(b Asturias, 1766; d Asturias, 14 Feb 1852). Spanish piano maker. He settled in Madrid before 1789; by 1799 he had established a piano workshop at Corredera de San Pablo 20, where he competed with the court piano maker, Francisco Flórez. In 1804 Fernández moved to the Calle del Barquillo. On 14 March 1806 he was named honorary maker to the Royal Chamber of Carlos IV; the post came into effect on 8 December 1816. Between 1814 and 1828 his workshop was situated at Calle San Fernando 5 (now Calle Libertad). In 1835 his post was brought to an end by Queen María Cristina, and he returned to his native village in Asturias, where he set up a new workshop and lived on a limited income until his death.
Fernández made and repaired pianos for the royal household and for some members of the nobility, such as the Duchess of Benavente, but he mostly made affordable instruments for domestic use. A keen advocate of the social and scientific ideology of the Enlightenment, he took an interest in the Spanish piano-making industry and, to alleviate the expense of importing instruments, proposed two projects: one being to create an indigenous school of piano making, the other to collect and study the best quality woods from various parts of Spain in order to use them for making instruments. In spite of receiving official support, the projects were never fully realized, although he did have several pupils at the school, the best-known being Julián Lacabra.
Fernández was awarded gold medals at the Spanish Industry Exhibitions of 1827 and 1828. He also invented a special tuning device, the ‘chromameter’, which he publicly announced in 1831. Several pianos with his signature have been preserved. The oldest, dating from about 1800 (now in a private collection, Madrid), is a square piano based on Zumpe’s models with a compass of five octaves (F'–f'''). Another two instruments of the same pattern, one dated 1807, are preserved in separate private collections, also in Madrid. At the Palacio Real (Madrid) there is an upright piano from 1805 in the shape of a bookcase, and a grand piano attributed to Fernández or to his workshop. Another square piano is preserved in the Palacio Real, El Escorial. It dates from 1827 and has a special mechanism in which the hammers strike the strings from above; a full soundboard covers the entire mechanism. The 1828 square piano at the Museu de la Música, Barcelona, with a compass of six octaves (F'–f''''), has a built-in device for tuning, consisting of a single string plucked by a plectrum, with a sliding bridge over a scale.
C. Bordas Ibáñez: ‘Dos constructores de pianos en Madrid: Francisco Flórez y Francisco Fernández’, RdMc, xi (1988), 807–51
C. Bordas: ‘Otros pianos de F. Flórez y F. Fernández’, RdMc, xiii (1990), 227–30
CRISTINA BORDAS