9UNP0439SD_Trevor_Stephenson_Norman_Gilliland

- Welcome to University Place. I'm Norman Gilliland and today we're going to find out why one of these was necessary for the writing of much of the world's greatest music. A simple crow feather being a crucial ingredient in the works of Bach and Handel and Scarlatti. We'll also find out where the keyboard went after they were through with it. We've made a field trip today to the studio of Trevor Stephenson. He's the founder of the Madison Bach Musicians. And with Norman Sheppard, the builder of replica keyboards, reproducing the sounds of the 18th century. And wish us luck today because if we have a thunderstorm, as we have been promised, we'll get a little extra percussion. But always a pleasure to be in your studio, Trevor. 

- Thank you so much for coming. 

- You are seated at an improbable instrument. It's got all the steps between the actual player and the music that comes out. 

- I know. 

- How did something that complicated ever develop in the first place? 

- Why make it so complicated? For thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years people have been plucking strings stretched over wood and getting a wonderful sound. Singing with it and all of that. And sometime in the 14th century, we don't know who, somebody said, gee, what if we automated that for you? What if can he turned it into a machine with levers in between you and the strings doing to the string instrument what had already been done to the pan pipe when the organ was made? 

Because the organ is really a keyed pan pipe. And so they were borrowing the technological idea. So we don't know what anybody thought of this, we don't know who thought of it, but somewhere in the 14th century a keyed harp appeared, they call it harpsichord, and in order to do this they make these fulcrum lever keyboards, just like all keyboards are, and riding out on the end of that is a thing called a jack. It's a wooden stick and poking through the jack is a bit of the shaft of a crow feather like you held up there. And that crow feather plucks the string for the player. It has an elaborate escapement on the way back down so that it can get out of the way of the string as it comes back down and reload so quickly that... 

(plays a trill)

 you can't out-trill it. It's a brilliant mechanism. And this really catches on. 

We don't know how it catches on but they just start building more and more of them. 

- The crows hated those things though. 

- The crows hated them, right. And of course everyone knew about crow feathers. They had played the -- often with handheld feathers, and people knew how to cut these very skillfully because they wrote with them. They wrote with raven quills and crow quills and all that. And a big part of harpsichord maintenance that I do every week is the hours spent cutting these quills and shaping them and all of that so that they sing. 

(plays harpsichord)

 That's what we're going for as a singing sound, and that's part of the harpsichord's art. 

- These are still plucked strings. 

- They are plucked strings, right. So it's a very fine sound. One way to think of it is it comes from the age of when they painted with a single brush most of the time. It was a single-hair brush. And the fineness of the line... 

(plays harpsichord)

 That you can kind of see the painting and the tremendous attention to detail. 

(plays harpsichord)

 Like that. It's also a very rich world that because of this fine string that's being plucked, the physics of it, we won't go into it too much, but the high sounds very high and the lows sound very low. 

(plays harpsichord)

 And if you go... 

(plays harpsichord)

 That seems like the bottom of the ocean compared to where we started like that. Which is very different from a piano. Pianos are made so they're smooth throughout and everything has the same voice which in -- sounds fantastic. 

- But very crisp compared to a piano. 

- Right. 

- And clean and clear tone. 

- Exactly. 

The moment is arrested with the harpsichord. 

(plays harpsichord)

 There's no doubt about when the sound starts. And it's got this beautiful lift. And that's also part of what the crow feather does is gives the sound this kind of a vase-like shape. And you can hear it lift off like that. So I think it's the way that they heard, it's very precise. It's also the pitch is extremely clear and they used the harpsichord most of the time not as a solo instrument really but as an ensemble instrument feeding everybody the pitch and the rhythm because this speaks faster than anything. No one is going to beat this to the beat. So the harpsichord speaks first and it feeds the ensemble, the pitch, and the rhythm, and then the voices and the cellos and all of that, they flesh it out from there. 

This is the way music was made until the middle part of the 18th century. 

- There really wasn't that much solo music by the harpsichord up to that point? 

- There was but its daily function was more for accompanying the voice, accompanying the violin, and mostly playing along with the cello. The left hand of the keyboard player and the cello played the same line, called continuo, and it's throughout Baroque music, and that is the foundation upon which all the rest of the texture was built. Baroque music is really built from the bottom up. And of course solo music was made a lot, and we're going to hear some great solo pieces for the harpsichord. But I think maybe its majority function was in helping the music making of others. 

- And still, though, we're talking about not a concert hall such as we would expect today, but maybe a drawing room or at most a fairly small public place like a coffee house. 

- Yes, right. Of course in the Baroque halls, places like that that maybe seated 100, 200, 300 with hard floor and high plaster or marble walls, these things sounded magnificent. 

That's exactly where they were played to greatest effect and, of course, in the home. This is, as you can see, this is a full concert instrument. Many of the harpsichords were tiny little things called spinets or virginals where the strings go transversely across in front of the player and people sang with them. That's where most of them were done, but this is kind of the Steinway D of the harpsichord. 

- It does seem as if suddenly we have this generation of fantastic keyboard players, harpsichord players, all born within maybe five years of each other in the late 17th century. 

- Right. How did this come about? 

- Something in the water. 

- Something in the water. And the three great players, great composers that we're going to look at, Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti, were all born in 1685. 

So bordering on spooky. And we don't know how this happened. What's even more amazing is they have such divergent careers too. 

- And styles. 

- And styles. And they really, looking back on it now, they summarize, I think, the great age of counterpoint and kind of finish off this great era of the harpsichord. Bach with his self-entrenched Lutheran spiritualism, going to the center of existence. Handel with his amazing theatrical quality and writing for everybody a sense of inclusiveness. And then Scarlatti the great diarist really. 

- How do I feel today? 

- How do I feel today, right. And 550 keyboard sonatas later having solved it. And it was amazing that these three guys all happened at the same time. And they were all super virtuosos and knew their instrument inside out. Should I maybe go to a few of these? 

- Yeah, I'm curious about some of this Lutheran spiritualism of Bach, for example, and counterpoint you mentioned which is I guess comes originally out of vocal singing and one voice sort of going counter to the other. 

- We know that somewhere in what we now call the early renaissance, late middle ages, the idea of more than one voice at a time is coming to the front, and of course this is being fought in some sectors. The church, in particular, thinks it's too hard to listen to. You can't follow the words. 

- Too many notes. 

- Too many notes, it's getting too busy. Composers like Palestrina say, no, this can magnify God's greatness. And the experiment is launched. And I think, again looking back on it, what we see in the age of counterpoint because it's very sophisticated music. When you start writing pieces where the melody is out of phase with itself and still works against itself, it's Sudoku level 700, and once you commit to that, you have a fusion of spirit and intellect, the like that we have never seen since. I think composers like Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti and Handel, all of them really believed that your intellect and your spirit could be one thing. They didn't see them as sometimes we see them as being almost opposed to each other. 

- Reason and emotion. 

- And in a way one could argue pretty convincingly that the renaissance was an experiment in that. That faith and reason could be one thing. 

And Bach is the end all of it. He's the very end of this great rainbow. And after he's done it collapses into homophonic style. Maybe collapse isn't the right word, but that's what takes over melody and accompaniment like that. In Bach there are no accompaniments, everything works together. So it was a grand experiment, and we're so glad that they ran it. That they really committed to it because it was a lot of work. 

(laughter)

- Well yeah, Bach, for example, who seemed to get maybe four hours of sleep a night had 17, 18 children. 

- Right, 21 were born and 13 lived. 

- And presumably he wasn't intense in the childcare department, but still just having that many voices in the same house where you're trying to work. And you have to copy everything out by hand and you needed music constantly for his employers. It's just amazing that there were as many hours enough in the day for him to produce what he produced. Now one of his most famous pieces, actually, is very simple in its beginning, and that's the very first of those 24 Preludes and Fugues. 

- Should we look at that one? It's where he started when he wrote his masterpiece, "The Well-Tempered Clavier," one of his seminal works for the keyboard. He started with the simplest of all possible melodic devices which is a repeated rolled chord. 

(plays harpsichord)

 ? 

? ? ? ? ? ? ? And of course he weds the simplest to the most complex right here in the first piece. 

- I had forgotten how complicated the fugue that follows the prelude is. The prelude, though, with the rolled chords that you mentioned, it would have been a lot shorter if he would have just played chords, wouldn't it? 

- Right, I always think if I had been the editor and Bach had sent me this manuscript with all this repetition in it... 

(plays harpsichord)

 As a modern, in which we save time because that's what we're best at is saving time, I would have told him to boil it down. Could you tighten this up a little bit? So if you take out the repetition here's what's left. 

(plays harpsichord)

 Kind of a sketch. But there's no grace in that. 

- So hard to find tune in there too. 

- Right, but when the repetition comes in, first of all your blood pressure drops, I don't know, 20 points. 

(plays harpsichord)

 And then the issue shifts because without the repetition he's just talking about this morning, what happened this morning. But when you hear the repetition, it's not just this morning, it's every morning that ever was and every morning that's ever going to be. 

- It's an eternity. 

- And that's the metaphysical we were talking about. He can take it from something so small and show you how it applies to everything. How he could have thought this piece up, I don't know. And it's so durable. At the end, too, it's so cleaver because at the end he breaks the pattern and holds the rhythm but shifts the shape so that you wake up. 

(plays harpsichord)

 I think that's, oh, I must be awake. And it's time to start the work day. 

(plays harpsichord)

 Which is exactly what the Fugue is. The Fugue is three cups of coffee. ? ? And 13 kids coming out of the bedroom. ? ? 

And it's in four parts. ? ? Listen to this. ? ? 

- Kind of dissonant. 

- As I always say, it's a Harry Potter moment. The point is how did he get there? How did he get to something so different in expression from this clean, beautiful morning that we were at, a few lines later where he's looking at... 

(plays harpsichord)

 This. 

- It's those 13 kids. 

- Right, and yet at no time during the playing of the Fugue, when you experience it as a continuum, do you say, wow, what is that doing there? Isn't he in left field? 

- You wake up and you're there. 

- Exactly. I think Bach's vision of life was so magnificently grand and big that all of this disparity is woven into one cloth, and you except it as being like life itself. 

- Unified field theory. 

- Took the words out of my mouth. 

I think it is unified field theory. Don't you think so? 

- For sure and of course the more Bach you hear the more that you get that impression. 

- Right, yeah. And so unified field theory. Here it is. A little village in Germany in the 18th century. And he was writing this music not for publication. This is for his students and, as he always said, for the glory of God. For my neighbor and the glory of God. 

There were no issue of it. No publication. When he wanted a student who had gotten advanced enough to play it, if he wanted them to have it he would copy out the whole thing again. The number of hours that Bach spent just copying music, not even just composing but recopying things he'd already written, is enough to give you tendonitis just thinking about it. So we don't know what he was made of. But something pretty wonderful. 

- And all of that he did have this wonderful temper too. He was known, especially as a young man, for getting into street fights and arguments with his superiors and still had plenty of time for romance too apparently. 

- Exactly. I always say if you had an IQ of 6 million, like he must have had, maybe you'd be a little short-tempered too. 

But he somehow managed to get through it and be a very functional part of society as well. It wasn't like he was an idiot savant of any type. He just moved along very nicely and was actually not too bad of a business man. He made it all work. 

- A fairly nice guy in all of that. There was an instance in which he actually was hoping to visit his contemporary Handel, and Handel seems to have kind of blown him off and avoided seeing him, and maybe that had to do with he was afraid of a harpsichord duel or something which was a fad back then. 

- In those days if two great musicians got together, they were often asked to go to the church and improvise on the organ and people would kind of judge who was better. But who knows. We do know that Handel, who got very famous while living in England, Handel did come back to his boyhood home in Halle, kind of a celebrity visit to his boyhood home, that Bach dropped everything, these two men had never met, and Bach dropped everything, got in a carriage, rode six hours to meet Handel and Handel had just left. They don't know if Handel caught wind that Bach was coming. 

Handel knew who Bach was for sure. And there might have been a playoff. I think it was very touching that Bach, who never wasted more than 15 minutes of his whole life, would ride six hours in a carriage to meet this man. It's a testament to Handel's greatness. Handel had a gift and an ability in music that is something that Bach does not, it's the one place he doesn't really go, which is toward kind of a theatrical catharsis. Handel is a theatre writer. 

- Bach never played in the theatre so far as we know. He was the church or the court. But Handel, of course, had quite the contentious career in London as an opera composer, very competitive cut-throat sort of business, and he, too, was a pretty temperamental guy so he must have had this theatrical flare about him anyway. I think at one point when a soprano balked at singing one of Handel's arias, he seized her by the waist and threatened to throw her out the window. 

And she sang. 

- That's a hard-boiled world there. And of course Bach, by contrast, stays in the belly of the beast, Lutheranism, for better or for worse in a place where his type of message would at least be more easily accepted. At least in his own day. Now we're all gaga for Bach. But in his own day it was good to know they were not building any statues to him. And Handel, by contrast, was really kind of a big deal. And I think Bach admired Handel, I really do. And I think when he showed up to meet him it's, I should give you the character of this, and Handel is a great orator, and he had this ability like an FDR or somebody to make everybody, high and the low, feel good about themselves from the moment he opens his compositional mouth. So this is the Gavotte in G major. 

It's just a little one-pager. 

(plays harpsichord)

 ? ? He's grand. He was grand. 

- There is a tune you can follow there though. 

- Right. 

- And you actually visualize easily people dancing to that. I'm not sure that's true of anything I can think of in Bach. 

- He was a little more abstract. 

- He played dance movements, I mean movements that had the names of Baroque dances, but it's harder to visualize people dancing. Whereas this, right away I see English dancing master and students. 

- He's public from his toes to the top of his head. And everything he does is to shape the public well-being. Which is why in "Messiah" it's an overwhelming experience. And I think it's the camaraderie of it. My favorite stories about Handel music is going to 600 grade school kids playing strings, and they all had played not more than a year or two. 600 launching into a Handel melody, "Song of Jupiter." Truly you've never heard anything as out of tune as this was. 

It was just appalling. And yet, tears of joy running down everybody's cheek because it's the publicness of it. And it catches some spirit about it. He's the Frank Capra of music. 

- It's a Wonderful Life if you listen to Handel. 

- And Mozart is his descendant. Mozart comes out of this. And both he and Handel know how to take the roof off at the moment, and they do so gladly. Bach, being the Lutheran, was a little suspicious. If you're feeling that good, you might want to look at it again. 

And they don't feel that way. They feel that life is to be enjoyed. And I don't know if we have time for another one here. 

- Oh, sure. 

- And then a little Scarlatti. 

- Absolutely. 

- These are all one-pagers by Handel. This is a minuet in G minor. A minuet is a very contemporary, for Handel, fashionable, French dance. And you can see on the cameras here that there are two keyboards here. 

I'll put my right one on the upper keyboard that sounds like an oboe. 

(plays harpsichord)

 And then the left one is down on the lower which is more of a fluty or a cello type of sound. 

(plays harpsichord)

 And the last one is just a one-pager, a sonatina in B flat major. Probably a very good fiddle tune. 

(plays harpsichord)

 Has a beautiful buoyancy to it. 

- So what was wrong with the harpsichord that people felt compelled to change it? 

- Right, why does this glory disappear? 

And it is a glory and a grandeur. And Handel is catching the last of that thing. There's something uplifting about the human spirit in this world that my colleague Norman Sheppard always says that the Baroque is the last flair of the belief that we're all going to heaven in a chariot. It is the end of that. And in the age of the Enlightenment things change, beliefs change, checks and balances really begin to come in. And a new instrument comes into the scene through Italy in which the strings are not plucked, but they're struck with hammers. And I don't think anybody said, at least that I've ever read, that this was a revolution in sound. I think it's only in retrospect that we see it as being a watershed. But the difference in the timbre between plucking a string and hitting a string, the emotion that that finds, is really a divergence. It's a change to the path that we're going down like that. 

And I'll just move over here to the fortepiano. 

- But I can't resist at least one parting shot of the instrument. Because as long as you mentioned Domenico Scarlatti, who was notorious as being one of those harpsichordists that was just unbeatable. 

- Right. 

- There's a player by the name of Thomas Roseingrave who said that he went and saw Domenico Scarlatti play, not knowing right away who he was, and that Roseingrave said that if he could have at the time he would have cut off all his fingers or at least never played the instrument again having seen Scarlatti play. So effective was the man. 

- Right, right. Scarlatti was a mega virtuoso at the harpsichord, and he probably spent most of his time playing the harpsichord. Not so much the organ and the clavichord and other things, but he really is to the harpsichord what Chopin is to the piano. And I think he wrote everything at the harpsichord, and so the music is accustomed, is designed to sound at its very best in this case. 

Strings being plucked in this particular type of case. So we call him an aesthete, he's writing for a site specific type of thing. And he was the son of one of the most famous Italian opera composers, Alessandro Scarlatti. He grew up with all the advantages of a musical household and some financial means. He has a great job he gets in his 20s. He becomes the harpsichord teacher to the princess of Portugal. And she marries into the Spanish royalty, becomes the queen of Spain, and he goes with her as part of her entourage. And it's somewhere in midlife he begins publishing these 550 keyboard sonatas. 

- Short ones, maybe five-six minutes long. 

- This is just a very brief one here but get an idea of how beautifully customized it is and how, I don't know, sensual it is. 

(plays harpsichord)

 You can hear right off the bat there's a woman involved. 

(plays harpsichord)

 ? ? 

- Which has kind of a Spanish sound to me. But again that wouldn't be too surprising since that's where he was working. 

- He probably hung out with guitar players and the dancers and the rest and maybe helped them drink their wine. But again, I hope you can agree how beautifully written for the harpsichord it is. And the only composer I can think of who is his rival is Chopin at the piano, where everything just sings and it's all balanced the way that the lows and the highs work and the way that the line spins. 

Just the tune. 

(plays harpsichord)

 The most gorgeous Spanish sunset you've ever seen. So anyway, thank you Scarlatti and thanks to Norman Sheppard for building this magnificent instrument. From the early part of the 18th century it's a replica. It's a kind of a space shuttle complexity, when they got this many ranks and all of that. But it's really fun it play. 

- Well, we've teased it long enough. Now about this new fangled thing called the fortepiano? 

- Exactly. 

We'll move over here and I'm going to stay in the same key of D minor, but the fortepiano, when it comes in, the first thing they do is they kind of start pulling the pitch up. When you put hammers into a string instrument, they find out right away that the strings need to be a lot tighter than they were in the harpsichord for you to get a good sound. If you hit a harpsichord string even with a small hammer, you don't get much sound because it's so loose. It sounds great plucked but hitting is a very -- thing to do. We always say if you test the child and you stretch a string in front of the infant, 999 out of 1,000 children will eventually reach up and pluck the string, but the child that goes to get a hammer to whack the string should be watched very carefully. This was a strange experiment. The Italians, again, they invented it. They built quite a few in the early 18th century, but the Germans, when they get hold of this, they're the ones who really solve most of the engineering problems that come with increased string tension and case stress and all of that. And actually a pretty elaborate action, which we'll look at later. What happens sound-wise is that beautiful sense of moment, that crystalline clarity and the pitch and all of that, that begins to recede into a kind of a beautiful but a nether region. 

You're not quite sure where you are any more. 

(plays fortepiano)

 Listen to that. The beginning of the sound, even though it's much faster than the modern piano, it's murky. 

- Yes, yes. It's spiritually ambiguous, as you say. 

- I always say from mysticism to mystery. This is mystery. Harpsichord is mysticism. It's something like that. 

- This is a fantasy. So you expect something kind of hard to pin down. 

- Right. And the fortepiano, the name of itself, the loud and the soft, fortepiano is about its advantage, the fact that you can shape things, you can push them and pull them back, makes music that would have been impossible on the harpsichord come to life. Mozart, this fantasy I can... 

(plays fortepiano)

 A fog machine, I can push 3-D. ? ? And this great note. 

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 

- That was in D minor, unfolding sunny spots of greenery as Coleridge would say. 

(laughter)

- And, again, looking at the whole thing, it's rather absurd because what does this... 

(plays fortepiano)

 A dark and stormy night have to do with... 

(plays fortepiano)

 And yet he sells it. It's an amazing job of convincing you that the darkness and the light join. And like a true classicist he joins them with silence. 

With this... 

(plays fortepiano)

 And Mozart is certainly our greatest case of arrested development. The inner child is never gone and he believes you can just be happy. You can just choose to go there. And he does it with such grace. And it's interesting how, again, bipolar the fortepiano is. This beginning... 

(plays fortepiano)

 The bass is actually, I think, much more demonic than the modern. 

(plays fortepiano)

 That's blood drying on the sidewalk. CSI: Vienna. It's not good. It's like the opening of Don Giovanni but then... 

(plays fortepiano)

 And part of it is that major keys and minor keys are still quite polarized because the wire is still relatively thin compared to the modern. When you have pure sounding wire, major chords sound very happy. And minor chords sound... 

(plays fortepiano)

 The emotional switch is much more visceral, I guess, like that. And high versus low. 

(plays fortepiano)

 And I think that Mozart when he sat down to this fortepiano when these were new and he realized that under his hands he had all the singers of his operatic cast. 

- It's a very operatic little piece. 

- Here's the queen of the night. 

(plays fortepiano)

 If you take her down an octave here, it's a different singer. ? ? 

Completely different gal. And then right in the middle it becomes a guy. ? ? And then it just gets dumber as it goes. ? ? And of course any modern piano that changed that much from top to bottom you would throw out to the curb because it's not supposed to change. But in Mozart's world, those characters are supposed to be there. And I do have a pedal. 

- That's the new thing where you're sustaining and getting that murkiness and all of the cloudy mystery. 

- Harpsichord, everything you sustain is done with your fingers. Here, if I lift with my knee, I get... 

(plays fortepiano)

 And then let go and then the sound stops. People fall in love with this idea of the pedal so much so that by the beginning of the 19th century they take it away from the knee, which is difficult to do, and give it to your foot, which is much easier to do. And it becomes the soul of the piano. The pedaled sound becomes the soul of that instrument. 

- I can't imagine Chopin without that pedal. 

- That's his quote I believe, the soul of the piano. 

Should we do, I don't know, do you want to look at the guts of it here really quick? 

- What's making that thing work? 

- It is so interesting. And this is the last of the keyboard instruments that is meant to be maintained by the player. So it disassembles like this quickly. The action sits on a sled. That is, this sled holds it up. And then if we're lucky it comes out, and then this is the entire mechanism right here. You cannot do this with a modern piano unless you're the governor of California. Unless you have that kind of strength. 

The action of a modern piano weighs almost a hundred pounds. And this is, I don't know, 15, something like that. What's going on in the fortepiano, and largely responsible for its voice, is the speed of this action. It's a speed mechanism. When you press the key, a millimeter of movement in the key here results in almost 10 millimeters in the hammer like that. So it is a hair trigger system. And if this hammer weighed anything, you wouldn't be able to push the key down because you're at such a mechanical disadvantage. But because they made these tiny little hammers that are covered with buck skin. 

- Not felt. 

- Not felt. 

And it's a deer hide that gives a leather pop to the sound, it's very quick. And as you can hear in the Mozart, articulation is the name of the game. It's still, it's supposed to be very light on its feet and to be able to keep up with the human tongue. I think they held acting and speech and reason at a premium in Mozart's life, and this is the machine that was meant to keep up with it. Again, by comparison with a modern piano, the modern piano speaks about 10 times slower than this does. That is, for when the pitch forms. And this, of course, is 10 times slower than the harpsichord. But it's still, by comparison with the modern, very intelligent. And I think in the 18th century that's what they were after. I'll just pull the one hammer out. 

We always hope we can get it back together. 

- Even on a humid day. It's still almost hard to imagine that all those moving parts can make such fast and beautiful music. 

- Exactly. You press down here, the back comes up and this little beak here, there's a double pivot and it gets caught when the back of the key comes up, and it flips the hammer toward the string. So this half inch here governs these five inches here, and that's why it's close to a 10 to one ratio. And like lightening. One layer of leather like that. This hammer, the hammers at the bottom of this instrument weigh less than the ones at the top of the modern piano, just to give you an idea of the difference. And of course it's not meant to play in a huge hall. 

- Sure, smaller venue. 

- And hard plaster walls and hard floors. But it's an amazing mechanism and really, again, the last meant to be maintained by the player. And she's enough work as it is. But it's kind of fun. Like you said, it's hard to imagine that that is responsible for that sound. 

- Still a little Rube Goldberg look to it. 

- It is, right. 

- Player strikes key, key strikes, this strikes, that strikes, lever strikes bottom side of string, and the strings are all paired, aren't they? 

- The strings are all, it's called a bichord instrument so there's two strings for each note. 

The modern piano is trichord for most of it. And the strings on the modern piano are much heavier than these. The tension on the case of the modern piano is much heavier than this. 

- That's why it has a metal case to it rather than wood like this. 

- There's no metal plate here which means the wood is the entire resonator. Which is part of why it has that voice. I think almost a human voice type quality to it. It's a suppleness to the whole mechanism. But by the time you get to the modern piano with a massive amount of tension, tens of thousands of pounds, you have to bring a metal plate in or it would all look like a chewed toothpick. It would all collapse. 

- So what else can we hear for contrast with that fantasy in D minor? On this fortepiano. 

- Well, there's a couple of quick little ones. There's the Moonlight Sonata. We could do that. 

- That gets us back to those rolled chords, doesn't it? 

- Exactly. 

- In contrast with the Bach. 

- Right. And by the time you get to Beethoven, this is Gothicism, it's really starting to set in. 

Beethoven is writing in a key C sharp minor here. Which is the strangest of all keys. I should say a little bit about how they tuned their instruments because this and the harpsichord are both tuned in a system called well temperament, and the choice of key was the composer's way of kind of setting the tone for the piece because every key was tuned a little bit differently. And C sharp minor had this constant loneliness to it. No friends. And Bach had codified this back in "The Well-Tempered Clavier" with... 

(plays fortepiano)

- Crying in the wilderness. 

- Right. 

And it is the 11th hour. And again, Beethoven understood that the tuning could give you that sense of loneliness there. Compare it to C minor who's right next door. 

(plays fortepiano)

 But Beethoven knew that C sharp minor had this, you can hear it in the thirds. ? ? They're all beating differently. This one is going... ? 

? Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa. And then... ? ? Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa, much slower like that. And this gives the player a kaleidoscopic type of expression. So the Moonlight Sonata, he goes to C sharp minor because he knows that it will give Gatsby on the dock. ? ? 

- Longing for Jordan. 

- For Daisy. 

- Right, Jordan's best friend. ? ? 

- And it's a serenade. ? ? With a melody of one note. ? 

? Again on the fortepiano you can hear the great undertow that it has. The bass is so dark. ? ? And the melody is far away. ? ? ? ? 

? ? ? ? 

- Well, a simple idea in some ways, but one that really draws the emotional impact, whatever exactly the emotion is. 

- Right. The inexpressible otherness. This is true romanticism. He's so messed up and he's not even quite sure what it is. And Beethoven wrote this in the period right before he goes deaf. 

And he's a virtuoso, he's a great improviser, he's playing every night for people, and this sonata he even titles it sonata in the style of a fantasy, meaning made up like that. And he was as attuned to this fortepiano as Debussy was to the modern piano. For what it could do, he knew C sharp minor is the right key for this. 

(plays fortepiano)

 And also it's a serenade. A serenade in a key you would never serenade somebody in if you expected to get anywhere. 

(plays fortepiano)

- A depressing serenade. 

- Exactly. 

- A melancholy serenade, let's say. 

- And when the melody comes in that's supposed to win their heart, this is all he's got. 

(plays fortepiano)

 This is it. It's just a one note Charlie kind of thing. And so it almost, as Norman Sheppard says, this is almost the beginning of concept art. It's not a melody, it's an idea. Or a signal. The light on Daisy's dock, something like that. And of course Beethoven turns it into the most beautiful piece. 

It's crushing. And at the end there's forgiveness. He makes this wonderful turn of phrase. 

(plays fortepiano)

 After he goes through the pangs of disprized love. Right here everyone is forgiven. ? ? Including himself. ? 

? And to get that forgiveness, he goes back to the Baroque, which is this sequence. ? ? That's back to Bach. And that sound it comes from the Baroque, it's the circle. It's the musical representation that all is as it should be and cannot be changed. 

- A good place to end, Trevor. Full circle and always as it should be. 

- It's a magnificent sonata. 

I like it on the fortepiano because it's more depressing, and I like it because it's more enlightening at the same time. I think it stretches the pole more. So anyway, and again it's a pedal fantasy and we have a pedal. 

- Well, Trevor Stephenson, it has been a pleasure. It has gone quickly. We'll have to come back. Thank you very much for spending the hour with us. And you and your keyboards are always charming and engaging and enlightening and entertaining. Well, just for contrast we'll stay with the fortepiano for a while. Do you have something in a lighter, more popular vein to show off this fortepiano? 

- Sure, this is a song by Stephen Foster. My wife introduced me to this many years ago. It's called "Hard Times Come Again No More." It was very popular in the 19th century. Stephen Foster even said that it was one of his very favorites. And it's about staying, kind of remembering the worst of times and hoping they never come again. 

- As Garrison Keillor would say, take us out. 

- Take us out. 

(plays fortepiano)

 ? 

?