19.4 - From Wagner's Piano to the Steinway of America

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From the course by Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1345 ratings

Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1345 ratings

Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.

From the lesson

The Romantic Era

Module 8 will begin with a tour of Yale’s extraordinary keyboard collection; perhaps the finest of its kind in the world. We’ll see fully functioning instruments of all shapes and sizes, some dating back to the time of Mozart and before! We’ll learn the preferred brands and styles of some of the finest pianists of all time, Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Schubert to name a few. We’ll even get to hear some of these instruments played by musical educator and concert pianist Robert Blocker. His performances will help us hear exactly how advances in technology changed the sound and capabilities of pianos during this time period. Our next session this module covers a rather polarizing topic: Opera. Many people find the Opera too artificial, too long, and sometimes just plain boring; others enjoy nothing more than this glamorous art form. We’ll spend some time making a case for the power and beauty, indeed the magic, of Opera. Maybe, we’ll be able persuade some naysayers along the way. Because it is impossible to encompass all of Romantic opera in an hour, we'll concentrate on the masterpieces of Verdi and the groundbreaking music dramas of Wagner. Perhaps the only figure who can reasonably by compared to Beethoven in terms of musical originality and innovation, Wagner changed the face of 19th century music. We’ll explore Wagner by briefly analyzing his Ring Cycle. This innovative cycle of librettos, based on Norse mythology, contains some of the most iconic and recognizable music from the period. Wagner's use of "leitmotifs” made detailed storytelling possible, with the music even conveying the subconscious thought of singers on stage, a truly revolutionary feat. His work would go on to serve as inspiration for writers and film makers such as Tolkien, Lewis, Lucas, and Martin, not to mention countless composers. In the final lesson of this module, we’ll expand our focus to look at the orchestra as a whole during the Romantic period. Just 60 years after Mozart led his thirty-five-player orchestra, it was not uncommon to see Wagner and Mahler conducting ensembles with well over 100 members. In addition to increased numbers, the instruments themselves changed. Technological advances, transformed previously one dimensional instruments, such as the French horn, into versatile tools, capable of projecting a completely chromatic melody. This newfound versatility allowed composers like Brahms and Mahler to experiment with and forever redefine orchestral instrumentation.

19.1 - Fixed Pitch Keyboard Instruments: A Quick Review8:20

19.2 - The Pianos of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert13:18

19.3 - The Pianos of Chopin and Liszt9:08

19.4 - From Wagner's Piano to the Steinway of America10:49

19.5 - Frédéric Chopin and the Nocturne6:40

19.6 - Franz Liszt and the Etude13:59

Meet the Instructors

Craig Wright
Henry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music

[MUSIC]

Well, as we follow Robert Blocker from piano to piano,

I think you're coming to have an appreciation of why this Yale collection

is arguably the finest collection of keyboard instruments in the world.

In the far corner you see another remarkable piano,

one owned by Richard Wagner at his home in Tribschen, Switzerland.

And it was on this instrument that Wagner composed parts of the music

of the Ring Cycle, parts of Siegfried and Gotterdamerung.

And of course, Wagner's father in law,

Franz Liszt played on this piano as well when he visited Wagner.

Yet as rich as this instrument is, when Robert Blocker plays it,

you'll be struck by its clarity.

>> And now here today at Yale we have not only the opportunity for

our students to play and to learn from this instrument, but

with yet a new technology to share this with a wider world.

As Craig pointed out earlier, this piano has a lot of clarity.

And I wanted to use a couple of examples from the Brahms Intermezzo, Opus 118.

Late pieces in Brahms' life where he's refined

this orchestra style in an economy of resources,

and you can hear some of the contrapuntal things that

I'm going to point out and what clarity is.

First of all, an excerpt from Opus 118 Number 2.

[MUSIC]

So you can hear the voices very clearly interacting with each other.

The piano has a lot of strength from Opus 116.

Again, the B section of the capriccio.

[MUSIC]

So in this piano we better understand certainly

the dramatic contrasts that we hear in Wagner's writing.

Because the piano gives him that basis for

thinking about this in his own imagination.

>> Now we move to an instrument that is less clear but much richer in sound,

the massive Steinway of just three years later,

1867, only three years after the end of the American Civil War.

The Steinway in the Yale Collection is so

big that it requires a special corner all to itself.

Notice that it's far bigger than any instrument we've seen,

the biggest in the collection.

We've arrived at the nine foot long concert grand of today.

But the year is only 1867.

It was built, not in Vienna or in Berlin by Germans, but

by German immigrants coming to America, in this case one Henrick Steinweg.

Now, Herr Steinweg soon became Mr.

Steinway, who setup a piano manufacturing company in New York in the 1850s.

And we'll be joined by Nicholas Renouf, senior curator of the collection

to introduce us to this massive new instrument.

So welcome to America,

that burgeoning dynamic new country in which technology was changing everything.

We're going to take a look now and a listen to beautiful large Steinway

piano that has a signficantly different

sound to it than the one we just heard with the earlier Wagnerian Bechstein.

So we've left Germany, Switzerland, and now we are only three years later

in the United States with this new Steinway piano.

>> This instrument, dating from 1867, was made at a time when our

country was coming of age, not only industrially, but culturally as well.

Examples such as this, and instruments by Steinway's rival,

Chickering, set the European industry on its ears.

They were appalled that we had done something that so

impressed the public and musicians as well.

What we see here is a complete unitary cast iron

frame that's absolutely rigid in its resistance of the string tension.

So even greater sonority is possible with this instrument.

It has the overstrung bass that made history as well as the cast iron frame.

And it gives us really the modern piano.

>> It also, I should add, has a very different action.

And when we speak of the piano action,

it's the way the keys react when they're depressed.

And this is a very, very sensitive action but

certainly not as sensitive as some of the earlier pianos.

>> [LAUGH] >> Nothing is as sensitive as that first

Beethoven piano.

But just to give us a good comparison,

I want to use the same Brahms examples that we did on the Bechstein.

And you can see, even in this wonderful, large Steinway piano,

you have a clarity of sound and even more expansive range, and

especially color because of the cross-stringing.

[MUSIC]

>> To amplify two points made by Nicholas and Robert,

the massive size of the Steinway is made possible owing to an innovation

of an American company in Boston, the Chickering Piano Company.

Now Chickering introduced the uniform or single piece cast iron frame.

Now you can see on the left here, the German Bechstein of 1864 with

the pieces of iron that are attached to other pieces of iron.

With the Steinway, there is much more iron surrounding the entire sound board.

it's all one piece, single cast.

And a second point, Robert mentioned the over stringing of the Steinway.

You can see with the Bechstein on the left that the bass strings

run out in a straight line with the other strings.

To the right you see that the Steinway company decided to

take those bass strings and run them up and over the middle strings.

The earlier Bechstein did have an advantage.

Parallel stringing did produce a very clear sound.

The Steinway, with its overstringing, creates a richer, more homogenous sound.

And after Steinway really all grand pianos were made with this

overstringing technique.

But as we can see, the overstringing is more readily apparent

here on this overhead photo of a modern Steinway.

The middle strings run straight out.

Follow the red arrow there straight out.

While the low bass strings ride up and over, as indicated by the blue arrow.

Let's go back to the collection now for a final thanks to our two guests.

So that concludes our brief tour of this extraordinary

collection of keyboard instruments.

Again, arguably the finest collection of keyboard instruments in the world.

My thanks to Robert Blocker, Dean of the Yale School of Music,

Senior Curator Nicholas Renouf of the collection of musical instruments.

This collection, this splendid collection is open to the public.

So if you're ever in New Haven please come join me and

join our colleagues at the collection here at Yale.

Thanks very much.

And the final takeaway from our visit to the Yale collection of musical

instruments, in the first 100 years of the existence of the piano,

from its invention in 1700 to the piano of around 1800, not all that much changed.

But during the next 60 years or so, up to the Steinway of 1867 that we saw,

the piano changed enormously, going from an almost tiny toy with limited

sound to a monster of various colors and huge sound.

Notice of course that all this happened during what period in Western history?

Well, the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America.

For the piano, the great age of change was the 60 years between 1800 and 1860.

And not much has changed on the concert grand since then.

The Industrial Revolution with the piano and

with other musical instruments, as we'll see, was the first great era

of technological change in Western musical history.

The second great change of technological advance came

during the 20th century with the popularization of recorded music.

And then especially with a capacity to digitalize recorded sound to the point

that the entire world of music can now be contained in a phone and

held in your hand.

Now that's real change.

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