Step on it . . .
reflections on the unexpected history of the pianoforte sustaining pedal...
broadcast on BBC Radio Three, 27th January, 2004
We’re in the middle of a concert where the piano finds itself pretty well at an extreme of energetic resonance — a welter of sound that was only ever to be expanded by playing with the entire forearm across the keyboard or by planting chains and things inside the mechanism.
It’s a sound world we risk taking for granted. Sustaining pedal down! — and off we go into tidal waves of sonority. But play that 1907 Scriabin on the pianos of a hundred years earlier and the legs would give way.
The history of the piano in those hundred years is one of exponential increase in physical strength — and sales. The 1851 Great Exhibition boasted over 100 manufacturers, at a time when production in Britain stood at over half a million instruments a year.
That’s a very nineteenth century story, the Brunel behind the Brahms, but there was just as great an adventure in the eighteenth century... foretelling an adventure in our own day...
It all began in — ah, well, that’s tricky.
The earliest instinct to hit the strings with a hammer rather than pluck them — in short, to evolve the piano from the harpsichord — dates from around 1711. There were uncannily simultaneous inventions in Florence and Dresden, but they didn’t catch on; a revival fifteen years later didn’t catch on. We have to wait for the early 1760s to find the idea emerge afresh, in London — with such dedicated gusto that by 1768 Johann Christian Bach gave the first piano recital, setting the seal upon the new contraption.
Contraption being the operative word. Even in the early 1800s you could buy a piano with up to ten pedals or knee-levers or hand-operated stops controlling special effects like bells and cymbals. The range of piano sizes and shapes, devices and gizmos, danced a dance of innovative excess and commercial opportunism unseen since — until the computer companies of today... ‘Oh dear, I see you have last year’s model... [sigh]’
Centre-stage in this drama of ingenuity and salesmanship was an enterprising cabinetmaker from Cockburnspath who, as ever with Scots, was lured by the road to London, arriving there in the late 1750s. Enter John Broadwood. In 1761 he was taken on by the Swiss-born harpsichord and piano-maker Burkat Schudi in his Great Pulteney Street workshop. Sic transit — there’s no blue plaque there today. Broadwood soon showed great initiative, patenting all manner of innovations and inventions to do with the piano mechanism, and marrying the boss’s daughter. By 1774 the instruments bear his name and he has sons to carry on the business...
In the flurry of commercial cleverness that characterised this ever-growing market, ideas were pinched and patents overlapped by so much that it’s not always easy to make attributions, as to the inventor of this or that. With the sustaining pedal, one Americus Backers probably came up with the idea, in a factory just along the road, but Broadwood was the one who got to the Patent Office first. Down came the rubber stamp, thus launching a trojan horse or time-bomb upon the history of music...
Yes, the history of music, not merely the history of the piano. From this point they’re inseparable for a hundred years. Can we really put this down to the sustaining pedal?
It’s certainly a very neat idea, consisting of unthinking an idea that had come before. That’s to say, having gone to the trouble of inventing something that served to dampen the sound from the strings, now you invent something that stops the dampers from operating. The sustaining pedal does exactly that, letting the strings go on vibrating. And so, the sound carries on — till you damp it or it dies.
Fine.
It immediately gave to Broadwood’s instruments — and quickly in turn to those whose makers nicked the idea — the singing tone, the sensation of legato, the smooth continuous ‘line’ that had always been missing from the harpsichord. After all, the impetus to invent the piano came from an impatience that and with the harpsichord’s limitations in terms of, well, piano/forte — soft/LOUD.
The first music to be published explicitly on the title page as being ‘for the pianoforte’ was by Broadwood’s buddy, Muzio Clementi. Here’s Malcolm Binns on a 1780 Broadwood:
Clementi, sonata in E flat, op.12 no.2: Slow movement
Lovely. Clean, singing music. A certain twang but a lovely soft-edged tone, at last. A caressing quality like nothing before from a keyboard. Just what the customers wanted.
But the bomb ticks on.
With relentless ingenuity and impatience, striving headlong towards a goal undefined except that each year’s sales-figures, — um, I mean, model — should outstrip last year’s, the piano became bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger, an altogether beefier beast.
The greater the oomph of the hammer mechanism, the greater the need for better strings; the greater the need for better strings, the greater the need for sturdy frames — and indeed, eventually, of course, wooden frames were superceded by metal.
All the while, the volume and resonance of the machine grew. And grew. Here’s a mahogany 1794 Broadwood — that’s only a few years later — in variations that Beethoven wrote 1796 on a popular opera aria, played with appropriately singing inflection by Alan Cuckston in Bowes Museum:
Beethoven, 6 variations on a theme from Paisiello
Already, you can sense that this new sound, driven by the sustaining pedal, is tempting the composer into making sheer sonority part of the subject matter of the piece.
It may seem obvious to say that Baroque clarity of texture is going to give way, but that is exactly what’s happening: the performer has not only a new level of control of volume but a new control over what you might call lucidity. Here’s Haydn, played on an 1806 instrument – by another Scot this time, Broadwood’s rival William Stodart — by Alan Cuckston again:
Haydn, sonata no.37
The pedal works on ‘lucidity’. It allows degrees of clarity. And thus unclarity; the piquant sound of overlapping notes heard at the same time. Composers could respond to that fresh challenge. How? By actually writing these effects in the first place, now that they were enticed... This was to have powerful ramifications [on the history of music] as the clean spring waters of the Bachs disappear in the muddied rubble-torrent of Beethoven. [subito:]
Beethoven, sonata op.10 no.1, finale
Ernest Lush
That’s an 1806 Broadwood, Beethoven going at it like a Bentley at Brooklands – an apt metaphor, Ernest Lush made that recording in 1938.
You could say, this is the most extraordinary revolution in the history of music since the invention of notation. At the helm of this new keyboard, his foot down, Beethoven was concerned not only to define the instrument, going ‘with’ it to see where it can go — as Bach had done with his cello suites, for example — but also going against it — as Bach couldn’t even have thought of doing.
Bach couldn’t, Beethoven could – had to, indeed? Are we talking Zeitgeist here? That’s a dodgy notion if ever there was one; what can we say of Beethoven as both slave and master of the spirit of his age? The story of the pedal throws up the slightly uncomfortable idea that he had little choice but to explore and exploit these possibilities, along a path inadvertantly set by Broadwood. As for the dreamy Romantic Zeitgeist, well, cannonfire anger had its place too, and Beethoven’s piano music often had a short fuse —
In those piano-hammer chords
Beethoven is shaking the piano into song.
He became fond of fisticuff effects that buffet the whole contraption into
response. We imagine the entire
wooden frame febrile with responsive anticipation of the notes to come.
One effect is the use of low notes to set every grain and atom of the instrument in motion:
bommm — diddle diddle iddle iddle....
It generates a richness of resonance quite impossible before the sustaining pedal. It’s an effect Beethoven uses with unprecedented range in his Waldstein sonata, in the shimmering opening declamation
Beethoven op.53 Alexei Lubimov, Broadwood of 1806
and in the famously sustained mists of the finale.
The low-note kick-off became an
indispensable gesture of rhetoric. Schumann for instance relished such patterns
in the characteristic folds and pleats of his textures.
Odd, then, that so few have recorded him on contemporary instruments:
here’s Jörg Demus on an 1847 Érard opening Schumann’s memorial to Beethoven, the
c-major Phantasy:
Schumann, Fantasy op.17
By the time Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev were writing, the sturdiness of the construction of the piano gave these declamations relatively little power as a way of making it all sing and rattle as one, yet they persist as an essential element in the piano vocabulary.
Out of those Waldstein mists, however, harmony acquired a new dimension, the possibility and then the desirability and then, you might say, by the time Brahms was spawning the Schoenberg to come, the necessity, of overlap. Mush.
I don’t just mean Beethovenian volume or anger since, as we’ll hear in a moment, the new possibilities led this worst tempered of composers to the greatest utterances of still, maybe wistful looks of love. Rather, it’s the echo, it’s the overlap, and that sensation that we can set the entire instrument a-hum with harmonies through which the music can emerge and shine like the sun through a sea mist.
Here’s an early example, a gentlest of meditations, mustered mid-storm, from his op.31 no.2, the so-called Tempest sonata, played by Malcolm Binns in a BBC recording, on a Broadwood from 1819:
Beethoven sonata op.31 no.2
Shapeliness of tune is faltering here in the haze. Beethoven saw the possibility not only of song-like recitative in piano music but also an undreamt-of slackness of the song’s shape itself. This is pioneering, insightful work, unveiling new vistas of significance.
The sustaining pedal gave Beethoven a gateway to the sublime, to the transcendent; washes of sound and the plangeant new sensuality of unprecedented harmonic freedom matched the Romantic-era’s poetic need to reach glimpses of mystery and the misty beyond. Beethoven stood before the sublime like some chap in a painting with his tall hat and tail-coat, on the edge of a cliff, while Turner was puffing and panting his way up to see too.
The sustaining pedal, this initially sensual device designed to enhance the singing tone of the new machine, inspired a revolution not only in noise but in meaning; not only in harmony but in structure. Shapeliness of tune had given way. The dissipation of harmony soon followed.
The classical aesthetic of cleanliness in form rapidly collapsed too, matching the new limpid and fragmented material.
Haydn to Beethoven to Schumann to Chopin to Lizst to Brahms, all in less than seven decades. Formal relationships could now become as shifting & interlayered, translucent & suggestive as the play of clouds Debussy saw when he heard the harmonies of Wagner’s Parsifal written a mere fifty years after the death of Beethoven.
Reference books will tell you that in later life, he studied Palestrina; it’s always struck me as an underrated, intruiguing fact dutifully trotted out. But why did he? Where did his late instinct for modality come from? Might it be that the pianoforte had given him a cathedral in his living room — and there could be no better tutor in writing music for a damn great echo chamber, than old Palestrina?
Beethoven, Bagatelles op.126
András Schiff on Beethoven’s Broadwood
And it was that rapacious predator Beethoven who first seized upon the idea for all — well, for more than it was worth. These sounds owe their gestation to Broadwood’s lever. Literally so, one of the pianos Beethoven battered to hear was a Broadwood given him by the maker and that was it, played by András Schiff.
The pedal and its Beethovenian legacy served Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and all the rest of them very well. But harmonic dissolution was not confined to the piano, of course; we sail through the 19th century out into the apocalyptic dread of Mahler, who could slam shut the book of harmonic history with a colossal chord of nine of the twelve notes at once:
MAHLER 10th
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle
Aprés moi, le déluge, indeed. Less than a couple of years later Berg helped himself to the possibility of all twelve at once, in one of his Altenberg Lieder, significantly setting a text that talks of looking beyond the boundaries of all there is:
Berg, Altenberg-Lieder, op.4 no.3
And what was there there to see beyond this edge and limit?
More to the point, where was the history of music to go now?
What was there left for Cage to do but strew the piano with chains and bits-&-bobs amidst the strings? No outrage that, but as much a necessity and logical progression as to write silence, as he did in his notorious 4’33”, so that we listen to life not art. Oh dear, does that imply the end of art?
To think that the process was launched by a canny cabinet-maker on the make with his singing sustaining pedal. The flapping butterfly that flips the tornado. Uninvent that tricksy new selling point in patent number 1379 and where would we be?
What would Beethoven have come up with?
Well, something else, of course. D’uh. Yet that rather plain and obvious answer points to an inescapable logic whereby the composer is the slave of the instrument, dependent on accidents of technological invention or progress to fire the next turn of inspiration. I remember that grim old essay question, ‘Does it make sense to speak of progress in the arts?’ Well, does it? It certainly makes sense to speak of progress in piano technology — and we’ve heard where that got us!
Fear not, ‘twas ever so.
Once they’d come up with flying buttresses you couldn’t go back to those chunky clunky squat churches, could you? Once Brunelleschi had peered through his peep-hole, perspective was in and gothic, byzantine skew was out. The invention of fixative for the early photographers hung by a thread; the great chemist Sir John Hirshel knew how to do it but didn’t realise anyone was interested. I’m sure Picasso would never have needed to hatchet his perspectives if Sir John hadn’t happened upon the problem over dinner one night. [that to be uttered with an air of insouciant whimsical speculation rather than authoritative historicism...] Well, we’ve seen how the piano took a few go’s to catch on.
And the creative artist is still caught in the thick of technology today. Digital trickery & jiggery-pokery gives the edge to a photographer who can paint and draw — and dulls all notion of the photograph as an objective record, rather foxed and tatty at the edges as it already was.
For the composer, the most challenging development is the expansion of those computer programmes designed to typeset scores; not content merely to set down in good, neat notation the notes you ask for — and to play them back in synthesised versions of the instrumentation you ask for — there’s a controversial new step, whereby you can pretty much give the thing a few notes and ask it to set off and write you a fugue the way Mozart might have done. Yes. It has its silly side, like quiz-show pastiches; soon it’ll give us a Bruckner symphony based on the Bob-the-Builder theme...
But it has its sinister side too, since we shall have to reshape our notions of authenticity.
Naturally enough, obviously enough, we do like the idea that music has the authentic voice of the composer; and we used to be able to tell; now, well, it’s not so clear. So, a device, in theory designed to help the composer, and no doubt in the sales pitch[1] to have a general educational benefit, turns out to pose an unsuspected creative challenge; it may even mark the final push in the collapse of complexity as the guiding guarantor of contemporary music’s contemporaneity and authenticity.
Indeed, mush can no longer hold. It’s back to Bach?
We’ve come full circle. Or should I say, we can take our foot off the pedal now?