This volume offers the reader a journey into the highways and byways of  the culture of the pianoforte, covering certain new aspects. The range of themes treated is vast, proof of the central nature of the instrument in European musical life on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the basis of original research, investigations have been made into the different ways in which the spread of instruments and printed music occurred; into the movements of musicians circulating from one end of Europe to the other; into the circulation of genres, forms, musical styles and stylistic elements conveyed including through the teaching of the instrument; into the presence of the pianoforte in the European literature and the arrangements for instruments at the beginning of the nineteenth century; into the role of the pianoforte in certain important centres in Europe and the United States. A rich period for European music, therefore, in which the opportunities for contact and mutual exchange among the musicians were particularly intense and in which the pianoforte acted as a catalyst in private and public musical life in all the cities of Europe.
The volume comes with the bonus of a CD, appositely providing pianoforte sonatas by Cramer, Hummel, Eberl and Beethoven.

Early Music (11/2009)
This book is a splendid tribute to the instrument which dominated so much of keyboard culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. ... Altogether the work presented in this volume bears impressive testimony to the rich potential of material carefully collected and evaluated from archival and documentary sources for research in this area. As we have come to expect from Ut Orpheus, the book is handsomely produced, very attractively printed, spaciously laid out and generously illustrated ... (Susan Wollenberg)