If you’ve ever played the piano before, chances are you’ve used the pedals by your feet. Most grand pianos will have three of them, and they all have different uses. But where did they come from? How, and why, were they developed?
The modern piano’s three pedals have pretty distinct functions; the right pedal, or the damper pedal, is the one that is by far the most used. It lifts the dampers off of the strings so that every note you play sustains even after you release the key. The left pedal, also called the una corda or the soft pedal, is designed to create a softer, more muted sound, and it achieves this on most piano designs by shifting the keys and hammers to the right so that each hammer only hits one of the strings (many notes on a piano have two or three strings that create the full sound). The middle pedal, which is rarely used, is usually a sostenuto pedal. It has the same effect as the damper pedal, but only on the notes that you are already holding down when you press the sostenuto pedal. This lets you sustain certain notes while simultaneously playing shorter notes elsewhere.
The first mechanism that changed the sound of the piano in a way that resembles our modern piano pedals was the una corda, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy. Cristofori’s 1700 piano is the first pianoforte that we know of. You’ll notice that Bartolomeo’s una corda shares the same name as our modern left pedal, and that’s because they shared the same function; however, Cristofori’s original una corda was a hand stop, not a pedal. This made it very clunky to use, as the pianist would have to stop playing with one hand every time they wanted to use it.
Moving ahead to Germany in the late 1700s, Johann Stein, who designed the pianos that Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn wrote music for, found a way around the problem of having to use your hands by using a knee lever instead. The lever itself is believed to be developed around 1765, and Mozart wrote about them in a 1777 letter, in which he says,
“I have played my six sonatas by heart repeatedly, both here and in Munich. The fifth in G, I played at the distinguished Casino concert, and the last in D, which has an incomparable effect on Stein’s pianos. The pedals, pressed by the knees, are also better made by him than by any one else ; you scarcely require to touch them to make them act, and as soon as the pressure is removed not the slightest vibration is perceptible.”
The first instance of the pedal itself is not as clear, but the consensus seems to be that it came from England. Gottfried Silbermann, the first German piano builder, had many English piano builders as apprentices, and a few of them are credited with first incorporating the damper pedal. Americus Backers, one of these English apprentices, has a surviving 1772 piano with what are believe to be the original pedals.
Piano makers were very experimental with how they arranged the pedals from then on, and the configuration changed constantly. Beethoven owned several different pianos from different makers, all with different pedal configurations. His Broadwood grand had a soft pedal and a separate damper pedal for the treble and bass notes. He also had a piano designed specifically to be louder for him, as he was going deaf. This piano had five different pedals as well as more strings on some of the notes.
The piano pedals are very important in modern classical playing, and looking back on the history of their creation and all of their different variations can be very interesting. It is entirely possible that the modern pedal configuration may end up changing at some point, so looking back at how these changes were made can offer a unique perspective on something as taken for granted as the piano pedals.