Although there were earlier attempts to make stringed keyboard instruments with struck strings, most notably hammered dulcimers such as the Iranian instruments santur and santoor, the apparatus of the modern piano is credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy, who was employed by Prince Ferdinand de Medici as the Keeper of the Instruments.
Much of the most widely admired piano repertoire, for example, that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, was composed for a type of instrument that is rather altered from the concomitant instruments on which this bebop is normally performed today. Even the bebop of the Romantics, including Liszt, Chopin, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms, was written for pianos substantially different from ours.