The piano was ordered by Queen Victoria from
the firm of Érard, the London firm of Érard, in 1856.
It's clear that it was not the first piano that she'd
had from that house and it's certainly the most
grand and elaborate that she ever ordered.
Victoria and Albert's lives and their life together
was absolutely full of music. They were talented
players of music. Prince Albert was an organist
and a composer and a singer and Queen Victoria
a very talented soprano. They also both played
the piano and that's where they would make
music together.
And they wouldn't just make piano music,
they would sit down and work their way through
the great European symphonic repertoire and
operatic repertoire together and that's how
they would amuse themselves at home.
And one reads in diaries, when they were
moving from one residence to another,
almost the most important thing was to remember
to take exactly the right sheet music they
would need.
It's a revolutionary instrument in terms of
piano design. People don't really know the
name Sébastien Érard anymore but in fact, he was really
the father of the modern piano and his
designs were so revolutionary they changed
the whole course of piano making.
One of the major differences is something
called the repetition lever.
This great innovation by Érard known as the
double escapement action is what allowed for
this rapid repetition of notes.
Previously, instruments just couldn't repeat a note
as quickly because the pianist had to wait
for the key to rise to its full rest position
before they could play the note again.
Now, with the double escapement lever, you could
repeat a note almost instantaneously.
You see here I can repeat a note when the
key has hardly risen back up to its position.
This innovation led the way for the great
virtuoso pianist of the 19th century. Suddenly
they could repeat notes so much more quickly.
And the sound of this kind of piano is completely
different from today's big modern concert Steinway.
The major difference is that of course it's quieter
but also the balance between the bass and the treble
of this instrument is very different.
It's a different character and it's very much
a contrast whereas the sound of a modern
piano is much more homogenous.
My brief was first of all to get the piano
in decent playing condition again. There
was a pretty major structural work that
had to be done. The tuning plank was split
and it had to be dealt with in a special way
because obviously given the complexity and beauty
of this casework it couldn't be taken apart
in the normal way. So it was more like
keyhole surgery in fact.
There's an intriguing aspect to this piano.
In 1839 in her journal, Queen Victoria
wrote that she'd sat down in her drawing room
with Lord Melborne and he had admired her
new piano. Particularly, he liked the monkeys
on it. Now that was in 1839, long before
this piano existed. But it seems to accord with
an account we have much later in 1856, for
removing the decorations of the earlier
piano and placing them on the new one.
So Queen Victoria so liked this strangely
old fashioned, 18th century French style
which is known as 'singerie' with monkeys
all over it engaged in musical pursuits
that she actually asked for the decorations
of the earlier piano to be laboriously transferred
to the new one.
On the lid there's a brass molding that goes
right the way round and it encloses the
outline of an earlier piano lid, a slightly
smaller one. Because pianos got bigger and
wider as time went on. Now when we actually
removed this molding some years ago to see
if we could find out how it was done,
I must say it was extraordinarily difficult
to see the join! These people were exceptionally
good at what they did.
The piano was going into an exhibition
here at the Queen's Gallery and it had been
in the White Drawing Room for many years, most
of its life, and over that time through coal fires
and soot, it had taken on quite a lot of surface dirt
which was a bit beyond a surface clean.
There's always complex challenges with any
project that comes into the workshop but
with the piano the aim was to really bring
it back to life without too much intervention.
That's the case with all our projects really
but it is done case by case. But with the piano,
with the surface dirt, I knew and was confident
that by removing the surface dirt it would then
tie in and match very nicely with the rest
of the sides of the piano that hadn't been
effected by surface dirt basically.
Each part is treated individually as an
individual project and it's not just the cleaning,
it's the retouching, the filling, the sanding back,
the regilding of new pieces, the final polish as well.
There was also an area in the middle of the piano
which had seen some damage. That required putting
in some new polish, so the final polish had to
tie in all together. So all these processes take
quite a long time and putting it all back together
also takes time. The whole process took about
12 months.
Close up the piano looks gold and gleaming
but really it still maintains its original
layers, it maintains its original authenticity.
It just really required the cleaning
and the attention to bring it back to life.
Well there's absolutely no doubt that
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert would have
both played this instrument and probably
in this very room and probably together.
Of course, there were only 5 years left for
Prince Albert at the time it was commissioned.
And although I have no doubt they would
have played the work of Mendelssohn on the piano
it must be pointed out that he couldn't
have played it, he having died much earlier
in 1847. But the wonderful thing about his
many visits to Buckingham Palace, which were
so very informal and frequent in the 1840s,
is that on one occasion as a sort of thank you
he wrote them a specially arranged four-handed
version of one of his famous 'Songs Without Words',
the manuscript of which still remains in the
Royal Collection and I would love to think
that they played it together on this beautiful piano.