Bartolomeo Cristofori and the Invention of the Piano

Trained as a violin and keyboard instrument maker, Stewart Pollens served as the conservator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York between 1976 and 2006, and is the Director of the firm Violin Advisor, LLC. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and award-winning publications on musical instrument history including The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1995), Stradivari (Cambridge, 2010) and the The Manual of Musical Instrument Conservation (Cambridge, 2015).