Grand Piano attr. Schmidt, J

This extraordinarily rare piano from about 1790 has a pedal board with eighteen notes that are played like pedals on an organ. Pedal stringed-keyboard instruments were not uncommon in the eighteenth century. Johann Sebastian Bach is known to have owned a pedal harpsichord and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's piano by Anton Walter originally had a pedal mechanism. Mozart's D-minor piano concerto, K. 466, requires the use of a pedal mechanism as it cannot be performed with the range of the manual alone.

This example is attributed to Johann Schmidt of Salzburg, a friend of the Mozart family, whom Leopold Mozart (Wolfgang's father) helped to secure the job of court organ and instrument maker in Salzburg. Indeed, cleaning done in the 1980s revealed the initials of Wolfgang Mozart scratched inside long ago. It is possible that Mozart played this piano in Salzburg (Credit Met. Museum)