Indisputably, Stewart Pollens's book offers a plethora of worthwhile information about Bartolomeo Cristofori, his instruments and his circumstances in Florence. My quibble is with what he did with this information, or rather what he failed to do: that is, to demonstrate how it all relates to Cristofori's invention of the piano. One wishes that, in addition to all the attention given to material of marginal relevance to this main subject, more were given, for example, to the late seventeenth-century keyboard manuscript (available in an edition by Aapo Häkkinen, The Medici Harpsichord Book (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2011)) briefly described at 233. In such pieces as the Preludio di Botte, Acciachature, e Ligature the anonymous composer (possibly Grand Prince Ferdinando himself) anticipates ‘pianistic’ effects later employed by Ludovico Giustini and Azzolino Della Ciaia, among others.

It is certainly an author's ‘prerogative to cite [or not to cite] whatever he or she wishes’, but he or she should be prepared to face criticism for their choices or omissions, deliberate or not. Eva Badura-Skoda's work, I'd agree, often presents rather far-fetched suppositions. In this case, however, the basic facts, established in Nicola Schneider's article cited in my review, are indisputable: that in 1726 the musically keen Christian Heinrich von Watzdorf returned home to Crostau in Saxony after spending more than a year in Florence; that he commissioned Gottfried Silbermann to build an organ, completed in 1732, for Crostau's parish church; and that Watzdorf owned a piano that he must have acquired before 1733. Although one might reasonably disagree with some aspects of Badura-Skoda's presentation of this episode, its essence is entirely plausible: that Watzdorf acquired his piano from Cristofori while he was in Florence and that, transported to Saxony (not Austria, as Pollens writes), it inspired Silbermann to make his own first pianos. Even if Pollens should disagree with Schneider and Badura-Skoda's interpretation of the documentary evidence, crucial as it would be in considering the early reception of the piano in Germany, one might have expected him to have voiced his objections, if only in a brief footnote.

At 270 Pollens states that ‘leather guides are used’ in mortices for the escapement jacks of three Portuguese pianos, ‘above and below in the Van Casteel and Antunes instruments, and at the top surface only in the anonymous piano’. While the leather in the Van Casteel piano is indeed visible in the photo at 270, the Antunes piano has an entirely different type of escapement jack requiring no leather guides, which are therefore, as I noted, absent in the photo at 271.

To my eye, there are faint but unmistakable signs of a former separate bass bridge in the Todini harpsichord. To my sense of historical harpsichord design, this bass bridge makes sense in conjunction with the main bridge, which ends atypically far from the tail end of the soundboard. Even if it were bold of me to claim, as I did in my article ‘Towards an Optimal Instrument: Domenico Scarlatti and the New Wave of Iberian Harpsichord Making’, that the conjectural reconstruction of the former layout of the soundboard represents the instrument's original state, this layout would still be from a relatively early intermediate state before the mid-eighteenth-century alterations that resulted in the present configuration (Early Music 35/4 (2007), 575–604, illustration 1 at 579)). In any event, left unexplored in Pollens's book are further precedents for separate bass bridges and other unusual technical features of Cristofori's instruments.

As for settling scores, I was not referring to Pollens's disagreement with Kerstin Schwarz, which he handles with all due professionalism and respect. What I had in mind were comments such as the gratuitous footnote at 29–30 disparaging the Metropolitan Museum's deaccessioning of two instruments. (Full disclosure: I acquired one of these and later donated it to the National Music Museum, Vermillion, South Dakota, where it remains available for study.)

This is not the place to discuss arcane issues of string lengths, materials and pitch. I would merely note that the Metropolitan Museum's Cristofori piano, having undergone major alterations in the eighteenth century and further mutilation during a disastrous restoration in 1938, provides no reliable evidence bearing on these matters.