Good evening and thank you for your time in advance!
I was reading up on Piano tuning recently, and I came across this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440_(pitch_standard)
In it, it says that in the Baroque Era, A = 415 Hz and A# = 440 Hz. Today, A = 440 Hz, which to me says that all instruments were pitched up by about a half step. To me, the logcial conclusion to this is that Baroque Era pieces would have to be transposed up by a half stop in order to be faithfully recreated. However, to my knowledge this is not done.
I know that transposing does change the sound of a piece. So my question is, why do we not compensate for tuning such as this for classical pieces?
It's not that simple.
See, there was no consensus on a pitch reference to the level of precision we discuss these days. There was eight foot pitch and people used whistles and so on to have pitch references, but there was no standard. We start to see that kind of thing in the second half (last decades?) of the 19th century, I think.
To make matters worse, it's not like they had the same notes we have now. See, there were other tuning systems, and those yielded intervals slightly different from the ones we consider normal these days. There plenty of those discussed between the 16th and the 19th century. Did everybody tuned the same back then? No. Several alternatives were discussed in treatises and manuals, but how people tuned those would be a different situation.
Woodwind instruments were made in one piece for a while (during the so called Middle ages and the Renaissance). That means you could not adjust pitch like you can with the modern versions made in several parts.
Is all hope lost if we want to listen to the sounds of yore? Not completely. It's very common for early music specialists to not tune their instruments to A4 = 440 Hz and very common to have keyboard instruments in something other than equal temperament.
why do we not compensate for tuning such as this for classical pieces?
Depends on who we are talking about. There was a revolution in the 20th century to try to do things the way they were done in the past, it came to be known as Historically Informed Performance (HIP). Not everybody was into that at first, but it has REALLY permeated the music world. However, there is still a difference between mainstream performance and HIP.