In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing
emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled
classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of
classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that
could afford not to invest in them. Duets echoed from the student
bedsit to the Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in
hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical
phenomenon it could cross national, social and economic boundaries,
bringing together poor students with the daughters of the
bourgeoisie, crowned heads with penniless virtuosi, and the
nineteenth century often regarded it with extreme suspicion for
that very reason. Four-hand piano playing was often understood as a
socially acceptable way of flirting, a flurry of hands that made
touching, often of men and women, not just acceptable but
necessary. But it also became something far more serious than that,
a central institution of the home, mediating between inside and
outside, family and society, labor and leisure, nature and nurture.
And writers, composers, musicians, philosophers, journalists,
pamphleteers and painters took note: in the art, literature and
philosophy of the age, four-hand playing emerged as a common motif,
something that allowed them to interrogate the very nature of the
self, the family, the community and the state. In the four hands
rushing up and down the same keyboard the nineteenth century
espied, or thought espy, an astonishing array of things.
Four-Handed Monsters tells the story of that practice, but also the
story of the astonishing array of things the nineteenth century
read into it.
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