Musical Inventors – Chapter 7: Bartolomeo Cristofori

We don’t know who invented the harpsichord.

It evolved into existence from previous instruments, like the psaltery and clavichord.

The best guess is the harpsichord came together in medieval Europe sometime during the 14th or early 15th century.

The earliest reference to something resembling a harpsichord is in a 1397 document by the German physician and composer Hermann Poll. He described what he called a “clavicembalum” which may have been a psaltery with a keyboard to pluck the strings.

The harpsichord was refined by various builders over the centuries and across western Europe. Hans Ruckers in Flanders and Giovanni Baffo in Italy crafted beautiful instruments and improved the instruments’ tone. By the 16th century, the harpsichord had become widely used and was particularly popular in Baroque music.

The flaw, if you want to call it that, in the design is that harpsichords play at one volume. As I mentioned in my article about Baroque, the strings inside a harpsichord are plucked.

But sometime around the year 1700, an Italian instrument maker named Bartolomeo Cristofori thought he could come up with something better.

We have his birth and death records so we know he was born on May 4, 1655 in Padua and died on January 27, 1731 in Florence, but that’s about all we know about him. There’s almost no information about his upbringing, education, personality, or relationships.

The Amati family had a long history of building high quality violins. Under Amati’s tutelage, Cristofori became a skilled instrument builder and was particularly good at making violins and keyboard instruments, though it’s likely he was already pretty good if he was able to land the apprenticeship.

The other important thing we know about Cristofori is that he was in northern Italy at the tail end of the Renaissance.

This period rejected superstition and embraced science, art, reason, and more. It was when Europe came out of the dark ages and into an era when intelligence, craftsmanship, and artistry were valued. Christofori was at its epicenter.

In 1690, Cristofori moved to the prince’s household in Florence. His job was to fix old instruments and make new ones, and he was also a musician in the prince’s court.

The extensive collection of instruments he watched over included harpsichords, clavichords, and other early keyboard instruments. This was where Cristofori began to experiment with improving them. His position gave him the time and environment to create new instruments.

He called his most famous instrument the “gravicembalo col piano e forte,” which translates to “harpsichord with soft and loud.” It was considered a variation of the harpsichord and was called a harpsichord for decades, so that makes it difficult to follow its history.

It eventually became known as both “pianoforte” and “fortepiano” — meaning “soft-loud” and “loud-soft” — and a 1700 inventory of instruments in the prince’s collection includes a pianoforte.

Now we simply call it: the piano.

Christofori’s innovation was to replace the harpsichord’s plucking mechanisms with small hammers to hit the strings. 

It works like so:

When the player releases the key, the damper falls back onto the string, the hammer base slides under the slip, and the key is ready for another note.

It’s a complicated apparatus, and contemporary pianos use even more complicated ones.

The hammer mechanism allowed the player to control the volume of the sound by varying the force with which the keys were pressed.

Since the hammers fall back quickly after striking the string, they don’t interfere with the string’s vibration. This is called an escapement mechanism and similar devices are found in clocks and watches to keep them ticking at regular intervals.

The dampers stop the strings from vibrating when the keys are released, ensuring that the sound could be controlled more effectively.

Early pianos sounded more like harpsichords than more recent models because they used harpsichord strings, made of iron or brass.

Contemporary pianos use steel wrapped with copper for the bass notes and high-tensile steel for the rest. Also, harpsichords, and therefore Cristofori’s early pianos, had only one string per key.

Despite the revolutionary nature of Cristofori’s invention, the early piano didn’t catch on right away. It was more expensive to build than a harpsichord and didn’t sound much different, at first. Musicians and patrons were slow to recognize its potential. 

Cristofori continued to refine his design in the following years, but he did not receive widespread fame or financial success from his invention. He remained in the service of the Medici court for the rest of his career, even after the prince’s death in 1713.

Much of Cristofori’s later work focused on improving the piano and other keyboard instruments. Some of his oldest surviving pianos, dating from the 1720s, are now housed in museums, such as the Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali in Rome and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Cristofori died without receiving popular recognition for his invention, at least not during his lifetime.

However, his piano would go on to become one of the most important instruments in Western music.

In the years following his death, other instrument makers, particularly in Germany, began to adopt and modify his design.

The piano eventually surpassed the harpsichord in popularity, and became the centerpiece of classical music performance and composition in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Cristofori’s piano laid the foundation, not just for its own evolution, but for all the wonderful music written for it.

Today, his handmade instruments are treasured relics that show his brilliance, creativity, and craftsmanship.

Though he may not have lived to see the full impact of his invention, and though we know next to nothing about him, he’s truly important in the history of music.

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