> David wrote: ... There's some discussion ... which is consistent with what
I remember from a Chopin biography, that when his regular tuner died he
could not find anyone else as satisfactory.
> It seems that only in the last hundred years or so that tuning 
methods were so systemised that the results were accurately ET, while 
before that ET was an aspiration which was only partially met, and 
that some tuners had their preferences for particular slight 
departures (or failures to get very close). That could be consistent ...
The greatest enthusiast . . .

Maybe so David, but 19th century tuning (unlike Baroque tuning for example)
is very well documented in sources that have been fully researched by "the"
temperament scholar, Patrizio Barbieri. You know his conclusions, as I
quoted them in my book which you kindly reviewed a few years ago!

Barbieri's findings are confirmed (if there was any need) in other more
recent scholarly publications. For example, precisely in Paris, in the 1829
book on piano tuning by Montal. This has been recently translated into
English with an Introduction by Peter Sturm, another very knowledgeable
person on the history of piano tuning.

Of course there were a few rare tuners who kept tuning unequal/circular in
19th c., but if this was infrequent in England and Italy, it happened hardly
at all in France. Sturm has shown conclusively that Jorgensen's dreams of
Romantic unequal tuning do not resist scrutiny: most tuners were just
producing ET with errors, not unequal on purpose.

(By mid 19th century tuning slightly unequal/circular is very unlikely:
reading writers like Helmholtz/Ellis and Bosanquet it is apparent that they
were not even aware that circular temperaments had ever existed!)

Sorry to be so "nitpicky": "Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas!".

All the best!!

Claudio


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