The Verschneider Piano at the Riemenschneider Bach Institute

Abstract:The Riemenschneider Bach Institute at Baldwin Wallace University possesses a square piano dated 1792, made by the Verschneider firm, organ builders of Puttelange-aux-Lacs, Moselle. The five-octave piano, of unknown provenance but modeled after English-style prototypes, is the oldest extant Verschneider product and their only known piano, evidently fourth in a series of otherwise lost instruments. Undistinguished in workmanship and repeatedly altered, in the mid-twentieth century by Marcel Asseman in Paris, the piano nevertheless displays interesting features indicative of stressful conditions in provincial Revolutionary France