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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
A study of Johann Christian Bach's keyboard music prompts the obvious and important question: which of his sonatas and concertos were composed for harpsichord, and which for the piano? (Indeed, did he think of them as two distinct instruments at all?) And what sort of pianos did he have available on the occasions when he played them in public? Did he really play his ‘Solo on the Piano Forte’ at the Thatched House on 2 June 1768 (in a concert that consisted mainly of orchestral music) on a little Zumpe square, or was he already using a prototype English grand? When were these various models of piano first made in London, and what musical use did other composers and performers, as well as J. C. Bach, make of them?
1 There is a photograph of this square piano in Early Music, 7 (1979), 525Google Scholar
2 Maunder, Richard, ‘The Earliest English Square Piano?’, Galpin Society Journal, 42 (1989), 77–84Google Scholar
3 It is worth noting that Leopold Mozart's travel notes for 1764–5 do not describe Zumpe, as they do Kirckman and Shudi, as a ‘Claviermacher‘Google Scholar
4 Shudi seems to have invented the machine pedal in 1765, one of his first examples was fitted to a harpsichord made for the king of Prussia, which was demonstrated in London by the nine-year-old Mozart in that year (Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart Die Dokumente seines Lebens, Kassel, 1961, 47)Google Scholar
5 Hubbard, Frank, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 321Google Scholar
6 See J C Bach's Collected Works, xxxiii (New York, 1985), introductionGoogle Scholar
7 Ibid., xxxiii–xxxiv (New York, 1985–6)Google Scholar
8 Cole, Warwick, ‘Americus Backers Original Piano Forte Maker’, The Harpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine, 4 (1987), 79–85Google Scholar
9 IbidGoogle Scholar
10 Hubbard, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, 163Google Scholar
11 Pleasants, Virginia, ‘The Early Piano in Britain (c 1760–1800)’, Early Music, 13 (1985), 39–44Google Scholar
12 Cole, ‘Americus Backers‘Google Scholar
13 Music, Men and Manners in France and Italy, 1770, Being the Journal Written by Charles Burney, during a Tour through those Countries, ed H. Edmund Poole (London, 1969)Google Scholar
14 I am grateful to Simon Heighes for drawing my attention to Hayes's concertosGoogle Scholar
15 Plantinga, Leon, Clementi His Life and Music (London, 1977).Google Scholar
16 Ullrich, Hermann, ‘Maria Theresa Paradis in London’, Music and Letters, 43 (1962), 16–24Google Scholar
17 ‘Mozart's Thematic Catalogue’, The Musical Times, 114 (1973), 781–3Google Scholar
