Open up a piano to look at the innards and you are transported back to a bygone age of bolts and rivets and wires under many tonnes of pressure, as emblematic of the Victorian age as a suspension bridge or steam engine. It now had an iron frame instead of a wooden one, and was mass-produced by names that are still familiar: Steinway, Baldwin, Chappell. In George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, the imperious German virtuoso Herr Klesmer (inspired by Franz Liszt) has "an imperious magic in his fingers that seemed to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer."īy then the piano had ceased to be a lovingly hand-crafted item for rich households. It could be decorous, which made it right for the ladies, but it could also reveal hidden passions. The middle classes were on the rise in Europe and America, and they needed an instrument in the home that showed how accomplished and tasteful they were. To understand them you have to go back more than 250 years, when the piano had just been invented and was beginning its ascent to the world’s pre-eminent instrument. The reasons are complex, to do with huge changes in social mores, musical taste and changing technologies. Why is this happening? Why has this thing that was once so highly prized become mere junk? They’re often found in landfill sites, on municipal tips or left in derelict buildings.
How could anyone do this?īut it’s not just on picturesque mountain-sides that pianos are being abandoned. The picture prompted much speculation about who may have left them, and how on earth they hauled them up there but, for anyone who has ever had a piano in their life, it prompted a pang of sorrow. This week a walker photographed two pianos – one baby grand, one upright – dumped near the top of a 1,841ft mountain in the Brecon Beacons National Park. It’s especially sad because once upon a time that piano, which now makes only broken and out-of-tune noises was once shiny and new and displayed with pride. An old piano is as evocative and forlorn as those family photo albums that turn up in junk shops. In those cracked and discoloured keys and squeaky non-functioning pedals you can feel and smell the traces of family singalongs, hours of careful practice, and random tinklings by infants or passing cats.
They are repositories of history and memory. There are few sadder sights than an abandoned piano, because old pianos are more than just musical instruments.
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