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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ii iap eI

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)




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




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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