Object Lesson: Four-Hand Nietzsche

Josef Venantius Wöss’s arrangement of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony for piano four hands (1906) would have presented domestic pianists with Mahler’s only setting of a text by Friedrich Nietzsche: the orchestral Lied movement no. 4 on a poem from Also Sprach Zarathustra, “O Mensch, gib Acht!”, otherwise known in German as the Mitternachtslied (Midnight Song), or in English as “Zarathustra’s Roundelay.” Scholarship on the practice of four-hands playing has to date been silent concerning what it meant for a poetic text to be offered to pianists in arrangements of symphonic works. Responding to this arrangement and this lacuna in research, the article asks what kind of engagement with Nietzsche’s poem–and the philosophy that it adumbrates–the four-hands score invites. To do so, the article brings together contextual historical research on Nietzsche’s poem, a comparative look at Mahler’s orchestral scores and the arrangement, and a twenty-first century approximation of a domestic read-through scenario at the piano. It posits that difficulties in Mahler’s music that are intensified for domestic pianists through the four-hands primo/secondo score layout can engender a reading of Mahler’s Nietzsche that strengthens and goes beyond Mahler’s own reinterpretation of the text.