A ‘Narrow-Keyed’ Pleyel: The Ergonomics of Chopin’s Interface

Over the course of his 39-year life, Fryderyk Chopin discovered a new tactile relationship with the keyboard, developing a choreography for the hands that has never been equalled. Running parallel to these developments, keyboard instruments were themselves undergoing an extraordinary revolution, as manufacturers altered their designs, materials and construction processes in response to the ever-evolving tastes of composers, critics and audiences. Chopin came into contact with pianos from all of the leading manufacturers of his era, and was keenly aware of their divergent aesthetics. For him, the piano was a compositional tool as necessary as quills and ink; the keyboard itself a crucial interface between the aural conception inside his head, its documentation on paper and its actualisation in sound.One of the most intriguing – yet problematic – observations of one of Chopin’s pianos from the early 1840s comes from the Baltic writer and amateur musician Wilhelm von Lenz, who observed the composer performing and teaching on a ‘light-touch, narrowkeyed, Pleyel’. The evidence to support Lenz’s observation has, thus far, been largely anecdotal, yet today, almost all pianos of Chopin’s time are assumed to have narrower keys than their modern counterparts, despite a lack of empirical evidence. By comparing the key measurements of instruments associated with the composer with other examples from their time, this essay contemplates the extent to which the ergonomics of the keyboard changed over Chopin’s lifetime, and offers some preliminary conclusions of causality between instrument, compositional process and notation.