Wagner à quatre mains: Four-Hand Piano and the Wagner phenomenon

JCC-SF 3200 California Street, San Francisco, CA (corner of California and Presidio) 

The Wagner Society welcomes back Professor Adrian Daub, Associate Professor of German Studies, Stanford University

Wagner à quatre mains: Four-Hand Piano and the Wagner phenomenon

It is easy to see that Richard Wagner’s operas became cultural mainstays in the German-speaking world and beyond during the late nineteenth century. What may be more surprising is that many of those who effortlessly referenced his musical works, who regarded him as the future of music, and as the carrier of a renewed German national identity, did not encounter them in the opera house. And even those that did lived with Wagner’s music on a day-to-basis thanks to another cultural obsession of the second half of the nineteenth century: the piano transcription, preferably the transcription for four hands. Long is the list of famous contemporaries who did not encounter Wagner and his oeuvre as listeners, but as players of transcriptions.

This lecture asks about what role piano transcription played in the constitution of Wagner’s oeuvre, what role it played in Wagner’s own circle, and how it shaped the cultural phenomenon of Wagner-idolatry. More specifically it will show that the Wagner-mythos intersected crucially with another: contemporaries regarded Wagner’s music as shockingly erotic, and they generally looked at four-hand piano playing in much the same way. What bearing did it have that Wagner entered so many a bourgeois home not through the aseptic LP or the decorous visit to the opera house, but via two bodies entwined and sweaty over a single keyboard?

Adrian Daub received his undergraduate degree at Swarthmore College and his Masters and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His studies focus on the intersection of music, literature and philosophy. His numerous publications include: Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014), Uncivil Unions – The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism  (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Tristan’s Shadow – Sexuality and the Total Work of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

This lecture is free to Wagner Society Members and $10 suggested donation for guests.

Location: JCC-SF 3200 California Street, San Francisco, CA (corner of California and Presidio) 1:00 p.m. Gallanter Hall