Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/735

PIANOFORTE. tasto, or d'astro, bar) and elsewhere. There has been a recent revival of Mr. W. F. Collard's idea, patented in 1821, of utilising the back draught of the wires, between the belly bridge and the hitch pins, for sympathetic vibration, by means of what he called (Patent No. 4542) a 'bridge of reverberation.' This reappears, in idea, in Messrs. Steinway's 'Duplex Scale'; but Herr Blüthner of Leipzig has gone further in employing independent sympathetic strings of half length in his 'Aliquot' piano. By this he adds the octave harmonic throughout three octaves, and thus produces something of the shifting soft pedal timbre: the forte or damper pedal in the ordinary pianoforte is however an incomparably more efficient floodgate to these sympathetic, or more properly, Æolian reinforcements.

The last inventions we have to mention concern the pedals, and are due to M. Montal, a blind Parisian pianoforte maker, who, in 1862, exhibited in London (1) a 'Pédale d'expression,' diminishing the range of the hammers instead of shifting them, an expedient now employed by American and German makers, and (2) a 'Pédale de prolongement,' a third pedal, by using which a note or notes may be prolonged after the fingers have quitted the keys. This pedal has been of late years re-introduced in Paris, Stuttgart and New York. Reference to will show the radical change that took place between 1830 and 1850 in 'instrumenting' the pianoforte, giving it what we may call colour of tone, divined by Beethoven, and perfected by Chopin and Liszt. By these parallel advances in technique and instrument, the masterpieces composed for the pianoforte by Beethoven have since 1850 found their fullest exposition.

It cannot be too emphatically urged that pianoforte makers, to truly excel, must ever be individual in their productions. They should be guided by care of proportions in every detail, and in equality of tension as far as the scale will admit; and by a fine discrimination of the proper striking place or point of attack upon the strings. The highly complex nature of the instrument offers inexhaustible facilities for choice in modification of these conditions, which, combined with tradition in working, an important factor, may be taken as the distinctive note of personality in a maker. But we must not forget that there is also a national taste in choice of tone which has an unmistakable influence.

A table of dates will be found a useful conclusion to this article.

[ A. J. H. ]