Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart (2001 by Thad Carhart).

No one knows exactly when the piano was invented. The generally accepted date is around 1700. There is little doubt, however, about its inventor, an instrument maker in Florence, Italy, named Bartolomeo Cristofori, who developed a way of making a struck string resound loudly. Before Cristofori, keyboard instruments were unsatisfactory for different reasons: clavichords, whose strings are struck, were small and delicate, and their greatly reduced volume made them suitable only for small gatherings. Harpsichords, while larger and therefore considerably louder, had one overriding limitation: since the string is plucked, the force with which the key is depressed is unrelated to the volume of the sound produced. Dynamic control of each note was not possible.

What was needed—and what Cristofori invented—was an instrument as large and robust as the big harpsichords that would also allow the dynamic range that before had only been available on the flimsy clavichords. The first piano was described by a contemporary musician in 1711 as a “gravicembalo col piano e forte,” a “harpsichord with soft and loud.” This was the essential breakthrough, but it took decades for the seed to find fertile ground, and it did so not in Italy but in eighteenth-century Germany.

German instrument makes incorporated Cristofori’s breakthrough into a series of increasingly powerful keyboard instruments that were true pianos. Johann Sebastian Bach was impressed by the first piano he tried, but he pointed out limitations that still needed to be worked on: a heavy action and a treble that was not loud enough. Two of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, championed the instrument in the next generation; by the time Johann Christian Bach gave England’s first solo piano performance in 1768, the triumph of this new instrument over the harpsichord was assured.

The role of the keyboard as a solo instrument came to the fore musically. It was no longer just another part of the ensemble, and its unique volume freed it from the confines of the drawing room to which the harpsichord had almost always been consigned. Haydn and Mozart both wrote masterful sonatas for the new instrument, its keyboard was greatly expanded, and its dynamic range—the single feature that most distinguished it from the harpsichord—was exploited fully. A whole new technique stressing fluidity was developed for the piano, and Mozart wrote: “It should flow like oil.” Solo concerts became the norm rather than the exception, and a class of instrumentalists with technique and power arrived on the scene.

What had been a tinkerer’s offshoot among harpsichord makers became an industry in its own right. London and Vienna were its focal points. The two capitals gave rise to distinct schools of piano building, the principal difference having to do with how the action—the intricate mechanism that activates the hammers to strike the strings—was conceived and assembled. Viennese pianos were generally softer, with a refined singing tone that allowed the melody to come to the fore; the pianos themselves had delicate cabinetry. English pianos, on the other hand, had a more robust tone, with a stronger action and greater tension in the strings; they had solid cases and sturdy frames. The great Viennese composers of the classical era—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—played Viennese pianos, but the transition to the stronger instruments of the English school can be seen in Beethoven’s last piano sonatas.

Beethoven was known for the increasing dynamic contrasts in his works for piano, from whisper to thunder, and he sometimes destroyed the fragile Viennese pianos when playing his music. He had a strong influence on the direction of piano manufacture, and as early as 1796 he expressed his frustration with the overly delicate styles of playing that were a holdover from harpsichords.

In 1818, Broadwood, the pre-eminent English manufacturer of the day , offered him a grand piano that incorporated all of the latest features: stronger case and frame, trichord stringing, more responsive action. This piano, too, Beethoven damaged with the fervor of his playing (a contemporary reported that “the broken strings were jumbled up like a thorn bush in a storm”), but he remained attached to it until his death in 1827. He imagined music unlike anything his contemporaries were writing; the Hammerklavier sonata from this period still strikes many as a revelation of the piano’s extreme limits of power and expressiveness.