Ok, not Mozart exactly…just his piano. With no HVAC to control indoor conditions, how did Mozart maintain his piano under such conditions? Did he tune it every other day, or did he accept a year’s worth of “wear and tear” before calling the piano tuner?
I’d like to know before I go invest in getting my own piano tuned in a house with marginal HVAC (esp in summer).
Mozart had perfect pitch.
That means he didn’t have to call the piano tuner, he could have been a piano tuner if he wasn’t busy being a musical genius. He would have simply adjusted the tuning when it needed adjustment. Easy to do if you have a screwdriver and perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch does not itself supply the necessary degree of precision for piano tuning. That has to be trained.
I imagine all keyboards of the time had to be tuned a lot more often than is common today, with modern temperature and climate control. I doubt Mozart ever did it himself; I don’t recall ever reading that he had such training. The likelihood is that he paid someone to tune his keyboards, just like you would today, except that it would need to be done a lot more often.
According to this lengthy history of piano tuning, Mozart is pretty likely to have tuned his own piano. (which for reference since it is a long piece covering many piano types, was a Fortepiano made by Anton Walter).
A musician could generally tune their own fortepiano but the uber-wealthy who bought them just for the fun of having one definitely created a huge industry for piano tuners eventually.
Once it became a widespread and lower cost service, Mozart may well have hired a tuner at some point, but with perfect pitch and a few tools he most certainly could have tuned his own, and likely did. This is probably a matter of historical record somewhere, but a few lazy google searches didn’t turn up anything definitive.
IIRC, when Beethoven’s piano went on tour some years back it needed to be retuned after every piece. Early pianos were crap.
Can’t find any videos.
Interesting.
Wrong. I am a musician of many years experience, and while my pitch isn’t perfect, my relative pitch (also discussed in the link above) is pretty good. I have worked with musicians who do have perfect pitch, including one who was a professional piano tuner.
Tuning a piano isn’t that difficult. I could do it with an electronic tuner and a screwdriver and zero training. I might not get it as exact as someone with perfect pitch, but I could do it well enough that anyone who didn’t have perfect pitch couldn’t tell.
I also believe that perfect pitch and piano tuning ability don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Perfect pitch just means being able to name any given note, for tuning all you need is the pitch of the strings relative to each other - and extremely exact. There are many situations where perfect pitch can come in handy for a musician, tuning is IMHO not one of them, unless you can tell apart 440 and 440.2 Hz, which I don’t think many perfect pitchers can do.
I think he was saying that perfect pitch is not enough to tune a piano by itself. Do these people you know tune without the electronic tuner? I’ve never seen it. In my experience, people with perfect pitch and good relative pitch do just as well.
I’ve watched a tuner tune before, and he did quite a lot of sounding two pitches at once. Perfect pitch doesn’t factor much into that. It’s more about listening for the “beats,” the places where the waves overlap if you aren’t perfectly in tune. (And a piano can never be perfectly in tune. It’s all about compromising between different factors.)
Yes, the guy I knew worked without an electronic tuner. We briefly played in a band together around 20 years ago, but I just Googled him and he’s still a piano tuner and now has his own piano store. Good for him, he’s a nice guy.
I don’t think that’s quite right. I’m not a tuner, but so far as I understand it, there’s more to it than matching up pitches to an exact frequency. As BigT notes, pianos are not tuned perfectly. If you tuned all the notes to their theoretical “correct” pitches, the piano would sound out-of-tune with itself. For example, with piano tuning you have to “stretch octaves” in order for them to sound in-tune, because of the harmonic overtones produced by the strings. This varies from piano to piano based on the type of string, its length, its tension, etc. That’s something, as far as I know, you have to do by ear and requires a judgment call rather than something you can figure out with an electronic tuner.
At any rate, for myself, there’s no way I could tune a piano with an electronic tuner and no previous training.
I should add, perfect pitch has nothing really to do with tuning a piano. You need good relative pitch.
I would assume someone with perfect pitch is likely to have good relative pitch as well. And I would also assume pianos in Mozart’s time were not quite as stable and well tuned as they are today, requiring constant adjustment. I would also assume that since most people who play acoustic stringed instruments tune them by hand daily, a piano would take a little longer, but not be incredibly burdensome to do. It’s all assumption, but keeping pianos in tune just doesn’t sound like the bane of Mozart’s existence to me.
Tuning a piano, in addition to knowledge about the physical acoustical properties of the instrument as pullykamell noted, which is non-trivial, also requires an thorough knowledge of the various tuning systems. This require training.
As a side comment, from my point of view as a professional musician and a professor of music, perfect pitch is a nice parlor trick but basically of very little importance to a music career. Perfect pitch does not innately come with good relative pitch without training, in my experience. Professional musicians aren’t impressed by perfect pitch as a rule, although students sometimes are. For example, musicians who are really good at sight singing, with or without perfect pitch, primarily use relative pitch to get the best results. Same with tuning. I’ve known many performers with perfect pitch who where not particularly good at singing or performing in tune in an ensemble. That skill, which obviously is extremely important in Classical music, needs to be trained.
By the way, a screwdriver is not the proper tool for tuning a piano.
Tuning fork? It’s a question as I don’t know if they had tuning forks then. It is how I tune my guitar.
Being in Austria lack of HVAC would be of minimal concern, compared to say New Orleans.
I’m sure they had tuning forks in Mozart’s day.
Nowhere in Austria typically reaches the high temperatures of New Orleans, but Austria gets a lot more winter, and big temperature swings sometimes. One of the big problems in wintertime with maintaining instruments is that conventional heating methods dry out the air. Low humidity can be worse for an instrument than high humidity.
I always wondered, since pianos are tempered, do they always sound out of tune to those with perfect pitch?
Does one need perfect pitch to know when an instrument is out of tune? My sense is that you don’t.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to my question.
It’s relevant in the sense that perfect pitch isn’t necessary for someone to realize when an instrument is out of tune. The other way around is not the same, however.