Bartolomeo Cristofori builds the first piano in Florence

Story: 1700 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1700

In the workshops of the Medici court in Florence, an Italian instrument maker quietly upended the world of music. Around the turn of the 18th century, Bartolomeo Cristofori completed something no one had managed before: a keyboard instrument that could respond to the force of a player’s touch, growing louder or softer depending on how hard the keys were struck. He called it, roughly, an arpicembalo che fa il piano e il forte — a harpsichord that plays soft and loud. The world would eventually shorten that to “piano.”

What the evidence shows

• Bartolomeo Cristofori piano: The first unambiguous documentary evidence for the instrument appears in a 1700 C.E. inventory of the Medici musical collection, which describes Cristofori’s new keyboard instrument in considerable technical detail.
• Medici court inventory: The 1700 C.E. document records the instrument’s range as four octaves — a standard compass for harpsichords of the era — and notes its novel mechanism for dynamic control through key pressure.
• Piano action mechanism: Cristofori’s central innovation was an escapement mechanism allowing hammers to strike strings and immediately rebound, giving players direct expressive control over volume — something no prior keyboard instrument had offered.

A lifetime of invention leading to one breakthrough

Cristofori was born in Padua in 1655 C.E. and came to Florence in 1688 C.E. at age 33, recruited by Prince Ferdinando de Medici. Ferdinando was an obsessive patron of music and machines — he collected more than 40 clocks — and he appears to have hired Cristofori not merely as a technician but as an inventor.

The evidence for this is circumstantial but suggestive. There were already qualified instrument makers in Florence, yet the Prince passed them over and paid Cristofori a higher salary than his predecessor. Strikingly, Cristofori submitted no bills for his pianofortes to the court — suggesting, as scholar Stewart Pollens notes, that the fruits of his experimentation were understood to belong to his employer.

Before arriving at the piano, Cristofori invented two other keyboard instruments. The spinettone, a large multi-choired spinet, was designed to produce a louder sound in cramped orchestra pits. The oval spinet, built around 1690 C.E., placed its longest strings in the center of the case — an elegant acoustic solution that had no precedent. By 1700 C.E., all of these inventions were documented in the Medici inventory, alongside the new instrument that would change everything.

What made the piano genuinely new

The harpsichord — the dominant keyboard instrument of the era — plucked its strings with small quills. It was responsive to rhythm and articulation, but not to touch. Whether a player pressed a key gently or hard, the volume stayed the same. That was a fundamental expressive limitation, and every serious musician of the period knew it.

Cristofori’s solution was mechanical genius. He designed a hammer mechanism — using hammers wrapped in leather rather than quills — along with an escapement that allowed each hammer to rebound instantly after striking the string, so the string could continue vibrating freely. The result was an instrument where dynamics became a dimension of performance, not just of composition.

By 1711 C.E., when the scholar Scipione Maffei published the first known account of the instrument after interviewing Cristofori, three pianos had already been built. One had been given to Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome. Two had been sold in Florence. The idea was beginning to travel.

How the piano spread beyond Italy

Maffei’s 1711 C.E. article included a diagram of Cristofori’s action mechanism. That diagram reached German instrument makers, and within decades, builders in Germany — most notably Gottfried Silbermann — were producing their own versions. Johann Sebastian Bach played one of Silbermann’s instruments and offered critical feedback that shaped the next generation of designs.

The Portuguese royal court purchased at least one of Cristofori’s own instruments. As the Medici dynasty declined financially in the early 18th century, Cristofori began selling his work more broadly. He continued making pianos until nearly the end of his life in 1731 C.E., improving the mechanism with each new instrument.

Three of his pianos survive today. One is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dating to 1720 C.E. A second is in the Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali in Rome. A third is in Leipzig. All three are still playable.

Lasting impact

It is difficult to overstate what Cristofori’s invention made possible. Within a century of the 1700 C.E. Medici inventory, the piano had become the central instrument of Western classical music. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert all wrote music that depended entirely on the expressive dynamics Cristofori’s mechanism enabled. Beethoven’s late sonatas, in particular, would be incoherent on a harpsichord.

The piano’s reach extended far beyond European classical tradition. It became foundational to jazz, blues, gospel, and ragtime — musical forms developed primarily by Black American musicians in the 19th and early 20th centuries who transformed the instrument’s expressive possibilities in entirely new directions. It spread into parlors, concert halls, and eventually recording studios on every continent.

The basic mechanical principle Cristofori established in Florence around 1700 C.E. — hammer strikes string, escapement allows rebound, player controls volume through touch — remains the foundation of every acoustic piano made today, more than three centuries later.

Blindspots and limits

Cristofori’s invention did not immediately displace the harpsichord — that transition took most of the 18th century, and many composers and musicians resisted the new instrument for decades. The historical record of Cristofori himself is thin: we have his birth and death records, two wills, his billing receipts, and a single published interview. The diary that might have pushed the piano’s origins back to 1698 C.E. is now considered of doubtful authenticity, meaning we cannot be certain of the precise moment the first instrument was completed. What Cristofori thought of his own achievement, in his own words, is almost entirely lost.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Bartolomeo Cristofori

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