Howard Goodall's Big Bangs

Bartolomeo Cristofori and his Amazing Loud and Soft Machine (1x4)

Air date: Apr 02, 2000

Back to Florence, this time to look at the emergence of an instrument which quickly became the most popular, versatile, prevalent instrument the world has ever seen: the piano. But unlike the gradual way in which most other instruments came into being, one man in particular can be credited with giving us the piano as we know it today, with catapulting it forward from the also-rans: Bartolomeo Cristofori.