At a very early period after the piano came into common use, musicians began to recognize the necessity of minimizing its characteristic defect by modifying their manner of writing. They soon discovered that if the tones would not sustain themselves, they must be struck over and over again as rapidly as possible: repetition must counteract evanescence. An early application of this principle is the use, by Bach and other clavichordists, of trills, mordants, and other ornaments as a means of keeping long melody-notes audible. A more important one is the breaking up of chords into figures of short notes in the accompaniments of Haydn and Mozart, a device which soon became so indispensable that a glance at any modern piano score will discover hundreds of such groups of short notes, which are nothing but chords played piecemeal in order to make them sound.
(a) MOZART: Piano Sonata, A-major.
(b) BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 1.
(c) SCHUBERT: Fantasia, Op. 15.