Fortepiano
In principle, the word "fortepiano" can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1700 up to the early 19th century.
[1][2] Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the mid-18th to early-19th century instruments, for which composers of the Classical era, such as Haydn, Mozart, and the younger Beethoven and Schubert, wrote their piano music.
Starting in Beethoven's time, the fortepiano began a period of steady evolution, culminating in the late 19th century with the modern grand.
Sforzando accents tend to stand out more than on the modern piano, because they differ from softer notes in timbre as well as volume, and decay rapidly.
However, other innovations were also needed to make the piano possible; merely attaching the Cristofori action to a harpsichord would have produced a very weak tone.
Cristofori's invention attracted public attention as the result of a journal article written by Scipione Maffei and published in 1711 in Giornale de'letterati d'Italia of Venice.
That article was republished in 1719 in a volume of Maffei's work, and then in a German translation (1725) in Johann Mattheson's Critica Musica.
[6] It has been conjectured that the improvement in Silbermann's instruments resulted from his having seen an actual Cristofori piano, rather than merely reading Scipione Maffei's article.
[9] Silbermann is credited with the invention of the forerunner of the sustain pedal, which removes the dampers from all the strings at once, permitting them to vibrate freely.
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.
One of the most distinguished fortepiano builders in the era following Silbermann was one of his pupils, Johann Andreas Stein, who worked in Augsburg, Germany.
Thus playing the Viennese fortepiano involved nothing like the athleticism exercised by modern piano virtuosos, but did require exquisite sensitivity of touch.
[11] Another important Viennese builder was Anton Walter,[12] a friend of Mozart, who built instruments with a somewhat more powerful sound than Stein's.
Although Mozart very much admired the Stein fortepianos, as the 1777 letter mentioned above makes clear, his own piano was a Walter.
Starting in the middle to late 1760s, Zumpe made inexpensive square pianos that had a very simple action, lacking an escapement, (sometimes known as the "old man's head").
Americus Backers, with John Broadwood and Robert Stodart, two of Shudi's workmen, produced a more advanced action than Zumpe's.
That English grand action, with an escapement and check, enabled a louder, more robust sound than the Viennese one, though it required deeper touch and was less sensitive.
The early English grand pianos by those builders physically resembled Shudi harpsichords, being very imposing, with elegant, restrained veneer work on the exterior.
Other builders also took up fortepiano construction, including Margaret F. Hood, Rodney Regier, Chris Maene, and Paul McNulty.
[21] A number of modern harpsichordists and pianists have achieved distinction in fortepiano performance, including Susan Alexander-Max, Paul Badura-Skoda, Malcolm Bilson, Hendrik Bouman, Ronald Brautigam, David Breitman, Wolfgang Brunner, Gary Cooper, Jörg Demus, Ursula Dütschler.
Richard Egarr, Richard Fuller, Tuija Hakkila, Christoph Hammer, Robert Hill, Knut Jacques, Jenny Soonjin Kim, Piet Kuijken, Geoffrey Lancaster, Gustav Leonhardt, Trudelies Leonhardt, Morgane Le Corre, Robert Levin, Alexei Lubimov, Steven Lubin, Yury Martynov, Costantino Mastroprimiano, Zvi Meniker, Bart van Oort, Olga Pashchenko, Trevor Pinnock, David Schrader, Viviana Sofronitsky, Andreas Staier, Melvyn Tan,[22] Natalia Valentin, Jos van Immerseel, Andras Schiff, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Katia and Marielle Labèque, Duo Pégase, Vladimir Feltsman.
Both are abbreviations of Cristofori's original name for his invention: gravicembalo col piano e forte, "harpsichord with soft and loud".
