The Fortepiano’s Revolution

he piano entered a world that was not quite ready for it. Polyphony was still the sound of the day, the harpsichord was king, and no one seemed to care about this odd new keyboard invention. But ready or not, the piano was born into the world in 1709, conceived and publicized by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Because the early piano had a more complicated mechanism with a higher possibility of malfunction or poor construction, for a long time people saw it as an inferior substitute for the harpsichord.1 Most musicians received it as a new kind of harpsichord fitted with hammers to strike the strings instead of plectora to pluck the strings. Thus the early piano did not become popular for quite a number of years after its initial invention. Only as the piano became more differentiated from the harpsichord did it become a unique musical influence and develop its own idiomatic keyboard style. The rise of the fortepiano throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed traditional keyboard techniqu