Cristofori died in 1731. He had pupils, but did not found a school of Italian pianoforte-making. The i7i1 essay of Scipione Maffei was translated into German, in 1725, by K6nig, the court poet at Dresden, and friend of Gottfried Silbermann, the renowned organ builder and harpsichord and clavichord maker (see Dr. Oscar Paul's Geschichte des Claviers, Leipzig, 1868). Incited by this publication, and perhaps by having seen in Dresden one of Cristofori's pianofortes, Silber mann appears to have taken up the new instrument, and in 1726 to have manufactured two, which J. S. Bach, according to his pupil Agricola, pronounced failures.
The trebles were too weak; the touch was too heavy. There has long been another version to this story, viz., that Silbermann bor rowed the idea of his action from a very simple model contrived by a young musician named Schroeter, who had left it at the electoral court in 1721, and, quitting Saxony to travel, had not afterwards claimed it.
Whatever Silbermann's first experiments were based upon, he ultimately adopted Cristofori's pianoforte without further alter ation than the compass and col our of the keys and the style of joinery of the case. In the Silbermann grand pianofortes at Potsdam, known to have been Frederick the Great's, and to have been acquired by that monarch Mahillon of Brussels, however, acquired a Frederici "upright grand" piano, dated 1745. In Frederici's upright grand action (fig. 12) we have not to do with the ideas of either Cristofori or Schroeter ; the movement is practically identical with the hammer action of a German clock, and has its counterpart in a piano at Nuremberg; a fact which needs further elucidation. We note here the earliest example of the leather hinge, afterwards so common in piano actions. An attempted combination of harpsichord and pianoforte appears very early. The English poet Mason, the friend of Gray, bought such an instrument at Hamburg in 1755, with "the cleverest mechanism imaginable." It was only under date of '763 that Schroeter published for the first time a diagram of his proposed invention, designed more than forty years before. It appeared in Marpurg's Kritische Briefe (Berlin, 1764). Now, immediately after, Johann Zumpe, a Ger man in London, who had been one of Shudi's workmen introduced (there is some tradition that Mason had to do with the inven tion of it) a "square" piano, which was destined to become the most popular domestic instrument. Zumpe was in fact not the inventor of the square piano, which appears to have been well known in Germany before his date, a discovery made by Mr. George Rose. In Paul de Wit's Musical Instrument Museum— formerly in Leipzig, afterwards transferred to Cologne—there is a small square piano by Hildebrandt 27 in. long io in. wide and 42 in high, having a contracted keyboard of 3 octaves and 2 notes.
The action of this small instrument is practically identical in every detail with that of the square pianofortes made much later by Zumpe (Paul de Wit, Katalog des musikhistorischen Museums, Leipzig, 1903. No. 55, illustration, p. 38). Inside is inscribed: "Friedrich Hildebrandt, Instrumentenmacher in Leipzig, Quer gasse," with four figures almost illegible. Paul de Wit refers the instrument to the middle of the 18th century. It has all the appearance of being a reduced copy of a well-established type, differing very little from the later models.
Burney tells us all about Zumpe; and his instruments still exist ing would fix the date of the first at about 1765. Fetis narrates, however, that he began the study of the piano on a square piano made by Zumpe in 1762. In this simple action (fig. 14) we have the nearest approach to a realization of Schroeter's idea. It will be noted that Schroeter's damper (fig. 13) would stop all vibration at once. This defect is met by Zumpe's "mopstick" damper.
Another piano action had, however, come into use about that time or even earlier in Germany. The discovery of it in the Viennese instrument, famous for its lightness of touch.
We will quit the early German piano with an illustration (fig. 17) of a square piano action in an instrument made by Johann Gottlob Wagner of Dresden in 1783, and embodying the Cristofori principle rather than the Viennese.
Burney, who lived through the period of the displacement of the harpsichord by the pianoforte, is the only authority to whom simplest form is to be attributed to V. C. Mahillon, who found it in a square piano belonging to Henri Gosselin, painter of Brussels (fig. 19). The principle of this action is that which was later perfected by the addition of a good escapement by Stein of Augs burg, and was again later experimented upon by Sebastian Erard. Its origin is perhaps due to the contrivance of a piano action that should suit the shallow clavichord and permit of its transformation into a square piano. It will be observed that the hammer is, as compared with other actions, reversed, and its pivot rises with the key, necessitating a fixed rail against which the hammer butt strikes. It was Stein's merit to graft the hopper principle upon this simple action; and Mozart's approbation of the invention, when he met with it at Augsburg in 1777, is expressed in a well known letter addressed to his mother. No more "blocking" of the hammer, destroying all vibration, was henceforth to vex his mind. He had found the instrument that for the rest of his short life replaced the harpsichord. V. C. Mahillon secured for his museum the only Johann Andreas Stein piano which is known to remain. It is from Augsburg, dated 178o, and has Stein's escapement action (fig. 16), two unisons, and the knee pedal.