3.2 Investigating early instruments

For the final years of his life, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) owned a piano which was placed above an independent pedalboard played with the feet, as on an organ. The piano survives, but the pedalboard does not. The pedalboard had its own strings, which were independent of the piano above it, and reinforced the bass of the music, making it sound rather less delicate than many imagine Mozart’s music would sound like.

Activity 5 Video of Mozart’s pedalboard

Timing: Timing: Allow around 20 minutes to complete this activity.

Watch this video, which will help you to understand the instrument and its characteristics. The instrument is a reconstruction made according to the available evidence.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 2

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Transcript: Video 2

[PIANO MUSIC]

DAVID ROWLAND:

I'm David Rowland. And I'm Professor of Music at The Open University. And the instrument that I'm playing is a reconstruction of the sort of instrument that Mozart had for the last few years of his life.

Now this is a reconstruction of an instrument made by Richard Maunder, an amateur music instrument maker. And it was made some years ago. You'll be able to hear some squeaks and some other noises from the action. But I'm using it because, as far as I know, it's the only instrument in the world of this kind.

First, let's look at the piano, the top bit before we come to look at the pedalboard. Now the top part, the piano itself, is independent of the pedalboard. And it can be lifted off. It's not particularly heavy. It can be done by three people, but it's certainly much lighter than a modern grand piano.

And it's lighter because there is less to it. I think one of the most obvious things is that the compass of the keyboard here is only five octaves, whereas on a modern grand piano, you'd have over seven octaves. So you simply got more notes on a modern grand piano.

From a performance point of view, it's much lighter to place. So I can easily just depress a note with my little finger. It requires virtually no effort at all. And you may notice also that the depth of the key has to fall to make the sound is much shallower than you would find on a modern grand piano.

And then instead of the sort of pedals you have on a grand piano-- grand piano usually has two pedals, one of them to raise the dampers from the strings-- this instrument has a knee lever to raise the dampers from the strings. So I can just press that up, and you might see the damper rail coming up a little bit, which moves the dampers off the strings. Now I'm going to remove the music rest here because I want to have a look at what's inside the piano.

And inside, you'll see that everything is wooden. There is no metal frame like there is in the grand piano at all. There are little bits of metal like the tuning pins here and the pins around which the strings go and the strings themselves, of course. There's no metal bracing on the instrument at all, which is why it's so light.

And then you can see just inside here, the dampers and the hammers just about. Now the dampers are, again, much smaller than you would find on a grand piano as are the hammers. The hammers are a little more than the size of a little finger.

[PIANO MUSIC]

Now the pedalboard, as I said a moment ago, is independent of the piano above it insofar as it has its own strings, and it has its own action. It has quite a limited compass. It goes from C down here up to A up here. Its main merit is that it sounds quite deep. When added underneath the piano, it just adds weight to the instrument's sound when coupled with the instrument above.

[PIANO MUSIC]

This is where it all happens down here. We have the hammer there, which you can see come up and hit the string. And then here, you'll just see the damper, which when the note is pressed down, it rises from the string and then falls again with the notes taken up.

[PIANO MUSIC]

So, what does it feel like to play this instrument? Well, I think, it's difficult for pianists because they have to learn an entirely new technique with their feet. And those organists who learn that technique usually take a few months in order to master it.

For organists then, it's easy enough to put the notes down, but there is a fundamental difference between this instrument and the organ. On the organ, it doesn't matter how hard you hit the pedal. You can hit it hard or you can hit it lightly, you'll still get the same volume of sound.

But that's not the case on this instrument because it's touch sensitive. So I can hit a note hard like that, or I can hit it quietly like that. You have to be a bit careful because if you hit it too hard, you tend to get a bit of action noise, which isn't very helpful.

[PIANO MUSIC]

There are, in fact, only five notes that Mozart wrote down that you should play with your feet. And they come from the beginning of the piano entry in the "Concerto in D-Minor," which goes like this.

[WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, "CONCERTO IN D-MINOR"]

That's all there is. So I suppose the question we have to ask to begin with is, what difference does the pedalboard make to the sound of the performance? Why should we have one? Why not just play it on an ordinary piano?

Well, I think, that can be illustrated quite easily by playing the example I just played and also something from the Fantasia that I played to begin with. So here's the passage from the D-Minor Concerto that I played without pedal.

[PIANO MUSIC]

And here it is with pedal.

[PIANO MUSIC]

I think the difference is pretty obvious. You get that sort of weight in the base of the instrument. So, what did Mozart actually play on his pedalboard? There's plenty of evidence that he used it in public and in private. And we know that he used it in different sorts of pieces such as concertos and fantasias.

But that's all very general. Apart from those five notes that I mentioned earlier, we have no idea what he actually did with his feet when he was playing. So we have to experiment a bit and guess a bit about what he might have done.

I think we can draw some conclusions, though, from the sort of music that we play on this instrument. So, for example, in the piece that I started off with, the Fantasia, the opening of that is written in octaves. And the pedal can simply be used to reinforce the sound of the piano like this.

[PIANO MUSIC]

Just lends a bit of weight to the piece. There are other places though where there's important material in the base of the instrument that the pedals simply can't do. I'm thinking about a place further into the Fantasia that goes like this.

[PIANO MUSIC]

No way you could play this on the pedals. Your feet can't move fast enough, and you've only got two of them. So that's one place that I wouldn't even attempt to play on the pedal. There are other places where the left hand often has an accompanying role, like this.

[PIANO MUSIC]

That sort of figure in the left hand is quite common. Now to play that on the pedals would be a bit cumbersome.

[PIANO MUSIC]

I don't think that's going to work at all. But what we can do is to depress a pedal note at the beginning of that little figure--

[PIANO MUSIC]

--or every other iteration of that figure.

[PIANO MUSIC]

And again, it just lends a bit of weight to the accompaniment.

[PIANO MUSIC]

Here's a phrase from a piece where I might use the pedal just to reinforce the beginning of each beat or each few beats.

[PIANO MUSIC]

So I could do it all the way through like that or maybe just where Mozart actually writes a sforzando. He wants an accent halfway through the first bar. So you could save it for that moment.

[PIANO MUSIC]

So no, I'm not sure which I prefer. And maybe from one performance to another, we might just adapt it. So just to close, I'm going to play that little bit. It's, again, from the "Fantasia in C-Minor," but it's a short few bars in D-major.

[PIANO MUSIC]

End transcript: Video 2

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The evidence used to reconstruct this instrument was wide-ranging. It included:

• a concert handbill
• a letter from Mozart’s father to Wolfgang’s sister, Nannerl
• a few notes in one of Mozart’s music manuscripts
• comments by Mozart’s pupil, the English composer Thomas Attwood, in an undated letter
• comments in his memoirs by the Swedish visitor to Mozart, Joseph Frank
• the inventory of Mozart’s possessions made after his death.

Details of the design of the reconstructed pedalboard are deduced from the descriptions of the instrument in documents, as well as the physical limitations of the space available beneath Mozart’s piano. Other relevant instruments from the period are also taken into account, so it seems likely that the reconstructed pedalboard roughly resembles the one used by Mozart. Once the evidence has been carefully studied, not too much is left to conjecture. As for the music played on it, there is evidence that tells us something about what Mozart played on the instrument, but there is also a further layer of evidence in broadly contemporary documents that suggests other sorts of music he might have performed on it. Precisely which notes Mozart played with his feet is unknown, so this aspect of a reconstructed performance remains a matter of conjecture (Maunder and Rowland, 1995).

Returning to the problematic aspects of the term ‘authenticity’ outlined earlier, you will hopefully readily see how much conjecture can be associated with the ‘reconstruction’ of early performances. In this case, not only does the relevant instrument not survive, but neither do specific instructions about what pieces of music were played on it. HIP is indeed a problematic musical subdiscipline!