Many people have their first encounters with classical music at the keyboard of a piano. The short piano pieces by nineteenth-century Romantic composers, like Chopin's Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4, or Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), seem so wedded to the keyboard that they imbue the piano with a sensitive soul of its own.   (read more)

Many people have their first encounters with classical music at the keyboard of a piano. The short piano pieces by nineteenth-century Romantic composers, like Chopin's Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4, or Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), seem so wedded to the keyboard that they imbue the piano with a sensitive soul of its own. Unlike some of the larger classical forms, they need no special effort to understand or appreciate. Until the advent of mechanical sound reproduction, a piano or another keyboard instrument might be the only way a household could make music for itself -- and in terms of sheer size of the literature, keyboard music is probably the largest subdivision of classical music as a whole.

The piano (or pianoforte, meaning "soft-loud") was invented by the Italian instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1709, but it didn't come into common use for another half century or so. Its predecessor was the harpsichord, which itself grew out of a variety of small keyboard instruments dating back to medieval times. Bach, a formidable keyboard player, wrote some of his most profound music for the harpsichord (such the the Goldberg Variations) or for the organ. One of the first composers to make full use of the piano's powers was Mozart, whose sonatas, pianist Artur Schnabel once said, were "too easy for beginners, and too difficult for virtuosi." Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas are central to his output and cover every range of mood from the ultra-dramatic (the Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, known as the "Appassionata"), to the lyrical (the "Moonlight" sonata, Op. 27, No. 1), to the graceful and circumspect (the Sonata No. 24, Op. 78), to the transcendent (the Sonata No. 32, Op. 111).

For nineteenth-century audiences a virtuoso pianist was a star, analogous in some ways to the guitar gods of rock music. Chopin and especially Liszt caused sensations when they appeared on the scene in Paris, playing their own compositions; Chopin's two sets of Etudes are much more than simply piano exercises. Schumann's piano career was cut short by a finger injury, but he found a sympathetic interpreter in his wife Clara Schumann. She composed piano music of her own and later championed the work of Brahms, whose small piano works like the three Intermezzi, Op. 117 often have the kind of complexity that keeps performers and listeners returning to them for many years.

The touring composer-virtuoso lived on into the twentieth century in the career of Rachmaninov, and many other modern composers pushed pianists to their limits technically. A good example is the set of three Ravel pieces entitled Gaspard de la Nuit, which the composer himself would have had trouble executing. The percussive quality of the piano allowed the Hungarian composer Bartók to highlight the Eastern European folk rhythms that permeated his music, and Mikrokosmos, his series of pieces for student pianists, has fascinated both young players and the people who have to listen to them. Prokofiev's five piano concertos and nine sonatas are all major works in classic molds, and the piano was likewise of interest to experimenters and musical free thinkers: John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1948) touched off a spate of works that involved modifications to the instrument, small or in some cases drastic.