Three essays on keyboard instruments

This volume contains three essays. Each of them presents a critical study of historical source material. That material variously includes musical instruments, manuscript writings and inventories, published writings, engravings, paintings and photographs.
The first essay assesses how many instruments are known to have been made by Bartolomeo Cristofori and Giovanni Ferrini. Not only the exis-ting instruments by or attributed to the two makers are examined but also the historical sources that mention their instruments. The sources include the Me-dician inventories, letters and wills of the time. Three documents, for instance, may refer to the same piano and also to one surviving instrument. On the minimum list these all count as one. On the maximum list they count as four. Speculation is thus left aside: the evidence is examined impartially, allowing qualified and reliable conclusions to be drawn.
The second essay examines the work of Johann Andreas Stein as an organ builder, in particular his building of an organ completed in 1757 for the Barfüßerkirche in Augsburg. Today, the representation of the organ in engra-vings, especially in the one made in 1768, might be taken to show the organ as it was when finished. It turns out that the engraving is not to be read as a mo-dern photo, that is, as a representation of the organ as made, but as a re-presentation of Stein's dream of how the organ could one day become. The details from the contract, from Stein's own notebook and from pre-war pho-tos show that that dream was never fully realised.
The third essay examines the famous Encyclopédie of Diderot & d'Alembert and the various encyclopaedias that derived from their Encyclopédie by following the entries for stringed keyboard instruments through the nume-rous editions. This examination shows that only the original version, and to a lesser extent the last, Charles Joseph Pancoucke's vast Encyclopédie Méthodique, present a reliable picture of the presence of stringed keyboard instruments in Paris when the various versions were written. The mention in some of the intermediary editions of instruments with hammers, for instance, turns out to be a vague reference to small pianos made in Germany or perhaps Switzerland, not to pianos seen in Paris, let alone made there. The intermediary editions appear to have been made to make money, emasculating and distorting the original Encyclopédie rather than bringing the work of Diderot & d'Alembert up to date.
Because source material is historical it does not mean that it only conveys truth to the modern researcher. These three essays aim to distil truth in these three particular cases.