The Fortepiano

The fortepiano, the name by which the piano was conventionally called in its first years of life, was designed and built in Florence around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, a brilliant craftsman from Padua in the service of Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, and was the instrument favored by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann... to name but the most famous of the great composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Built entirely of wood, without metal reinforcements in the structure, with hammers covered in leather rather than felt, the fortepiano has timbral and sound characteristics that are very different from modern pianos. The various areas of the keyboard have a very pronounced sonic individuality, which differs markedly from the homogeneity characteristic of modern pianos; however, the reduced dynamics regarding the volume is very varied for all the nuances of piano, pianissimo, mezzoforte and forte; furthermore, especially in instruments built in the first thirty years of the 1800s, it is possible to change the timbre of the strings, through a series of mechanisms controlled by pedals or knee pads, with very particular sound effects that are impossible to harm on modern instruments. We are mainly referring to the so-called "moderator" pedal which works by inserting a thin strip of felt between the hammers and the strings, creating a vaporous and mysterious sound effect (very suitable for Schubert's music, for example). Another bizarre pedal controls the so-called "bassoon"; in this case it is a strip of parchment which, when it comes into contact with the vibrating strings, produces a very nasal sound that is somewhat similar to that of the bassoon. A real curiosity is then constituted by the so-called "turcherie" pedal, which controls a series of devices designed to simulate the sound of the bass drum, bells and cymbals, a typical sound of contemporary Turkish music. All these special effects pedals went out of fashion over the decades and were progressively eliminated in the newly built pianos which gradually replaced the fortepiano. In fact, the changed musical and concert needs caused radical changes in the construction and structure of the instruments: the greater demand for sound volume justified by the spread of the rite of the public concert in ever larger environments imposed the use of strings no more than brass, copper or iron, but of steel with larger calibers and therefore with greater tensions which in turn are necessarily supported no longer by a fragile wooden frame, but by a robust cast iron support. The hammers, no longer covered in leather but in felt, and larger in size, were called upon to produce sounds more suitable for an increasingly numerous audience. So insensibly in the period from around 1830 to 1850 and beyond, the fortepiano became what we are used to recognizing today as the piano. But the fortepiano cannot be considered as a primitive instrument subsequently perfected until reaching the piano, as the fortepiano was perfectly functional for the musicians and the needs of the era of its greatest splendor. It is from this perspective that in the last fifty years the renewed interest in a philological reading of the musical production of the classical and romantic periods has led to the rediscovery, revaluation and recovery of the fortepiano no longer and not only as a museum exhibit, but as a tool of music. The instruments present at the Bartolomeo Cristofori Academy are the work of some of the most celebrated Viennese builders.

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