FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Grand piano
construction hasn’t changed significantly since 1867, when Steinway & Sons
and its three-pedal model won the “Grand Gold Medal of Honor” at the World’s
Fair in Paris.
Jura Margulis wants to change that.
Margulis, who holds the Emily J.
McAllister Endowed Professorship in Piano at the University of Arkansas, has
collaborated with German manufacturer Steingraeber & Söhne to return the
sordino pedal to the grand piano.
When pressed, the pedal creates a
softer sound.
“One uses the sordino to augment an
expressive range of the instrument,” he said. “It is not to mute the sound — it
is an expressive tool.”
Margulis traveled to Frankfurt,
Germany, last month to present the prototype piano at Musikmesse, the world’s
leading fair for music instruments and live music. Margulis recorded a CD using the
prototype and describes the piano on his website.
“Hayden, Mozart, Schubert and
Beethoven, they were all familiar with the sordino pedal and used it when they
composed,” said Margulis, an internationally acclaimed concert pianist and
recording artist. “It is arcing back to the fortepianos of the older times.
When you play this augmented instrument, you have the full range of the modern
concert grand and you have a second piano under your hands. It’s not just
softer; it is different. You can play with an enriched overtone mixture. You
can also play articulations that Schubert wrote that you can’t play on the
modern grand.
“We don’t play exactly what he wrote
in many places in the compositions because it is not doable with the modern
concert grand,” he said. “With this pedal, it is.”
Margulis calls the pedal “a bridge
to the past.”
“Today, there are about 12 major
firms that build pianos in Europe,” Margulis said. “Two hundred years ago,
there were 2,000 companies building pianos in Europe, which meant that every
little city had a piano builder and bigger cities like Vienna had 100 piano
builders. They all tried to change and improve the instrument at hand.”
In the late 19th century,
the three-pedal concert grand piano became ubiquitous, according to Margulis.
Before that, some pianos had up to seven pedals, he said.
“There was no unification of the
pedal mechanism in the past,” he said. “In the last 150 years, people tinkered
with pianos but nothing stuck.”
About five years ago, Margulis
became curious about what pianos looked and sounded like before the modern Steinway.
He went to historic collections and played for hours. He played a piano from
Schubert’s time and was drawn to the sound made by pressing the sordino pedal.
“The particular piano I was playing
had four pedals and the quality of sound that you could produce with this
instrument was so uniquely beautiful and inspiring,” he said. Beethoven,
Schubert and so on, they mention the sordino pedal in their scores. Today, we
don’t know this pedal so we misinterpret what it means. They had all pianos at
their disposal on which to play and compose and the ones that they played had
the sordino pedal. The idea was born in me to put this function into a modern concert
grand.”
The last pedal to be added to the
modern grand was the middle pedal, known as the sostenuto. It can sustain selected
notes. In the prototype, known as Steingraeber D-232, the sordino takes the
place of the sostenuto pedal.
“No musician outside of pianists
actually knows what the middle pedal is for or what it does,” Margulis said.
“In my entire repertoire, I used the middle pedal in one piece, while I would
use the sordino pedal in my entire repertoire.”
Margulis has recorded nine CDs for
Sony, Ars Musici, and Oehms Classics.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia,
Margulis was raised in Germany, where he studied with his father, Vitaly
Margulis, at the Musikhochschule Freiburg
(Freiburg Conservatory of Music). He was also a student at the prestigious Fondazione per il Pianoforte in Cadenabbia
(International Piano Foundation) at Lake Como in Italy. He moved to the United States
to study with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and
joined the U of A faculty in 1999.