Chapter Eleven

The Early Piano (Broadcast

on BBC Radio 3, Music Weekly,

September 23, 1973)

There has always existed, and still exists, a school of harpsichord fanatics who
regard the piano as an archenemy. This is not my feeling. For me there is too
much in common between good harpsichord playing and good piano play-
ing, even though the means and techniques of execution have in many ways
been rendered almost irreconcilable by the emergence of the modern piano.
And it is unthinkable that I should ever regard as an enemy the instrument
for which the Schubert Impromptus, the Chopin Preludes, the Schumann
Kreisleriana, and the Années de pèlerinage of Liszt were written. But its later
development and the sclerosis that presently affl icts it are not exactly what I
would have wished.
My fi rst working experience with an early piano was with an Anton Walter
piano of Mozart’s time, now in the Germanisches [National] Museum in
Nürnberg. It resembles the one in the Mozart house in Salzburg and one in
the Vienna collection. This latter instrument, on which I have always worked
and played, dates from 1785. We will now hear some fragments of the com-
posite Mozart Sonata in F major (K. 533 and K. 494) played on it by Paul
Badura-Skoda.
[Music]
Although as we hear it, this recording does not fully convey the character of
the instrument as I know it, nor does it reveal all its possibilities of color and
shading, it is the best example I have been able to fi nd of Mozart recorded on
a contemporary instrument.
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