Pianoforte School

Musicologists concerned with the “London Pianoforte school,” the group of composers, pedagogues, pianists, publishers, and builders who contributed to the development of the piano in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, have long encountered a formidable obstacle in the general unavailability of music of this “school” in modern scholarly editions. leading representatives, like Johann Baptist Cramer and Jan Ladislav Dussek, has eluded serious attempts at revival.

Nicholas Temperley’s ambitious new anthology decisively overcomes this deficiency. What underscores the intrinsic value of Temperley’s editions is that the anthology reproduces nearly all of the original music in facsimile. Making available this cross section of English musical life—some 800 works by 49 composers—should encourage new critical perspectives about how piano music instrument was transformed from the fortepiano to what we know today as the piano.

To be sure, the concept of the London Pianoforte school itself calls for review. “School” may well be too strong a word for what was arguably a group unified not so much by stylistic principles or aesthetic creed as by the geographical circumstance that they worked at various times in London and be so great as to cast doubt on the notion of a ‘school.’”

The notion of a school was first propounded by Alexander Ringer, who argued that laws of artistic survival forced the young, progressive Beethoven to turn outside Austria for creative models, and that he found inspiration in a group of pianists connected with Clementi in London. Ringer’s proposed London Pianoforte school did suggest by the period (c. 1766–1873) during which it flourished, as Temperley has done in the anthology.