Louis-Constantin Boisselot

Louis-Constanin Boisselot (11 March 1809 in Montpellier–5 June 1850 in Marseille) was a French piano manufacturer and the great artisan of the creation of the House Boisselot in Marseille. According to Howard Schott, their instruments were popular in the south of France and Spain. He married Fortunée Funaro (1816–?), the daughter of a merchant of Marseilles, on 25 November 1835. They had a son, Marie-Louis-François Boisselot (1845–1902), known simply as Franz, because he had as godfather Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886), a long-time friend of the family.[1]

In 1843 he patented a piano equipped with sympathetic strings sounding an octave above, an idea that would eventually lead to Blüthner's 1873 aliquot scaling patent for grand pianos and at the Paris Exposition the following year, where he presented another piano with a "pedal tone" which preceded the "sostenuto mechanism" that Steinway re-introduced in 1874.[2] He succeeded his father Jean-Louis Boisselot in the manufacture of pianos in 1847,[3] a business continued by successive generations of his family until the late nineteenth century.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Archives Musique, Facteurs, Marchands, Luthiers. "Le Boisselots". Archives Musiques. Retrieved 15 March 2013.
  2. ↑ Ryberg, J. Stanley. "The 19th Century Piano—Coming and Going" (in French). Pianoren. Retrieved 15 March 2013.
  3. ↑ Clinkscale, Martha Novak (1999). Makers of the Piano: 1820-1860. Oxford University Press. p. 38. ISBN 0198166257.