Musical Performance

The piano is rarely used as an instrument of the orchestra, but when it is the part is written in the score between the percussion and strings. The piano is a percussion instrument since the strings are struck by hammers.

Today the piano is the heaviest of all musical instruments, the cabinet being uniformly sombre in colour and the several legs of muscular appearance on account of the weight they have to bear.Unlike any other instrument of the orchestra the name of the maker could sometimes be read by the audience because it used to be announced in large letters.

The iron framework of the concert grand carries a tension load of about 3o tons and each key needs a weight of approximately 3 oz to depress it. Translated into everyday shopping terms, a chord of five notes is equal to a one pound bag of sugar. The piano is therefore almost an athlete’s instrument, a fact recognized by the celebrated pianist Dame Myra Hess who, having witnessed a particularly energetic display of pianism, barely resisted springing to her feet and calling out Wive le sport!’

Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731) is popularly credited with the invention of a hammer mechanism which he built into a harpsichord- shaped cabinet, but many musicologists suggest that only the earliest extant pianos are by Cristofori, because his mechanism was too accomplished and advanced not to have trial-and-error precursors. Whether the hammer mechanism was invented in Italy or not, the fact is that after Cristofori the Italians took no further part in the development of the piano, the centres for its advance being first Germany, then France and England, and finally the U.S.

From its beginning the history of the piano is one of intense commercial rivalry, abounding in names that are familiar today: Broadwood, established in England in 1723, Erard, established in France in 1779, Chickering, established in Massachusetts in 1823, Bechstein, established in Germany in 1853, the same year as Steinway in the U.S. These are a mere five names out of more than a thousand firms producing pianos at the beginning of this century. The piano was almost as common then as the ubiquitous TV set today.

Gottfried Silberman (1683-1753) was the first successful maker (copying Cristofori’s action) and his instruments were nearly all bought by Frederick the Great and housed at Sans Souci, where Quantz, J.S. Bach and C.P.E. Bach regarded and played them with interest and enthusiasm. The piano was introduced into England just after the middle of the 18th century by yet another son of J.S. Bach, Johann Christian.

Two acute problems faced the early makers. First, what sort of sound were they trying to produce? Second, how were they to devise a reliable and fluent hammer action that would rival the action of the perfected harpsichord?

The first hammers were covered in leather, producing in some cases a reflection of harpsichord timbre. In fact some nervous early makers incorporated harpsichord and dulcimer timbres in their instruments. These faint-hearted designers were soon overtaken by those who strove to develop the small tinkle into something more robust. A plethora of patents from the 1770s onwards bears witness to the international scramble for an action that allowed of rapid repetition over a wide range of dynamics.

In the 18th century there was already one type of piano being produced in huge quantities. This was called the square piano — no one knows quite why since the cabinet is a shallow oblong box. This popular square was invented and introduced in 1760 by Johannes Zumpe, a pupil of Silberman. Square pianos were eminently suitable for accompanying the voice, having a delicate and subtle timbre. Instead of having pedals the earliest squares had hand stops, some of which damped the whole or half the strings producing a timbre not unlike that of the buff stop on the harpsichord. The lid could be half or fully closed, but there was a hinged flap at the sound board end which, when open, released the sound of the upper harmonics. All these early pianos, whether square or grand, had wooden frames. As the tension of the strings was increased to produce more volume, small areas of metal bracing were introduced at the hitch pin end to prevent warping. Fairly rapidly these areas of metal bracing were extended, and by 182o Erard had produced the first iron bar grand piano, the iron bars running the length of the sound board. This was but a step away from the full iron frame of the type patented in 1843 by Jonas Chickering.

By the end of the 19th century there were countless shapes and sizes of pianc to choose from, ranging from small folding yacht pianos to very grand uprights with storage space for music. There were pyramid pianos and giraffe pianos (really upright grands), and pianos with up to six pedals providing different effects on the strings and bashing a drum and bells for the realistic reproduction of Turkish music. There were pianos concealed in tables and cabinets, and hosts of uprights of different sizes and specifications, not to mention the straightforward concert grands — except that they were not all that straightforward.

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