The range of the fortepiano at the time of its invention was about four octaves and this
was gradually increased. Mozart wrote his piano music for instruments of about five
octaves. The piano works of Beethoven reflect a gradually expanding range and his last
works are for an instrument of about six octaves. Pianos eventually attained a range of 7
1/3 octaves. Fortepianos usually had hand stops or knee levers to achieve the result of
the later pedals.
As in the modern piano, the fortepiano could vary the sound volume of each note,
depending on the player’s touch. The tone of the fortepiano was softer and less sustained
than the tone of the modern piano. Accents stood out more than on the modern piano as
they differed from softer notes in timbre as well as volume and decayed rapidly.
Fortepianos also had quite different tone quality in their different registers. They were
noble and slightly buzzing in the bass, tinkling in the high treble and more rounded, and
closest to the modern piano, in the middle range. In comparison, modern pianos are more
uniform in sound through their range.
The fortepiano was invented by the harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori around
- Cristofori is most admired today for his ingenious fortepiano action which was
more subtle and effective than that of many later instruments. Other innovations,
however, were also needed to make the fortepiano possible. Merely attaching the
Cristofori action to a harpsichord would have produced a very weak tone. Cristofori’s
instruments instead used thicker, tenser strings, mounted on a frame considerably more
robust than that of contemporary harpsichords. As with all later pianos, in Cristofori’s
instruments the hammers struck more than one string at a time and Cristofori used pairs
of strings throughout the range.
Cristofori was the first to use a form of soft pedal in a piano by means of a hand stop
which caused the hammers to strike fewer than the maximum number of strings. It is not
known for sure whether the modern soft pedal descended directly from Cristofori’s work
or arose independently.
Cristofori’s invention soon attracted public attention as the result of a journal article
written by Scipione Maffei and published in 1711 in ‘Giornale de’letterati d’Italia’ of
Venice. The article included a diagram of the action, the core of Cristofori’s invention.
This article was republished in 1719 in a volume of Maffei’s work, and then in a German
translation in 1725 in Johann Mattheson’s ‘Critica Musica’. The latter publication was
perhaps the triggering event in the spread of the fortepiano to German-speaking countries.
Cristofori’s instrument spread quite slowly at first, probably because being more
elaborate and harder to build than a harpsichord it was expensive. For a time the
fortepiano was the instrument of royalty, with fortepianos played in the courts of Portugal
and Spain. Several were owned by Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, herself a pupil of
Domenico Scarlatti. One of the first private individuals to own a fortepiano was the
castrato Farnelli who inherited one from Maria Barbara on her death.