Download Lost and Found: Six Centuries of the Harpsichord

Program Note by David Wright
Lost and Found: Six Centuries of the Harpsichord
With its keyboard and wing shape, the harpsichord looks like a piano, but people who know
about such things actually classify it as a type of zither, because its strings are plucked
instead of struck or bowed. When you press a key on a harpsichord, it activates a plectrum—
essentially a guitar pick on a stick—that jumps up and twangs the corresponding string inside
the instrument.
Of course, the flying fingers of an expert harpsichordist can twang more strings in less
time than even the fastest guitar picker. That’s been true since at least 1397, the date of the
earliest document that mentions a harpsichord. The oldest known image of this instrument is
carved into a north German altarpiece dating from 1425.
By contrast, the very earliest instruments that might be called pianos date from the
1730s, late in the lifetime of J.S. Bach (who tried them and didn’t think much of them). For
its ability to play entire compositions by themselves, and to accompany singers and
instruments, the harpsichord (along with the organ) ruled the musical scene for centuries.
The vast majority of music made by harpsichords was improvised in the moment,
vibrated briefly in the air, and was never heard again. But a few times and places produced
outstanding composers for the instrument whose compositions were printed and distributed,
mostly to home players. Pieces by Giles Farnaby (c. 1565-1640), Thomas Tomkins (15721656), and the other “virginalists” of Elizabethan England—so called not because of the
Virgin Queen but in reference to the virginal, a smaller cousin of the harpsichord typically
played in homes by eligible young ladies—are the tuneful, lively products of a general
flourishing of the arts that gave us the works of Shakespeare and much else.
The harpsichord’s high noon as a solo instrument was surely the early and middle
years of the 18th century, when French clavécinistes such as Couperin and Rameau were
perfecting the dance suite and the character piece. During his decades of service in the
Spanish royal court, the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) mixed his native
and adopted national idioms with unprecedented virtuosity in no fewer than 550 dazzling
sonatas for the harpsichord.
And Scarlatti’s exact contemporary, J.S. Bach (1685-1750) was, well, J.S. Bach. His
matchless genius lit up everything he put his hand to, including a wealth of concertos,
preludes, fugues, suites, and toccatas for harpsichord.
The word toccata is from the Italian word for “touch,” and a toccata by Bach is meant
to display the sensitivity and skill with which the player touches the keys. This elusive thing
called “touch,” as in the expression “He’s got the touch,” mattered a lot to harpsichord
players, because on its own the instrument wouldn’t produce louder or softer tones when one
pressed the keys hard or gently—unlike a piano, whose full name (pianoforte) literally means
“soft-loud” in Italian. A twang was a twang was a twang—and yet somehow, skillful
composers and players could create the illusion of a crescendo through tempo, articulation,
and massing of notes, if they had the touch.
By the Baroque era of Scarlatti and Bach, harpsichords had sprouted more than one
keyboard, controlling more than set of strings or type of plectrum (made of quill, leather, etc.,
each producing its special brand of twang). Some actual loud-and-soft sounds, and variety of
tone color, were the result. But touch was still paramount for true excellence in playing.
The harpsichord’s central role went unchallenged for most of the 18th century. As late
as the 1780s and ‘90s, Joseph Haydn followed traditional practice and led his symphonies
and operas from his seat at the harpsichord. (Meanwhile, however, his younger contemporary
Wolfgang Mozart was wowing audiences by composing and performing concertos for that
newfangled instrument, the piano.)
In fact, the harpsichord’s only period of total eclipse was the seventy years or so we
consider the heart of the Romantic era, when Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, and others
were composing the music that—judging by frequency of performance even today—is
considered the core of the piano repertoire.
As the Romantic consensus started to fray late in the 19th century, its challengers
included early-music enthusiasts such as Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), the English
musician and instrument maker who led the movement to play old music on period-style
instruments. At his urging, piano manufacturers such as Pleyel in Paris and Chickering in
Boston began making harpsichords, often using iron frames and other piano technology
undreamed-of by Scarlatti or Bach.
The Polish keyboard player Wanda Landowska (1879-1959) used those instruments to
become the first celebrity harpsichord virtuoso of the 20th century, playing to houses as
packed as those of Heifetz or Horowitz with her fiery virtuosity and the hall-filling sound of
her modern instrument.
But if the celebrity recital tended to cast the harpsichord as “piano lite,” avant-garde
composers and performers heard the instrument’s clean, pointillistic sound as a refreshing
alternative to the piano’s well-stuffed Romantic associations. The American Henry Cowell
(1897-1965), the Czech Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006), and the Finn Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952),
for example, composed for harpsichord not because they were going Baroque or there wasn’t
a piano handy, but because the instrument suited what they wanted to say.
For better or worse, the Landowska-style super-harpsichords are rarely seen in public
any more. The extraordinary flourishing of the early-music movement has brought much
knowledge of the design and materials of instruments three hundred years ago—and an
insistence that the new ones be made that way.
But it’s just possible that the harpsichord can still rival the piano in one of its
specialties: transcription. Can music for another instrument really transfer successfully to the
harpsichord? Well, to begin with, all of Bach’s harpsichord concertos originated as violin
concertos. And listeners at this recital can judge for themselves how the ground-breaking
minimalist piece Piano Phase by Steve Reich (b. 1936) sounds on the piano’s ancient
ancestor.
It just goes to show that, six centuries or so after it was invented, the harpsichord is
still an experimental instrument.