Piano Trivia
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100 free Piano trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The piano is the instrument almost everyone has touched at least once, and these 42 piano trivia questions cover everything from how it works to who played it best. The first section is the machine itself: Bartolomeo Cristofori's invention for the Medici around 1700, the 88 keys and what they span, the 230-odd strings under 20 tons of tension, the three pedals and what each does, the cast-iron frame, the player piano, and the makers from Steinway and Bösendorfer to Yamaha. Then come the players and the pieces: Chopin's thirty public concerts and his heart in Warsaw, Lisztomania, Clara Schumann playing from memory, Rachmaninoff's cure by hypnosis, Beethoven's Für Elise and the Moonlight Sonata, Glenn Gould's humming, Van Cliburn's ticker-tape parade, Scott Joplin, Rhapsody in Blue, John Cage's prepared piano, Chopsticks, Piano Man, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Elton John and Liberace's candelabra. Beginners will get the easy ones; teachers and conservatory students will enjoy the hard ones. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and reference sources, and each question shows its source once you answer.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who invented the piano in Florence while keeping the Medici court's instruments?
Bartolomeo Cristofori
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.
Q 02The piano's original Italian name promised a keyboard that could play with what quality?
Soft and loud
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.
Q 03How many keys does a standard modern piano have?
88
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.
Q 04Which Peanuts character plays a toy piano while Lucy leans on it and pesters him?
Schroeder
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.
Q 05On a three-pedal grand piano, what is the leftmost pedal called?
Una corda
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.
Q 06The strings of a modern grand piano are stretched to a combined tension of roughly how much?
20 tons
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.
Q 07A piano's treble notes have three strings each, tuned how?
In unison
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.
Q 08Roughly how many individual parts can a piano contain?
About 12,000
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.
Q 09Which maker's Imperial grand piano adds extra keys at the bass end to span a full eight octaves?
Bösendorfer
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.
Q 10Before recordings took over, a player piano played itself by reading music from what?
A paper roll
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.
Q 11What material traditionally covered a piano's white keys before plastics took over?
Ivory
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.
Q 12Steinway & Sons also builds pianos in Hamburg, but where was it founded?
New York
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.
Q 13Steinway's Model D is what kind of piano?
Concert grand
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.
Q 21Which keyboard work did Glenn Gould record in both 1955 and 1981, bookending his career?
The Goldberg Variations
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.
Q 22What honour did Van Cliburn receive back home for winning the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow?
A ticker-tape parade
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.
Q 23Which city hosts the International Chopin Piano Competition, held only once every five years?
Q 14Which piano giant began in 1887 when its founder repaired a school's broken reed organ, then built his own?
Yamaha
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.
Q 15The oldest surviving piano, built in Florence in 1720, is now kept in which American museum?
Metropolitan Museum of Art
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.
Q 16Chopin disliked giving public concerts and much preferred to play where?
In salons
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.
Q 17Which French novelist was Chopin's lover for nine years from 1838?
George Sand
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.
Q 18Which German poet coined 'Lisztomania' for the frenzy at Franz Liszt's concerts in the 1840s?
Heinrich Heine
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.
Q 19Which piano piece was first published 40 years after its composer's death?
Für Elise
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.
Q 20Which famous piano sonata takes its nickname from a poet's image of a lake?
Moonlight
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'.
Warsaw
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.
Q 24Which Buenos Aires-born pianist won the Chopin Competition in 1965?
Martha Argerich
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.
Q 25John Cage first 'prepared' a piano because a Seattle dance venue lacked room for what?
A percussion ensemble
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.
Q 26Which piano tune did Euphemia Allan publish in 1877 as 'Arthur de Lulli'?
Chopsticks
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.
Q 27Whose band, led by the so-called 'King of Jazz', backed Gershwin at the 1924 premiere of Rhapsody in Blue?
Paul Whiteman's
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.
Q 28Which airline has used Rhapsody in Blue as its theme since 1987?
United Airlines
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.
Q 29Billy Joel wrote 'Piano Man' after working a Los Angeles piano bar under what stage name?
Bill Martin
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.
Q 30Which actress played Ada, the mute pianist, in Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano?
Holly Hunter
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.