Because of Nanette Streicher’s expertise and business acumen, the piano was on its way into the homes of aristocrats and the wealthiest merchants in Europe as a coveted piece of domestic furniture. And as with any high-end product, emerging technology soon liberated the piano from exclusivity. Before long, thanks to factories such as Nanette’s popping up across Europe and the United States, production increased to meet the demand of the burgeoning Victorian middle classes. By 1847, according to Arthur Loesser’s comprehensive Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History, 60,000 instruments were manufactured each year in Paris alone, and 20,000 in England. Within a few decades of its invention, the piano had become ‘the social anchor of the middle-class home’.7 As it had for Nannerl Mozart, the piano shaped Nanette’s life, but possibly in a different way from what she had imagined as a child. She was significant in the history of talented women pianists because she turned her musicianship into a thriving business that ushered in generations of girls at the piano from all social classes.
As the product equally of art and commerce, the piano walked hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution. In its large-scale production, the instrument was one of the first consumer items to face competition from rival nations. Annual production worldwide increased almost tenfold in the second half of the nineteenth century; by 1910 it was 500,000. But despite the piano’s cutting-edge relationship to technology and manufacturing, playing the instrument was seen as a recreation for girls rather than boys. The 1881 Girls Own Annual included an advice column on how to purchase and look after your piano.8 In his bizarre bestseller, the 1871 spiritual-musical manifesto Music and Morals, the Reverend H.R. Haweis spuriously maintains that ‘the piano makes a girl sit upright and pay attention to details’, whereas Latin grammar strengthens a boy’s memory.9 I’m not sure if the good reverend ever tried learning a Mozart sonata by heart. Posture aside, I well remember that effort as an intensive and repetitive combination of attention to detail and memorisation.
Not everyone perceived the ubiquity of pianos in domestic life as an altogether happy event. ‘All—except perhaps teachers of music—will agree that at the present day the piano is too much with us,’ declared the British Medical Journal in April 1899. Protesting the ‘scandalous waste of time, money and labour’ of music lessons for most piano students, the Journal insisted that ‘an ordinary intelligent girl will learn half the languages of Europe in the time given to her abortive struggles with an art she really does not care for and cannot understand’.10
Whether or not this judgement was true, the piano lost its central place in domestic life after World War I. Presented with the gramophone, the pianola and expanding economic opportunities for women, many ordinary intelligent girls found other things to do. By 1977, the year I began learning the instrument, French philosopher Roland Barthes was asking: ‘Who plays the piano today?’11 In ‘Musica Practica’, the essay that poses the question, Barthes describes the decline in amateur musicianship as only an amateur musician can: with nostalgia and indignation. ‘Initially the province of the idle (aristocratic) class, it lapsed into an insipid social rite with the coming of the democracy of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady, the drawing room, the nocturne), and then faded out altogether,’ he writes. His potted history has a large hole in it the size of millions of working-class families, who embraced the piano as a ticket to respectability in the second half of the nineteenth century.
While thousands of upper middle-class girls may have been playing nocturnes in drawing rooms for prospective husbands, working-class families caused the explosion in demand when upright pianos became available mid-century. The upright is easier to fit into a room than a grand piano, and much cheaper. And to accommodate families aspiring to acquire one, piano makers invented the payment system of hire-purchase, meaning that the instrument was the first product to be sold by this method. Those without the means to pay in full at the time of ordering could take delivery for a deposit and then make a series of monthly repayments until they owned their piano outright. The system proved so successful that by 1892 hire-purchase comprised 70 per cent of all piano sales.12 In Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence gets close to the truth, which is to say the symbolism, of piano ownership, when he writes of the ‘amazing heights of upright grandeur’ provided by a piano in the home of a coalminer: ‘It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion…several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied.’
The pleasure of playing the piano knows boundaries of neither class nor technique. In ‘Musica Practica’, the bourgeois Barthes distinguishes the music we listen to from the ‘practical music’ that we play at home as amateurs who ‘inscribe’ it on our bodies while we transmit sound and meaning from page to instrument. In Barthes’ case he inscribed mostly Schumann, which he played every morning for his mother—with whom he lived for sixty years. We may physically inscribe our music through touch and sight and hearing as we play, as Barthes says, but we also inscribe it on our bodies when we’re not playing, in the memories and associations—positive and negative—we form with music and take through life.
At the most literal level, amateur pianists tend to play as adults the music they learned as children, not straying far in terms of
