Beethoven gave the piano its first impulses towards the modern instrument as we know it today. It is necessary, Beethoven proclaimed, that the sound of the piano should be distinguished from that of the harp! The sum of the 32 sonatas bears traces of emancipation, both in terms of writing and in terms of the craftsmanship that this writing implies. Beethoven's exchanges with piano makers were motivated by progress in violin making which, in the 19th century, affected all families of instruments. Beethoven wanted to find the material equivalent to his formal and acoustic experiments. The Sonata op. 101 continues the path of unification of movements, already hinted at in some of Bach's suites or Mozart's symphonies. The Sonata opens up to the musical thought of the19th century with its first phrase, the emergence of which seems to have been deployed beforehand.

Chopin shares with Beethoven the desire to use his instrumental writing as a mirror to the deployment of his ideas. Chopin's imagination certainly resides in the economy of the acoustic resources of the piano. A few years after Beethoven’s death, he veered toward an unexpected and new writing, neither close to the best pages of John Field, nor to the Cahiers de Virtuosité which were exchanged among certain composers, at the expense of rilvalries between them, which raised the piano as a scene of competitions and battles. Like Beethoven, Chopin enriches the future and the past, knowledge and emergence, memory and instinct. That is the tension upon wuich rests the radical modernity of his language. Late Beethoven uses fugue, two-part invention, and theme and variations. Early Chopin deploys the harmonic language defined by Bach, within the instrumental limits of the first half of the 18th century. The fundamental chorals of opus 10 #1, and opus 25 #12 open up incredible acoustic spaces. We would dare imagine Beethoven's reaction to such music. Had he prepared for it? Beethoven is a model for Chopin in this radical decentralization of registers while placing the singing line in its middle range. Son of Bach and Bel Canto, Chopin laid the foundations of pianistic writing for the 20th century, up to Debussy and Scriabin.

By contrast, reacting to a cantabile conception of the piano, Bartók, Prokofiev and Stravinsky wish to highlight the piano as a percussion instrument, with indeterminate sounds and complex sonorities. Basque Drum or Gong? Tam-Tam or gamelan? The piano sonorities, from now on, will reflect the sounds of music coming from virgin and distant lands. Petroushka, in the Stravinsky’s transcription, at the invitation of Arthur Rubinstein, is emblematic of the modernity of early 20th century music. This piece sings but integrates the melodic line into an overall percussive sound. The transcription desecrates the power of writing. Liszt, Busoni, Stravinsky and Godowsky use transcriptions to present the instrumental sonorities in conjunction with a classical conception of resonance. They embody this dialectic between the will to write and notate music and the furtive gesture of improvisation. They tell us of the constant oral and improvised role of all phenomena of inscriptions using ink and paper. For the future, the history of piano music can continue to be written in this positive tension between the permanent and the spontaneous.