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