History of the pianoforte and pianoforte players

by Oskar Bie

Streicher’s Pianoforte and Concert Saloon. After the lithograph of Lahn-Sandmann.

“I must now,” writes Mozart, “begin at once with Stein’s pianoforte. Before I saw anything of Stein’s work I liked Spath’s best; but now I must give the preference to Stein’s, for they damp much better than the Regensburg instruments. If I strike hard, whether I let the fingers lie on the keys or lift them up, the sound is over and done with the very instant I lift my hand. I may come down on the keys as I like, the tone will always be the same; it never hangs fire; it doesn’t get weaker, or grow stronger, or stay on; it’s just all one. It’s true you can’t get a pianoforte like that under three hundred florins, but the trouble and diligence he shows is not to be repaid. His instruments have this point that makes them better than others: they are made with an escapement which there isn’t a man in a thousand knows anything of; and without this it is just impossible for a pianoforte to help blocking or sounding again. His hammers, when the piano is played, fall back again the very moment they touch the strings, whether you hold the key down or let it go. When he has finished a piano, so he says, he sits down to it and tests all kinds of passages, runs and leaps, and works and scrapes until the piano’ll do anything; for he works only for the good of music, and not his own merely, or he would be done long before. He often says: ‘If I myself didn’t love music so passionately, or couldn’t do a little on the piano, I should long ago have lost all patience in my work; but I’m just a lover of instruments which don’t try the player and will last.’ His pianos do last, too. He guarantees that the sounding-board won’t warp or break. When he has got a sounding-board ready for a piano, he puts it in the air, rain, snow, sun, or any beastly thing, to warp it, and then he glues crossbars in until it is strong and firm. He’s quite glad when it warps, for you’re about certain nothing more can happen to it. He often cuts into it himself, and glues it again, and so makes it strong. He has three of these pianos ready, and I have played to-day on them for the first time.

“The machine which you move with the knee is also made better by him than by others. I scarcely touch it, when off it goes; and as soon as I take my knee the least bit away, you can’t hear the slightest after-sound.”

George Frederick Handel.
Engraved by Thomson.

We see from this letter of Mozart’s that in 1777 the “escapement,” which lets the hammers fall back immediately after the strings are struck, was as yet by no means universal, but that the pedal, which was pressed at the side by the knee and raised the dampers, was already a usual feature. What numberless small modifications and improvements must have been introduced before the developed mechanism exhibited by the key-levers, the hammers, the dampers, the escapements, the pedals, the sounding-boards, could have advanced to the self-evident simplicity which made possible the meteoric splendours of piano-technique about the middle of this century! Prices for pianos were still fairly high. The younger Ruckers obtained three thousand francs for a clavier, but it had painted on it those rich pictures with which the spinet, when it began to take its place among household furniture, was so captivatingly adorned. We hear also that the Parisian pianos with leather-plectrums (jeu de buffle) fetched, in their finest specimens, as much as three thousand francs. A Wagner clavicymbal from Dresden, which was a so-called Deckenclavier, in which the tone could be softened or strengthened by fan-shaped dislocations of the inner lid, fetched six hundred and sixty thalers; and Frederick the Great actually gave seven hundred thalers to Silbermann for the first hammer-claviers. If Stein, with his three hundred florins, seems to fall off from this price, we must remember the difference in the purchasing power of money. But, to-day, two thousand marks for a good pianoforte is cheap in comparison with the prices of those days. It is only through the growth of popularity that the greater demand and the lower price have become possible.

I turn to the works themselves. Our step falls very heavy, and our judgment may easily be unduly harsh, when we have just parted with old Bach. This meeting with genius, which we celebrate in every bar—this earnest greatness which meets us at every turn, has made us very exacting in our demands for the higher beauty. In the first moment the “Galant” School seems to us a school of pigmies, until the sight has again adjusted itself, and the vision has again become awake to the miniature beauties of this smaller art. A good transition is provided by Handel, for, against Handel, Philip Emanuel Bach appears an astonishing genius.

The tendency of the public, to group celebrities in pairs, has brought not merely Goethe and Schiller, but Bach and Handel, into juxtaposition. How little the scholarly hermit had in common with the grandiose world-musician—who first followed the wise prescription, glory in Italy, gain in England—would be seen from a comparison of their clavier-writings, which are a fair average of their general work. Handel is the negation of the classic. He gets his results from materials close at hand; brings them into plastic clearness, and writes from the point of view of the vulgar herd; he is never troubled by an exacting inward conception, or overwhelmed by his own imagination, as are all true classic artists.[101]