

(30) On the gendered imaginaries of the songbird, cf. Susan Rutherford, The Prima
Donna and Opera, 18151930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 47.

(31) Walter Frisch, Brahms: The Four Symphonies (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2003), 70.

(32) Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 147.

(33) Quoted in Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, Franz Schubert (Vienna: Gerold, 1865),
124.

(34) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2010), 288.

(35) Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 288, translation modified.

(36) Penny A. Weiss, Gendered Community (New York: New York University Press,
1993), 46.

(37) Ossip Schubin, Im Gewohnten Geleis (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1901), 59.

Page 27 of 29

(38) Markus Grassl and Reinhard Kapp, eds., Die Lehre von der musikalischen
Auffhrung in der Wiener Schule (Vienna: Bhlau, 2002), 95.

(39) Cone, The Composers Voice, 135.

(40) Eliza Wille, Richard Wagner and Eliza WilleFnfzehn Briefe des Meisters nebst
Erinnerungen von Eliza Wille (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1912), 58.

(41) Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover,
1990), 161.

(42) Edmond de Goncourt, Chrie (Paris: Charpentier, 1884), 196.

(43) Hans-Peter Duerr, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess, Band 3: Obsznitt und
Gewalt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995),

(44) Richard Leppert, The Sight of SoundMusic, Representation, and the History of the
Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 15388.

(45) Adolph LArronge, Mein Leopold, in Dramatische Werke (Berlin: Stilke, 1908), 1: 8.

(46) E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke in sechs Bnden (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1963), 2:
371f.

(47) Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 2:378.

(48) Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 2:400.

(49) E. T. A. Hoffmann, Smtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003),

551.

(50) Carl Dahlhaus, Studien zur romantischen Musiksthetik, Archiv fr

Musikwissenschaft 42, no. 3 (1985): 163.

(51) Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 3: 272.

(52) Letter from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Carl Schall, January 19, 1822; quoted in Peter Faesi,
Knstler und Gesellschaft bei E.T.A. Hoffmann (Dissertation, University of Basel, 1975),
8485.

(53) Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 41, no. 1 (January 2, 1839): 12.

(54) Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 5:734.

(55) Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, 5:734.

(56) Gerald Br, Das Motiv des Doppelgngers als Spaltungsphantasie in der Literatur
und im deutschen Stummfilm (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 231.

Page 28 of 29

(57) Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, in Image/Music/Text, ed. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 188.

(58) Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 15.

(59) Theodor W. Adorno, Radio Voice, in The Current of Music (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2007), 499559.

(60) Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2005), 3336.

(61) I am indebted to Jeffrey Kallberg for this information.

(62) Interview with Gerg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe, 2008.

(63) Theodor W. Adorno, Four Hands, Once Again, Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005):
2.

(64) Adorno, Four Hands, Once Again, 3.

(65) Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich,
Philip Glass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169.

(66) Paul Epstein, Pattern, Structure and Process in Steve Reichs Piano Phase,
Musical Quarterly 72 (1986), no. 4:496.

(67) Steve Reich, Music as a Gradual Process, in Steve Reich: Writings on Music, ed.
Paul Hillier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.

(68) Epstein, Reichs Piano Phase, 498.

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Korsakov State Conservatory

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