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KENNETH MOBBS
MICHAEL COLE : The Pianoforte in the Classical Era . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xiv, 398 pp., 58 figs. 8 tables, 2 musical examples. Hardback ISBN 0-19816634-6. Price: £60.
It is now sixty five years since Rosamond Harding's ground-breaking achievement The Piano-forte: Its history traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 . (Old Woking, 2nd ed., 1978). In the last twenty five years several general surveys have appeared of varying quality, taking the history of the piano through to the present day, of which probably the most technical has been Edwin Good's book with the surprising title Giraffes, Black Dragons, and other pianos (Stanford, USA, 1982). But there have also been more detailed examinations of specific periods: especially that by Cyril Ehrlich: The Piano: A History . (Oxford, rev. ed., 1990) in which he starts where Harding left off and concentrates particularly on the economics of manufacture, and recently Stewart Pollens' masterly study of The Early Piano (Cambridge, 1995) taking us from its origins up to 1763. Now the present book continues on from that last date with a detailed technical examination of the history up to c . 1817.
The author's preface explains why the adoption of a straightforward chronological approach is not possible: '... the early history of the pianoforte does not reveal one unified story but several disparate sequences of events proceeding in parallel'. After his two introductory chapters he therefore opts for a thorough discussion of the English square and grand up to 1805 (with a side-long glance at the French), then embarks on a searching examination of German and Viennese origins: pantalon, clavecin royal, tafelklavier and tangentenflügel, before moving on to the classic fortepiano. There follow chapters on combination instruments, various forms of uprights, touch and tone, and fakes, frauds and forgeries. Three particularly interesting Appendices follow, then a Glossary, Bibliography and Index bring the book to its end.
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Attracted to buying the book by its title and della Croce's cosily familiar Mozart family conversation piece on the dust cover, the general reader might very soon find himself in some difficulty with detailed descriptions of the mechanics and dynamics of piano actions. But this searching, analytical approach of the author, worrying at a problem and its...