The heavenly keyboard behind the Sugar Plum Fairy, Hedwig's Theme and Pure Imagination
The celesta looks like a small upright piano, but its hammers strike steel bars over wooden resonators, giving a soft bell-like shimmer. Its name comes from the French for heavenly. Tchaikovsky made it famous in The Nutcracker, and it later opened Pure Imagination and sparkled through the early Harry Potter films.
A Paris harmonium builder, Auguste Mustel, invented the celesta in 1886. His father had earlier built a forerunner called the typophone, which struck tuning forks instead of metal plates, and a near-identical instrument, the dulcitone, appeared in Scotland at about the same time. Both were too quiet to be heard over a full orchestra, a problem the celesta partly solved, though even it is too delicate for loud ensemble passages.
It also reaches unusually high. The celesta sounds an octave above the written notes, and its top C vibrates at 4186 Hz, among the highest pitches in regular musical use. Though technically percussion, it is normally handled by an orchestra's keyboard player. Only two companies, Schiedmayer and Yamaha, still make them.
Tchaikovsky is usually named as the first major composer to write for it with full orchestra, in his 1891 symphonic poem The Voyevoda. A year later he gave it the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, after the ballet master Marius Petipa asked for music like drops of water spurting from fountains. Yet Ernest Chausson had quietly beaten him, using it in 1888 in incidental music for a French version of The Tempest. Mahler, Holst in Neptune from The Planets, Bartók, Gershwin and Shostakovich, who scored it in seven of his fifteen symphonies, all followed.
Jazz pianists adopted it from 1928, when Earl Hines took it up, and Fats Waller sometimes played celesta with one hand and piano with the other. Its jazz moment faded once the vibraphone arrived. Pop and film kept it alive, from The Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning and Rod Stewart's Maggie May to the Blue Fairy's magic in Pinocchio and the dreamy opening of the theme to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
Source: Celesta
