Kremsegg Historical Pianos

Chopin himself preferred a Pleyel - much like the 1935 model in Kremsegg 2 (Kg2). This instrument may sound quite dated to modern ears but I like it. I like even more the Erard (1849) from Kg1. Erard tried to convince Chopin to switch to his pianos but he wouldn't budge (interesting story, but you can look it up if you're interested). The mids and highs are delicate and rather beautiful on these old pianos, but the bass notes are thin by modern standards.

The jewel in the Kremsegg crown is the 1899 Bechstein imho. This is a remarkably modern sounding instrument. And it's gorgeous. It comes with Kg2, so if you're only going to buy one Kg set, go for #2. And you'll get Chopin's fave piano as well.

But if you're not convinced, just spend more time with the demo versions.

Chopin may not have been convinced, but I love playing his music on the 1849 Kremsegg Erard.  Wonderful transparent sound, definitely not a modern sound, and enables the clarity of Chopin's writing to emerge - subject to my shortcomings as a performer, of course.  Thoroughly recommend it if you are interested in playing Chopin on an instrument which is sympathetic to his music.

Start out with the free instruments in the KIViR collection and see if you like them.

https://www.pianoteq.com/free_stuff

These free models include the circa 1790 Walter (associated with Mozart), the 1812 Schöffstoss, the 1790 Schmidt, the 1790 Schantz (associated with Beethoven in his younger days), the 1826 Graf (associated with Beethoven), the 1926 Pleyel (rather similar to what Chopin used in the previous century) and the 1922 Erard (similar to what Liszt was known to use in the previous century). Then there's the Yamaha CP-80, associated with Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks of Genesis, and everybody else on stage in the 1980s.

Then if you are enjoying these instruments, you might go further by purchasing one of the two Kremsegg collections.

A key to getting the most out of these instruments is this: Do not play them in "standard" 12-tone equal temperament at A=440 as if they were tuned up for a contemporary musician. Play them in the historical tuning/temperament that the composer used back in the day. In his compositions, Chopin, like many other composers, intended to exploit the various unique discrepancies in the intonation of certain chords that were a bit remote from the base pitch (kammerton or diapason) of the temperament he used. If you play his compositions in contemporary 12-tone equal temperament, you may be missing some of the musical effects that the composer intended to create.

Playing Chopin (or other composers from the period) in a historical temperament rather than the 12-tone equal temperament you have been using all your life is going to sound strange to your ears at first, but that's the point. Using a historical temperament is the way the composer would have heard it.

Forgive me if this is remedial information, but it is only in the last 100 years or so that pianos, and other instruments, have been tuned according to the scheme we call 12-tone equal temperament, in which each note on the piano is exactly 100 cents distance from the note below it or above it. 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise in intonation whereby it's possible to play any song in any key, but certain intervals are considerably out-of-tune compared to the pure, just intonation that you can achieve with chords played by a string quartet or a an a cappella group of  singers.

For instance, this may never have occurred to you, but any interval of a major third played on a piano tuned to 12-tone equal temperament is significantly out-of-tune compared to a pure major third that can be sung by two singers or played by two violinists. Thus, all major chords played on a modern piano sound a bit sour in temperament to those of us with good ears who understand and can hear the difference.

Before this time in history, musicians throughout history used many different tuning schemes where the 1/2 steps were of different sized intervals, in order to approximate pure, just intonation. However all of these various tuning schemes (called temperaments) only sounded best in certain keys. If you played chords in remote keys, they would sound very badly out-of-tune.

None of the classic keyboard composers in history before about the year 1915 used a piano tuned to 12-tone equal temperament. They all used one of many different historical temperaments.

Pianoteq Standard and Pianoteq Pro have a menu of many different historical temperaments from which you can select. Choosing one of these instantly re-tunes the entire keyboard to the historical temperament.

Pianoteq Stage does not have this feature. Pianoteq Stage can only be used in 12-tone equal temperament.

Furthermore, before about 1915, irrespective of temperament, pianists did not tune their instruments to the modern base pitch of A=440. People in the time of Handel, Bach and Vivaldi tuned to about A=415, which is a half-step lower than A=440. Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven used A=430. I'm a tenor vocalist, and I can tell you that it's hard to sing the high notes in Mozart's beloved tenor opera arias in A=440, but it's easier to sing them in Mozart's A=430. The same goes for Handel's arias in A=415.

To access the historical temperaments in Pianoteq Standard or Pianoteq Pro, go to the Tuning panel and pull down the Temperament menu and try the different choices. You can acces even more choices by toggling the Microtuning Mode button to the right, which changes the "Diapason" field to the "Scale" field and enables a pull-down menu with a very large list of historical temperaments.

Read the owners manual section entitled 4.2 Temperament (starting on page 30 in the English language manual).

Chopin did not dislike the instrument's sound or playability. What he disliked was exactly the opposite: how easy it was to play and how beautiful and expressive it could be with little effort. He believed that practising on such an instrument would make for sloppy pianists. Very much like a recent discussion on this forum about using modern MIDI piano keyboards + Pianoteq vs playing acoustic instruments. Nothing new under the Sun...

Yes, but just how unequal were tunings in the 19th century? I'm familiar with Jorgensen's massive book, which supports 1915 or thereabouts as the first truly scientific method for tuning ET. But tuning by ear based on color rather than counting beats can get one pretty close, if that is the goal. So I'm just curious about your source for this, and what historical temperaments you're referring to.

I've got the Studio bundle (all instruments) and I still use the Kremsegg 2 Bechstein a lot.