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What Killed The Golden Age of Piano?
What killed the golden age of the piano, that period between 1800 and 1910? You have to realize how piano-mad the world went for a while. Before 1900, there was no radio, television, cars, record players or electricity. What else was there to do but listen to someone play the piano?
If you lived in a city, you might have had a chance to hear an orchestra -- but not very often. Most people experienced orchestral music by listening to a pianist. Sometimes there was a small ensemble playing a wide variety of symphonic music arranged for various smaller groups.
Piano Functions As Radio
Many composers, Liszt among them, earned a living arranging Beethoven symphonies. They arranged for everything from a single piano to a string quartet. This was done to whet the insatiable appetite of the public for live performances of the latest masterpieces.
And these performances took place in your living room. Those who were suitably wealthy enough to have time and resources educated their sons and daughters.
Piano Was Part Of The Social Fabric
General musical skills were far higher than now. Music was one of the few respectable pursuits that the middle and upper classes adored. Most people could read music, or at least had the rudiments of it included in their education.
A young lady was not considered properly “turned out” unless she could play the piano or sing creditably. It was a social mark of distinction to be able to entertain others with music. An orchestra concert was a major event for the public. The ultra wealthy, in Beethoven’s day, kept their own private orchestras, but soon that became too expensive even for the rich.
Piano Is Easy
Piano Becomes The Musical Vehicle
And so the piano stepped in, and became the musical synonym for the orchestra. Virtuosi like Liszt and Chopin filled that need for complex music played on the readily available, ubiquitous piano. And the public’s need fueled a culture among the musicians who made livings creating, playing and arranging the masterworks and humbler works of every kind.
Early Tech Destroys The Piano
Then came several events that destroyed the momentum of that musical revolution, known as the Golden Age of Piano. First came the automobile, which gave America mobility at the turn of the century. Who wanted to sit home listening to a piano when they could be whizzing down the road in their Model T?
Next came the gramophone, or record player, fully developed by around 1918. This alone minimized the need for piano and pianists, although it disseminated the recordings of many great early artists (Gabrilowitsch, Paderewski, etc.) who would otherwise have been lost.
Radio Was The Death Blow
Next came the Radio in 1926, the year they figured out how to mass-produce it. That was the death knell. Now Americans were addicted to the idea of entertainment issuing from machines. Perhaps it was simply the enthusiasm for machinery and gadgets that swept America at the time.
From then on, it was downhill. Although radio and then television promised at first to widen the piano culture, they were in fact singing its Swan Song. By the 1970’s the Golden Age of the Piano had disappeared and the digital age was right around the corner.
Are we really better off with pink iphones?
REFERENCES
Music History
Carl Tausig Cooks His Cat
I Meet Aaron Copland
George Sand Killed Chopin
Why Brahms Must Have Been Fat
Artur Rubinstein Was A Vampire
Igor Stravinsky Loses His Cool
Vladimir Horowitz Goes To The Racetrack
Beethoven Was No Beauty
The World’s Largest Blue Danube Waltz
Was Mozart Murdered?
Beethoven’s Rage Over A Lost Penny
Franz Schubert, The First Bohemian
Chopin’s Singing Piano Tone
Stravinsky’s Good Luck
Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Fan
Hector Berlioz and the Orchestral Train Wreck
Piano Lessons with Papa Bach
Piano Lessons with Frederic Chopin
The Great Piano Craze of 1910
The American Piano Wars
Why Hugo Wolf Went Insane
Rachmaninoff and the Evolution of Pop Songs
Musical Feuds
Piano In The Past Was Better
The Master’s Hands
Einstein’s Piano
Einstein’s Violin Improvisations In Gypsy Style
A History of Piano and Numbers
Ryan Seacrest’s Piano Concerto #2
