badura skoda tocuh early
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Playing the Early Piano
Author(s): Paul Badura-Skoda
Source: Early Music , Vol. 12, No. 4, The Early Piano I (Nov., 1984), pp. 477-480Published by: Oxford University Press
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Paul Badura-Skoda
Playing the early piano
Last year in this journal the late Ralph Kirkpatrick
wrote of 'the fortepiano and its present disastrous
vogue'. He continued:
One of the reasons that I gave up the fortepiano 25 years ago,
at least as far as public performance was concerned, was that
I had learned what I needed to know and that I had
discovered that on an instrument like the B6sendorfer
Imperial the lessons learned from the fortepiano could very
well be realized in the absence of rattles and buzzes, and in
freedom from those embarrassing moments in which one is
forced to pay attention to a patently inferior instrument
instead of being transported on the wings of music. If I can
think of anything worse than archaeological Mozart, it is
archaeological Schubert, and now we have them both
confronting us.I
If fine musicians dislike certain aspects of music
then there is obviously something wrong, either with
the music or with the listener. Thomas Beecham s
remark likening the sound of a harpsichord to the
actions of skeletons on a tin roof contain a grain of
truth, as do Kirkpatrick's remarks: old keyboard in-
struments, even good ones, have 'less flesh and more
bones'. Yet their sinewy character might itself be
considered a source of beauty. Taste changes now
even more rapidly than it used to. The harpsichord has
become more fashionable but undoubtedly also more
beautiful in an objective way. Beecham would probably
admit today that a well-restored Ruckers, Dulcken or
Kirckman (or a fine modern replica) is much less like a
skeleton than many harpsichords of 50 years ago.
Similarly, Kirkpatrick might perhaps have changed his
mind if he had able to play my Schantz or my Graf; for
it is a sad fact that the fault with early pianos lies more
often than not with the instrument rather than the
listener.
The enthusiasm of some pioneers of the early piano
who have played and recorded on whatever instrument
came to hand has not always helped to foster wide-
spread enthusiasm. Granted that we have far better
original and restored early pianos than only 20 years
ago, the problem still persists. Even if we love fine old
instruments, as I do, we still recall in the back of our
minds that for many years keyboard music simply
meant piano music and that great masters such as
Edwin Fischer or Alfred Cortot gave us moments of
sublime beauty on the modern piano. The slow
movement of Bach s D minor Concerto BWV1052 in
Fischer's recording is, for me, so beautiful that I care
not whether the instrument he uses is historically
correct. And the attitude of fanatics who deny such
beauty and who would never hear a modern piano
again derives in part from non-conformism or mere
snobbery.
The beauty I find in the modem piano is the reason
why I gladly play on both modern and old instruments.
The last thing Mozart and Beethoven intended was to
produce an exotic effect. And even to the listener who
is well disposed and open-minded, the best early piano
still sounds as exotic as a good B6sendorfer or
Steinway would have sounded to an enlightened
listener of 1780 or 1810. Considerations like this
probably provoked Friedrich Gulda, when asked by an
interviewer whether he would like to play Mozart on an
18th-century piano, to answer, 'Only if you give me an
18th-century audience'.2 Yet in the same interview
Gulda mentioned that he enjoyed playing Bach on a
clavichord (electronically amplified) and that he liked
Harnoncourt's interpretations of 17th-century music.
In fact, a touch of the exotic is welcome, even on the
modern piano. Piano playing has always existed
between the extremes of cathedral and circus. Do we
not flock to the concert hall to hear-and sometimes
even enjoy-the eccentricities of an Ivo Pogorelich?
While I do not deny the validity of the circus or even of
shock in art, I have a personal inclination to search for
'authenticity' in performance. This authenticity cannot
be a historical one, as I hope I have demonstrated
above. When I search for authenticity (this time
without quotation marks) I do so in the strong belief
that old music has a Jot to say to us now and that its
message can be heard and understood by the modern
listener if the music is performed in the right spirit.
After many years of searching I came to the conclusion
that the more faithful we are in spirit to a great
composers' intentions, the more we can convince and
move our audience. Nobody can hope to improve a
work of a genius.
The disillusion in this century of a large public with
EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1984 477
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Paul Badura-Skoda in his studio playing a piano by Johann Schantz (cl 790). The other instruments are a harpsichord by Kirckman (1780), a
piano by Broadwood (1796), a concert grand by Bdsendorfer (1923), a concert grand by Steinway (1953) and a copy of Mozart's own piano
which was made by Anton Walter (1781)
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modern art and music has meant that most of the
music performed in opera house, concert hall, record-
ing, radio or television is 'early music' in that it was
written before our own age. But even the performing
musician needs to be creative. The best performers
have always been those who composed, wrote or
painted as well. (It is significant that Furtwingler, one
of the greatest interpreters of this century, considered
himself first and foremost a composer.) Even a per-
former whose gift for composition is limited ought to
try to compose, if only to become acquainted with the
anguish of creation.
How then do I play an early piano? First, simply as a
piano. It is technically much the same as a modern
instrument, and the playing technique is much closer
to that of a modern piano than to that of a harpsichord.
Touch is the soul of every keyboard instrument
(including the harpsichord), and therefore one has to
use every variety of touch and velocity, avoiding
banging and knocking even more than on a modern
grand but without sacrificing vitality.
One of the major problems for the modern pianist
who plays an early piano lies in the fact that our hands
have become too 'heavy'. Faced with the much lighter
mechanism and the shallower keys of the old instru-
ments, we feel like helpless giants or, as Alfred Brendel
once put it, like furniture movers trying to do a
watchmaker's job. As a result, many pianists get so
scared that they hardly touch the keys at all: they dare
not play with energy or go right to the bottom of the
key, for fear of breaking such a delicate instrument.
The result is a misleadingly shallow tone. In fact, early
pianos are generally quite sturdy and can withstand a
lot of beating (though not of the kind meted out
during, say, Tchaikovsky's First Piano toncerto) and
can produce a surprisingly big tone: owners of Broad-
woods and Grafs who let me play their pianos in
concerts have repeatedly told me how surprised they
were about the range of tone I managed to extract from
their instruments.
It takes time and study to adjust to playing early
pianos, for it requires less strength yet more agility
than the modern piano. One consideration has proved
very useful: since the fingers need so much strength to
press down the heavy keys of a modern piano,
emphasis in teaching and playing is given to the
downward motion, and the upward return motion
practically takes care of itself. On an early piano a
better balance between the upward and downward
motion of the fingers is needed. In practising I bring
my fingers down 'mezzo-forte' and raise them 'forte'
afterwards. By this method a lighter and more fluent
touch is developed and, even more important, so is the
capacity for non-legato touch even in rapid passages.
For finger non-legato (as opposed to wrist non-legato)
demands only the capacity to lift the finger immediately
after a note before the next note is struck.
Also necessary is a supple wrist motion, and much
less use of the arm than in playing modem pianos. In
this respect the art of touch in playing the harpsichord
and the early piano is similar. Rameau observed in his
'M6thode sur la m6canique des doigts' (1724) that'The
perfection of touch on the harpsichord consists
primarily in a well-conducted motion of the fingers.
The wrist joint must always be supple, a suppleness
which, after spreading to the fingers, gives them all the
necessary freedom and lightness'., He continues by
asserting that the motion of the fingers 'is taken at
their roots, that is, at the joint by which they are
attached to the hand-and never elsewhere'. If by this
he meant playing with the fingers almost outstretched,
the directive cannot apply to playing the early piano,
where it would produce an insensitive touch. We know
from Quantz that J. S. Bach played with curved fingers;
and Bach was also a master of the clavichord, which
demands an even more sensitive touch and still less
weight than the early piano.
Another difference between playing old and new
pianos is in the use of the pedals. Here, independence
of the feet from the hands is required and the use of
the knee levers or pedals must be finely judged. This
does not mean that the dampers should be raised more
sparingly than on a modern instrument. On the
contrary, the leaner tone and lesser sustaining power
of the early piano allow 'over-pedalling' (for example
in the first movement of the 'Moonlight' Sonata). Less
pedal is needed in Mozart's music than in Beethoven's,
yet one cannot expect a sustained, singing tone from a
note in the treble unless the dampers are raised. The
pedal (or knee lever) here produces an effect similar to
that of a violinist's vibrato. Still, rests ought to remain
rests: it is a bad habit on any piano to cover nearly all
silences by pedal. This makes the music literally
breathless and obscures the clear succession of artic-
ulated phrases. The music of Mozart and Haydn
should be as much spoken as sung.
The left pedal (or knee lever) should be used very
sparingly. The purpose of this register is to darken the
tone. The modern tendency to use the pedal for nearly
every soft passage perhaps has its roots in the inability
EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1984 479
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of some pianists to play softly with the fingers only;
they need their feet to produce delicate sounds. Such
use of the left pedal is analogous to a violinist's putting
on and taking off his mute 50 times in a straightforward
movement.
How rarely the moderato stop was used can be seen
from Mozart's own piano on which he made his public
appearances in Vienna. The stop is operated by a white
button over the centre of the keyboard, which means
that to engage the register Mozart needed a free right
or left hand.
In Beethoven's time pianos could have up to seven
pedals, nearly always including a shifting pedal and
one to three pedals with moderato stops of varying
softness. But again, Beethoven employed the indication
'una corda' infrequently, reserving it for a very special
ethereal expressiveness. On some Viennese pianos a
fine moderator produces even better results than the
shift pedal, the only trouble being that the moderator
pedal is sometimes placed on the right side, so that the
pianist must learn to reverse the function of right foot
and left. But my best lesson in the use of the soft pedal
was a recording session when a squeaking mechanism
precluded any use of that pedal; I had to rely entirely
on my fingers.
The difficulty in playing softly with the fingers
alone lies in the piano action but is more pronounced
on old instruments. The slower the hammer strikes the
string, the softer the sound. Since the ratio of velocity
between finger and hammer is 1:5 on a modern piano
but generally larger (1:6-1:8) on an early piano, the
keys of an early piano have to be depressed fairly
slowly if a chord is to sound piano or pianissimo. Thus it
would seem to be impossible to play fast runs softly,
for you cannot depress a key slowly while playing fast.
Yet we know from experience that fast passages can be
played very delicately indeed. How is this possible?
Simply by a technique every pianist learns intuitively:
if you depress the key by just 2-3mm rather than to its
full depth, the hammer receives the smallest impetus
and thus strikes the string at low speed (if it strikes at
all-every pianist is afraid of 'holes' in the middle of
runs .
The absence of double escapement on pianos up to
ci825 (or later) is scarcely noticeable because of their
shallow touch: repeated notes are played in almost the
same way as on a modern instrument. Only rarely is
one conscious that a note cannot be repeated on
Viennese or old English actions unless the key has
returned to its original position.
It is obvious that many of these experiences with old
instruments can have a welcome effect on our playing
of modern pianos. Precision of finger movement and
greater sensitivity of touch are welcome results. We
learn to play the overpowering bass notes of the
modern piano with more restraint and much less
pedal; we learn how to produce a clear, crisp, bell-like
sound, how to articulate and to play with finger
staccato.. . and we rejoice in the singing quality in the
higher register, a quality of which earlier piano makers
could only dream.
1'Fifty years of harpsichord playing', EM, xi (January 1983), pp.31-
41, on p.40. (An obituary of Ralph Kirkpatrick by Howard Schott
appears on pp.585 of the present issue.)
2Le Monde de la Musique, No.34, Paris, May 1981
3Cited in Land6wska on Music, ed. D. Restout (London, 1965), p.168
Playing the early piano
continues in the February 1985 issue
with contributions by
Linda Nicholson, Christopher Kite,
and Melvyn Tan
Early M sikc
Stu ides
Offering a B.A. in Music Literature with
emphasis in Early Music. Graduate courses
are available; however, no graduate degrees
in music are offered.
TI CcOllEGE O
SI. SCHOAICA
For more information, write. Department of Music,
1200A Kenwood Avenue, Duluth, Minnesota 55811.
FACULTY
Shelley Gruskin, flutes,
recorders, early winds
LeAnn House,
harpsichord
Sr. Monica Laughlin,
clarinets, recorders
Ed Martin, lute
Steven Morgan, voice
Penny Schwarze, viols,
baroque violin
ifi
480 EARLY MUSIC NOVEMBER 1984
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