From Florence to the Concert Hall: The Story of the Piano
Florence, around 1700. In a workshop serving Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, a keeper of the court's instruments named Bartolomeo Cristofori was working on a problem that had frustrated keyboard players for generations. The harpsichord could sparkle, but it could not whisper or shout: however hard you pressed a key, its quill plucked the string at roughly the same strength. Cristofori's answer was to replace the quill with a small hammer that struck the string and then fell away, so that the player's touch decided the volume.
He called his invention a gravicembalo col piano e forte, a harpsichord with soft and loud. It took most of the eighteenth century for musicians to realise what he had given them, and another century for builders to turn his delicate cypress-and-cedar instrument into the iron-framed giant of the modern concert stage. This is the story of that journey, from a Medici workshop to millions of homes, schools and screens.
Cristofori's quiet revolution
Cristofori was not the first person to imagine striking strings with hammers, but he was the first to solve the mechanical puzzle well enough to build a practical instrument. His action included an escapement, which let the hammer fly free of the string after striking it so the note could ring, and a check to catch the hammer on the rebound. Those ideas remain at the heart of every acoustic piano.
The invention became known beyond Florence after the writer Scipione Maffei published a description of it, with a diagram of the action, in 1711. Three of Cristofori's pianos survive, dating from the 1720s, and are kept today in museums in New York, Rome and Leipzig. They are light, quiet instruments by modern standards, with a range of about four and a half octaves, yet the essential idea is all there.
The fortepiano of Mozart and Beethoven
Maffei's article was translated into German, and builders north of the Alps took up the idea. Gottfried Silbermann in Saxony built pianos based on Cristofori's design, and by the second half of the century two schools had emerged. In Vienna and southern Germany, makers such as Johann Andreas Stein of Augsburg built light, responsive instruments with a crisp, singing tone. In London, firms such as Broadwood developed a heavier, more robust action and a fuller sound.
Musicians now call these instruments fortepianos to distinguish them from the modern piano. Mozart wrote enthusiastically in a letter of 1777 about Stein's instruments, and his own piano, built by Anton Walter in Vienna, survives in Salzburg. His concertos, written largely for himself to play in Vienna, helped make the piano the star solo instrument of the age, displacing the harpsichord within a few decades.
Beethoven pushed the instrument harder than anyone. Over his career he owned pianos from several makers, including an Érard from Paris and a Broadwood sent from London, and his music seems to strain at the edges of their range and power. The piano of his early sonatas spanned about five octaves; by his late works, builders had extended it to six and more. The thunderous dynamics and long, sustained lines he demanded were a challenge that piano makers spent the next century answering.
Iron, felt and the concert grand
The nineteenth century transformed the piano from a wooden instrument into a precision machine. Thicker strings at higher tension gave a bigger sound, but wooden frames could not hold the strain. Builders added metal bracing, and in 1825 Alpheus Babcock of Boston patented a one-piece cast-iron frame for the square piano. A cast-iron plate eventually became standard, allowing tensions that would have torn a wooden case apart.
Other innovations followed:
In New York, Steinway & Sons, founded in 1853 by the German immigrant Henry E. Steinway and his sons, combined a full cast-iron frame with overstringing in its grand pianos and won acclaim at international exhibitions. By the late nineteenth century the standard of 88 keys, a little over seven octaves, had settled into place. Meanwhile, virtuosos such as Franz Liszt filled halls on their own, helping to create the solo piano recital that audiences still attend today.
- The double escapement, patented by the Érard firm in Paris in 1821, let a note be repeated quickly without the key returning fully to rest, a gift to virtuoso players.
- Felt-covered hammers gradually replaced leather, giving a rounder, warmer tone.
- Overstringing, in which the bass strings cross diagonally over the others, allowed longer strings and a richer bass in a compact case.
The upright in the family parlour
Grand pianos were large and expensive. Builders experimented throughout the early nineteenth century with turning the strings on end, and the compact upright piano that resulted fitted neatly against the wall of a modest home. As industrial manufacturing brought prices down, the upright became a fixture of middle-class parlours in Europe and North America.
For many families the piano was the home entertainment system of its day. Popular songs were sold as sheet music arranged for voice and piano, children took lessons as a matter of course, and evenings were spent gathered around the keyboard. In the early twentieth century, the player piano, driven by perforated paper rolls, even allowed households to hear music without a pianist at all. Ragtime, then jazz and blues, found some of their first and most important voices on the upright pianos of saloons, dance halls and front rooms.
The piano in the modern age
Recordings and radio eventually took over the piano's role as the centre of home music-making, but the instrument did not fade. Its keyboard became the model for a new family of electric and electronic instruments, from electric pianos to synthesizers, and later for digital pianos that sample the sound of fine grands and fit into a small apartment with headphones attached.
Meanwhile the acoustic piano itself has changed remarkably little since the late nineteenth century. A concert grand built today would be recognisable to a pianist of the 1890s, which is a measure of how thoroughly the builders of that era solved the problems Cristofori first took on. The piano remains central to classical music, jazz, pop songwriting and music education, and for many people it is still the instrument on which they first learn how music fits together.
Playing the story forward
From a single workshop in Florence, the idea of a keyboard that answers the player's touch spread to concert halls, parlours and recording studios around the world. If you would like to try that idea for yourself, you can play a free virtual piano in your browser on HarmonyHub, using your computer keyboard or a touchscreen, and explore other keyboard instruments in the keyboard category. Three centuries on, Cristofori's soft and loud is still only a key press away.