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Burney distinguishes Americus Backers by special mention. He is said to have been a Dutchman. Between 1772 and 1776, Backers produced the well-known English action, which has remained the most durable and one of the best up to the present day. It refers in direct leverage to Cristofori's first action. It is opposite to Stein's contemporary invention, which has the hopper fixed.
Stein's light and facile movement with shallow key-fall, resembling Cristofori's in bearing little weight, was gratefully accepted by the German clavichord players, and, reacting, became one of the determining agents of the piano music and style of playing of the Vienna school.
The name has not been met with again between the Estense document and Scipione Maffei's well-known description, written in 1711, of Cristofori's "gravecembalo col piano e forte." My view of Cristofori's invention allows me to think that the Estense "piano e forte" may have been a hammer cembalo, a very imperfect one, of course.
I had this one, which was known to have remained in the new palace at Potsdam until the present time unaltered, examined, and, by a drawing of the action, found it was identical with Cristofori's.
The sketch of Cristofori's action in Maffei's essay, from which I have had a working model accurately made, shows that in the first instruments the action was not complete, and it may not have been perfected when Prince Ferdinand died in 1713.
I have given the first place in description to Cristofori's actions, instead of to the "cembalo" or instrument to which they were applied, because piano and forte, from touch, became possible through them, and what else was accomplished by Cristofori was due, primarily, to the dynamic idea.
In the English action, as in the Florentine, the hopper rises with the key. To the direct leverage of Cristofori's first action, Backers combined the check of the second, and then added an important invention of his own, a regulating screw and button for the escapement. Backers died in 1776. It is unfortunate we can refer to no pianoforte made by him.
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