Johann (Georg) Andreas Stein (16 May 1728 – 29 February 1792) was an outstanding German maker of keyboard instruments, a central figure in the history of the piano.
He was primarily responsible for the design of the so-called German hammer action. Pianos with this hammer action, or its more developed form known as the Viennese action, may be said to be appropriate for the performance of the piano music of Haydn, Mozart, and the early works of Beethoven and Schubert.
Stein was born in 1728 in Heidelsheim in the Upper Palatinate. He died in Augsburg in 1792. He learned his trade as an organ builder from his father in Heidelsheim. From August 1748 to January 1749, he worked as a journeyman at two workshops, those of Johann Andreas Silbermann in Strasbourg and of Franz Jakob Späth in Regensburg. Johann Andreas Silbermann was the eldest of the four sons of Andreas Silbermann, the elder brother of Gottfried Silbermann. Stein settled in Augsburg, probably in 1750 and became a citizen in 1756 or 1757, the latter being the year in which he completed his magnificent organ for the so-called Barfüßerkirche in Augsburg. In the same year, he became an organist at the church. According to a letter he wrote, he gave up organ building in the 1760s in order to devote himself to stringed keyboard instruments. His first contact with piano making may have occurred in the Späth workshop, not in the Silbermann workshop.
As a stringed keyboard instrument maker, Stein built clavichords, harpsichords, and pianos. He also built some more extraordinary keyboard instruments, including the "Poli-Toni-Clavichordium" (described in the Augsburg Intelligenzblatt in 1769) that combined a large harpsichord having four choirs of strings (registration 8', 8', 8', 16') with a piano. He also built (1772) the "Melodica," a small organ in which the player's touch could alter volume, which could be used with a harpsichord or a piano or on a separate manual of an organ or simply as a solo instrument. The importance of the Melodica, of which Stein may only have made a few prototypes, lies in Stein's own 1772 description. In that published description, he expressed his dissatisfaction with keyboard instruments in general because they did not allow expressivity in the manner of the human voice, the violin and the trombone.
The 1769 description of the expressive possibilities of the Poli-Tono-Clavichordium nonetheless shows Stein's confidence in stringed keyboard instruments that in the end led him to the invention of his so-called German hammer action shortly before 1780. He also built "vis-à-vis" instruments with a piano and a harpsichord facing one another in a single case. In both the surviving examples (Verona 1777, Naples 1783), the player of the harpsichord (8', 8', 8', 16' in Verona, 8' quill, 8' leather, 4' quill in Naples) can also couple the piano action at the other end on one of the harpsichord keyboards. The Verona instrument has hand stops for engaging and disengaging the stops, in the manner of an organ or a German harpsichord, whereas the Naples instrument has knee levers in the manner of French harpsichords.
Stein travelled twice to Paris and once to Vienna. He also made trips to other cities in Germany and Switzerland to deliver instruments as evidenced in his notebook. The hammer action in the 1777 Vis-à-vis is unique in Stein's oeuvre, that in the 1783 Vis-à-vis is Stein's so-called German action.
Two clavichords by Stein survive, one of them, now in the Budapest National Museum, was bought by Leopold Mozart for practising while travelling. One instrument combining a piano and a single rank of organ pipes survives in Gothenburg’s Historical Museum. About fifteen Hammerflügel (wing-shaped pianos) bearing Stein's label survive, ranging in date from 1780 to 1794 (sic). The making of those after about 1790 would have been supervised by Nannette, Stein's daughter. Of the fifteen, two are privately owned (1782 and 1783).
The instrument shown above is not by Stein but probably by Louis Dulcken. Apart from the music desk, typical of Dulcken's work, the instrument has the appearance of a piano by Stein. Many such instruments built after Stein, some with fake labels, exist.
His contributions to the piano
Stein's most important innovation was perfected around 1780, and became known as the Prellzungenmechanik, or German action, and distinguished from previous mechanisms by an escapement mechanism.
In this arrangement, each hammer was mounted on top of the key, with the head on the end closer to the player, a traditional arrangement in German pianos of Stein's day. The hammers were like small, asymmetrical levers, with the hammer head far from the fulcrum, and a small upward-facing hook ("beak") on the other side of the lever, much closer to the fulcrum. When the player depressed the key, the whole hammer assembly would rise. The beak would engage an escapement hopper attached to the keyframe. The escapement hopper pulled down on the beak as it rose, in turn causing the hammer (the other end of the lever) to fly upward and strike the string. The escapement hopper was hinged and sprung; this permitted the beak to push past it as the key sank back to rest position.
Latcham (see Grove reference below) calls this invention "a breakthrough in the piano's history;" it "offer[ed] the player a remarkable control of the hammers, especially when playing softly, and [wa]s astonishingly responsive to the player’s touch."
Stein may have been the first to produce a knee lever for the dampers, the forerunner of the damper pedal using which the player can disengage all the dampers from the strings. Such a device had been devised by Gottfried Silbermann in the 1740s for his wing-shaped pianos but it was operated by two hand levers and required the use of the player's hands to work them, and thus could only be deployed during pauses in the music. Stein's device was controlled by a knee lever.
Stein's device is mentioned in the 1769 description of his Poly-Toni-Clavichordium. It is clear from the description however that Stein's 1769 knee lever, when pressed in, engaged the dampers; it did not disengage them. Playing pianos without the dampers, using a knee lever to engage the dampers when required was not unusual at the time. Stein's later pianos, starting with the one described by Mozart in 1777, had a knee lever for disengaging all the dampers at once, permitting the equivalent of modern piano pedaling
Stein's acquaintance with Mozart
Mozart visited and befriended Stein in Augsburg in 1777, during the (unsuccessful) job-hunting tour that took him also to Mannheim and Paris. The enthusiastic letter that Mozart wrote to his father Leopold is informative concerning Stein and Mozart's own preferences in pianos. The letter is very widely quoted. The following translation, by Emily Anderson, is taken from Broder 1941:
This time I shall begin at once with Stein's pianofortes. Before I had seen any of his make, Späth's claviers had always been my favourites. But now I much prefer Stein's, for they damp ever so much better than the Regensburg instruments. ... In whatever way I touch the keys, the tone is always even. It never jars, it is never stronger or weaker or entirely absent; in a word, it is always even.
It is true that he does not sell a pianoforte of this kind for less than three hundred gulden, but the trouble and the labour which Stein puts into the making of it cannot be paid for. His instruments have this special advantage over others that they are made with escape action. Only one maker in a hundred bothers about this. But without an escapement it is impossible to avoid jangling and vibration after the note is struck. When you touch the keys, the hammers fall back again the moment after they have struck the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them ...