There has always existed, and still exists, a school of harpsichord fanatics who regard the piano as an archenemy. This is not my feeling. For me there is too much in common between good harpsichord playing and good piano playing, even though the means and techniques of execution have in many ways been rendered almost irreconcilable by the emergence of the modern piano. And it is unthinkable that I should ever regard as an enemy the instrument for which the Schubert Impromptus, the Chopin Preludes, the Schumann Kreisleriana, and the Années de pèlerinage of Liszt were written. But its later development and the sclerosis that presently afflicts it are not exactly what I would have wished.

My first working experience with an early piano was with an Anton Walter piano of Mozart's time, now in the Germanisches [National] Museum in Nürnberg. It resembles the one in the Mozart house in Salzburg and one in the Vienna collection. This latter instrument, on which I have always worked and played, dates from 1785. We will now hear some fragments of the composite Mozart Sonata in F major (K. 533 and K. 494) played on it by Paul Badura-Skoda.

[Music]

Although as we hear it, this recording does not fully convey the character of the instrument as I know it, nor does it reveal all its possibilities of color and shading, it is the best example I have been able to find of Mozart recorded on a contemporary instrument.

The touch of these instruments is as light as that of a clavichord and considerably less reliable. The tone is transparent, to the point of brittleness. There is nothing massed for thickness, and the basses and low-lying chords are clear. The sound throughout is fragile and all-too-easily forced if the player is insensitive or incautious. But the very forcing of sound is of telling effect in those sforzatos that can sound like overblown wind instruments or like the accents of emphatic speech. At various levels of volume, the tone can change its color so that a forte has a totally different overtone content from [that on] a piano, and a pianissimo can achieve a breathy whisper.