Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/80

Rh 70 PIANOFORTE &quot; 1530 (April). Item the vj daye paied to William Lewes for ii payer of virginalls in one coder with iiii stoppes brought to Grenewiche iii li. And for ii payer of virginalls in one coll er 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 &quot; Two fair pair of new long Yirginalls 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.&quot; Rimbault saw in this an upright instrument, and such a one was not then impossible, Virdung s claviciterium (fig. 12) being no more than a horizontal harpsichord turned up upon its broad end, which a slight modi fication of the action rendered facile, but if upright, the two fair pair of new long virginalls would not have been &quot; long &quot; but high. We explain &quot; harp-fashion &quot; according to Galilei s &quot; arpa giacente, &quot; and are disposed to believe that we have here another double keyboard harpsi chord. We read in an inventory of the furniture of Warwick Castle, 1584, &quot; a faire paire of double FIG. 12. % ii-dung s Claviciterium (upright Harpsichord), 1511. virginalls,&quot; and in the Hengrave inventory, 1603, &quot;one great payre of double virginalls.&quot; Hans Ruckers, the great clavisingel maker of Antwerp, lived then too late to have invented the double keyboard and stops, evident adaptations from the organ, but we may not withhold from him the credit of introducing the octave string, so long attributed to him, which incorporated the octave spinet with the large instrument, to be henceforth play able without the co-operation of another performer. It had been attached to the bent or angle side of harpsi chords, as shown in a modern instrument which forms part of the famous Plantin Museum at Antwerp, and also in one by Hans Ruckers himself, dated 1594, preserved in the Kunst und Gewerbe Museum, Berlin. The double harpsi chord by that maker at the Conservatoire, Paris, dated 1590, which is four years earlier than the above, has the octave string. From that date until the last harpsichord was made by Joseph Kirkman in 1798, scarcely an instru ment of the kind was made, except in Italy, without the octaves. Hans Ruckers had two sons, Hans the younger, and Andries the elder, who followed and rivalled him in skill and reputation. Another Andries, the son of the former, appears to have done but little, at least for him self ; but a nephew, Jan Couchet, a grandson of old Hans Ruckers, continued the prestige of this distinguished family, Huygens being a witness to the rare ability of Couchet. All these men, and, in fact, all the clavisingel makers of Antwerp, belonged to the artist s guild of St Luke, the affiliation being recognized from the close alliance at that time of the arts, the painter having often as much to do with the musical instrument as the maker himself. 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 i harpsichord, which may be the one long sought for and lately discovered by Mr Julian Marshall in Windsor Castle ; it completes the number of sixty-three existing Ruckers instruments catalogued in Grove s Dictionary of Mime 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 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 Shucli, 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 &quot;lute,&quot; the charm of which was due to the favouring of high harmonics by plucking the strings close to the bridge, and the &quot;harp,&quot; 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, rendered practicable by first moving the &quot; machine,&quot; a sixth stop, with the left hand of the player ; the right-hand pedal was to raise a hinged portion of the top or cover and thus gain some power of &quot;swell&quot; or cres cendo, an invention of Roger Plenius, to whom also the harp stop may be rightly attributed. This ingenious harp sichord maker had been stimulated to gain these effects by the nascent pianoforte which, as we shall find, he was the first to make in England. The first idea of pedals for the harpsichord to act as stops appears to have been John Hay- ward s (1 Haward) as early as 1676, as we learn from Mace s Musick s Monument. The French makers preferred a kind of knee-pedal arrangement known as the &quot;genouillere,&quot; and sometimes a more complete muting by one long strip of buff leather, the &quot;sourdine.&quot; As an improvement upon Plenius s clumsy swell, Slmcli in 1769 patented the Venetian swell, a framing of louvres, like a Venetian blind, which opened by the movement of the pedal, and, becoming in England a favourite addition to harpsichords, was early transferred to the organ, in which it replaced the rude &quot; nag s-head &quot; swell. A French harpsichord maker, Marius, whose name is remembered from a futile attempt to design a piano forte action, invented a folding harpsichord, the &quot; clavecin brise&quot;,&quot; by which the instrument could be disposed of in a smaller space. One, which is preserved at Berlin, probably formed part of the camp baggage of Frederick the Great. It was formerly a custom with kings, princes, and nobles who were well-disposed towards music to keep large collec tions of musical instruments, not as now for beauty of decoration, form, and colour, or historical associations, but for actual playing purposes in the domestic and festive music of their courts. There are records of their inventories, and it was to keep such a collection in playing order that Prince Ferdinand dei Medici engaged a Paduan harpsichord maker, Bartolommeo Cristofori, the man of genius who in vented and produced the pianoforte. We fortunately pos sess the record of this invention in a literary form from a well-known writer, the Marchese Scipione Maffei ; his description appeared in the Ciornale dei letterati d Italia,
 * with Tabel s widow. Tschudi was of a noble Swiss family