Of all the pianos described here my favourite is the convertible bedroom piano (American, 1866). You sleep attached to it. Ideal. The Austrian/German "Giraffe " piano is good because it looks like one, and I quite like the English "Upright grand Pianoforte in the form of a book-case" (1795), with shelving for busts of Roman heroes and other things.
Like Irving Berlin:
I love to stop right
beside an Upright
Or a high toned Baby Grand.
If only more people realised how crucial the piano is. You can lose weight by playing energetically, reduce smoking by playing slowly, ward off boredom/loneliness at any speed, and duets - four hands at one piano - are rife with possibilities.
This marvellous book has very good illustrations for the keyboard as sexual facilitator/social indicator. A Daumier lithograph of 1843 shows a leering tutor pretending to teach a young lady the solfege syllables DO SO MI while an unsuspecting old needle-pointing chaperone sits nearby. "If you only knew how pretty you are! Pretend you're playing DOn't talk. - You like me SO - I hope you'll always like MI."
In Vermeer's "A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal" everything is implicit, imminent. The towering naked cupid coupled with the woman's gaze suggests that the empty chair in the foreground will soon be occupied. And in Cezanne's gloomy painting of his sister, the piano conveys an oppressive domesticity. Matisse (unusually showing a boy at the keyboard) and Caillebote capture very well that removed sense of playing alone.
There are endless Renoir paintings of saccharine serial misses drooling over the music, always in the same position, and a wonderful Degas painting of Manet sitting on a sofa listening to his wife. (She played Wagner to Baudelaire on his deathbed.) Degas has a vertical band of paint (a curtain) on the right of the canvas, which hides Madame Manet's face, hands, legs and the piano we know she's playing. Manet was so incensed at this portrayal of his wife that he cut the painting and Degas departed with the fragments "without even saying goodbye". As a retort Manet painted his wife playing and filled the picture plane with her, removing himself, but it's a little staid and doesn't have the Degas work's quality of listening in.
The evolution of the piano's place in society is followed here through its appearance in literature and painting, invaluable eyewitness accounts. The early light instruments, limpid music and exquisitely agonising courtships of Jane Austen; an 1840 painting of Liszt at the keyboard surrounded by Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Paganini, Rossini, George Sand and Liszt's lover Marie d'Agoult, all in thrall, contemplating the beyond. They have become the sound, entered the instrument itself, are the keyboard:
"And because the whites, when you press them, are so obviously gay, and the blacks - immediately sorrowful, truly - sorrowful, so really and truly that if I press - it's as though I'm pressing on my eyes, and tears will burst from them, right away."
- (Marina Tsvetaeva)
A century after Pride and Prejudice pianos are sturdier, heavier, and the young woman must work harder at courtship:
"Yekaterina sat down and struck the keys with both hands; then she struck them again and again with all her might, and again and again; her shoulders and bosom shuddered, she went on striking the keys in the same place, and one could not help feeling that she would go on hitting the keys till she had driven them into the piano. Startsev . . . found Yekaterina, rosy with the exertion, . . . very attractive indeed."
- (Chekhov)
As the piano is usually taught, there is the intoxicating business of pupil and teacher. I was lucky to study with one of the most wonderful people in Dublin, Elizabeth (Lily) Huban. I remember one typical moment when I had reached a haunting passage in Schumann. I thought things were going pretty well (as in one of St Teresa's ecstasies) when she stopped me, gazed (more in Corot than in Ingres - I know, but I can't not), and whispered "le poete parle". What she had wanted was what the American composer Morton Feldman described when his old Russian teacher played (sank into) a B flat and it made him want to die - a good image for his work. Heaven in a grain of sand/a novel in a sigh and so on.
Gerald Barry is a composer. His latest work is In The Asylum