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Variations on a Theme by Cristofori
Pianos, Weird and Wonderful
by
William Leland

Does the name Bartolomeo Cristofori ring a bell? It should, if you are one of the vast legion of professional and amateur pianists of the last 250-odd years who have toiled over those exasperating black and white levers in order to bring beautiful music to life. By rights, Cristofori's name should be--for us, anyway--at least as celebrated as those of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, or Eli Whitney. Had there been no Cristofori, there might well have been no Chopin, no Liszt, no Rachmaninoff; Horowitz would have been a composer, Van Cliburn might have been just another Fort Worth playboy, and George Gershwin would have had to write I Got Rhythm at the harpsichord.

Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), instrument maker to the court of Ferdinand de Medici in Florence, Italy, invented the piano almost by accident. He, along with other artisans of the 17th century, was trying to figure out some way of overcoming the major limitation of the harpsichord, namely, the inability to vary its volume by means of touch. When you pluck a string with a piece of crow's quill that is linked to a keyboard, as the harpsichord does, you simply can't change the sound by more than a virtually inaudible amount.

What Cristofori did, in order to obtain volume control through direct finger action, was to do away with plucking the string altogether and substitute hitting it; and in doing so, some time between 1693 and 1700, he managed to invent a whole new instrument. Oh, he still called it a harpsichord: gravicembalo col piano e forte--"large harpsichord with soft and loud"--but subsequent history took care of that mouthful; in short order, the new instrument came to be called piano e forte ("soft and loud"), and then pianoforte. After that, for some reason, it was fortepiano, and finally just piano (that's right: today we play "the soft"!)

There were many reasons why the new pianoforte was destined for success (see this author's The Why of the Piano on The Piano Education Page), but perhaps the most important of these was the fact that what Cristofori did, he did extremely well. Already a firmly established, greatly skilled and experienced mechanical genius, he--and only he--was able to overcome a group of knotty engineering obstacles right at the beginning, and create an ingenious and reliable action whose basic design, though much refined over the years, is still incorporated into the standard acoustical piano of today.

(Readers not inspired by technical details may want to skip the following section.)

To begin with, by deciding to hit the string instead of pluck it, Cristofori turned his erstwhile gravicembalo into a percussion instrument. Now, every percussion instrument produces a sound by having its main vibrating body struck by something--bell clapper, drumstick, cymbal, piano hammer, etc.--but whatever implement does the striking must not merely make contact, but must immediately get away again. If the drumstick stays on the drumhead or the clapper on the bell, without rebounding, you get a clunk instead of a prolonged vibration. Therein lies the main problem of wedding a hammer to a key lever: if you simply tack a hammer onto the end of a pivoted key and then press the other end with your finger, it's going to stay in contact with the string as long as you hold your finger down, so some contrivance must be devised which permits the hammer to rebound immediately whether you hold the key down or not.

Such a device is called an escapement. It is essentially a hinged upright stick, called a jack, which is mounted just above the rear of the key. When the front end of the key goes down, the back end goes up, and the jack pushes the hammer toward the string but slips out of the way just before contact, so that the hammer can strike and then immediately fall back again even if the key is held down. Imagine pushing a child on a swing by running forward and shoving it all the way to the high point, then dodging out of the way just before it swings back; this is what the jack does.

The mechanism of a piano action has to accomplish five things:

1. Cause the hammer to strike the string when the key is depressed
2. Allow the hammer to rebound whether the key is held down or not
3. Stop the string from vibrating when the key is released
4. Yield a wide range of volume from variations in key pressure
5. Permit immediate repetition of the entire cycle

Cristofori not only devised a mechanism that could do all of that, but eventually added two pedals (actually hand stops) which functioned exactly like the left and right pedals of today's grand piano: one to let all the strings continue to sound, and the other to cause the hammers to miss some of the strings and thus make soft playing easier.

Here is one of the three surviving Cristofori pianos, built in 1722:

This instrument, now housed in a museum in Rome, is more than seven feet long. It has a range of four octaves, two strings per note, and a shift mechanism which moves the hammers sideways so that each will strike only one string.

Having hosted the invention of the piano, Italy proceeded to forget all about it. To the north, however, the new instrument was taken up eagerly and developed by a whole host of busy practitioners in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, England, and eventually the United States. Along the way, it took on some interesting styles and shapes, as had the harpsichord itself. At least as early as 1742, pianos were being built in smaller, boxy shapes called squares, similar in appearance to the harpsichord style known as the virginal:

Flemish virginal, about 1640. Range of four octaves, strings parallel to keyboard.

English square piano, 1770's. Five octaves, strings parallel to keyboard. The pedal raises and lowers the lid to help vary the volume in the same way as do the swell louvers on a pipe organ.

Square pianos, like the earlier virginals, were developed to fit more conveniently than grand pianos or gravicembalos would into private homes; they were also considerably less expensive. The worthy goal of convenience, however, could sometimes be carried to extremes, as seen below:

This unlikely contraption, known as a "sewing box" piano, was not meant to be a mere toy, though it is little more than a foot wide and has correspondingly tiny keys. Its range is two and a half octaves, with one string per note, and it has no legs. The keyboard as pictured has been slid back into the case for closing and storage; for playing, it would be pulled out. The piano was probably built around the end of the 18th century.

Another portable piano of the same period was called the "orphica", which was available in several sizes; this one is about three and a half feet long and could be held by a strap around the player's neck, like an accordion.

At the opposite extreme, here's a view of the largest piano ever built:

The monstrous Challen grand piano, manufactured in London in 1935, was nearly twelve feet long and weighed well over a ton. Its keyboard range, however, was the standard seven and a third octaves--88 notes.

The piano with the greatest range, however, is the present-day Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand:

The Imperial is nine and a half feet long and has a range of a full eight octaves--96 notes, CCC to c³. The highest C is the same as on a standard piano, the extra nine notes being added in the bass. The lowest string sounds at a theoretical 15 cycles per second, producing a pitch that is virtually unrecognizable. Adding notes at the extreme ends of the compass, however, causes the more useful high and low tones to sound better, because they are moved farther away from the edge and thus closer to the more resonant areas of the soundboard.

Pianos have been made in many different shapes and combinations as well as sizes. Mozart is known to have used a pedal piano--one with foot pedals attached, like an organ--and even in the early 20th century a few of these were made expressly for professional organists who wanted to practice at home:

Pedal piano, around 1924. This is essentially a standard upright piano with one set of strings; the upper keyboard and the pedals have been coupled to the single action inside and do not have their own independent hammers. These instruments were frequently made with detachable pedal units.

 

In the piano's formative years, many attempts were made to combine it with other instruments, including the clavichord, the harpsichord, the reed organ and even the pipe organ. Mozart's favorite piano maker, Johann Andreas Stein, produced this specimen in the 1780's:

Piano-organ. The upper keyboard operates a standard Viennese piano action, while the lower sounds organ pipes which are housed below. Most such combination instruments proved to be far too expensive and difficult to maintain to have much practical or lasting value.

Nineteenth century attempts to save space by creating an upright piano began with what seemed the obvious solution: keep the keyboard level and rotate the rest of the instrument up ninety degrees. These experiments sometimes produced weird results:

The Upright Grand Piano

The Pyramid Piano

The Lyre Piano

The Giraffe Piano

But the modern upright takes advantage of a basic design which simply inverts the string layout so that the tonal unit (soundboard and strings) extends down to the floor instead of up in the air:

Bösendorfer 52" upright. The left, or "soft", pedal on most vertical pianos merely moves the hammers closer to the strings instead of shifting them to the right, as in grands.

...and here is the writer's own favorite; it invariably brings to mind Dr. Dolittle's two-headed animal, the pushmi-pullyu:

Pleyel Double Grand piano. It has two sets of strings and independent action units, but only one soundboard. Designing a keyboard instrument to accommodate two players was not at all a new idea in 1928, when this piano was built, but goes back to the 17th century.

 

A brief survey of this sort can show only the merest fraction of the great variety of piano designs that have appeared in the three hundred years since Bartolomeo Cristofori's epochal achievement. Every instrument pictured above represents some basic difference in the interior mechanism or layout, but the important components of the modern acoustical piano have been well established since about 1855; the many changes since that time have been relatively minor. In recent times, however, a number of designers have experimented with the piano's appearance, and a few of the results are pictured below:

Two Steinway pianos, designed on commission by New York artist Wendell Castle.

Kawai "see-through" grand. The transparent case is made of an acrylic resin which is stronger and more flexible than glass.

This arthropodal creature was designed by the German firm Seiler in 1987.

 

Ever since the end of World War II, after which its sales began to decline precipitously and the electronic keyboard came into being, the piano has been the subject of many premature obituaries and epitaphs. Certainly it no longer occupies the honored center of home entertainment it enjoyed long before the radio, the television set and the personal computer, and many of the pianos still on the market are bought to be used primarily as pieces of furniture. Yet it refuses to go away. Old and respected firms like Steinway, Baldwin, Schimmel and Bösendorfer continue to turn out instruments of high quality and craftsmanship, and companies like Yamaha and Fazoli contribute to ever higher standards. May this all continue for another 300 years!

 

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