Decorative Arts

This volume traces the diffusion of pianos with a tangent action through and beyond the eighteenth century. Some are primitive harpsichord-to-piano conversions but others are refined pianos with a Stossmechanik with non-pivoting vertical hammers. Apart from the simple models of Jean Marius around 1716, Christoph Gottlieb Schroeter before 1739 probably designed the first sophisticated action with non-pivoting hammers propelled by intermediate levers. However, the most refined eighteenth-century tangent pianos are those known as Tangentenflugel, built by Franz Jacob Spath and Christoph Friederich Schmahl from Regesburg, and by their followers, such as Johann Wihlhelm Berner. Tangent pianos were possibly exported from Germany. Pianos of this type made in England and Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be traceable to the German tradition, but are probably not related directly to the school of Spath and Schmahl. In Italy, pianos with a tangent action were made until the mid-nineteenth century. The volume includes a detailed catalogue of 42 pianos with a tangent action in public and private collections in Europe, the Usa and Japan, including Tangentenflugel by Spath and Schmahl.

The book describes the musical instruments preserved at Palazzo Mirto in Palermo. The collection includes a grand piano by Mathias Jakesch (Vienna, 1827), a mechanical organ by Anton Beyer (Naples, c. 1840), a grand piano by Pleyel (Paris, 1858), an upright piano by Koelliker & Grammer (Zurich, c. 1870).

The violicembalo invented by Luigi Taparelli was a piano whose strings were not struck by hammers but rubbed by gut cords whose friction was similar to a bow. Father Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio began to work on the violicembalo around 1829 in Rome, where he was rector of the jesuitic College, and continued his mechanical experiments in Naples and then in Palermo. His letters demonstrate that the jesuit obtained some of the most important mechanical results just during his stay in Sicily. In 1842 he decided to apply a pedal friction mechanism to the ordinary strings of the piano. During that year he committed the construction of the violicembalo to the piano maker Salvatore La Grassa from Palermo. Their co-operation failed soon and the jesuit decided to collaborate with another unknown builder. Unfortunately we have no trace of the instruments that Taparelli most probably made and carried out when he was in Sicily. In 1848, the revolts in Palermo obliged Taparelli to leave his experiments until 1850 when he moved to Rome. There he was finally able to achieve his last mechanical improvements thanks to the collaboration with the piano maker Paolo Alessandroni. Taparelli’s violicembalo had the consent of Pio IX and even of Franz Liszt who played this instrument in 1861 during his stay in Rome and suggested to call it “symphonium”. But after 30 years of modifications and perfectings, in 1862 Taparelli died and his violicembalo, when it was just becoming succesful, was quickly forgotten. It seems that no one of the very few instruments made by Taparelli has survived.

This article traces the diffusion of pianos with a tangent action through and beyond the eighteenth century. Some are primitive harpsichord-to-piano conversions but others are refined pianos with a Stossmechanik with non-pivoting vertical hammers. Apart from the simple models of Jean Marius around 1716, Christoph Gottlieb Schroeter before 1739 probably designed the first sophisticated action with non-pivoting hammers propelled by intermediate levers. However, the most refined eighteenth-century tangent pianos are those known as Tangentenflugel, built by Franz Jacob Spath and Christoph Friederich Schmahl from Regesburg, and by their followers, such as Johann Wihlhelm Berner. Tangent pianos were possibly exported from Germany. Pianos of this type made in England and Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be traceable to the German tradition, but are probably not related directly to the school of Spath and Schmahl. In Italy, pianos with a tangent action were made until the mid-nineteenth century. the article includes detailed descriptions of many pianos with a tangent action in public and private collections in Europe, the Usa and Japan, including Tangentenflugel by Spath and Schmahl.

In 1716 Jean Marius submitted several projects for his clavecins à maillet to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Short descriptions and plates of four of Marius’s actions were published in 1735 after his death. Even if Marius is well known as the first French piano maker, a wide part of his handwritten reports and descriptions on his clavecins à maillet are still unpublished. These descriptions give a number of details about the first piano actions devised in France some fifteen years after Cristofori's invention of his arpicimbalo che fa il piano e il forte in about 1700. These documents, which are included in this article for the fist time, were not quoted in the 1735 printed version that is usually mentioned in all the main surveys on the history of the early pianoforte. Furthermore, the article describes Andries Veltman's 1759 combined harpsichord-piano which was one of the very first hammer-action keyboard instruments made in France after Marius's experiments .

The article provides an overview of the Pleyel company during a fifty-year period, starting at the time of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the death of the well-known piano maker Camille Pleyel. During this period, the famous French firm was directed by Auguste Wolff (from 1855 to 1887) and Gustave Lyon (from 1887 to the beginning of twentieth century). The entrepreneurial talents,  scientific abilities and musical skills of Pleyel’s two successors made this company the biggest and most innovative French piano producer of the second half of the nineteenth century. Both Wolff and Lyon played leading roles on the occasion of universal exhibitions in which they promoted their renowned pianos as well as many of their new inventions which are described in the article: the piano à double percussion, the piano-pédalier, the clavier transpositeur, the pédale tonale, the harpe éolienne, the new-designed clavecin, the piano-double, the harpe chromatique, the harpe-luth, the Pleyela.

Vincenzo Trusiano Panormo is usually considered to be one of the finest violinmakers of the second half of the 18th century. However, much of what has been written on his early life is not based on any documentary evidence. This paper reveals new documentary findings concerning the biography of this important instrument maker and on other members of the Panormo family in Italy.