The Cambridge Companion to the Piano
The Cambridge Companion to the Piano is an informative and practical guide to one of the world’s most popular instruments. This collection of specially commissioned essays offers an accessible introduction to the history of the piano, performance styles and its vast repertory. Part 1 reviews the evolution of the piano, from its earliest forms up to the most recent developments, including the acoustics of the instrument, and the history of its performance. Part 2 explores the varied repertory in its social and stylistic contexts, up to the present, with a final chapter on jazz, blues and ragtime. The Companion also contains a glossary of important terms and will be a valuable source for the piano performer, student and enthusiast.
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The Cambridge Companion to the
PIANO
EDITED BY
David Rowland
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521474702
© Cambridge University Press 1998
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1998
Third printing 2004
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to the piano/edited by David Rowland.
p. cm. – (Cambridge companions to music)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 47470 1 (hardback) ISBN 0 521 47986 X (paperback)
1. Piano. I. Rowland, David, Dr. II. Series.
ML650.C3 1998
786.2–dc21 97–41860 CIP MN
ISBN-13 978-0-521-47470-2 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-47470-1 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-47986-8 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-47986-X paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2006
Contents
Bibliographical abbreviations and pitch notation
Introduction David Rowland
Part one · Pianos and pianists
1 The piano to c. 1770 David Rowland
2 Pianos and pianists c. 1770–c. 1825 David Rowland
3 The piano since c. 1825 David Rowland
4 The virtuoso tradition Kenneth Hamilton
5 Pianists on record in the early twentieth century Robert Philip
6 The acoustics of the piano Bernard Richardson
7 Repertory and canon Dorothy de Val and Cyril Ehrlich
8 The music of the early pianists (to c. 1830) David Rowland
9 Piano music for concert hall and salon c. 1830–1900 J. Barrie Jones
10 Nationalism J. Barrie Jones
11 New horizons in the twentieth century Mervyn Cooke
12 Ragtime, blues, jazz and popular music Brian Priestley
Figures
1.3 Clavichord by Christian Gotthelf Hoffmann, Ronneburg, 1784 (Cobbe Foundation).
1.4a Square piano by Zumpe, London, 1766 (Emmanuel College, Cambridge).
1.5 Grand piano by Americus Backers, London, 1772 (Russell Collection, Edinburgh).
2.1 Grand piano, c. 1795, Stein school, South Germany (Cobbe Foundation).
2.2a ‘Viennese’ grand piano action by Rosenberger, Vienna, c. 1800.
2.2b Diagram of the action in Figure 2.2a. A.
2.3a English grand piano action by Broadwood, London, 1798.
2.3b Diagram of the action in Figure 2.3a.
2.4 Reconstruction by Richard Maunder of Mozart’s Walter piano with pedalboard.
2.5 Grand piano by Graf, Vienna, c. 1820 (Cobbe Foundation).
2.6 Moderator device on a ‘Viennese’ grand piano c. 1800.
2.7 Bassoon device on a grand piano by Streicher, Vienna, 1823 (Cobbe Foundation).
3.1 Grand piano by Stodart, London, c. 1822 (Faculty of Music, Cambridge University).
3.4 Broadwood square piano, 1858 (Finchcocks Collection).
3.5 Upright grand piano by Jones, Round and Co., London, c. 1810 (Finchcocks Collection).
3.6 Cabinet piano by Broadwood, London, c. 1825 (Richard Maunder).
3.7 Action of cabinet piano by Broadwood, London, c. 1825 (Richard Maunder).
3.8 ‘Cottage’ piano by Dettmar & Son, London, c. 1820 (Richard Maunder).
4.1 Statuette of Thalberg by Jean-Pierre Dantan (Musée Carnavalet, Paris).
4.2 Statuette of Liszt by Jean-Pierre Dantan (Musée Carnavalet, Paris).
5.1 Steinway grand piano with ‘Duo-Art’ reproducing mechanism, 1925.
6.1 Plan view of a Steinway concert grand piano, model D (9 foot) (Steinway & Sons).
6.3 Side view of the action of a modern grand piano. Reproduced from Askenfelt, Acoustics , p. 40.
6.4 Examples of wave-forms of middle c 1 (fundamental frequency 262 Hz) on a piano.
6.5 The first three modes of vibration of a stretched string using a ‘slinky spring’.
7.1 Extract from a catalogue by Goulding and d’Almaine, London, c .1830.
8.1 Steibelt, An Allegorical Overture (1797), title page.
8.2 Steibelt, An Allegorical Overture (1797), p. 8.
Music examples
2.1 Mozart, Piano Concerto in D minor, K466, first movement, bars 88–91 (piano part).
2.2 Mozart, Rondo in A minor, K511, bars 85–7.
2.3 Steibelt, Mélange Op. 10, p. 6.
2.4 Steibelt, Concerto Op. 33, p. 12.
4.2 J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, final aria, bars 1–4 (Bärenreiter Verlag).
4.3 Busoni’s arrangement of Ex. 4.2.
4.4 Grainger, Rosenkavalier ramble , bars 1–6 (Adolph Fürstner).
5.2 Bartók, Suite Op. 14, first movement, bars 1–12.
5.3 Bartók, Suite Op. 14, fourth movement, bars 22–3. Bartók’s rubato .
5.4 Chopin, Nocturne in E ♭ , Op. 9 No. 2. Rosenthal’s rubato .
6.1 The first eight harmonics of a harmonic series based on C.
7.1a Schubert, Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3 (Bärenreiter, 1984).
7.1b Schubert, Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3 (Schloesser, 1890).
8.1 J. C. Bach, Sonata Op. 5 No. 3, bars 1–4.
8.2 C. P. E. Bach,‘Prussian’ Sonata No. 1, slow movement, bars 1–8
8.3 Field, Nocturne No. 1, bars 1–2.
9.1 Mendelssohn, Rondo capriccioso Op. 14, bar 227.
9.2 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 2 No. 3, bar 252.
9.4 Brahms, Ballade Op. 10 No. 2.
9.5 Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 2.
9.6 Chopin, Prelude in B, bars 14–15.
10.1 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 30 No. 4, bars 125–33 (G. Henle Verlag).
10.2 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4, end.
10.3 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 68 No. 2.
10.4 Chopin, Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4, bar 18 (G. Henle Verlag).
10.5 Liszt, Csárdás macabre , bars 58–65 (Editio Musica Budapest).
11.1 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 31 No. 2, first movement.
11.2 Debussy, ‘Pagodes’ from Estampes , bars 39–40 (Durand et Fils).
11.3 Messiaen, ‘La colombe’ from Préludes , end (Durand & Cie).
11.4 Bartók, Second Piano Concerto, slow movement, bars 88–93 (piano part only) (Universal Edition).
11.5 Debussy, L’isle joyeuse , end (Durand et Fils).
11.6 Schoenberg, Three Pieces Op. 11 No. 1, bars 14–16 (Universal Edition).
11.7 Webern, Variations Op. 27 No. 2 (Universal Edition).
12.1 Joplin, ‘Maple Leaf rag’, first edition (New York Public Library).
Notes on the contributors
Mervyn Cooke was for six years a Research Fellow and Director of Music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before being appointed Lecturer in Music at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Cambridge University Press handbooks on Britten’s Billy Budd and War Requiem , a monograph Britten and the Far East and two volumes devoted to jazz (Thames and Hudson); he is currently involved in the preparation of an edition of Britten’s letters and editing the Cambridge companion to Britten . He is also active as a pianist and composer, his compositions having been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio France, and performed at London’s South Bank and St John’s Smith Square.
Cyril Ehrlich is Emeritus Professor of Social and Economic History at the Queen’s University Belfast and has also been Visiting Professor in Music at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. He has written extensively on musical matters in his books First Philharmonic: a history of the Royal Philharmonic Society ; Harmonious alliance: a history of the Performing Right Society and The music profession in Britain since the eighteenth century . His book The piano: a history has become essential reading for piano historians.
Kenneth Hamilton is well known as a concert pianist and writer on music. He has performed extensively both in Britain and abroad, specialising mainly in the Romantic repertory, and has broadcast on radio and television. His book on Liszt’s Sonata in B minor is published by Cambridge University Press, and he is currently working on a large-scale study of Liszt and nineteenth-century pianism. He has premiered many unpublished virtuoso works by Liszt and others (some in his own completion), and is at present a member of the music department of Birmingham University.
Barrie Jones is a Lecturer in Music at the Open University. His main interests lie in the nineteenth century, particularly keyboard music. He has made extensive contributions to several Open University courses, has translated and edited Fauré’s letters, Gabriel Fauré: a life in letters (Batsford, 1989) and published a number of articles on Schumann, Liszt, Granados and Parry. He continues to perform regularly on the piano.
Robert Philip is a producer at the BBC’s Open University Production Centre, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University. He has written and presented many programmes for BBC Radio 3, often on the subject of early recordings. His book Early recordings and musical style (Cambridge, 1992) was the first large-scale survey of performance practice in the early twentieth century. He has also contributed chapters to Performance practice , ed. Howard Mayer Brown and Stanley Sadie (London, 1989) and Performing Beethoven , ed. Robin Stowell (Cambridge, 1994). He is currently writing A century of performance , a survey of trends in twentieth-century performance.
Brian Priestley is a performer, writer and broadcaster who taught jazz piano for many years at University of London, Goldsmith’s College. Now an Associate Lecturer at the University of Surrey, he is a contributor to the International directory of black composers and to the New Grove dictionaries of American music and of jazz, and has written several widely praised biographies. For the best part of twenty-five years, he has presented a weekly radio programme, currently on Jazz FM.
Bernard Richardson is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wales at Cardiff. For the past twenty years he has undertaken scientific research into the acoustics of stringed musical instruments. These research activities stem from a long-standing passion for making and playing musical instruments. He lectures world-wide on the subject and has contributed to The Cambridge companion to the violin , The encyclopedia of acoustics and many journals.
David Rowland is a lecturer in music and Sub-Dean in the Faculty of Arts at the Open University and Director of Music at Christ’s College, Cambridge. His book, A history of pianoforte pedalling , was published in 1993 and he has contributed chapters and articles on aspects of piano performance and repertory history to The Cambridge companion to Chopin , Chopin studies 2 , Performing Beethoven and a number of journals. Since winning the St Albans International Organ Competition in 1981 he has continued to perform and record extensively on the organ, harpsichord and early piano.
Dorothy de Val completed a doctoral dissertation at King’s College London on the development of the English piano and has since taught music history at the Royal Academy of Music. She is a contributor to the Haydn Companion , published by Oxford University Press. Her interests include nineteenth-century London concert life, women pianists and the beginnings of the early music and folk-song revival in Britain in the late nineteenth century. She now resides and lectures in Oxford.
Acknowledgements
A wide-ranging volume such as this could not have been written without substantial help from a number of individuals and institutions. I would therefore like to thank Vicki Cooper, Commissioning Editor for the volume, for her ideas and help throughout the project. I would also like to thank Richard Maunder for many interesting hours discussing piano matters, for reading the drafts of my chapters and for his assistance with diagrams and illustrations. David Hunt has been of invaluable assistance in technical piano matters and has never hesitated to spend time on the telephone or in his workshop answering my questions. Cyril Ehrlich has also provided advice on piano history and read some of my drafts. All of the chapter authors have been most patient and co-operative in discussing details of their material with me and with each other and making changes as necessary. Rosemary Kingdon of the Open University deserves thankful recognition for the many hours spent preparing the typescript of this volume.
A number of individuals and collections have kindly provided illustrative material. Details of the sources accompany the list of figures, but I would especially like to thank the following for their help in locating suitable photographs: Richard Burnett and William Dow at Finchcocks, Alec Cobbe of The Cobbe Foundation, Stewart Pollens of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the Faculty of Music, Cambridge University, the staff of the Russell Collection, Edinburgh.
I am grateful to a number of libraries for allowing me to use music in their possession, especially the Pendlebury Library and University Library in Cambridge and New York Public Library.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Ruth, and daughters, Kate, Hannah and Eleanor, for the many hours they have spent waiting for me to return home from the office.
Bibliographical abbreviations
The following abbreviations have been used:
AMZ
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
EM
Early Music
ML
Music & Letters
MQ
The Musical Quarterly
MT
The Musical Times
New Grove
Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980)
Pitch notation When referring to keyboard compasses the following notation has been used, which is similar to, or identical with, that most commonly found in the literature on the keyboard:
DAVID ROWLAND
Introduction
The Cambridge companion to the piano brings together in a single volume a collection of essays which covers the history of the instrument, the history of its performance and a study of its repertory. Each chapter is written by a specialist with access to the most recent research on his or her topic, but all the authors have written accessibly, with the student of the instrument, or an enthusiastic amateur, in mind.
Chapters 1 –3 bring together as much up-to-date piano history as is possible in the space available. In recent years, some extremely important work has been published on the early history of the piano. Stewart Pollens’s The early pianoforte and Michael Cole’s The pianoforte in the Classical era between them provide a comprehensive survey of the technical developments which took place in the eighteenth century. These developments are summarised in chapters 1 and 2 along with information about the specific kinds of instrument played by the early pianists. Necessary technical terms are explained in the glossary at the end of the volume. The equivalent history of the piano in the first half of the nineteenth century is much less well documented and a new, detailed history of the piano in the nineteenth century is urgently needed. It is remarkable that Rosamond Harding’s book The piano-forte , first published as long ago as 1933, remains the standard text for this period. Nevertheless, new work is emerging in this field by scholars, curators and restorers and it has been possible to draw on much of this material for the brief history of the piano found in the remainder of chapter 2 and in chapter 3 . Cyril Ehrlich’s The piano: a history continues to be a major source of information for the piano industry in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Many issues in the early performance history of the piano are intimately associated with the nature of the instruments themselves. It is not possible, for example, to assess whether Mozart composed some of his earlier music for the piano, or for the harpsichord or clavichord, without a knowledge of the general availability of pianos in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Likewise, an understanding of the differences between English and ‘Viennese’ pianos is crucial to an understanding of some of the performance issues associated with the music of Beethoven and his contemporaries. For reasons such as these, the study of piano performance to c .1825 will be found alongside the history of the instrument in chapters 1 and 2 . The way in which later pianists played is investigated in two chapters. Chapter 4 assesses those pianists whose playing styles can be studied only through written sources – concert reviews, memoirs, letters and so on. Chapter 5 studies those pianists who belong to the recording era.
Part 1 of this volume, which deals only with instruments and performers, concludes with an examination of the precise way in which sound is generated in a modern grand piano, and how that sound is transmitted to an audience.
Part 2 concerns the repertory of the piano. Rather than devote single chapters to studies of the sonata, the concerto and so on, authors have written about the music in the wider context of its performance setting and stylistic development. The discussion begins in chapter 7 with an examination of the emergence of a ‘standard’ repertory in the nineteenth century (which continues to form the basis of the repertory for most modern pianists). Even by the early years of the century, an enormous volume of music had been written for the piano; yet only a small proportion of what was written came to be played by subsequent generations, and an even smaller proportion of it has come to be considered ‘canonic’ or ‘exemplary’. Chapter 7 explores how and why this was so.
Chapters 8 –10 examine the piano music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in some detail. The way in which composers wrote for the instrument at the time was shaped by a variety of factors. For early pianists such as Mozart the sonata was the most common vehicle for solo expression; yet within a generation, sonatas were no longer in widespread fashion and composers were beginning to concentrate their energies on shorter, ‘character’ or dance pieces. At least part of the reason for this change lay in the rapidly increasing public demand for shorter works, many of which were written for the burgeoning amateur market catered for by a growing publishing industry. At the same time, a distinctive piano style emerged which displaced a keyboard style capable of realisation on the harpsichord and clavichord as well as on the piano. Virtuosos of the piano emerged who achieved celebrity status in their public performances. These pianists wrote difficult concert études and concertos for themselves to play in public; but they also wrote more intimately for the salons in which they performed and for the amateur, domestic market (chapter 9 ). Within the concert and salon repertory towards the middle of the nineteenth century there was a strong interest in musical elements of eastern Europe (such as the Polish ingredients in Chopin’s music, or those from Hungary in Liszt’s). These and other nationalistic elements from, for example, Russia and Scandinavia, are reviewed in chapter 10 . The twentieth century has seen many new developments in piano writing. Many novel techniques emerged during the first half of the century (chapter 11 ) and there has been an increasing appreciation of the ‘popular’ styles of ragtime, blues and jazz (chapter 12 ). Many classically trained pianists now play music in these styles and the cross-over of ‘art’ music and ‘popular’ music styles can be seen in integrated works by composers such as Gershwin.
This volume, in common with all of the others in the Cambridge companion series, cannot claim to be comprehensive. Nevertheless, it will give the reader a breadth of information on the subject rarely found elsewhere, written by specialists who have made their own thorough studies.
PART ONE
Pianos and pianists
1
DAVID ROWLAND
The piano to c. 1770
Italy and the Iberian peninsula
Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1732) is generally credited with the invention of the piano in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century. Although some earlier accounts of keyboard actions survive, it is only from Cristofori that a continuous line of development can be drawn. 1
Cristofori entered the service of Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 as curator and instrument maker. In this capacity he maintained harpsichords, spinets and organs and made a variety of keyboard (and possibly stringed) instruments. 2 His work on the piano may have begun as early as 1698, certainly by 1700, 3 and in 1709 or 1710 Scipione Maffei noted that Cristofori had ‘made three so far, two sold in Florence, one to Cardinal Ottoboni’. 4 In 1711 Maffei published a detailed description of Cristofori’s pianos, including a diagram of the action (Fig. 1.1 ). 5
Figure 1.1 Maffei’s diagram of Cristofori’s piano action from the Giornale de’letterati d’Italia , 5 (1711).
The action in Maffei’s diagram works in the following way: as the key (C) is depressed one end of the intermediate lever (E) – which pivots around the pin (F) – is raised. This causes the escapement (G) to push the hammer (O) towards the string (A). The escapement then ‘escapes’ from contact with the hammer and allows it to fall back to its resting position, on a silk thread (P). When the key is released, the escapement, which is hinged and attached to a spring (L), slides back into its resting position and the damper (R) – which had been lowered when the key was depressed – comes back into contact with the string in order to damp the sound.
Many aspects of piano design evidently continued to occupy Cristofori, since the three surviving pianos by him, dated 1720, 1722 and 1726, as well as a keyboard and action of c. 1725, differ from each other and from Maffei’s description in certain aspects of their mechanism and construction. Nevertheless, all of the existing instruments share certain characteristics: they are lightly constructed, compared with later pianos, and have small hammers (in two of the pianos, made only of rolled and glued parchment covered with leather). The instruments produce a gentle sound and their keyboard compass is just four octaves (1722, c. 1725 and 1726) or four and a half octaves (1720) – considerably smaller than the five octaves or so of the biggest harpsichords of the time.
Cristofori’s work was continued by his pupils, the most important of whom was probably Giovanni Ferrini (fl .1699(?)–1758) who, like his teacher, made harpsichords as well as pianos in Florence. 6 Indeed, his only surviving instrument with piano action is a combination harpsichord / piano, with an upper and lower manual operating the piano and harpsichord respectively. Such combination instruments continued to be popular throughout the period during which the relative merits of the two types of keyboard instrument were debated – until at least the 1780s. In the meantime, the fame of the Florentine makers spread to the Iberian peninsula, where other makers began to construct instruments based on Cristofori’s design. 7
Who used these early pianos, and for what purpose? Very little evidence has survived but it is likely that a number of well-known musicians encountered pianos in southern Europe during the early decades of the century. George Frederic Handel (1685–1759) may have seen Cristofori’s instruments in Florence and Rome. Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) almost certainly played a number of Florentine pianos: he stayed in Florence for several months in 1702 and he taught Don Antonio of Portugal, the dedicatee of the first music known to be published for the piano – twelve sonatas by Lodovico Giustini (1685–1743), which appeared in Florence in 1732. He was also employed at the court of Maria Barbara of Spain, who owned five Florentine pianos, according to an inventory made in the year following Scarlatti’s death. 8 Farinelli, the famous castrato and Scarlatti’s colleague in Spain for twenty-two years, also owned a piano dated 1730, according to Burney. 9
Figure 1.2 Piano by Cristofori, 1720.
From the start, the piano seems to have been regarded as a solo instrument. Maffei wrote that ‘its principal intention’ was ‘to be heard alone, like the lute, the harp, the six-stringed viol, and other most sweet instruments’. 10 Giustini’s sonatas were written for solo piano, and Farinelli played solos on his piano when Burney visited him in 1770. It has also been suggested that a significant proportion of Scarlatti’s sonatas were written for the piano, though the evidence cannot be regarded as conclusive. 11 Nevertheless, early pianos had certain shortcomings as solo instruments and Maffei was the first to voice a common complaint of the eighteenth century: ‘this instrument does not have a powerful tone, and is not quite so loud’ as the harpsichord. 12 Perhaps it was this problem that caused Maria Barbara to convert two of her Florentine pianos into harpsichords. 13 Whatever the extent of the piano’s use for solo performances, it also had some success in accompanying one or more other instruments in chamber music: Maffei and several other eighteenth-century writers recommended its use in this way.
Germany and Austria
The history of the piano in German-speaking lands is complex. Christoph Gottlieb Schröter (1699–1782) claimed to have invented a keyboard action in 1717 for an instrument in which the strings were struck by hammers. 14 The inspiration for Schröter’s invention was Pantaleon Hebenstreit’s (1669–1750) performance on the ‘pantalon’. Hebenstreit’s pantalon was an enlarged dulcimer measuring about nine feet in length which had one set of metal strings and one of gut. It was played with wooden beaters held in the hands, and had no dampers. The pantalon was reputed to be extremely difficult to play and expensive to maintain, but its sound was much admired and a small, elite group of performers toured Europe throughout much of the eighteenth century. 15 By designing a hammer action operated from a keyboard Schröter no doubt wished to capture the sound of the pantalon while avoiding the strenuous efforts required of a performer. He presented his solution in the form of two hammer-action models – one striking the strings from below, the other from above – to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden in 1721. However, no complete instrument ever seems to have been made, and Schröter’s contribution to the development of the hammer-action instruments with keyboard was probably confined to some articles in eighteenth-century German journals. The idea of the keyed pantalon lived on, however. A number of instruments survive with bare wooden hammers which are called ‘pantalon’ in the literature of the time. The term pantalonzug (‘pantalon stop’) is also commonly found to describe the stop or lever which removed the dampers from the strings (equivalent to the right pedal on a modern piano), in imitation of the undamped sound of the pantalon. 16
Early piano making in Germany seems to have been concentrated in the area just south of Leipzig. Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753) worked in Freiberg and Christian Ernst Friederici (1709–80), reputedly Silbermann’s pupil, worked about sixty miles to the west, in Gera. Silbermann was making pianos in the early 1730s. 17 No details of these instruments survive, but it is possible that they followed Cristofori’s design, published by Maffei in 1711 and subsequently in German translation in Mattheson’s Critica musica (Hamburg, 1725). One of Silbermann’s early instruments evidently failed to satisfy Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) who, according to his pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola, had ‘praised, indeed admired, its tone; but he had complained that it was too weak in the high register, and was too hard to play’. Agricola goes on to describe how Silbermann was angered at Bach’s reaction, but decided nevertheless
not to deliver any more of these instruments, but instead to think all the harder about how to eliminate the faults Mr. J. S. Bach had observed. He worked for many years on this. And that this was the real cause of the postponement I have the less doubt since I myself heard it frankly acknowledged by Mr. Silbermann. Finally, when Mr. Silbermann had really achieved many improvements, notably in respect to the action, he sold one again to the Court of the prince of Rudolstadt. Shortly thereafter His Majesty the King of Prussia had one of these instruments ordered, and, when it met with His Majesty’s Most Gracious approval, he had several more ordered from Mr. Silbermann. 18
In fact, according to Forkel, 19 the King ordered a total of fifteen pianos from Silbermann, and prior to the second world war three of these instruments still existed. Now only two of the King’s pianos survive, one of them dated 1746. In addition, however, there is another grand piano by Silbermann dated 1749 in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg. 20
The actions of the surviving Silbermann pianos resemble the extant Cristofori instruments extremely closely and suggest that Silbermann copied one of Cristofori’s later pianos. The instruments by the two makers differ in some respects, however. Not surprisingly, the appearance of the case of Silbermann’s pianos resembles that of contemporary German harpsichords, as does the range of the instruments – just under five octaves with FF as the lowest note. The devices to modify the sound of the instrument are also different. Cristofori included just one on his instruments – a pair of stop knobs to shift the keyboard laterally, thereby causing the hammer to hit only one string, the precursor of the modern una corda and probably a legacy from Italian harpsichords which often had two registers operated by means of stops. Silbermann included two tone-modifying devices, neither of which was the una corda . One was a stop knob which operated a mechanism to introduce small pieces of ivory between the hammers and the strings, producing a harpsichord-like sound. The other was a stop which was used to raise the dampers from the strings – the precursor of the modern damper or sustaining pedal.
According to Agricola, Silbermann’s later pianos were approved by J. S. Bach, whose visit to Frederick the Great’s court in 1747 was also reported in a contemporary newspaper. The King evidently
went at Bach’s entrance to the so-called forte and piano, condescending also to play, in person and without any preparation, a theme to be executed by Capellmeister Bach in a fugue. This was done so happily by the aforementioned Capellmeister that not only His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment. 21
Further evidence of Bach’s approval is his signature on a voucher for the sale of one of Silbermann’s pianos to Count Branitzky of Poland dated 9 May 1749. 22 Despite Bach’s fascination with the piano, however, the instrument cannot have been of any significance for his keyboard music written before the 1740s – Silbermann’s improved pianos were not made before then.
By the middle of the eighteenth century German pianos were being made in forms other than the conventional grand. The upright grand came to be associated with northern European makers, especially Christian Ernst Friederici, although a similar instrument by the southern European maker Domenico del Mela (1683–c .1760?), of 1739, survives. In 1745 Friederici published an engraving of one of his upright grands and at least one, possibly more, of his is still in existence. 23 Friederici is also credited with the invention of the square piano, which was being made in Germany around the middle of the eighteenth century. 24 Square pianos were much smaller and cheaper than either the conventional or upright grand, and were ultimately to become extremely popular in the home, but in mid-eighteenth-century Germany they had a formidable rival in the clavichord, which keyboard players continued to use until at least the end of the century.
Much of what happened to the development of the piano in German-speaking lands in the third quarter of the eighteenth century is shrouded in uncertainty. One of the most important makers during this time was evidently Johann Heinrich Silbermann (1727–99; Gottfried’s nephew) in Strasbourg, some of whose pianos from the 1770s survive. 25 His instruments share many features of those made by his uncle, Gottfried Silbermann: pianos by both makers have transposing devices which are operated by moving the keyboard laterally and the actions of both makers are similar, even to the extent of having hammers made from rolled parchment covered with leather (rather than wood and leather), as on two of Cristofori’s pianos. But apart from these instruments, the absence of other grands as well as the lack of detail in contemporary literature, make it impossible to describe how, when and indeed if any developments took place. One thing at least is clear, however, the piano did not immediately take the place of either the clavichord or the harpsichord in the affections of keyboard players. On the contrary, the piano seems to have been regarded as just one possibility among others. Many sources could be quoted to illustrate this point. One of the earliest, and probably the best known, is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–88), who wrote in 1753:
Figure 1.3 Clavichord by Christian Gotthelf Hoffmann, Ronneburg, 1784.
something remains to be said about keyboard instruments. Of the many kinds, some of which remain little known because of defects, others because they are not yet in general use, there are two which have been most widely acclaimed, the harpsichord and the clavichord. The former is used in ensembles, the latter alone. The more recent pianoforte, when it is sturdy and well built, has many fine qualities, although its touch must be carefully worked out & It sounds well by itself and in small ensembles. Yet, I hold that a good clavichord, except for its weaker tone, shares equally in the attractiveness of the pianoforte and in addition features the vibrato and portato which I produce by means of added pressure after each stroke. It is at the clavichord that a keyboardist may be most exactly evaluated. 26
C. P. E. Bach must have written this after several years’ experience of Silbermann’s pianos at Frederick the Great’s court. Further evidence for the limited progress of the piano in the region comes from Jacob Adlung, who spent all of his adult life in Erfurt, not far from Gera, where Friederici worked, and even closer to Rudolstadt, where Silbermann had sent a piano in the early or mid 1740s. In 1758 Adlung wrote that he had not yet seen a piano, although he was aware that the instrument was known in a number of places, and he knew of Friederici. 27
Figure 1.4a Square piano by Zumpe, London, 1766.
Figure 1.4b Detail of Zumpe piano showing (inside the case, to the left) the sustaining handstop which raises the bass dampers from the strings, the small, leather-covered hammers and (at the top of the photograph) the wooden levers on which the dampers are mounted.
The slow progress of the piano is underlined by Charles Burney’s account of his journey to Germany and Austria in 1772 which reveals much concerning keyboard history and performance. Over a period of several months he heard many keyboard players, both in public and in private, but there are relatively few accounts of performances on the piano. Only harpsichords and harpsichordists are mentioned in his account of Coblenz and Frankfurt. In Ludwigsberg Burney met Christian Friedrich Schubart (1739–91) who ‘played on the clavichord, with great delicacy and expression’ and then later in the day ‘played a great deal on the Harpsichord, Organ, Piano forte, and Clavichord’. 28 In Munich Burney heard several harpsichord performances, but none on the piano, and in Vienna, out of a total of some fifteen accounts of keyboard playing in public and in private, only one was on a piano: a ‘child of eight or nine years old’ played ‘upon a small, and not good Piano forte’. 29 In Czaslau Burney heard clavichords and in Dresden a harpsichord, but it was only when he arrived in Berlin that he heard pianos again. Agricola ‘received me very politely; and though he was indisposed, and had just been blooded, he obligingly sat down to a fine piano forte , which I was desirous of hearing and touched it in a truly great style’. 30 Of Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721–83), however, Burney noted that
the harpsichord, which was his first, is likewise his best instrument & He played at my request upon a clavichord, during my visit, some of his fugues and church music & After this he had the complaisance to go with me to the house of Hildebrand, the best maker of harpsichords, and piano-fortes, in Berlin. 31
The mention of Hildebrand as a piano maker is interesting, since it demonstrates that by this time other makers besides the Silbermanns and Friederici had set up in business. Indeed, a brief article published in 1769 reports that Johann Andreas Stein (1728–92), who was to become one of the most important late-eighteenth-century piano makers, had already been working to improve the piano for the previous ten years. 32 Stein had worked with the Strasbourg Silbermanns in 1748 and 1749 and is usually associated with the so-called ‘Viennese’ action (see chapter 2 ).
England
The early history of the piano in England is sketchy. According to Charles Burney ‘The first [piano] that was brought to England was made by an English monk at Rome, Father Wood, for an English friend (the late Samuel Crisp &)’. 33 Crisp spent some time in Italy in the late 1730s and it seems likely that Father Wood, of whom nothing is known, made a copy of a Cristofori-type piano. The action of Wood’s piano cannot have been very sophisticated since ‘the touch and mechanism were so imperfect that nothing quick could be executed upon it, yet the dead march in Saul, and other solemn and pathetic strains, when executed with taste and feeling by a master a little accustomed to the touch, excited equal wonder and delight to the hearers’. 34 Burney relates how Crisp sold the piano to Fulke Greville for 100 guineas and elsewhere describes how he became accustomed to the touch of the instrument during a prolonged stay in Greville’s house, which must have been in the late 1740s. 35 Again, according to Burney, this piano remained unique in England ‘till Plenius & made a piano-forte in imitation of that of Mr. Greville. Of this instrument the touch was better, but the tone very much inferior.’ 36 Roger Plenius (1696–1774) came to England having worked for some time in Amsterdam. He was in London by 1741 and the records of his bankruptcy in 1756 show that in December 1741 he borrowed £1100, presumably to set up in business. After making his copy of Greville’s piano Plenius evidently asked Burney to demonstrate it in public, but Burney declined because ‘I had other employmt s w ch I liked better than that of a shewman’. 37 Presumably this discussion took place after Burney returned to London from Greville’s estate and before he went to live in Kings Lynn, that is, in the years 1749–51, or after Burney again returned to London in 1760.
Meanwhile an English cleric, William Mason journeyed to Hanover where he purchased a combination piano/harpsichord. On 27 June 1755 he wrote to his friend Thomas Gray: ‘Oh, Mr Gray! I bought at Hamburg such a pianoforte, and so cheap! It is a harpsichord too of two unisons, and the jacks serve as mutes when the pianoforte stop is played, by the cleverest mechanism imaginable.’ 38 Unfortunately, no details of this instrument survive.
In 1763 Frederic Neubauer advertised ‘harpsichords, piano-fortes, lyrachords and claffichords’ for sale in London. 39 No records survive to show whether or not he sold any instruments, but the mention of pianos in the same advertisement as lyrachords possibly suggests the work of Plenius: the lyrachord was a peculiar invention of his, and he had probably made a piano by this time.
From 1766 there is incontrovertible evidence of piano making in London in the form of some existing square pianos by the German émigré Johann Christoph Zumpe (fl .1735–83), who had settled in London in about 1760 (Figs. 1.4a and 1.4b ). Zumpe began to make pianos in the mid 1760s and within a very short time his instruments, as well as similar models by other makers such as Johann Pohlman (fl .1767–93), had become extremely popular. This was doubtless partly due to their price – half that of a single manual harpsichord and much less than a grand piano (see below) – as well as their touch sensitivity, though that was limited by today’s standards. A nineteenth-century member of the Broadwood family summed up the characteristics of these instruments well:
They were in length about four feet, the hammers very lightly covered with a thin coat of leather; the strings were small, nearly the size of those used on the Harpsichord; the tones clear, what is now called thin and wiry; – his object being, seemingly, to approach the tones of the Harpsichord, to which the ear, at that period, was accustomed & Beyer, Buntebart and Schoene – all Germans – soon after this introduction by Zumpe, began making Pianos, and by enlarging them, produced more tone in their instruments. 40
Johann Christian Bach (1735–82) quickly took advantage of the new interest in square pianos. On 17 April 1766 the London Public Advertiser announced the publication of Bach’s ‘Six Sonatas for Piano Forte or Harpsichord’ Op. 5, which were presumably intended for performance on Zumpe’s instruments. Bach also seems to have become an agent for Zumpe: on 4 July 1768 his bank account at Drummond’s shows a payment of £50 to Zumpe (enough, probably for three pianos – see the prices quoted below) and Bach helped Madame Brillon in Paris to acquire an English piano sometime before Burney visited her in 1770. 41
The grand piano took rather longer than the square to come into popular use in England. Americus Backers (fl .1763–78) was the first maker of significance. He probably began to make grands in the late 1760s, and an instrument of his dated 1772 still exists (Fig. 1.5 ). 42 By the time Backers made this instrument he had refined the action to the extent that other makers of English grands such as John Broadwood (1732–1812) copied its essential details. The 1772 Backers is bichord throughout (unlike some of his later pianos – see Burney’s letter below) and has the two pedals that were to be standard on English grand pianos thereafter; a damper or sustaining pedal and a una corda pedal. Backers appears to have made about sixty pianos before his death in January 1778 and for most of this time he seems to have been the only maker of grand pianos in London. One of his instruments was probably rented by J. C. Bach, who made a payment of ten guineas to Backers on 17 February 1773. Backers also earned Burney’s respect, judging from the latter’s comments which also sum up the state of the English piano industry in 1774. Burney wrote to Thomas Twining on 21 January:
Figure 1.5 Grand piano by Americus Backers, London, 1772.
[Ba]ckers makes the best Piano Fortes, but they come to 60 or 70 £, with 3 unisons – & of the Harpsichord size – Put them out of the question, & I think Pohlman the best maker of the small sort, by far. Z [u ]mpe WAS the best, but he has given up the business. – Pohlmann then for 16 or 18 Guineas makes charming little instruments, sweet & even in Tone, & capable of great variety of piano & forte, between the two extremes of pianissimo & fort mo . Those for 16 Gn s only go to double G, without a double G ♯ ; but for the 2 Gn s more he has made me two or three with an octave to double F & F ♯ with a double G ♯ . 43
The piano was adopted for public performance relatively quickly in England. The first recorded occasion was 16 May 1767, when Charles Dibden (1745–1814) accompanied Miss Brickler in a ‘favourite Song from Judith … on a new instrument called piano-forte’ at Covent Garden. 44 The first solo performance seems to have been a piano concerto played by James Hook (1746–1827) on 7 April 1768, possibly on a Backers grand. 45 Within just a few years, most of the prominent keyboard players in London were performing in public on the piano. There were notable exceptions, however. Ironically one was Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), the so-called ‘father of the pianoforte’. Despite the fact that his publications of the 1770s all stipulate the piano or harpsichord on their title pages, six out of seven public performances that he gave in the period 1775–80, and for which it is possible to identify the keyboard instrument, were given on the harpsichord. 46
The piano may have featured relatively early in professional concerts in London. In a domestic setting, however, and outside of the capital, the harpsichord persisted much longer. This is illustrated in the number of harpsichords still made in the 1770s and 1780s by firms such as Broadwood (see also chapter 2 ). Some insight into domestic music making is also to be found in the account books of Thomas Green, a keyboard tuner in Hertford: although he tuned a piano as early as 1769, he continued to tune and purchase harpsichords right up to the end of his career in 1790. 47
France
Apart from some drawings of hammer actions submitted to the Académie Royale in Paris in 1716 by Jean Marius, the first reference to a piano in France is an advertisement dated 20 September 1759 which describes in some detail the ‘newly-invented harpsichord called piano et forte ’. 48 Nine months previously, the keyboard player Johann Gottfried Eckard (1735–1809) had arrived in Paris with Johann Andreas Stein, both having visited the Silbermann workshop in Strasbourg en route . Perhaps Eckard, who stayed in Paris, had begun to act as Silbermann’s agent. Whether or not this was so, there is clear evidence that Silbermann’s pianos became known in Paris in the 1760s. An advertisement for one of his pianos, with transposing device, appeared in the Avant Coureur in April 1761. In 1769 an article in Hiller’s Nachrichten reported that ‘Mr. Daquin & organist at Notre Dame’ had a Silbermann piano which he compared with his harpsichord: ‘the harpsichord is the bread, and the fortepiano a delicate dish, of which one will soon be sick’. 49 Later eighteenth-century dictionary articles also relate how Silbermann’s pianos were especially well known in France.
Two grand pianos of the 1770s by J. H. Silbermann survive, and it was probably for this type of instrument that Eckard published the first music for the piano in France – his Op. 1 Sonatas, which were advertised in the French press on 28 April 1763. The title page mentions only the harpsichord but an explanatory note inside mentions the possibility of harpsichord, piano or clavichord. His Op. 2 was advertised for harpsichord or piano in the following year. By this time, in addition to Silbermann’s imported instruments, there is evidence of grands being produced in Paris by local makers: an inventory detailing the belongings of Claude-Bénique Balbastre’s (1727–99) wife, of 1763, mentions a ‘clavecin with hammers’ by François-Etienne Blanchet (c .1730–66), 50 in whose workshop was found a similar, but unnamed, instrument in 1766. 51 Blanchet’s work was continued by Pascal Taskin (1723–93), who was making grand pianos at least as early as the mid 1770s, and some of whose pianos survive. 52 Other Parisian makers followed, such as Jacques Goermans (1740–89). 53
Makers of square pianos in London quickly made inroads into the Parisian market: J. C. Bach acted as an agent for Zumpe in the sale of at least one square piano (see above, p. 17) and we know from Burney that Zumpe himself had been in Paris in 1770. 54 Burney himself advised Diderot on the cost of a Zumpe square which was quoted at the apparently inflated price of twenty-eight guineas. 55 The number of imports from England at this time can be judged from the comments in the French press. The Avant Coureur of 2 April 1770 reported a performance on a new piano designed by Virbès, describing the instrument as ‘in the shape of those from England’. The same newspaper printed a poem entitled ‘L’Arrivée du forte piano’ (‘The arrival of the forte piano’) which read:
What, my dear friend, you come to me from England?
Alas! How can we declare war on her? 56
In 1773 the French music publisher Cousineau announced that he had ‘several excellent English pianos’ for sale, 57 and a number of later sources made it clear that a large proportion of pianos sold in France in the 1770s and 1780s came from England.
Far from attempting to resist this trend, some French keyboard makers themselves imported English square pianos. In 1777 Pascal Taskin evidently owed money – sufficient for two square pianos – to Frederick Beck (fl .1756–98) in London, 58 and in 1784 the same maker ordered four more pianos from Broadwood. 59 Such was the popularity of English squares that by the time of the Revolution the vast majority of pianos owned by the nobility were made by Zumpe, his successor Schoene and others such as Beck and Pohlman. 60 In the face of this flood of imports a number of French makers began to produce copies of English square pianos. The first appears to have been Johann Kilian Mercken (1743–1819) – a 1770 piano of his survives. Mercken was followed by several other Parisian makers, one of whom was Sebastian Erard (1752–1831), whose firm was to become very influential in the subsequent history of the piano (see chapters 2 and 3 ).
The impression gained from a study of the introduction of the piano into France is that square pianos became very popular as domestic instruments, presumably on account of their size and low cost, while grand pianos took much longer to be preferred over harpsichords. Perhaps this is not surprising in view of the magnificence of many mid-eighteenth-century French harpsichords which still survive. Certainly the French were strongly attached to the harpsichord as we have seen from Daquin’s remarks, as well as comments such as those by Voltaire, who considered the piano to be a tinker’s instrument compared with the harpsichord. 61 It is unsurprising therefore that the piano only gradually came to be preferred in public performance. Despite the fact that a piano was first heard in public in Paris as early as 1768, the harpsichord still featured on more occasions than the piano a decade later at the Concert Spirituel. From 1780 onwards, however, the piano was used as the main keyboard instrument.
2
DAVID ROWLAND
Pianos and pianists c. 1770– c. 1825
In 1830 Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849) wrote:
The instruments of Vienna and London have produced two different schools. The pianists of Vienna are especially distinguished for the precision, clearness and rapidity of their execution; the instruments fabricated in that city are extremely easy to play, and, in order to avoid confusion of sound, they are made with mufflers [dampers] up to the last high note; from this results a great dryness in sostenuto passages, as one sound does not flow into another. In Germany the use of the pedals is scarcely known. English pianos possess rounder sounds and a somewhat heavier touch; they have caused the professors of that country to adopt a grander style, and that beautiful manner of singing which distinguishes them; to succeed in this, the use of the loud pedal is indispensable, in order to conceal the dryness inherent to the pianoforte. 1
His remarks could easily have been made twenty or thirty years previously, since his description summarises – albeit in a highly generalised fashion – so many of the essentials of piano making and playing for much of the period covered by this chapter.
‘Viennese’and English grand pianos
Most English grand pianos of the late eighteenth century look much like the Backers grand of 1772, illustrated in Fig. 1.5 . The anonymous and undated grand of Fig. 2.1 is typical of instruments made in the last two decades of the eighteenth century in southern Germany and Austria (generally referred to as ‘Viennese’ pianos). These two instruments therefore illustrate the essential differences in appearance of pianos by members of the English and ‘Viennese’ schools.
Figure 2.1 Grand piano, c. 1795, Stein school, South Germany.
The English piano looks heavier, and is square at the tail, whereas the ‘Viennese’ piano is more elegant, in this instance with a double bentside (the S-shaped piece of wood on the long side of the piano to the right of the performer). Eighteenth-century ‘Viennese’ pianos have knee levers rather than the pedals found on English grands. Internally, the two types of instrument have important differences too. The ‘Viennese’ piano has a substantial base board (the underside of the piano) upon which the internal bracing system is built. The strength of an English piano case is derived largely from a system of internal bracing which holds the sides of the instrument (which are thicker than the ‘Viennese’) together. The action of the two types of instrument differs fundamentally (Figs. 2.2a –2.3b ). ‘Viennese’ hammers are very light and are usually mounted on the key mechanism itself, pointing towards the performer. English hammers are mounted on a separate frame and point away from the performer. Both actions, however, have escapement mechanisms and in both types of piano the hammers are covered with leather (in the case of Fig. 2.3a , multiple layers of leather). The damping systems are placed above the strings in both types of piano, but the ‘Viennese’ system is more effective, as Kalkbrenner later pointed out, and continues up to the highest note, whereas most English pianos have an undamped upper register.
Figure 2.2a ‘Viennese’ grand piano action by Rosenberger, Vienna, c. 1800.
Figure 2.3a English grand piano action by Broadwood, London, 1798.
Figure 2.3b Diagram of the action in Figure 2.3a. A. Check; B. Hammer; C. Hammer rest rail; D. Escapement lever; E. Escapement spring; F. Hammer pivot rail; G. Escapement adjustment.
It is impossible to be certain when and where pianos with ‘Viennese’ actions were first made: relatively few eighteenth-century instruments of this kind still exist, and they are usually undated. Johann Andreas Stein, also a maker of organs, clavichords and a variety of combination instruments (such as harpsichord/pianos), was initially the best-known maker of ‘Viennese’ pianos. He produced them from at least the 1780s and possibly earlier. Several of his pupils set up their own businesses in southern Germany in the last decade or so of the century, and he must have had a sizeable workshop judging by the number of references to his workmanship in late-eighteenth-century journals. Stein died in 1792 but his business was continued by his daughter, Nannette (1769–1833), and son, Matthäus (1776–1842), who both moved to Vienna in 1794. Nannette was married to Johann Andreas Streicher (1761–1833).
Figure 2.2b Diagram of the action in Figure 2.2a. A. Escapement spring; B. Escapement lever; C. Kapsel ; D. Hammer; E. Check rail.
In Vienna, Nannette Streicher (who continued to include her father’s name on her instruments for at least another thirty years) was in competition with many other piano makers. Among them was Anton Walter (1752–1826), who began to make pianos in Vienna probably around 1780. Walter’s action was similar to that of Fig. 2.2a , with a hammer check rail whose function is to catch the hammer as it returns to its resting position (the English action of Fig. 2.3a has individual checks for each hammer). The Stein–Streicher version of the ‘Viennese’ action differed in certain respects from Walter’s; for example, it had no check rail. Walter’s pianos were renowned for their robustness, characterised by a strong tone, especially in the bass, and a heavier touch than some other ‘Viennese’ makers. His instruments were comparatively expensive, but seem to have been preferred by at least some of the leading pianists in the city at the end of the century. 2 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) acquired one of Walter’s pianos in the early 1780s: the instrument, which still exists, has no maker’s inscription, but there is little doubt that it is by Walter, given its similarities to other known Walter pianos. 3 When Carl Czerny (1791–1857) first visited Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) in 1801 he found a Walter piano in the composer’s room, and Beethoven is known to have been in negotiation with Walter for a piano on another occasion. 4
In England, following Backers’s introduction of the grand piano in London around 1770, other makers such as Joseph Merlin (1735–1803) and Robert Stodart (fl .1775–96) – both, incidentally, makers of combination piano/harpsichords – set up in business. The most important figure, however, was John Broadwood. At first, Broadwood made harpsichords with his mentor Burkat Shudi (1702–73). He then started to make square pianos, probably in 1770, no doubt eager to capitalise on the market already exploited so successfully by Zumpe. He began to make grands somewhat later, and by the early 1780s Broadwood’s workshop was producing harpsichords, grand and square pianos, with an increasing emphasis on the piano side of the business. Wainwright identifies 1783 as the year ‘that the pianoforte began to overhaul the harpsichord in popularity’, though the latter continued to be made in large numbers for several years afterwards. 5 Along with the growth in popularity of the piano came a boom in business – by the end of the century the firm was making in excess of one hundred grands a year, as well as square pianos and harpsichords. Much of this growth is accounted for by increased sales within the United Kingdom, but markets much farther a field were opening up, in such places as India, Russia, the United States and the West Indies.
Mozart, Clementi and the London School
Kalkbrenner (see the quotation above) recognised a London and a Viennese school of playing in 1830 (see p. 22), but he was by no means the first to categorise pianists according to the cities in which they performed. As early as 1802, an article appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung which identified a group of pianists whose names were closely associated with London: Muzio Clementi, Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858) and Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812). 6 Ironically, none of them was British, but each had settled in London for some years towards the end of the eighteenth century, during which time they worked together as pianists, composers, teachers and businessmen. No such close-knit school can be said to have existed in eighteenth-century Vienna, though there were several important individuals such as Leopold Koželuch (1747–1818), who arrived in Vienna in 1778. However, by far the most important keyboard player in the region at the time was Mozart.
Mozart’s early experience of keyboard instruments must have been extremely varied. 7 As a very young child, travelling around Austria and southern Germany in the early 1760s, it is unlikely that he would have played any pianos: harpsichords and clavichords still appear to have been the only normally available keyboard instruments in those regions at the time. While it is just possible (but by no means proven) that he encountered some of the first pianos in Paris, London, Holland and Belgium in 1763 and 1764, he played the harpsichord for most, if not all, of the time in Italy in the early 1770s. Back home in Salzburg, there is no evidence that there were pianos except for a square dated 1775 which was owned by Archbishop Colloredo. In fact, the earliest conclusive account of Mozart playing a piano dates from the winter of 1774–5, when he performed on an ‘excellent Fortepiano’ in the home of one Mr Albert in Munich. 8 After this, he played the harpsichord, clavichord and piano, depending on what was available, although once he had settled in Vienna and acquired his Walter piano there can be little doubt that this was the instrument for which he composed.
Mozart’s keyboard music was evidently written for a variety of instruments. The sonatas may all have been composed for the piano, but some of the variations (for example, the C major variations K179) were possibly written for harpsichord. Several of the early concertos were almost certainly for harpsichord (K175, K238, K242, K246), some others are debatable, while those written in Vienna are certainly for piano. Of these, at least two (K466 and K467 of 1785) appear to have been composed with the pedal piano in mind. 9 The evidence – a letter from Mozart’s father, a concert announcement and accounts of those who visited Mozart – shows clearly that Mozart used a pedalboard with independent action and strings which was situated underneath his Walter piano (Fig. 2.4 ). The pedalboard has long since been lost and the only evidence in the music itself for its use is the presence of some bass notes in the first movement of the D minor Concerto K466. It is impossible to play these notes and the chords above them with the left hand alone (Ex. 2.1 ). Exactly what else Mozart played with his feet in this concerto or in other works, and indeed which works he played on the pedalboard, remain largely matters of conjecture; but the reinforcement of the bass register which results from a use of the pedals makes a significant difference to the way in which Mozart’s music is perceived.
Ex. 2.1 Mozart, Piano Concerto in D minor, K466, first movement, bars 88–91 (piano part).
Mozart was particularly admired for his expressive playing, which was praised by no less a pianist than Clementi, following a competition staged between them in 1781. One of the most noteworthy aspects of Mozart’s expressive performance was his use of rubato ; not the constant changing of tempo which is adopted by many pianists today, but a technique whereby the two hands do not quite synchronise. Mozart himself explained it in a letter to his father of 1777 in which he pours scorn on Nannette Stein’s playing:
Figure 2.4 Reconstruction by Richard Maunder of Mozart’s Walter piano with pedalboard.
she will never acquire the most essential, the most difficult and the chief requisite in music, which is, time, because from her earliest years she has done her utmost not to play in time … Everyone is amazed that I can always keep strict time. What these people cannot grasp is that in tempo rubato in an Adagio, the left hand should go on playing in strict time. With them the left hand always follows suit. 10
The way in which some of Mozart’s published music is written suggests that he sometimes notated a rubato (Ex. 2.2 ), although even this amount of rhythmic detail must surely have been inadequate to express the subtlety of Mozart’s playing.
Ex. 2.2 Mozart, Rondo in A minor, K511, bars 85–7.
This kind of rubato featured in the playing of a number of later pianists, notably Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49) (see chapter 4 ) and can be heard in many twentieth-century recordings (see chapter 5 ).
The same letter contains remarks by Mozart on other elements of technique. Commenting on Nannette’s performance he says:
instead of sitting in the middle of the clavier, she sits right up opposite the treble, as it gives her more chance of flopping about and making grimaces. She rolls her eyes and smirks. When a passage is repeated, she plays it more slowly the second time. If it has to be played a third time, then she plays it even more slowly. When a passage is being played, the arm must be raised as high as possible, and according as the notes in the passage are stressed, the arm, not the fingers, must do this, and that too with great emphasis in a heavy and clumsy manner. But the best joke of all is that when she comes to a passage which ought to flow like oil and which necessitates a change of finger, she does not bother her head about it, but when the moment arrives, she just leaves out the notes, raises her hand and starts off again quite comfortably. 11
We should be careful about the conclusions we draw from such a passage. Nannette was only eight at the time, yet she grew to be very well respected as a performer, as was her teacher (whom Mozart also criticises). Perhaps Nannette’s performance was bad; but it is also possible that she had been trained in a school of playing that Mozart disliked and found easy to caricature. However, what is certain from this letter is that Mozart’s ideal technique was based on finger movement only, with an evenness in certain passage-work, which should ‘flow like oil’.
When Clementi recalled his meeting with Mozart in 1781 he confessed himself to have been amazed at Mozart’s lyrical playing. 12 Mozart was less generous: he regarded Clementi as a ‘mere mechanicus ’. 13 Other contemporary writers, however, were dazzled by Clementi’s virtuosity and his playing of fast movements generally – a prominent feature of the ‘London’ school’s style: ‘Clementi’s greatest strength is in characteristic and pathetic Allegros, less in Adagios.’ The same author goes on to describe Dussek’s and Cramer’s style: ‘Dussek played truly excellent, brilliant Allegro movements with great speed, but played the Adagio very tenderly, agreeably and ingratiatingly; Cramer commanded such speed less well, but had an extremely neat and magical style’, which the author found difficult to describe, but which was very ‘singular’ nonetheless. 14
Among the elements of Dussek’s and Cramer’s techniques which later authors singled out for particular mention was their use of the pedals. However, although these pianists undoubtedly contributed much to early pedalling techniques, it was Daniel Steibelt (1765–1823) who had first indicated the use of the pedals in two printed works which were published in Paris in 1793. 15 The nature of most of these markings suggests that pianists were at that time using the pedals for little more than to create a particular tone quality or effect lasting for several bars at a time (Ex. 2.3 ).
Ex. 2.3 Steibelt, Mélange Op. 10, p. 6. O denotes the use of the pedal which, according to the preface to the work, ‘imitates the harp’ and O denotes the use of the sustaining pedal. The symbol signifies the release of the pedal.
Indeed, this was all that could be achieved on the numerous early pianos which had handstops rather than knee levers or pedals to operate the sustaining and other devices. Some of the earliest pedal markings in the works of other composers suggest a similar approach to Steibelt’s, such as the indication to raise the dampers throughout the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata Op. 27 No. 2. As Beethoven’s pupil Czerny remarked about a passage in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto which the composer played with constantly raised dampers, this kind of performance worked on eighteenth-century pianos with their relatively small resonance, but it was not viable on later instruments. 16
Pedalling began to be indicated in printed music by members of the ‘London’ school shortly after Steibelt’s arrival there in the winter of 1796–7. The markings of Dussek and Cramer (but not those of Clementi), as well as those in Steibelt’s London works, show how sophisticated their technique had by then become. It is common in these works to see the sustaining pedal depressed for half a bar, or a single beat, for the purposes of creating a certain richness in part of a phrase, or for enabling the pianist to play in a more legato style (Ex. 2.4 ).
Ex. 2.4 Steibelt, Concerto Op. 33, p. 12 (indications for the use of the sustaining pedal).
The pedalling technique in these works is still a long way removed from the kind of constant pedalling that became fashionable in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but it represents a significant development from earlier eighteenth-century techniques and marks the end of performances ‘on harpsichord or pianoforte’ that were advertised on so many keyboard works of the late eighteenth century. By the end of the 1790s the piano is undoubtedly the only option for the music of the London School. The new pedalling techniques of the late 1790s also gave rise to significant new figurations in compositions of the period (see chapter 8 ).
Grand pianos c. 1790–1825
The period from about 1790 to 1825 was one of intense activity for piano makers, during which the initiative moved between three major pianomaking centres, London, Vienna and Paris.
Most pianos made in London before the 1790s had a five-octave range, from FF to f 3 , although there were exceptions such as Burney’s six-octave Merlin piano of 1777. It appears to have been Dussek who prompted Broadwood to add a further half octave to the standard five-octave range, to take the treble up to c 4 . A letter of Broadwood of 1793 states that ‘We now make most of the Grand Pianofortes in compass to CC in alt. We have made some so for these three years past, the first to please Dussek, which being much liked Cramer Jr. had one off us so that now they are become quite common.’ 17 The piano in question may have been that which Broadwood sold to Dussek on 20 November 1789. 18 By 1792, Broadwood was making six-octave pianos. 19 This was achieved by adding the half octave in the bass (down to CC) that was found on some earlier English harpsichords.
English pianos were vigorously marketed on the continent. French, German and Austrian newspapers contain advertisements for English pianos in the 1780s and 1790s. Members of the London School played their part too, in their continental tours of the late 1790s and early 1800s. Dussek, for example, was contracted to Clementi, who in 1798 had become a partner with James Longman in a firm of piano makers and music publishers following the demise of Longman … Broderip. Dussek sold a number of Clementi’s pianos on the continent. 20 Clementi himself toured Germany, Russia, Italy and Austria in the years 1802–10, selling pianos as he went. 21 He set up a large piano warehouse in St Petersburg with his pupils John Field (1782–1837), Ludwig Berger (1777–1839) and Alexander Klengel (1783–1852), and formed business partnerships with firms such as Breitkopf und Härtel and Artaria. All of this activity placed considerable pressure on some continental makers to keep up with the latest developments in London, while other continental makers were already making changes of their own.
The different compasses of German and Austrian pianos at the end of the eighteenth century are difficult to summarise. Some makers preserved the five-octave range FF–f 3 into the nineteenth century while others exceeded that range at a considerably earlier date. In 1789 and 1790, for example, the Speier Musikalische Real-Zeitung advertised the work of two of Stein’s pupils, Johann Georg Kuppler in Nürnberg and J. C. Bulla in Erlang. Both makers were selling pianos with ranges from FF to a 3 – just over five octaves. 22 Other continental makers at the time commonly used the range FF–g 3 . Joseph Heilmann of Erfurt (son of the better-known Matthäus Heilmann of Mainz) advertised six-octave pianos from FF to f 4 in 1799 while at the same time continuing to make five-octave pianos 23 – it was common for makers to produce more than one model at a time. In Vienna the compass used by makers seems to have stayed around five octaves until just after 1800. Streicher, however, appears to have extended the range from five and a half to six octaves very quickly – probably by 1803 – perhaps as a direct response to English competition.
The six-octave compass of continental and English pianos differed. For some years Broadwood used the six-octave compass down to CC, whereas continental instruments (including French pianos) had six octaves beginning an interval of a fourth higher, at FF. The situation was even more complicated, however, because some English and Irish makers (notably William Southwell (1756–1842), in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and Clementi, from c. 1810) used the ‘continental’ six-octave compass. This confused state of affairs posed obvious problems for composers who wished to write music for the international market, and it is noteworthy that almost all works from around the turn of the century stay within the five and a half octaves, range FF–c 4 , which was manageable on both English and continental extended-compass instruments. There were some exceptions, however, notable among which is the early use of a ‘continental’ six-octave compass in one of Steibelt’s Op. 16 sonatas published in Paris around 1795. An easy resolution of the incompatible six-octave compasses was to combine them in a six and a half octave compass, from CC to f 4 . This happened before 1810 on the continent, and shortly afterwards in London.
Other differences characterised English and continental pianos in the early nineteenth century. In Paris from around 1800 – where Sebastian Erard had begun to make pianos based on the English model – and in Vienna from a few years later, it became customary for pianos to have four pedals (knee levers being generally abandoned at about this time). In addition to the sustaining and una corda pedals, which were the only two normally found on London pianos, continental instruments also used the ‘moderator’ – a strip of material interposed between the hammers and strings which produces a muffled sound (Fig. 2.6 ). On ‘Viennese’ pianos a bassoon effect was also made possible by means of a strip of parchment or silk which was placed against the bass strings to produce a buzzing sound (Fig. 2.7 ). (The moderator was the usual device for muting the sound on ‘Viennese’ pianos in the eighteenth century: the una corda was introduced on these instruments only in the nineteenth century.) The French also used the bassoon, but on some of their instruments there was instead a lute pedal which brought a strip of material into permanent contact with the strings, thereby reducing their vibration, to make a dry, plucking effect. On some extravagant continental instruments there were also drums, bells, triangles and cymbals operated by pedals, or a combination of several pedals and a few knee levers; but there is strong evidence to suggest that professional pianists treated these ‘extras’ with disdain. 24 However, by about 1830 in France, and about 1840 in Vienna, the number of pedals was reduced to the same two found on English pianos – sustaining and una corda .
Figure 2.5 Grand piano by Graf, Vienna, c. 1820.
Figure 2.6 Moderator device on a ‘Viennese’ grand piano c. 1800 – tongues of material are interposed between the hammers and strings. To the right of the hammer can also be seen a metal spacer which helps to keep open the space between the soundboard and the wrestplank. The damper rail can be seen at the top of the picture, above the strings.
Figure 2.7 Bassoon device on a grand piano by Streicher, Vienna, 1823.
Other developments in the construction of grand pianos in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and a description of domestic pianos, are discussed in chapter 3 .
Pianists in Vienna and Paris
A number of pianists came to prominence in Vienna following Mozart’s death. Beethoven was the most famous: having settled in the city in 1792 he quickly established himself as a leading performer until deafness forced him progressively to retire from public performance during the early years of the nineteenth century. In the years 1795–9 Beethoven had a serious rival in Joseph Wölfl (1773–1812), but like many pianists of his generation, Wölfl did not stay in any one city for very long, and departed for Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg on his way, eventually, to Paris and London. The other pianist of note at the time was Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837), one of Mozart’s pupils, whose style of playing differed markedly from Beethoven’s (see below).
Before examining Beethoven’s style of performance, some attention must be given to the pianos that he played and for which he wrote. Much controversy has surrounded the instruments of his which survive – an Erard grand of 1803, a Broadwood grand of 1817 and a Conrad Graf (1782–1851) grand of 1825. 25 Beethoven’s ownership of these pianos is not in doubt: it is their significance for the performance of his music that is in question. Beethoven found the action of the Erard unsatisfactory and sent it back to Streicher’s workshop for adjustment. By 1810 he considered the piano ‘quite useless’. 26 The compass of the Broadwood must have been considered rather odd when it arrived in Vienna in 1818. It had six octaves, from CC to c 4 , a peculiarly English compass, as we have seen; and Beethoven was already writing music for the full six and a half octaves which had been available to him in Vienna for a decade. By the time the Graf piano arrived in 1825, Beethoven had written all of his keyboard music and had only two years to live, so the instrument’s significance is limited.
So which pianos did Beethoven prefer? A strong case has been put forward suggesting that Beethoven maintained a preference for ‘Viennese’ instruments throughout his life. 27 Prior to his arrival in Vienna he appears to have developed a preference for Stein’s pianos. There were several of them in Bonn in the late 1780s 28 and Beethoven was uneasy about performing on at least some pianos by other makers, if a report from Mergentheim in 1791 is to be believed: ‘Beethoven did not perform in public, probably the instrument here was not to his mind. It is one of Späth’s make, and at Bonn he plays upon one by Stein.’ 29 When Beethoven arrived in Vienna he would have found pianos by many local makers as well as a few imported instruments (mostly squares). During his early days in the city he hired a piano: no further details exist as to its type. In 1794 Nannette and Matthäus Stein, and Johann Andreas Streicher moved to Vienna and renewed their friendship with Beethoven, prompting a large body of correspondence between them, and prompting Beethoven to use their pianos on numerous occasions. Nevertheless, despite his relationship with them, Beethoven appears also to have used pianos by other Viennese makers: the presence of a Walter piano in his apartment in 1801 has already been noted, and his correspondence shows how he also used a piano by Johann Schanz (c .1762–1828) and had dealings with a variety of makers on his own account as well as on behalf of others. 30
Beethoven’s preference for ‘Viennese’ pianos was strong, yet he also had an affinity with members of the London School and their music. He knew some of them personally and imitated certain aspects of their compositions. Czerny, for example, observed that the finale to the Piano Sonata Op. 26 was in that ‘perpetually moving style, as are many of the sonatas by Cramer, whose sojourn at Vienna prompted Beethoven to the composition of this work’. 31 In performance, Beethoven seems to have taken some of the more robust elements of the London School and combined them with his own somewhat rough character. Consequently, his playing was contrasted with Hummel’s more refined style: ‘Hummel’s partisans accused Beethoven of mistreating the piano, of lacking all cleanness and clarity, of creating nothing but confused noise the way he used the pedal.’ 32 We have already seen how the use of the sustaining pedal was particularly developed by the London School. Beethoven may not have been so adventurous as the likes of Dussek, but he was clearly more inclined to use it than was Hummel. Hummel’s aversion to a liberal use of the sustaining pedal is a theme that recurs in his piano tutor of 1828, in which he also calls into question the necessity for the una corda pedal, which had been available on the earliest English grand pianos, but was not found on ‘Viennese’ pianos until after 1800. Beethoven, however, indicates the use of the una corda in his music far more than any other pianist of his generation: other performers were rather more circumspect regarding its use because of the change in timbre which resulted, as well as the tendency for the piano to go out of tune when only one string was hit with the full weight of the hammer. A further peculiarity of Beethoven’s pedalling is the absence of any markings for the moderator pedal in his music. Some Viennese composers such as Franz Schubert (1797–1828) occasionally indicated the moderator in their music, but there is no evidence that Beethoven ever used it. 33
Literally hundreds of piano tutors were published at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, most of them for the domestic amateur market. Hummel’s is one of the relatively few tutors aimed at a more professional readership and it is one of the most conservative of his generation. In addition to expressing concerns about pedalling, Hummel comments on other performing trends. One of these was the increasingly fashionable tendency towards rhythmic flexibility – a tendency of which Mozart had complained in Nannette Stein’s playing. Hummel was highly critical of performers who distorted the rhythm ‘by the capricious dragging or slackening of the time, (tempo rubato ), introduced at every instant and to satiety’. 34 Beethoven had been inclined to do this in some small measure. His pupil Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838), himself a prominent nineteenth-century pianist and composer, recalled how Beethoven ‘in general … played his own compositions most capriciously, though he usually kept a very steady rhythm and only occasionally, indeed very rarely, speeded up the tempo somewhat. At times he restrained the tempo in his crescendos with a ritardando, which had a beautiful and most striking effect.’ 35 Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) also espoused a flexible approach: ‘the beat, the tempo must not be a controlling tyrant nor a mechanical, driving hammer; it should be to a piece of music what the pulse beat is to the life of a man’. 36
By the 1820s the pianists who embraced these more progressive trends most wholeheartedly began to group themselves around Paris, where the most significant developments in piano design were also taking place (see chapter 3 ). Franz Liszt (1811–86) is typical: having received lessons in Vienna from Czerny, he used Paris as a base from which to tour from 1823, and settled there more permanently after the death of his father in 1827. Elements of his technique are discussed in chapter 4 . Another important, but slightly older, performer of the 1820s whose style can be discussed here was Friedrich Kalkbrenner. (It was he who offered to teach the young Chopin when the latter arrived in Paris in 1831 – the offer was declined.) Like Hummel, Kalkbrenner also published a piano tutor aimed at the professional market. Unlike Hummel, however, Kalkbrenner included in his work the most up-to-date practices. The una corda pedal, for example, which many in the 1820s still viewed with suspicion, was wholeheartedly recommended because it ‘produces a marvellous effect in all diminuendo passages, and may be used when a composer has marked a diminuendo, morendo, or pianissimo’. 37 In Kalkbrenner’s music the una corda is often indicated at the end of a phrase, in which case it would have been used at the same time as another effect: ‘all terminations of cantabile phrases should be retarded’. Kalkbrenner also goes on to suggest changes of tempo in other places: ‘when a frequent change of harmony occurs, or modulations succeed each other rapidly, the movement must be retarded’. 38 This should happen several times in each piece, if the musical examples in his tutor are to be regarded as typical.
We should be uneasy about generalising too much about a period of performance history during which pianists moved frequently from country to country, but by the end of the period under discussion in this chapter it appears that most of the progressive figures in piano making and performance were centred in Paris while the conservatives were to be found in German-speaking lands. London had in the meantime receded in importance.
3
DAVID ROWLAND
The piano since c. 1825
The concert grand to c. 1860
Piano making in the years c. 1825–60 was characterised by the development of ever more powerful and sonorous instruments. In order to achieve their aims, makers continued to experiment with all aspects of piano design and as each small change was made in one part of the instrument, modifications were inevitably required elsewhere. So, for example, greater string tension necessitated a stronger frame and heavier hammers, which in turn led to a deeper touch. However, a deeper touch made fast note repetition more difficult, so a new kind of action was invented. It was a combination of hundreds of such developments (each of them painstakingly patented by makers, and listed by piano historians) 1 that led to the emergence, around 1860, of grand pianos which were essentially the same as those used on concert platforms today.
A wooden structure was sufficient to cope with the string tension on early grand pianos. Nevertheless, small amounts of metal were used by some makers to strengthen the most vulnerable parts of the piano’s structure. The first Broadwood grands, for example, from the 1780s, had small hoops of metal between the wrestplank (the block of wood which holds the tuning pins) and belly rail (the substantial wooden frame member that runs across the width of the piano and supports the end of the soundboard nearest the player) in order to prevent the gap closing through which the hammers pass on their way to hit the strings. Viennese makers soon adopted the same practice having first used wooden supports for the same purpose. 2 (Fig. 2.6 shows a metal support for this purpose on a ‘Viennese’ piano of c. 1800.) Broadwood experimented with additional metal bracing in the form of bars ‘to resist the treble strain in 1808, and again in 1818, but was not successful in fixing them’. 3 One of the most significant additions of metal to the grand piano was the compensation frame, invented by two Englishmen, James Thom and William Allen. This was patented in 1820 and consisted of metal tubes made of the same materials as the strings over which they were placed – brass in the bass and steel in the treble – in order to provide greater tuning stability (the tubes were intended to expand and contract in response to changes in temperature at the same rate as the strings beneath) (Fig. 3.1 ). Erard patented an identical scheme in Paris in 1822. The effects of the compensation frame on tuning stability were debatable, but the additional strength that it gave to the structure of the instrument was undeniable. Other makers quickly began to use a number of solid metal braces above the strings of grand pianos (Fig. 3.2 ): Broadwood evidently began to do so at least by 1823. 4
Figure 3.1 Grand piano by Stodart, London, c. 1822.
Figure 3.2 Metal bracing on a grand piano by Erard, London, 1840–1.
Having provided longitudinal strength to the grand piano, makers quickly turned their attention to the next weak point – the hitchpins around which the strings pass at the end of the piano opposite the keyboard. Until the 1820s the hitchpins had been set in wood, but in 1827 Broadwood patented a small hitchpin plate – a single metal plate into which were set all of the hitchpins. The longitudinal metal bars above the strings were fastened to the metal hitchpin plate, which was in turn screwed into a wooden block beneath (Fig. 3.3 ). Broadwood’s patent was quickly followed by similar ones of Pleyel (1828), Pape (1828) and Erard (1839).
Figure 3.3 Metal hitchpin plate on a grand piano by Erard, London, 1840–1.
The next part of the instrument to be strengthened was the wrestplank. This proved difficult, since the tuning pins themselves could not be set into metal. Consequently a variety of different methods of strengthening the wrestplank – which was liable to split under the increasing string tension – were attempted in the 1830s and 1840s.
While English and French makers progressively adopted metal in grand pianos during the 1820s and 1830s, their Viennese counterparts persisted with wooden framing: Graf’s surviving pianos, for example, which are dated between 1812 and 1842, have only wooden bracing. 5 Nevertheless, many of these ‘Viennese’ pianos are very robust – less prone to twisting under the tension of the strings than some English and French pianos. Despite the continuing success of the wooden bracing system, however, some of the more progressive Viennese makers such as Streicher began to use systems of metal bracing in the 1830s. 6
For most of the first half of the nineteenth century grand pianos were considered essentially wooden structures, strengthened in varying degrees by the addition of metal. But at the Great Exhibition of 1851 the essential ‘woodenness’ of pianos was fundamentally challenged by instruments whose main strength lay in their metal framework:
Messrs. Erard exhibited, in 1851, a full-sized grand instrument, the peculiarity of which was, that, in addition to the metallic string-plate and longitudinal tension bars, the wrest-block was also of metal, being formed of a frame-work of brass, in which was fixed a strip of beech-wood to receive the wrest-pins. This, in conjunction with the longitudinal bars and the string-plate, formed an entire metallic framing, extending from one end of the instrument to the other. 7
As the description makes clear, this was a combination of all the previous metal additions making up a composite metal frame. However, a more radical solution had already been patented in 1843 by Jonas Chickering (1798–1853) of Boston. This was the complete cast-iron frame for grand pianos, in which the entire frame was cast as one piece, rather than assembled from a number of smaller metal components. Chickering’s cast-iron frame for grands was the climax of American developments, most notably the invention of a cast-iron frame for a square piano (the result of a number of attempts to strengthen square pianos with metal) by Alpheus Babcock (1785–1842), also of Boston, in 1825: during the second quarter of the century Boston emerged as one of the most progressive centres of piano development. 8
As we shall see later in this chapter, the use of the cast-iron frame was to be very significant in taking the initiative in piano development away from Europe to the United States. As the Americans modernised and streamlined their manufacturing processes, many European makers became entrenched in their traditional views. The debate can already be seen in a number of mid-century sources as, for example, in Edward Rimbault’s history of the piano, published in London in 1860:
We agree … that the growing tendency to the use of too much metal in the construction of pianofortes is injurious to the quality of the tone. It also adds greatly to the weight of the instrument, and consequently diminishes its portability and general usefulness. Nevertheless, the use of metal up to a certain point has its advantages; in fact, owing to the increased weight of the strings, it cannot now be dispensed with. 9
Another development which became associated with the American grand piano was cross-stringing – an arrangement whereby the bass strings pass either over or underneath the remaining strings of the piano. Cross-stringing had been applied to the upright piano as early as 1828, in a patent by Henri Pape (1789–1875) in Paris. Its use at such an early date was brought about by the demand for increasingly compact pianos, in which the length of the bass strings was severely restricted so long as they remained in a vertical position. Pape’s solution was to place the bass strings diagonally across the instrument, in front of the rest of the strings, which continued to run more or less vertically. There was no comparable string-length problem on grand pianos and makers continued to string their instruments in the traditional way until it was realised that a better tone was achieved by moving the bridge for the bass strings further towards the centre of the soundboard. This necessitated a cross-stringing arrangement without, however, significantly increasing string length. Following the development of cross-stringing by a number of makers of upright and square pianos and a few experiments on grands, 10 Henry Steinway (1797–1871) patented a system for grands in 1859 which used cross-stringing as well as a cast-iron frame. The ‘Steinway system’ was to provide the basis for the design on which modern grand pianos are made. It was the cause of much debate at the 1862 London exhibition. Some European makers quickly adopted the American innovations while others remained sceptical of its advantages: Broadwood, for example, did not cross-string grands until 1895. 11
The progressive use of thicker strings at higher tensions demanded heavier hammers and the merits of various kinds of hammer coverings occupied makers for most if not all of the nineteenth century. Various forms of leather had been used on the majority of pianos in the early history of the instrument and by the 1820s grand piano hammers were generally covered with several layers of the material (see Fig. 2.3a ). Around this time, however, Pape developed a felt covering which was more durable than had previously been available, and which he patented in 1826. 12 Other makers in France and England followed Pape and for some time it was customary for hammers to have a final covering of felt on top of several layers of leather. This arrangement was still common at the time of the Great Exhibition, according to an account of materials used in the construction of pianos which lists buffalo leather as the ‘under covering’ for bass hammers, while ‘saddle’ was used in the tenor and treble with felt as the ‘external covering’. 13 However, while English and French makers experimented with felt, makers of ‘Viennese’ pianos, with their lighter action, continued to use leather: for example, all Graf’s extant instruments, made before he sold his business in 1842, have ‘hammer heads … covered with several layers of brown leather, ranging from as many as six in the bass to three in the treble’. 14
If some European makers remained conservative in their use of felt, a number of their American counterparts were pressing forwards to develop methods of covering hammers by machine. The benefits of this system were that a set of hammers could be covered quickly, and therefore cheaply, with a consistency that was virtually impossible to achieve if the process were done by hand. The technical problems that needed to be overcome were the production of suitable felt and the development of a machine to fix the felt to the wooden base of the hammer. Following initial developments in Germany in the 1830s, a number of Americans developed systems, culminating in the work of Alfred Dolge (1848–1922) in the 1880s which enabled hammers to be covered with a single, thick layer of felt, rather than the multiple layers of earlier decades. 15 In developing his hammer-covering business Dolge epitomised a new trend in piano manufacture – the development of a piano components industry in which parts of the instrument, such as actions, hammers or frames, were made in one factory and purchased wholesale by makers who then assembled the components into the finished product in much the same way as the production of the modern motor car. 16
Throughout the nineteenth century both the ‘Viennese’ and English actions continued to be made. At the Great Exhibition, for example, it was noted that all of the pianos from Vienna had an action which was ‘altogether different from the English mechanism’. 17 By this time, however, the ‘Viennese’ action’s popularity was in sharp decline because, as Sigismund Thalberg (1812–71) put it in his report on the pianos at the exhibition, ‘now … we have an action, the invention of the late Sebastian Erard, which gives a more powerful blow than the old grand action [Thalberg’s term for the English action], and a far more rapid and delicate effect than the old Vienna action – thus combining the advantages of both systems’. 18 Thalberg was referring to Erard’s double escapement action which was patented in 1821 and which enabled the performer to repeat notes without the necessity of the key returning to its resting position. With this action, as Thalberg pointed out, makers could use heavier hammers and a greater depth of touch without sacrificing the responsiveness which players demanded. Similar actions were quickly adopted by other makers in France, England and Germany, and Erard’s pianos became popular all over Europe – a fact which the firm was extremely eager to point out in their own publicity literature. 19 Before long, the ‘Viennese’ action was more or less confined to makers in Vienna itself. Graf, for example, persisted with it in all of the instruments he made before selling his business in 1842. Streicher, however, began to experiment with various kinds of action while continuing to make ‘Viennese’ grands in the conventional way. He patented a down-striking action in 1823 which was evidently popular judging from the amount of coverage it received in the press as well as its use in a number of surviving instruments. 20 In the mid 1830s the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported that Streicher was also making his own version of the English action in his workshop alongside the ‘Viennese’ and down-striking models. 21 Streicher’s manufacture of alternative actions evidently persisted for a long while, since pianos with English and ‘Viennese’ style mechanisms survive from at least as late as c. 1870. Indeed, some makers continued to make pianos with ‘Viennese’ actions well into the twentieth century: Bösendorfer included it in standard models until 1909 22 and other makers used it later still.
Keyboard compass continued to vary in the period. Erard’s seven-octave range of 1822, from CC to c 5 , proved unsatisfactory according to the company’s own literature of 1834, which stated that Erard had by then returned to the six-and-a-half octave range CC to f 4 because of the poor quality of sound at the extremities of the keyboard. 23 Most other makers were producing pianos with a similar or identical range of six and a half octaves by the 1830s; but at the same time, some makers were beginning to extend the compass further. Graf evidently added two extra notes (up to g 4 ) in the late 1820s – which was then to become the standard range for most makers until the late 1840s – while a few makers took the keyboard a little higher still to a 4 . Shortly before the Great Exhibition some of the most influential makers again adopted a seven-octave compass, most commonly from AAA to a 4 (such as Erard, Collard and Kirkman) but sometimes from GGG to g 4 (Broadwood). William Pole, in his description of the pianos at the Exhibition, also noted that ‘one in the Exhibition, made by Mott, has seven and a half octaves, from F to C; and M. Pape, of Paris, has made them eight octaves from F to F; but it is doubtful whether more than six and a half will be generally used’. 24 In the event, Pole’s final comment was proved wrong: a seven-octave compass from AAA to a 4 was adopted as standard on concert instruments until the 1870s, when a further three notes were added in the treble to take the keyboard up to c 5 , thus establishing the range that has been used by most makers to the present day.
Grand pianos after 1860
The iron-framed, cross-strung grands made by Steinway and its imitators from the 1860s onwards are essentially the same as the pianos used on concert platforms today. This is not to say, however, that instruments of the 1860s sound the same as their modern counterparts, or that no developments have occurred since then. On the contrary, grands from this earlier period tend to sound brighter and are not quite so powerful as modern instruments on account of small changes in design, such as those which affected hammer coverings.
One significant development was Steinway’s addition of a third pedal, patented in 1875. The third (‘sostenuto’) pedal ‘catches’ the dampers of any notes that are being played at the moment it is depressed: the dampers of any other notes played after the pedal has been activated continue to work as normal. This principle of selective sustaining (in addition to the ‘normal’ sustaining pedal) had been a concern of European makers in earlier decades. The Parisian maker Xavier Boisselot was the first to invent such a device in 1844, and others followed with schemes of varying complexity. One of the more difficult to operate was designed by Eduard Zachariae of Stuttgart whose invention ‘divides the row of dampers by four cleft pedal feet into eight sections’. 25 None of these schemes enjoyed any degree of success, however, and the principle of selective sustaining gained ground significantly only after Steinway’s patent of 1875. Following the third pedal’s acceptance in America, a few European makers adopted it. Others remained sceptical of its value, however, such as Broadwood, who dismissed it in a pamphlet of 1892: ‘THE THIRD PEDAL … being of no value in the concert room, and liable to get out of order, is not adopted by John Broadwood and Sons.’ 26
The third pedal was not adopted wholeheartedly by makers in Europe: Steinway themselves did not include it on pianos made in their Hamburg branch and Bösendorfer began to use it only after the second world war, as a result of requests from American dealers. 27 Japanese makers, however, adopt it as a matter of course on their instruments and it looks to have become a permanent feature of the concert grand, whether or not pianists choose to use it!
Since the 1870s there have been few deviations from the normal concert grand compass of seven and a third octaves (AAA–c 5 ). Some seven-octave instruments continued to be made after that date (AAA–a 4 ) but by far the most important exceptions to the normal compass are the eight-octave keyboard (CCC–c 5 ) found on the largest of Bösendorfer’s pianos from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day, as well as the seven-and-a-half-octave compass (FFF–c 5 ) available on smaller grands by the same maker. A small repertory exists which uses these extra notes, 28 but the additional compass has not found general acceptance among makers.
Aside from developments in the instrument itself, one of the most important aspects of piano history since the mid nineteenth century has been the rise and fall of national piano industries within world markets. In the second half of the nineteenth century many of these developments can be traced in the literature of the various trade exhibitions held around the world: the Great Exhibition in London has already been referred to on a number of occasions; of equal significance to the piano’s history were the London and Paris exhibitions of 1862 and 1867 respectively. Steinway exhibited at both of these and as a consequence its innovations were immediately seized upon and copied by the more progressive European makers. Germany led the way, notably with newer companies such as Bechstein and Blüthner (both founded in 1853), although some older firms also adopted the new technology – Streicher, for example, exhibited an iron-framed, overstrung piano in 1867. The English and French were, on the whole, more reactionary. Firms which had exerted considerable influence earlier in the century, such as Broadwood and Erard, continued to be sceptical of the latest developments in both piano design and industrial practices: a visitor to Erard’s factory in 1894, for example, noted that ‘each hammer was still being individually covered three times by hand before the outer covering was applied’, 29 in contrast to the machine covering processes used in America and Germany. Such practices were wasteful and increased costs, and Erard’s firm went into sharp decline. Pleyel, by far Erard’s biggest competitor in France earlier in the century, fared rather better by adopting new technology and practices; but nobody in Europe could rival the growth of the German piano industry and by the end of the nineteenth century almost all virtuosos played American or German instruments. 30
The continued prominence of Steinway in the twentieth century is a tribute to the firm’s products as well as its industrial practices and marketing. The durability of all of the various Steinway models is attested by the high prices that second-hand instruments nearly a century old still command. Intense competition has never been far away, however. In 1936, for example, when the BBC anonymously selected a number of grand pianos for broadcasting use, it was Bösendorfer’s instruments which were judged best in the full-sized and small-grand categories, whereas Steinway’s and Challen’s medium-sized grands were preferred. 31 Competition later came from the Far East. A Japanese maker exhibited a square piano at the Paris exhibition of 1878, and in the decades that followed Japanese apprentices studied American and German instruments – Yamaha hired a Bechstein consultant in the early stages of their enterprise. 32 To begin with, firms such as Yamaha and Kawai (the two most prominent Japanese makers) concentrated on the cheaper domestic market, although they did make some grands. Later, grands by both makers offered serious competition to Steinway, Bösendorfer and others on the concert platform. However, it is probably in the market for medium-sized grands that Yamaha and Kawai have made the greatest impact: with instruments costing between a third and a half of the equivalent Steinway, these makers have progressively killed off their British competitors and the German industry.
Domestic pianos
In his report of the pianos at the Great Exhibition, Thalberg wrote:
the increase of the number of pianos compared with the population is every year more rapid, a circumstance which is not observed in regard to other musical instruments …
The social importance of the piano is beyond all question far greater than that of any other instrument of music. One of the most marked changes in the habits of society, as civilisation advances, is with respect to the character of its amusements. Formerly, nearly all such amusements were away from home and in public; now, with the more educated portion of society, the greater part is at home and within the family circle, music on the piano contributing the principal portion of it. In the more fashionable circles of cities, private concerts increase year by year, and in them the piano is the principal feature. Many a man, engaged in commercial and other active pursuits, finds the chief charm of his drawing-room in the intellectual enjoyment afforded by the piano.
In many parts of Europe this instrument is the greatest solace of the studious and solitary …
… this influence of the piano … extends to all classes; and while considerable towns have often no orchestras, families possess the best possible substitute, making them familiar with the finest compositions. 33
Even so, the mass ownership of pianos was in its relative infancy, as Cyril Ehrlich points out:
By the early twentieth century perhaps one Englishman in 360 purchased a new piano every year, a proportion at least three times higher than in 1851 and exceeded only in the United States where it was 1:260. In Germany the ratio was 1:1000, and in France 1:1600 … by 1910 there were some two to four million pianos in Britain – say one instrument for every ten to twenty people. 34
Piano ownership peaked in the early twentieth century, but was soon to decline. Production was seriously affected by the first world war, after which the piano faced intense competition from at least two important sources – the motor car, which made ‘a greater visible show’ than the piano and absorbed a significant proportion of the family budget, and the gramophone, which was a cheaper and easier way of bringing music into the home. 35
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen a wide variety in the design of domestic pianos. Around 1825 the square was undoubtedly the favourite type. Such instruments were more or less straightforwardly developed from their eighteenth-century predecessors, although increased keyboard compass (not necessarily to the full extent of the largest contemporary grands) and heavier stringing had necessitated a heavier construction and the introduction of metal in various ways. Broadwood, for example, began using metal hitchpin plates on squares in 1821, 36 several years before their introduction on grands, and a number of makers began to use metal bars in various ways to strengthen the frame. Babcock’s invention of the cast-iron frame for squares in 1825 has already been mentioned.
Square pianos were made in large numbers. Around 1790 Broadwood was making some 200 a year, but the figure rose to about ten times that number by the 1840s. 37 In 1842 squares accounted for almost two-thirds of Broadwood’s total annual output of pianos (including various grands and uprights). When the firm stopped making them in 1866, the last instrument was numbered 64161 38 (see Fig. 3.4 ). Broadwood had numerous competitors, both large and small, such as Clementi (later Collard) and many other makers, several of whose instruments survive today. Despite its popularity, however, the days of the square piano were numbered: already in the 1840s production was falling sharply and at the Great Exhibition only a handful of squares were seen. Their place had been taken by dozens of uprights from all over Europe, particularly France. Square pianos remained popular in America, however, where large, seven-octave cross-strung squares with cast-iron frames were produced in the second half of the nineteenth century. The success of these models can be gauged by the numbers made by Steinway: in 1866, for example, 97 per cent of the firm’s pianos were squares. Popularity declined sharply in the 1880s, however, in the face of competition from greatly improved uprights, and in 1896 only 1 per cent of Steinway’s output were squares, whereas uprights accounted for 95 per cent of total production. 39
Figure 3.4 Broadwood square piano, 1858. This piano was used by the company until 1925 and was frequently hired out to Buckingham Palace.
The development of the upright piano was a long process which saw a variety of models come and go as makers tried to overcome some fundamental design problems. To begin with, makers did little more than turn a grand on its end, supporting it on a stand, with the strings running vertically upwards from the level of the keyboard. Both del Mela and Friederici made instruments like this in the mid eighteenth century (see chapter 1 ), and they were followed by Stodart, Clementi, Broadwood and others in Europe at the end of the century and at the beginning of the nineteenth (Fig. 3.5 ). The problem with these instruments lay chiefly in their height – in excess of eight feet – although the invention of an action to strike vertically-arranged strings also posed difficulties: consequently, relatively few instruments of this design were ever made. At the beginning of the nineteenth century makers conceived the idea of running the strings of an upturned grand from just above floor level. Either the wrestplank could be placed at the bottom of the instrument, as in the continental ‘giraffe’ pianos which were popular in the early decades of the century, or it could be placed at the top, which made tuning easier. Either way, a new kind of action had to be invented allowing the strings to be struck towards one or other end, not in the middle, on a level with the rest of the key mechanism. The ‘sticker’ action was therefore used in English pianos, in which the hammers are mounted at the top of a long piece of wood attached at the other end to the rest of the action, which is at key level (Figs. 3.6 and 3.7 ). These ‘cabinet’ pianos were more successful than upright grands; Broadwood continued to make them until the 1850s. On continental giraffe pianos the hammer was situated below the level of the keys. 40
Figure 3.5 Upright grand piano by Jones, Round and Co., London, c. 1810.
Figure 3.6 Cabinet piano by Broadwood, London, c. 1825.
Figure 3.7 Action of cabinet piano by Broadwood, London, c. 1825. The hammers can be seen just above the wooden rail at the top of the photograph.
Cabinet and giraffe pianos were sizeable pieces of furniture, and during the entire period of their manufacture makers were struggling to produce smaller pianos with vertical stringing. The ancestors of the modern upright began to be made around 1800. Aside from William Southwell’s attempt to make an upright in 1798 by turning a square piano on its side, 41 the first significant instruments in the line of the modern upright were made in 1800: the ‘Ditanaklasis’, by Matthias Müller (1770–1844) of Vienna, and the ‘Portable Grand Pianoforte’, by John Hawkins (1772–1855) of Philadelphia. Müller’s instrument was about five feet tall, and Hawkins’s was a little shorter. 42 In both instruments the strings run more or less vertically from floor level and both have novel actions to deal with the problem of striking a vertical string. Several other makers began to make instruments of a similar size shortly after the beginning of the century and they acquired a variety of names, ‘cottage piano’ and ‘pianinino’ being two of the most common (Fig. 3.8 ). One of the fundamental problems of these small instruments, as it had been on earlier square pianos, was the length of the bass strings compared with their grand counterparts: shorter bass strings need to be thicker, but overly thick strings produce a ‘clanking’ sound. The solution on squares had always been to use ‘wound’ strings, in which the mass was increased by winding one string around another. The best solution on any keyboard instrument, however, was always to maximise the length of the bass strings: Pape did just this by using a system of cross-stringing in his uprights of 1828.
Figure 3.8 ‘Cottage’ piano by Dettmar … Son, London, c. 1820.
In addition to improvements in stringing, the upright’s action received much attention in the early decades of the nineteenth century: many of these developments are described by Harding in her chapter on the development of the upright piano. 43 Wornum was associated with a number of improvements, not least the ‘tape-check’ action used on its pianos in the 1840s, which had, however, previously been used by others. This action used a short strip of material, or tape, to prevent the hammer rebounding onto the strings. It proved to be very successful and the actions of most modern uprights are based on it.
The history of the upright piano since the 1840s mirrors in so many ways the history of the grand. By the end of the nineteenth century the market leaders of iron-framed, cross-strung uprights were Steinway and Bechstein, although a host of inferior instruments were available at a wide variety of prices. In the twentieth century the Japanese captured a large percentage of markets with their cheaper, but reliable instruments. Within the last two decades, however, even the Japanese have had to give way to other makers from the Far East, particularly South Korea.
As well as squares and uprights, small grand pianos should also be included in this section on domestic instruments. It could be argued that ‘domestic’ grand pianos have been made since about 1800: when the compass of concert instruments extended to five and a half, then six octaves and beyond, makers continued to produce grands with less than the full compass and it was still possible to purchase five-and-a-half-octave grands twenty years after six-octave instruments were first made. In the Great Exhibition a number of the smaller grands exhibited had only six and a half or six and three-quarters octaves and were called ‘short’ or ‘semi’ grand. However, these instruments were still large compared with the ‘baby’ grands of less than five feet in length which were particularly popular in the first quarter of the twentieth century in America, and a little later in Europe.
4
KENNETH HAMILTON
The virtuoso tradition
That night Sylvia took me to a friend’s house, where some Belgian musicians played chamber music … They played Mozart’s G minor piano quartet with Mark Hambourg at the keyboard. Hambourg was a pianist of the old virtuoso school; his percussive tone and his freelance treatment of the work was wholly unadaptable for Mozart. 1
Mark Hambourg’s (1879–1960) cavalier approach to Mozart, as recalled by Artur Rubinstein (1887–1982), typifies one popular image of the Romantic virtuoso pianist: stylistically insensitive, contemptuous of textual fidelity and, to cap it all, too loud – especially in chamber music. Rubinstein heard Hambourg in 1915, but equally harsh criticisms of the ‘virtuoso school’ had been penned at least as far back as the nineteenth-century heydays of Liszt and Thalberg, whose concert triumphs served as models for many later pianists. Even today, some critics seem unable to utter the word ‘virtuosity’ without the appendages ‘empty’ or ‘meretricious’. This contrast between playing that somehow metaphysically exposes the soul of music without drawing attention to technical accomplishment, and playing in which tasteless display is paramount echoes Mozart’s two-hundred-year-old criticism of Clementi as ‘a mere mechanicus ’. 2 Of course, in a fundamental sense this contrast is misleading. No player, however elevated his interpretative ability, can communicate his intentions without a sound instrumental technique (unless he becomes a conductor), and most of the great Romantic pianists were both interpreters and virtuosos of the highest order.
The golden era of Romantic pianism lasted roughly one hundred years, the famous musical duel between Liszt and Thalberg in 1837, and the death of Paderewski (the most highly paid concert pianist of all time) in 1941 being convenient, if slightly arbitrary, markers at either end.
Liszt and Thalberg
The evening of 31 March 1837 witnessed an unusual, and long-awaited, entertainment at the Parisian salon of Princess Christina Belgiojoso, a svelte Italian aristocrat of wide-ranging artistic interests, extensive financial resources and paradoxically left-wing politics, a combination as fashionable then as it is today. Her social coup had been to persuade both Liszt and Thalberg, contenders for the title of ‘greatest pianist in Europe’, to perform at a charity concert in aid of indigent Italian refugees. For over a year the Parisian newspapers had fanned the flames of rivalry between the two musicians, despite the fact that their personal relations were not always unfriendly.
Franz Liszt was the greatest prodigy as a pianist since Mozart. Born in Raiding, Hungary, of humble background, he had studied under Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny and was a veteran of international concert giving by his mid teens. Sigismond Thalberg was, by contrast, an illegitimate scion of the German aristocracy, whose masters were Hummel and Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870). By 1834 he had already toured extensively and been appointed court pianist to the Habsburg emperor in Vienna, but it was the tremendous impression he made on Parisian audiences in 1835–6 that set the seal on his fame. Liszt, though hitherto a resident of Paris, had eloped with the Countess d’Agoult to Switzerland; Thalberg temporarily had the field, if not completely to himself, then at least cleared of his most threatening competitor.
Thalberg’s playing was characterised by an intense cultivation of the legato cantabile style, and his unostentatious manner contrasted vividly with Liszt’s wild rhapsodic virtuosity. The satirical sculptor Jean-Pierre Dantan made comic statuettes of both players, and managed to capture for posterity something of the visual aspect of their performance styles (Figs. 4.1 , 4.2 ). Thalberg’s demeanour is grave and concentrated, nothing about his statuette suggesting any unnecessary movement whatsoever. Only his hands seem at all remarkable, when the viewer notices that each has more than the regulation five fingers. Liszt’s statuette is akin to the depiction of a tornado at the keyboard, all flailing arms and dishevelled hair. He too has a distinctly unconventional number of fingers. When Liszt was unwise enough to express irritation at the amount of hair Dantan had endowed him with, the sculptor made a second statuette with even more, this time completely covering his face. Liszt made no further comments.
Figure 4.1 Statuette of Thalberg by Jean-Pierre Dantan.
Figure 4.2 Statuette of Liszt by Jean-Pierre Dantan.
Although the styles of the two pianists were so vastly different that comparison was scarcely possible, Thalberg’s enormous success with his Fantasy on Rossini’s Moïse (Moses) (1835) prompted a lively debate in the musical world about their respective merits. The Moses Fantasy was a showcase for Thalberg’s so-called ‘three-handed’ writing (Ex. 4.1 ), where a melody in the middle register is decorated by arpeggio figuration in bass and treble, cunningly arranged to give the impression that three hands are indeed needed to perform the whole thing simultaneously. The effect, though adumbrated in the works of Francesco Pollini (1762–1846) and others, had appeared in his first Don Juan Fantasy, performed in Vienna in 1833–4. The audience included a fascinated Czerny, who admitted that even the most experienced pianists present could not initially work out how it was done. 3 Liszt, initially isolated in Switzerland, was worried that Thalberg’s popularity would eclipse his own, and wrote a damning article about Thalberg’s music in the Revue et gazette musicale . This, however, was temperate compared with his private correspondence, where he described the hapless Thalberg as ‘a con-trick’ and ‘a failed nobleman who makes an even more failed artist’. 4 (Evidently Thalberg’s rumoured aristocratic ancestry had also touched a raw nerve.) A newspaper war of words ensued, with the critic François-Joseph Fétis taking Thalberg’s part, but hostilities were brought to an end with Princess Belgiojoso’s charity soirée. Liszt performed his Fantasy on a cavatina from Giovanni Pacini’s Niobe , Thalberg his Moses Fantasy. The pianists acquitted themselves well, and it was finally realised that both were masters in their own domain. Newspaper reviews counselled that Thalberg could benefit from a little of Liszt’s spirit and energy, while Liszt would be improved by the addition of a little of Thalberg’s repose, which might have prevented him banging the pedal so loudly with his foot during the more vigorous passages of his Niobe Fantasy.
Ex. 4.1 Thalberg, Grand Fantasia For The Piano Forte On The Celebrated Prayer in Rossini’s Opera Mosé in Egitto … Op. 33, bars 262–3 [1839].
Liszt soon took Thalberg’s arpeggio effects into his repertory, the G major study from the Grandes études (later titled Vision ) displaying the full panoply of arpeggio writing. A few years later, the Fantasy on Bellini’s Norma would effectively out-Thalberg Thalberg, as he himself admitted. A perusal of Thalberg’s other piano music shows him to have been a competent but unimaginative composer, at his best producing nothing more than an insipid imitation of Chopin (for example the Twelve Studies Op. 26), at his worst producing an atrocity like the Marche funèbre , Op. 56, in which the contrast between the attempted solemnity of the music and the poverty of its invention might at least move an audience to tears of laughter, if not emotion. Although Thalberg’s concert repertory largely consisted of his own music, he was admired for his interpretations of Chopin by no less a musician than Robert Schumann (1810–56). In this, at least, his fine pianistic gifts were married to music of comparable quality. As a teacher he was less active than either Chopin or Liszt. His one eminent pupil, Charles-Wilfred de Bériot (1833–1914) became a professor at the Paris Conservatoire where Enrique Granados (1867–1916) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) were his students. An almost painless way of comparing Thalberg’s compositional skills with that of his contemporaries is by a glance at the gargantuan Hexaméron , a set of variations on ‘Suoni la tromba’ from Bellini’s I puritani , originally intended to be the centrepiece of Princess Belgiojoso’s soirée, but not finished in time. This composite work consists of variations by Thalberg, Liszt, Johann Peter Pixis (1788–1874), Henri Herz (1803–88), Czerny and Chopin, with an introduction, interludes and finale by Liszt rounding off the whole. It was one of Liszt’s favourite war-horses during his tours of the 1840s, usually in an arrangement for piano and orchestra. The piece is occasionally still performed, mostly for its curiosity value, and proves that posterity is, for once, correct in singling out Chopin and Liszt for immortality. Their contributions are embarrassingly better than the miserable clichés trotted out by the other four composers.
The only respect in which Thalberg surpassed Liszt was the extent of his concert tours, which took in North and South America (in 1855–6) as well as Europe. Liszt had also been offered engagements in America with the prospect of earning phenomenal sums of money, but by the 1850s had given up his life as a travelling virtuoso. It was left to Anton Rubinstein (1829–94), and later Ignacy Paderewski to capitalise fully on the opportunities offered in the new world after Thalberg’s successes. Although confined to Europe, Liszt’s tours of the 1840s took in Moscow, St Petersburg and Constantinople as well as all other major capitals. In 1848 he finally gave up his gypsy life to devote himself to composition in Weimar. The ‘Glanz-zeit’ (‘glory-days’) of the 1840s had, however, been enough to establish his reputation as the greatest of Romantic pianists. Liszt still performed fairly frequently after 1848, giving, for example, the first performance of his E piano concerto in 1855, with Berlioz conducting, but most of his subsequent concerts were for charity. Charity concerts were not subjected to the intense criticism that professional performances often elicit, and ‘virtuosity’, Liszt explained to Eduard Hanslick,‘requires youth’. 5
The concert world of the nineteenth century
The success of Liszt and Thalberg would have been impossible without the improvement to piano design achieved during the first few decades of the nineteenth century (detailed in chapter 3 ). The introduction of iron bracing, the double escapement action, and the use of heavier hammers and thicker strings created a greater volume of tone and a more penetrating sonority. The piano of Mozart’s day was incapable of producing enough sound to fill a large hall, let alone opera houses like La Scala, Milan, where Liszt performed in 1837–8. The striving for ever-increasing volume eventually led to the cast-iron frame, popularised by Steinway’s in the 1860s. Only with this could the pianist play as loudly as possible without danger of serious mishap. In old age Liszt recalled the problems he faced during his tours of the 1830s and 1840s:
In those times pianos were built too light. I usually had two grands placed on the platform, so that if one gave out it could be replaced without delaying the recital. Once – I think it was in Vienna – I crippled both grands, and two others had to be brought in during the intermission. 6
No doubt the possibility of witnessing the smashing-up of an expensive piano helped to sell tickets for Liszt’s recitals, but a more potent incentive was the growth of amateur piano playing among the newly emergent middle classes of Europe, nowhere more obvious than in Paris. The bourgeoisie had been the chief beneficiary of the 1830 July revolution, and their predilection for the piano as a domestic instrument had already given work to a remarkable number of instrument makers. According to Fétis, 320 piano makers worked in Paris by 1830, and 139 in the French départements . 7 Although these figures probably represent individual workers rather than companies, they are still astonishingly high, considering that Paris was a city of under one million inhabitants. Fifteen years later, the manufacturers had succeeded in creating a situation where there were an estimated 60,000 pianos in Paris, and around 100,000 persons capable of playing them to some extent. 8 Not surprisingly, pianists flocked to Paris like the elect to the New Jerusalem. By 1839 the city could boast, as either permanent or sporadic residents, Liszt, Chopin, Thalberg, Herz, Pixis, Theodor Döhler, Jacob Rosenhain, Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmermann, Henri Bertini and Charles Alkan, along with a host of other, tyro virtuosos.
The context in which the public heard these master pianists was strikingly different from that of the present-day formal recital. Its respectful audience offers polite applause to the white-tied pianist on his first appearance, and maintains silence until the end of each individual piece, when the applause is then repeated to a formal bow from the performer. Such an event would have seemed bizarrely funereal throughout most of the nineteenth century. To begin with, solo recitals were relatively rare. The term ‘recital’ had first been used by Liszt for a number of his 1840 London concerts. He himself believed that a concert he gave in Rome towards the end of 1839 was the first true solo recital and announced with pride to his friend Princess Belgiojoso that he could say, after Louis XIV, that ‘Le concert c’est moi’ (‘I am the concert!’). 9 This Rome recital was short by modern standards, consisting of a few transcriptions and character pieces, all by Liszt himself. Even after 1840, the solo concert was hardly a normal part of the musical scene. Most concerts were in the nature of variety acts, with a number of performers sharing the stage either solo or in ensemble. When Liszt toured Britain in 1841 he did so as part of a troupe of artists presenting a mixed programme, which included not only his own solo contributions but also comic songs such as ‘Wanted, a governess’. Though Liszt was usually spared the indignity of accompanying ditties like this, he did act as accompanist for other, more elevated, offerings, as well as performing his trademark improvised fantasia on themes suggested by the audience.
Today the art of improvisation is alive and well in the world of the jazz or even the cocktail pianist, but the idea of improvising in public would now strike fear into the heart of many classical pianists, whose attempts at improvisation are usually restricted to covering up particularly catastrophic memory lapses. Liszt was unusual in showcasing his improvisational ability to such an extent, but in the nineteenth century the talent was expected of any decent performer. Czerny, writing in 1836, commented:
It is akin to a crown of distinction for a keyboardist, particularly in private circles at the performance of solo works, if he does not begin directly with the composition itself, but is capable by means of a suitable prelude of preparing the listeners, setting the mood, and also hereby ascertaining the qualities of the pianoforte, perhaps unfamiliar to him, in an appropriate fashion. 10
In more formal public concerts, the soloist often played a modulatory prelude between pieces, a practice that survived well into the twentieth century. As late as 1938, when Josef Hofmann (1876–1957) gave a famous recorded recital in the Casimir Hall, Philadelphia, this art was still alive, Hofmann improvising sometimes reflectively, sometimes humorously between works. At one point the audience laughs at a particularly strident bass octave interjected jokingly before the next piece, Chopin’s fourth Ballade! 11 So much for the awed hush expected of modern audiences before the performance of a masterwork. Even the sacred Beethoven was not immune. Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bülow (1830–94), the first (and, one hopes, the last) pianist to play all five of Beethoven’s late sonatas in a single recital, gave an extempore introduction to each sonata – the one for the ‘Hammerklavier’ consisted of a chordal build-up on the dominant seventh of B ♭ , leading straight into the opening theme.
Pianists were not averse to preluding verbally as well as musically. Pieces were normally announced from the platform, and some performers in smaller halls even milled around the audience between pieces to chat to their friends and to gauge their reaction. Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873) described a particularly theatrical incident at one of Liszt’s concerts in April 1848:
He played the Fantasy on a C. Graff, burst two bass strings, personally fetched a second C. Graff in Walnut wood from the corner and played his Étude. After breaking yet another two strings he loudly informed the public that since it didn’t satisfy him he would play it again. As he began he vehemently threw his gloves and handkerchief on the floor. 12
Audiences, for their part, could be equally vocal. Especially captivating passages were applauded, wherever they appeared in the piece. Bülow proudly told his students that he had always been given a good round of applause for his opening solo in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto. 13 (As this applause presumably drowned out most of the subsequent orchestral tutti, the need for a so-called ‘double’ exposition in many concertos might need to be understood in a new light.) A public largely made up of amateur pianists could usually be relied upon to notice particularly fine displays of technical accomplishment, and to reward them accordingly. To be doubly certain of applause, Bülow also advised that in sections con sisting of, for example, daring leaps, the pianist should always get one or two wrong deliberately. This would ensure that everyone in the audience could have no doubt just how difficult the passage was. After all, what was the point of jumping hurdles that no-one realised were there? 14
A nineteenth-century virtuoso could expect the audience to respond to his choice of repertory as well as to his skill in performing it. In many ways the reaction was similar to that found at present-day pop concerts. Requests would be shouted out for favoured items. One notorious incident concerned a chamber-music recital in Paris in 1841. Charles Hallé was in attendance:
The programme given in the ‘Salle du Conservatoire’ contained the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, to be played by Liszt and Massart, a celebrated and much esteemed violinist. Massart was just commencing the first bar of the introduction when a voice from the audience cried out ‘Robert le Diable!!’ At that time Liszt had composed a very brilliant fantasy on themes from that opera, and played it always with immense success. The call was taken up by other voices, and in a moment the cries of ‘Robert le Diable!’‘Robert le Diable!’ drowned the tones of the violin. Liszt rose, bowed, and said ‘Je suis toujours l’humble serviteur du public, mais est-ce qu’on désire la fantaisie avant ou après la Sonate?’ [‘I am always the humble servant of the public, but do you want the fantasy before or after the sonata?’] Renewed cries of ‘Robert, Robert!’ were the answer upon which Liszt turned half round to poor Massart and dismissed him with a wave of the hand, without a syllable of excuse or regret. He did play the fantasy magnificently, rousing the public to a frenzy of enthusiasm, then called Massart out of his retreat, and we had the ‘Kreutzer’, which somehow no longer seemed in its right place. 15
This was not an isolated demonstration. A little later Liszt was again forced to play the Fantasy on Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable by an enthusiastic audience before he commenced a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto conducted by Hector Berlioz (1803–69). Richard Wagner (1813–83), who was then in Paris as a correspondent for a German newspaper, wrote that one day Liszt would no doubt be expected to play his fantasy on the Devil before St Peter and the assembled company of angels – as his very last performance. 16
If Liszt was the pioneer of the solo recital, it was the next generation of pianists that established it in the more extensive form familiar today. Of particular significance was Anton Rubinstein, one of the nineteenth century’s greatest pianists and a prolific composer. His ‘historical recitals’, which took in music from the late renaissance to his own time, served as a template for twentieth-century pianists, many of whom retain a fondness for programmes which traverse a few hundred years of music in chronological order. The main difference is the sheer length of the recital. Rubinstein, Bülow, Busoni, Arthur Friedheim (1859–1932) and others thought nothing of performing for nearly three hours in a single evening. Bülow’s programme of the last five Beethoven sonatas, mentioned above, also had an encore – the ‘Appassionata’!
Undoubtedly, the fact that playing from memory was not absolutely de rigueur for these pianists allowed them to tackle longer programmes with greater confidence. Bülow frequently played from music, especially in his last years, and Rubinstein, whose ability to play from memory was legendary, also suffered legendary memory lapses. In any case, even when they had the score in front of them, many Romantic pianists did not feel the need to pay slavish attention to it, for the golden era of the piano was also the era of the composer–virtuoso.
The pianist as composer
A highly significant feature of pianism in the Romantic era is that virtually all pianists were composers as well as performers. Of course, even today there are few pianists who do not have some attempts at composition hidden in their attic, but for most of the Romantic virtuosos compositional activity was an integral part of pianism. The most extreme example is Chopin, who rarely performed in public, and when he did almost always played nothing but his own music. His reputation as one of the greatest of pianists is inseparably linked with his reputation as a composer. For Liszt and Thalberg the situation was similar – we have already mentioned that Liszt’s first solo ‘recital’ was entirely made up of his own original pieces or arrangements. As the nineteenth century progressed, the balance between the pianist as composer and the pianist as interpretative artist changed somewhat. The recital programmes of Paderewski or Hofmann were largely made up of other composers’ music. Nevertheless, Paderewski composed his (remarkably fine) piano concerto chiefly for his own performance, while few of Hofmann’s concerts were complete without one of his own character pieces, such as Kaleidoscope , thrown in as an encore.
In some respects, these performers’ roles as composers crossed over into their interpretations of other repertory. Anton Rubinstein advised his piano students to learn a piece of music exactly as the composer wrote it. If, after having mastered the work, the student thought that some improvements could be made, then he should feel free to make them. The result of this approach can be seen in such publications as Ferruccio Busoni’s (1866–1924) fascinating edition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, where the last four variations are rewritten as a free fantasy in a pianistic style that owes far more to Busoni than to Bach. The final return of the theme is also rearranged, shorn of ornamentation and played forcefully in block chords (Exx. 4.2 , 4.3 ). For Busoni, this was a more fitting use of the powers of the nine-foot grand piano than Bach’s delicate conception.
Ex. 4.2 J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, final aria, bars 1–4.
Ex. 4.3 Busoni’s arrangement of Ex. 4.2.
Sergey Rachmaninoff’s (1873–1943) magnificent recording of Chopin’s B minor sonata also makes important changes to the original text, most notably the way in which he treats the Funeral March – a long crescendo followed by a decrescendo (with the Trio an interlude in the middle). This derives from Anton Rubinstein’s interpretation of the piece and ignores Chopin’s own dynamic indications. Such reinterpretations of dynamics stop short of Busoni’s wholesale recomposition in the Goldberg Variations, but go considerably further than most pianists nowadays in imposing a different climactic structure upon the music. Very few of the Romantic pianists who recorded the Funeral March could resist some form of reinterpretation. Raoul Pugno (1852–1914, a pupil of Chopin’s pupil Mathais) in his 1903 recording gives a similar interpretation to that of Rachmaninoff. Paderewski, though more faithful to Chopin’s dynamics, cannot resist rewriting the bass in the recapitulation of the march, producing an effect akin to the tolling of a deep bell – a wonderful idea, even if it does have nothing to do with Chopin.
Pieces like the Funeral March, with an ostinato rhythm, were particular targets for rewriting. Busoni was one of the most inventive of the usual suspects. His piano roll of Chopin’s ‘raindrop’ Prelude treats the central section as one long, gloomy crescendo, while in the A Polonaise (according to the edition of his pupil Guido Agosti) he rewrote the central part of the trio, with its famous octave bass, to produce a continuous build up of sonority rather than the two separate crescendos indicated by Chopin. He also added octaves in the middle, where Chopin had unaccountably left them out. Busoni was certainly influenced in this by Liszt’s octave crescendo in Funérailles , and he transferred the dynamic structure of the Liszt piece onto the similar passage of the Chopin. Ironically, as this section of Liszt’s Funérailles was itself inspired by Chopin’s A Polonaise, we have here a peculiar example of anachronistic cross-fertilisation, prompted by Busoni’s desire to raise the rafters with his, no doubt very impressive, octaves.
These alterations to Chopin and Bach are prime examples of the intermingling of performance and composition in the Romantic era. This musical approach was, of course, one that existed long before the first generation of Romantic pianists. In fact, it is the musical culture of the late twentieth century, with its emphasis on textual fidelity, and on the relegation of the performer’s role to that of a sometimes strait-jacketed interpreter – all underpinned by the division, in music conservatories and colleges, of students into separate composition and performance streams – that constitutes a radical break with previous eras of music.
A large part of the responsibility for this lies with the growth of a ‘standard’ repertory of concert music that pianists, and other performers, are now required to master. Most of this music is at least one hundred years old, and considered a distinct category from contemporary music, which occupies an isolated, and often less popular, niche. The performance of a pianist’s own compositions now seems rather inappropriate, perhaps even arrogant, in the same programme as the masterpieces of the past. Yet when Liszt played Schumann, for example, he was performing contemporary music beside which his own compositions took their natural place. The general style in which he played his own compositions, and those of other composers with whom he had a particular connection, was passed to two generations of students, the younger of which helped to bring Romantic pianists into the recording age. Only Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915) had a comparable number of distinguished pupils and it is to the legacy of Liszt and Leschetizky that we must look for definite information on Romantic performance styles.
How they played
Leschetizky, like Liszt, was a pupil of Czerny. His students included Hambourg, Ignacy Friedman (1882–1948), Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963), and Paderewski. Although primarily a gifted teacher, Leschetizky’s own playing can be heard on piano rolls, which feature, among other things, Mozart’s C minor Fantasy K475 and Chopin’s D Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2.
Despite the much-discussed inadequacy of the piano roll recording method, we can gain from these performances a fairly good idea of Leschetizky’s own style of playing. The Mozart is treated in a much more respectful manner than Rubinstein’s description of Hambourg, reminding us that Leschetizky also taught the arch-classicist Artur Schnabel (1882–1951), but the Chopin displays the two prime techniques often categorised as late-Romantic ‘mannerisms’, namely frequent arpeggiation of chords and the asynchronisation of bass and treble. In other words, Leschetizky, the Czerny pupil, played in a left-hand-before-right style easily as extensive as that of his most successful student Paderewski. Leschetizky probably thought that this style was quite appropriate to Chopin, for he had been particularly impressed by what seems to have been a similar approach in the playing of the Chopin pupil Julius Schulhoff (1825–98). He described the impact of hearing Schulhoff in the 1850s in effusive terms:
That melody standing out in bold relief, that wonderful sonority – all this must be due to a new and entirely different touch. And that cantabile, a legato such as I had not dreamed possible on the piano, a human voice rising above the sustaining harmonies! I could hear the shepherd sing, and see him. 17
This obsession with a singing tone on the piano was a theme of much nineteenth-century pedagogical writing and no doubt the chief stimulus for what Percy Grainger (1882–1961) described as a ‘harped’ or highly arpeggiated piano style.
The most detailed attempt to notate this manner of playing is Grainger’s own Rosenkavalier ramble , where the individual voicing of each chord, and the speed of the spread, is meticulously indicated (Ex. 4.4 ). Romantic pianists, however, tended to spread chords whether indicated or not, especially in lyrical works. If we compare modern performances of Chopin’s E Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, or Schubert’s A Impromptu with the recordings by Paderewski, we hear two completely different sound worlds. Paderewski arpeggiated chords so frequently that a chord played together was almost a special effect. Moreover, in the nocturne virtually every left hand bass note is played before the melody note with which, according to the notation, it ought to synchronise. The effect is not only to emphasise the melody (for no other note is thus struck simultaneously with it) but also to give it a greater singing quality, for the piano strings are already resonating with the pedalled bass note, providing a cushion of sound on which to place the tune. Although Paderewski is an extreme example of this style of playing it was used frequently by many pianists at the turn of the century, and probably long before. The performance of Chopin’s Op. 9 No. 2 recorded by Vladimir de Pachmann (1848–1933) is very similar to Paderewski’s. Interestingly, when Paderewski was playing under par, his chief worry was not wrong notes, of which there were almost enough to make another piece, but that he could not produce a singing tone.
Ex. 4.4 Grainger, Rosenkavalier ramble , bars 1–6.
From the 1830s onwards a large part of the pianist’s repertory had consisted of opera or song transcriptions, encouraging direct imitation of vocal models in the production of piano tone. In 1853 Friedrich Wieck, whose daughter Clara (1819–96) had already established herself as one of the finest nineteenth-century pianists, entitled his magnum opus on piano teaching Piano and song , while Sigismund Thalberg published The art of singing applied to the piano around the same time. This consisted of a collection of transcriptions prefaced by a short dissertation on cantabile playing, the importance of which was ringingly endorsed in a preface, which included the comment that ‘it is by the force of melody, and not of harmony, that a work endures successfully through all ages’. 18 Notwithstanding Artur Rubinstein’s denigration of Hambourg’s ‘percussive’ touch, an attention to tonal beauty and melodic projection is one of the few things common to all Romantic pianists who have left recordings.
Although Leschetizky did at least leave an impression of his playing on piano rolls, Fryderyk Chopin died long before that method or Edison’s cylinder recording was available. In contrast to Liszt, we do not even have any recordings by distinguished pupils. Chopin’s most promising student, Karl Filtsch (1830–45), died at a tragically young age, and it was left to students like Karol Mikuli and Georges Mathias to transmit what they remembered of Chopin’s teaching to pianists such as Raoul Koczalski and Pugno, who then transferred some of their art to disc. As far as direct information on Chopin’s teaching and performing is concerned, the best present-day compendium is Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s indispensable Chopin: pianist and teacher (Cambridge, 1986) which collects together the most important sources.
It is a moot point whether the type of playing favoured by Schulhoff – which so impressed Leschetizky and became the basis of his style – was actually based on Chopin’s teaching, or was an independent development. When Schulhoff came to Weimar in the 1850s to perform before Liszt and his students, William Mason (1829–1908) remarked on his beautiful cantabile tone, adding that the basic sound was much more attractive than Liszt’s. Despite this, he maintained that Liszt’s playing was of an infinitely superior intellectual and emotional range. 19 We might assume from this that Liszt’s approach to cantabile tone, and thus his use of arpeggiation, was different from Schulhoff’s. There seems nevertheless to be no way of proving this one way or the other, short of dabbling in spiritualism and asking the question directly.
Liszt’s playing was never recorded – rumours of an Edison cylinder that occasionally crop up are surely without foundation – but his art lives on in his music for piano, which displays the most acute and inventive ear for keyboard sonority of any Romantic composer. In this he was approached only by Chopin, who nevertheless rarely strove for the orchestral effects constantly suggested by Liszt’s writing. Initially inspired by the example of Paganini on the violin, Liszt freed virtuoso writing from an over-reliance on brilliant finger-work. His own technique, and his music, united what had hitherto been specialities of individual pianists: the octaves of Alexander Dreyschock (1818–69) (who reputedly played the left hand of Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ Study in octaves, but found a scale in single notes something of a trial); the solo left-hand writing of Theodor Döhler (seen especially in the early version of Liszt’s Petrarch sonnet 104 ); the wide accompaniment stretches of Adolf Henselt (1814–89); and the legato arpeggio style of Thalberg. To this core he added a fondness for wide leaps in both hands which far surpass anything found in the music of Henri Herz. All the elements are found in the twelve Transcendental studies of 1837–51, but are seen in perhaps their most extravagant form in Reminiscences de Don Juan (1841), described quite aptly by Busoni as a pianistic summit. However astounding Liszt’s technical capabilities were, they would now be only of historical interest had they not been wedded to a musical imagination of the highest order. Now that more of his music has become part of the standard repertory than ever before, it has become easier to evaluate the astonishing range of his gifts both as a pianist and composer.
Liszt’s work as a teacher of the next two generations of pianists ensured his continued influence on pianism well into the twentieth century. In addition to the redoubtable Hans von Bülow, the first wave of Liszt students in the 1850s included Carl Tausig (1841–71), William Mason and Karl Klindworth (1830–1916). All died too early to leave recordings, but most of the second generation of students – Emil Sauer, Alexander Siloti, Arthur Friedheim, Eugène d’Albert, Moriz Rosenthal, Frederic Lamond, Bernhard Stavenhagen, Jószef Weisz, Arthur de Greef, Conrad Ansorge and José Vianna da Motta among them – can be heard on record. Their playing all demonstrates, to varying degrees, the typically Romantic traits of frequent chordal arpeggiation and asynchronisation of the hands. Although the individuality of these players is at least as marked as that which they have in common, these familiar features of turn of the century pianism – found also in the playing of most of the Leschetizky students mentioned towards the beginning of this section – must surely reflect something of Liszt’s approach to the keyboard.
There has rightly been much discussion over whether the playing of a pupil can tell us much about the playing of a teacher (the problem of Schulhoff, for example, was mentioned above). Pianists are often exaggeratedly proud of their pedagogical pedigrees – as if musical talent were passed on by apostolic succession – and all of Liszt’s best pupils had gone beyond the stage of thoughtless imitation. Moreover, with a pianist like Rosenthal, whose teachers included Mikuli, Liszt and Rubinstein, the question of what he learned from whom becomes ludicrously complicated. It does, however, appear to me that it is possible, by listening to a selection of recordings of Liszt’s pupils, to gain a good idea of the broad stylistic range within which he expected most piano music, including his own, to be interpreted. This is especially significant because so many features of the playing of Liszt’s pupils differ from performances today. With a pupil like Arthur Friedheim, who admired Liszt to the point of idolisation, we may hear closer echoes of Liszt’s own playing, although the exact extent of these must always remain a matter of opinion. 20
Fortunately we also have a large amount of written information on Liszt’s playing and teaching, the main source being Lina Ramann’s Liszt-Pädagogium , reprinted some time ago with an excellent introduction by Alfred Brendel, in addition to the diaries of August Göllerich, and memoirs by other Liszt students such as Carl Lachmund, Lamond and Sauer. 21 One of the most moving of all sources is Frederic Lamond’s radio broadcast from the 1940s of his memories of Liszt’s teaching. Lamond’s awe and admiration for Liszt are still evident in his voice after nearly sixty years.‘He could be very strict!’
Taken together, the written sources show that Liszt’s playing changed considerably in his old age from that of his virtuoso years. Gone were the wild gestures, and many of the extensive alterations to the score. Beethoven and Chopin, in particular, were regarded as sacrosanct, and interpreted with a keen fidelity. Liszt had given the first public performance of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata in 1836. According to Berlioz he played it exactly as written – unusual enough in those days to be remarked upon. Hans von Bülow’s Beethoven edition shows that he did, in fact, make some minor alterations to the last page, but there can be little doubt that Liszt pioneered the art of faithfully interpreting masterworks at the same time as he was giving demonstrations of the art of Romantic exaggeration. The contradictions were fundamental to the man. Although Arthur Friedheim was notoriously unhappy with his recordings, if we listen to his first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, we do indeed hear a remarkably simple, straightforward, even ‘modern’ performance, in contrast to Paderewski’s indulgent Romanticism in the same piece. Perhaps Friedheim is passing down something of Liszt’s teaching here? (We know that Liszt used to make fun of Anton Rubinstein’s wayward performance of the ‘Moonlight’.) Friedheim’s added turns and ornaments in his piano roll of Liszt’s Harmonies du soir also sound strikingly similar to descriptions of Liszt’s own treatment of his more lyrical works. A full discussion of this topic would require a book on its own, but as suggested above, by critical listening to the recordings of Liszt’s pupils, we can at the very least get some general idea of a Liszt style.
If this stylistic ambit does indeed seem wide – from the dash of d’Albert to the aristocratic poise of Sauer – it is because in the final analysis variety and individuality were the chief hallmarks of Romantic pianism. The virtuoso tradition emphasised the uniqueness of the interpreter along with that of the composition, and it could be argued that the difference between the styles of, say, Paderewski and Hofmann was almost as great as the differences between the separate pieces on their programme. The concert world of today may have lost some of the more questionable fits of caprice exhibited by the great virtuosos of the past – Vladimir de Pachmann’s spectacular rallentando at the end of Chopin’s C ♯ minor Waltz sounds as if the audience might die of old age before he gets to the final note – but in consequence it has also made a sacrifice of interest, spontaneity and sheer panache.