Americus Backers - His Instruments

His Instruments

Americus built both harpsichords and pianofortes. He is described by composer, musician and chronicler Charles Burney in Rees's Cyclopaedia for 1772 as “a harpsichord maker of second rank, who constructed several pianofortes, and improved the mechanism in some particulars, but the tone, with all the delicacy of Schroeter's (see below) touch, lost the spirit of the harpsichord and gained nothing in sweetness”.

Nevertheless, one of his harpsichords was owned and played by the naturalized English castrato, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, an intimate friend of Johann Christian Bach and an associate of world-renowned castrato Gaspare Pacchierotti, a regular visitor to London between 1778 and 1791. Tenducci published a set of sonatas for the harpsichord or pianoforte not heard since the 18th century. (A recording of one of these pieces exists on a CD by David Leigh playing the actual restored 1766 Backers harpsichord in question.)

A Covent Garden play bill from 1767 amongst the Broadwood family memorabilia dated 16 May for that year announces "End of Act 1. Miss Brickler will sing a favourite song from Judith, accompanied by Mr Dibdin on a new instrument called Piano Forte." There is some speculation that Backers was the maker of this novelty.

Americus announced the first exhibition of this “new Forte Piano” in February 1771. Subsequent Backers pianos were used by J.C. Bach and his protégé Johann Samuel Schroeter for concerto performances in London and would certainly have been known by Muzio Clementi. This was played at the Thatched House in St James's Street, London, in 1773.

Cesare Ponsicchi, a 19th Century piano restorer who had himself worked on original Cristofori pianos, found a Backers grand piano at Pistoria, Italy dated 1778, indicating that Americus’s pianos were exported abroad. This piano can no longer be traced.