Introduction

Summary

Beethoven's opinions about piano playing and the piano, as outlined in the previous chapters, concentrate on three elements: tone length (or, as he expressed it, a “singing” manner of playing and a singing piano tone), tone character (evident in his wish to create a “personal tone” and in his disapproval of a “wooden” tone), and tone volume (evident in his middle-period interest in the French piano and eventually also due to his deafness). For a full understanding of these concepts in our time, practical experience with early instruments is indispensable. There are, however, obstacles to gaining that experience.

One difficulty when discussing the merits of historically informed approaches to music is the modern concept of a successful performance and an audience's adherence to comparison with earlier experiences. Whether this is a problem or not depends greatly on the circumstances. Early pianos of all kinds have become a fact of contemporary concert life. The audience's increasing experience of listening to these instruments, as well as the performers' ability to handle them with authority, has relieved them of their aura of imperfect exoticism. There should be no reason to be partial other than for reasons of admitted personal taste, except perhaps in the case of a direct comparison between several similar instruments. Nevertheless, the unavoidable confrontation of the early piano with its modern successor in the experience of the modern listener makes a discussion of the potential and the merits of the former a complicated task.