The orchestra and its instruments

The piano, or harpsichord, ceased to belong to the Orchestra in the days of Haydn; but it is often called upon to play a Concerto with the Orchestra and of late composers have again been experimenting with it as an orchestral instrument.

A description of its mechanism would be dull. Like every other instrument, the piano was a development of older instruments; and as it developed composers changed their style of writing for it. We can follow the development of the piano by following a chronological list of compositions, from the preludes and fugues of Bach; the suites for the clavecin and clavier of Handel, Couperin, and Rameau; and the early sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven to the big sonata of Beethoven, written for the “hammer clavier,” op. 111, and the elaborate Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, and so on. With the development of the piano came the development of touch. In the days of the harpsichords and clavichords there was practically no such thing as touch. There was brilliant execution, of course, and effects were produced; but touch developed after the piano had been equipped with its softly padded hammers and its improved action.

The modern piano is a miniature orchestra; and since the days of Liszt pianists have sought to get orchestral effects from it. More literature has been written for the piano than for any other instrument.

To find the origin of the pianoforte we must go back to the dulcimer and the psaltery, or psaltérion. These two instruments are much alike, differing only in the way they were played. The strings of the dulcimer were set in vibration by hammers held in the hands of the performer, and the strings of the psaltery were plucked with an ivory, metal, or quill, plectrum, or even by the fingers. The psaltery was smaller than the dulcimer and had fewer strings. Perhaps the name dulcimer was derived from the words dulce melos, sweet melody; but it was only one of the names for the instrument. The French called it tympanon; the Italians cembalo and salterio tedesco (German psaltery); and the Germans hackbrett, a board for chopping sausage-meat. The Hungarian, or Magyar, name for it is cimbelom. It is played in Hungarian bands.

The dulcimer was a three-cornered or trapeze-shaped instrument, about three feet at its widest part composed of a wooden frame inclosing a wrestplank for the tuning pins around which one end of the strings were wound; a soundboard with two or more sound-holes; and two bridges over which the strings passed. Opposite the wrestplank there was a hitchpin-block, to which the other ends of the strings were attached.

The dulcimer had about fifty notes, and several strings (two, three, four, and even five) were used for each note. They were of fine wire. The dulcimer was placed on a table and struck with hammers, the heads of which were of leather, hard on one side and soft on the other to get the required loud and soft forte and piano effects. There was no damping (checking) contrivance to stop the vibration.

The compass was from two to three octaves from C or D in the Bass Clef. The psaltery and dulcimer came from the East; they had been known in Persia and Arabia for centuries when the Crusaders made their acquaintance and brought them home. Chaucer describes the instrument in his Miller’s Tale, (Canterbury Tales) as “a gay sauterie.” It appears in that beautiful fresco of Orcagna’s, Triumph of Death, in the Campo Santo in Pisa (1348) and in many illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. From its likeness to the shape of a pig’s head, old writers often call it Istromento di porco.

Even as late as 1650, when instruments had improved so greatly, Kircher wrote in his Musurgia that the psaltery played with a skilled hand is second to no other instrument, and Mersenne praises “its silvery tone and purity of intonation so easily controlled by the fingers.” These two instruments were often beautifully decorated and inlaid and the sound-holes artistically treated.

If we look at the frontispiece we will see the psaltery, or psaltérion, resting on the lap of the lady on the extreme left, who holds the plectrum delicately, but firmly, in her right hand. But to reach our modern piano from these two quaint instruments we have to travel through several centuries.

We get into a tangle of names when we stir up the ancestors of the pianoforte. The dulcimer and psaltery are simple enough, but from them we come immediately to the clavicembalo (one of the Italian names for the harpsichord), or gravicembalo, as it was also called, which name was derived from clavis, a key, and cembalo, a dulcimer. Then we get the French clavecin (which comes from clavicymbalum) clavichord, harpsichord, harpsicordo, clavicordo, and clavier. Then in the same group we have the virginal and the spinet, closely allied to these forerunners of the pianoforte in everything but their names.

Students of the piano are often puzzled to know why they are given a Suite de pièces pour le clavecin, or a Prelude and Fugue from the Well-tempered[90] Clavichord.

It is well to remember that the clavecin (French), the clavicembalo or gravicembalo (sometimes cembalo alone) and harpsichordo (Italian), and Clavicymbel or Flügel, meaning wing, from its shape (German) are all names for the harpsichord. All of these, as we will see by looking at the picture facing page 182 of Scarlatti at the gravicembalo, and that facing page 296 from Peter Preller’s Modern Music Master (London), showing a gentleman at the harpsichord, have the form of our modern concert piano. On the other hand, the clavicordo, clavichord, and clavier, spinet and virginal, are of the square, oblong type, like the old square piano that has almost gone out of use.

In all the instruments of the piano family, the place of the plectrum of the psaltery is taken by the “jack,” which was usually made of pear-tree. It rested on the back end of the key-lever with a movable tongue of holly kept in place by a bristle spring. Projecting at the end of the tongue at right angles was a thorn, or a spike of crowquill. As the key was pushed down, the jack was forced upwards and the quill brought to the string, which it plucked. The string was “damped” (softened) by a piece of cloth above the tongue. When the finger left the key, the key sprang upward to its own level and the jack fell. The jack, is exactly the principle of the plectrum of the psaltery adjusted to a key.

The hammer of the pianoforte is only the old hammer of the dulcimer made into a part of the action, or mechanism, of the piano.

The spinet was a keyed instrument with jacks. According to Dr. Burney it was a small harpsichord, or virginal, with one string to each note. Though many writers persistently say that the name was derived from the spine, or thorn, that plucked the strings, an old Italian book, published in Bologna in 1608, says: “The Spinetta received its name from its inventor, Giovanni Spinetti, of Venice.” One of his instruments is dated 1503. Very beautiful cases were made for these old Italian spinets which were sometimes painted by great artists.

Annibal Rosso made a new kind of spinet without a case, showing the soundboard with the wires lying flat like a harp. In England this Spinetta traversa was called the Stuart, Jacobean, or Queen Anne, Spinet, and also the couched harp. The spinet made its way from Italy to France, the Netherlands, Germany, and England.

The largest spinets were called the virginals. The word “virginal” appears in a book by Virdung, published in Basle in 1511, which contains a picture showing an instrument of the same shape as the clavichord and with the same arrangement of the keyboard.

According to Prætorius, who wrote about a hundred years later, the word “virginal” was used for a quadrangular instrument. However, from the time of Henry the Seventh to the close of the Seventeenth Century the word was used to describe all quilled keyboard instruments,—the harpsichord and trapeze-shaped spinet as well as the regular virginal of Virdung and Prætorius. Henry the Eighth was a fine performer on the virginal and so was his daughter Queen Elizabeth.

Facing page 292 is a typical virginal of the Seventeenth Century; and we can see from the performer just how the hands were placed on the keyboard. This is taken from the title-page of Playford’s Banquet of Music, published in London in 1688.

Very often in literature we find “a pair of virginals” mentioned; for example Pepys, describing the Great Fire of London in 1666, writes: “I observed that hardly one lighter, or boat, in three that had the goods of a house in but there was a pair of virginals in it.”

The clavecin and harpsichord seem to have supplanted the psaltery some time in the Sixteenth Century. The gravicembalo or clavicembalo was, as we have seen, a conspicuous member of Monteverde’s Orchestra (see page 143). It remained in the Symphony Orchestra until the days of Haydn, who got rid of it.

Originating in Italy, it spread northward into France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England.

The earliest mention of the harpsichord is under the name clavicymbolum and occurs in the rules of the Minnesingers in 1404. The earliest mention in English is in 1502, when it is called clavicymball.

The oldest harpsichord in the South Kensington Museum, of London, is a Venetian clavicembalo, signed and dated Joanes Antonius Baffo, Venetus, 1574. It has a compass of four and a half octaves from C to F. “Raising the top and looking inside, we observe the harp-like disposition of the strings, as in a modern grand piano, which led Galilei,[91] the father of the astronomer, Galileo, to infer the direct derivation of the harpsichord from the harp. In front, immediately over the keys, is the wrestplank, with the tuning-pins inserted, round which are wound the nearer ends of the strings—in this instrument two to each note—the further ends being attached to hitchpins, driven into the soundboard itself, and following the angle of the bent side of the case to the narrow end, where the longest strings are stretched. There is a straight bridge along the edge of the wrestplank and a curved bridge upon the soundboard. The strings pass over these bridges between which they vibrate, and the impulse of their vibrations is communicated by the curved bridge to the soundboard. The plectra, or jacks, with the exception that they carry points of leather instead of quills, are the same as in later instruments. This Venetian harpsichord has a separate case from which it could be withdrawn for performance, a contrivance usual in Italy, the outer case being frequently adorned with painting. Lastly, the natural keys are white and the sharps black, the rule in Italian keyed instruments, the German practice having been the reverse.”[92]

This was the kind of instrument—the gravicembalo—that had a place in the Monteverde’s Orchestra (see page 143), and that Domenico Scarlatti is playing in the illustration facing page 182.

Just what the Amati family of Cremona was to the violin, the Ruckers family of Antwerp was to the harpsichord. The Ruckers made the most perfect and the most artistic of harpsichords. Altogether there were about forty Ruckers.

Of this family there were four members living and working between 1591 and 1651, or later, who achieved great reputation. Their instruments are known by their signatures and by the monograms forming the ornamental rosette, or sound-hole, in the soundboard—a survival from the psaltery. The great improvement of the harpsichord is attributed to Hans, the eldest, who by adding to the two unison strings of each note a third of shorter length and finer wire, tuned an octave higher, increased the power and brilliancy of the tone. To employ this addition at will alone, or with one or both the unison strings, he contrived, after the example of the organ, a second keyboard, and stops to be moved by the hand, for the control of the registers, or slides, of jacks acting upon the strings. By these expedients all the legitimate variety ever given to the harpsichord was secured. The Ruckers harpsichord given by Messrs. Broadwood to the South Kensington Museum, signed and dated “Andreas Ruckers me fecit Antverpiae 1651,” said to have been left by Handel to Christopher Smith, shows these additions to the construction, and was, in the writer’s remembrance, before the soundboard gave way, of deliciously soft and delicately reedy timbre. The tension being comparatively small, these harpsichords lasted much longer than our modern pianofortes.

“When the Ruckers family passed away we hear no more of Antwerp as the city of harpsichord makers; London and Paris took up the tale.”[93]

A Fleming named Tabel established himself in England, and his pupils Tschudi (or Shudi) and Kirchmann (or Kirkman) developed the harpsichord to its utmost and produced what in those days was considered a big tone.

The earliest mention of the pianoforte, or forte-piano rather, occurs in the records of the Este family, in the letters addressed to Alfonso II, Duke of Modena, by an instrument-maker named Paliarino. The invention of the pianoforte is, however, given to Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori (1651-1731), a harpsichord maker of Padua, who removed to Florence at the wish of his patron, Prince Ferdinand de’ Medici. Cristofori then produced instruments with the hammer mechanism. A stone in Santa Croce, Florence, to Bartolomeo Cristofori records that he was the inventor of the “Clavicembalo col Piano e Forté.”

However, the hammer head was small and there was no check to control the hammer in its rebound. At first the pianoforte was not much liked by the musicians. It required a new kind of touch; but as makers added improvements the new instrument gained in popularity and gradually supplanted the harpsichord. Bach did not care for it. His favorite instrument was the clavichord; and he often said “that he found no soul in the clavecin, or spinet, and that the pianoforte was too clumsy and harsh.”

But with the piano a new style of playing came into fashion and also a new style of composition. Clementi, Mozart and Beethoven laid the foundations for the modern style of playing. Then followed Hummel and poetic Chopin; and, finally, Liszt, who created modern piano-playing after hearing Paganini’s magical violin. In 1839 Liszt gave the first piano recital ever heard; and he labored all his life to teach pupils to play the piano correctly and poetically and to put his technical knowledge into permanent form for future generations. And this is how he felt towards the instrument:

“My piano is to me what his boat is to the seaman, what his horse is to the Arab: nay, more, it has been till now my eye, my speech, my life. Its strings have vibrated under my passions, and its yielding keys have obeyed my every caprice. In my opinion the piano takes the first place in the hierarchy of instruments; it is the oftenest used and the widest spread. In its seven octaves it embraces the whole compass of the orchestra, and a man’s ten fingers are enough to render the harmonies which in an orchestra are only brought out by the combinations of many musicians. We can give broken chords like the harp; long sustained notes like the wind; staccati; and a thousand passages which before it seemed only possible to produce on this or that instrument.”

By the side of this eulogy we may place the following and quite extraordinary description of the piano written by an English musician named William Gardiner, in 1818, just one hundred years ago.

“The pianoforte was scarcely known in the time of Bach; and, from the style of his compositions, it is evident that they were the product of the harpsichord, an instrument of very limited powers, the boldest effects of which were produced by sprinkling the chords in Arpeggio, which occasioned a disagreeable jingling. The early sonatas of Haydn, also, bear marks of the influence of this instrument, and possess nothing of the expression of his later works.

“The invention of the pianoforte has formed a new era in the art. It has been the means of developing the sublimest ideas of the composer, and the delicacy of its touch has enabled him to give the lightest shades, as well as the boldest strokes of musical expression. It is the only instrument that will represent the effects of a full orchestra; and, since its mechanism has been improved, Beethoven has displayed its powers in a way not contemplated even by Haydn himself.”

Modern composers have experimented with the piano as an orchestral instrument. Saint-Saëns uses it efficiently in his great Symphony in C, dedicated to the memory of Liszt. Perhaps the most successful treatment of it has been made more recently by Stravinsky in his Ballet, Petrushka.