This book surveys the cultural perception of four-hand piano playing in the nineteenth century. As the piano became a central institution of the bourgeois household and as piano transcriptions created a stable canon of classic works, four-hand playing became a ubiquitous and structurally important buttress of domestic life, provoking reflections in the literature, philosophy, journalism and the visual arts of the age.

• Acknowledgements


• Introduction


• Chapter 1: The Sonic Hearth and the "Piano Plague"


• Chapter 2: Four-Hand Piano Playing between Parlor Music and the Culture Industry


• Chapter 3: "At Best an Intruder, at Worst a Voyeur": Four-Hand Piano Playing and the Family Unit


• Chapter 4: Four-Handed Monsters


• Chapter 5: The Semantics of the Hand


• Chapter 6: Fordist Chords


• Chapter 7: Musical Platonism: Four-Hand Playing Among the Philosophers


• Chapter 8: Kakanian Variations-Four Hands and the Passing of the Nineteenth Century


• Index

Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University, where he works on the intersection between literature, music and philosophy in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (2012) and Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner (2013).