The piano was invented at the turn of the eighteenth century by a craftsman from Padua, Italy, named Bartolomeo Cristofori.
Decades later, German instrument builder Gottfried Silbermann picked up where Cristofori left off – refining the design, championing the instrument to the courts of Europe, and bringing it to the attention of composers who would shape its future.
Six of their instruments have survived the centuries. Each one tells a chapter of the same remarkable story.
Who Invented the Piano?
Bartolomeo Cristofori
Bartolomeo Cristofori was born in 1655.
We know nothing about his early life, but in 1688, at the age of 33, he was hired by royal patron of the arts Prince Ferdinando de Medici.
The prince’s previous keyboard technician had just died, and he was looking for an employee to handle repairs, tuning, and maintenance.
In May of 1688, just a few weeks after having been recruited, Cristofori dropped everything and moved to the prince’s home in Florence.
What Made the First Pianos Different?
Sometime around 1700, Cristofori invented a new instrument. It had the ungainly name of “gravicembalo col piano, e forte”, or “harpsichord with soft and loud.” It would later be called the pianoforte, and later just shortened to “piano.”
Pianofortes were different from harpsichords in one very important way: harpsichords pluck their strings, while fortepianos use hammers that strike a string.
A player could now create gradations of volume using the hammer system that were not possible using the plucked mechanism. The result is a very different tone, and the change opened up entirely new creative worlds for composers.
However, the instruments weren’t the same ones we’d recognise today.
As evidenced by a surviving 1720 model, the keyboard had only 54 keys, compared with the modern piano’s 88.
These early pianos were also much quieter than instruments we see today, which have been continually optimised over generations for larger and larger concert halls – and bigger, louder, more technically demanding repertoire.
The Three Earliest Surviving Cristofori Pianos
Cristofori piano
The earliest surviving examples of Cristofori’s work date to the 1720s.
There are three that have survived the centuries: a 1720 model now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a 1722 model at the Museo Strumenti Musicali in Rome, and a 1726 model at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum of Leipzig University.
A brief document on the Met’s 1720 Cristofori
This instrument is fascinating to listen to today, knowing how the piano – and piano literature – would ultimately develop. The piano may not have reached its final form, but the bones were there.
The Rise of German Piano Builder Gottfried Silbermann
Gottfried Silbermann
In 1683, instrument builder Gottfried Silbermann was born in modern-day Saxony to a carpenter and his wife – far removed from the glamorous world of the Medicis.
He opened a workshop in 1711. Initially his speciality was organ building.
In 1723, Silbermann was named the “Honorary Court and State Organ Builder to the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony.”
Silbermann never studied under Cristofori directly, but he did read analysis of Cristofori’s work. Remarkably, in 1732, when he built his first pianoforte, he’d likely never seen an example before in the flesh. (Cristofori had died just a year prior.)
Over the course of his career, Silbermann built on Cristofori’s ideas, including developing the idea of the damper pedal.
It is worth noting that Silbermann had a famous organist friend: one Johann Sebastian Bach. In fact, they were close enough that Silbermann stood as godfather to Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel (known as C.P.E. Bach).
As legend has it, Bach was intrigued by the early Silbermann pianos, but was sceptical. His two big critiques were that the action was too heavy and the treble was too weak.
The Influence of the Silbermann Instruments
In the 1740s, King Frederick the Great of Prussia – a famously musical monarch – became acquainted with Silbermann’s invention and purchased several examples for his court.
Silbermann’s godson, C. P. E. Bach, worked for Frederick the Great, meaning that he came in contact with these new instruments and worked extensively with them.
A performance on a copy of a 1749 Silbermann
The Silbermann pianos would have influenced C.P.E. Bach – and he in turn influenced later composers.
By the mid-eighteenth century, it was becoming increasingly clear that the idea of the piano had legs.
Today, two of Silbermann’s 1740s pianos reside in Frederick’s palaces in Potsdam, and a third is part of the collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.
They – and the copies made of them – are vital historical documents tracing the evolution of the harpsichord into the piano we know and love today.
Conclusion
These six pianos by these two makers, scattered across Europe and America, tell a vitally important music history story: how the initial piano prototype of the 1720s evolved within a single generation into the instrument favoured by the generation of Bach’s children – paving the way for giants like Haydn, Beethoven, and their contemporaries to push the instrument to new heights.
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