Pianos

[pianisten1989]

I didn't really know where to put this topic, but since it's some about composers, i'll put it here.
Anyway, i wonder what kind instruments the old composers had to deal with, and what was special about them.
I know Chopin had a Pleyel, and it was very soft, so his ff is more kind of mf, or f. So you shouldn't play as loud as it really says
And Beethoven had some piano with a pedal which fade away after a short while.. kind of.
Which means you can't use his pedalmarks, 'cause it will be very blurry, and really a lot of pedal.
But I don't know about Liszt, and since I'm playing the mephisto walz, no 1, i want to know. He wrote these long pedal marks, which can hold on for like 20 bars, when there's a lot of notes, and many chords, and it sounds really awful... Like when Jeno Jando plays any piece by liszt (plz don't comment that one).
Anyway, does anyone know about his piano?

[richard black]

Liszt lived a long time and saw a lot of developments happen in and around pianos. His first experiences would have been with instruments hardly more developed than the Viennese fortepiano, his last with pianos that quite closely resemble modern instruments in terms of volume and sustain.

[iumonito]

This is a topic dear to my heart.  I think you will get different responses by posting in repertoire, instruments and performance.

Take a look here.  This is a recording on a Bechstein from 1873, a piano fairly similar to pianos known to Liszt towards the end of his life.

The field of performance in period instruments is still in its infancy.  For example, I think it is fair to say you can count with your fingers the people in the world who know anything reliable about the hammers these instruments had, what they were made of, how hard they were, the glue used, the voicing favored at the time, etc.  And that's just the hammers.  Multiply that by the thousands of variables that go into making a wonderful piano today, and the discrepancy today of what is a nice intrument, and you get the idea. 

You hear generalizations, which some times have little basis, like the statement that the pianos known to Beethoven had such decay that you would not get a blur by following the pedal markings of Op. 31 No. 2, Op. 37 or Op. 53.  I have played restored Broadwoods and you do get a beautiful blur, and there is good reason to believe one was intended.

Go further back and the ignorance about the extra pedals that would have made Mozart's Turkish march a true orchestral feat with cannons and cymbals is just depressing.

My ideal of the Liszt piano is just marginally clearer and warmer, and insubstantially less powerful than a modern piano.  You can get recordings of Liszt music in a Steingraeber of the time, restored.  Google it.

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,26283.0.html
https://www.lisztsociety.hu/grandprix.html