This post began with a question from a follower: If a piano was called a “pianoforte” during the Regency, would the term “pianist” not be correct? If not, what would one call someone who played pianoforte?

First, I began with a response to the question above. The piano’s proper name (even today) is pianoforte, not piano. At some time in the last century we shortened the name to “piano.” The French term pianiste was used in England as early as 1816. The Anglicisation of the term does not show up in extant examples until around 1822.

Starting in the 18th century, the instrument was also called a “piano.” In Emma, Frank Bates secures a piano for Jane Fairfax, remember? The earliest citation for pianist in the OED is 1820, but words are generally in use quite a while before they are written.

Piano is equal to “soft,” and forte to “loud.” One advancement on the instrument was that one could play loudly or quietly. What is more interesting is that I believe Austen used a brand name. An early example of product placement?

In both Emma and Sense & Sensibility, the term used in my copies is “piano-forte.”

Melanie Spanswick post dated in 2013 tells us, “Austen was a keen pianist as were the majority of her heroines, who played to various standards. All accomplished young ladies were expected to play the piano as a matter of course, and therefore Jane was no exception. She apparently practised every day after breakfast and was quite specific about the music she enjoyed working on, as we can glean from her niece’s memoir:

“Aunt Jane began her day with music – for which I conclude she had a natural taste; as she thus kept it up – ‘tho she had no one to teach; was never induced (as I have heard) to play in company; and none of her family cared much for it. I suppose that she might not trouble them, she chose her practising time before breakfast – when she could have the room to herself – She practised regularly every morning – She played very pretty tunes, I thought – and I liked to stand by her and listen to them; but the music (for I knew the books well in after years) would now be thought disgracefully easy – Much that she played from was manuscript, copied out by herself – and so neatly and correctly, that it was as easy to read as print. (extract from My Aunt Jane, a Memoir – 1867 by Caroline Austen: Jane Austen Society 1952).

“Jane was apparently introduced to the piano aged nine whilst she attended the Abbey School in Reading in 1785. The Austen’s appear to have borrowed a piano and it was during this period that Jane compiled several volumes of music. An instrument was eventually purchased and she studied the piano with Dr George Chard, assistant organist of Winchester Cathedral. Jane had access to a piano most of her adult life and when she did not, her writing appears to have suffered demonstrating just how important music was for her. At Chawton, the house where she lived in Hampshire, Jane owned a Stodart Square piano.“

I actually checked on this because I had recently listened to them on audiobook, and the narrator pronounced it “piano-FORT,” and I thought that strange to my American pronunciation of “FOR-tay.”

A very popular instrument by the last few years of the 1700s, the pianoforte was quite popular with professionals and amateurs. We must remember that those instruments were not of the same caliber of the modern piano. On The Met website, an article from Independent Scholar, Wendy Powers, in 2003 fills in the history of the pianoforte. “Broadly defined as a stringed keyboard instrument with a hammer action (as opposed to the jack and quill action of the harpsichord) capable of gradations of soft and loud, the piano became the central instrument of music pedagogy and amateur study. By the end of the nineteenth century, no middle-class household of any stature in Europe or North America was without one. Almost every major Western composer from Mozart onward has played it, many as virtuosi, and the piano repertory—whether solo, chamber, or with orchestra—is at the heart of Western classical professional performance.

“Cristofori and the First Pianofortes: The quiet nature of the piano’s birth around 1700, therefore, comes as something of a surprise. The first true piano was invented almost entirely by one man—Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731) of Padua, who had been appointed in 1688 to the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici to care for its harpsichords and eventually for its entire collection of musical instruments. A 1700 inventory of Medici instruments mentions an “arpicimbalo,” i.e., an instrument resembling a harpsichord, “newly invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori” with hammers and dampers, two keyboards, and a range of four octaves, C–c”’. The poet and journalist Scipione Maffei, in his enthusiastic 1711 description, named Cristofori’s instrument a “gravicembalo col piano, e forte” (harpsichord with soft and loud), the first time it was called by its eventual name, pianoforte. A contemporary inscription by a Florentine court musician, Federigo Meccoli, notes that the “arpi cimbalo del piano e’ forte” was first made by Cristofori in 1700, giving us a precise birthdate for the piano.

“Cristofori was an artful inventor, creating such a sophisticated action for his pianos that, at the instrument’s inception, he solved many of the technical problems that continued to puzzle other piano designers for the next seventy-five years of its evolution. His action was highly complex and thus expensive, causing many of its features to be dropped by subsequent eighteenth-century makers, and then gradually reinvented and reincorporated in later decades. Cristofori’s ingenious innovations included an “escapement” mechanism that enabled the hammer to fall away from the string instantly after striking it, so as not to dampen the string, and allowing the string to be struck harder than on a clavichord; a “check” that kept the fast-moving hammer from bouncing back to re-hit the string; a dampening mechanism on a jack to silence the string when not in use; isolating the soundboard from the tension-bearing parts of the case, so that it could vibrate more freely; and employing thicker strings at higher tensions than on a harpsichord.”