The widely held belief that Beethoven was a rough pianist, impatient with his instruments, is not altogether accurate: it is influenced by anecdotes dating from when deafness had begun to impair his playing. Presenting a new, detailed biography of Beethoven's formative years, this book reviews the composer's early career, outlining how he was influenced by teachers, theorists and instruments. Skowroneck describes the development and decline of Beethoven's pianism, and pays special attention to early pianos, their construction and their importance for Beethoven and the modern pianist. The book also includes new discussions of legato and Beethoven's trills, and a complete annotated review of eyewitnesses' reports about his playing. Skowroneck presents a revised picture of Beethoven which traces his development from an impetuous young musician into a virtuoso in command of many musical resources.

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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach stated that a musical performer ‘must of necessity be able to transport himself into all of the affections that he wants to arouse in his listeners’. As famous as this passage is, it still raises questions. Did Bach mean that performers must arouse and feel all the shifting affections of the music within their own bodies, or was he using a metaphor here? Were composers supposed to feel the affections in their music while they composed it, as Bach suggested? Was this demand specific to Bach alone, or was it a stock recommendation given by many mid-18th-century German music writers? This article explores similar recommendations in historical sources and describes how Bach’s strategy might be enacted by performers. In an ideal empfindsam concert, the listener’s sympathetic response to the music would have been reinforced by the physical manifestations of the performer’s affective state.

The widely held belief that Beethoven was a rough pianist, impatient with his instruments, is not altogether accurate: it is influenced by anecdotes dating from when deafness had begun to impair his playing. Presenting a new, detailed biography of Beethoven's formative years, this book reviews the composer's early career, outlining how he was influenced by teachers, theorists, and instruments. Skowroneck describes the development and decline of Beethoven's pianism, and pays special attention to early pianos, their construction, and their importance for Beethoven and the modern pianist. The book also includes new discussions of legato and Beethoven's trills, and a complete annotated review of eyewitnesses' reports about his playing. Skowroneck presents a revised picture of Beethoven which traces his development from an impetuous young musician into a virtuoso in command of many musical resources. tilman skowroneck is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southampton, and is also a freelance harpsichordist and fortepianist. His main area of interest is the early piano, its construction, and its repertoire. This is his first book.

The Erard firm occupies a unique position in the tale of the development of the piano and the harp. The firm's various ground-breaking technical innovations paved the way for the modern actions of these instruments. Along the way, Erard pianos came to be associated with numerous famous pianists and composers. Yet there has not to date been an overarching account of the history of the firm, especially not one that was correct in all its details.The present book fills this gap with aplomb. It is based in part on materials from the substantial 2015 edition of documents from the Erard archives (Robert Adelson, Alain Roudier, Jenny Nex, Laure Barthel and Michel Foussard, eds, The History of the Erard Piano and Harp in Letters and Documents, 1785-1959, two volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)), and in part on the Erard family archives, which author Robert Adelson discovered in 2016. The text is organized chronologically and consists of fifteen topic-driven chapters, beginning with the apprentice years of Sébastien Erard (1752-1831) in Strasbourg and his subsequent move to Paris at the age of sixteen. Once he began making his own instruments in the 1770s, he focused on designing both harpsichords with enhanced possibilities of dynamic shading and registration as well as instruments with a piano action.The second chapter takes the reader from the year 1788 and the creation of the firm 'Erard frères' -Sébastien being joined by his elder brother Jean-Baptiste (1749-1826)to the mid-1790s. It discusses the organization of the workshop, questions of training and payment of the workers, problems of finding supplies such as wood and strings at reasonable qualities and for reasonable prices, and negotiations with customers and instrument dealers. Chapter 3 focuses largely on the same period, but addresses square pianos and piano-organs. Chapter 4 provides further insight into the Erards' customer management, various methods of payment (for the modern reader, the most unexpected of these is probably payment in wine) and the logistics of shipping the instruments. There are also interesting discussions about the kinds of damage that could occur during transport, and how the Erard brothers dealt with dishonest customers.Chapter 5 offers new insights into the circumstances that made Sébastien Erard travel to England in 1792 to set up a harp-manufacturing branch in London, while Jean-Baptiste stayed in Paris to run the firm there. As manufacturers of instruments that could be seen as luxury goods for the aristocracy, the Erards were indeed at risk during the French Revolution. However, the popular idea that Sébastien had to flee the dangers of the Revolution is here solidly debunked. The rationale for his trip was that establishing the London branch enabled him to obtain a patent for 'his newly invented system of forked discs that shorten the vibrating length of the strings by a semitone' (47). Obtaining this patent was apparently not possible in Revolutionary France.Chapter 6 introduces the concept of the French grand pia...