100 Fun Facts About Piano

Who invented the piano in Florence while keeping the Medici court's instruments?

Bartolomeo Cristofori came from Padua at the invitation of Prince Ferdinando de' Medici. His design was largely ignored in Italy and caught on in Germany instead, where builders copied it from a published description.

The piano's original Italian name promised a keyboard that could play with what quality?

Soft and loud is 'piano e forte' in Italian: the new keyboard answered to how hard each key was pressed. The phrase shrank to pianoforte and then, oddly, to just the word for soft.

How many keys does a standard modern piano have?

88 is where a long growth spurt stopped. The first pianos spanned only about four octaves, and makers kept adding keys through the 1800s as composers asked for higher and lower notes.

Which Peanuts character plays a toy piano while Lucy leans on it and pesters him?

Schroeder plays masterpieces on a toy piano whose black keys are only painted on. Charles Schulz got the idea from a toy piano that belonged to his young daughter Meredith.

On a three-pedal grand piano, what is the leftmost pedal called?

Una corda means 'one string'. On early pianos the pedal slid the hammers across until they struck a single string per note, and on a modern grand they still shift, to hit two of the three.

The strings of a modern grand piano are stretched to a combined tension of roughly how much?

20 tons, and the pull never lets up. The strings slowly stretch under it, so a piano drifts out of tune even when nobody plays it, and a new one needs tuning several times in its first year.

A piano's treble notes have three strings each, tuned how?

In unison: three strings struck together give a stronger sound than one. A tuner has to silence two of them with mutes while setting the third.

Roughly how many individual parts can a piano contain?

About 12,000 is one leading maker's own count for a single grand. With that many pieces to cut, fit and adjust by hand, each instrument takes close to a year to build.

Which maker's Imperial grand piano adds extra keys at the bass end to span a full eight octaves?

Bösendorfer gave it 97 keys for the pianist Ferruccio Busoni, who was arranging organ music for the piano and ran out of low notes. The extras are often finished in black so players do not lose their place.

Before recordings took over, a player piano played itself by reading music from what?

A paper roll, punched with holes, ran over a tracker bar, and air drawn through each hole worked a note. Rolls made by Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Gershwin still preserve their playing.

What material traditionally covered a piano's white keys before plastics took over?

Ivory was cut into thin strips and glued to the top of each white key. Once elephants were protected by treaty the trade dried up, and makers now cover keys in acrylic or an artificial ivory instead.

Steinway & Sons also builds pianos in Hamburg, but where was it founded?

New York: Heinrich Steinweg, a German piano builder, emigrated with his sons and set up shop in a Manhattan loft. The Hamburg factory came a generation later.

Steinway's Model D is what kind of piano?

A concert grand, almost nine feet long. The famous pianists who vouch for it do so for nothing: Steinway says none of its artists is paid to endorse the instrument.

Which piano giant began in 1887 when its founder repaired a school's broken reed organ, then built his own?

Yamaha still wears its origins: the logo is three crossed tuning forks. Torakusu Yamaha went from that first organ to Japan's first pianos in 1900, and the motorcycle business was split off in 1955.

The oldest surviving piano, built in Florence in 1720, is now kept in which American museum?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has the oldest of the inventor's three surviving pianos; the others are in Rome and Leipzig. It came with the gift of Mary Elizabeth Brown, a collector who gave the museum some 3,600 instruments.

Chopin disliked giving public concerts and much preferred to play where?

In salons, the drawing rooms of Paris's great houses, his delicate touch suited the room as it never suited a big hall. Teaching and selling his music paid so well that he could stay off the concert stage, which he loathed.

Which French novelist was Chopin's lover for nine years from 1838?

George Sand, the pen name of Aurore Dudevant, spent their first winter with him on Majorca. They ended up lodging in a cold, damp monastery, and his health grew so much worse that she decided they must leave.

Which German poet coined 'Lisztomania' for the frenzy at Franz Liszt's concerts in the 1840s?

Heinrich Heine, writing from Paris, was describing fans who tore at Liszt's clothes and fought over his broken piano strings and locks of his hair.

Which piano piece was first published 40 years after its composer's death?

Für Elise first appeared in print in 1867, when the scholar Ludwig Nohl published it from a manuscript that has since vanished. Nobody knows for certain who Elise was.

Which famous piano sonata takes its nickname from a poet's image of a lake?

The 'Moonlight' Sonata owes its name to the poet Ludwig Rellstab, who pictured its first movement as a lake in moonlight; tradition makes it Lake Lucerne. Its composer's own heading was 'Sonata quasi una fantasia'.

Which keyboard work did Glenn Gould record in both 1955 and 1981, bookending his career?

The Goldberg Variations made Gould famous. In 1964 he quit the concert stage for good to work only in the studio, and there, the year before he died, he recorded them again.

What honour did Van Cliburn receive back home for winning the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow?

A ticker-tape parade, an honour no musician had been given before. In Moscow the judges had checked with Khrushchev before handing first prize to an American, and he told them to go ahead.

Which city hosts the International Chopin Piano Competition, held only once every five years?

Warsaw holds more of Chopin than his competition. He is buried in Paris, but at his own request his sister carried his heart home, and it is sealed inside a pillar of the city's Church of the Holy Cross.

Which Buenos Aires-born pianist won the Chopin Competition in 1965?

Martha Argerich had already won two international competitions at 16. Yet from the 1980s she all but gave up solo recitals, saying the stage was a lonely place, and has played mostly alongside other musicians since.

John Cage first 'prepared' a piano because a Seattle dance venue lacked room for what?

A percussion ensemble was what he had been writing for, so he wedged bolts, screws and bits of rubber between the strings of the one grand piano that fitted and made it sound like a whole band.

Which piano tune did Euphemia Allan publish in 1877 as 'Arthur de Lulli'?

Chopsticks began as 'The Celebrated Chop Waltz', and the title is an instruction: play with both hands turned on edge, little fingers down, chopping at the keys. Her brother's firm published it.

Whose band, led by the so-called 'King of Jazz', backed Gershwin at the 1924 premiere of Rhapsody in Blue?

Paul Whiteman's band had asked for the piece, but Gershwin is said to have learned how soon it was due from a newspaper, five weeks before the concert. On the night his own piano part was still only in his head.

Which airline has used Rhapsody in Blue as its theme since 1987?

United Airlines had to license the piece for its adverts and safety videos, because Gershwin's 1924 score stayed in copyright for 95 years. It became free for anyone to use only in 2020.

Billy Joel wrote 'Piano Man' after working a Los Angeles piano bar under what stage name?

Bill Martin was most of his real name, William Martin Joel. He was lying low in the bar while lawyers got him out of a bad record contract, and its regulars became the characters in the song.

Which actress played Ada, the mute pianist, in Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano?

Holly Hunter won the Best Actress Oscar for a part in which she never speaks to anyone aloud. She was up for a second Oscar the same night, for her supporting role in The Firm.

Scott Joplin's ragtime enjoyed a huge revival after his music was used in which 1973 film?

The Sting is set in 1936, almost twenty years after ragtime had gone out of fashion. Even so, Marvin Hamlisch's version of 'The Entertainer' from the film became a hit single in 1974 and helped win him an Oscar.

Which object did Liberace famously keep on top of his piano during performances?

A candelabrum became his trademark, a touch he is said to have copied from a prop in A Song to Remember, a 1945 film about Chopin. It glowed on his piano through The Liberace Show, the 1950s TV series that made him a star.

Elton John was born with which name?

Reginald Dwight built his stage name from two bandmates in Bluesology, the saxophonist Elton Dean and the singer Long John Baldry. He later made it his legal name and gave himself the middle name Hercules.

Which rock and roll pioneer, nicknamed 'The Killer', recorded 'Great Balls of Fire' for Sun Records in 1957?

Jerry Lee Lewis played standing up, kicking the stool away and hammering the keys with his feet. In 1958 the British press learned that his new wife was his 13-year-old cousin, and his tour was cancelled after three shows.

Rachmaninoff wrote his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901 after a three-year depression was lifted by what treatment?

Hypnotherapy, given free and almost daily for more than three months by Dr Nikolai Dahl, himself a keen musician. When the concerto was finished, Rachmaninoff dedicated it to his doctor.

Where in California did Rachmaninoff die in 1943, an exile from Russia since the Revolution?

Beverly Hills was his last home, far from the Russia he never stopped missing. Exile all but silenced him as a composer: in 25 years abroad he wrote little that was new and lived by touring as a pianist.

Which 19th-century pianist appeared on Germany's 100 Deutsche Mark note?

Clara Schumann had to take her own father, who was also her piano teacher, to court for the right to marry Robert Schumann. When Robert's health collapsed she became the family's only breadwinner, touring to support their children.

Which composer's Vexations carries a note about playing its short theme 840 times in succession?

Erik Satie never had the piece performed, and whether he meant the note literally is still argued over. John Cage took him at his word in 1963, with a relay of pianists who needed more than 18 hours.

Which Ray Charles recording became an official US state song in 1979?

Georgia on My Mind was written in 1930, the year Charles was born in Albany, Georgia. He sang it at the piano for the state's lawmakers in their own chamber, and weeks later they voted it the official song.

Which two earlier keyboard instruments did the piano combine and surpass?

Harpsichord and clavichord were the main stringed keyboards of the day: one plucked its strings, the other pressed brass blades against them. The piano's new idea was a hammer that struck and fell away, leaving the string free to ring.

Which John Lennon song of 1971 has a video of him at a white grand piano in an all-white room?

Imagine was mostly written at the piano in a single morning. Lennon later said that much of the lyric and the whole idea came from Yoko Ono, and in 2017 she was at last credited as its co-writer.

Which pianist led the quartet that recorded the jazz classic 'Take Five' in 1959?

Dave Brubeck's name is on the record, but he did not write its hit. 'Take Five', with its lopsided five beats to the bar, was composed by his saxophonist, Paul Desmond.

Which composer criticised Gottfried Silbermann's first pianos, then later helped him sell one?

Johann Sebastian Bach told him the treble was too weak. Silbermann was stung, but he reworked the design until Bach approved, and in the end Bach acted as his agent in a sale.

A piano's soundboard, the thin sheet that turns string vibration into sound, is usually made of which wood?

Spruce is very strong for its weight, so a thin board can bear the press of the strings and still vibrate freely. Wood also soaks up the harshest overtones, which a metal plate would let ring.

The 'double escapement' action at the heart of every modern grand piano lets a pianist do what faster?

Repeat the same note: the hammer can be thrown again before it has fallen all the way back, so the key need not rise fully between strokes. The rapid-fire repeated notes of Romantic showpieces depend on it.

Boston maker Alpheus Babcock's 1825 patent gave the piano what?

A one-piece iron frame, cast in a single pour, could hold a tension that wood alone would buckle under. That made possible the more powerful pianos bigger concert halls demanded, and every modern piano is built around one.

Some 18th-century Viennese pianos differed from modern ones in what striking visual way?

The key colours were reversed, with black naturals and white sharps, as on many keyboards of Mozart's day. The pattern flipped during the 1800s, and nobody is quite sure why.

Who first patented over-stringing for grand pianos in the United States, in 1859?

Henry Steinway Jr. ran the long bass strings over the top of the others, giving them more length inside the same case. The layout won a first prize in London in 1862 and is now standard in every grand.

The hammers of a modern piano strike the strings with heads covered in what?

Felt took over from the layered leather of early pianos. It slowly packs hard with playing and the tone turns bright and harsh, so a technician has to soften, or 'voice', the hammers from time to time.

The London firm of Broadwood shipped one of its grand pianos to Vienna as a gift for which composer?

Beethoven was almost deaf by then, yet he kept the Broadwood and composed at it through his last years. It later belonged to Franz Liszt and now stands in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest.

Dooley Wilson, a drummer who could not play piano, sat at the keyboard as Sam in which 1942 film?

Casablanca dubbed in its piano music from a player off-screen, because Wilson was a singer and drummer but not a pianist. He still performs the theme song himself on camera.

Which actor danced out a duet on a giant walking piano with Robert Loggia in the 1988 comedy Big?

Tom Hanks and Loggia built two cardboard pianos and practised the steps at home. The studio hired doubles in case the pair got it wrong.

Which White Christmas songwriter stuck to the black keys and used a transposing piano to change key?

Irving Berlin played almost entirely in one key so he could stay on the black keys, and moved a lever on his special pianos to shift into any other. For much of his career he could not read sheet music.

Which actor learned to play the piano parts himself so that La La Land needed no hand models?

Ryan Gosling practised until every close-up of his jazz-pianist character's hands could be his own. He worked at the piano in one room while Emma Stone rehearsed with the choreographer in another.

Which American songwriting district is said to be named for the din of its cheap upright pianos?

Tin Pan Alley, in the most popular account, was named by a journalist who likened its publishers' pianos, all playing different tunes, to pans being banged. The original strip was West 28th Street in Manhattan.

Which singer of Unforgettable began as a jazz pianist leading his own trio in the late 1930s?

Nat King Cole formed the King Cole Trio as its pianist, and it became the top-selling group on Capitol Records in the 1940s. Only later did his voice take over from his playing.

Which Best Picture winner follows pianist Don Shirley and his driver around the Deep South in 1962?

Green Book cast Mahershala Ali as Shirley, and composer Kris Bowers taught him basic piano skills. Bowers also stood in whenever the camera needed close-ups of hands playing.

In modern piano fingering, where each finger has a number from 1 to 5, which finger is number 1?

The thumb is finger 1 on both hands, which makes the little finger 5. In 19th-century Britain the thumb was instead marked with a cross and the other four fingers were numbered 1 to 4.

Which Marx brother was the family act's piano player, known for 'shooting' the keys as he played?

Chico left home in his mid-teens and supported himself by playing piano in nickelodeons, long before the films. His nickname was originally spelled Chicko.

Which singer of Feeling Good hoped to be a concert pianist but was rejected by the Curtis Institute?

Nina Simone took her stage name so that her mother, who would not have approved of her nightclub playing, could not trace her. She blamed the Curtis rejection on racism, which the school denied.

Which Coldplay single, built around a piano riff, won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year?

Clocks grew from a riff that came to the band's singer late one night in Liverpool, which he then worked out at the piano. The others added guitars, bass and drums around that track.

What is the American name for a crotchet, which lasts one beat in a bar of four-four time?

Quarter note is the plain American label, while crotchet comes from an Old French word for a little hook. The hook was part of how the note was drawn in medieval notation.

Which ticking device, patented by Maelzel in 1815, helps piano students keep a steady beat?

A metronome of the familiar pyramid shape borrowed its pendulum from a rival's invention in Amsterdam. Maelzel added a numbered scale and mass-produced it under his own name.

Which Italian tempo marking, whose original meaning is 'cheerful', tells a pianist to play fast?

Allegro carries a mood of joy as well as speed, a trace of what the word first meant in Italian. Presto asks for something faster still.

Which Italian marking, a dot above or below a note, tells a pianist to play it short and detached?

Staccato cuts a note short so that a sliver of silence separates it from the next one. A wedge instead of a dot asks for the even more emphatic staccatissimo.

Which musical symbol, resembling a hash sign, raises the note it is applied to by one semitone?

Sharp signs have crossbars that slant upwards from left to right, so that they do not hide the lines of the staff. On a piano, the raised note is simply the next key to the right, black or white.

Piano strings are drawn from which tempered metal, with the bass ones wrapped in copper?

Steel took over piano stringing after 1834, when a Birmingham firm's wire proved so superior to the older kind that it soon had a monopoly. The copper wrapping adds mass while keeping the bass strings flexible.

A classical piano trio usually joins the piano with a violin and which other instrument?

Cello and violin are thought to have done the keyboard a favour at first: pianos of Haydn's day sounded weak and tinkling, and the strings strengthened the tone. His trios are even nicknamed accompanied sonatas.

Pressing a piano's rightmost pedal moves which parts off the strings, letting them ring freely?

The dampers normally silence a string as soon as its key is released. One early builder is thought to have let players lift them with a knee lever, before any foot pedal did the job.

Which musical term describes sweeping a finger along the piano keys from one note to another?

Glissando is an Italian-looking word built on the French glisser. On a piano the slide comes out in steps, because every key it crosses still sounds its own separate pitch.

Which John Cage work, premiered by pianist David Tudor in 1952, tells the player to make no sound?

4′33″ began with Tudor sitting at the piano and closing the keyboard lid to mark the start of the piece. The score instructs performers not to play through all three of its movements.

Which Chinese pianist played at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics?

Lang Lang was seen that night by an audience put at between one and four billion people. He first wanted to learn at the age of two, after watching a cartoon cat perform a Liszt rhapsody.

Which actor won an Oscar for playing Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's 2002 film The Pianist?

Adrien Brody practised for many months before and during the shoot, so that his keystrokes would convince viewers he was really playing. The film also won Oscars for its director and its screenplay.

Whose piano sessions did Pixar's animators use as the reference for Joe Gardner's playing in Soul?

Jon Batiste also composed the original jazz numbers for the film's city scenes. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote the ambient score for its otherworldly ones.

Which Muppet, performed by Jim Henson himself, was the resident pianist of The Muppet Show?

Rowlf began in 1962 as the spokesman in dog-food commercials. He then became the first Muppet with a regular spot on network television, on The Jimmy Dean Show.

Which New Orleans pianist sold more than 65 million records with hits such as Ain't That a Shame?

Fats Domino joined a local bandleader's group in 1947 for $3 a week at the piano. By 1955 five of his records had each sold more than a million copies.

Which singer-pianist's 1971 album Tapestry topped the US album chart for 15 consecutive weeks?

Carole King filled Tapestry with new songs plus her own versions of two 1960s hits she had co-written for other singers. It stayed on the charts for around six years.

Which singer plays a piano as it moves through Los Angeles in the video for A Thousand Miles?

Vanessa Carlton wrote the song's piano riff in 1998 at her parents' house in Philadelphia. Her mother, listening in, told her straight away that it was a hit.

Which jazz pianist led his own orchestra for fifty years and made his name at Harlem's Cotton Club?

Duke Ellington got the Cotton Club job only after another bandleader turned it down. He directed his players from the keyboard with piano cues and gestures, very rarely picking up a baton.

Which French composer wrote the piano piece Clair de lune, first titled Promenade sentimentale?

Claude Debussy began the piece around 1890 but held it back as immature work. He let it be published only in 1905, once fame had made his early piano pieces worth a publisher's while.

Which composer faced Muzio Clementi in a piano contest staged for Emperor Joseph II in 1781?

Mozart and Clementi each had to improvise and play selections from their own works for the court's guests on Christmas Eve. Mozart later told his father that his rival was a mere mechanic, without taste or feeling.

Which word for a solo concert was first applied to a Franz Liszt performance in London in 1840?

Recital was first used of his concert at the Hanover Square Rooms. Liszt is credited as the first pianist to give solo concerts in the modern sense, and he usually played his enormous repertoire from memory.

Which Chopin piece is said to have been inspired by watching a small dog chase its own tail?

Minute Waltz was its publisher's nickname and meant small, as in miniature, so Chopin never intended it to be played in sixty seconds. A typical performance takes between one and a half and two and a half times that.

Irish composer John Field originated which piano form, later made famous by Chopin's 21 examples?

The nocturne, as Field shaped it, floats a singing melody over a rippling, almost guitar-like accompaniment. He wrote 18 of them himself, three fewer than his famous successor.

Which Russian wrote Pictures at an Exhibition for piano, decades before Ravel orchestrated it?

Modest Mussorgsky wrote it in 1874 as a musical tour of a memorial show for the artist Viktor Hartmann, who had died suddenly the year before. Ravel's 1922 version became the most performed of many orchestrations.

Which Viennese teacher, whose studies still drill piano students, taught the young Franz Liszt?

Carl Czerny was so impressed by the boy that he taught him free of charge. Liszt repaid the favour by playing his teacher's music in Paris and dedicating a celebrated set of études to him.

Which Scott Joplin composition of 1899 earned him a royalty of one cent on every copy sold?

Maple Leaf Rag was considered significantly harder to play than the average sheet music of its time. Its first print run of 400 copies took a year to sell, yet steady sales later gave Joplin an income for life.

Which pianist went back to the Soviet Union in 1986, his first visit since 1925, to play in Moscow?

Vladimir Horowitz found most of the Moscow tickets reserved for the Soviet elite, so a number of Conservatory students simply gatecrashed the hall. The concert was also filmed for television.

Under the international tuning standard, the A above middle C on a piano sounds at which frequency?

440 Hz had been the informal choice of the American music industry since 1926. Delegates from five European countries met over the question at the BBC's London headquarters in 1939, and an international standards body took it up in 1955.

Which world-famous concert pianist became prime minister of newly independent Poland in 1919?

Ignacy Paderewski served as prime minister and foreign minister for most of 1919, and he signed the Treaty of Versailles for Poland. His ten months in office also brought democratic elections to parliament.

Which jazz pianist, the composer of Round Midnight, would stand up and dance mid-performance?

Thelonious Monk would stop while the other musicians played on, dance for a few moments and then return to the piano. He was also known for his suits, hats and sunglasses, and in 1964 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Which jazz pianist joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963 and scored a 1983 pop hit with Rockit?

Herbie Hancock caught Davis's attention with his debut album, Takin' Off. One of its tunes, Watermelon Man, also gave the bandleader Mongo Santamaría a hit single.

Which jazz pianist improvised the best-selling solo piano album at the Cologne Opera House in 1975?

Keith Jarrett had to play a small rehearsal instrument in poor condition, because opera-house staff had put the wrong piano on stage. He nearly walked out, until the 18-year-old promoter convinced him to perform anyway.

Which jazz pianist from Toledo, visually impaired from infancy, had his own radio show in his teens?

Art Tatum started at the piano as a small child, playing by ear with the help of an excellent memory and sense of pitch. One critic who heard him on 52nd Street declared him the greatest pianist in jazz history.

Which electric piano evolved from its inventor's wartime work teaching recovering soldiers to play?

Rhodes pianos descend from miniature instruments that could be played in bed. Patients in convalescent hospitals built them in the craft shops from discarded aircraft parts.

Which Paris piano maker owned the hall where Chopin gave his first and last concerts in the city?

Pleyel also supplied Chopin's own pianos, which he considered the very best to be had. Ravel and Stravinsky were among the later composers who chose the firm's instruments.

Which pianist, a famous philosopher's brother, lost an arm in war and inspired a Ravel concerto?

Paul Wittgenstein altered the score of the Concerto for the Left Hand so freely that Ravel was furious, and the two made up only once he agreed to play it as written. His younger brother was the philosopher Ludwig.

Which Hungarian wrote Mikrokosmos, 153 piano pieces that climb from beginner to concert level?

Béla Bartók dedicated the first two volumes to his son Péter, and teachers still use the set in piano lessons. It ends with dances in Bulgarian rhythm, shaped by his years of collecting folk music.

Which piano maker, founded by an engineer and pianist in 1981, builds the F308 with a fourth pedal?

Fazioli gave the F308 an extra pedal that brings the hammers closer to the strings, which lowers the volume without changing the tone. The firm still carries the name of its founder, Paolo.

Which Romantic composer wrote eight volumes of short piano pieces called Songs Without Words?

Felix Mendelssohn seems to have invented the title himself, though his sister Fanny wrote similar pieces and may have helped inspire the idea. Each of the volumes holds six songs.