Cristofori, Grand Piano

In the history of ideas I think the piano is one of the real standouts. This is the earliest surviving piano. It was made in 1720 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, who was the inventor of the piano. The harpsichord ruled the keyboard landscape of the Baroque, and no matter how much energy you put behind touching the keys of the harpsichord the volume of sound that it produces is always the same. Whereas, the piano is a touch-sensitive instrument: if the player touches the keys gently, it produces a soft sound; if you put the weight of your body into it, it really sings out. And that's the revolutionary part of the idea. Cristofori devised the escapement, which allows the player's finger to control the flight of the key until the last minute before it touches the string, and then it lets the key fall away so that the string can sing out freely. It's completely intuitive, it's very responsive, it's incredibly intimate. The piano becomes all things to all people, from the aristocratic drawing room right to the piano-pounders of Tin Pan Alley. It also becomes liberating for unmarried women, because teaching the piano got them out of the home and that helped them attain some financial independence. It's humbling to me to think that Cristofori didn't have any idea of what a phenomenon the piano was to become. It wasn't until some forty or fifty years after his death that the piano starts to flourish. In the days before recordings, in the days when it was quite expensive to attend concerts, by having a piano, all of a sudden, you're opening up a whole world of musical entertainment. And I think that's hard for us to remember today, because we live surrounded by sound. But the piano was the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century music-on-demand system. It's there for anyone who can sit down in front of it.