Gottfried Silbermann (January 14, 1683 – August 4, 1753) was a German builder of keyboard instruments. He built harpsichords, clavichords, organs, and fortepianos; his modern reputation rests mainly on the latter two.


Life：

Very little is known about Silbermann's youth. He was born in Kleinbobritzsch (now a part of Frauenstein, Saxony) as the youngest son of the carpenter Michael Silbermann. They moved to the nearby town of Frauenstein in 1685, and it is possible that Gottfried also learnt carpentry there. He moved to Straßburg in 1702, where he learnt organ construction from his brother and came in touch with the French-Alsatian school of organ construction. He returned to Saxony as a master craftsman in 1710, and opened his own organ workshop in Freiberg one year later. His second project in Germany was the "Grand Organ" in the Freiberg Cathedral of St. Mary, finished in 1714. In 1723 he was bestowed the title Königlich Polnischen und Churfürstlich Sächsischen Hof- und Landorgelmachers ("Honorary Court and State Organ Builder to the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony") by Frederick I.[1] Silbermann died in Dresden in 1753, probably as the result of a tin-lead poisoning, while still working on the organ at the Hofkirche.


Silbermann and the piano：

Silbermann was also a central figure in the history of the piano. He transmitted to later builders the crucial ideas of Bartolomeo Cristofori (the inventor of the piano), ensuring their survival, and also invented the forerunner of the damper pedal.
Evidence from the Universal-Lexicon of Johann Heinrich Zedler indicates that Silbermann first built a piano in 1732, only a year after Cristofori's death. Silbermann may have found out about Cristofori's invention as follows. In 1709, Scipione Maffei did research on the newly invented piano, including an interview with Cristofori, and published his findings (with a ringing endorsement of the instrument) in a 1711 Italian journal article. In 1725, this article was translated into German by the Dresden court poet Johann Ulrich König, who was almost certainly a personal acquaintance of Silbermann.
In his mature pianos, Silbermann scrupulously copied the complex action found in Cristofori's last instruments, failing only to produce a correct copy of the back check. Silbermann also copied another ingenious Cristofori invention, the inverted wrest plank (see Bartolomeo Cristofori for the function of this device). In other respects (case construction, choice of wood species, string diameters and spacing, keyboard design), Silbermann relied on his own experience as a harpsichord builder.
During the 1740s, King Frederick the Great of Prussia became acquainted with Silbermann's pianos and bought a number of them (the early-19th-century musicologist Johann Nikolaus Forkel claims this number was 15, though Stewart Pollens (reference below) believes this to be "certainly exaggerated"). Two of Silbermann's pianos are still located in Frederick's palaces in Potsdam today; they stand out for their elegant but plain and sober design amid the elaborate splendor of their surroundings.