Chapter 4

As this paper is composed from a technical point of view, some elucidation of facts, forming the basis of it, is desirable before we proceed to the chronological statement of the subject. These facts are the strings, and their strain or tension; the sound-board, which is the resonance factor; and the bridge, connecting it with the strings. The strings, sound-board, and bridge are indispensable, and common to all stringed instruments. The special fact appertaining to keyboard instruments is the mechanical action interposed between the player and the instrument itself. The strings, owing to the slender surface they present to the air, are, however powerfully excited, scarcely audible. To make them sufficiently audible, their pulsations have to be communicated to a wider elastic surface, the sound-board, which, by accumulated energy and broader contact with the air, re-enforces the strings' feeble sound. The properties of a string set in periodic vibration are the best known of the phenomena appertaining to acoustics. The molecules composing the string are disturbed in the string's vibrating length by the means used to excite the sound, and run off into sections, the comparative length and number of which depend partly upon the place in the string the excitement starts from; partly upon the force and the form of force that is employed; and partly upon the length, thickness, weight, strain, and elasticity of the string, with some small allowance for gravitation. The vibrating sections are of wave-like contour; the nodes or points of apparent rest being really knots of the greatest pressure from crossing streams of molecules. Where the pressure slackens, the sections rise into loops, the curves of which show the points of least pressure. Now, if the string be struck upon a loop, less energy is communicated to the string, and the carrying power of the sound proportionately fails. If the string be struck upon a node, greater energy ensues, and the carrying power proportionately gains. By this we recognize the importance of the place of contact, or striking-place of the hammer against the string; and the necessity, in order to obtain good fundamental tone, which shall carry, of the note being started from a node.

If the hammer is hard, and impelled with force, the string breaks into shorter sections, and the discordant upper partials of the string, thus brought into prominence, make the tone harsh. If the hammer is soft, and the force employed is moderated, the harmonious partials of the longer sections strike the ear, and the tone is full and round. By the frequency of vibration, that is to say, the number of times a string runs through its complete changes one way and the other, say, for measurement, in a second of time, we determine the pitch, or relative acuteness of the tone as distinguished by the ear.

We know, with less exactness, that the sound-board follows similar laws. The formation of nodes is helped by the barring of the sound-board, a ribbing crosswise to the grain of the wood, which promotes the elasticity, and has been called the "soul" of stringed musical instruments. The sound-board itself is made of most carefully chosen pine; in Europe of the _Abies excelsa_, the spruce fir, which, when well grown, and of light, even grain, is the best of all woods for resonance. The pulsations of the strings are communicated to the sound-board by the bridge, a thick rail of close-grained beech, curved so as to determine their vibrating lengths, and attached to the sound-board by dowels. The bridge is doubly pinned, so as to cut off the vibration at the edge of the bearing the strings exert upon the bridge. The shock of each separate pulsation, in its complex form, is received by the bridge, and communicated to such undamped strings as may, by their lengths, be sensitive to them; thus producing the Æolian tone commonly known as sympathetic, an eminently attractive charm in the tone of a pianoforte.

We have here strings, bridge, and sound-board, or belly, as it is technically called, indispensable for the production of the tone, and indivisible in the general effect. The proportionate weight of stringing has to be met by a proportionate thickness and barring of the sound-board, and a proportionate thickness and elevation of the bridge.

The tension of the strings is met by a framing, which has become more rigid as the drawing power of the strings has been gradually increased. In the present concert grands of Messrs. Broadwood, that drawing power may be stated as starting from 150 lb. for each single string in the treble, and gradually increasing to about 300 lb. for each of the single strings in the bass. I will reserve for the historical description of my subject some notice of the different kinds of framing that have been introduced. It will suffice, at this stage, to say that it was at first of wood, and became, by degrees, of wood and iron; in the present day the iron very much preponderating. It will be at once evident that the object of the framing is to keep the ends of the strings apart. The near ends are wound round the wrest-pins, which are inserted in the wooden bed, called the wrest-plank, the strength and efficiency of which are most important for the tone and durability of the instrument. It is composed of layers of wainscot oak and beech, the direction of the grain being alternately longitudinal and lateral. Some makers cover the wrest-plank with a plate of brass; in Broadwood's grands, it is a plate of iron, into which, as well as the wood, the wrest-pins are screwed. The tuner's business is to regulate the tension, by turning the wrest-pins, in which he is chiefly guided by the beats which become audible from differing numbers of vibrations. The wrest-plank is bridged, and has its bearing like the soundboard; but the wrest-plank has no vibrations to transfer, and should, as far as possible, offer perfect insensibility to them.

I will close this introductory explanation with two remarks, made by the distinguished musician, mechanician, and inventor, Theobald Boehm, of Munich, whose inventions were not limited to the flute which bears his name, but include the initiation of an important change in the modern pianoforte, as made in America and Germany. Of priority of invention he says, in a letter to an English friend, "If it were desirable to analyze all the inventions which have been brought forward, we should find that in scarcely any instance were they the offspring of the brain of a single individual, but that all progress is gradual only; each worker follows in the track of his predecessor, and eventually, perhaps, advances a step beyond him." And concerning the relative value of inventions in musical instruments, it appears, from an essay of his which has been recently published, that he considers improvement in acoustical proportions the chief foundation of the higher or lower degree of perfection in all instruments, their mechanism being but of secondary value.

I will now proceed to recount briefly the history of the pianoforte from the earliest mention of that name, continuing it to our contemporary instruments, as far as they can be said to have entered into the historical domain. It has been my privilege to assist in proving that Bartolommeo Cristofori was, in the first years of the 18th century, the real inventor of the pianoforte, but with a wide knowledge and experience of how long it has taken to make any invention in keyed instruments practicable and successful, I cannot believe that Cristofori was the first to attempt to contrive one. I should rather accept his good and complete instrument as the sum of his own lifelong studies and experiments, added to those of generations before him, which have left no record for us as yet discovered.

The earliest mention of the name pianoforte (_piano e forte_), applied to a musical instrument, has been recently discovered by Count Valdrighi in documents preserved in the Estense Library, at Modena. It is dated A.D. 1598, and the reference is evidently to an instrument of the spinet or cembalo kind; but how the tone was produced there is no statement, no word to base an inference upon. The name has not been met with again between the Estense document and Scipione Maffei's well-known description, written in 1711, of Cristofori's "gravecembalo col piano e forte." My view of Cristofori's invention allows me to think that the Estense "piano e forte" may have been a hammer cembalo, a very imperfect one, of course. But I admit that the opposite view of forte and piano, contrived by registers of spinet-jacks, is equally tenable.

Bartolommeo Cristofori was a Paduan harpsichord maker, who was invited by Prince Ferdinand dei Medici to Florence, to take charge of the large collection of musical instruments the Prince possessed. At Florence he produced the invention of the pianoforte, in which he was assisted and encouraged by this high-minded, richly-cultivated, and very musical prince. Scipione Maffei tells us that in 1709 Cristofori had completed four of the new instruments, three of them being of the usual harpsichord form, and one of another form, which he leaves undescribed. It is interesting to suppose that Handel may have tried one or more of these four instruments during the stay he made at Florence in 1708. But it is not likely that he was at all impressed with the potentialities of the invention any more than John Sebastian Bach was in after years when he tried the pianofortes of Silbermann.

The sketch of Cristofori's action in Maffei's essay, from which I have had a working model accurately made, shows that in the first instruments the action was not complete, and it may not have been perfected when Prince Ferdinand died in 1713. But there are Cristofori grand pianos preserved at Florence, dated respectively 1720 and 1726, in which an improved construction of action is found, and of this I also exhibit a model. There is much difference between the two. In the second, Cristofori had obtained his escapement with an undivided key, reconciling his depth of touch, or keyfall, with that of the contemporary harpsichord, by driving the escapement lever through the key. He had contrived means for regulating the escapement distance, and had also invented the last essential of a good pianoforte action, the check. I will explain what is meant by escapement and check. When, by a key being put down, the hammer is impelled toward the strings, it is necessary for their sustained vibration that, after impact, the hammer should rebound or escape; or it would, as pianoforte makers say, "block," damping the strings at the moment they should sound.

A dulcimer player gains his elastic blow by the free movement of the wrist. To gain a similarly elastic blow mechanically in his first action, Cristofori cut a notch in the butt of his hammer from which the escapement lever, "linguetta mobile" as he called it--"hopper," as we call it--being centered at the base, moved forward, when the key was put down, to the extent of its radius, and after the delivery of the blow returned to its resting place by the pressure of a spring. The first action gave the blow with more direct force than the second, which had the notch upon what is called the underhammer, but was defective in the absence of any means to regulate the distance of the "go-off," or "escapement" from the string. In the second action, a small check before the hopper is intended to regulate it, but does so imperfectly. The pianoforte had to wait for fifty years for satisfactory regulation of the escapement.

In the first action, the hammer rests in a silken fork, dropping the whole distance of the rise of every blow. The check in the second action, the "paramartello," is next in importance to the escapement. It catches the back part of the hammer at different points of the radius, responding to the amount of force the player has used upon the key. So that in repeated blows, the rise of the hammer is modified, and the notch is nearer to the returning hopper in proportionate degree.

I have given the first place in description to Cristofori's actions, instead of to the "cembalo" or instrument to which they were applied, because piano and forte, from touch, became possible through them, and what else was accomplished by Cristofori was due, primarily, to the dynamic idea. He strengthened his harpsichord sound-board against a thicker stringing, renouncing the cherished sound-holes. Yet the sound-box notion clung to him, for he made openings in his sound-board rail for air to escape. He ran a string-block round the case, entirely independent of the sound-board, and his wrest-plank, which also became a separate structure, removed from the sound-board by the gap for the hammers, was now a stout oaken plank which, to gain an upward bearing for the strings, he inverted, driving his wrest-pins through in the manner of a harp, and turning them in like fashion to the harp. He had two strings to a note, but it did not occur to him to space them into pairs of unisons. He retained the equidistant harpsichord scale, and had, at first, under-dampers, later over-dampers, which fell between the unisons thus equally separated. Cristofori died in 1731. He had pupils, one of whom made, in 1730, the, "Rafael d'Urbino," the favorite instrument of the great singer Farinelli. The story of inventive Italian pianoforte making ends thus early, but to Italy the invention indisputably belongs.

The first to make pianofortes in Germany was the famous Freiberg organ-builder and clavichord maker, Gottfried Silbermann. He submitted two pianofortes to the judgment of John Sebastian Bach in 1726, which judgment was, however, unfavorable; the trebles being found too weak, and the touch too heavy. Silbermann, according to the account of Bach's pupil, Agricola, being much mortified, put them aside, resolving not to show them again unless he could improve them. We do not know what these instruments were, but it may be inferred that they were copies of Cristofori, or were made after the description of his invention by Maffei, which had already been translated from Italian into German, by Koenig, the court poet at Dresden, who was a personal friend of Silbermann. With the next anecdote, which narrates the purchase of all the pianofortes Silbermann had made, by Frederick the Great, we are upon surer ground. This well accredited occurrence took place in 1746. In the following year occurred Bach's celebrated visit to Potsdam, when he played upon one or more of these instruments. Burney saw and described one in 1772. I had this one, which was known to have remained in the new palace at Potsdam until the present time unaltered, examined, and, by a drawing of the action, found it was identical with Cristofori's. Not, however, being satisfied with one example, I resolved to go myself to Potsdam; and, being furnished with permission from H.R.H. the Crown Princess of Prussia, I was enabled in September, 1881, to set the question at rest of how many grand pianofortes by Gottfried Silbermann there were still in existence at Potsdam, and what they were like. At Berlin there are none, but at Potsdam, in the music-rooms of Frederick the Great, which are in the town palace, the new palace, and Sans Souci--left, it is understood, from the time of Frederick's death undisturbed--there are three of these Silbermann pianofortes. All three are with unimportant differences having nothing to do with structure, Cristofori instruments, wrest plank, sound-board, string-block, and action; the harpsichord scale of stringing being still retained. The work in them is undoubtedly good; the sound-boards have given in the trebles, as is usual with old instruments, from the strain; but I should say all three might be satisfactorily restored. Some other pianofortes seem to have been made in North Germany about this time, as our own poet Gray bought one in Hamburg in 1755, in the description of which we notice the desire to combine a hammer action with the harpsichord which so long exercised men's minds.

The Seven Years' War put an end to pianoforte making on the lines Silbermann had adopted in Saxony. A fresh start had to be made a few years later, and it took place contemporaneously in South Germany and England. The results have been so important that the grand pianofortes of the Augsburg Stein and the London Backers may be regarded, practically, as reinventions of the instrument. The decade 1770-80 marks the emancipation of the pianoforte from the harpsichord, of which before it had only been deemed a variety. Compositions appear written expressly for it, and a man of genius, Muzio Clementi, who subsequently became the head of the pianoforte business now conducted by Messrs. Collard, came forward to indicate the special character of the instrument, and found an independent technique for it.

A few years before, the familiar domestic square piano had been invented. I do not think clavichords could have been altered to square pianos, as they were wanting in sufficient depth of case; but that the suggestion was from the clavichord is certain, the same kind of case and key-board being used. German authorities attribute the invention to an organ builder, Friederici of Gera, and give the date about 1758 or 1760. I have advertised in public papers, and have had personal inquiry made for one of Friederici's "Fort Biens," as he is said to have called his instrument. I have only succeeded in learning this much--that Friederici is considered to have been of later date than has been asserted in the text-books. Until more conclusive information can be obtained, I must be permitted to regard a London maker, but a German by birth, Johannes Zumpe, as the inventor of the instrument. It is certain that he introduced that model of square piano which speedily became the fashion, and was chosen for general adoption everywhere. Zumpe began to make his instruments about 1765. His little square, at first of nearly five octaves, with the "old man's head" to raise the hammer, and "mopstick" damper, was in great vogue, with but little alteration, for forty years; and that in spite of the manifest improvements of John Broadwood's wrest-plank and John Geib's "grasshopper." After the beginning of this century, the square piano became much enlarged and improved by Collard and Broadwood, in London, and by Petzold, in Paris. It was overdone in the attempt to gain undue power for it, and, about twenty years ago, sank in the competition, with the later cottage pianoforte, which was always being improved.

To return to the grand pianoforte. The origin of the Viennese grand is rightly accredited to Stein, the organ builder, of Augsburg. I will call it the German grand, for I find it was as early made in Berlin as Vienna. According to Mozart's correspondence, Stein had made some grand pianos in 1777, with a special escapement, which did not "block" like the pianos he had played upon before. When I wrote the article "Pianoforte" in Dr. Grove's "Dictionary," no Stein instrument was forthcoming, but the result of the inquiries I had instituted at that time ultimately brought one forward, which has been secured by the curator of the Brussels Museum, M. Victor Mahillon. This instrument, with Stein's action and two unison scale, is dated 1780. Mozart's grand piano, preserved at Salzburg, made by Walther, is a nearly contemporary copy of Stein, and so also are the grands by Huhn, of Berlin, which I took notes of at Berlin and Potsdam; the latest of these is dated 1790.

An advance shown by these instruments of Stein and Stein's followers is in the spacing of the unisons; the Huhn grands having two strings to a note in the lower part of the scale, and three in the upper. The Cristofori Silbermann inverted wrest-plank has reverted to the usual form; the tuning pins and downward bearing being the same as in the harpsichord. There are no steel arches as yet between the wrest-plank and the belly-rail in these German instruments. As to Stein's escapement, his hopper was fixed behind the key; the axis of the hammer rising on a principle which I think is older than Stein, but have not been able to trace to its source, and the position of his hammer is reversed. Stein's light and facile movement with shallow key-fall, resembling Cristofori's in bearing little weight, was gratefully accepted by the German clavichord players, and, reacting, became one of the determining agents of the piano music and style of playing of the Vienna school. Thus arose a fluent execution of a rich figuration and brilliant passage playing, with but little inclination to sonorousness of effect, lasting from the time of Mozart's immediate followers to that of Henri Herz; a period of half a century. Knee-pedals, as we translate "geuouillères," were probably in vogue before Stein, and were levers pressed with the knees, to raise the dampers, and leave the pianoforte undamped, a register approved of by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, who regarded the undamped pianoforte as the more agreeable for improvising.. He appears, however, to have known but little of the capabilities of the instrument, which seemed to him coarse and inexpressive beside his favorite clavichord. Stein appears to have made use of the "una corda" shift. Probably by knee-pedals, subsequently by foot-pedals, the following effects were added to the Stein pianos.

The harpsichord "harp"-stop, which muted one string of each note by a piece of leather, became, by the interposition of a piece of cloth between the hammer and the strings, the piano, harp, or _celeste_. The more complete sourdine, which muted all the strings by contact of a long strip of leather, acted as the staccato, pizzicato, or pianissimo. The Germans further displayed that ingenuity in fancy stops Mersenne had attributed to them in harpsichords more than a hundred and fifty years before, by a bassoon pedal, a card which by a rotatory half-cylinder just impinging upon the strings produced a reedy twang; also by pedals for triangle, cymbals, bells, and tambourine, the last drumming on the sound-board itself.

Several of these contrivances may be seen in a six-pedal grand pianoforte belonging to Her Majesty the Queen, at Windsor Castle, bearing the name as maker of Stein's daughter, Nannette, who was a friend of Beethoven. The diagram represents the wooden framing of such an instrument.

We gather from Burney's contributions to "Rees's Cyclopaedia," that after the arrival of John Christian Bach in London, A.D. 1759, a few grand pianofortes were attempted, by the second-rate harpsichord makers, but with no particular success. If the workshop tradition can be relied upon that several of Silbermann's workmen had come to London about that time, the so-called "twelve apostles," more than likely owing to the Seven Years' War, we should have here men acquainted with the Cristofori model, which Silbermann had taken up, and the early grand pianos referred to by Burney would be on that model. I should say the "new instrument" of Messrs. Broadwood's play-bill of 1767 was such a grand piano; but there is small chance of ever finding one now, and if an instrument were found, it would hardly retain the original action, as Messrs. Broadwood's books of the last century show the practice of refinishing instruments which had been made with the "old movement."