Organmistrzowski rodowód fortepianmistrzów

For centuries all kinds of keyboard instruments such as organs, clavichords, harpsichords and pianos were made by organ builders, with pianos being additional by-products. The gradual specialization in manufacture came along with a growing demand for stringed keyboard instruments. Already in the 18th century, some organ builders in larger musical centers began making more harpsichords than pipe organs. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, one could clearly notice the trade specialization of makers originally educated as organ builders, of whom only few spent the rest of their lives manufacturing and repairing organs. Making harpsichords or pianos did not demand continuous journey in search for places or churches in need of new organs, where the maker had to stay for at least a few months, first to build the instrument and then to place it at the proper location within a given church. It did not demand adaptation to the architecture and acoustics of the sacral building. Instead, one could build these newly popular instruments in a stationary workshop or manufacture, and using a similar structural and artistic form, which in time simply gave way to serial production. This specialization process, first within the framework of a single trade, and later splitting in two different ones, will be shown on the examples of both European makers (such as Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence or Gottfried Silbermann in Freiberg), and Polish builders from the 18th–20th centuries — working in a variety of locations: from magnates’ mansions and small towns, like Sandomierz, through larger manufacture centers as Warsaw, Cracow, Gdańsk or Lvov.