from two unisons (forte) to one string (piano), at that time a
Flemish practice, and most likely brought to Italy by one of the
Flemish musicians who founded the Italian school of composition.
About the year 1600, when accompaniment was invented for
monody, large cembalos were made for the orchestras to bring
out the bass part, the performer standing to play. Such an
instrument was called “archicembalo,”[1] a name also applied to
a large cembalo, made by Vito Trasuntino, a Venetian, in 1606,
intended by thirty-one keys in each of its four octaves—one
hundred and twenty-five in all—to restore the three genera of
the ancient Greeks. How many attempts have been made
before and since Trasuntino to purify intonation in keyboard
instruments by multiplying keys in the octave? Simultaneously
with Father Smith’s well-known experiment in the Temple organ,
London, there were divided keys in an Italian harpsichord
to gain a separate G sharp and A flat, and a separate D sharp
and E flat.
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Fig. 11.—Roman Clavicembalo by Geronimo of Bologna, 1521; Vict. and Albert Museum. |
Double keyboards and stops in the long cembalo or harpsichord came into use in the Netherlands early in the 16th century. We find them imported into England. The following citations, quoted by Rimbault in his History of the Pianoforte, but imperfectly understood by him, are from the privy purse expenses of King Henry VIII., as extracted by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1827.
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Fig. 12.—Virdung’s Clavicy- |
“1530 (April). Item the vj daye paied to William Lewes for ii payer of virginalls in one coffer with iiii stoppes brought to Grenewiche iii li. And for ii payer of virginalls in one coffer brought to the More other iii li.”
Now the second instrument may be explained, virginals meaning any quilled instrument, as a double spinet, like that at Nuremberg by Martin van der Beest, the octave division being movable. But the first cannot be so explained; the four stops can only belong to a harpsichord, and the two pair instrument to a double-keyed one, one keyboard being over, and not by the side of the other. Again from the inventory after the king’s death (see Brit. Mus. Harl. MS. 1419) fol. 247—
“Two fair pair of new long Virginalls made harp-fashion of Cipres, with keys of ivory, having the King’s Arms crowned and supported by his Grace’s beastes within a garter gilt, standing over the keys.”
We are disposed to believe that we have here another double keyboard harpsichord. Rimbault saw in this an upright instrument, such as Virdung’s clavicytherium (fig. 12). Having since seen the one in the Kraus Museum, Florence, it seems that Virdung’s drawing should not have been reversed; but he has mistaken the wires acting upon the jacks for strings, and omitted the latter stretched horizontally across the soundboard (see Clavicytherium). We read in an inventory of the furniture of Warwick Castle, 1584, “a faire paire of double virginalls,” and in the Hengrave inventory, 1603, “one great payre of double virginalls.” Hans Ruckers, the great clavisingel maker of Antwerp, lived too late to have invented the double keyboard and stops, evident adaptions from the organ, and the octave string (the invention of which was so long attributed to him), which incorporated the octave spinet with the large instrument, to be henceforth playable without the co-operation of another performer, was already in use when he began his work. Until the last harpsichord was made by Joseph Kirkman, in 1798, scarcely an instrument of the kind was constructed, except in Italy, without the octaves. The harpsichord as known throughout the 18th century, with piano upper and forte lower keyboard, was the invention of Hans Ruckers’s grandson, Jean Ruckers’s nephew, Jan Couchet, about 1640. Before that time the double keyboards in Flemish harpsichords were merely a transposing expedient, to change the pitch a fourth, from plagal to authentic and vice versa, while using the same groups of keys. Fortunately there is a harpsichord existing with double keyboards unaltered, date 1638, belonging to Sir Bernard Samuelson, formerly in the possession of Mr Spence, of Florence, made by Jean Ruckers, the keyboards being in their original position. It was not so much invention as beauty of tone which made the Ruckers’ harpsichords famous. The Ruckers harpsichords in the 18th century were fetching such prices as Bologna lutes did in the 17th or Cremona violins do now. There are still many specimens existing in Belgium, France and England. Handel had a Ruckers harpsichord, now in Buckingham Palace; it completes the number of sixty-three existing Ruckers instruments catalogued in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
After the Antwerp make declined, London became pre-eminent for harpsichords the representative makers being Jacob Kirckmann and Burckhard Tschudi, pupils of a Flemish master, one Tabel, who had settled in London, and whose business Kirckmann continued through marriage with Tabel’s widow. Tschudi was of a noble Swiss family belonging to the canton of Glarus. According to the custom with foreign names obtaining at that time, by which Haendel became Handel, and Schmidt Smith, Kirckmann dropped his final n and Tschudi became Shudi, but he resumed the full spelling in the facies of the splendid harpsichords he made in 1766 for Frederick the Great, which are still preserved in the New Palace, Potsdam. By these great makers the harpsichord became a larger, heavier-strung and more powerful instrument, and fancy stops were added to vary the tone effects. To the three shifting registers of jacks of the octave and first and second unisons were added the “lute,” the charm of which was due to the favouring of high harmonics by plucking the strings close to the bridge, and the “harp,” a surding or muting effect produced by impeding the vibration of the strings by contact of small pieces of buff leather. Two pedals were also used, the left-hand one a combination of a unison and lute. This pedal, with the “machine” stop, reduced the upper keyboard to the lute register, the plectra of which acted upon the strings near the wrest-plank bridge
- ↑ Invented by Nicola Vicentino; see L'Antica musica ridotto alla moderna prattica (Rome, 1555).
