1 - Keyboard culture

Summary

Pianos came of age in Beethoven's formative years. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, they rivalled and eventually superseded harpsichords and clavichords as the favoured domestic and concert keyboard instrument. As the wealth of mercantile families in England and central Europe grew, so did the market for the new instruments. To meet the demands of this unprecedented mass cultural phenomenon, a vast body of music exploiting the instrument's unique properties was written (largely for domestic consumption), and the publication of sheet music proliferated. The crest of this wave was ridden by virtuoso pianist-composers who built their careers on three core skills: their technical brilliance as performers, their outstanding abilities at extempore improvisation, and their fluency as composers. Mozart and Clementi (born in 1752) blazed the trail in the early 1780s, and in the next twenty years a number of virtuosi came to prominence. In addition to Beethoven, the outstanding figures at the turn of the century were (in order of birth) Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760), Daniel Steibelt (1765), Johann Baptist Cramer (1771), Joseph Wölfl (1773), and Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778). Without the financial security of long-term court appointments, most of these men had to support themselves by diversifying their musical activities. It was advantageous for them to live in one of the few large cities whose wealth and cultural life could provide them with lucrative opportunities for teaching and performing: chiefly London, Vienna, and – in its brief periods of political stability – Paris.