Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

114 ❧ chapter eleven
The touch of these instruments is as light as that of a clavichord and consid-
erably less reliable. The tone is transparent, to the point of brittleness. There
is nothing massed for thickness, and the basses and low-lying chords are clear.
The sound throughout is fragile and all-too-easily forced if the player is insen-
sitive or incautious. But the very forcing of sound is of telling effect in those
sforzatos that can sound like overblown wind instruments or like the accents of
emphatic speech. At various levels of volume, the tone can change its color so
that a forte has a totally different overtone content from [that on] a piano, and
a pianissimo can achieve a breathy whisper.
Heard behind closed doors, the early piano has a tendency to sound like a
harpsichord. (Stravinsky, who happened to be present at my fi rst performance
on a reconstructed early piano of a Mozart concerto, told me he felt it had a
double nature, like a centaur—harpsichord in the bass, piano in the treble).
Some examples of changes in tone color, and of the effects of a sforzato can
be heard in the following excerpts from my recording of some twenty years ago
of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17 in G (K. 453).
[Music]
In fact, the transition from the harpsichord to the piano was so gradual, espe-
cially that from the double unison strings of the harpsichord to those of the
early piano, both in the evolution of a specifi c piano sound and in the progres-
sive disappearance of the harpsichord, that it all took place without anyone
really realizing what had happened.
On the basis of stylistic evidence alone, it is unwise to attempt to distinguish
between late harpsichord music and early piano music. For example, the key-
board music of Johann Schobert, which often looks like pure idiomatic piano
music, is known to have been conceived exclusively for the harpsichord. The
title pages devised by publishers confuse the issue, even down to the end of
Beethoven’s life, by seeking to augment sales by designating both harpsichord
and piano, even in connection with music for which the harpsichord, as in opus
111, can hardly be regarded as a serious vehicle. In general, the evidence indi-
cates that after about 1770, both Haydn and Mozart, when they could obtain
them, used pianos rather than harpsichords in their public performances.
The early piano was never standardized, nor did it ever achieve a defi nitive
statement of any kind. The forces that brought it into being were in a con-
stant state of fl ux, and methods of construction continually in a state of experi-
ment and transition. Certain schools of harpsichord building had achieved a
vast accumulation of experience and stability, especially the Franco-Flemish,
for example, and one can use or copy many old harpsichords with consid-
erable assurance that these makers really knew what they were doing. The
workshops of Augsburg and Viennese piano makers abounded in miracles of
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