This Social History of the Piano treats the role of the piano in the home, from its invention
in the early 18th century to the present days.
Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, pianos were financially beyond the reach of
most families, and the pianos of those times were generally the property of the gentry and
the aristocracy.
Visiting music masters taught their children, more often the girls than
the boys, to play the piano. It was widely felt at the time that ability to play the piano
made young women more marriageable.
Women who had learned to play as children often continued to play as adults, thus providing
music in their households. For instance, Emma Wedgwood (1808-1896), the granddaughter of the
wealthy industrialist Josiah Wedgwood took piano lessons from none other than Frédéric Chopin,
and apparently achieved a fair level of proficiency. Following her marriage to Charles Darwin,
Emma still played the piano daily, while her husband listened appreciatively.
A number of female piano students became outright virtuose, and the skills of woman pianists
inspired the work of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, who dedicated difficult-to-play works to
their woman friends. However, careers as concert musicians were typically open only to men
(an important exception was Clara Schumann).
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the middle class of Europe and North America
increased in both numbers and prosperity. This increase produced a corresponding rise in the
domestic importance of the piano, as ever more families became able to afford pianos and piano
instruction. The piano also become common in public institutions, such as schools, hotels, and
public houses. As elements of the Western middle class lifestyle gradually spread to other
nations, the piano became common in these nations as well, for example in Japan.
To understand the rise of the piano among the middle class, it is helpful to remember that before
mechanical and electronic reproduction, music was in fact performed on a daily basis by ordinary
people. For instance, the working people of every nation generated a body of folk music, which was
transmitted orally down through the generations and sung by all. The parents of Joseph Haydn
(1732-1809) could not read music, yet Haydn's father (who worked as a wheelwright) taught himself
to play the harp, and the Haydn family frequently played and sang together. With rising prosperity,
the many families that could now afford pianos and music adapted their home-grown musical abilities
to the new instrument, and the piano become a major source of music in the home.
Amateur pianists in the home often kept track of the doings of the leading pianists and composers
of their day. Professional virtuosi wrote books and methods for the study of piano playing, which
sold widely. The virtuosi also prepared their own editions of classical works, which included
detailed marks of tempo and expression to guide the amateur who wanted to use their playing as a
model. (Today, students are usually encouraged to work from an urtext edition.) The piano compositions
of the great composers often sold well among amateurs, despite the fact that, starting with Beethoven,
they were often far too hard for anyone but a trained virtuoso to play perfectly. Evidently,
the amateur pianists obtained satisfaction from coming to grips with the finest music, even if
they could not perform it from start to finish.
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