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- Title
Among Mozart's spättischen Clavier: a Pandaleon-Clavecin by Frantz Jacob Spath, Regensburg, 1767?
- Authors
KOSTER, JOHN
- Abstract
A small grand piano acquired in 2006 by the National Music Museum, Vermillion, SD (cat. no. 13010), bears a handwritten paper label inscribed Frantz Jacob Spath / Regenspurg 1767. The instrument's authenticity can be established by comparison with other mid-to-late eighteenth-century German instruments, including later products of the workshop of F. J. Spath (1714-86) and his partner and successor Christoph Friedrich Schmahl (1739-1814). In its original state, the piano had the compass AA to e³ and its action was a form of Stoßmechanik without escapement. The present hammers, early nineteenth-century replacements, are, like the original hammers, hinged with parchment to a rail at the front edge of the soundboard. Although there are now no dampers, they might have been attached to the original hammer shanks. The 1767 piano, the earliest known stringed-keyboard instrument from the Spath workshop, is probably a unique surviving example of the Pandaleons-Clavecins that Spath advertised in 1765. It is of considerable historical importance as representing a tradition of piano making more closely related to Pantaleon Hebenstreit's Pantaleon than to the tradition of Gottfried Silbermann's work influenced by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Further, it may well represent the spättischen Clavier preferred by W. A. Mozart before he encountered J. A. Stein's pianos in 1777. Since Spath's instruments were known in Vienna and Paris, instruments like the Spath piano of 1767 might have influenced piano making in those cities, where similar instruments were made in the following decades.
- Subjects
PIANO; KEYBOARD instruments; HARPSICHORD; MUSICAL instruments; MUSIC
- Publication
Early Keyboard Journal, 2010, Vol 25/26, p153
- ISSN
0899-8132
- Publication type
Article