This was a surprising and unforgetable find in the Museum. A piano by Broadwood that is, for all intents and purposes, the same model that was delivered to Beethoven.
I was unsure whether I should genuflect or not, when I realized what was in front of me.
Seriously, it always does strike me, moments like this. Or, should I say, objects like this? Even if it were precisely Beethoven's own piano, it would still stand before you, inert. Charming, but inert. No music emanates from it, until someone puts fingers to its keys. And what music, exactly, what sort of music, will emerge from its polished surfaces? Whose fingers will press the keys? Will those fingers press gently, or will they pound the keyboard in a fury? Will the decisions made by those fingers come from a mind that makes the piano sing in ways no piano ever has before, or will the sounds emerging from the piano be like everyone, or anyone, else's sounds?
So there the piano stands. Basking in enchantment by association. But how real is this enchantment? Does enchantment really exist, within the object, so to speak? Or is this piano just an object period, without any "separate" or verifiable or physical enchantment, which would differentiate it from all other such objects? Even ― or especially ― identically manufactured ones.
One can stare at the piano, vacillating back and forth between whether or not it is simply a solitary, inanimate entity, amounting to nothing more than its own pure physicality, just a mechanical device, with period design thrown in for good measure, or whether it is truly a wound-up and coiled witness of the ineffable, ready to pounce on all unbelievers and philistines who doubt its uniqueness, however far in the past this one example of a thing differentiated itself from its kin, proof to the end of time that indeed this piano is different from all other Broadwoods made, even the ones manufactured exactly like it in 1816, because it was the immortal Beethoven himself who made the chords of this piano ring, and caused this wooden case to strain itself in such a way as none of its twins ever have, and never will.
The insignia above the keyboard reads:
John Broadwood & Sons / Makers to His Majesty & the Princesses / Great Putney Street / Golden Square / London
