Temperament, A pianist responds

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Tom writes: 
<< it has been my impression that tuners 
of past eras were ATTEMPTING to tune ET and didn't have the proper approach 
to execute it. >> 

    ET was being advocated by a few radicals in the late 1700's, but they 
really appear as abberations to the field at large.  Too many contemporary 
writers were extolling the inequalities of temperament to think that they 
wanted to get rid of them.  Jorgensen offers more than a few examples. 
    I don't think ET was a goal of many people before 1900.  However, as the 
world became infatuated with science in the late 19th century, and popular 
taste swung toward scientific anything, abetted by manufacturers efforts,  I 
can see how ET would have been heralded as the "best". And, I also believe 
that tuners were quick to follow the money.  
   I guess I would say that the move from Meantone to Well-Tempered was 
motivated by compositional imperatives while the move from WT to ET was 
motivated by economic concerns.  
   As a side note, I have just had a customer ask me to retune his piano to 
ET. This makes 5 people in 7 years to do that, and I am beginning to see a 
pattern.  Three of these people more or less play the same music. Know what 
it is?  
   Gershwin, Rogers/Hart/Hammerstein/Carmichael/etc.  
  Show tunes from the turn of the century forward!!  Since I believe that all 
that music was composed with ET as the intonational environment,  it doesn't 
surprise me that it sounds best in ET.  Other of my WT customers  play this 
music, but also stuff from Bach-Brahms, and they gladly accept the slight 
damage a WT does to 20th century music.  It is worth it to them to have some 
key character for the rest of their repertoire.  
      There is no one tuning that will do it all.  What is poison to one is 
essential to anothers.   I personally hear ET Beethoven as a harmonic 
caricature.  I would just as soon look at black and white photos of Van 
Gogh's oil paintings.  

>>how  can we be so sure that the HT we tune today is similar to what was 
used in 
Beethoven's day, since the methods we use to recreate those HTs are so 
radically different from the methods used at the time?  >>

Owen J. can explain his investigative procedure in detail, and it doesn't 
take a genius to follow Thomas Young's instructions to tune six pure fifths 
and then six equally imperfect ones.  There was also a tremendous amount of 
math applied to the puzzle of temperament. 
   I think the piano's evolution is a larger deviation from "original 
intentions" than any misinterpretation of the published temperaments.  
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT