Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883

V >> Various >> Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883

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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
"geuouilleres," 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."

[Illustration: Fig. 1.]

Burney distinguishes Americus Backers by special mention. He is said
to have been a Dutchman. Between 1772 and 1776, Backers produced the
well-known English action, which has remained the most durable and one
of the best up to the present day. It refers in direct leverage to
Cristofori's first action. It is opposite to Stein's contemporary
invention, which has the hopper fixed. In the English action, as in the
Florentine, the hopper rises with the key. To the direct leverage of
Cristofori's first action, Backers combined the check of the second, and
then added an important invention of his own, a regulating screw and
button for the escapement. Backers died in 1776. It is unfortunate we
can refer to no pianoforte made by him. I should regard it as treasure
trove if one were forthcoming in the same way that brought to light the
authentic one of Stein's. As, however, Backers' intimate friends, and
his assistants in carrying out the invention, were John Broadwood and
Robert Stodart, we have, in their early instruments, the principle and
all the leading features of the Backers grand. The increased weight
of stringing was met by steel arches placed at intervals between the
wrest-plank and the belly-rail, but the belly-rail was still free from
the thrust of the wooden bracing, the direction of which was confined to
the sides of the case, as it had been in the harpsichord.

Stodart appears to have preceded Broadwood in taking up the manufacture
of the grand piano by four or five years. In 1777 he patented an
alternate pianoforte and harpsichord, the drawing of which patent shows
the Backers action. The pedals he employed were to shift the harpsichord
register and to bring on the octave stop. The present pedals were
introduced in English and grand pianos by 1785, and are attributed to
John Broadwood, who appears to have given his attention at once to the
improvement of Backers' instrument. Hitherto the grand piano had been
made with an undivided belly-bridge, the same as the harpsichord had
been; the bass strings in three unisons, to the lowest note, being of
brass. Theory would require that the notes of different octaves should
be multiples of each other and that the tension should be the same for
each string. The lowest bass strings, which at that time were the note
F, would thus require a vibrating length of about twelve feet. As only
half this length could be afforded, the difference had to be made up in
the weight of the strings and their tension, which led, in these early
grands, to many inequalities. The three octaves toward the treble could,
with care, be adjusted, the lengths being practically the ideal lengths.
It was in the bass octaves (pianos were then of five octaves) the
inequalities were more conspicuous. To make a more perfect scale and
equalize the tension was the merit and achievement of John Broadwood,
who joined to his own practical knowledge and sound intuitions the aid
of professed men of science. The result was the divided bridge, the bass
strings being carried over the shorter division, and the most beautiful
grand pianoforte in its lines and curves that has ever been made was
then manufactured. In 1791 he carried his scale up to C, five and a
half octaves; in 1794 down to C, six octaves, always with care for the
artistic, form. The pedals were attached to the front legs of the stand
on which the instrument rested. The right foot-pedal acted first as
the piano register, shifting the impact of each hammer to two unisons
instead of three; a wooden stop in the right hand key-block permitted
the action to be shifted yet further to the right, and reducing the blow
to one string only, produced the pianissimo register or _una corda_ of
indescribable attractiveness of sound. The cause of this was in the
reflected vibration through the bridge to the untouched strings. The
present school of pianoforte playing rejects this effect altogether, but
Beethoven valued it, and indicated its use in some of his great works.
Steibert called the _una corda_ the _celeste_, which is more appropriate
to it than Adam's application of this name to the harp-stop, by which
the latter has gone ever since.

Up to quite the end of the last century the dampers were continued to
the highest note in the treble. They were like harpsichord dampers
raised by wooden jacks, with a rail or stretcher to regulate their rise,
which served also as a back touch to the keys. I have not discovered the
exact year when, or by whom, the treble dampers were first omitted,
thus leaving that part of the scale undamped. This bold act gave the
instrument many sympathetic strings free to vibrate from the bridge when
the rest of the instrument was played, each string, according to its
length, being an aliquot division of a lower string. This gave the
instrument a certain brightness or life throughout, an advantage which
has secured its universal adoption. The expedients of an untouched
octave string and of utilizing those lengths of wire that lie beyond the
bridges have been brought into notice of late years, but the latter was
early in the century essayed by W. F. Collard.

From difficulties of tuning, owing to friction and other causes, the
real gain of these expedients is small, and when we compare them with
the natural resources we have always at command in the normal scale
of the instrument, is not worth the cost. The inventor of the damper
register opened a floodgate to such aliquot re-enforcement as can be got
in no other way. Each lower note struck of the undamped instrument,
by excitement from the sound-board carried through the bridge, sets
vibrating higher strings, which, by measurement, are primes to its
partials; and each higher string struck calls out equivalent partials
in the lower strings. Even partials above the primes will excite
their equivalents up to the twelfth and double octave. What a glow of
tone-color there is in all this harmonic re-enforcement, and who would
now say that the pedals should never be used? By their proper use,
the student's ear is educated to a refined sense of distinction of
consonance and dissonance, and the intention and beauty of Chopin's
pedal work becomes revealed.

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