page_title: Fortepiano
section_title: Cristofori
hierarchical_section_title: Fortepiano / History / Cristofori
caption_attribution_description: Pianoforte (Florence, 1720) by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731) "An early (1700s I think) model of a piano. Only 4 pianos of this type were made." Grand Piano - Bartolomeo Cristofori Date: 1720 Geography: Florence, Italy Medium: Various materials Dimensions: Case length (perpendicular to keyboard) 228.6 cm, Width (parallel to keyboard) 95.6 cm, Case depth without lid 23.5 cm, Total height 86.5 cm, 3-octave span 49.6 cm, L. of longest string 188.6 cm, L. of shortest string 12.0 cm, L. of c2 27.9 cm Classification: Chordophone-Zither Credit Line: The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889 Accession Number: 89.4.1219 Description: “Bartolomeo Cristofori was the first person to create a successful hammer-action keyboard instrument and, accordingly, deserves to be credited as the inventor of the piano. This example is the oldest of the three extant pianos by Cristofori. About 1700 he began to work on an instrument on which the player could achieve changes in loudness solely by changing the force with which the keys were struck. By 1700 he had made at least one successful instrument, which he called "gravicembalo col piano e forte" (harpsichord with soft and loud). His instrument still generally resembles a harpsichord, though its case is thicker and the quill mechanism has been replaced by a hammer mechanism. Cristofori's hammer mechanism is so well designed and made that no other of comparable sensitivity and reliability was devised for another seventy-five years. In fact, the highly complex action of the modern piano may be traced directly to his original conception.”
context_page_description: A fortepiano is an early piano. In principle, the word "fortepiano" can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700 up to the early 19th century. Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the late-18th to early-19th century instruments for which Haydn, Mozart, and the younger Beethoven wrote their piano music. Starting in Beethoven's time, the fortepiano began a period of steady evolution, culminating in the late 19th century with the modern grand. The earlier fortepiano became obsolete and was absent from the musical scene for many decades. In the 20th century the fortepiano was revived, following the rise of interest in historically informed performance. Fortepianos are built for this purpose today in specialist workshops.
context_section_description: The piano was invented by harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around the turn of the 18th century.  The first reliable record of a piano appears in the inventory of the Medici family (who were Cristofori's patrons), dated 1700.  Cristofori continued to develop the instrument until the 1720s, the time from which the surviving three Cristofori instruments date.
  Cristofori is perhaps best admired today for his ingenious piano action, which in some ways was more subtle and effective than that of many later instruments.  However, other innovations were also needed to make the piano 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 virtually all later pianos, in Cristofori's instruments the hammers struck more than one string at a time; Cristofori used pairs of strings throughout the range.
  Cristofori was also the first to incorporate a form of soft pedal into a piano (the mechanism by which the hammers are made to strike fewer than the maximum number of strings; Cristofori's was a hand stop).  It is not clear whether the modern soft pedal descends 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 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 1719 in a volume of Maffei's work, and then in a German translation (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 (see below).
  Cristofori's instrument spread at first quite slowly, probably because, being more elaborate and harder to build than a harpsichord, it was very expensive.  For a time, the piano was the instrument of royalty, with Cristofori-built or -styled instruments played in the courts of Portugal and Spain.  Several were owned by Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, who was the pupil of the composer Domenico Scarlatti.  One of the first private individuals to own a piano was the castrato Farinelli, who inherited one from Maria Barbara on her death.
  The first music specifically written for piano dates from this period, the Sonate da cimbalo di piano (1732) by Lodovico Giustini.  This publication was an isolated phenomenon; James Parakilas conjectures that the publication was meant as an honor for the composer on the part of his royal patrons.  Certainly there could have been no commercial market for fortepiano music while the instrument continued to be an exotic specimen.
  It appears that the fortepiano did not achieve full popularity until the 1760s, from which time the first records of public performances on the instrument are dated, and when music described as being for the fortepiano was first widely published.
caption: A 1720 fortepiano by Cristofori in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is the oldest surviving piano.
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