The Eighteenth-Century Fortepiano Grand and Its Patrons

Eva Badura-Skoda

Description

In the late 17th century, Italian musician and inventor Bartolomeo Cristofori developed a new musical instrument—his cembalo che fa il piano e forte, which allowed keyboard players flexible dynamic gradation. This innovation, which came to be known as the hammer-harpsichord or fortepiano grand, was slow to catch on in musical circles. However, as renowned piano historian Eva Badura-Skoda demonstrates, the instrument inspired new keyboard techniques and performance practices and was eagerly adopted by virtuosos of the age, including Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Clementi, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Presenting a rich array of archival evidence, Badura-Skoda traces the construction and use of the fortepiano grand across the musical cultures of 18th-century Europe, providing a valuable resource for music historians, organologists, and performers.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Bartolomeo Cristofori
2. Giving Cristofori's nuovo cimbalo a Name: Terminology Problems throughout the Eighteenth Century
3. Domenico Scarlatti
4. New inventions in Germany, Pantalone Instruments, and Gottfried Silbermann
5. Johann Sebastian Bach and the "Piano et Forte"
6. Pianoforte Builders in Germany around 1750
7. The Generation of Bach's Older Sons
8. From Alberti, Platti, and Rutini to Eckard and the Younger Sons of Bach
9. Developments in the Second Half of the Century: Johann Andreas Stein and Sébastien Erard
10. Joseph Haydn-Wenzel and Johann Schantz, Young Mozart and Nannette Stein
11. Anton Walter and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
12. From Broadwood, Merlin, and Clementi to Beethoven
Epilogue
Appendix: Scipione Maffei's Article of 1711
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Technique musicale
• Technique musicale
• Techniques musicales
• Musical Instruments
• MUSIC
• Musical instrument
• Reference
• Multiple signal classification
• Fortepiano
• Criticism
• History of classical music traditions
• Keyboard instrument
• 18th century
• Keyboard
• History
• Piano-forte
• Scarlatti
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Piano
• Clavier

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253022646
• Langue: English

Extrait

T HE E IGHTEENTH -C ENTURY F ORTEPIANO G RAND and I TS P ATRONS
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY Fortepiano Grand AND ITS PATRONS

F ROM S CARLATTI TO B EETHOVEN

EVA BADURA-SKODA
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Eva Badura-Skoda
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Badura-Skoda, Eva, author.
Title: The eighteenth-century fortepiano grand and its patrons from Scarlatti to Beethoven / Eva Badura-Skoda.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019218 (print) | LCCN 2017021199 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022646 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253022639 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH : Piano-History-18th century.
Classification: LCC ML 650 (ebook) | LCC ML 650 . B 33 2017 (print) | DDC 786.2/1909-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019218
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CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Bartolomeo Cristofori
2. Giving Cristofori s Nuovo Cimbalo a Name: Terminology Problems throughout the Eighteenth Century
3. Domenico Scarlatti
4. New Inventions in Germany, Pantalone Instruments, and Gottfried Silbermann
5. Johann Sebastian Bach and the Piano et Forte
6. Pianoforte Builders in Germany around 1750
7. The Generation of Bach s Older Sons
8. From Alberti, Platti, and Rutini to Eckard and the Younger Sons of Bach
9. Developments in the Second Half of the Century: Johann Andreas Stein and S bastien Erard
10. Joseph Haydn-Wenzel and Johann Schantz, Young Mozart and Nannette Stein
11. Anton Walter and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
12. From Broadwood, Merlin, and Clementi to Beethoven
Epilogue
Appendix: Scipione Maffei s Article of 1711
Selected Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
ONE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to draw the attention of musicians and music historians to the implications and consequences of misunderstandings of terms and some other misperceptions. Another is to present historical insights that are results of my lifelong interest in eighteenth-century music and its performance and of my care for a collection of historical keyboard instruments. This book, however, is not intended to become a History of the Piano-Forte in the Eighteenth Century. A reader should not expect therefore to find here such a comprehensive history-the book does not pretend such completeness. In addition, I should mention that my historiographical approach is not a mere positivistic one; my intention has always been to question the plausibility of various assumed but somehow odd research results as presented in some books or articles. Documents can be sometimes misleading if taken too literally or misunderstood in another way. 1 Problems stemming from terminological ambiguities caused by incomplete source survival are sometimes difficult to understand and to explain; it needed a repeated careful study of all known sources as well as considerations of plausibility to explain the proposed solutions for obvious riddles not yet generally considered solved. Some of those riddles require a new discussion.
This book was planned many years ago. In an article that appeared in 1980, Prolegomena to a History of the Viennese Fortepiano, 2 I spoke of my discovery that during most of the eighteenth century the meanings of the terms harpsichord, cembalo , and clavecin differed from the way these terms have been generally perceived by many musicians in the twentieth century. The opinion that the terms meant in the twentieth century the same as in the eighteenth century is not correct; in the twentieth century these terms referred to plucked instruments only, but in the eighteenth century they referred solely to the outer form of stringed keyboard instruments, a fact I understood from studying many eighteenth-century documents. Especially during the first half of the eighteenth century this form was that of a harp or a wing (in German, Fl gel ). Besides, before 1750, there must have been a common understanding that all wing-shaped pianofortes, or Fl gel , belonged to the family of harpsichord instruments. The term hammer-harpsichord was in use in England during Charles Burney s lifetime. For a book written in English it is therefore appropriate to point to this clearly expressed fact in Burney s writings. Burney s use of harpsichord helps us understand that it referred to harpsichords with quills as well as harpsichords with hammers (or hammer-harpsichords as Burney called the new pianofortes in his historical survey). These two kinds of harpsichords were usually both called simply harpsichords. The very term hammer-harpsichord certainly proves that there is a difference between Burney s understanding of the term and that of the many modern musicians and musicologists who still wrongly assume that an eighteenth-century harpsichord had only quills plucking the strings and could not possibly have had hammers touching the strings. The eighteenth-century meaning of harpsichord in its broader generic sense as a large stringed keyboard instrument, regardless of whether it had quills or hammer actions or both, has been acknowledged in the meanwhile by an increasing number of musicologists and also by some musicians; but the great majority of present-day musicians are still not aware of this fact and its implications. Therefore, I decided to begin the introduction to this book with Burney s statements that demonstrate clearly the differing eighteenth-century meaning of harpsichord , thus making apparent that it is not my subjective personal belief but a historical fact and an objectively proven reality. In Burney s time harpsichord could also mean a hammer-harpsichord.
When in 1980 I tried for the first time to publish facts that I thought proved beyond doubt that for eighteenth-century musicians such terms as harpsichord or cembalo simply referred to their wing-shaped form of stringed keyboard instruments, regardless of whether the strings were plucked or made to vibrate with the help of tangents or hammers, I was myself not yet aware of the important implications of this misunderstanding among musicians. Indeed, it took me many years to see how this terminology had caused far-reaching misunderstandings. Often a slightly distorted and lopsided historical view ( Geschichtsbild ) was one of the unfortunate results of the misunderstanding. Today, even those colleagues who concur with the fact that the mentioned terms have a different meaning in modern times than they had in the eighteenth century do not realize that some relevant strong (though often unconscious) prejudices were created long ago by the misperception and are still influential. What does the title of a composition such as Harpsichord Sonata or Sonata da Cembalo mean? We all (me included) still have to fight our probably unnoticed subconscious assumption that a harpsichord is an instrument with quills when asking ourselves which eighteenth-century sonatas were obviously composed for quilled harpsichords and which may have already been intended to be played primarily on a hammer-harpsichord if such an instrument was available. Traditional understanding is a mighty force against any change of perception. This book s writing and its long gestation will not have been in vain if in the future, when we encounter the terms harpsichord, clavecin , or cembalo in an eighteenth-century context, we will force ourselves to ask whether perhaps a hammer-harpsichord was meant; in a few cases we might feel obliged to change our old perception.
I considered it necessary to discuss the consequences of this evidence of a wrong perception in a book and not only in an article because there are still far too many musicians and music lovers around who have no idea about this eighteenth-century terminology problem. During the last decades, however, other tasks and problems had left me little time for planning the final outline for a book. A few chapters, written before 1990, became shorter articles and informed a script for a TV documentary, History of the Pianoforte , a series of three films made for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, and the documentary s highlights were published in 1999 and 2013 by Indiana University Press on VHS and DVD. 3
Art in general is not democratic, and great music in particular is written by individuals and not by committees or democratically elected majorities. Creators of great art music such as Domenico Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Mozart, Muzio Clementi, or Ludwig van Beethoven, all excellent keyboard players, often composed in styles unusual for their time and far ahead of it. Surely they all tried to get the best instruments from the best builders. It seems obvious to me that, as ambitious keyboard performers, they took pains to use the best keyboard instruments available. Subjects of interest are of course what instruments by which maker were they able to acquire and play. Naturally, more composers and more instrument builders could or should have been discussed in this connection, and the reader may rightly criticize the omission of a proper discussion of such keyboard (pianist) composers as Johann Gottfried M thel, Leopold Kozeluch, or Jan Louis Dussek. But, regrettably, space restrictions demanded the