Fortepiano: Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven)

I thoroughly enjoyed last week’s video about recorders and Van Eyck, so this week, we’re going to do something similar. 🙂 I have two videos for you today. The first one is an informational video about the fortepiano, and then the second one is a musical selection that Miss Darcy might have played on her fortepiano.

And the music in the video is actually being played on the fortepiano, which means the piece of music sounds as it would have when Beethoven first composed it. Surely, I can’t be the only one who finds that cool, can I be? 🙂

I’ve paired the above musical videos with an excerpt from a book where Georgiana plays a key role in bringing her brother and Elizabeth together. This excerpt is from a scene where Georgiana and Darcy are about to have a disagreement.

Two Days Before Christmas is the first book in my Darcy Family Holidays series. Darcy has returned home from Netherfield sooner than expected, and he’s in quite the state. Georgiana thinks she knows what his trouble is and determines that she is going to give him the best Christmas present — an unbroken heart.

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Leenie Brown

Leenie Brown fell in love with Jane Austen's works when she first read Sense and Sensibility followed immediately by Pride and Prejudice in her early teens. As the second of five daughters and an avid reader, she has always loved to see where her imagination takes her and to play with and write about the characters she meets along the way. In 2013, these two loves collided when she stumbled upon the world of Jane Austen Fan Fiction. A year later, in 2014, she began writing her own Austen-inspired stories and began publishing them in 2015. Leenie lives in Nova Scotia, Canada with her two teenage boys and her very own Mr. Brown (a wonderful mix of all the best of Darcy, Bingley and Edmund with healthy dose of the teasing Mr. Tillney and just a dash of the scolding Mr. Knightley).

8 thoughts on “Fortepiano: Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven)”

  1. Is there a difference between a fortepiano and a pianoforte? I’ve seen it written both ways, sometimes in a single book.

    1. Yes, the two instruments are different (the fortepiano replaced the harpiscord and then the fortepiano evolved into the pianoforte which we now just call a piano). However, at one time (when the instrument was changing from the fortepiano to our modern pianoforte), the two terms were used interchangeably and eventually shortened to just piano. Now days, we would most likely use the term fortepiano to only refer to the sort of early instrument like the one in the first video that has the hand and knee levers for sustaining and dampening sound, but a Regency era character such as Georgiana might have indeed called the instrument a fortepiano, a pianoforte, or a piano.

  3. I love these videos. It was so informative about the evolution of what Georgiana might have played. I imagine she would have several instruments at Pemberley and at Darcy House. And, of course, she would have the latest innovations available to someone of her wealth and station. I had goosebumps as I listened to him play in that second video. I think my OCD would be screaming as I tried to make out the difference between the black and white keys. It was rather disconcerting. Thanks for sharing.

    1. I agree. I think she’d have the older version and the newest one as well. 🙂 I’m glad you enjoyed the videos. I found them fascinating.

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