Richard Pennycuick writes:

>I recently heard some pieces by Schumann for oboe and piano and was
>surprised to find that the recording used a fortepiano. A check of a few
>websites and references, including a biography of Schumann I read years
>ago, found nothing more precise than that the instrument was in common use
>"until the early nineteenth century." Can anyone suggest a more accurate
>time for the fortepiano's demise?

The fortepiano didn't so much die as evolve.  (Early keyboard enthusiasts
often decry the notion of evolution as implying development from something
primitive toward something more perfect, and I certainly don't use the word
in quite that sense -- a modern Steinway is not at all a BETTER instrument
for Schubert than a 1820's Conrad Graf.) From Mozart's time through the
late nineteenth century, one finds a gradual increase in the range of the
keyboard, increasing hammer size, and from the 1820's onward, more and more
use of metal in piano framing.  To ask at what point a fortepiano ceases to
be a fortepiano is really a modern question, just as the term "fortepiano"
is really a relatively recent way of distinguishing historical pianos and
more current models.  If pressed for an answer, I might suggest somewhat
arbitrarily that a piano is not a fortepiano if it has a full metal frame.
It's also crucial to recognize that what we call "fortepianos" are not one
thing.  There are Viennese, French, and English action instruments, all
with distinctive characteristics, and 18th- and 19th-century craftsmanship
was much less homogeneous than today's piano building, just as performance
styles were formerly more geographically varied than tends to be the case
now.

Getting back to Schumann -- he would have grown up with Viennese
"prellmechanik" pianos, which continued to be built largely without metal
reinforcement well into the 19th century.  He and Clara received a Graf
as a wedding gift; although some of his piano music reaches beyond the
keyboard range of a Graf, most of it stays quite nicely within its
confines.  I've privately tried Schumann on Grafs and other contemporaneous
instruments.  The instruments make possible wonderfully transparent
texture, especially in the bass.  Schumann's canonic bass lines sing on
such pianos, rather than getting muddied.  (I have on disc a performance
of the Schumann Violin Sonata played by Richard Burnett of the Finchcocks
Collection in Kent, about an hour south of London -- the balance between
violin and piano is quite wonderful.) Those raised on Horowitzian Schumann
may at times miss a certain heft and richness of sonority in the earlier
instruments, but the compensating virtues are many.

Of course, it's interesting to consider the question of what is the
"appropriate" piano for Schumann, especially when one realizes that Clara,
whose public career began when Schubert was still alive, continued playing
in until late in the century.  Did she consider that she was playing the
"wrong" instrument at the end of her career? (One can ask the same question
about Liszt.)

I could go on and on, but this should be enough to keep the discussion
going.

D. P. Horn