MOZART’S CONCERTOS CHANGED the piano’s standing. Before long, the instrument’s inviting tones became a perfect conductor for the erotic current that flowed through the arts as the age of Romance took hold, serving the music of dreamy poets like Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812)—the first to sit with his side to the audience, the better to show his profile)—and thunderous firebrands like Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), who could reduce the delicate, early instrument to splinters. In sheer usefulness, it easily trumped everything that had come before. As time went on, the piano would also accommodate the rhythms and harmonies of jazz, the edginess of modernism, the spicy inflections of world music, and the intensity of rock.
But the utility of the piano explains only half the story of its success. Its ascendance at the end of the eighteenth century was also a matter of a shifting political and social climate. Revolutions engulfed America and France; dramatic changes occurred nearly everywhere else. Out of the turmoil, the era spawned a new, mushrooming middle class—unprecedented numbers of men and women now eager for the accoutrements of fine living—and a riotous demand for pianos signaled their arrival.
Franciolini harpsichord, ca. 1890
MIM/HOLLY METZ (Illustration credit 4.1)
Of course, it started slowly. The Beggar’s Opera performance in London’s Covent Garden in 1767 was the first production to feature “a new instrument called Piano Forte”; the next year, a recital by Johann Christian Bach marked the instrument’s London debut as a solo vehicle. The handful of leading craftsmen turning out pianos during that time produced only around thirty to fifty of them per annum. But by 1798, piano maker James Shudi Broadwood could barely keep up with demand, writing to a wholesaler, “Would to God we could make them like muffins!” Five decades later, England had become the center of the piano world, with some two hundred manufacturers; by 1871 the number of pianos in the British Isles was estimated at 400,000. By then, piano fever had become an epidemic.
Why the piano? Keyboards had long been considered a symbol of prosperity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, harpsichords adorned with beautiful paintings—of Orpheus charming the animals, or of battle scenes on horseback—were choice trophies of a charmed life, and essential accessories in any fine home.
The moral hazards of piano lessons. The Comforts of Bath: The Music Master, by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) (Illustration credit 4.2)
As emblems of civilized living, they often sported pithy mottoes as well. “Listen, watch and be silent if you wish to live in peace,” read one wise pronouncement on an instrument built by the famous Ruckers family of Antwerp. Another, more wistfully philosophic, proclaimed: “I was once an ordinary tree, although living I was silent; now, though dead, if I am well played I sound sweetly.” Sometimes, the message was more pointed: “To take a wife,” declared the decoration on one instrument, “is to sell one’s freedom.”
Despite that cynical message, most of these keyboards were intended for the women of the household. Indeed, one of the best sources of income for professional musicians was teaching, especially of aristocracy’s daughters. These were fertile grounds—in more ways than one. Private music lessons were not only lucrative, they also offered certain opportunities against which the only defense was parental vigilance. In a satiric report that reveals the pervasiveness of concerns about this danger, a 1754 article in the Connoisseur announced the invention of a “female thermometer” for measuring “the exact temperature of a lady’s passions.” The device, created by a Mr. Ayscough of Ludgate Hill, consisted of a glass tube filled with a mixture of distilled extracts of lady’s love, maidenhair, and “wax of virgin-bees.” It could supposedly detect the full range of feminine response, from “inviolable modesty” to “abandoned impudence,” and was remarkably accurate, claimed the author, when used at the theater and the opera.
Despite this wariness, all authorities agreed that musical training for young women was indispensable. Diderot’s Encyclopédie described instrumental skill as “one of the primary ornaments in the education of women.” As an anonymous pamphlet written around 1778 explained, such musical accomplishment was critical so that young ladies could “amuse their own family, and [foster] that domestic comfort they were by Providence designed to promote.”
Portrait of Miss Margaret Casson at the piano, 1781, by George Romney (1734–1802) (Illustration credit 4.3)
Those on the prowl for a husband knew that honing their skills at riding, reading, and especially music making offered a sure pathway; publications like the influential periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book repeatedly told them so. Critic Henri Blanchard in France could report in 1847 that “Cultivating the piano is something that has become as essential, as necessary, to social harmony as the cultivation of the potato is to the existence of the people … The piano provokes meetings between people, hospitality, gentle contacts, associations of all kinds, even matrimonial ones … and if our young men so full of assurance tell their friends that they have married twelve or fifteen thousand francs of income, they at least add as a corrective: ‘My dear, my wife plays piano like an angel.’ ”
When it came to cultivating musical skills, a keyboard was the medium of choice for good reason. Writer John Essex pointed out in The young ladies’ conduct: or, rules for education, under several heads; with instructions upon dress, both before and after marriage. And advice to young wives (1722) that among the various musical instruments, some were “unbecoming the Fair Sex; as the Flute, Violin and Hautboy [oboe]; the last of which is too Manlike, and would look indecent in a Woman’s Mouth; and the Flute is very improper, as taking away too much of the Juices, which are otherwise more necessarily employ’d to promote the Appetite, and assist Digestion.” (Female “juices” seemed to be of special concern to such authorities. Dr. Edward Clarke, a Victorian-era Bostonian, cautioned the woman of his day against engaging in intellectual activity: too much thinking could place a strain on her energy, he claimed, which she otherwise needed for “the periodical tides of her organization.”)
All the merits that social critics had attributed to the harpsichord were easily transferred to the piano. Indeed, for a while, the two often occupied the same dwelling. More than half the instruments confiscated from the homes of noblemen killed or run off in the French Revolution were pianos, and many shared their quarters with harpsichords. (The historical shift toward the newer instrument was evident in an inventory taken of the confiscated items: almost all of the harpsichords had been built before 1780; most of the pianos, after.)
Naturally, the instrument had a special place in fine Victorian homes, which featured a formal area for entertaining so that the inhabitants could demonstrate a flair for stylishness, and thereby denote—as Mrs. Jane Ellen Panton (the authoritative author of From Kitchen to Garret, which went through eleven editions in a decade) put it—“that they are worth cultivating, for no doubt they will turn out to be desirable friends.” Drawing rooms typically contained sofas, chairs, a sewing table (though “the very best Sewing-Machine a man can have is a Wife,” exclaimed Punch in 1859, with tongue firmly in cheek), a round table for the center of the room, and, most conspicuously, a piano. The instrument, wrote Mrs. Panton, was an absolute necessity (not the least because, as the Reverend H. R. Haweis reiterated, “the piano makes a girl sit upright and pay attention to details,” and it was well suited to feminine mood swings: “A good play of the piano has not infrequently taken the place of a good cry upstairs”).
Yet, admitted Mrs. Panton, the object itself was, after all, not very attractive. And so propriety demanded that certain measures be taken. The piano was best covered with serge, felt, or damask, “edged with an appropriate fringe … which thus makes [it] an excellent shelf for odds and ends of china and bowls of flowers.” If the family could afford a grand piano, it was a good idea to fit a big palm in a brass pot into the bend of the instrument. “This gives a very finished look to the piano.” An upright, however, had to be turned around so that the player would face her audience; then, the instrument’s naked back could be covered with “a simple full curtain,” topped with a piece of Japanese embroidery, a photograph frame, a cup for flowers, and perhaps some ornaments. As Victorian-era prudishness set in, some upstanding citizens also took to putting coverlets over the instrument’s legs out of an exaggerated sense of modesty.
Sewing table piano (Illustration credit 4.4)
Some piano builders began creating special models with the homeowner in mind. An “upright grand Piano-forte in the form of a bookcase” was patented by William Stodart in 1795 (there is evidence that Haydn visited Stodart’s shop and approved of the device); the early nineteenth century also saw the introduction of a square piano in the form of a sewing table.
Highly decorated upright pianos featured giant lyres, arabesques, and flutings; one extant sample includes a medallion bust of Beethoven. The odd-shaped “giraffe” upright piano (its verticality highlighted with an outlandish case that rises high above the keyboard, tracing the increasing length of the instrument’s strings as they grow in the bass end of the instrument before swooping down at the top like an animal on the prowl for fresh water) added an exotic ambience to a room. In 1866, American Charles Hess even applied for a patent for a convertible bedroom piano complete with foldout mattress and drawers.
For those concerned about lack of space, John Isaac Hawkins, an English engineer living in Philadelphia, patented a vertical “Portable Grand Piano,” a mere fifty-four inches tall. (Thomas Jefferson purchased one for $264 in 1800, but promptly returned it because it would not stay in tune “a single hour.”)
Of the many designs for keyboard instruments that came along, perhaps the most bizarre was one that produced its tones by means of live animals. In 1892, the Italian journal Gazetta musicale di Milano carried an announcement of an instrument called the Catano—a wooden case with rows of compartments into which different-sized cats were placed: big ones to meow the lowest notes, kittens for the treble. “The heads are fastened in loopholes,” read the description, “and their tails are operated by a species of keyboard at the end of the case, like that of a concert grand. When a key is put down, a cat’s tail is pulled, and he begins to caterwaul loudly or otherwise according to the force with which the key is manipulated … Anyone who has studied music can easily play the Catano,” claimed the advertiser, “but for purposes of accompaniment, especially in sacred music, the Catano is not considered particularly useful or appropriate.”
According to the December 1869 issue of the periodical the Folio, an American version of the device was introduced in Cincinnati by a man named Curtis. He announced a “Grand Vocal and Instrumental Concert” featuring no less than forty-eight cats in his Cat Harmonicon. The first number on the program was to be “Auld Lang Syne.” Unfortunately, according to the report, the cats became overly excited, “paid no attention to time, tune, rhythm or reason, but squealed, mewed, yelled, spat, and phizzed in the madness of pain and terror,” drowning out the accompanying organ in a welter of wails.
There must be something special about Cincinnati. Apparently that same city was the first to introduce a Porco-Forte in 1839, which used pigs instead of cats.
For those homes where no one was around to play, there were “self-acting” instruments, a primitive version of the modern player piano, produced in 1825 by pianist Muzio Clementi (who had founded his own piano business). A more sophisticated version was developed in 1863, when a French patent was granted to J. B. Napoléon Fourneaux for a pneumatic piano called the Pianista.
A Hawkins portable piano (Illustration credit 4.5)
The distribution of sheet music and instructional books also increased greatly by the end of the nineteenth century, with sales of such pieces as “The Lost Chord” reaching 500,000 between 1877 and 1902, and “The Holy City” selling 50,000 copies a year by the 1890s. Do-it-yourself manuals such as The Art of Playing at Sight, by One who has taught Himself proliferated.
Not every family had the disposable cash to acquire the instrument of its dreams. To make their pianos affordably attractive, manufacturers began offering a three-year payment plan. One enterprising publisher went even further: London’s Pianoforte Magazine, published from 1797 to 1802—one of many periodicals and collections that cropped up to supply sheet music to the swelling number of players—came with vouchers; a complete set could be redeemed for a free piano.
A giraffe piano (Illustration credit 4.6)
In England, the newly cultivated middle class explored other tantalizing artistic commodities for their homes, but with less success. Helped along by factory owners who arranged excursions to art fairs for their workers, mobs of day trippers often searched avidly for works of art to acquire. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne witnessed these consumers, greeted by brass bands, lavish refreshments, and rows of canvases, as they “sought to get instruction from what they beheld.” For art dealers, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The Times commented sourly that conducting these marketing events was “like feeding infants strong meat.” These ordinary men and women of the Industrial Revolution, noted Charles Dickens, could not hope to discern the aesthetic value of a new painting: “The thing is too still after their lives of machinery; the art flows over their heads in consequence.” Choosing a piano was a safer bet, though its narrow association with femininity became so fixed in the public’s mind that when Charles Hallé (1819–1895), the first pianist to play all of the Beethoven Sonatas in London, asked some English gentlemen during a visit in the 1840s if any of them played an instrument, they regarded it as an insult. Nevertheless, women were generally unwelcome in the domain of the professional musician. Indeed, when Elizabeth Stirling passed the music-composition test at the University of Oxford in 1856, she was refused a degree.
There were notable exceptions, like the Linley sisters of Bath, who were immortalized in a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough in 1772. Elizabeth and Mary Linley became well-known performers while in their teens (under the tutelage of their father, Thomas), though both gave up the business at the first sign of a marriage proposal. Then there was Lady Hallé, who performed with her husband, Charles, until his death, and was anointed by Queen Alexandra “violinist to the queen.”
Across the Channel, Clara Wieck, who married composer Robert Schumann, maintained a serious career for most of her life, though her touring caused her fragile husband more than a little heartache. And even though Oxford refused to grant accreditation to Elizabeth Stirling, the Paris Conservatory appointed Hélène, Marquise de Montgeroult, one of the first piano professors at its founding in 1795. Almost fifty years later, in 1842, the school gave Louise Farrenc a similar position.
Women were never completely absent from show business, of course, and in 1868 Londoners were treated to the skills of a Batavian woman who played “two different arias with each hand at the same time and likewise sang a fifth.” But on the concert stage, in taverns, or at the theater, instrumental performance was primarily a male occupation. (In some instances, only a very well built male would do: Eugen Sandow, the strongman, famously carried both a piano and its player off the stage as part of his act. Unfortunately, one day in 1899 he dropped both and was sued for damages.)
It was not, in any case, a career for the faint of heart. Just traveling from city to city was wearying. And then there was the challenge of facing an audience that often considered musical concerts a place in which to pursue more pressing activities. Charles Hallé was once congratulated, in fact, for playing at a volume soft enough to allow “the ladies to talk.” For that reason, Franz Liszt claimed that the opening page of his Fantasy on Bellini’s La Sonnambula was written specifically for the audience to “assemble and blow their noses” as they settled down in their seats.
There was always a danger that the audience might actually turn ugly. At one concert at Vienna’s Mehlgrube in 1789, a customer complained that he disliked the music. “A virtuoso from the full orchestra who was firmly holding the beat gave him a sturdy box on the ears, almost like Achilles did to Thersites in Homer,” says one report.
Thereby the point d’honneur of the nobility present was attacked. One Herculean Youth, together with many young ladies, cried: Allons! Storm the Bastille! The uncouth Orpheus was pounced upon. He was encircled. He had to kneel down and beg pardon. The remaining chorus of the sons of Apollo found that ignominious for their noble art. They armed themselves to avenge the disgrace of their colleague. The waiters and busboys hurried to bring them reinforcements. Now the skirmish became universal. All sounding instruments were squashed and smashed. The silver spoons of the waiters and bottles, glasses, and chairs flew everywhere. Finally this comical barricade was overcome by the superior strength of the enemy. The conquered inhabitants tried to save themselves by fleeing, and the victors too parted laughing, after they had admired the wreckage their bravery had caused.
Decades later, even the celebrated Liszt continued to find audiences disruptive at times, though a good deal less violent; during some of his performances, fans impatiently interrupted the music making by shouting out requests for pieces they would rather hear.
At least they cared. Leopold Mozart complained in 1768 that in Vienna audiences at plays were “not curious to see serious and rational things, of which they have little or no concept. They like nothing but foolish tricks, dancing, devils, spirits, magical spells … But in serious scenes, or at touching and beautiful actions onstage, and the most sensible ways of speaking, [a gentleman] talks in a loud voice to his lady, so that honorable people cannot understand a word.” It’s awfully hard for a musician to win out over foolish tricks and magical spells. Keyboardist James Hook, who was music director at London’s Vauxhall Gardens from 1774 to 1820, regretfully competed with fireworks, tightrope dancers, and parachuting balloonists for his audience’s attention.
ON AUDIENCES by Vladimir Horowitz
There are three kinds of audience. One is social; they come because the artist is well known and they have to be seen. That’s the worst. They’re asleep from beginning to end and don’t know what’s going on. Then there are the professionals who listen only to the notes to see if there is a mistake. They don’t listen to the music. My father-in-law, Maestro Toscanini, used to say that for a mistake you never go to jail. The third is the best audience. They come because they want to hear me, they believe in me, and they want to hear the best. Sometimes I don’t give the best, but they will come again because they know it wasn’t my night.
I can tell what kind of audience I have by how they listen. Applause doesn’t mean anything. Silence is the success of the artist. If they listen to every note and don’t cough too much or move or rustle their programs, they are attentive. The concentration of the artist is contagious to the public, and the public starts to be a little hypnotized. They’re listening to the music, not just to the notes and whether you play too fast or too slow. That’s secondary. That’s for the critics to show that they know something. The artistry you cannot erase.
As the piano’s popularity continued to grow, it gained a foothold in the New World as well. After George Washington was inaugurated in 1789, he and his wife, Martha, hired composer Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809) to give piano lessons to her granddaughter, Nelly Custis, who made it a regular practice to play for foreign dignitaries and members of Congress. One diplomat described Nelly as the kind of “celestial” being dreamed of “by poets and painters,” and announced that she played the piano “better than the usual woman of America or even of Europe.” (How she viewed her audience was another matter: she once confessed to playing for over an hour in an attempt to “attune the souls” of “two homely Spaniards,” but in the end gave up and declared one of them just a “crazy count.”)
The instrument even reached beyond the big cities into America’s western territories. “ ’Tis wonderful,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Civilization (1870), “how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier.” Diaries of the homesteaders fill out the story. Living in the mining town of Aurora, Nevada, in the 1860s, a Mrs. Rachel Haskell recorded that in the evening, after dinner, her husband would come into the sitting room and place himself near the piano as their daughter, Ella, accompanied the entire family in song. Rachel’s daytime regime included instructing Ella at the piano, along with practicing the multiplication tables with her sons, making dinner, and visiting friends.
The trend caught the attention of W. W. Kimball, who settled in Chicago in 1857 and announced that he wanted to sell pianos “within the reach of the farmer on his prairie, the miner in his cabin, the fisherman in his hut, the cultivated mechanic in his neat cottage in the thriving town.” He based his new business on the installment plan—as did D. H. Baldwin, a Cincinnati dealer who hired an army of sewing-machine salesmen in 1872 to recruit new customers.
Naturally, the piano was an essential component in the homes of America’s cultured class. In Mark Twain’s Hartford, Connecticut, residence, the writer would bang out African-American spirituals on a Steinway baby grand (that is, when it wasn’t being used for recitals organized by his wife, Livy). Louisa May Alcott played a Chickering square piano in her parlor in between her boat rides with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. Visitors to literary homes can still see the evidence: Emily Dickinson kept a Wilkinson in Amherst, Edna St. Vincent Millay owned two Steinways, Robinson Jeffers had a Steinway grand, Frederick Douglass a Kimball upright, and Kate Chopin took breaks from playing cards to enjoy her French Pleyel.
Eugene O’Neill adored his player piano, a coin-operated instrument with stained-glass panels, and named it “Rosie.” (O’Neill’s wife, Carlotta, described it as “the sort of piano that, in years past, was in salons and ‘other places!’ This particular one,” she explained, “was in one of the ‘other places’ in New Orleans.”) When architect Frank Lloyd Wright established his winter colony at Taliesin West in the desert of Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1937—a rugged architectural laboratory with a minimum of comforts—he quickly gathered eighteen pianos to provide a semblance of civilization.
And once again, the piano was promoted as a tool to regulate the emotional life of the tender sex. The critic of the New York World, A. C. Wheeler, laid out the argument in 1875:
[It] may be looked upon as furniture by dull observers or accepted as a fashion by shallow thinkers, but it is in reality the artificial nervous system, ingeniously made of steel and silver, which civilization in its poetic justice provides for our young women. Here it is, in this parlor with closed doors, that the daughter of our day comes stealthily and pours out the torrent of her emotions through her finger-ends, directs the forces of her youth and romanticism into the obedient metal and lets it say in its own mystic way what she dare not confess or hope in articulate language … A woman must put her woman impulses into action. So, not wishing her to become a lecturer or a telegraph-operator or to play Lady Macbeth, he gives her the piano …
Presently it becomes her companion, her confidant, her lover. It tells her what no one else dare utter. It responds to her passion, her playfulness, her vagaries, as nothing else can.
Little wonder the American home, like those in Europe, became a center of piano activity. It helped prepare the way for the invasion of the European virtuosos, who would soon find audiences from one side of America to the other eager to hear the instrument in the hands of the masters.