Content area
Full Text
Anyone who reads Rosamond Harding's history of the pianoforte must be profoundly impressed. Her readiness to explore and report the often bewildering byways of early piano actions; the precision of her technical drawings (which she laboriously executed herself in pen and ink); and the copious appendices with their heavy burden of reference data - such features tell us very quickly that we are engaging with an author with serious aims and high intellectual attainments. Those who wish to master the subject soon discover that Harding's work demands a serious effort of study.
The book in question is The Piano-forte - its History traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 published in 1933 under the imprint of Cambridge University Press. It was to remain unquestionably the standard work on technical development of the pianoforte for at least half a century, and on some aspects of early piano history it can never be superseded. A steady demand for the book continues to this day as it is still recommended reading for anyone embarking on a piano technician's course, and it remains a familiar reference work for curators and collectors of old keyboard instruments.
It could be expected that such an uncompromisingly detailed publication, describing the inner workings of ancient pianos, as well as many of the processes that went into making them, might have come from an experienced, middle-aged technician distilling a lifetime's work in the piano trade - but not at all! This book was researched and written by a young woman, with (so far as is known) no previous expertise in this field, and she completed it when she was just thirty two years old. It shows an astonishing mastery of this subject, yet amazingly, Rosamond Harding never revisited this subject except to compile some entries for Grove's Dictionary, which were nevertheless based entirely on her earlier research. Subsequently she received many requests for a second edition but she seemed reluctant to proceed, and when it finally appeared, a few years before she died, it showed no evidence at all that she had kept in touch with any later research by others; considering the standard of her initial achievement it is surprising that there is not the least hint within it that she had developed...