The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies
Early fortepiano replica
The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies has the largest collection of Beethoven materials of any collection outside of Europe. They have a large library of original first editions, multiple copyist manuscripts, a few Beethoven original letters, and many artifacts like Beethoven sculptures, contemporary clothing, and even a few locks of Beethoven’s hair! The Center also contains five historical keyboards: a clavichord, a harpsichord, a replica of an early fortepiano, an English Broadwood fortepiano, and a Viennese fortepiano.
Eric Gjovaag, the public service coordinator at the Center, showed me all the instruments. I found the pedals on the pianos to be most interesting. The early fortepiano had no pedals, but instead had knee-levers for the mute and sustain functions. The Broadwood fortepiano had two pedals, one to shift the keyboard for the “una corda” effect, and the other, a split sustain pedal. One half of the pedal sustained just the lower register keys and the other half sustained just the higher register keys, but if you press the whole pedal down, then the whole range of the instrument sustains. The Viennese fortepiano had a bunch of pedals, including a very special one called the Janissary pedal - check it out below :)
As for the research, I worked through the copyist manuscript of Symphony No. 5. This manuscript score was created from a set of first edition parts, not from Beethoven autographs. Two copyists worked on this score, and the most useful thing I found was that one of the copyists underlined nothing and the other copyist underlined everything (or at least, most of the p, pp, and ppp dynamic marks). This seems to have been purely a stylistic difference and not a musically significant one. I was particularly curious whether these copyists underlined any dynamics in their own copies, especially since there is no way I’m aware of that they would have seen Beethoven’s own dynamic underlinings for this piece.
I took a run around the neighborhood this morning and walked to the downtown San Jose farmers’ market in the evening. Several photos from these excursions are in the photo gallery below. Enjoy!