3: Modernization: translating past expressive means
"Let them not tell me any more that the piano is not a suitable instrument for a big hall, that the sounds are lost in it, that the nuances disappear, etc. I bring as witnesses the three thousand people who filled the immense Scala theatre yesterday evening from the pit to the gods on the seventh balcony. . . all of whom heard and admired, down to the smallest details, your beautiful instrument. . . never before has a piano created such an effect."1
Liszt wrote this letter to the piano maker Pierre Erard expressing his satisfaction with the instrument. This marks another transition towards today’s culture of piano concerts, dated as early as 1837. The aesthetic shift corresponds with the developments towards bigger and longer tones, and the differences in the resonance nature between early pianos and a modern piano is one of the main challenges in attempting to translate means of expressions and executions. Many things start to feel either loud, bulky, and too homogenous or the contrasting harsh and choppy sewing machine-like if we try to approach things in the same way we might do on earlier keyboards. We can perhaps find some compromises without discarding the characteristics of the historical keyboards with a better understanding of how different keyboards react to sound, from the initial strike of a hammer to beyond the moment when the damper is dropped. Here is a detailed observation from David Breitman’s Piano – Playing Revisited:
Middle C played mf on my Steinway sustains for about four seconds (one measure of 4/4 at M.M. = 60), then makes a diminuendo for another bar, and lingers on faintly for a third bar. On my Walter copy, the same note begins a sharp diminuendo almost immediately, is vanishingly weak in the second measure, and gone without a trace by the beginning of the third bar. The beginnings of the notes also differ. The Steinway's tones develop relatively slowly as the energy moves gradually from the strings, through the big bridges, and on through the heavy structure, producing a subtle crescendo. That big structure, once it begins vibrating, keeps the sound alive for a relatively long time. In the lightly constructed earlier pianos the sound propagates very quickly, and also dissipates quickly.2
3.1: This change in keyboards evolution is one of the main things that caused us discrepancies in aesthetic values and practical senses of piano playing, especially for music written on and for early Viennese pianos. This “endlessly long, beautiful tones” and its concert hall cultures have taken quite some priorities in piano music making process especially since the 20th century, we do not have to look far to find evidence of many great pianists demanding this quality. In Aspects of Cortot by Thomas Manshardt, a manual for piano technique and methods of Cortot, one of the most influential pianists in the 20th century, “The long vibration” is worthy enough to earn its spot at one of the first topics in his book:
Pianists have always talked about TONE and an earlier generation used the phrase "long vibration" in their discussions. This referred to tones that carried on and on, seeming not to diminish in intensity at all quickly, tones that carried with clarity to the back of the largest concert hall whether in pianissimo or fortissimo
The opposite of the long vibration is the blocked tone, to demonstrate what causes a blocked tone the damper pedal can be depressed and then the lid of the piano struck with the fist. The piano yields a hollow sounding noise. . . producing a non-carrying or blocked, tone.3
He also demanded that students should get familiar with this tone quality for bigger halls, even when they are working alone in a practicing space:
In a studio or teaching room the impact sound of hammers striking strings and of fingers striking keys can result in a tone that may sound deafeningly loud. In a concert hall where there is great space to be filled such a tone will sound small and harsh: blocked. Students must learn to hear the quality of tone that carries.4
3.2: No matter if you agree with the practices of this philosophy or not, the ability to produce and project ‘beautiful tones’ on a modern piano in a large hall and its aesthetic quality should not be disregarded. I believe that Cortot, among other countless great performers from any era, understood the potential of the instruments, the nature of the acoustic of their usual venues, the tradition and convention of the audience, among other things.
The subject of differences between early pianos and modern pianos has been covered in great details with the rise of the Early Music movement.5 In the course of this chapter, I would like to explore several elements of piano techniques which I believe to be most practical in implementing their effects on a modern instrument. These elements were parts of the means of expressions that stemmed from the nature of instruments and music of the time; the applications of these effects must not be executed too literally on a modern setting, like Schopenhauer’s comment, quoted earlier, “otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will itself, but merely imitates its phenomenon inadequately.”6
Articulation
3.3: The nature of the instruments’ tone production corresponds with the nature of its contemporary music and thus approaches articulation. The term “usual” (gewöhnliche) way of playing has been mentioned throughout the development of keyboard instruments, it refers to the preferred length which the keyboardist should hold down a key for the general context where there is no specific instruction in the scores.
Türk’s description reveals a crucial factor in the performance style: “For notes that are to be played in the usual way, that is, neither detached nor slurred, the finger is raised from the key a little earlier than the duration of the note requires.”7 This application of touch is necessary to their preferred musical style that values the subtlety of declamation and clarity in rhetorical expression:
Without the previous study of (German) prosody, without a detailed understanding of iambic, trochaic, dactylic and spondaic verse meters, as well as those poetic forms that lay the foundation for all instrumental music, the student will gain nothing, because the art of proper accentuation and discrimination of longs and shorts in groups of tones is based on this understanding.8
A shift toward more legato style can be spotted already by the end of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century, especially from the emerging English style by the likes of Clementi and the development of their pianos. In 1806, Clementi described how he had adopted “the more cantabile and refined style of performance by listening attentively to singers celebrated at the time, and also through the gradual perfection particularly of the English pianos, whose earlier faulty construction virtually precluded a cantabile, legato style of playing.” This progression in the cantabile style would prove to keep evolving along with the pianos and thus result in a preference toward longer and more melodic phrases over smaller scale articulation.
3.4: Even though, as I mentioned, we cannot simply deny this quality on our modern piano, George Barth voiced his concerns for neglecting this aspect of expressivity in response to the changes in instruments, his arguments on Czerny’s “modernization” deserves to be quoted in full:
While it would be unfair to think less of Czerny for his "modernizations"---these, too, were, after all, part of the tradition he felt himself entrusted with--we must not underestimate their effect on his "translations" of Beethoven's notation and his reminiscences of Beethoven's playing. Czerny helped to popularize the practice of substituting changes in dynamics for articulation, at least partly, I believe, because he was responding to changes in the instrument itself. With the continued growth of tone life, hammer size, compass, and dynamic range, lightness of touch and quickness of damping increasingly diminished. Small-scale articulation began to seem less and less natural. Beethoven, who taught Czerny to play Emanuel Bach's works with a legato touch, nevertheless lived during a time when he could innovate without letting go of everything that he had inherited Czerny let go of a lot more, and in teaching the generations that followed to play Beethoven with an ultralegato touch, removing many of the microarticulations that remain, he began to leave the world of rhetoric behind. The power of Czerny's influence might be measured by the extent to which the expressiveness of articulation remains unrealized in most performance of classical piano music today, even among those who specialize in performance on period instrument.9
The shift to the application of slurs is obvious, especially the long slur in the left hand that lasts seven bars, an editorial change that occurred already with Czerny (Example1.2) with his commentary on the movement:
We see from the fingering that the inner accompaniment is to be played by the right hand, without exception. The whole legato, and the melody clearly brought out. The succeeding four-part repetition of the theme, very harmonious, legatissimo, and a little louder.10
Breitman pointed out that these irregular slurs would seem to be problematic when we interpret Beethoven’s performance direction “cantabile” in a model of continuous legato of Italian bel canto. He suggested that we look at it in a sense that “carried out subtly and sympathetically—are perfectly compatible with the natural declamation of consonant-heavy German words.”11
When we look at the original slurs as “to mask square syntax”12 in Newman’s words, we can see how Beethoven used the slurs to cancel the nature of a classical eight-bars phrase and highlight the ‘units’ in an irregular way. This is an effect that Bülow did not disregard in his edition but rather translated to his instruments and tastes. I believe he changed the first slur on the right hand to respond to a bulkier piano with caution that the D at the end of bar 2 would not have enough time for the sound to develop unlike a nature of Beethoven’s piano. His longer slur still canceled an accentuation of the E♭ of that bar, and as he indicated a crescendo hairpin in bar 3 along with the original ending of a slur to suggest expanding in time and pronounce the e♭ in the next bar. The pedal indication and a crescendo in bar 4 signify the end of the common four-bars structure without giving away the special effect of the original slurring over the bar to weaken the F. All these notations seemed to still value Beethoven’s small-scale articulation, only differed in the means of conveyance, what we can do as performers might be as Breitman suggests: to a performer, details of declamation that convey variety, surprise, and even ambiguity can be virtues, and Beethoven's Pianos were well-suited to deliver them. With a smoother surface we may enhance our “atmosphere-painting,” but not without giving up some “speaking.”13