Navy SEALs, bin Laden and Violent Modernism and Mysticism
WorldNews.com
London rioters resent media image of hooded teen thug
The Star
The Absurdity of Using Atomic Bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
WorldNews.com
Nothing 'mindless' about rioters
Al Jazeera
Afghan crash highlights critical, dangerous role of special forces
CNN
The range of the fortepiano was about four octaves at the time of its invention and gradually increased. Mozart (1756–1791) wrote his piano music for instruments of about five octaves. The piano works of Beethoven (1770–1827) reflect a gradually expanding range; his last piano compositions are for an instrument of about six octaves. (The range of most modern pianos, attained in the 19th century, is 7⅓ octaves.)
Fortepianos from the start had devices similar to the pedals of modern pianos, but these were not always pedals; sometimes hand stops or knee levers were used instead.
Fortepianos also tend to have quite different tone quality in their different registers — noble and slightly buzzing in the bass, "tinkling" in the high treble, and more rounded (closest to the modern piano) in the mid range. In comparison, modern pianos are rather more uniform in sound through their range.
Cristofori is perhaps best admired today for his ingenious fortepiano action, which in some ways was more subtle and effective than that of many later instruments. However, other innovations were also needed to make the fortepiano possible. Merely attaching the Cristofori action to a harpsichord would have produced a very weak tone. Cristofori's instruments instead used thicker, tenser strings, mounted on a frame considerably more robust than that of contemporary harpsichords. As with all later pianos, in Cristofori's instruments the hammers struck more than one string at a time; Cristofori used pairs of strings throughout the range.
Cristofori was also the first to incorporate a form of soft pedal into a piano (the mechanism by which the hammers are made to strike fewer than the maximum number of strings; Cristofori's was a hand stop). It is not clear whether the modern soft pedal descends directly from Cristofori's work or arose independently.
Cristofori's invention soon attracted public attention as the result of a journal article written by Scipione Maffei and published 1711 in Giornale de'letterati d'Italia of Venice. The article included a diagram of the action, the core of Cristofori's invention. This article was republished 1719 in a volume of Maffei's work, and then in a German translation (1725) in Johann Mattheson's Critica Musica. The latter publication was perhaps the triggering event in the spread of the fortepiano to German-speaking countries (see below).
Cristofori's instrument spread at first quite slowly, probably because, being more elaborate and harder to build than a harpsichord, it was very expensive. For a time, the fortepiano was the instrument of royalty, with Cristofori-built or -styled instruments played in the courts of Portugal and Spain. Several were owned by Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, who was the pupil of the composer Domenico Scarlatti. One of the first private individuals to own a fortepiano was the castrato Farinelli, who inherited one from Maria Barbara on her death.
The first music specifically written for fortepiano dates from this period, the Sonate da cimbalo di piano (1732) by Lodovico Giustini. This publication was an isolated phenomenon; James Parakilas conjectures that the publication was meant as an honor for the composer on the part of his royal patrons. Certainly there could have been no commercial market for fortepiano music while the instrument continued to be an exotic specimen.
It appears that the fortepiano did not achieve full popularity until the 1760s, from which time the first records of public performances on the instrument are dated, and when music described as being for the fortepiano was first widely published.
Silbermann's instruments were famously criticized by Johann Sebastian Bach around 1736, but later instruments encountered by Bach in his Berlin visit of 1747 apparently met with the composer's approval. The piano action Maffei described does not match that found in surviving Cristofori instruments, suggesting that Maffei either erred in his diagram (he admitted having made it from memory) or that Cristofori improved his action during the period following Maffei's article.
Silbermann is credited with the invention of the forerunner of the damper pedal, which removes the dampers from all the strings at once, permitting them to vibrate freely. Silbermann's device was in fact only a hand stop, and thus could be changed only at a pause in the music. Throughout the Classical era, even when the more flexible knee levers or pedals had been installed, the lifting of all the dampers was used primarily as a coloristic device. In the post-fortepiano era of the 19th century, the damper pedal became the foundation of piano sound, which came to rely on the sympathetic vibrations of the undamped but unstruck strings.
Stein put the wood used in his instruments through a very severe weathering process, and this included the generation of cracks in the wood, into which he would then insert wedges. This gave his instruments a considerable longevity, on which Mozart commented, and there are several instruments still surviving today.
Another important Viennese builder was Anton Walter, a friend of Mozart's who built instruments with a somewhat more powerful sound than Stein's. Although Mozart admired the Stein fortepianos very much, as the 1777 letter mentioned above makes clear, his own piano was a Walter. The fortepianos of Stein and Walter are widely used today as models for the construction of new fortepianos, discussed below. Still another important builder in this period was Conrad Graf (1782–1851), who made Beethoven's last piano. Graf was one of the first Viennese makers to build pianos in quantity, as a large business enterprise.
John Broadwood married the master's daughter (Barbara Shudi, 1769) and ultimately took over and renamed the Shudi firm. The Broadwood company (which survives to this day) was an important innovator in the evolution of the fortepiano into the piano. Broadwood, in collaboration with Jan Ladislav Dussek, a noted piano virtuoso active in London in the 1790s, developed pianos that gradually increased the range to six octaves. Dussek was one of the first pianists to receive a 5½ foot piano, and in 1793 he wrote the first work for piano "with extra keys", a piano concert (C 97). The firm shipped a piano to Beethoven in Vienna, which the composer evidently treasured.
In the second half of the 20th century, a great upsurge of interest occurred in period instruments, including a revival of interest in the fortepiano. Old instruments were restored, and many new ones were built along the lines of the old. This revival of the fortepiano closely resembled the revival of the harpsichord, though occurring somewhat later in time. Among the more prominent modern builders have been Philip Belt, Paul McNulty, and Rodney Regier. As with harpsichords, fortepianos are sometimes built from kits purchased from expert makers (1, 2).
The reintroduction of the fortepiano has permitted performance of 18th and early 19th century music on the instruments for which it was written, yielding new insights into this music; for detailed discussion, see Piano history and musical performance.
A number of modern harpsichordists and pianists have achieved distinction in fortepiano performance, including Paul Badura-Skoda, Malcolm Bilson, Hendrik Bouman, Ronald Brautigam, Jörg Demus, Richard Fuller, Geoffrey Lancaster, Gustav Leonhardt, Robert Levin, Steven Lubin, Trevor Pinnock, David Schrader, Peter Serkin, Andreas Staier, Susan Alexander-Max, Bart van Oort and Gary Cooper.
However, one of Cookson's colleagues from MusicWeb, Gary Higginson, disagrees with this negative view. In a CD review, Higginson argues that a performance on a "...reproduction of a 1730 Cristofori - the greatest of all makers and often the most underrated...makes a gorgeous sound. Yes it can be metallic and subdued in climaxes but it has a marvellous delicacy and, especially in the expressive sonatas, a profoundly beautiful sound."
Howland Auchincloss acknowledges that listeners' first reaction to the sound of a fortepiano may be to view it as a less attractive sound than that of a grand piano. However, he argues that "such a reaction will usually be changed if the player listens to good recordings." He states that the "clear sound and relatively short sustain of the fortepiano tends to favor the special elements of style in the music of Haydn and Mozart. The sound is different but not inferior."
The term fortepiano is somewhat specialist in its connotations, and does not preclude using the more general term piano to designate the same instrument. Thus, usages like "Cristofori invented the piano" or "Mozart's piano concertos" are currently common and would probably be considered acceptable by most musicians. Fortepiano is used in contexts where it is important to make the precise identity of the instrument clear, as in (for instance) "a fortepiano recital by Malcolm Bilson".
The use of "fortepiano" to refer specifically to early pianos appears to be recent. Even the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary does not record this usage, noting only that "fortepiano" is "an early name of the pianoforte". During the age of the fortepiano, "fortepiano" and "pianoforte" were used interchangeably, as the OED's attestations show. English novelist Jane Austen, who lived in the age of the fortepiano, used "pianoforte" (also: "piano-forte", "piano forte") for the many occurrences of the instrument in her writings.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
