The Piano Before the Concert Grand
Early pianos changed touch before they filled concert halls. Ten historic keyboards trace the choices behind that transformation.
The oldest surviving piano does not look ready to overpower an orchestra. Bartolomeo Cristofori's instrument of 1720 has a long, restrained wooden case and a keyboard of 54 notes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds it, describes a sound much less imposing than that of a modern concert grand. The new possibility lay in the player's control of soft and loud. A mechanical invention was changing what a hand could ask of a phrase, before the piano acquired the strength, range, and public presence now associated with its name.
That distinction gives the piano's early history a different shape. Harpsichords already supported elaborate music. Clavichords already responded sensitively to touch. Cristofori's achievement addressed a particular problem between those alternatives, and later makers kept changing the answer. Ten historic keyboards in The Met's collection follow that process through registers, tangents, escaping hammers, knee levers, dampers, and pedals. The evidence comes from collection records and museum scholarship, not a visit to the instruments or a listening test of their present condition.
Florence: a new kind of emphasis
Cristofori arrived at the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici in 1688 to care for keyboard instruments. A court inventory of 1700 records his newly invented instrument with hammers and dampers. In 1711, the writer Scipione Maffei described it using the words piano and forte, soft and loud. The name identified a capacity for gradation. It did not announce that all previous keyboard music had been flat, or that the new instrument was immediately the strongest voice in a room.
Three Cristofori pianos survive, dated 1720, 1722, and 1726; The Met's example is the earliest. Its wing-shaped case belongs visually to the world of the Italian harpsichord. The collection record's 54 keys contrast with the 88 of a modern standard piano, while its hammer and string design produces a different musical character. The museum's account cites Maffei's view that the instrument suited a soloist, a voice, or a single accompanying instrument better than a large ensemble. Early expressive advantage and maximum projection were separate questions.
The expressive world the piano entered
A harpsichord activates its strings with plectra carried by jacks. Its response does not offer the piano's familiar system of making an individual note much louder through a stronger key stroke. Yet expression also depends on timing, note length, articulation, and the choice of sounding registers. Jan Couchet the Elder's harpsichord, dated about 1650, makes those choices tangible. Originally a single-keyboard instrument, it was later enlarged and equipped with another keyboard and additional strings. The present instrument preserves an expanded set of resources rather than one untouched seventeenth-century specification.
The museum describes rows of jacks operating unison and octave strings, including a close-plucking lute register. Some of the arrangements divide at middle C, allowing contrasting resources in the bass and treble. This is expression organized through a configuration of the instrument. The distinction from a piano is not between musical feeling and its absence. It is between different ways of preparing and varying a texture. A performer who changes a register changes which resources participate in a passage; a pianist can also vary the force of individual attacks within that passage.
Hans Ruckers the Elder's double virginal of 1581 offers an especially direct example. A smaller instrument, tuned an octave higher, fits into the larger one. Either can be played separately. The small virginal can also be placed on top so that the larger keyboard activates both, making the two sound together in octaves. Here, an increase in richness comes from coupling instruments. The painted garden in the lid belongs to the object's social and decorative setting, but the musical comparison rests on that documented coupling. Keyboard expression had several dimensions well before the piano's arrival.
The clavichord kept the finger connected
Johann Christoph Jesse's clavichord of 1765 explains why touch-sensitive keyboard playing did not begin with the piano. Pressing a key raises a small metal tangent against a string. The tangent remains involved in the vibrating system while the note sounds; release ends that relationship and the string is damped. The mechanism allows differences of loud and soft within a quiet overall range. It also permits bebung, a form of vibrato produced through the player's pressure. The gesture continues to matter after the note has begun.
The Met describes the clavichord as an instrument suited to study, practice, and composition. Jesse's example is unfretted, meaning that different notes do not share a string in the way they can on earlier fretted clavichords. The important historical comparison is therefore not simply loud versus quiet. The clavichord gives a player a close, continuing connection to a note, but with limited projection. The piano would pursue a stronger attack while allowing the string to vibrate after the hammer had left it. Those are distinct relationships between finger and sound.
A hammer had to strike, then get out of the way
Cristofori's solution required several actions to cooperate. A hammer must reach the string with enough energy to make it speak, then leave quickly so that it does not suppress the vibration it has just started. His escapement lets that separation occur even while a key remains depressed. A check prevents the hammer from rebounding into an unwanted second strike. A damper silences the string when appropriate. Attack, free vibration, resetting the hammer, and release therefore become different mechanical tasks rather than one continuous contact.
The distinction from a clavichord is decisive. Holding a piano key does not mean that its hammer keeps leaning against the string. Nor is the ringing note being continuously powered by the finger. The player has launched an event and controls its ending through the key and damper system. Within a phrase, differences in those launches help separate a melody from an accompaniment or give one note more weight.
The complexity had a cost. The Met's account describes Cristofori's action as sophisticated and expensive, with features later makers sometimes omitted and subsequently reintroduced. Adoption was gradual. Lodovico Giustini's twelve sonatas published in Florence in 1732 are identified by the museum as the earliest published music definitely written specifically for the piano. Their instructions for degrees of soft and loud connect the mechanical possibility to a composer's demands. An instrument became more consequential when music began to ask explicitly for the control it provided.
Vienna and London built different answers
The later eighteenth century did not settle on a single piano action. Johann Andreas Stein developed a different design in Augsburg, simplifying the intermediate mechanism and arranging the hammer in the reverse orientation from Cristofori's. This became central to the Viennese tradition. Mozart praised Stein's instruments after visiting in 1777, although the piano he later bought was by Anton Walter. The distinction is a reminder that a composer's approval of a maker and ownership of a particular instrument are separate historical facts.
Ferdinand Hofmann's grand piano of about 1790 represents the Viennese type customary in Mozart's time, not a claim that Mozart owned this object. Its range is five octaves, or 61 notes. The bass and middle register use two strings per note, while the treble uses three. Knee levers lift the dampers, and a knob above the nameplate operates a moderator. Before assuming the familiar arrangement beneath a modern piano, a performer has to discover where these controls are and what each one does.
The player's knees therefore participate in the management of resonance, while a hand-operated control alters another aspect of the sound. The interface is distributed around the seated body. According to The Met's history of Viennese instruments, about sixty known makers were working in Vienna by 1800. Demand from musicians and composers helped support several competing solutions. The story is not a single inventor's design gradually enlarged in every workshop. It includes different actions, ranges, and control arrangements serving the increasingly prominent role of the piano.
John Broadwood's London grand of 1792 supplies a near-contemporary comparison. It also has 61 keys, but uses an English grand action, three strings throughout, and two foot pedals. One shifts the action so that fewer strings are struck; the other raises the dampers. Put beside Hofmann's knee levers and hand knob, it reveals different ways of assigning work to a player's body. Matching key counts do not imply matching controls. A pianist moving between them would encounter different equipment even before choosing the first piece.
Broadwood's record also describes a separate bass bridge and changes to the relation between string length and hammer striking point, intended to produce a more even tone. These concerns sit alongside the question of touch. A maker must decide not only how a key moves a hammer, but where the hammer meets the string and how the resulting vibration is carried. The English and Viennese examples show how a common ambition could produce several viable designs, rather than one inevitable arrangement under a similar-looking lid.
A square case could hide two very different pedals
A piano's growing audience also needed instruments that could fit into rooms. John Broadwood & Sons' square piano of 1797 organizes its strings in a rectangular case. Its five-and-a-half-octave range uses keys extending beneath the soundboard, and its tuning pins run along the back. The Met reports that Broadwood's firm was making about 400 square pianos and 100 grands annually by the 1790s. Those figures concern one manufacturer, but they establish that the compact form was a substantial product rather than a peripheral curiosity.
The most revealing detail is under the case. This Broadwood has no damper control. Its pedal opens a flap over the soundboard when the main lid is closed, creating a swell effect. It does not perform the job a modern pianist might reflexively assign to a right pedal. The distinction matters to musical phrasing: opening a lid changes how sound is released into the room, whereas lifting dampers changes how strings are allowed to continue vibrating. A similar foot movement can operate a different acoustic resource.
The American square piano made by Babcock, Appleton and Babcock in 1814 supplies the comparison. Its single pedal lifts all the dampers. The instrument has a five-and-a-half-octave compass, an off-center keyboard, six reeded legs, and drawers below the keys. The familiar furniture presence and the mechanism beneath it belong to the same domestic object. For an American reader, this Boston instrument also places the early piano trade on this side of the Atlantic, well before the enormous concert instruments that would later make American makers internationally prominent.
Alpheus Babcock's name carries another important date, but it must not be attached to the wrong object. His cast-iron frame patent came in 1825. This piano predates that invention. Together, the Broadwood and Babcock pianos show that domestic scale did not eliminate technical experimentation. It brought questions of compass, resonance, room size, and manufacture into a format intended for everyday use.
More notes and more resonance changed the bargain
Conrad Graf's fortepiano of about 1838 has six and a half octaves, extending well beyond Hofmann's five. Its four pedals operate una corda, two moderators, and a damper lift. Most notes have three strings; the lowest seven have two. These are resources for varying color and resonance as well as expanding range. Calling every historic pedal a sustain control would erase much of the instrument's intended flexibility. The keyboard's greater reach was only one part of what a player could change.
The construction also makes a useful counterpoint to an easy industrial timeline. Apart from an iron gap spacer, the Graf's structure is wooden, without the metal frame familiar in a modern piano. The museum identifies a developed Viennese action and leather-covered hammers. An instrument from the 1830s therefore need not embody every feature later treated as standard. Makers were balancing tension, response, range, and the handling of resonance with different materials and mechanisms, rather than completing a checklist in a uniform order.
The Met's nineteenth-century music history describes two expanding settings: public performance and the domestic parlor. Larger audiences, more demanding virtuoso repertory, and bigger ensembles encouraged more powerful instruments. At home, a piano could accompany singing, support lessons, or make arrangements of larger works playable in a room. These uses did not demand exactly the same object. The contrast helps explain why the growth of concert power coexisted with a market for compact pianos. Musical ambition could mean filling a hall, but it could also mean bringing more music within reach of a household.
New York and the emerging concert grand
The Steinway & Sons grand cataloged as 1868 brings several later expectations into view. The museum identifies this Plain Grand Style 2 as the firm's first model with 88 keys and an ancestor of the Centennial Grand introduced in 1875, which led to the Model D concert grand. Its cast-iron frame and overstringing belong to a different structural approach from the largely wooden Graf. The record also describes a double-repeating action, addressing the need to play notes again rapidly and reliably.
The dates require a qualification. Although the museum's main date is 1868, its text says this particular case was finished in January 1869. The present music rack may be later still. Manufacture and subsequent use can have their own sequence. Compared with Cristofori's instrument, almost a century and a half earlier, the changes span compass, strength, repetition, and the scale of the occasions a piano could serve.
The museum links nineteenth-century piano development to the demands of virtuoso performance and larger venues. That context explains the pursuit of power without making power the only standard of value. Cristofori's quieter dynamic instrument, a responsive clavichord, a register-rich harpsichord, and a later concert grand offered different relationships to a phrase and an audience. The concert grand became enormously influential, but its success does not turn the earlier solutions into failed attempts to build it.
Listen for the choices, not just the volume
A useful comparison begins with a short passage and a few concrete questions. How does the performer emphasize one note? What happens when a key is held, and when it is released? Can a register, knee lever, or pedal change the resource available to an entire passage? Compare the beginning of a note with its continuation. These questions make the action relevant to music rather than reducing historical instruments to unfamiliar furniture.
The Met provides performance recordings on several of the linked object pages, including the Hofmann and Graf instruments. These invite listening rather than offering a controlled test of how every instrument of that type sounded when new. The performer, room, microphone, tuning, and instrument's condition all shape a recording. The musical comparison is richest when those differences remain part of the listening.
The piano's early achievement was to give musical touch a new mechanical path. Its later history added range, resonance, repetition, compact domestic formats, and power in different combinations. Following those choices makes the familiar keyboard less automatic to imagine. Before a concert grand could fill a hall, makers and musicians had to work out how a single finger, a moving hammer, and a freely vibrating string could make a phrase speak.
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