Sébastien Érard

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Sébastien Érard (Portrait of H. Pottin)

Sébastien Érard (born April 5, 1752 in Strasbourg , † August 5, 1831 in La Muette near Passy , today 16th arrondissement ) was a French instrument maker of German-speaking Alsatian origin with the baptismal name Sebastian Ehrhardt.

The company founded by Sébastien Érard in Paris became, from the time of his death under the management of his nephew Pierre Érard, over several decades in the mid-19th century the world's leading piano manufacturing company .

Live and act

Youth and education

Sébastien Érard was a contemporary of the composer François-Adrien Boïeldieu and had his workshop in Paris , initially in the basement of the villa of a wealthy aristocrat who promoted him. It also helped Érard, who had no classical harp- making training, to obtain special permission from the French royal family to continue making harps, apart from the objections of the harp-making guild, which wanted to prevent him from doing business successfully.

In 1811 he brought the harp with a double-pedal mechanism onto the market, through which the harp regained the position that it had enjoyed with the public for centuries. The new possibilities of the harp by Érard were soon used by many composers, including Hector Berlioz .

The Érard company grew; his older brother Jean-Baptiste Érard (1750-1826) supported Sébastien Érard in the company management. During the French Revolution, Sébastien went to London and opened another factory for harps and pianos, which continued under the direction of his talented nephew after the turmoil of the French Revolution subsided and Sébastien returned to Paris. Later, only Steinway found anything comparable, emigrating to New York and returning to Germany and the Hamburg factory.

Sébastien Érard became very wealthy and was able to buy a castle on the Bois de Boulogne near Paris. He died there in 1831. The management of his company fell to his nephew Pierre Érard, son of his older brother.

Piano construction

Érard also developed the double escapement on the fortepiano in 1821, which meant a significant increase in the performance of this instrument. The invention was only improved in details by Henri Herz . To this day, their execution forms the basis of a piano's touch repetition, which is much better and much faster than the high piano. This so-called “double repetition” or “double release” according to the Erard patent, with the essential element of the repeating leg, which catches the rebounding hammer and allows the key to be struck again before the key has returned completely, is one of the most important inventions in piano construction history.

In 1803, Érard gave Beethoven a grand piano from his production. He left the instrument to his brother Nikolaus Johann in 1824/1825, through whom it came into the possession of the Upper Austrian State Museum in Linz in 1845 .

Different strings on an Érard harp

In the first third of the 19th century, at the time of the young Franz Liszt as a touring virtuoso on the grand piano, Erard rose to become the world's leading piano maker and overtook the leading English piano maker John Broadwood & Sons . The fast repetition suited the new, highly virtuoso pianists in the Thalberg and Liszt category.

Exhibits from production

In addition to the above-mentioned grand piano in Linz, another grand piano and a double-pedal harp from the Erard production are on permanent loan in the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry .

Further history of the Erard company

Even after the rise of the US company Steinway & Sons , in Europe after the Paris World Exhibition in 1867, Erard retained the construction principle of the concert grand with an attachment plate, steel support struts and straight strings as well as complex covered hammers with up to nine layers of leather, which he had already found in the 1830s , Felt and fabric.

Ideas supplier for Steinway

Until the 1860s and 1870s, European virtuosos brought their own instruments with them by ship on US tours, suspected that there were no good concert grand pianos in the US. This continued until the tour of Anton Rubinstein for Steinway, organized by William Steinway , ended this suspicion. Previously, Erard concert grand pianos were the “classic souvenirs” of the pianists on the ship to the USA, they were then often sold at high profit during or at the end of the tour in the USA. Louis Moreau Gottschalk , American pianist, first toured Europe for his training and then - with several Erard concert grand pianos in his luggage - through the USA as a virtuoso.

Grand pianos of this type gave the US piano technician and technical historian Bill Shull in Loma Linda near Los Angeles clear evidence that the Erard system of struts and the inside of the grand piano had provided the Steinway men with an important model for their grand piano construction from 1856 onwards. Father Henry Steinway had oriented itself to the world's leading grand piano, that of Erard, and also recognized that the Erard system could easily be adapted and scaled to other sizes. The Erard system of having five strings between the struts in the concert grand piano and setting the dampers from above is identical to Steinway. Pleyel initially had six string fields and mopstick dampers under the strings. Steinway, especially the gifted son Henry Jr., quickly developed the Steinway grand piano from this very beginning, and the world's first bass-crossed grand piano with a one-piece cast plate of the Steinway design was created as early as 1858/1859 - the apprentice Steinway had overtaken his teacher Erard .

Technical standstill at a high level

Even the appearance of the German piano makers, who were very successful from the 1880s onwards and who almost flooded France with their products, did not change the opinion of those responsible at Erard that their pianos were the best of all and did not need to be adapted to modern times. They were suspicious of iron in the piano apart from the strings and were restricted to the bare minimum. An exclusive upper-class clientele in France remained loyal to the Erards. It was not until the 1920s that the last Erard grand pianos were built. From around 1875, the smaller competitor Pleyel, formerly a supplier to Chopin, had already turned to the “American” system with bass crossover and one-piece cast plate in grand piano construction.

The Erard company thus became the “last of the Mohicans” to build straight-strung grand pianos. It is only very recently (2013), by Stephen Paulello in Burgundy, that modern grand pianos with straight strings (ie without bass crossover, but now with a one-piece plate) have been built in a French manufacture, partly according to Erard's principles.

Recent history of Erard

Erard had merged with Boisselot, Gaveau and Pleyel in the 1960s, was sold to Schimmel in Braunschweig in the 1980s, was bought out again by wealthy French in the 90s, had opened a new production facility on the northern edge of the Pyrenees, a few years later returned to small parts of the old piano building halls in the north of Paris. At the end of 2013, however, all manufacturing activities were terminated in order to prevent another bankruptcy. The grand pianos that have already been manufactured are still being sold, but a more than 200-year tradition of piano making is now ending.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Crombie: Piano. Evolution, design and performance . London 1995, ISBN 1-871547-99-7 , p. 34.
  2. Both types are available e.g. B. next to each other in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg.
  3. http://www.shullpiano.com/html/the_collection.html Website of the Period Piano Center, managed by Bill Shull, accessed January 8, 2013
  4. Archived copy ( memento of the original from December 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Website on the history of important French piano makers, accessed on January 7, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pianosromantiques.com

literature

Web links

Commons : Sébastien Érard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files