virtuosos
who may be considered distinctively composers for and players on the
pianoforte, it is indispensable to a clear understanding of the theme
involved that the reader should turn back for a brief glance at the
history of the piano and piano-playing prior to his time. Before the
piano-forte came the harpsichord, prior to the latter the spinet,
then the virginal, the clavichord, and monochord; before these, the
clavieytherium. Before these instruments, which bring us down to modern
civilized times, and constitute the genealogy of the piano-forte, we
have the dulcimer and psaltery, and all the Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman
harps and lyres which were struck with a quill or plectrum. No product
of human ingenuity has been the outcome of a steady and systematic
growth from age to age by more demonstrable stages than this most
remarkable of musical instruments. As it is not the intention to offer
an essay on the piano, but only to make clearer the conditions under
which a great school of players began to appear, the antiquities of the
topic are not necessary to be touched.

The modern piano-forte had as its immediate predecessor the harpsichord,
the instrument on which the heroines of the novels of Fielding,
Smollett, Richardson, and their contemporaries were wont to discourse
sweet music, and for which Haydn and Mozart composed some delightful
minor works. In the harpsichord the strings were set in vibration by
points of quill or hard leather. One of these instruments looked like
a piano, only it was provided with two keyboards, one above the other,
related to each other as the swell and main keyboards of an organ.
At last it occurred to lovers of music that all refinement of musical
expression depended on touch, and that whereas a string could be plucked
or pulled by machinery in but one way, it could be hit in a hundred
ways. It was then that the notion of striking the strings with a hammer
found practical use, and by the addition of this element the piano-forte
emerged into existence. The idea appears to have occurred to three men
early in the eighteenth century, almost simultaneously--Cristofori, an
Italian, Marins, a Frenchman, and Schroter, a German. For years attempts
to carry out the new mechanism were so clumsy that good harpsichords
on the wrong principle were preferred to poor piano-fortes on the right
principle. But the keynote of progress had been struck, and the day
of the quill and leather jack was swift