A new Silbermann piano has joined the instrument collection at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards.

The piano, which has a hammer action that could produce gradations of loud and soft, was invented in the late 17th-century by the Florentine instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori, who lived from 1655-1731. The Cornell addition is modeled after a piano created in 1749 by Gottfried Silbermann, who hailed from a long-standing Saxon organ-building family and had the additional reputation for building the first German piano.

Silbermann's pianos show near-exact copies of Cristofori's highly sophisticated mechanism coupled with other aspects of design –‑ case construction, string spacing, choice of wood species — that drew from his experience as an instrument maker. Silbermann's pianos are organologically significant as the Germanic counterpart of what one might call the first "school" of piano making, said Mike Lee PhD '15, visiting scholar and artist-in-residence in the music department.

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