even those of the Stradivariuss and Guaneris) have been lengthened, making the strings
tauter; the bows are used today with hairs considerably more tight as well. The sound is a
good deal more brilliant, fatter, and more penetrating. The piano, in turn, has become
louder, richer, mushier in sound, and, above all, less wiry and metallic. This change
makes nonsense out of all those passages in eighteenth-century music where the violin
and the piano play the same melody in thirds, with the violin below the piano. Both the
piano and the violin are now louder, but the piano is less piercing, the violin more.
Violinists today have to make an effort of self-sacrifice to allow the piano to sing out
softly. The thinner sound of the violin in Haydn’s day blended more easily with the
metallic sonority of the contemporary piano and made it possible for each to accompany
the other without strain.’
The una corda pedal is also called the soft pedal. On grand pianos, both modern and
historical, it shifts the action sideways, so that the hammers do not strike every string of a
note. There were normally three strings except in the lower range.
On the modern piano the soft pedal can only reduce the number of strings struck from
three to two, whereas the pianos of the classical era were more flexible, permitting the
player to select whether the hammers would strike three strings, two, or just one. The
very term ‘una corda’, Italian for ‘one string’, is thus an anachronism as applied to
modern pianos.
In his Sonata in A major opus 101 of 1816 Beethoven marks the beginning of the third
movement with the words ‘Mit einer Saite’, German for ‘on one string’. At the end of
this movement there is a passage that forms a continuous transition to the following
movement. Here Beethoven writes ‘Nach under nach mehrere Saite’, ‘gradually more
strings’.
More elaborate instructions are given by Beethoven in the second movement of his Piano
Concerto no. 4 in G major opus 58. During a long crescendo trill at the start of the
cadenza there appear the words ‘due e poi tre corde’, Italian for ‘two and then three
strings’. Up to this point the movement has been played una corda. The effect is
reversed on a long decrescendo trill at the end of the cadenza, ‘due poi una corda’. The
una corda on [the type of piano for which Beethoven wrote the concerto] is hauntingly
beautiful and evocative. To shift the action from the una corda position to the full tre
corde position produces only a slight increase in volume: what is exciting is the
unfolding of the timbre of the instrument.
Not all performers attempt to adapt the older music to the modern instruments.
Participants in the authentic performance movement have constructed new copies of the
old instruments and have used them, or sometimes restored originals, in performance.
This form of musical exploration has been widely pursued for the music of the classical
era and has provided important new insights into the interpretation of this music.
Although most of the scholarly focus on differences in pianos covers the classical era it is
also true that even in the romantic era, and later, the pianos for which the great composers