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only, the lower keyboard to the second unison. Releasing the machine stop and quitting the pedal restores the first unison on both keyboards and the octave on the lower. The right-hand pedal was to raise a hinged portion of the top or cover and thus gain some power of “swell” or crescendo, an invention of Roger Plenius,^[1] to whom also the harp stop may be rightly attributed. This ingenious harpsichord maker had been stimulated to gain these effects by the nascent pianoforte which, as we shall find, he was the first to make in England. The first idea of pedals for the harpsichord to act as stops appears to have been John Hayward’s (?Haward) as early as 1676, as we learn from Mace’s Musick’s Monument, p. 235. The French makers preferred a kind of knee-pedal arrangement, known as the “genouillère,” and sometimes a more complete muting by one long strip of buff leather, the “sourdine.” As an improvement upon Plenius’s clumsy swell, Shudi in 1769 patented the Venetian swell, a framing of louvres, like a Venetian blind, which opened by the movement of the pedal, and becoming in England a favourite addition to harpsichords, was early transferred to the organ, in which it replaced the rude “nag’s-head” swell. A French harpsichord maker, Marius, whose name is remembered from a futile attempt to design a pianoforte action, invented a folding harpsichord, the “clavecin brisé,” by which the instrument could be disposed of in a smaller space. One, which is preserved at Berlin, probably formed part of the camp baggage of Frederick the Great.

It was formerly a custom with kings, princes and nobles to keep large collections of musical instruments for actual playing purposes, in the domestic and festive music of their courts. There are records of their inventories, and it was to keep such a collection in playing order that Prince Ferdinand dei Medici engaged a Paduan Cristofori’s invention
of the Pianoforte. harpsichord maker, Bartolommeo Cristofori, the man of genius who invented and produced the pianoforte.^[2] We fortunately possess the record of this invention in a literary form from a well-known writer, the Marchese Scipione Maffei; his description appeared in the Giornale dei letterati d’Italia, a publication conducted by Apostolo Zeno. The date of Maffei’s paper was 1711. Rimbault reproduced it, with a technically imperfect translation, in his History of the Pianoforte. We learn from it that in 1709 Cristofori had completed four “gravecembali col piano e forte”—keyed-psalteries with soft and loud—three of them being of the long or usual harpsichord form. A synonym in Italian for the original cembalo (or psaltery) is “salterio,” and if it were struck with hammers it became a “salterio tedesco” (the German hackbrett, or chopping board), the latter being the common dulcimer. Now the first notion of a pianoforte is a dulcimer with keys, and we may perhaps not be wrong in supposing that there had been many attempts and failures to put a keyboard to a dulcimer or hammers to a harpsichord before Cristofori successfully solved the problem. The sketch of his action in Maffei’s essay shows an incomplete stage in the invention, although the kernel of it—the principle of escapement or the controlled rebound of the hammer—is already there. He obtains it by a centred lever (linguetta mobile) or hopper, working, when the key is depressed by the touch, in a small projection from the centred hammer-butt. The return, governed by a spring, must have been uncertain and incapable of further regulating than could be obtained by modifying the strength of the spring. Moreover, the hammer had each time to be raised the entire distance of its fall. There are, however, two pianofortes by Cristofori, dated respectively 1720 and 1726, which show a much improved, we may even say a perfected, construction, for the whole of an essential piano movement is there. The earlier instrument (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) has undergone considerable restoration, the original hollow hammer-head having been replaced by a modern one, and the hammer-butt, instead of being centred by means of the holes provided by Cristofori himself for the purpose, having been lengthened by a leather hinge screwed to the block;^[3] but the 1726 one, which is in the Kraus Museum at Florence, retains the original leather hammer-heads. Both instruments possess alike a contrivance for determining the radius of the hopper, and both have been unexpectedly found to have the “check” (Ital. paramartello), which regulates the fall of the hammer according to the strength of the blow which has impelled it to the strings. After this discovery of the actual instruments of Cristofori there can be no longer doubt as to the attribution of the invention to him in its initiation and its practical completion with escapement and check. To Cristofori we are indebted, not only for the power of playing piano and forte, but for the infinite variations of tone, or nuances, which render the instrument so delightful.

Fig. 13.—Cristofori’s Escapement Action, 1720. Restored in 1875 by Cesare Ponsicchi.

Fig. 14.—Cristofori’s Piano e Forte, 1726; Kraus Museum, Florence.

But his problem was not solved by the devising of a working action; there was much more to be done to instal the pianoforte as a new musical instrument. The resonance, that most subtle and yet all-embracing factor, had been experimentally developed to a certain perfection by many generations of spinet and harpsichord makers, but the resistance structure had to be thought out again. Thicker stringing, rendered indispensable to withstand even Cristofori’s light hammers, demanded in its turn a stronger framing than the harpsichord had needed. To make his structure firm he considerably increased the strength of the block which holds the tuning-pins, and as he could not do so without materially adding to its thickness, he adopted the bold expedient of inverting it; driving his wrest-pins, harp-fashion, through it, so that tuning was effected at their upper, while the wires were attached to their lower, ends. Then, to guarantee the security of the case, he ran an independent string-block round it of stouter wood than had been used in harpsichords, in which block the hitch-pins were driven to hold the farther ends of the strings, which were spaced at