CHAPTER I

KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF KEYBOARD TECHNIQUE

Keyboard instruments and their derivation; the clavichord and its mechanism; the harpsichord and its relatives, virginal, _cembalo_, etc.; technique and use of the harpsichord--The beginnings of harpsichord music; the Gabrielis and Merulo; early forms; the influence of harmony and the crystallization of form--Frescobaldi and other organist-composers for harpsichord; early English virginal collections; John Bull, etc.--Genesis of the suite; influence of lute-music; Froberger, Denis Gaultier, etc.; Kuhnau--Development of the harpsichord ‘style’; great players: Chambonnières, etc.

I

The foundations of pianoforte music were laid during the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, with the foundations of instrumental music in general. Though there were at this time no pianofortes, there were three keyboard instruments, all of which not only took their part in the development of instrumental music, but more especially prepared the way for the great instrument of their kind which was yet unborn. These were the organ, the harpsichord, and the clavichord.

The organ was then, as now, primarily an instrument of the church, though there were small, portable organs called _regals_, which were often used for chamber music and even as a part of accompaniment, together with other instruments, in the early operas. With the history of its construction we shall not concern ourselves here (see Vol. VI, Chap. XIV). From the middle of the fourteenth century Venice had been famous for her organists, because the organs in St. Mark’s cathedral were probably the best in Europe. Up to the end of the seventeenth century they were very imperfect. Improvements were slow. Great as was the rôle taken by the organ all over Europe, from the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome to the northern town of Lübeck in Germany, the action was hard and uneven, the tuning beset with difficulties. But the organ was the prototype of all keyboard instruments. Upon the imperfect organs of those days composers built up the keyboard style of music.

The harpsichords and the clavichords were what one might call the domestic substitutes for the organ. Of these the clavichord was perhaps slightly the older instrument. Its origin is somewhat obscure, though it is easy to see in it the union of the organ keyboard with strings, on the principle of that ancient darling of the theorists, the monochord, the great and undisputed ruler over intervals of musical pitch, from the days of Pythagoras down throughout the Middle Ages. This monochord was hardly an instrument. It was a single string stretched over a movable bridge. By shifting the bridge the string could be stopped off into different lengths, which gave out, when plucked, different pitches of sound. The relative lengths of the stopped string offered a simple mathematical basis for the classification of musical intervals.

The clavichord worked on the same principle. At the back end of each key lever was an upright tangent, at first of wood, later of metal, which, when the key was depressed, sprang up against the wire string stretched above it. The blow of this tangent caused the wire to vibrate and produce sound; and at the same time the tangent determined the length of the string which was to vibrate, just as the finger determines the length of a violin string by stopping it at some point on the fingerboard. The strings of the clavichord were so stretched that of the two lengths into which the tangent might divide them, the longer lay to the left. It was this longer length which was allowed to vibrate, giving the desired pitch; the shorter length to the right being muffled or silenced by strips of felt laid or woven across the strings. Thus the little tangents at the back end of the keys performed the double function of sounding the string by hitting it and determining its pitch by stopping it. Thus, too, one string served several keys. By the middle of the sixteenth century the normal range was four full octaves, from C to c^3. There were many more keys than strings, which was a serious restriction upon music for the instrument; for notes which lay as closely together as, let us say, C-sharp and E could not be sounded at once, since both must be played upon the same string. Not until practically the beginning of the eighteenth century were clavichords made with a string for each key. They were then called _bundfrei_, in distinction from the older clavichords, which had been called _gebunden_.

The clavichord always remained square or oblong in shape, and for many years had no legs of its own, but was set upon a table like a box--hence one of its old names, _Schachbrett_, chess-board. The case was often of beautiful wood, sometimes inlaid and adorned with scrolls, and the under side of the cover was often painted with allegorical pictures and pious or sententious mottoes. The keys were small, the touch extremely light. The tone, though faint, had a genuine sweetness and an unusual warmth; and, by a trembling up and down movement of the wrist while the finger still pressed the key, the skilled player could give to it a palpitating quality, allied to the vibrato of the human voice or the violin, which went by the name of _Bebung_. This lifelike pulsing of tone was its most precious peculiarity, one which unhappily is lacking to the pianoforte, in most ways immeasurably superior. Hardly less prized by players who esteemed fineness of expression above clearness and brilliance, was the responsiveness of its tone to delicate gradations of touch. This made possible fine shading and intimate nuances. On this account it was highly valued, especially in Germany, as a practice instrument, upon which the student could cultivate a discriminating sensitive touch, and by which his ear could be trained to refinement of perception.

The tone of the clavichord was extremely delicate. Its subtle carrying quality could not secure it a place in the rising orchestras, nor in the concert hall. It belonged in the study, or by the fireside, and in such intimate places was enshrined and beloved by those who had ears for the finer whisperings of music. But not at once was it so beloved in the course of the early development of our instrumental music. Frail and restricted, it was but a makeshift to bring within the circle of the family the growing music of its powerful overshadowing prototype--the organ.

The harpsichord was quite different and shared with its weaker sister only the keyboard and the wire strings. It was in essence a harp or a psalter played by means of a keyboard. The strings were tuned as in a harp and were plucked by means of quills attached to the key-levers. The tone was sharp and dry and could not be influenced by the player’s touch. Instruments of this nature seem first to have been made in England. At any rate it was in England that a considerable literature was first written for them. The English virginals are small harpsichords. The origin of the quaint name is no longer carried back to the love of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth for such music as the instrument could produce. Nor is it likely that it was so named on account of its size (it could be held on the lap), whereby it recommended itself to the convenience of young ladies with a musical turn. Most likely its name is due to its range, which was the high range of a young woman’s voice, an octave higher than the centre octave of the organ.

The harpsichord, or, more exactly, instruments which were plucked by quills attached to key-levers, went by many names besides virginals. In Italy it was called the _clavicembalo_, later the _gravicembalo_, or merely _cembalo_; in France the _clavecin_; in Germany the _Kielflügel_. The more or less general name of spinet seems to be derived from the name of a famous Italian maker working at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Giovanni Spineta, of Venice.

These instruments developed side by side with the clavichord but to much greater proportions. In the course of time several strings were strung for one note, one or all of which might be used, at the discretion of the player, by means of stops similar in appearance and use to organ stops. Sometimes the extra strings of a note would be tuned at the octave or upper fifth, permitting the player to produce the mixture effects common to the organ. Many instruments were fitted with two and even three banks of keys, which operated upon distinct sets of strings, or might bring some special sort of quill into play; and these keyboards could be used independently for contrast, or coupled for volume, or the music might be divided upon them. There were also pedals for special effects.

There was great need of these numerous sets of strings, these various sorts of quills, these keyboards and devices for coupling them, because the mechanism of the harpsichord action was unsusceptible to the fine gradations of touch. It was essentially a mechanical instrument; its range of what we may call tone-shading was defined by the number of purely mechanical adjuncts with which it happened to be furnished. Variety depended upon the ingenuity of the player in bringing these means into play. This does not, of course, imply that there was no skill in ‘touching’ the harpsichord. The player had to practice hours then as now, to make his touch light and, above all, regular and even. The slightest clumsiness was perhaps even more evident to the ear of the listener in the frosty tones of the harpsichord than it would be today in the warmer and less distinct tone of the pianoforte. But once this evenness and lightness attained, the science of ‘touch’ was mastered and the player proceeded to search out musical effects in other directions.

In the course of these years from 1500 to 1750 it was made more and more to impress the ear by means of added strings and stops and sets of quills, till it became the musical keystone of chamber music, of growing orchestra and flowering opera. At the same time it was made ever more beautiful to the eye. It grew fine in line and graceful in shape; its wood was exquisitely finished and varnished; it was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and was beautifully decorated and enscrolled. The keys were small and usually of box-wood, the diatonic keys often black, the chromatic keys white with mother-of-pearl or ivory. Artisan and artist lavished their skill upon it. What a centre it became! How did it sound under the fingers of Count Corsi, behind the scenes of his private theatre in the Palazzo Corsi at Florence, while noble men and gentle ladies sang out the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to a great king of France and Maria de Medici his bride, when the first Italian opera was sung in public?

The great Monteverdi’s antique orchestra clustered about two harpsichords, only a few years later in Mantua, when ‘Ariadne’ brought tears to the eyes of princes. How was it in Venice when Cavalli was of all musicians the most famous, in the public theatre of San Cassiano? It supported the oratorios of Carissimi in Rome, and his cantatas as well. And in 1679 the great Bernardo Pasquini, organist of the people and the senate of Rome, presided at the harpsichord when the new theatre of Capranica was opened, and the amiable Corelli led the violins. And so they all presided at the harpsichord, these brilliant writers of operas now of all music the most discarded, down to the days of the great Scarlatti in Naples, of Handel in London, of Keiser and Graun in Hamburg, and Hasse, the beloved Saxon, in Dresden. Lully the iron-willed, he who watched alertly the eyebrow of great King Louis XIV of France, sat at his harpsichord in his lair and spilled snuff on the keys while he wrought his operas out of them. Then there was Mattheson, who would sing Antony, and die in the part, yet would come back and play the harpsichord in the Hamburg opera house orchestra after all the house had seen him die. He was determined to sit at the harpsichord, in the centre of the orchestra, and accompany his Egyptian queen to death, when all knew he should rightfully be waiting for her in Heaven with a lyre!

The harpsichord was indeed the centre of public music of orchestra and opera. Even after a race of virtuosi had pulled it to the fore as a brilliant solo instrument it still held its serviceable place in the orchestra. When in the course of time overtures became symphonies, it was still from the harpsichord that the conductor, usually the composer, led the performance of them. Gluck wished to banish it from the orchestra of the opera house; but, when Haydn came to London in 1790 and again in 1794 to lead a performance of his specially composed symphonies, he sat at the instrument which, more than any other, had assisted at the growth of independent instrumental music--at the harpsichord, now slowly but surely withdrawing into the background before the victorious pianoforte.

It is easy to pick flaws in it, now that we can thunder it to silence with our powerful concert grands. It is natural to smile at its thin and none too certain sounds. It is difficult to imagine that the hottest soul of a musician-poet could warm away the chill of it. But what a place it held, and how inextricably is it woven with the development of nearly all the music that now seems the freest speech of passion and imagination! What men gave service to it: Domenico Scarlatti, François Couperin, and Rameau; great Bach and Handel; the sons of Bach, some of them more famous once than their father; and the child Mozart, with a dozen courts at worship of him! The music they wrote for it has come down to us; we hear it daily in our concert halls. Few will deny that it gains in beauty and speaks with richer voice through our pianoforte; but they who wrote it never heard it so; and we who hear it, hear it not as they. Even when by the efforts of some devoted student it is brought to performance upon the instrument which saw its birth, we cannot truly hear it as it sounded once. We listen, as it were, to an intruder hailing from the past, whose usurpation of our modern ears we tolerate because we are curious and because he is winning. With the wigs and powder, the breeches and slippers, the bows and elegancies, it has faded into the past. Its sound is dumb and its spirit is gone.

II

The clavichord and the harpsichord were the instruments upon which music was first shaped for the pianoforte during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Looming behind them and quite dominating them until the last quarter of the seventeenth, until even much later in Germany, was the organ. Instrumental music had a long road to travel before either of the two smaller instruments received the special attention of composers. The organ led this uncertain way, setting out milestones which mark the successive stages in the development of the great forms of instrumental music. Later bands of strings took this leadership away from her. Always the clavichord and the harpsichord followed submissively in the trail of the organ, or carried the impedimenta for the strings, until late in the seventeenth century. Considering the wilderness through which composers had to make their way, their progress was rapid. In the course of the seventeenth century they found forms and styles of music quite unknown when the march began.

[Illustration]

Top: the virginal and the gravicembalo. Bottom: the clavicord and the harpsichord.

In the year 1600 there was no pure-blooded instrumental music. The sets of pieces for organ, lute, or groups of instruments which had appeared up to that time, and such sets had appeared as early as 1502, were almost strict copies of vocal forms, in which the vocal style was scarcely altered. Frequently they were simply arrangements of famous madrigals and _chansons_ of the day. The reason is obvious. For well over a century and a half, the best energy of musicians had gone into the perfecting of unaccompanied choral music, into masses and motets for the church, and into madrigals, the secular counterparts of the motets. Long years of labor had amassed a truly astonishing technique in writing this sort of music. The only art of music was the special art of vocal polyphony. Instruments were denied a style and almost a music of their own.[1] But improvements in sonority and mechanism brought instruments into prominence, and the spirit of the Renaissance stimulated composers to experiment with music for them. This was the beginning of a new art, fraught with difficulties and problems, to meet which composers had only the skill acquired in the old.

By far the most serious of these was the problem of form. The new music was independent of words, and, in order to enjoy freedom from words of any sort and at the same time to exist and to walk abroad, it had to become articulate of itself; had, so to speak, to build a frame or a skeleton out of its proper stuff. It had to be firmly knit and well balanced.

The music of the masses of Palestrina, woven about a well-known text, like that of the madrigals and _chansons_ of Arcadelt and Jannequin, which depended upon popular love-poems, was vague and formless. Such inner coherence as it had of itself was the result of continuous and skillful repetition of short phrases or motives in the course of the various voice-parts. In religious music these motives were for the most part fragments of the plain-song chant, nearly as old as the church itself; and masses frequently went by the name of the plain-song formula out of which they were thus built. Over and over again these bits of melody appeared, now in one part, now in another, the voices imitating each other so constantly that the style has been aptly called the imitative style. It was this style in which the great organists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century first shaped music for the organ. It was the one principle of musical form upon which they knew how to build.

Thus were constructed the _ricercars_ of the famous Andrea Gabrieli (d. 1586), Claudio Merulo (d. 1604), and Giovanni Gabrieli (d. 1612), the great pioneers. The name ricercar is itself significant. It came from _ricercare_ (_rechercher_), to seek out over and over again. Such were the pieces, a constant seeking after the fleeing fragment of a theme. Older names, originally applied to vocal music, were _fuga_ and _caccia_--flight and chase. Always there was the idea of pursuit. A little motive of a few notes was announced by one part. The other parts entered one by one upon the hunt of this leader, following, as best the composer could make them, in its very footsteps.

There was a unity in this singleness of purpose, a very logical coherence, so long as the leader was not lost sight of. Little counter-themes might join in the chase and give a spice of variety within the unity. But unhappily for the musical form of these early works, the theme which began was run to earth long before the end of the piece; another took its place and was off on a new trail, again to be run down and to give way to yet a third leader. Unity and coherence were lost, the piece ambled on without definite aim or limit. There is, however, a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli in which the opening theme and a definite counter-theme are adhered to throughout. This is a rather brilliant exception, becoming as the century grows older more and more the rule until, other principles mastered and applied, composers have built up one of the great forms, the true _fugue_. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the name _fantasia_ is applied to this same incoherent form and in the seventeenth that of _capriccio_ appears. Later, at the time of Bach, the word _ricercar_ signified a fugue worked with unusual technical skill.[2]

The ricercar was the most important of the early instrumental forms, if form it may be called which was at first but a style. The _canzona_, another form at first equally favored by composers, was destined to have but little effect upon the development of keyboard music. There was no real principle of construction underlying it. It was merely the instrumental counterpart of the famous French _chansons_ of the day. These were part-songs divided into several contrasting sections according to the stanzas of the poems to which they were set. Some of the sections were in simple chord style, like hymns of the present day; others in more or less elaborate polyphonic style. The instrumental _canzona_ followed the same plan. The sections were irregular in length, in number and in metre; and the piece as a whole lacked unity and balance. After the middle of the seventeenth century it was generally abandoned by organists. Other composers, however, took it up, and by regulating the length and number of the various sections, by expanding them, and, finally, by bringing each to a definite close, laid the foundations for the famous Italian _sonata da chiesa_, cousin germain to the better known Suite.

Other names appear in the old collections, such as Toccata and Prelude, which even today have more or less vague meaning and then were vaguer still. Toccata was at first a general name for any keyboard music. All instrumental music was originally _sonata_ (from _sonare_, to sound), in distinction from _cantata_ (from _cantare_, to sing); and from _sonata_ keyboard music was specially distinguished by the appellation _toccata_ (from _toccare_, to touch). When a characteristic keyboard style had at last worked itself free of the old vocal style, the word toccata signified a piece of music which need have no particular form but must display the particular brilliance of the new style.

The Prelude, too, was at first equally free of the limits of form. As the name plainly tells, it was a short bit of music preparatory to the greater piece to come. Not long ago it was still the fashion for concert pianists to preludize before beginning their programs, running scales and arpeggios over an improvised series of harmonies. The old preludes were essentially the same, very seriously limited, of course, by the childish condition of instrumental technique, and more or less aimless because harmonies were then undefined and unstable. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century organists built up definite schemes, if not forms, of preludizing before the singing of chorales in the Lutheran Church; but this art was naturally restricted to the organ. Preludes for the harpsichord and clavichord took on definite form only when the relatively modern system of major and minor keys had grown up out of the ruin of the ancient system of ecclesiastical modes.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that all forms of instrumental music had to attend the definite shaping and establishment of the harmonic idea of music. This was a slow process, and nearly all instrumental music written before 1650, no matter how skillfully the thematic material is woven, lacks to our ears logical form, because of the vagueness or the monotony of its harmony. The system of harmony upon which our great instrumental music rests is so clear and familiar that it is hard for us to imagine another art of music in which it did not constitute a groundwork, in the structure of which, indeed, it held no firm place. Yet in the magnificent vocal music in the style of which Palestrina has left imperishable models, harmony, as we understand it today, did not enter. He and his great predecessors were guided seldom, it is easy to say they were guided not at all, by the beauties of chord progressions. They did not aim at modulations. Rather, by the rules of the art of their day, modulation was forbidden them. No composer might lead his music out of the _mode_ in which it began, to bewilder his hearer in a vague ecstasy of unrest, later to soothe him, gently shifting the harmonies back again home. Before his mind was the ideal of weaving many voice-parts, and to his pen the skill of countless imitations and independent melodies. The beauty of consonance after dissonance could not be appreciated by him, since to him each dissonance was a blemish. His was a music of flowing concord. Such harmonic discord as was inevitable was so smoothly prepared, so gently touched, that it now passes all but unobserved. This was essentially religious music.

Many causes brought about the awakening of musicians to the beauty of harmony and its expressive power. The most effectual was the growing opera. The aim of the first writers of opera was the combination of dramatic recitation and music, from the union of which they shaped a style of music we now call _recitative_. The singing or reciting voice was accompanied by a few scattered chords upon the harpsichord, these chords serving at first mainly to mark cadences, later little by little to intensify the emotion of the play. It was then but a step to dramatic effects of harmony, to harsh, unprepared discords. The player at the harpsichord, always the nucleus about which the operatic orchestra grouped itself, began to appreciate chords as a power in music. The organist, under the influence of the dramatic style, thought of chords now and then in his slow-moving ricercars. The modes were broken down. A new system of scales, our own, grew up, which was adaptable to the new need of composers, to the sequence and contrast of chords. Harmony grew into music, became more than themes, than imitation and pursuit, the balance of its form.

Until music had thus knit itself anew upon harmony, it was fundamentally unstable. Toccatas, ricercars, canzonas, preludes, even fugues, all wandered unevenly, without proper aim, until harmony came to lay the contrast and balance of chords and keys as the great principle of form. Especially was instrumental music dependent upon this logical principle, for, as we have noted, music without words stands in vital need of self-sufficing form, and without it totters and falls in scattered pieces.

The best skill at knitting themes together was of no avail without harmony. It left but a texture of music flapping to the caprice of the wind of invention. Or, to change the figure, composers laid block by block along the ground; but, without harmony, had not the art to build them up one upon the other into lasting temples. And so the music of the Gabrielis, of Merulo, and of many another man from many a wide corner of Europe lies hidden in the past. It is tentative, not perfect. And the music of later and perhaps greater men lies similarly hidden.

III

The construction of instrumental music on the basis of one central key with excursions or modulations into other keys for the sake of development and variety began to be understood about the middle of the seventeenth century. A very noticeable advance in this direction shows in the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), one of the most brilliant organists before the time of Bach. Much of his music has an archaic sound to our ears. He is by no means wholly free of the old modal restrictions. But he stands as one of the pioneers in the relatively new art of organ music--a bold innovator, guided by the unerring taste of a great artist.

A romantic glory is about his name. As a player he was probably unmatched in his day, and his fame was widespread. It is said that when he played in St. Peter’s at Rome, where for many years he held the position of organist, the vast cathedral was filled with people come to hear him. One of the great masters of the next generation, the German Froberger, was granted four years of absence from his duties at the court of Vienna, that he might go to study with Frescobaldi in Rome. His compositions were published in several sets, which included ricercars, toccatas, preludes, canzonas, capriccios, and so forth. All these, not excepting even the preludes, are in the contrapuntal style which is the outgrowth of the old vocal polyphony. But they are greatly enlivened by rapid figures, scales and arpeggios as well as trills and ornamental devices. Such figures, being not at all suitable to voices but only to a keyboard instrument, mark the progress of the keyboard style toward a distinct individuality if not independence from the ancient past of vocal masses and motets, an independence which no great music has ever quite achieved.

All these sets of pieces were written in good faith for the harpsichord as well as for the organ. But in reality, except in so far as certain principles of form are valuable to all music, and a few figures of musical ornamentation are common to all keyboard music, harpsichord music profits but vicariously from Frescobaldi. His music is essentially organ music, and the development it marks as accomplished, and that toward which it points, are proper to the organ and not to the harpsichord. To the one instrument breadth and power are fitting, to the other lightness and fleetness. Inasmuch as the same distinction exists between the organ and the pianoforte at the present day, with some allowances made for improvements in the mechanism of the organ and for the great sonority of the pianoforte, which allowances affect only the degree but not the kind of differences, Frescobaldi can be said to have influenced the development of pianoforte music only by what he contributed toward the solution of very general problems of form and structure.

The same must be said of many other great organists of his and of later days, such as Zweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, Buxtehude, Bohm, Pachelbel, and others. It may be noted that after the death of Frescobaldi the art of organ-playing passed from Italy, the land of its birth and first considerable growth, to Germany. Here a great line of virtuosi added more and more to the splendor and dignity of organ music, perfecting and embellishing style, inventing new forms and making them firm. They remained loyal to the polyphonic style, partly because this is almost essentially proper to the organ with its unlimited power to sustain tone; partly because it is the impressive and noble style of music most in keeping with the spirit of the church, from which the organ will apparently never be wholly dissociated.[3]

It cannot be said that this style is in any measure so fitting to the harpsichord and the clavichord or to the pianoforte. For these, a markedly different sort of polyphony has been devised. But so long as organists alone walked in music with the power of assurance--and they were well in command of the problems of their special art while other instrumentalists and writers of operas were floundering about--so long did their influence keep instrumental music in sway.

How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By establishing certain forms, notably the fugue, which have been adapted to every kind of serious instrumental music and to the pianoforte with only less propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay the harmonic foundation of music which, as we have said, is the basis for all music down to the present day and is but now being forsaken; by discovering the effectiveness of certain styles of ornamentation and runs which are essentially common to all keyboard instruments. They helped to give music a form made of its own stuff, and a beauty and permanence which is the result of such form perfected. In their workshops two of such forms were rough-hewn which proved of later service to pianoforte music--the harmonic prelude and the fugue.

We must look elsewhere for the development of other forms, less perfect perhaps, but no less important in the history of pianoforte music. Such are the rondo and the variation form. The rondo may be mentioned here because of its great antiquity. Like the ballade, it was originally a dance song, really a song with a burden and varying couplets. No form could be simpler. The burden recurring regularly gives an impression of unity, which, only in case of too many recurrences, has the fault of monotony. The varying couplets, constituting the episodes between the reiterations of the burden or main theme, offer variety and contrast. Yet, in spite of the merits of this scheme of musical structure, the form was little used by composers down to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Relatively long pieces of music, in which the rondo form could be used, were generally written in the style of fugues. Furthermore, until the harmonic art was developed and the contrast of keys appreciated, the episodes, being restricted by the old modal laws to the tonality of the main theme, would be in a great measure without the virtue of contrast.

The variation form, on the other hand, was greatly used, conspicuously so by a number of writers for the virginal in England, whose works, surviving in several ancient collections, form a unique and practically isolated monument in the history of pianoforte music. These collections have often been described in detail and carefully analyzed. The most comprehensive is that long known as the Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book, now called merely the Fitzwilliam Collection, a beautifully worked manuscript preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Others are Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book and Will Foster’s, both of which are at Buckingham Palace; a smaller book, known as Lady Nevile’s Book, and the _Parthenia_, famous as the first collection of virginal music printed in England.

The _Parthenia_ was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection, the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later than 1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during the years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of his virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti.

Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in the works which make up these collections is the variation form. It is to be understood, of course, that these variations are not the variations of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new form, even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental technique to hand, from which to select a thousand devices wherewith to adorn and color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons, for all their conspicuous genius, could not expand to great proportion the art of writing for domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a weak infancy. Nor was the emotional power of music at all appreciated at that time, nor the treatment of the same theme as the expression of various emotions in turn likely to occur to the mind of the most gifted of musicians.

The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of considerable length, which should yet have consistency and coherence. The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its various repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the composer added above it an ever more complicated or a more animated counterpoint. The counterpoint was for the most part conjunct; that is to say, that it progressed by short steps, not by skips. Scales are therefore far more frequent than arpeggios. The shade of the old vocal art is deep even over these composers. John Bull alone is, as we have said, at times astonishingly modern. His brilliant imagination devised arpeggio figures which today have by no means lost their effectiveness, and he could split up the theme itself into a series of lively, skipping figures.

Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their life. We have saved to us again a dead music.

Most lifeless of all, and almost laughably pompous in their rigor, are the variations on the first six notes of the scale, the so-called _Fantasias on ut re mi fa sol la_. Every composer tried a hand at this sort of composition. The six notes usually marched up and down the scale, with no intermission. A great deal of modulation was attempted. Sometimes the formula was gone through upon the successive notes of the scale. It was set upon its way in various rhythms, sometimes in long, steady notes, again in rapid notes, yet again in dotted rhythms. At the best the result was a display of some cleverness on the part of the composer, a bit of daring in chromatic alterations, some novelty in combinations of rhythms. It can hardly be supposed that they expressed any æsthetic aspiration. They stand in relation to the development of pianoforte music only as technical exercises of a sort.

The same may be said in some instances of the variations upon songs, but is not in the main true. Here is distinctly a groping toward beauty, largely in the dark, to be sure, but tending, on the one hand, toward the development of a fitness of style and, on the other, of a broad and varied form, the noble possibilities of which have become manifest through the genius of all the great instrumental composers since the time of Bach.

The influence of these gifted Englishmen and their extraordinary work upon the development of harpsichord music in general was probably relatively slight. A piece by Sweelinck, the famous Dutch organist, is in the Fitzwilliam collection; a fact which points to the intimacy between Holland and England in matters musical. The presence of famous English organists in Holland throughout the first half of the seventeenth century points in the same direction. But the course of harpsichord music in Holland and Germany was, down to the time of Emanuel Bach, guided by organ music. Inasmuch as perhaps the most remarkable feature of this English virginal music is the occasional flashes of instrumental skill and of intuition for harpsichordal effects from the pen of John Bull, and as these stirred to no emulation in Germany, the effect of the English virginal music as such upon the history of the special art may be set down as practically negligible. The famous collections endure, quite like Purcell’s music a whole century later, as an isolated monument of a sudden national development.

The toccata, prelude, fugue, and variations are the results of the labor of musicians during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries to invent and improve forms of music which, as independent compositions, might impress the hearer with their organic unity, so to speak, and serve as dignified expression of their own skill and their own ideals of beauty. Of these the prelude alone, with its basis of chord sequences, is wholly a product of the new time. The others rest heavily upon the vocal skill of the past. None of them, however, is perfect. Skill in laying a harmonic groundwork of wide proportions is still to be acquired; and, so far as the harpsichord and clavichord are concerned, a sense for instrumental style and special instrumental effects has to be cultivated much further. We shall have to wait another half-century before that sense has become keen enough to influence development of harpsichord music.

IV

Meanwhile the growth and relative perfection of another form is to be observed, namely, the suite.[4] This is a conventional group of four short pieces in dance forms and rhythms. A great amount of dance music had been published for the lute in Italy as early as 1502. Of the twenty-one pieces published in the _Parthenia_ more than a hundred years later, five were pavans and ten were galliards. In all these early dance pieces the rhythm is more or less disguised under a heavy polyphonic style; so we may presume that they were not intended to be played in the ballroom, but rather that the short and symmetrical forms of good dance music were regarded by composers as serviceable molds into which to cast their musical inspirations. Indeed, they must have made a strong appeal to composers at a time when they were baffled in their instrumental music by ignorance of the elementary principles of musical structure.

The early Italian lute collections already reveal a tendency on the part of composers to group at least two of these dances together. The two chosen are the pavan and the galliard, the one a slow and stately dance in double time, the other a livelier dance in triple time. Often, it is true, these two are not grouped together in the printed collections; but it seems likely that the lutenists of the sixteenth century were fond of such a selection in performance. In 1597 Thomas Morley, an English musician, published in the form of dialogues his ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.’ In this he treated of dance music at some length, and made special note of the pleasing effect to be got by alternating pavans and galliards.

This group of two pieces is the nucleus about which the suite developed during the first half of the seventeenth century. The several steps in its growth are rather obscure; and, as they are to be observed more in music for groups of strings than in harpsichord music, it will serve us merely to mention them. The pavan and the galliard gave way early to the _allemande_ and the _courante_. The origin of the former is doubtful. There were two kinds of courantes--one evidently native to France, the other to Italy. Both were in triple time, but were in many other ways clearly differentiated. To the allemande and courante was later added a slow dance from Spain--the _sarabande_; and before the middle of the century the _gigue_, or _giga_, from Italy, made secure its place as the last of the standard group of four. These four pieces so combined were invariably in the same key. Apart from this they had no relationship.[5] The tie which held them together was wholly one of convention.

Such is the stereotype of the suite when it becomes firmly established in music for the harpsichord, as we find it in the works of the German J. J. Froberger. Froberger died in 1667, but his suites for harpsichord, twenty-eight in all, were written earlier; some in 1649, others in 1656, according to autograph copies. He had been a wanderer over the face of Europe. After studying with Frescobaldi in Rome he had spent some years in Paris, where he had come into contact with French composers for the harpsichord, whose work we shall discuss later on. Thence he had gone to London, where his skill in playing the organ and harpsichord seems to have lifted him from the mean position of pumping air into the organ at Westminster (he had been robbed on his journey and had reached London friendless and poverty-stricken) to that of court favorite. Later he returned to Europe, evidently pursued by ill luck, and he died at Héricourt, near Montbelliard, at the home of Sibylla, Duchess of Würtemberg, a pupil who had offered him refuge.

By far the majority of his suites for the harpsichord, and be it noted they are for harpsichord and not for organ, are in the orthodox order of _Allemande_, _Courante_, _Sarabande_, and _Gigue_. The dances are all constructed upon the same plan, a plan at the basis of which the new idea of harmony has at last been solidly established. Each piece is divided neatly into two sections of about equal length, each of which is repeated. The harmonic groundwork is simple and clear. The dance opens in the tonic key. If the piece is major it modulates to the dominant, if minor to the relative major; and in that key the first section ends. This section having been repeated, the second section begins in the key in which the first section left off, and modulates back again, usually through one or two keys, to end in the tonic. The whole makes a compact little piece, very neatly balanced. It would seem to be quite sealed in perfection and to contain no possibilities of new growth; but the short passages of free modulation through which the second section pursues its way from dominant or relative major back to tonic contained germs of harmonic unrest which were to swell the whole to proportions undreamed of.

The change from tonic to dominant and back, with the few timid modulations in the second section, offered practically all the contrast and variety there was within the limits of a single piece. Except in the _sarabande_, the musical texture was woven in a flowing style. The effect is one of constant motion. A figure, not a theme, predominated. The opening figure, it is true, was modified, often gave way to quite a different figure in the dominant key; but the style remained always the same, and there was but the slightest suggestion of contrast in the way one figure glided into another.

In the suite as a whole, the uniformity of key which ruled over all four movements precluded in the main all contrast but the contrast of rhythm. Yet a few peculiarities of style became associated with each of the dances and thus gave more than rhythmical variety to the whole. The counterpoint of the allemande, for example, was more open and more dignified, so to speak, than that of the fleet, sparkling Italian courante. In the French courante a counterpoint of dotted quarters and eighths prevailed, and a shifting between 6/4 and 3/2 rhythm stamped the movement with a rhythmic complexity not at all present in the other movements. The second section of the gigue was almost invariably built upon an inversion of the figures of the first section, and the solid chord style of the sarabande not only contrasted radically with the style of allemande, courante, and gigue, but, moreover, beguiled composers into the expression of personal emotion now noble, now tender, which put sarabandes in general in a class by themselves amid the music of that time.

Though the normal suite was constituted of these four dances in the order we have named, other dances came to find a place therein. Of these the favorites were _gavottes_, _minuets_, _bourrées_, _loures_, _passepieds_, and others; and they were inserted in any variety or sequence between the sarabande and the gigue. Sometimes in place of extra dances, or among them, is to be found an _air_ or _aria_, the salient quality of which is not rhythm, but melody, usually highly ornamented in the style made universally welcome by the Italian opera. More rarely the air was simple and was followed by several variations. The best known of these airs and variations which were incorporated into suites is probably Handel’s famous set upon a melody, not his own, which has long gone by the name of ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith.’ By the beginning of the eighteenth century many composers were accustomed to begin their suites with a prelude, usually in harmonic style.

In the music of the great French lutenists and clavecinists of the seventeenth century the suite never crystallized into a stereotyped sequence. The principle of setting together several short pieces in the same key was none the less clearly at work, though nothing but the fancy of the composer seems to have limited the number of pieces which might be so united. On the other hand, the idea of emphasizing rhythm as the chief element of contrast within the suite was often secondary to the idea of contrasting mood. How much of this contrast of mood was actually effective it is hard to say, but the great number of little pieces composed either for lute or clavecin in France of the seventeenth century, were given picturesque or fanciful names by their composers.

This custom was firmly established by the great lutenist, Denis Gaultier, whose collection of pieces, _La rhétorique des dieux_, comprises some of the most exquisite and most beautifully worked music of the century. The pieces in the collection are grouped together by modes; but the modes by this time have become keys, and differ from each other in little except pitch. The greater part of the pieces are given names, borrowed for the most part from Greek mythology. _Phaèton foudroyé_, and _Juno, ou la jalouse_ are indicative of the general tone of them.

Close upon Gaultier’s pieces for lute came the harpsichord pieces of Jacques Champion, son of a family of organists, who took upon himself the name of Chambonnières. Two books of his pieces were published in 1670. Here again the pieces are grouped in keys, in, however, no definite number; and, though most have still only dance names to distinguish them, many are labelled with a title.

In spite of these titles, the tendency to call upon an external idea to aid in the construction of a piece of music is not evident in this early harpsichord music. There is little attempt at picture drawing in music. The names are at the most suggestive of a mood, indicative of the humor which in the composer gave birth to the music, hints to the listener upon the humor in which he was to take it. The structure of the music is independent of the titles, and is of a piece with the structure of the dance tunes which make up the German suite. The influence of this music was not important upon the growth of form, but upon the molding and refinement of style.

To be sure, a tendency toward realistic music crops out from time to time all through the seventeenth century. The twitter of birds no less than the roar of battle was attempted by many a composer, resulting, in the case of the latter especially, in hardly more than laughably childish imitations. Further than this composers did not often go until, just before Bach entered upon his professional career, J. F. Kuhnau, of Leipzig, published his extraordinary Biblical sonatas. Besides these, the ‘Rhetoric of Gods,’ the ‘Hundred Varieties of Musical Fruit,’ the ‘jealous ladies’ and the ‘rare ladies,’ even the battles and the gossips, all of which have been imitated in music, appear conventional and absolute. Here is narrative in music and a flimsiness of structure which is meaningless without a program. There are six of these strange compositions, upon the stories of David and Goliath, of David and Saul, of Jacob and Leah, and others. Some years later they undoubtedly suggested to Sebastian Bach the delicate little capriccio which he wrote upon the departure of his brother for the wars. Apart from this they are of slight importance except as indications of the experimental frame of mind of their composer. Indeed, beyond imitation and to a small extent description, neither harpsichord nor pianoforte music has been able to make much progress in the direction of program music.

Kuhnau’s musical narratives were published in August, 1700. Earlier than this he had published his famous _Sonata aus dem B_. The work so named was appended to Kuhnau’s second series of suites or _Partien_. It has little to recommend it to posterity save its name, which here appears in the history of clavier music for the first time. Nor does this name designate a form of music akin to the sonatas of the age of Mozart and Beethoven, a form most particularly associated with the pianoforte. Kuhnau merely appropriated it from music for string instruments. There it stood in the main for a work which was made up of several movements like the suite, but which differed from the suite in depending less upon rhythm and in having a style more dignified than that which had grown out of experiments with dance tunes. In addition, the various movements which constituted a sonata were not necessarily in the same key. Here alone it possessed a possible advantage over the suite. Yet though in other respects it cannot compare favorably to our ears with the suite, Kuhnau cherished the dignity of style and name with which tradition had endowed it. These he attempted to bestow upon music for the clavier.[6]

The various movements lack definite form and balance. The first is in rather heavy chord style, the chords being supported by a dignified counterpoint in eighth notes. This leads without pause into a fugue on a figure of lively sixteenth notes. The key is B-flat major. There follows a short adagio in E-flat major, modulating to end in C minor, in which key the last movement, a short allegro in triple time, is taken up. The whole is rounded off by a return to the opening movement, signified by the sign _Da Capo_.

Evidently pleased with this innovation, Kuhnau published in 1696 a set of seven more sonatas called _Frische Clavier Früchte_. These show no advance over the _Sonata aus dem B_ in mastery of musical structure. Still they are evidence of the efforts of one man among many to give clavier music a life of its own and to bring it in seriousness and dignity into line with the best instrumental music of the day, namely, with the works of such men as Corelli, Purcell, and Vivaldi. That he was unable to do this the verdict of future years seems to show. The attempt was none the less genuine and influential.

In the matter of structure, then, the seventeenth century worked out and tested but a few principles which were to serve as foundation for the masterpieces of keyboard music in the years to come. But these, though few, were of vast importance. Chief among them was the new principle of harmony. This we now, in the year 1700, find at the basis of fugue, of prelude and toccata, and of dance form, not always perfectly grasped but always in evidence. Musical form now and henceforth is founded upon the relation and contrast of keys.

Consistently to hold to one thematic subject throughout a piece in polyphonic style, skillfully to contrast or weave with that secondary subjects, mark another stage of development passed. The fugue is the result, now articulate, though awaiting its final glory from the hand of J. S. Bach. To write little dance pieces in neat and precise form is an art likewise well mastered; and to combine several of these, written in the same key, in an order which, by affording contrast of rhythms, can stir the listener’s interest and hold his attention, is the established rule for the first of the so-called cyclic forms, prototype of the symphony and sonata of later days. Such were the great accomplishments of the musicians of the seventeenth century in the matter of form.

V

In the matter of style, likewise, much was accomplished. We have had occasion frequently to point out that in the main the harpsichord remained throughout the first half of the seventeenth century under the influence of the organ. For this instrument a conjunct or _legato_ style has proved to be most fitting. Sudden wide stretches, capricious leaps, and detached runs seldom find a place in the texture of great organ music. The organist strives for a smoothness of style compatible with the dignity of the instrument, and this smoothness may be taken as corollary to the fundamental relationship between organ music and the vocal polyphony of the sixteenth century.

On the other hand, by comparison with the vocal style, the organ style is free. Where the composer of masses was restricted by the limited ability of the human voice to sing wide intervals accurately, the organist was limited only by the span of the hand. Where Palestrina could count only upon the ear of his singers to assure accurate intonation, the organist wrote for a keyboard which, supposing the organ to be in tune, was a mechanism that of itself could not go wrong. Given, as it were, a physical guarantee of accuracy as a basis for experiment, the organist was free to devise effects of sheer speed or velocity of which voices would be utterly incapable. He had a huge gamut of sounds equally at his command, a power that could be mechanically bridled or let loose. His instrument could not be fatigued while boys could be hired to pump the bellows. So long as his finger held down a key, or his foot a pedal, so long would the answering note resound, diminishing, increasing, increasing, diminishing, according to his desire, never exhausted.

Therefore we find in organ music, rapid scales, arpeggios rising from depths, falling from heights, new figures especially suited to the organ, such as the ‘rocking’ figure upon which Bach built his well-known organ fugue in D minor; deep pedal notes, which endure immutably while above them the artist builds a castle of sounds; interlinked chords marching up and down the keyboard, strong with dissonance. There are trills and ornamental turns, rapid thirds and sixths. And in all these things organ music displays what is its own, not what it has inherited from choral music.

Yet, notwithstanding the magnificent chord passages so in keeping with the spirit of the instrument, in which only the beauty of harmonic sequence is considered, the treatment of musical material by the organists is prevailingly polyphonic. The sound of a given piece is the sound of many quasi-independent parts moving along together, in which definite phrases or motives constantly reappear. The harmony on which the whole rests is not supplied by an accompaniment, but by the movement of the several voice-parts themselves in their appointed courses. And it may be said as a generality that these parts progress by steps not wider than that distance the hand can stretch upon the keyboard.

During the first half of the seventeenth century the harpsichord was but the echo of the organ. Even the collections of early English virginal music, which in some ways seem to offer a brilliant exception, are the work of men who as instrumentalists were primarily organists. In so far as they achieved an instrumental style at all it was usually a style fitting to a small organ. The few cases where John Bull’s cleverness displayed itself in almost a true virtuoso style are exceptions which prove the rule. Not until the time of Chambonnières and Froberger do we enter upon a second stage.

About the middle of the seventeenth century Chambonnières was famous over Europe as a performer upon the harpsichord. As first clavicinist at the court of France, his manner of playing may be taken to represent the standard of excellence at that time. Constantine Huygens, a Dutch amateur exceedingly well-known in his day, mentions him many times in his letters with unqualified admiration, always as a player of the harpsichord, or as a composer for that instrument. Whatever skill he may have had as an organist did not contribute to his fame; and his two sets of pieces for harpsichord, published after his death in 1670, show the beginnings of a distinct differentiation between harpsichord and organ style.

[Illustration] Title page of Kuhnan's "Neue Clavier-Übung".

The harpsichord possesses in common with the organ its keyboard or keyboards, which render the playing of solid chords possible. The lighter action of the harpsichord gives it the advantage over the organ in the playing of rapid passages, particularly of those light ornamental figures used as graces or embellishments, such as trills, mordents, and turns. A further comparison with the organ, however, reveals in the harpsichord only negative qualities. It has no volume of sound, no power to sustain tones, no deep pedal notes. Consequently the smooth polyphonic style which sounds rich and flowing on the organ, sounds dry and thin upon the weaker instrument. The composer who would utilize to advantage what little sonority there is in the harpsichord must be free to scatter notes here and there which have no name or place in the logic of polyphony, but which make his music sound well. Voice parts must be interrupted, notes taken from nowhere and added to chords. The polyphonic web becomes disrupted, but the harpsichord profits by the change. It is Chambonnières who probably first wrote in such a style for the harpsichord.

He learned little of it from what had been written for the organ, but much from music for the lute, which, quite as late as the middle of the century, was interchangeable with the harpsichord in accompaniments, and was held to be equal if not superior as a solo instrument. It was vastly more difficult to play, and largely for this reason fell into disuse. The harpsichord is by nature far nearer akin to it than to the organ. The free style which lutenists were driven to invent by the almost insuperable difficulties of their instrument, is nearly as suitable to the harpsichord as it is to the lute. Without doubt the little pieces of Denis Gaultier were played upon the harpsichord by many an amateur who had not been able to master the lute. The skilled lutenist would find little to give him pause in the harpsichord music of Chambonnières. The quality of tone of both instruments is very similar. For neither is the strict polyphony of organ music appropriate; for the lute it is impossible. Therefore it fell to the lutenists first to invent the peculiar instrumental style in which lie the germs of the pianoforte style; and to point to their cousins, players of the harpsichord, the way towards independence from organ music.

Froberger came under the influence of Denis Gaultier and Chambonnières during the years he spent in Paris, and he adopted their style and made it his own. He wrote, it is true, several sets of ricercars, capriccios, canzonas, etc., for organ or harpsichord, and in these the strict polyphonic style prevails, according to the conventionally more serious nature of the compositions. But his fame rests upon the twenty-eight suites and fragments of suites which he wrote expressly for the harpsichord. These are closely akin to lute music, and from the point of view of style are quite as effective as the music of Chambonnières. In harmony they are surprisingly rich. Be it noted, too, in passing, that they are not lacking in emotional warmth. Here is perhaps the first harpsichord music which demands beyond the player’s nimble fingers his quick sympathy and imagination--qualities which charmed in Froberger’s own playing.

Kuhnau as a stylist is far less interesting than Froberger, upon whose style, however, his clavier suites are founded. His importance rests in the attempts he made to adapt the sonata to the clavier, in his experiments with descriptive music, and in the influence he had upon his contemporaries and predecessors, notably Bach and Handel. Froberger is the real founder of pianoforte music in Germany, and beyond him there is but slight advance either in style or matter until the time of Sebastian Bach.

What we may now call the harpsichord style, as exemplified in the suites of Chambonnières and Froberger, is relatively free. Both composers had a fondness for writing in four parts, but these parts are not related to each other, nor woven together unbrokenly as in the polyphonic style of the organ. They cannot often be clearly followed throughout a given piece. The upper voice carries the music along, the others accompany. The arrangement is not wholly an inheritance from the lute, but is in keeping with the general tendency in all music, even at times in organ music, toward the monodic style, of which the growing opera daily set the model.

But the harpsichord style of this time is by no means a simple system of melody and accompaniment. Though the three voice parts which support the fourth dwell together often in chords, they are not without considerable independent movement. They constitute the harmonic background, as it were, which, though serving as background, does not lack animation and character in itself. In other words, we have a contrapuntal, not a polyphonic, style.

A marked feature of the music is the profuse number of graces and embellishments. These rapid little figures may be akin to the vocal embellishments which even at the beginning of the seventeenth century were discussed in theoretical books; but they seem to flower from the very nature of the harpsichord, the light tone and action of which made them at once desirable and possible. They are but vaguely indicated in the manuscripts, and there can be no certainty as to what was the composer’s intention or his manner of performance. Doubtless they were left to the discretion of the player. At any rate for a century more the player took upon himself the liberty of ornamenting any composer’s music to suit his own whim. These _agrémens_[7] were held to be and doubtless were of great importance. Kuhnau, in the preface to his _Frische Clavier Früchte_, speaks of them as the sugar to sweeten the fruit, even though he left them much to the taste of players; and Emanuel Bach in the second half of the eighteenth century devoted a large part of his famous book on playing the clavier to an analysis and minute explanation of the host of them that had by then become stereotyped. They have not, however, come down into pianoforte music. It is questionable if they can be reproduced on the pianoforte, the heavy tone of which obscures the delicacy which was their charm. They must ever present difficulty to the pianist who attempts to make harpsichord music sound again on the instrument which has inherited it.

The freedom from polyphonic restraint, inherited from the lute, and the profusion of graces which have sprouted from the nature of the harpsichord, mark the diversion between music for the harpsichord and music for the organ. In other respects they are still much the same; that is to say, the texture of harpsichord music is still close--restricted by the span of the hand. This is not necessarily a sign of dependence on the organ, but points rather to the young condition of the art. It is not to be expected that the full possibilities of an instrument will be revealed to the first composers who write for it expressly. They lie hidden along the way which time has to travel. But Chambonnières, in France, and Froberger, in Germany, opened up the special road for harpsichord music, took the first step which others had but to follow.

Neither in France nor in Germany did the next generation penetrate beyond. Le Gallois, a contemporary of Chambonnières, has remarked that of the great player’s pupils only one, Hardelle, was able to approach his master’s skill. Among those who carried on his style, however, must be mentioned d’Anglebert,[8] Le Begue,[9] and Louis and François Couperin, relatives of the great Couperin to come.

In Germany Georg and Gottlieb Muffat stand nearly alone with Kuhnau in the progress of harpsichord music between Froberger and Sebastian Bach. Georg Muffat spent six years in Paris and came under French influence as Froberger had come, but his chief keyboard works (_Apparatus Musico Organisticus_ (1690)) are twelve toccatas more suited to organ than to harpsichord. In 1727 his son Gottlieb had printed in Vienna _Componimenti musicali per il cembalo_, which show distinctly the French influence. Kuhnau looms up large chiefly on account of his sonatas, which are in form and extent the biggest works yet attempted for clavier. By these he pointed toward a great expansion of the art; but as a matter of fact little came of it. In France, Italy, and Germany the small forms were destined to remain the most popular in harpsichord music; and the sonatas and concertos of Bach are immediately influenced by study of the Italian masters, Corelli and Vivaldi.

In Italy, the birthplace of organ music and so of a part of harpsichord music, interest in keyboard music of any kind declined after the death of Frescobaldi in 1644, and was replaced by interest in opera and in music for the violin. Only one name stands out in the second half of the century, Bernardo Pasquini, of whose work, unhappily, little remains. He was famous over the world as an organist, and the epitaph on his tombstone gives him the proud title of organist to the Senate and People of Rome. Also he was a skillful performer on the harpsichord; but he is more nearly allied to the old polyphonic school than to the new. A number of works for one and for two harpsichords are preserved in manuscript in the British Museum, and these are named sonatas. Some are actually suites, but those for two harpsichords have little trace of dance music or form and may be considered as much sonatas as those works which Kuhnau published under the same title. All of Kuhnau’s sonatas appeared before 1700 and the date on the manuscript in the British Museum is 1704. Pasquini was then an old man, and it is very probable that these sonatas were written some years earlier; in which case he and not Kuhnau may claim the distinction of first having written music for the harpsichord on the larger plan of the violin concerto and the sonatas of Corelli.[10]

Two books of toccatas by Alessandro Scarlatti give that facile composer the right to be numbered among the great pioneers in the history of harpsichord music. These toccatas are in distinct movements, usually in the same key, but sharply contrasted in content. The seventh is a theme and variations, in which Scarlatti shows an appreciation of tonal effects and an inventiveness which are astonishingly in advance of the time. He foreshadows unmistakably the brilliant style of his son Domenico; indeed, he accounts in part for what has seemed the marvellous instinct of Domenico. If, as is most natural, Domenico approached the mysteries of the harpsichord through his father, he began his career with advantages denied to all others contemporary with him, save those who, like Grieco, received that father’s training. Alessandro Scarlatti was one of the most greatly endowed of all musicians. The trend of the Italian opera during the eighteenth century toward utter senselessness has been often laid partly to his influence; but in the history of harpsichord music that influence makes a brilliant showing in the work of his son, who contributed perhaps more than any other one man to the technique of writing not only for harpsichord but for pianoforte.

Little of the harpsichord and clavichord music of the seventeenth century is heard today. It has in the main only an historical interest. The student who looks into it will be amazed at some of its beauties; but as a whole it lacks the variety and emotional strength which claim a general attention. Nevertheless it is owing to the labor and talent of the composers of these years that the splendid masterpieces of a succeeding era were possible. They helped establish the harmonic foundation of music; they molded the fugue, the prelude, the toccata, and the suite; they developed a general keyboard style. After the middle of the century such men as Froberger and Kuhnau in Germany, Chambonnières, d’Anglebert, and Louis and François Couperin in France, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy, finally gave to harpsichord music a special style of its own, and to the instrument an independent and brilliant place among the solo instruments of that day. Out of all the confusion and uncertainty attendant upon the breaking up of the old art of vocal polyphony, the enthusiasm of the new opera, the creation of a new harmonic system, the rise of an instrumental music independent of words, these men slowly and steadily secured for the harpsichord a kingdom peculiarly its own.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It should be noted in passing that during the early stages of the growth of polyphonic music, roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, composers had brought over into their vocal music a great deal of instrumental technique or style, which had been developed on the crude organs, and on the accompanying instruments of the troubadours. In the period which we are about to treat the reverse is very plainly the case.

[2] At the head of Sebastian Bach’s _Musikalisches Opfer_ stands the Latin superscription: _Regis Iussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta_. The initial letters form the word ricercar.

[3] _Cf._ Vol. VI, Chap. XV.

[4] Suites were known in England as ‘lessons,’ in France as _ordres_, in Germany as _Partien_, and in Italy as _sonate da camera_.

[5] There was a form of suite akin to the variation form. In this the same melody or theme served for the various dance movements, being treated in the style of the allemande, courante, or other dances chosen. _Cf._ Peurl’s Pavan, Intrada, Dantz, and Gaillarde (1611); and Schein’s Pavan, Gailliarde, Courante, Allemande, and Tripla (1617). This variation suite is rare in harpsichord music. Froberger’s suite on the old air, _Die Mayerin_, is a conspicuous exception.

[6] ‛_Denn warum sollte man auf dem Clavier nicht eben wie auf anderen Instrumenten dergleichen Sachen tractieren können?_’ he writes in his preface to the ‘Seven New _Partien_,’ 1692.

[7] So they were called in France, which until the time of Beethoven set the model for harpsichord style. In Germany they were called _Manieren_.

[8] D’Anglebert published in 1689 a set of pieces, for the harpsichord, containing twenty variations on a melody known as _Folies d’Espagne_, later immortalized by Corelli.

[9] Le Begue (1630-1702) published _Pièces de clavecin_ in 1677.

[10] See J. S. Shedlock: ‘The Pianoforte Sonata,’ London, 1895.

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