Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (review)

Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano. By James Parakilas and others. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. [x, 461 p. ISBN 0-300-08055-7. $39.95.]

James Parakilas, professor of music and chair of the Humanities Division at Bates College, has edited and contributed substantially to Piano Roles, an illustrated history of the piano. The other contributors share his perspective on the instrument, which he calls a "cultural go-between" in the introduction (p. 4). The essays in Piano Roles return repeatedly to two related themes: the marketing of the piano throughout its three-hundred-year history and the cultural meanings attached to the instrument and its players. Examples of the latter theme elicit many entertaining interpretations from Parakilas, whose ironic turn of mind often makes Piano Roles--the title is itself a pun--lively reading. The following passage concerning the large audience of Polish immigrants who attended Ignacy Paderewski's piano recitals in the United States exemplifies Parakilas's perceptiveness, as well as his occasional tendency to repeat himself:

The fact that many of these immigrants had never heard a piano, let alone Chopin, before they left Poland did not stop his concertgoers from "reviving their musical memories" of Poland. He made them want their children to learn to play Chopin. Furthermore, the presence of non-Poles in the audience was a crucial part of the effect. It was the lionizing of Paderewski within American culture as a whole that made him such a source of pride to Polish immigrants. And that pride, not just in Polish culture, but also in America's recognition of that culture, meant that through Paderewski's piano playing, Polish immigrants and their children not only could have memories of a musical Poland that they didn't remember; they could also turn their Polishness into a way of feeling at home in America. (pp. 288-89)

Piano Roles will most likely not be read from cover to cover; instead, readers will seek out certain of its essays according to their interests. In the first essay, on Bartolomeo Cristofori, the piano's inventor, Parakilas draws the reader's attention to Scipione Maffei, a publicist for Cristofori who developed strategies that helped market the new instrument successfully. The third essay, "1770s to 1820s: The Piano Revolution in the Age of Revolutions" by Parakilas and Gretchen A. Wheelock, opens with a discussion of the career of Muzio Clementi, whose commercial efforts changed the market for pianos from an elite upper class to the general public. Clementi promulgated two notions still widely held today: that the diligent amateur can become a virtuoso by practicing technical studies, and that mastering an instrument is a means of self-improvement. The chapter proceeds chronologically, with Wheelock surveying the keyboard music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as it was affected by the instrument's mechanical evolution in their time. Subsequent essays examine the piano lesson, practicing, virtuosos, and musical "imperialism" through the exporting of pianos to non-European countries. Richard Leppert writes from a postmodern perspective in "Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt."

For the nineteenth century, when the piano arrived more or less at a permanent stage of mechanical development, Piano Roles is concerned with popular perspectives rather than the music composed for the instrument. Outstanding among the later essays is Ivan Raykoff's contribution, "Hollywood's Embattled Icon," a wide-ranging survey of the depiction of pianos and the portrayal of pianists or composers as characters in Hollywood films. Raykoff details the distorted plot of a film of limited merit, A Song to Remember (1945), about the life of Chopin. His lengthy discussion of this and other films gains significance when one realizes that the public's view of classical music and musicians has been influenced in large part by Hollywood movies. It is refreshing to find this taken into account in a history of the piano.

Because the book's...