Upright Piano

The journey towards a proper working model of an upright piano is a long road littered with the relics and debris of many discarded attempts to achieve what at the outset, seemed so easy to achieve. This frustratingly exhaustive quest took some seventy or so years to meet with any satisfaction.

The stringing aspect of the piano was advanced enough by 1800 to need few changes to adapt it to an upright case.  The first upright piano ever to be built was by Johann Schmitt of Salzburg, Austria in about 1780. In America, some 20 years later, John Isaac Hawkins of Philadelphia patented an upright piano - curiously called a ‘Portable Grand Piano’. This was a five octave piano standing about 138 cm high.

Matthias Muller of Vienna called his five octave little wonder a ‘Ditanaklasis’. Two versions show a commendable willingness to adopt any improvement available in order to get it to work as well as possible.

1802, Thomas Loud of London patented an upright piano. Knowing good tone was very much linked to the length of the bass strings, Loud was clearly trying to cram a long string length into an upright case - heights of up to 157 cm were mentioned. Playability was low in the pecking order of priorities.

1806, France, Pfeiffer et Cie, bought out their rather tall offering - nearly 2 m. This piano had 6 octaves and had an action based on the German action ( A German Sticker Action). These tall pianos were by nature, large, awkward to move and not what the piano-buying public were really looking for.

1811 Robert Wornum made his first upright and, constantly looking for improvements he brought out another just two years later. The 1813 version became known as the ‘cottage’ piano. These pianos became very sought after and attracted the attention of Ignace Pleyel who, with Kalkbrenner as his business partner, had set up Pleyel et Cie in Paris 1807. In 1815, with help from Henri Pape, they began building cottage pianos after the Wornum design.

By 1826, Wornum brought out another small upright called the ‘professional pianoforte’. But still he was not done! A string of developments edged the upright piano action ever closer to what has become the basis of upright piano action until today! A 1842 drawing of a Wornum action serves as a significant milestone in the progress of upright piano. I remember working on actions like these when I first entered the piano trade in the early 1970s. 

We were still working on and tuning pianos inferior to this drawing - and there were plenty of them around! These cheaply built pianos had actions we called ‘spring & loop’ and ‘sticker’. Often they still worked, but always played badly. The hammers were often on vellum hinges, which dry out and break after about a hundred years. Other parts relied on guide pins for the long ‘jacks’ that moved the hammers, small leather strips were glued to the sides of these jacks, which, on the more used notes, invariably wore out and jammed themselves against the pins. 

The piano trade is thankful that Wornum, particularly, did not settle for the ‘just about good enough’ label for his pianos.

© Steve Burden

Square Pianos

By looks, the square piano evolved from reconstructing the clavichord - but the sweet and timid sound of the clavichord could no longer satisfy the musicians appetite for the stronger, more expressive sounds afforded by the piano. This new piano-making industry was still very much in its infancy and was evolving into a competitive business with plenty of scope for experimentation and development.

Remodelling a clavichord-type case to become a square piano demanded some enlargement, a beefed up construction and being fitted with a hammer action.

While the main evolution of the piano followed more along the lines of the harpsichord - ultimately to become what is now the modern grand piano, the square piano was smaller and less expensive and enjoyed immense popularity from about 1760 until declining during the late 1800s.

In London there were many makers but, Johann Zumpe is mostly held responsible for the surge in demand for pianos. These pianos were designed, made and sold from his house in Princes Street, Hanover Square from about 1766. John Broadwood - another big name in piano history - began making square pianos from 1771. 

In Paris, Sebastien Erard made one in 1776 - a copy of the English piano. In America, Johann Behrend of Philadelphia exhibited his square piano in 1775. Within a decade, the square piano was now being made in England, France Germany and America. Chales Albrecht of Philadelphia probably the best of the American makers in the 1780s.

The ’English’ and the ‘German’ or ‘Viennese’ school of action design differed mainly in how the hammer was placed and set in motion. The ‘English’ layout placed the action over the back end of the key with the hammer heads very close to the end of the key. The hammer set in motion via an intermediate lever.

The ‘German’ layout had the action over the back end of the key but this time, with the hammer heads close to the mid point of the key. The hammer pivot point being fixed to an extension on the back end of the key.

Eventually, efforts to improve the ‘German’ approach could not match the kind of performance achieved by the ‘English’ approach and so, it  fell out of favour 

Square pianos were constantly being modified to extract a stronger, more powerful tone. Wooden frames were clearly incapable of meeting these demands. 

String gauges were increased to enhance the volume and tone, thus increasing up to four times, the strain on the earlier, eighteenth-century pianos. To handle this augmented tension and stress, from about 1825, Alpheus Babcock invented the full iron frame. Chickering was granted a patent in 1840 for further improvements to the frame.

To match these striking enhancements, the hammers too, were made larger and heavier, perhaps losing some of its former lightness of touch. 

At the World Fair, Crystal Palace, New York in 1855, Steinway created a sensation with a square piano with a full iron frame and an overstrung scale. After significant initial resistance, accepting the iron frame and the overstrung construction was eventually adopted universally.

Steinway’s celebrated iron-framed, overstrung square grands were more than two and a half times the size of Zumpe's wood-framed instruments that were successful a century before. 

In Europe, square pianos were made until about 1866. By then the upright piano had become the popular choice for the domestic setting. The last American square pianos were made until about 1905. 

© Steve Burden

Johann Andreas Stein

Johann Andreas Stein was born 16 May 1728 in Heidelsheim. Stein settled 140 or so miles away in Augsburg about 1750. He learned his trade as an organ builder from his father and he built the organ at the Barfüßerkirche - this was the first Protestant church in Augsburg. As a bonus, he became the organist at the church! By 1760, he had decided to give up the organ building trade in favour of building stringed keyboard instruments.

Taking Schroters action design as a model, he set out to improve it, making his first piano in 1768. By 1780, Stein’s daughter Nannette, a musician but also, having a sound scientific grasp of piano-building, was involved in refining the Schroter design. This action was the preferred choice of the likes of Mozart and Beethoven.

With this action, the ‘German’ or ‘Vienna’ School of piano building was firmly established. The advantages over the ‘English’ School was the very easy, lighter touch and the sweeter tone. What these pianos lacked was the capacity for a stronger, powerful tone. But, for the time being, and with the endorsement of the great masters, there was strong demand for Stein pianos.

A further development of the Stein action came in 1824, designed by Stein’s grandson, Johann Baptist Streicher. Piano-building was clearly a genetic condition passed down through the generations! This action was instantly approved by players and other makers.

Over Stein’s career as piano maker, he made about 700 pianos. His pianos were widely reproduced - especially in Vienna. Good grounds for his being called the ‘father’ of the Vienna School.

 He died in Augsburg 29 February 1792. 

© Steve Burden