Some odd tunes played on old pianos

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34041, 3 January 1976, Page 10

Some odd tunes played on old pianos

The Piano Ma *ers. By David Wainwright. Hut chinson of London. 192 pp. Illustrai ed. N.Z. price $14.50. Clementi, tirek e»» composer and even more tireless i ntemational salesman for Clementi a nd Company, music publishers and piano manufacturers, wrote to London in 1807 of his recent adventures in V lenna: "By a little management, anti without committing myself I have mift le at last a conquest of that haughty} beauty Beethoven; who first began - at public places to grin and coquet with me, which of course I took cat t not to discourage; then slid into fai ■ 'iliar chat -•■' So that, a little later. “1 agreed with him to take in MS t hree Quartetts, a Symphony, an Ov t rture, a Concerto for the Violin whi c h is beautiful and a Concerto for the Pianoforte . .. I think I have made . a good bargain. This engaging an < cdote is one of manv which make “iTie Piano Makers ’ much more agreeable* reading than the solemn historv of Briti sh piano-making it sets out to be. The specialised technical history is » <1 here, to be sure, from earlv. curio t is variations on the harpsichord <“C iravicembalocol piano e forte" was the • technical name of a successful Floren| Jne invention) to the plastic-surf<4 :ed - gaudily coloured instruments of * today; but the more widespread and ta iduring value of the book lies tn the co ntributions it makes to social history. Some of these are sin 'Pb bizarre anecdotes, like a story vw hich begins. "Musical mice were a phei tomenon of early Victorian London" ai id goes on to tell of one prodigy boasb ng a voice “whose notes resemble those ' of a bird

in spring” which accompanied itself on an early Victorian cottage piano. Others, the veracity of which seems less doubtful, illuminate much about individuals and society in a way which a survey of musical or industrial statistics could not approach. One mav learn a good deal about pre-Raphaelite taste, for example from the piano given Burne-Jones as a wedding present: he decorated it with an elegant but rather incongruous fneze . depicting a group of women cowering at the approach of Death, robed and crowned, with a scythe tn one hand. Even stranger was the decoration devised for the Broadwood grand of Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, ornate to a degree that makes his paintings appear by comparison faint-hearted: "The case was on columnar legs of rosewood and ivory, and itself was oak inlaid with ebony, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, mahognay, ebony, gilding, brass and ivory. The frieze round the edge of the case was inspired by decoration in the church of St Sophia in Constantinople. The inside lid was left comparatively plain, so that Alma Tadema could pin sheets of parchment to it upon which distinguished visitors were invited to sign their names.” Whether anyone had the nerve to play this formidable instrument is not recorded. It may, however, have been an ideal match for Liszt, who emerges from this account as the man who inadvertently did more than any other for the development of the modern piano His bravura technique, combining an agility unmatched before

and irobably since with an extraoflinary strength in fortissimo passage, won many hearts but broke those f provincial entrepreneurs who found he strings and soundboards of their instruments snapped and clicked: Mr Wainwright records that Lizt’s “progress through England left a itter of broken woodwork and twisted wire.” Contemporary critics and latr historians tended to sneer at the gb brilliance of such virtuoso exhibitons, but it seems beyond doubt that ineteenth-century extravagance made possible the solidity of the twentith-century piano.