Christoph Friedrich Schmahl

Christoph Friedrich Schmahl (* 1739 in Heilbronn ; † May 15, 1814 Regensburg ) was a German organ and piano builder .

Life

Christoph Friedrich Schmahl was born in Heilbronn in 1739. From 1770 he worked as a master organ and instrument maker in Regensburg. On September 28, 1772 he married Franz Jakob Späth's second daughter, Anna Felicitas.

In 1774 the company Späth und Schmahl is mentioned for the first time. After Späth's death on July 23, 1786, Schmahl continued the business alone. In 1802 he took his older son Jakob Friedrich (1777-1819) into his company. He left the company in 1812 in favor of his younger brother Christian Carl (1782–1815).

Christoph Friedrich Schmahl died in 1814; in 1815 the company went out.

plant

Probably on the initiative of Christoph Friedrich Schmahl, the mechanics of the tangent piano were further developed together with his father-in-law, the organ builder Franz Jakob Späth . This made the company known far beyond the country's borders.

Even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote in a letter in 1777: “Before I saw anything of the stone of his work, the late pianos were my favorite”. Aside from the early compositions written for harpsichord , Mozart probably wrote his piano works for this type of instrument up until this year.

Around 20 tangent blades from the Späth and Schmahl company are currently still preserved. These are mostly found in the world's most famous collections of historical keyboard instruments.

Instruments (selection)

• Tangentenflügel, Christoph Friedrich Schmahl, Regensburg 1800 in the Deutsches Museum
• Tangent grand piano by Christoph Friedrich Schmahl and Franz Jakob Späth, before 1794 at the Institute for Music Research at the University of Würzburg
• Sulzbacher Tangentenflügel, Christoph Friedrich Schmahl, Regensburg 1790 on the website of the restorer Georg Ott
• Tangentenflügel,? 1794 , fortepiano, 1809 and model of a tangent grand piano mechanism after Christoph Friedrich Schmahl at Europeana

literature

• August Scharnagl: Late. In: Music in the past and present , personal section, vol. 12. Bärenreiter, Kassel 1965, ISBN 3-7618-5913-9 , columns 969–970.
• Heinrich Herrmann: The Regensburg piano makers Späth and Schmahl and their tangent grand piano. Karl Döres, Erlangen 1928.
• Siegbert Rampe : Mozart's piano music - sound world and performance practice. 2nd Edition. Bärenreiter, Kassel / Basel / London / New York / Prague 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1180-2 .

Web links

• Christoph Friedrich Schmahl in the Bavarian Musicians' Lexicon Online (BMLO)