Pianos and harpsichords for Their Majesties

TOWARDS the close of the 18th century, the piano gradually took over from the harpsichord in both London and Vienna, the two cities that by 1800 became the foremost centres of piano building in Europe. Despite the success elsewhere of the gravecembalo col piano e forte invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700, there had been almost no awareness of the piano in London before the mid-1760s; in Vienna, pianos only started to emerge in the late 1770s.1 In Paris, pianos shaped like harpsichords were certainly known and appreciated in the 1760s, but probably as special harpsichords rather than as instruments different in kind from harpsichords with plectra. After the arrival in Paris of the ‘new’ square piano in the 1770s, acceptance of the piano more or less followed the same pattern as in London but with one major difference; in Paris the development was interrupted by the French Revolution and only taken up again in earnest in about 1796.