Kristine Moffat traces the arrival of the first piano in New Zealand in her entertaining treatise Piano Forte (Otago University Press). It was a Broadwood grand on board the schooner Herald unloaded at Pahia in 1827.
PIANO FORTE
Kristine Moffat
Otago University Press
Many other pianos crossed the seas to provide "home" comfort for settlers and a new sound for Maori, who also learned the instrument ... and many were made in the Dunedin piano factory of Frederick Howell and Co (shown in an 1898 photograph from the Hocken Collections).
The preface reminds us of Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano, with its image of a piano on a deserted beach, an "alien" intruder, pointing out how it was a moving testimony to the personal and cultural value of the instrument.
The book explains why bringing such cumbersome and expensive possessions to the other side of the world was so important for 19th-century settlers, how it was not just an instrument but also a status symbol.
The tiny size of the text type may be discouraging but the reader should persevere. Moffat's research is wide-ranging and interesting.
The stories give a splendid patchwork history of the importance of the piano in this country in the years before talking movies, the phonograph and radio.
Colonial New Zealand needed the piano then for family entertainment and social activities, as the narrative shows with its many different references to the instrument from memoirs, diaries, letters, concert programmes and other archives that are fascinating to dip into.
The author contends that association of the instrument with upper and middle-class values has not been upheld - "the piano brought joy and consolation to people of all classes and backgrounds" in our early history.
She also provides insights into the complex relationship between Maori and the piano. At first there was amazement, the reaction of one person in Kerikeri in 1843 being that Sarah Selwyn, wife of the bishop, had a man inside her piano clamouring to get out.
But then "initial hostility and confusion" gradually gave way to interest in the instrument and "its appropriation into Maori cultural spaces and contexts for Maori purposes".
Interesting illustrations are assembled, mainly in two sections.
Particular delights are the sketch of a woman pianist and a 1921 painting A Musician's Evening, both by Frances Hodgkins, and the 1880 painting Musical Group by her father W.M. Hodgkins, and a lovely colour sketch by Rita Angus.
The author recalls a "poignantly delightful moment" that occurred when she sat on the piano stool in front on the gleaming Steinway piano of Olveston in Dunedin: "To my left, the stained glass faces of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Tennyson smiled benignly upon me from the bay window. Semi-transparent silk lampshades, made in France, adorned the delicate chandelier.
"In one corner, the pink-clad lady of Frances Hodgkins' painting La Robe Rose dried herself before a painted fire. A jade Cantonese sceptre and brass Jewish ceremonial bowl graced a shelf in the china cabinet.
"All of these are dominated by the magnificent piano, given to Dorothy Theomin by her parents as a birthday gift in 1906 and, in accordance with her final wishes, always kept perfectly in tune."
• Geoff Adams is a former editor of the ODT.
