A fortepiano , sometimes referred to as a pianoforte, is an early piano. In principle, the word "fortepiano" can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 up to the early 19th century. Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the mid-18th to early-19th century instruments, for which composers of the Classical era, especially Haydn, Mozart, and the younger Beethoven and Hummel, 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. The earlier fortepiano became obsolete and was absent from the musical scene for many decades. In the later 20th century, the fortepiano was revived, following the rise of interest in historically informed performance. Fortepianos are built for that purpose, in specialist workshops.
Construction
The fortepiano has leather-covered hammers and thin, harpsichord-like strings. It has a much lighter case construction than the modern piano and, except for later examples of the early nineteenth century (already evolving towards the modern piano), it has no metal frame or bracing. The action and hammers are lighter, giving rise to a much lighter touch, which in well-constructed fortepianos is also very expressive.
The range of the fortepiano was about four octaves at the time of its invention and gradually increased. Mozart wrote his piano music for instruments of about five octaves. The piano works of Beethoven reflect a gradually expanding range; his last piano compositions are for an instrument of about six and a half octaves. The range of most modern pianos, attained in the 19th century, is 7⅓ octaves.
Fortepianos from the start often had devices similar to the pedals of modern pianos, but they were not always pedals; sometimes hand stops or knee levers were used instead.
Sound
Like the modern piano, the fortepiano can vary the sound volume of each note, depending on the player's touch. The tone of the fortepiano is quite different from that of the modern piano, however, being softer, with less sustain. 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.
Fortepianos also tend to have quite different tone quality in their different registers – 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 tone through their range.
History
Cristofori
The piano was invented in 1698 by harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence. The first reliable record of a piano appears in the inventory of the Medici family (who were Cristofori's patrons), dated 1700. Cristofori continued to develop the instrument until the 1720s, the time from which the surviving three Cristofori instruments date.
Cristofori is perhaps best admired today for his ingenious piano 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 piano 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 virtually 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, for which Cristofori used a hand stop. It is not clear whether the modern soft pedal descends directly from Cristofori's work or arose independently.
Cristofori's invention 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. That 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).