Grand Pianoforte by William Rolfe

GRAND PIANOFORTE
By William Rolfe c. 1798

A very fine specimen of the typical English Grand "pianoforte" of the period 1794 - 1804. Joseph Haydn, on his visit to Bath in August 1794, must have played such a piano. When he left London finally in 1795 he was presented with something very similar by the firm Longman & Broderip.

The action is the standard one of the time, as patented by Robert Stodart in 1777 and used by him and by the most prolific and best-known maker of the time, John Broadwood. It is in essence the ancestor of the modern piano action.

There are three strings (brass in the bass, iron in the treble) to each note, the compass is of 5½ octaves (the most usual compass by the turn of the century) and, as was customary, every note from the top to the bottom of the instrument has its own damper. A damper rail acts both as a guard and as an "inverted trampoline" to return the dampers quickly in fast passagework.

© 1988 Kenneth Mobbs, formerly Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol, UK.