The History of the Piano

The History of the Piano

The history of the piano, and his technique born, of course in close relation with the others keyboard instruments especially with the clavichord, his predecessor. The transition from the clavichord to the piano bring to us very interesting information about piano technique and the problems that the musician from that time had to confront.

The piano technique, the works for piano, the composers, recitals, auditions and all around the piano history have absolute relation with the manufacture and progress of the instrument construction and the possibilities that the piano could give to pianist and composers.

At the same time the piano was showing up, a new music style was emerging. It was the homophonic style, the Style Galant. Even though the pianoforte was invented in the early part of the eighteen-century it had to wait some decades to be widely known and accepted by musicians and manufactures. Bartolommeo Cristofori, a harpisichord-maker from Padua invented the new instrument in 1709. It constructed the device, in Florence, in which hammers activated strings and he called it a gravicembalo col piano e forte, explaining that it could play soft and loud.

Around 1730 Gottfried Silbermann builds few of them in Germany and them he could show them to Johann Sebastian Bach who didn’t pay much attention thinking maybe that the instrument was no yet to compete with the clavichord for example. Of course Bach was a great clavichord, harpsichord and organ player and his point of view and his technique were from those instruments. About this and from Bach biographer and also by looking at his keyboard music we could guess that his playing must have featured complete independence of hands and fingers. His biographer adds, “Bach is said to have played with so easy and so small a motion of the fingers that it was hardly perceptible. Only the first joints of the fingers were in motion; the hand retained, even in the most difficult passages, its rounded form; the fingers rose very little from the key, hardly more that in a trill, and when one was employed the others remained quietly in position”. But although we could have some information about how he played keyboard instrument in those times the piano came too late to J S Bach and also to other greats composer like Handel and Scarlatti.

The first known examples of music composed to pi...

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...t in Vienna until Beethoven came along; Leopold Koseluch, other pianist whom Mozart had some compliments and who was disturbed by Beethoven arriving; Josef Wolffl, who came to Vienna from Salzburg in 1795, had studied with Leopold Mozart and Michael Haydn and had enormous hands; and Daniel Steibelt, a famous charlatan of those times but who is recognized for add several things to the pedal technique.

But all those pianists had to confront with Beethoven when he arrived to Vienna from Bonn. Beethoven was advanced in the piano playing at his time. He came with his rough and overwhelming playing for those times and his surprising improvisations, he was broking all the law in name of the expression. Pianos were no safe with him, he broke more pianos than anybody in Vienna and he played only his music with few exceptions. He admired Clementi and C P E Bach as classic masters but he was creating a new school of piano playing. He was plagued of piano problems and for most of his life he used Viennese pianos at first a five-plus octaves and then a six octaves instrument. In 1818 he received a magnificent grant piano with a range of over six octaves but by that time his hearing was gone.