wrote were not the same as the pianos that are generally used today in performing their
music.
One example is the last piano owned by Johannes Brahms. The instrument was made in
1868 by the Streicher firm which was run by the descendants of the great pioneer
eighteenth-century maker Johann Andreas Stein. It was given by the Streicher firm to
Brahms in 1873 and was kept and used by him for composition until his death in 1897.
The piano was apparently destroyed during the Second World War. Piano scholar Edwin
Good (1986) has examined a very similar Streicher piano made in 1870 with the aim of
finding out more about Brahms’s instrument. This 1870 Streicher has leather, not felt,
hammers, a rather light metal frame with just two tension bars and a range of just seven
octaves (four notes short of the modern range). It was straight strung (rather than cross
strung) and had a rather light Viennese action (a more robust version of the kind created a
century earlier by Stein).
Edwin Good observes (page 201): ‘The tone, especially in the bass, is open, has
relatively strong higher partials than a Steinway would have and gives a somewhat
distinct, though not hard, sound.’ He continues: ‘To hear Brahms’s music on an
instrument like the Streicher is to realize that the thick textures we associate with his
work, the sometimes muddy chords in the bass and the occasionally woolly sonorities
come cleaner and clearer on a lighter, straight-strung piano. Those textures, then, are not
a fault of Brahms’s piano composition. To be sure, any sensitive pianist can avoid
making Brahms sound murky on a modern piano. The point is that a modern pianist must
strive to avoid that effect, must work at lightening the dark colors where Brahms himself,
playing his Streicher, did not have to work at it.’
The revival of such later nineteenth century pianos has not been pursued to anywhere
near the extent seen in the classical fortepiano, but pianist Joerg Demus has issued a disc
of Brahms works performed on pianos of his day.
Edwin Good (1986) also describes an 1894 piano made by Erard of Paris. This
instrument is straight-strung (not cross-strung), has only seven octaves, and uses iron
bracing but not a full frame. He continues (at page 216): ‘[While] some Erards were the
equal in volume and richness of Steinways and Bechsteins, the ‘typical’ Erard sound was
lighter than that of its competitors.’ He further continues: ‘though Claude Debussy
preferred the Bechstein, Maurice Ravel liked the glossy sound of the Erard.’
Thus, even for major composers of the first part of the twentieth century, the possibility
exists that performers might profitably experiment with what would count as authentic
pianos, in light of the particular composer’s own musical preferences. Pianist
Gwendoline Mok has made commercial recordings of Ravel’s music on an 1875 Erard
piano.
INTERPRETATIVE EDITIONS