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The pedal piano (also known as the piano-pédalier or simply pédalier) is a kind of piano that includes a Pedal keyboard, enabling bass register notes to be played with the feet, as is standard on the pipe organ.
There are two broad types of pedal pianos: either the pedal board may be an integral part of the instrument, using the same strings and mechanism as the manual keyboard (e.g. the 19th century Érard pedal grand piano and Pleyel upright pedal piano), or it may consist of two independent pianos (each with its separate mechanics and strings) which are placed one above the other, either a regular piano played by the hands and a bass-register piano played by the feet (e.g. the 18th century pedal piano owned by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the 21st century Doppio Borgato made by Luigi Borgato), or two standard pianos of which the lower one is played from a pedalboard which acts on its (manual) keyboard through a special mechanism (e.g. the 21st century Pinchi Pedalpiano System).
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart owned a fortepiano with independent pedals, built for him in 1785 by Anton Walter. His Leopold Mozart refers to this in a letter to his daughter on March 12, 1785. The autograph manuscript of the Concerto in D minor K. 466, composed the same year, shows a series of chords for the left hand plus bass notes an octave lower, covering about measures. Some believe that the bass notes were intended for the pedal, but there is disagreement about this interpretation. The low bass notes could be an earlier version of the left hand part which Mozart neglected to cross out when he decided to replace them with chords.
Louis Schone made a pedalflügel for Robert Schumann in 1843, when he was in Dresden. Schumann preferred an upright pedal piano, and his pedal keyboard had 29 notes and was connected with an action placed at the back of the piano where a special soundboard, covered with 29 strings, was built into the case. Schumann wrote much music for the pedal piano and was so enthusiastic about the instrument that he convinced Felix Mendelssohn, who owned a grand pedal piano, to form a class devoted to it in the Leipzig Conservatory. Charles-Valentin Alkan owned an Sebastien Erard pedal piano made in 1853 and now in the Musée de la Musique, the historic instrument collection of the Conservatoire de Paris. Alkan composed a number of works for it, in the virtuoso style to be found in his other piano music. Kevin Bowyer has revived some of this music in recent years, though he plays it on the organ.
The instrument never became very popular in the 1900s, and it remains a rarity. It is mostly used to enable organists to practice at home, rather like the pedal harpsichord and clavichord were centuries ago, instead of being used to play the pedal piano repertoire. In the 2000s, pedal pianos are made in Italy by Luigi Borgato (who reinvented and patented it). This company makes the Doppio Borgato, an independent bass-register instrument connected to a pedal board, on which a concert grand can be placed. Borgato expanded the register of the bass piano to 37 notes, A0 to A3 (rather than the standard 30 or 32 on an organ). On September 13, 2011 Italian pianist Roberto Prosseda presented the modern premiere of the Concerto for pedal piano and orchestra by Charles Gounod with Orchestra Toscanini di Parma conducted by Jan Latham Koenig. "Robert Prosseda resurrects the pedal piano", Classic FM website On April 27, 2012, the Pinchi Pedalpiano System, designed by Claudio Pinchi and Roberto Prosseda, and built by the organ building enterprise Fratelli Pinchi Ars Organi, was presented in a public performance by Roberto Prosseda. It is a pedalboard which works with any two standard 88-key grand pianos. The Pinchi pedalboard has 37 pedals (from A to A three octaves up), but has a total range of five octaves, thanks to its 61 wooden "fingers", some of which can be seen in the adjacent picture, and which operate the lower 61 keys (A0 to A5) of the lower piano. These "fingers" are mapped to the 37 note pedalboard in three independent stops of three octaves each (A0–A3 for 16′, A1–A4 for 8′, and A2–A5 for 4′). Wall Street Journal article on Roberto Prosseda and pedal-piano renaissance, The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2012
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