The complete keyboard concertos - Volume 7

Abstract

Performer's remarks More about the tangent piano The roots of the idea to construct a keyboard instrument with a mechanism striking the strings go back as far as the fifteenth Century. This means that the piano had had a long pre-history before Bartolomeo Cristofori built his first piano about 1690 - which was for a long time thought to be a new 'invention'. If we can believe the sporadic documents surviving from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, we can assume that piano-like instruments were already known and built, though it is still Unclear how widespread they were. Undoubtedly harpsichords and Clavichords were more populär keyboard instruments than any piano in those early times, but the existence of pianos cannot be denied. Therefore, Cristofori's invention marks the first summit in the history of piano building rather than its beginning. How the strings in the early pianos were Struck - with hammers or with 'tan-gents' - seems to have been considered a question of secondary importance for a long time. Mechanics both with pivoted hammers and with freely moving wooden slips (tangents') were known and adapted (see also the drawing of the tangent action on page 12). The resulting sound must have been very similar in both cases. On early drawings of piano actions, the offen uncovered wooden hammers also had a thin edge, similar to the striking surface of the 'tangents' of the tangent mechan¬ism. It is difficult to discover more about the pre-Cristofori pianos because of the lack of surviving examples. The earliest known 'piano' is an Italian spinet dating from 1587, the plucking mechanism of which was transformed into a tangent mech¬anism in 1632.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (11714-88) has been recognized ever since his own lifetime as one of the most original musicians of the 18th Century, over-shadowed in that respect perhaps only by his younger contemporary. Joseph Haydn. Both men clearly feit themselves most importantly to be creative artists; yet, like any mid-18th-century composer, they depended for their success on an ability to provide music for whatever occasions might present themselves. Like Haydn. Emanuel Bach spent the first 30 years or so of his career as a court musi-cian, in his case at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great of Prussia. where he wrote the greater number of his keyboard concertos. But since Frederick made a far less appreciative audience for innovative music than Count Esterhäzy was to do, Emanuel began rather early to seek an audience outside the court. He issued pub-lications of his keyboard sonatas in 1742 and 1744, when he was barely 30 years old, and in 1746 published a keyboard concerto composed only three years earlier (H. 414/W. 11, included in volume 5 of this series). This desire to make his music as widely available as he could was probably an im-portant factor in the composition of the first and last works on this disc. H. 437/W. 29 in A major and H.434/W.28 in B flat major. Both these concertos, as well as the concerto in A minor, H. 430/W. 26, exist not only as keyboard concertos but also as concertos (in the same keys) for flute and for cello. Two other keyboard concertos (H.425/W.22 in D minor and H.444/W. 34 in G major) exist in versions for solo flute, and yet two more IH.465/W.39 in B flat major and H.467/W.40 in E flat majori as oboe concertos. In most of these cases, with the exception of the G major concerto, scholars have found reason to believe that a version for melody instru-ment probably preceded the keyboard one, which would thus be an arrangement of an earlier composition. Such a procedure was not unusual: Emanuel's father, Johann Sebas*„ian Bach, had made similar arrangements of his solo violin (and perhaps also oboe) concertos for the harpsichord. making them available for his own appear-ances as a keyboard virtuoso.