Dear Friends,
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last email - I spent some time redesigning the newsletter and simplifying the format. I hope you like it!
Before we get started - if you have ever been curious to hear me perform instead of just talking about playing the piano 😂, here’s your chance. Next month I will be playing two recitals in Door County, Wisconsin: October 4 in Sturgeon Bay and October 5 in Egg Harbor.
Additionally, if you live in the Indianapolis area, I will be playing a FREE recital at Butler University, on October 28. (And if you don't live here, the October 28th recital will be live-streamed; I’ll share that link in an upcoming email.)
These recitals are the first in my series of performances of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Das Jahr - an epic cycle that takes you through the calendar year, with one movement for each month. I’m excited to present this rarely-performed work in concert!
But anyway, on to this week's topic. Today I want to talk about the piano as an instrument. In a recent lesson, a student asked what actual instrument her Haydn sonata (composed in 1774) was written for. It’s a great question with a fascinating answer. Today we tend to think of “the piano” as a fixed, standardized instrument that has always existed in its current form, but actually the grand piano as we know it is the result of a couple of centuries of innovation, experimentation, and refinement.
When Haydn was composing his early sonatas, the harpsichord was still widely used in households throughout Europe, and the fortepiano was just emerging. The shift from one instrument to the next wasn’t immediate. People didn’t put their harpsichords out on the curb for trash pickup the second the first fortepiano appeared! Some households had both, and for a while, much of the keyboard music we now think of as “piano repertoire” was played on both instruments interchangeably.
One way we can think of this today is the shift from listening to music on vinyl records, which gave way to cassettes and then CDs. Now, streaming is the standard way to consume music, but many people still use their CD and record players.
It’s important to keep in mind: the harpsichord is not an early piano; it’s a completely different instrument. Each key plucks the string with a plectrum, like a guitar pick. The fortepiano, by contrast, used leather-covered hammers to strike the strings, similar to the felt-wrapped hammers on a modern-day piano.
The piano in its current incarnation didn’t emerge until the late 1800s. Innovations like the double escapement action (allowing faster repetition of notes) and a cast-iron frame were added, which allowed much higher string tension, and therefore a much louder sound. These changes made it possible for pianists to project (and therefore perform) in larger halls, and completely changed the expressive palette of the instrument.
So when you’re playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert, it’s worth remembering: those composers weren’t writing for the 88-key modern-day piano. From roughly the 1770’s onward, composers were writing for the fortepiano, but even then, the harpsichord was still in common use.
If you’ve never listened to music from the Classical era on a fortepiano, it’s worth doing. textures, colors, and even tempo choices can suddenly make more sense. Here's a wonderful performance of a Haydn Sonata (with introduction) by Sir Andras Schiff. If you want to go deeper on this topic, you might want to check out David Breitman’s book, Piano-Playing Revisited: What Modern Players Can Learn from Period Instruments, about how to adapt early music performance practice to interpretative choices on the modern piano. (The book is also available through libraries.)
Have a great week - happy practicing! 👋
-Kate