O piano cantor: a evocação da vocalidade na origem do instrumento e no repertório para teclas do século XVIII

Abstract

At the turn of the 18th century the instrument we now know as piano, the invention of Bartolomeo Cristofori, an employee of the Medici court, emerged in Florence. In 1709 the writer Scipione Maffei interviewed him for an article about his invention, which was published two years later in an Italian journal, and in 1725 was translated into German, initiating the process of popularization of the instrument. By the end of the century, the piano would have taken the place of the harpsichord as the most versatile and most widely used keyboard instrument outside the ecclesiastical environment. To a great extent, its popularization was due to its main characteristic, the possibility of dynamic control directly by the touch of the keys, quality that radically distinguished it from the other two great keyboards of the time, the harpsichord and the organ, both much older instruments and full of expressive possibilities, but which did not offer dynamic differentiation by touch. From the observation of the musical aesthetics, the characteristics of the visual arts and the thought of the Baroque period, in addition to the collection of accounts of historical characters, this research brings together elements that point to the same conclusion: the creation of a touch sensitive keyboard instrument of great proportions was the result of the need to fill an expressive gap in the keyboard family in the 17th century, which did not have an instrument with such characteristics and, therefore, had no means to fully realize the ideal of instrumental music of then, the imitation of singing. The specialized literature does not deal clearly or in depth with the implications of the new expressive possibilities of Cristofori's invention, hence the validity of this research, in the sense of relating them to the aesthetics of the period and the mimesis of vocal expression. Our method was based on the following tripod: the collection of documentary information directly related to the emergence of the fortepiano and/or Cristofori and his environment, the investigation of a varied literature that allowed us to understand both specific aspects and the broader context related to the object of study, and the search for evidence in the transposition of the aesthetic thought of the period to eighteenth-century keyboard music, which we consider as one of the results of the aesthetic search for instrumental music that has happened since the beginning of the previous century, as well as the very emergence of the piano. For our conclusions, it was fundamental to observe Maffei's article based on the considerations of Laura Och (1986) about a probable indirect and uncredited participation of Cristofori as author of excerpts from the article, especially with regard to the description of the mechanism of his new instrument. As a significant part of the contribution of this research, we present a translation of Maffei's article on the invention of Cristofori, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one in Portuguese.