instrument’s responsiveness to keyboard touch, which allows the pianist to produce notes
at different dynamic levels by controlling the speed at which the hammers hit the strings.
Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy, who was employed by Prince Ferdinand de Medici
as the Keeper of the Instruments, is regarded as the inventor of the piano. The Medici
family owned a piano in 1709 and there may have been a piano built in 1698 and a
prototype in 1694. The three Cristofori instruments that survive today date from the
1720s.
The piano was based on earlier technological inventions. The mechanisms of keyboard
instruments such as the clavichord and the harpsichord were well known. In a clavichord
the strings are pressed by tangents while in a harpsichord they are plucked by quills.
Centuries of work on the mechanism of the harpsichord had shown the most effective
ways to construct the case, soundboard, bridge and keyboard. Cristofori, who was an
expert harpsichord builder, was well acquainted with this body of knowledge.
Cristofori succeeded in solving the fundamental problem of piano design. The hammers
must strike the string but must not remain in contact with the string, as a tangent remains
in contact with a clavichord string, because this would damp the sound. The hammers
must return to their rest position without bouncing violently and it must be possible to
repeat a note rapidly. Cristofori’s piano action served as a model for the many different
approaches to piano actions that followed. Cristofori’s early instruments were made with
thin strings and were much quieter than the modern piano. The clavichord was the only
previous keyboard instrument capable of minutely controlled dynamic nuances through
the keyboard. Pianos were louder and had more sustaining power than the clavichord.
In 1711 an Italian writer named Scipione Maffei wrote an enthusiastic article about
Cristofori’s piano including a diagram of the mechanism. The article was widely
distributed and most of the next generation of piano builders started their work because of
reading it. One of the builders who read the article was Gottfried Silbermann who is
better known nowadays as an organ builder. Silbermann’s pianos were direct copies of
Cristofori’s with one important addition: Silbermann invented the forerunner of the
modern damper pedal which lifts all the dampers off the strings at once.
Silbermann showed Bach one of his early instruments in the 1730s but Bach thought that
the higher notes were too soft to allow a full dynamic range. He did, however, approve
of a later piano in 1747 and even served as an agent in selling Silbermann’s pianos.
Piano making flourished during the late eighteenth century in the Viennese school which
included Andreas Stein (who worked in Augsburg, Germany) and the Viennese makers,
Nanette Stein (daughter of Johann Andreas Stein) and Anton Walter. Viennese pianos
were built with wooden frames, two strings per note, and had leather-covered hammers.
On some of these Viennese pianos the notes were differently coloured from those of
modern pianos, with black notes corresponding to the present-day white notes, and brown
or white notes corresponding to the present-day black notes. It was for such instruments
that Mozart composed his concertos and sonatas and replicas of them are built today for