hammer

"Many have speculated that Beethoven attacked the keyboard with such fury in order to feel the vibrations of his music through the piano's cabinet as he gradually lost his hearing. In 1818 Broadwood, the pre-eminent English manufacture of the day, offered him a grand piano that incorporated all of the latest features: stronger case and frame, trichord stringing, more responsive action. This piano, too, Beethoven damaged with he fervor of his playing (a contemporary reported that "the broken strings were jumbled up like a thorn bush in a storm"), but he remained attached to it until his death in 1827. Descending into deafness, he imagined music unlike anything his contemporaries were writing; the Hammerklavier sonata from this period still strikes us as a revelation of the piano's extreme limits of power and expressiveness."