116 ❧ chapter eleven
Here is part of my recording of the Mozart C-major Fantasy (K. 394). The
instrument, as in my other example, is a modern reconstruction, a mongrel,
but it serves to demonstrate characteristics and possibilities that are present
in one early piano or another. And above all, it permits a fairly concentrated
demonstration of much that I learned from my experience with early pianos.
[Music]
For the solo works and for the piano concertos of Mozart, I feel that there
are good chances of successfully applying to a good modern piano the les-
sons learned from the early piano. But for the chamber music, other prob-
lems arise, especially in trios and violin sonatas where the sound of the modern
piano steadfastly refuses to mix with that of stringed instruments. For the mod-
ern piano has forgotten that it was once a stringed instrument itself. This is
perhaps the one most unfortunate feature of its debatable and now arrested
evolution. With unparalleled sensibility, but also with unsurpassed brutality,
our century has treated it as a kind of carillon or glockenspiel.
Artur Schnabel, who hated the harpsichord and who never lost an opportu-
nity to tell me I could make a much better musical contribution at the piano,
once outlined to me in the interval of a concert to which he came out of sheer
politeness, what he considered an absurd fantasy concerning future genera-
tions of purist keyboard players. According to him, they would not only play
harpsichord music on the harpsichord, but they would play Mozart on a Mozart
piano, Beethoven on another, Schubert and Schumann on still another, and so
on. Little did he know that his whimsical fantasy was indeed downright proph-
ecy. Today recording companies vie with each other in putting out Clementi on
Clementis, Beethoven on Broadwood or Streicher, Schubert on Graf, Chopin
on Pleyel, and so on, all of it sounding more or less as the engineers choose to
record it, or as the consumer chooses to regulate the dials.
Much more useful is the preservation and restoration in museums and pri-
vate collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pianos themselves. The
study and revival of the nineteenth-century piano is about to begin in earnest.
Much of it will be pursued with the same pedantry and foolishness and lack
of discrimination that has been applied to keyboard instruments of the previ-
ous century. But many really valuable contributions will doubtless be made. A
better history of piano building than has hitherto been written can easily be
imagined. A history of piano playing from about 1789 to about 1850 can be
abundantly documented from the diverse and highly articulate keyboard trea-
tises published during this period, from fi rsthand accounts of performances,
and from collections with instruments and iconography. But what is most
needed is a reexamination by musicians and builders of the tendencies that
went to create the modern piano, and better education for pianists concerning
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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