You still haven't established that Mozart ever used a pedal,
Can't be done either way mate. There's proof he did at Stein's, and loved it.
from Badura-Skoda:
Thus it is not so easy to re-create on a modern piano the full differentiation
of tone of a Mozart piano, and perhaps this is the main reason why many
pianists recommend the avoidance of the pedal in playing his music. But all
eighteenth-century fortepianos had a knee-lever, which had exactly the same
function as the present-day sustaining pedal, and which Mozart very much
appreciated. We know of his letter from Augsburg to his father ( 1 7th October
1777), in which he praises the efficiency of this mechanism in Stein's pianos:
'The last [Sonata], in D, 12 sounds exquisite on Stein's pianoforte. The device
too which you work with your knee is better on his than on other instruments.
I have only to touch it and it works; and when you shift your knee the
slightest bit, you do not hear the least reverberation. '
The use of the knee-lever, i.e. the lifting of the dampers, gave a richer and
more satisfying tone even to the Mozart piano. When it is said that the pedal
should not be used in playing Mozart
because Mozart never reckoned on this pedal as a regular adjunct, and
regarded its use, at most, as a rare exception, a quite special effect this must be contradicted. It is very improbable that Mozart was sparing in
his use of the tonal possibilities of the right knee-lever. 14 There are passages
in his piano works which in fact rely on a pedal effect — for example, the
very beginning of the D minor Fantasia (K.397), or bar 46 of the Fantasia
from the G major Fantasia and Fugue (K.394) :
There are many cantabile passages which can be played much more expres-
sively and effectively with the aid of the pedal (Piano Sonata in A major
(K.331), first movement, variation IV, bar 3) : The piano solo at bar 40 of the Romanze from the D minor Piano Concerto, too, would sound very meagre if the pedal were completely avoided.
Why should Mozart, the unchallenged master at exploiting all the timbres
and tonal possibilities of his instruments (think of the wonderful soft trumpet
solo in the first Finale of Don Giovanni, the treatment of the clarinet in the
Trio K.498 or the Clarinet Concerto, or the Wind Serenade K.361) — why
should he not have used a mechanism about which he wrote so enthusiastic-
ally ? Unfortunately, this opinion is very widespread, though the only possible
argument in its favour is that — if we had to choose between two extremes —
a performance of Mozart's music would be more tolerable when played
without pedal than when overpedalled. Naturally, the use of the pedal must
in no way be allowed to mar the clarity of performance, and one should
expressly warn against excessive pedalling. Even with the dampers raised,
the pianos of Mozart's time sounded much more translucent than those of the
present day.
An authority for that? It's been called that by the uneducated for quite some time, but I don't recall it's forebears (knee lever/switch) being referred to by that term, or it being called that in any literature from the classical period.
LOUD pedal - kind of answers itself don't you think? Cause that's indeed what it does and
did in the 18th century. And where do I say 'called'? Speak the Queen's English, please!
edit: just found this interesting tidbit - from a review of David Rowland's book on the History of pedaling:
Having traced the development of early pedaling by schools, Rowland tries
to discover how individual "first-generation" pianist-composers, writing be-
fore the advent of indications, might have used tone-modifying devices. He
starts with a specific clue, Mozart's enthusiastic endorsement of the knee
lever on Stein's pianos, and goes through Mozart's music like a detective,
searching for unusual textures suggestive of raised dampers. In the end he
becomes convinced that Mozart's use of raised dampers was well ahead of
most of his contemporaries and that he might have "considered" using the
raised dampers to enrich the tone even where simple harmonic accompani-
ments lie within the grasp of the hand.
Topic: Mozart sonatas - practicing evenness & trills