(b Padua, 4 May 1655; d Florence, 27 Jan 1732). Italian maker of pianos and harpsichords. He is best known for the invention of the piano. He received an appointment to the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 to tune and maintain harpsichords. By 1716 he had become custode (steward) of the Medici collection of musical instruments and was working out of rented quarters, independent of the Uffizi artisan workshops. Nothing is known of his early career, but his Florentine years are richly documented. Expense records from Prince Ferdinando’s treasury establish the dates of Cristofori’s engagement and also his parity with the court musicians. During his first ten years of service he received a monthly stipend and reimbursements for his rent, but after 1698 the prince fell into financial difficulties and payments lagged. Some of Cristofori’s invoices survive from the period 1690–98 and from 1711, documenting his duties and expenses. His shop employed at least two assistants, one of whom is known to have been Giovanni Ferrini. Throughout his 44-year career in Florence, Cristofori never joined the Università di Por san Piero e Fabbricanti, the guild to which generations of Florentine harpsichord makers had traditionally belonged. Perhaps this was because he came from Padua where he seems to have owned property and, according to his wills, to which he always wished to return.
By 1700 Cristofori had developed a hammer-action keyboard instrument capable of dynamic gradations. Exactly when he began working on a piano design is not known. Perhaps early efforts caught the attention of Grand Prince Ferdinando and precipitated Cristofori’s appointment, or perhaps his first work on it was not until the late 1690s. The earliest known reference to a Cristofori piano is the anonymous Medici inventory of 1700. It describes a harpsichord-like instrument (‘arpicimbalo’), ‘newly invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori’, with hammers and dampers and two 8' choirs, having a range of four octaves, C–c''';. Whether Cristofori’s work on the piano was part of his court responsibilities or was to some degree independent of the Medicis is an open question (the spurious yet often cited memoria of Francesco Mannucci, known only from Fabbri, cannot credibly serve as contemporary testimony). In 1711 the Italian poet Scippione Maffei published an illustrated description of Cristofori’s piano. In the draft to that article Maffei wrote that Cristofori had worked only on his own volition, contradicting a modern theory that the piano was developed at the behest of Grand Prince Ferdinando. Whatever the prince’s interests, Cristofori’s invention found widespread currency outside the Medici courts. Maffei wrote that by 1709 two pianos had been sold in Florence and another was owned by Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome. A 1725 translation of Maffei’s article circulated north of the Alps, where it was probably read by Gottfried Silbermann, whose own pianos were closely modelled on a Cristofori prototype and later introduced to J.S. Bach. By 1732 Silbermann had come to know a Cristofori piano at first hand; he may have purchased it himself, or it could have been brought to Dresden by Antonio Lotti. Eventually Cristofori’s instruments became familiar to Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, the patron of Domenico Scarlatti. Lodovico Giustini’s 12 sonatas of 1732, da cimbalo di piano, e forte, detto volgarmente di martelletti, are the earliest pieces written specifically for the piano and were dedicated to the queen’s uncle, Don Antonio of Portugal, a pupil of Scarlatti.
Surviving instruments, harpsichords as well as pianos, exhibit Cristofori’s tremendous ingenuity. He had grasped the technical crux of piano engineering, incorporating intermediary levers between hammer and keylever, backchecks, the separation of soundboard from stress-bearing functions of the case sides and hitchpin rails, as well as many other technical subtleties (see Pianoforte, §I, 2). Cristofori had also developed spinet designs (such as the spinnetone, and the so-called oval spinet of 1698 described in his bills and now in Leipzig) having multiple choirs enhancing their theatre use. His instruments ranged from the conventional to those variously employing 4' and 2' choirs, shifting keyboards, distinctive closed-top jacks, a variety of registration mechanisms, unique stringband configurations, floating hitchpin rails, double bentsides, and in one case – the 1698 oval spinet – a double, criss-crossing balance rail. Only three Cristofori pianos are extant (of 1720, in New York; 1722, in Rome; and 1726, in Leipzig, illustrated in Pianoforte, fig.2), all made after his Medici patrons had died.
FétisB
La MusicaE
S. Maffei: ‘Nuova invenzione d’un gravecembalo col piano, e forte, aggiunte alcune considerazioni sopra gli strumenti musicali’, Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, v (Venice, 1711), 144–59; Ger. trans. in J. Mattheson: Critica musica, ii (Hamburg, 1725/R), 335–42
L. Puliti: ‘Della vita del Serenissimo Ferdinando dei Medici granprincipe di Toscana e della origine del pianoforte’, Atti dell’accademia del R. Istituto musicale di Firenze, xii (1874), 92–240
M. Fabbri: ‘Nuova luce sull’attività fiorentina di Giacomo Antonio Perti, Bartolomeo Cristofori e Giorgio F. Haendel’, Chigiana, new ser., i (1964), 143–90
V. Gai: Gli strumenti musicali della corte medicea e il Museo del Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini di Firenze: cenni storici e catalogo descrittivo (Florence, 1969)
S. Pollens: ‘The Pianos of Bartolomeo Cristofori’, JAMIS, x (1984), 32–68
L. Och: ‘Bartolomeo Cristofori, Scipione Maffei e la prima descrizione del “gravicembalo col piano e forte”’, Flauto dolce, nos.14–15 (1986), 16–23
G. Montanari: ‘Bartolomeo Cristofori: a List and Historical Survey of his Instruments’, EMc, xix (1991), 383–96
K. Restle: Bartolomeo Cristofori und die Anfänge des Hammerklaviers (Munich, 1991)
H. Henkel: ‘Bartolomeo Cristofori as Harpsichord Maker’, The Historical Harpsichord: a Monograph Series in Honor of Frank Hubbard, iii, ed. H. Schott (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 1–58
M. O’Brien: Bartolomeo Cristofori at Court in Late Medici Florence (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1994)
S. Pollens: The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1995)
D. Wraight: ‘Principles and Practice in Stringing Italian Keyboard Instruments’, Early Keyboard Journal, xviii (2000)
MICHAEL O’BRIEN