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“It is the technology that makes the music. So the search for the music begins with the technology.”
Three different but similar harpsichords, all with their damping boards mysteriously vanished. Metal-working tools of the sixteenth century. Early music by Haydn that uses chords your fingers can’t span on a modern keyboard. These are the kinds of clues Alfons Huber deciphers to repair and recreate ancient musical instruments for the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum’s historic collection. |
A world-class expert on the 600-year history of the Austrian harpsichord, Professor Huber also creates lovely replica instruments so that museum-goers can feel their “action”–and hear the sounds that Haydn and others imagined as they composed. The differences can be subtle or striking. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata sounds amazing on a period instrument! Later, Frank got to try out Mozart’s Sonata in C Major on the Mozart-replica keyboard in this picture.
Many thanks to Professor Huber, and to harpsichordist Susanne von Laun, who led us through Hamburg’s lovely historical keyboards, for making this adventure possible! (Note to the learned: please ascribe any errors in my description to bad memory; I was much too enthralled to take any detailed notes.)
Related webpages:
- Webpage for Vienna’s historic keyboard instruments (with links to a sound file for each one.)
- Exhibition coming in May, 2006: Viennese pianofortes in the time of Mozart.
- More about the Vienna museum display
If you go: The display of ancient musical instruments is not in the Kunsthistorisches Museum itself but in the Neue Burg nearby (in the same building as the Nationalbibliothek.)