George Barth

The Rise of the Piano

1995 saw the publication of two very important studies of the early piano, one a more traditional work, and the other so untraditional as to be almost experimental. Stewart Pollens's The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1995) is just what it claims to be: "the first comprehensive historical and technological study of the pianoforte based on important primary source material" - an exhaustively detailed organological study of the piano from its origins in the fifteenth century to the beginning of its rise to prominence in 1763. Katalin Komlós's Fortepianos and their Music, which so felicitously takes up the piano's history where Pollens leaves off, is, though less specialized and less comprehensive, much more complex: It is a study of the developing piano that illuminates not just its history and character, but the "reciprocal relationship" between the styles of its music, and the tastes and aesthetics of the builders, composers, performers, publishers and publics who brought it to prominence. Though brief in length, this is an ambitious and unusual book, rich in detail, written in clear and unaffected English, and concerned almost as much with imparting a sense of the social and artistic milieu of the day as with communicating information about the instrument and repertory itself.

The book is divided into three main sections, "The Instruments," "The Music," and "The Players." The first of these, one fifth of the book's length, lays a foundation, sketching the origins of the piano, noting the preponderance of squares (Tafelklavier) over Flügel-shaped grands in the early years, describing the slide into oblivion of the rival clavichord and harpsichord during the piano's rise to popularity, and noting its growing compass, changing keyboard, and the ways in which its sounds - characterized as German/Viennese or English - reflected or challenged contemporary aesthetic ideals.

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Of the book's three main sections, the second, just over half the book's length, is clearly the most significant for Komlós. In "The Music," she wishes to demonstrate first and foremost that compositional texture is often importantly revealing of instrument preference, and more particularly, that the differently developing German/Viennese and English instruments became in the last two decades of the 18th century excellent vehicles for two contrasting styles, the former more concerned with rhetorical clarity and articulation of a transparent, linear music dependent on quick and efficient damping and a varied spectrum of sound, and the latter with projecting thicker textures, legato touch, and a bravura style dependent on fuller but more homogeneous tone made possible by dampers that allow ample Nachklang.

Komlós concentrates here on solo and small ensemble repertoire, fully aware that in eliminating larger genres she is omitting "perhaps the most important group of works in classical keyboard music" - Mozart's piano concertos. (vii) Her decision is in keeping with the thrust of her study, which is designed to remain closer to the world of the Liebhaber and to investigate a wider range of pianist-composers and genres popular among amateurs than the usual tour of the "greats" takes into account. She explores instead the work of the minor composers Eckard, Burton, Schroeter, Vor˙is˙ek, Gallassi, and Attwood, as well as the "lesser greats" Emanuel and J. C. Bach, Clementi, Dussek and Koz˙eluch. Of the three Viennese giants, Mozart and Beethoven receive comparatively little attention (though what little they receive is lucidly presented), while Haydn is afforded lavish coverage in more than one chapter because, Komlós asserts, "he alone was exposed to the inspirations and possibilities of both types of the eighteenth-century pianoforte." (vii)

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In "The Players," over a third of the book's length, Komlós describes the disparate worlds of Kenner und Liebhaber, the tutors and treatises that began to proliferate with the piano's rise to popularity and the proverbial "rise of the middle class," and the aesthetics of performance from the days of first generation piano players to the close of the century. Here she is most successful in inverting many of the timeworn ideas about late 18th-century musical society. She paints a composite picture that is utterly unlike the one many of us grew up with, reminding us that for the vast majority of musicians, it was square pianos, not grands, that were the focus of the age, and light solo and chamber music, not the "great" concerti or even the more monolithic sonatas, that were the object of most admiration.

Partly because of the complexity of the task Komlós has chosen, and partly because of her approach to historical description - she always stays very close to the details - Fortepianos and their Music at times feels more like a series of essays relating to a single theme than a monograph. Only occasionally is the reader given a sense of the big picture in advance of detail, and as a result this meditation on texture is not always easy to assimilate. For example, in her penultimate chapter, entitled "Piano Tutors and Treatises," Komlós spends seven pages discussing ideas presented in particular treatises before clarifying the fact that the tutors and treatises she has been quoting here and throughout her book are not at all alike, that some are for "mere" amateurs, some for amateurs who wish to become professionals, some for professionals, some for teachers - and of course, that some were widely distributed and often quoted and others by comparison almost obscure. She is wisely concerned that we not develop a "fetishistic reliance" on such treatises (132), and points out just how difficult it can be "to determine whether some 'rule' or other is merely a local custom or the personal opinion of a theorist of limited experience." (131) But typically, she expresses these important thoughts as a cautionary note near the end of the chapter rather than as a starting point. Where one might expect a summary of theory to induce some "recognition" of important universals, one finds instead a reminder that the sources are so unlike as to make comparison almost treacherous, and that we need to absorb more and more "context," that "rich and varied repertory" through which "the character and the elements of any given piece of music reveal themselves." For Komlós breadth is the key: "The best composers and thinkers of the time should guide one towards the maximum understanding of the style." (131)

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George Barth,

Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University, is a performing pianist, fortepianist and musicologist. He is the author of The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style (Cornell Press, 1992).