Introduction - The fortepiano I (a1800)

Foto aus der Multimedia-CD-ROM "Mechanik der Poesie – Besaitete Tasteninstrumente des 15.-19- Jahrhunderts" 
Foto aus der Multimedia-CD-ROM
"Mechanik der Poesie – Besaitete Tasteninstrumente des 15.-19- Jahrhunderts"

The piano began its career as a "harpsichord with hammers." Its sound had the quality that the players could influence its loudness by their touch, but this was far from being considered an advantage at first.


The players were used to the touch of a harpsichord when the player's finger pressing the key felt a distinct resistance when the quill touched the string, suddenly released when the quill plucked the string. Nothing of this sort of immediate control of producing a sound on the piano though:  the play when pressing a key felt the weight and resistance  of the mechanism but no exact point of resistance, instead - nothing else until the hammer struck the string. Another problem arose when the finger pressed the key for too long. With some types of early piano mechanisms it could indeed happen that the hammer struck the string a second time. The construction of specific "escapements" to prevent the resulting rattle took several decades.

So the early pianos were less a challenge for the harpsichord but for the other instrument with capabilities of dynamic playing; the clavichord. When Johann Christian Bach gave his very first concert on a piano in London in 1764 he didn't use a grand but a square piano, not as a replacement harpsichord, but as sort of a loud clavichord audible for an audience.  But soon an invention race started to combine all cherished qualities of harpsichord, piano and clavichord in one single instrument. Harpsichords were applied with swells, piano and harpsichord were united in one, the tangent piano with its specific sound "in between" appeared, clavichords were constructed to be as voluminous as possible - and composing keyboard music became popular like maybe never before and never again.

 
 
 

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