The Death and Second Life of the Harpsichord


Occidental College

From the SelectedWorks of Edmond Johnson

Spring 2013

The Death and Second Life of the Harpsichord
Edmond Johnson, Occidental College

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/edmond_johnson/2/

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The Death and Second

Life of the Harpsichord

E D M O N D J O H N S O N

But nobody, save perhaps an antiquarian or two, thought of summoning
to action the harpsichord . . . . Had any temerarious musician seriously
advanced the claims of the antiquated relic a contemptuous majority
would have dismissed it at once as outmoded, feeble, merely quaint.

—Pitts Sanborn

Writing for the Nation in 1925, the American
music critic Pitts Sanborn did not have to look very far into the past to
recall a time when the harpsichord was widely dismissed as being ‘‘out-
moded, feeble, merely quaint.’’ Indeed, the instrument had spent much
of the previous century as the silent denizen of storerooms, attics, and
museum galleries, and very few of the ‘‘contemptuous majority’’ would
have been able to claim any real familiarity with its sound. It was only
around the turn of the twentieth century—and with the advent of a gen-
eration of fervent early music advocates and enthusiasts—that the instru-
ment began to attract the attention and support that would eventually
allow it once again to take a prominent place within the contemporary
musical landscape. Over the course of a few short decades the harpsi-
chord underwent a remarkable transformation: no longer the ‘‘anti-
quated relic’’ of the nineteenth century, it once again became, as
Sanborn put it, ‘‘an instrument with a vivid independent life of its own.’’1

The choice of words is telling. Whereas it might seem strange to
speak of an instrument as having acquired an ‘‘independent life,’’ the
harpsichord’s peculiar history had long attracted similar patterns of

1 Pitts Sanborn, ‘‘Landowska’s Contribution,’’ The Nation 121 (5 August 1925): 175.

180

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speech. As far back as the middle of the nineteenth century the instru-
ment’s abandonment was described in terms of death or even extinction,
and during its subsequent revival the harpsichord’s modern history has
been written with terms borrowed liberally from the lexicon of rebirth
and resurrection. Indeed, the last two centuries have seen the instrument
widely represented, both verbally and pictorially, with figurations that
invoke either life or death.2 To expand on the conceit put forward by
the title of this article, it might be said that the harpsichord has had three
lives and one (impermanent) death. The instrument’s first life, of
course, would encompass its prime, a time roughly spanning the six-
teenth through eighteenth centuries. Near the end of this period the
harpsichord came to its figurative demise, struck down, it is tempting to
say, by the hammer blow of the ascendant pianoforte. Following the same
figurative logic, the harpsichord’s resurgence near the turn of the twenti-
eth century would represent a sort of second life, whereas the dramatic
and nearly wholesale adoption of more historically based models arguably
constitutes a third (and current) existence for the instrument, a renais-
sance begun in the decades following World War II by such luminaries as
Hugh Gough, Frank Hubbard, and William Dowd.

Though far from being the only historical instrument to receive
renewed attention during the decades surrounding the turn of the twen-
tieth century, the harpsichord holds a special place in the history of the
early music revival. No other instrument played as visible—or, perhaps,
as controversial—a role in popularizing musical activities related to the
revival. Having, as it does, a large and visually distinctive presence, the
harpsichord has a tendency to garner attention wherever it appears,
whether in a museum case or on the concert hall stage.3 In this study I

2 In a 1923 history of the instrument, Norman Wilkinson wrote that ‘‘far from being
laid up in lavender, [harpsichords] have, as often as not, been pushed carelessly into
the outhouse or hayloft . . . and there have died an unheeded death.’’ Norman Wilkinson,
‘‘A Note on the Clavichord and the Harpsichord,’’ Music and Letters 4, no. 2 (April 1923):
162–69, esp. 162. Similarly, Wanda Landowska once described her agenda in reviving the
harpsichord in vitalizing terms: her object was to ‘‘make it live again, to give it jubilant or
pathetic accents, to evoke polyphonic purity, to make the coupled keyboards resound, to
sing with lingering tones the amorous cantilenas.’’ Wanda Landowska, Landowska on Music,
ed. and trans. Denise Restout (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), 11.

3 As Sheridan Germann noted in her treatise on harpsichord decoration, ‘‘[A]n
oboist or violinist need not worry whether his instrument’s decoration is appropriate to his
repertoire, but a harpsichord is too large and dominant not to be part of an audience’s
visual experience of a concert.’’ Sheridan Germann, Harpsichord Decoration: A Conspectus,
vol. 4 of The Historical Harpsichord, ed. Howard Schott et al. (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press,
2002), 92. In a 1922 essay the harpsichordist Nellie Chaplin recalled how her instruments
had attracted ‘‘a great deal of interest’’ during the extensive run of Frederic Austin’s
popular revival of The Beggar’s Opera, reporting that ‘‘hundreds of people’’ had asked about
her instrument. See Nellie Chaplin, ‘‘The Harpsichord,’’ Music and Letters 3, no. 3 (July
1922): 269–73, esp. 270.

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explore the harpsichord’s nineteenth-century ‘‘death’’ and its subse-
quent revival—the two periods of its history that have been most ne-
glected. By reexamining the ways in which the harpsichord was
portrayed in both words and images I shall show that the instrument’s
eventual acceptance in the twentieth century was far from a fait accompli
but depended largely on an extensive and deliberate renegotiation of
both its image and cultural identity. In the first section I explore the
harpsichord’s nineteenth-century existence as an evocative emblem of
a vanished past: an instrument turned relic that was frequently laden with
supernatural literary tropes and ghostly imagery. In the second section I
move on to the instrument’s revival, focusing on the ways in which the
harpsichord was brought before modern audiences in a form that was
ultimately heavily reengineered and reconfigured. Indeed, in its journey
from museum piece to modern musical instrument the harpsichord
underwent a marked transformation of both form and character. The
process involved a gradual rejection of much of the cultural baggage that
the harpsichord had accrued during its long dormancy in the nineteenth
century and resulted in a transformation that ultimately won it a place in
the modern musical world.

The Death of the Harpsichord

In truth, the harpsichord never quite disappeared. Noting that the
instrument had appeared at Ignaz Moscheles’s concerts historiques as
early (or, perhaps, as late) as the 1830s, Howard Schott observed that ‘‘in
a narrow technical sense it is probably correct that the harpsichord never
really became extinct in the same sense as the dodo bird.’’4 It is reason-
able to conclude that the vast majority of plucked keyboards were aban-
doned when instrumental fashions changed around the turn of the
nineteenth century, but a few old instruments were inevitably retained
by their owners. Some were kept as treasured antiques, and others served
as historical curios. A select few even saw regular use for decades after the
piano had become the dominant keyboard instrument.5 But if a few
specimens remained in the hands of collectors and devoted musical
antiquarians, for the most part the harpsichord existed during this

4 Howard Schott, ‘‘The Harpsichord Revival,’’ Early Music 2, no. 2 (April 1974): 85–95,
esp. 85.

5 Edward Kottick has noted that both Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi were
taught to play the harpsichord as children, despite their growing up at a time when the
instrument was already seen as outmoded. Edward Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 396. For the most detailed account of
harpsichord making and performance during the early part of the nineteenth century, see
ibid., 391–406. For a broader history of the interest in early music during the first half of the
nineteenth century, see Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1988), 13–25.

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period not as a tangible musical object but as a fanciful idea residing
in the collective imagination. Though rarely encountered by the gen-
eral public during most of the nineteenth century, the harpsichord
was far from forgotten: it lived on in the poetry and prose of the
time, maintaining a sort of shadowy belletristic afterlife that contin-
ued long after most of the physical relics—all that wood, quill,
leather, and ivory—had been relegated to the silent indignity of the
rubbish heap.6

Literary Hauntings

By the middle of the nineteenth century the piano had reached near
ubiquity in the parlors and concert rooms of the Western world, and the
old keyboards that had held reign in previous centuries had been
reduced to little more than evocative names—mere emblems of a past
age. An example of this new role can be found in Robert Browning’s
celebrated poem ‘‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’’ (1855), one of the earliest
instances in which an antiquated keyboard is explicitly employed as
a symbol of antiquity. To be sure, in this poem Browning invokes not
the harpsichord but its cousin the clavichord, but, as Larry Palmer has
observed, nineteenth-century writers frequently took the names of early
keyboards to be interchangeable.7 Indeed, with little awareness of their
histories and mechanisms, the harpsichord, virginal, spinet, and clavi-
chord were generally conflated under a common umbrella of instrumen-
tal obsolescence.8 More important than the specific genus Browning
assigned to it is the way he treated the antique instrument, using it as
the central poetic device in an imagined transhistorical dialogue with the

6 For instance, in Thomas Haynes Bayly’s ‘‘My Great-Grandmother’s Harpsichord,’’
a short story that achieved some popularity in the 1830s, a father concerned with the
musical education of his daughters (but reluctant to purchase an expensive new piano)
seeks to restore a large harpsichord that had languished for three generations in his attic,
only to conclude that the instrument is fit only for firewood (a fate that it ultimately
suffers). Thomas Haynes Bayly, ‘‘My Great-Grandmother’s Harpsichord,’’ in Forget-Me-
Not: A Christmas, New Year’s and Birthday Present for 1831, ed. Frederic Shoberl (London:
R. Ackermann, 1831), 263–70.

7 Larry Palmer, ‘‘Some Literary References to the Harpsichord and Clavichord, 1855–
1923,’’ Diapason 74 (September 1983): 18.

8 This conflation sometimes spread to early pianos, the appearance of which did not
always differentiate them from other early keyboards. While touring Italy in 1897, Arnold
Dolmetsch was shown an instrument that was reported to be the clavichord that had
inspired Browning’s poem; upon closer inspection, however, Dolmetsch discovered that
the instrument was in fact a small square piano. See Mabel Dolmetsch, Personal Recollections
of Arnold Dolmetsch (1958; New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 27. Another example of con-
fused taxonomy can be seen in figure 4 of this article: an engraving of a large harpsichord
by Andreas Ruckers that was printed in an 1887 issue of Art Amateur with a caption that
described it as a ‘‘clavichord.’’

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eighteenth-century Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi. The poem
takes as its subject the rich world of Settecento Venice, using music as
the evocative connection between the present and the past: the narrator,
upon hearing the tones of the titular toccata, is transported to the time
and place where Galuppi himself ‘‘sat and played Toccatas, stately at
the clavichord.’’9 Though leaving the details of the toccata (the mere
agent of the poem’s historical evocation) mostly to the reader’s imag-
ination, Browning does provide a sort of poetic harmonic analysis, in
which pitch content mingles freely with mournful voices from the imag-
ined past:

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—‘‘Must

we die?’’
Those commiserating sevenths—‘‘Life might last! We can but try!’’10

The poem continues with a rhapsodic catalog of the glories of this
earlier age, before gradually adopting, in the tenth through twelfth stan-
zas, the somber tones of a meditation on mortality:

Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep thro’ every nerve.

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
‘‘Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.’’11

The beauties of the past have given way to images of their ruination, and
the long dead composer—that ‘‘ghostly cricket’’—has provided the key-
hole through which the decaying spirit of this long vanished age can still
be glimpsed. That Browning cast the clavichord as a prime character in
his historical fantasy speaks to how potent the instrument’s associations
with the past were by the middle of the nineteenth century. It makes little
difference that Galuppi never wrote a single toccata, or that the

9 Robert Browning, ‘‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s,’’ in The Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works
of Robert Browning, Cambridge Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 175. The poem was
first printed in Browning’s collection Men and Women (1855). For a brief overview of
Browning’s musical connections, see R. W. S. Mendl, ‘‘Robert Browning, the Poet-Musician,’’
Music and Letters 42, no. 2 (April 1961): 142–50.

10 Browning, ‘‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s,’’ 175.
11 Ibid.

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clavichord was hardly a major presence in eighteenth-century Italy. As
a literary device the instrument’s role is unambiguous: it functions as an
evocative emblem of a time long past.

A similarly uncanny use of an old keyboard instrument comes to us
from the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In the prelude to
his famous 1863 cycle of poems Tales of a Wayside Inn a mysterious sound,
straining the boundaries of verbal description, emerges from an un-
played harpsichord just after a violinist has finished performing for the
assembled crowd:

And from the harpsichord there came
A ghostly murmur of acclaim,
A sound like that sent down at night
By birds of passage in their flight,
From the remotest distance heard.12

The harpsichord serves no other function in the poem’s narrative than
to add a sort of supernatural resonance to the moment.

Subsequent literary references are often even more explicit in asso-
ciating the harpsichord with the specters of the past. Lewis Morris’s
episodic poem ‘‘Pictures—I,’’ first published in 1883, is structured in
twenty-one quatrains, each of which amounts to a free-standing vignette:
little slices of life ranging in mood from sunny to profound and mourn-
ful. In one of the darkest stanzas we find a harpsichord placed at the
center of a morbid scene:

Around a harpsichord, a blue-eyed throng
Of long-dead children, rapt in sounds devout,
In some old grange, while on that silent song
The sabbath twilight fades, and stars come out.13

Two similarly macabre accounts of the instrument come from the
other side of the Atlantic, penned by the prolific American poet Madison
Julius Cawein, a native of Louisville, Kentucky. In his 1896 poem
‘‘Haunted,’’ Cawein’s sentences heave with Romantic imagery as they
exposit a mysterious scenario:

The sunset spreads red stains as bloody proof;
From hall to hall and stealthy stair to stair,

12 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Tales of a Wayside Inn (London:
Bell and Daldy, 1867), 10.

13 Lewis Morris, ‘‘Pictures—I,’’ in The Works of Lewis Morris (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trübner, 1891), 316–18. Lewis Morris (1833–1907) was born in Wales, though he
lived most of his life in England. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1895 in recognition
of his literary accomplishments.

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Through all the house, a dread that drags me toward
The ancient dusk of that avoided room,
Wherein she sits with ghostly golden hair,
And eyes that gaze beyond her soul’s sad doom,
Bending above an unreal harpsichord.14

In a variation on this poem that Cawein wrote some years later (entitled
‘‘Præterita’’), the poet elaborated on the harpsichord’s supernatural
disposition, concluding the verse with the image of a golden-haired
woman ‘‘Waking the Ghost of that old harpsichord.’’15

A more benign apparition is conjured in an unusual prose sketch
published in 1889 by the French writer and artist George Auriol. In his
‘‘Le clavecin de Yeddo,’’ Auriol emphasized the harpsichord’s perceived
otherness by placing it within the context of an imagined Orient:

Upon an old harpsichord of the time of Marie Antoinette—that has
found its way, no one knows how, to the country of the Mikados—the
frivolous Lou-Laou-Ti plays a love song. Perched upon the unsteady
stool, like a doll upon a stand, with head thrown back, the young girl
sings softly. Her delicate fingers dance madly upon the yellowed ivory,
then sweep very gravely over the keys of ebony, and recommence to
flutter distractedly hither and thither. The harpsichord, with its clear
and caressing voice, seems, under the witchery of the little fairy, to find
in its old heart shudders, murmurs, and vibrations long forgotten. And
that puffed dress of blue, flowered with roses, is it not of a marquise?16

Auriol’s miniature story capitalizes on the compound exoticism of a sub-
ject that is foreign in both time and place. Given the work’s publication in
June 1889 it is tempting to connect it with the Exposition Universelle, which
had opened in Paris only a month earlier and offered a diverse display of
cultural and historical objects.17 (Indeed, the mention of Marie Antoin-
ette in the opening sentence is particularly suggestive, as a harpsichord

14 Madison Julius Cawein, ‘‘Haunted,’’ in The Garden of Dreams (Louisville, KY: John P.
Morton, 1896), 114.

15 Madison Julius Cawein, ‘‘Præterita,’’ in The Poems of Madison Cawein (Boston: Small,
Maynard, 1908), 85–86.

16 George Auriol, ‘‘The Harpsichord of Yeddo,’’ in From the French: Pastels in Prose,
trans. Stuart Merrill (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890), 81–83. Originally published in
French as ‘‘Le clavecin de Yeddo,’’ in La Plume 1, no. 5 (15 June 1889): 49. Auriol’s poem
was a popular example of French prose poetry, and the English version was subsequently
anthologized in a number of early twentieth-century textbooks. ‘‘Yeddo’’ is a variant roman-
ization of ‘‘Edo,’’ a historical name for the city of Tokyo.

17 In her work on the music of the 1889 exposition, Annegret Fauser has noted that
the ‘‘discovery of new sonorities in early music shows parallels to the sonic discovery of
‘other’ music at the Exposition Universelle, whether the gamelan or opera transmitted
through the telephone.’’ Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair
(Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 41–42.

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that had formerly been in her possession was displayed at the exposition.)
The story might also reflect Auriol’s exposure to one of the many historical
instruments that were adorned with scenes of life in an imagined Orient,
a mode of décor that reflected a widespread European vogue for the exotic
East in the decades surrounding the turn of the eighteenth century.18

When ‘‘Le clavecin de Yeddo’’ was reprinted the following year in an
American anthology of French prose poetry, the text of the opening
page was artfully set around a fanciful engraving by Henry W. McVickar
(fig. 1).19 As if in an effort to invert the historical modes of chinoiserie,
McVickar showed the European instrument and its player, here clothed
in Western dress, alongside imagery commonly associated with Japan.
McVickar’s ‘‘harpsichord’’ is of an imaginative design that conjoins
a small keyboard to an upright harp, an overly literal interpretation of the
word that may suggest that the artist was unfamiliar with the instrument he
was asked to depict.20 Like Robert Browning’s clavichord in ‘‘A Toccata of
Galuppi’s,’’ the harpsichord here is portrayed by Auriol as a powerful
evocator capable of carrying its listeners to another time and another
place. As Lou-Laou-Ti continues to play (a powdered wig suddenly gracing
her head), the accoutrements of her Japanese world are swiftly substituted
for those from an imagined European past:

And suddenly all the statuettes change into graceful groups of pale
Saxe, and bands of monkeys embroidered upon the silk screens become
groups of rosy cupids that might have been painted by Boucher himself.
And the black hair of Lou-Laou-Ti seems covered with a vapory snow.21

Perhaps one of the surest indicators that the harpsichord had
emerged from the nineteenth century with a heavy freight of ghostly
associations comes in the form of a satirical short story entitled ‘‘The
Haunted Harpsichord,’’ published by James Huneker in 1905.22

18 At least one harpsichord on display at the 1889 Exposition, a 1728 instrument by
Christian Zell of Hamburg, had a case painted in an Orientalist style, though the scenes
were not of Japan but of China. This instrument is now in the collection of the Museum für
Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. For a list of instruments displayed at the Exposition Uni-
verselle, see the Catalogue général officiel: Section II, Arts libéraux exposition rétrospective du travail
et des sciences anthropologiques (Lille: L. Danel, 1889), 74–90.

19 George Auriol, ‘‘The Harpsichord of Yeddo,’’ 81.
20 Fanciful as it might be, the form of McVickar’s imaginary instrument is not entirely

lacking historical precedent: a 1641 painting by Andrea Sacchi, for instance, shows a more
elaborate open-framed clavicytherium (sometimes called a ‘‘keyed harp’’) that is being
played by the Italian castrato Marc’Antonio Pasqualini (Marcantonio Pasqualini Crowned by
Apollo, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). This painting is discussed and
reproduced in Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord, 24, and pl. 2.

21 George Auriol, ‘‘The Harpsichord of Yeddo,’’ 83.
22 James Huneker, ‘‘The Haunted Harpsichord,’’ in Visionaries (New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 188–202.

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Huneker, who is remembered today mainly as a music critic for the
Musical Courier and the New York Times, set his story in an intentionally
indeterminate era that combines elements of the Middle Ages and the
eighteenth century. The story begins with two men speeding across the
French countryside, hot in pursuit of a fugitive vassal. Stopping to rest at
an unassuming roadside inn not far from the town of Amboise, the men
listen as the innkeeper regales them with a tale redolent with the hall-
marks of Gothic fiction. In this story within a story we are told that the inn
stands before the ruins of a chateau that was burned to the ground in the
years following the French revolution and that spirits from the ancien
regime have not entirely vacated the premises.

It is at this point that the narrative suddenly engages in a fantastic
reinvention of the musical past. The innkeeper tells of a duchess who
made a frequent habit of hosting the composer Christoph Willibald
Gluck during periods when her husband was away. One night, while the
duchess and the famous composer of Alceste were playing a duet on the

figure 1. First page of ‘‘The Harpsichord of Yeddo,’’ a prose poem by
George Auriol; reprinted in From the French: Pastels in Prose,
trans. Stuart Merrill (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890),
81–83

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harpsichord, the duke discovered the pair and in a fit of jealous rage
murdered them as they sat before the keyboard. Ever since, the inn-
keeper says, the place has been haunted by the sounds of a ghostly harp-
sichord. At the conclusion of this ghost story the boundary between the
inner and outer narratives is suddenly blurred by a spectral appearance
outside the inn:

Music, faint, tinkling, we certainly heard. It came with the wind in little
sobs, and then silence settled upon us. ‘‘It’s the Chevalier Gluck, and he
is playing to his duchess out in the fields. See, I will open the door and
show you,’’ whispered the fat landlord.

Just then the moonlight was blackened by a big cloud, and we heard
the tinkling music of a harpsichord again, but could see naught. The
sounds were plainer now, and presently resolved into the rhythmic
accents of a gavotte. But it seemed far away and very plaintive!

‘‘Hark,’’ said Michael, in a hoarse voice. ‘‘That’s the gavotte from
Pagliacci. Listen! Don’t you remember it?’’

‘‘Pshaw!’’ I said roughly, for my nerves were all astir. ‘‘It’s the Alceste
music of Gluck.’’

‘‘Look, look, gentlemen!’’ called our host, and as the moon glowed
again in the blue we saw at the edge of the forest a white figure, saw it,
I swear, although it vanished at once and the music ceased.23

In spinning together such an incongruous assortment of historical
details, Huneker in effect gave his readers a knowing wink.24 (Indeed, he
went so far as to provide the story with a parenthetical subtitle, ‘‘In the
Style of Mock-Mediæval Fiction,’’ lest anyone miss the point.) But if the
‘‘Haunted Harpsichord’’ is unabashed parody, it is certainly not without
object. The confused and convoluted historical details are a jab at the
sort of cultural conflation in which history is casually compressed (or
even radically skewed), represented here by an anachronistic scenario in
which Pagliacci, the 1892 verismo opera, and Alceste, Gluck’s hit from
1767, can somehow coexist in a common pseudo-historical space. At the
very core of this epoch-blurring tale is the ‘‘haunted harpsichord’’ itself,
an instrument whose supernaturally charged historical associations
were still potent enough at the turn of the twentieth century to make
it an appealing centerpiece for a satire on the romanticization of the
musical past.

23 Ibid., 197–98.
24 Huneker’s use of the term ‘‘Chevalier’’ is likely a reference to a historical fantasy

story by E. T. A. Hoffmann entitled ‘‘Ritter Gluck’’ (later published in French as ‘‘Chevalier
Gluck’’). The story—Hoffman’s earliest publication—first appeared in Allgemeine Musikalische
Zeitung 11, no. 20 (15 February 1809).

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The Silence of ‘‘Antiquated Relics’’

For much of the nineteenth century the harpsichord existed more as an
idea than as an actual physical entity. Whereas it may have appeared with
some frequency in the poetry and prose of the time, actual sightings
remained rare, and those antique instruments that had avoided destruc-
tion remained mostly confined to private collections and were rarely
accessible to the public at large.25 This situation began to change around
the last quarter of the century with the advent of a series of high-profile
exhibitions that presented historical musical instruments, typically on
loan from both public and private collections.26 The first of these exhibi-
tions was the Special Exhibition of Ancient Musical Instruments, which
opened on 1 June 1872 at London’s South Kensington Museum (later
the Victoria and Albert).27 The organizing committee for the exhibition
was chaired by Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred (later to become the
Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), and curatorial direction was provided
by Carl Engel, the German-born musicologist and instrument collector
who had since the 1840s made his home in London and established
himself as one of the country’s leading organological authorities.28

In the months leading up to the exhibition’s opening the organizing
committee actively sought out instruments that had been long hidden
from view, seeking out possessors of ‘‘instruments noted for their deco-
rative, archaeological, ethnological, or intrinsic technical merits’’ and
encouraging them to share their treasures with the public at large.29 The
result was an impressive display of several hundred historic instru-
ments—lent by collectors from across the United Kingdom and conti-
nental Europe—that was heralded as an unprecedented opportunity to

25 The rarity of encountering such instruments was noted by Carl Engel, who wrote in
1874: ‘‘It is surprising how soon musical instruments become scarce when they are no
longer in popular demand. How seldom is a harpsichord now seen! Yet it was still in favor as
recently as the beginning of the present century.’’ Carl Engel, ed., A Descriptive Catalogue of
the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (London: George E. Eyre and William
Spottiswoode, 1874), 346.

26 For a broad overview of these exhibitions see Malou Haine, ‘‘Expositions d’in-
struments anciens dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle,’’ Revue Belge de Musicologie 42
(1988): 223–40.

27 The South Kensington Museum, founded in 1852 in the wake of the previous year’s
Great Exhibition, was rededicated as the Victoria and Albert Museum in May 1899.

28 Engel, who wrote the catalog to the 1872 exhibition and was also the South Ken-
sington Museum’s principal advisor on instruments, provided a brief account of the ex-
hibition’s origins and planning process in an appendix to a catalog of the South
Kensington Museum’s permanent collection of musical instruments. See Engel, ed., A
Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum, 347–49.

29 See ‘‘Special Loan Exhibition of Ancient Musical Instruments at the South Ken-
sington Museum,’’ Journal of the Society of Arts 20, no. 1005 (23 February 1872): 279; and
‘‘Exhibition of Ancient Musical Instruments,’’ Journal of the Society of Arts 20, no. 1015 (3 May
1872): 511.

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view little-seen relics from the musical past. In an article published in the
Pall Mall Gazette, for instance, the novelist Charles Reade implored the
public to visit the exhibition, specifically noting the rarity of the instru-
ments and the unlikelihood that they would again be seen together:

On the first of June the South Kensington Museum opened a special
exhibition of ancient musical instruments. They have been obtained on
loan from all quarters; money, powerful as it is, could not buy the
greater part; and every man and woman, who loves music, or possesses
a mind, should study them before the unique opportunity runs away,
and this multitude of gems is dispersed for ever.30

The public seems to have heeded Reade’s words. The venture, which
stayed open through the end of September, was deemed a huge success
and subsequently laid the way for similar loan exhibitions that were held
in major cities throughout Europe and the United States in the decades
that followed.31

The thirty years that followed saw no fewer than sixteen major ex-
hibitions of historical musical instruments, often held in conjunction
with a larger exposition or world’s fair (table 1). In cities like Vienna,
Paris, Milan, and Brussels, crowds flocked to see long-neglected instru-
ments of the past, with antique keyboards frequently receiving top bill-
ing. But if such exhibitions provided the public with the opportunity
once again to see harpsichords, virginals, and spinets, they only rarely
provided an opportunity to hear them.32 Whereas some exhibitions
offered the occasional historical concert or lecture recital, for the most
part the objects on display were treated more as silent historical relics

30 Charles Reade, ‘‘Ancient Musical Instruments,’’ reprinted in English Mechanic and
World of Science 15, no. 377 (14 June 1872): 324. This article also appeared in Dwight’s Journal
of Music 32, no. 8 (13 July 1872): 266.

31 In a 1910 dictionary entry on ‘‘Musical Loan Exhibitions’’ Francis W. Galpin spe-
cifically credited the South Kensington exhibition with setting a model for all those that
followed: ‘‘The idea of bringing before the public the art treasures of private collectors
under the form of a loan exhibition is essentially English, the Special Exhibition of Ancient
Musical Instruments held at South Kensington in 1872 being acknowledged as the prototype
of the many similar collections which have since been made in Europe and America.’’
Francis W. Galpin, ‘‘Musical Loan Exhibitions,’’ in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
vol. 3, ed. J. A. Fuller Maitland (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 338.

32 For example, whereas the 1885 Music Loan Exhibition (held in the upper galleries of
the Royal Albert Hall) was generally well received, the limited opportunity for visitors to
hear any of the antique instruments on display was noted bitterly by the press. An unsigned
critic of the Musical Times and Singing Class Circular wrote, ‘‘The errors and omissions of the
executives of the International Inventions Exhibition with regard to the nature and quality
of the musical performances provided for the entertainment of visitors have been com-
mented upon in severe terms, not only in our own columns, but in the ordinary press.’’ The
writer, however, made positive mention of the handful of historical concerts that had been
offered. Unsigned review, ‘‘Historic Concerts at the Inventions Exhibition,’’ Musical Times
and Singing Class Circular 26, no. 510 (1 August 1885): 477–79, esp. 477–78.

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than as musical instruments. Cordoned-off on platforms or confined
within glass-walled vitrines, the instruments maintained a mute existence
and their observers were left to imagine their sound.

In an 1882 article in All the Year Round, a literary journal founded by
Charles Dickens, an unsigned writer laments the silence of the instru-
ments exhibited at the South Kensington Museum:

Some fine specimens of spinets and harpsichords are among the old
musical instruments at South Kensington. One may walk round the

T A B L E 1 .
Major exhibitions of musical instruments in Europe and North

America held between 1872 and 1904

Year Location Exhibition details

1872 London Special Exhibition of Ancient Musical Instruments
(South Kensington Museum)

1873 Vienna Part of the 1873 Weltausstellung
1878 Paris Part of the 1878 Exposition Universelle
1880 Brussels Part of the 1880 Exposition Nationale, celebrating the

fiftieth anniversary of Belgium’s independence
from the Netherlands

1881 Milan
1885 London Part of the 1885 International Inventions Exhibition
1888 Brussels Part of the 1888 Grand Concours International des

Sciences et de l’Industrie
1888 Bologna
1889 Paris Part of the 1889 Exposition Universelle
1890 London Part of the 1890 Royal Military Exhibition
1892 Vienna Part of the 1892 Internationale Ausstellung für

Musik- und Theaterwesen
1893 Chicago Part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
1894 Edinburgh Loan Exhibition of the Society of Musicians
1900 London International Loan Exhibition of Musical Instruments

(Crystal Palace, Sydenham)
1900 Paris Part of the 1900 Exposition Universelle
1902 Boston Historical Musical Exhibition, held at the Horticultural

Hall and sponsored by Chickering and Sons
1904 London Special Loan Exhibition of Musical Instruments,

Manuscripts, Books, Portraits, and other Mementoes,
celebrating the tercentenary of the Worshipful
Company of Musicians (Fishmonger’s Hall)

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glass-case which isolates each, and see the whole wire-arrangement and
key-board; but the tone is a tantalising secret to be preserved for the
curiosity of other ages than ours.33

Seven years later a writer reviewing the vast musical offerings of the 1889
Exposition Universelle for Le Petit Journal would note the startling contrast
between the hush of the historical gallery and the clamorous piano-filled
pavilion (a division labeled ‘‘Class 13’’) in which modern instrument
makers displayed their wares:

While the venerable musical instruments shown in the galleries of the
Histoire du Travail are mute, while no sound escapes the Italian clavi-
chords from 1547, the harpsichords from 1678 and the piano of Marie-
Antoinette, what a racket, in contrast, in Class 13, where the modern
instruments roar!34

Given the enforced silence of the museum display, it is understand-
able that historical keyboards would be seen primarily in terms of their
visual and historical value—as precious relics from the past rather than as
useful musical tools. Indeed, the exhibitions of the nineteenth century
generally privileged the historical over the musical, often featuring in-
struments that were closely connected with famous figures from the past.
Reviews of instrument exhibits further reflected the bias of the visual
over the musical. A passage from an 1872 report in the English Mechanic
and World of Science is telling:

Then there are Italian spinets, one of which ought to interest the ladies;
for it has nineteen hundred and twenty-eight precious stones outside it,
and very little music inside. There is Handel’s harpsichord. He had
more harpsichords than Cromwell skulls. But this time there really is
a tidy pedigree made out.35

Here, as with many other accounts of such exhibitions, the harpsichord
is valued primarily for two qualities: its decorative appeal and its histor-
ical provenance—the elements that most strongly connected it with the

33 ‘‘The Pianoforte Family,’’ All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal 29 (27 May 1882):
353–56, esp. 354.

34 ‘‘Les Instruments de Musique,’’ Le Petit Journal (5 July 1889): 1; quoted in Fauser,
Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 26.

35 Charles Reade, ‘‘Ancient Musical Instruments,’’ 324. The instrument with ‘‘nine-
teen hundred and twenty eight precious stones’’ was, in fact, a 1577 spinet made in Milan by
Annibale dei Rossi. Its elaborate pietre dure case made it a star of several nineteenth-century
exhibits. It was purchased by the South Kensington Museum in 1867 for the then enormous
sum of £1200 and remains in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. See
Howard Schott and Anthony Baines, Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Victoria and Albert
Museum (London: V and A Publications, 1998), 35–39.

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past.36 Furthermore, the writer’s quip about George Frideric Handel’s
apparently prodigious number of harpsichords is an indication of the
prevalence with which displayed instruments were claimed to have been
played or owned by prominent historical figures, though such claims
were frequently based on scant or dubious historical evidence.

This emphasis on history and appearance can also be found in
Alfred J. Hipkins’s beautifully illustrated volume Musical Instruments, His-
toric, Rare and Unique, published in 1888.37 Though Hipkins was a serious
and knowledgeable scholar of early keyboard instruments, Musical Instru-
ments, with its oversized pages and colorful lithograph plates (mostly of
instruments that were displayed as part of London’s International Inven-
tions Exposition of 1885) served primarily as a lavishly illustrated Victorian
coffee table book, valued as much for its high production values as for
the knowledge it contained.38 Among the instruments described and
depicted in Hipkins’s book is what may well have been the most famous
antique keyboard of the time, a late sixteenth-century spinet that con-
tinues to be one of the treasures of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s
collection (fig. 2). Though the instrument’s origins are almost certainly
Italian (its specific history prior to 1798 is a mystery to this day), the
spinet was famous to the nineteenth-century public as ‘‘Queen
Elizabeth’s Virginal.’’39 Indeed, its position as a historical marker and
artifact was particularly emphasized at the 1885 exhibition, where the
instrument was used as the star attraction of a recreated Tudor room
complete with period furnishing and contemporary works of art.40 What
makes all of this even more remarkable is that the instrument’s connec-
tion with the famous virgin queen appears to have been almost entirely
speculative, based solely on the existence of a small crest on the front of

36 Reade reports of having been able to hear the sound of one of the harpsichords,
played by Carl Engel, the first curator of musical instruments at the South Kensington
Museum, which Reade described as being ‘‘full of sweetness and tenderness, yet not defi-
cient in grandeur.’’ Reade, ‘‘Ancient Musical Instruments,’’ 324.

37 Hipkins, Alfred] J. Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare and Unique (Edinburgh: Adam
and Charles Black, 1888).

38 A contemporary reviewer praised the book as being ‘‘among the most beautiful
examples of printing it is possible to obtain.’’ Unsigned review of Musical Instruments:
Historic, Rare, and Unique, by Alfred J. Hipkins, Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 29,
no. 539 (1 January 1888): 45. On Hipkins’s considerable contribution to the revival of early
keyboard instruments, see the unsigned article ‘‘Alfred James Hipkins,’’ Musical Times and
Singing Class Circular 39, no. 667 (1 September 1898): 581–86.

39 Hipkins, Musical Instruments. The pages of Hipkins’s book are not numbered; the
illustration of ‘‘Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal’’ is listed as plate 7 and followed by a brief
description.

40 International Inventions Exhibition, Guide to the Loan Collection and List of Musical
Instruments, Manuscripts, Books, Paintings, and Engravings, Exhibited in the Gallery and Lower
Rooms of the Albert Hall (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1885), 110. The sixteenth-
century Tudor room also featured several Italian lutes, as well as ‘‘furniture, paneling, and
other fittings’’ arranged and lent by Mr. George Donaldson.

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the case that was most likely added centuries later. Although nineteenth-
century historians appear to have been aware of the instrument’s ques-
tionable provenance, the potency of the myth was enough to cement its
place in the popular historical imagination.41 Many other keyboard in-
struments were similarly displayed bearing pedigrees that included hav-
ing been played by a famous figure from the past. In France, Marie
Antoinette’s spirit loomed large over a harpsichord she was said to have
once owned; this instrument garnered much attention when it was dis-
played as part of the 1889 Exposition Universelle.42 It is worth noting, too, that

figure 2. ‘‘Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal’’; illustration from Alfred J.
Hipkins, Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare and Unique
(Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1888)

41 The most comprehensive modern assessment of this instrument can be found in
Schott and Baines, Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum, 29–31.
The later discovery of a tiny date—1594—inscribed in the instrument’s elaborate sgraffito
case further complicates its history. If the instrument was in fact ever owned by Queen
Elizabeth I (1533–1603) she could only have possessed it in her last years. See Nanke
Schellmann, ‘‘The Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Scribbles, Scratches and Sgraffito,’’ V and A
Conservation Journal 42 (Autumn 2002): 9–11, www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conser-
vation-journal/issue-42/the-queen-elizabeths-virginal-scribbles,-scratches-and-sgraffito/.

42 Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 33.

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the veneration accorded historically important instruments for their bio-
graphical associations extended well into the inner confines of the music
world. Franz Liszt, for example, some years after he had already acquired
one of Beethoven’s fortepianos, was reported to have purchased a harpsi-
chord that in 1853 was claimed to have been Mozart’s.43

Hauntings in the Musical Museum

An intriguing connection between the public exhibition of early musical
instruments and their ‘‘hauntings’’ in the literature of the age comes in
the form of an anonymous poem published in Chambers’s Journal of Pop-
ular Literature, Science and Art. The poem, titled ‘‘On an Old Harpsi-
chord,’’ appeared on 8 June 1872, one week after the opening of the
1872 Special Exhibition of Ancient Musical Instruments in South Kensington.
The unsigned poet begins by linking the worn musical object with the
age of its creation:

Its varnish cracked, its paintings scarred,
Its dainty gilding sadly marred,
And turned to dingy umber,
It stands forlorn, a waif or stray
Of glories long since passed away,
An ancient piece of lumber.

What more? And yet how rich it is,
This harpsichord, in memories
And quaint associations,
Recalling that far time, when still
High birth and title had their will,
And kings were more than nations.44

43 ‘‘Mozart’s Old Harpsichord, offered for sale at Weimar, has been purchased by
Franz Liszt. The instrument played on by Beethoven is also in the possession of the cele-
brated pianist.’’ Unsigned review, ‘‘Brief Chronicle of the Last Month,’’ Musical Times and
Singing Class Circular 5, no. 107 (1 April 1853): 173.

44 ‘‘On an Old Harpsichord,’’ Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art
441 (8 June 1872): 368. The identity of the poem’s author remains unclear, but when it was
subsequently reprinted in the text of James Payn’s novel The Heir of the Ages, Payn (the
editor of Chamber’s Journal at the time the poem was first published) provided the following
prefatory note: ‘‘The two poems, entitled ‘The Children’ and ‘On an Old Harpsichord,’
ascribed to [the character] Matthey Meyrick in this novel, were written by a lad who died
many years ago of consumption, before he attained his majority. I never knew him per-
sonally—our relation being only that of editor and contributor—but judging from his
letters, no less than his verses, I am well convinced that in him his country lost a genius. The
poems in question were written, I believe, in his nineteenth year.’’ James Payn, The Heir of
the Ages, rev. ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1888).

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The poem, which spans ten six-line stanzas, encompasses nearly every
trope that was commonly associated with the harpsichord. Above all, the
decaying instrument calls forth a distant age. And it is perhaps not sur-
prising that the touch of a key suddenly fills the room with apparitions:

I touch the keys—the startled chord
Can scarce a weak response afford
That wakes a low vibration
Among the slackened, palsied strings:
A feeble spell, and yet it brings a magic transformation.

An antique aspect veils the place,
A weird, oppressive, ghostly grace
That almost makes one tremble;
A mystic light pervades the air,
Faint footfalls gather on the stair—
The belles and beaux assemble.

The belles and beaux? Alas, the ghosts!
Thin shadows of once-reigning toasts,
And heroes of the duel.
They smile, they chatter, they parade,
They rustle in superb brocade,
They shine with many a jewel.45

The poem concludes with the sudden disappearance of the spirits. In
fact, they stroll into the ether to the strains of Gluck’s ‘‘Che farò senza
Euridice?’’ leaving the harpsichord once more a mere relic:

The lights go out; the voices die;
Among the strings strange tremors fly,
That slowly sink to slumber;
The harpsichord remains alone,
A monument of glories done,
An ancient piece of lumber.46

A similarly mystical tone pervades an article that appeared in Frank
Leslie’s Popular Monthly in February 1894.47 Aptly titled ‘‘Musical Ghosts,’’ it
surveys the predecessors of the modern piano, focusing on the efforts of
the prominent nineteenth-century instrument collector Morris Steinert.48

45 ‘‘On an Old Harpsichord.’’
46 Ibid.
47 L. D. Mayland, ‘‘Musical Ghosts: Being a Research into the Ancestry of the

Pianoforte,’’ Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 37 (February 1894): 245–55.
48 Morris Steinert would later give his significant collection to Yale University, where

it remains today. Many of the details in Mayland’s article come directly from Steinert’s book

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The article’s author, L. D. Mayland, describes the old keyboards as being
‘‘scattered over the world in dark garrets, where they are regarded as
merely pieces of obsolete furniture,’’ and he describes Steinert’s efforts
to recover them:

[U]p under the red-tiled roofs, he found old clavichords which had
been hidden there for years in the obligato society of disused furniture,
dust and spiders. Sometimes it was to the astonishment of the house-
holder that he revealed these treasures, so long forgotten; oftentimes
he was met with vigorous protests of their absolute non-existence and
peremptory refusals of the privilege of search; but a glass of beer or
a cigar generally obtained willing consent.49

In breathless tones Mayland described the moments when Steinert uncov-
ered an instrument hidden in the musty attics of southern Germany:

It was a veritable treasure quest, and he frequently philosophized over
his dusty instruments in the garrets where light was admitted by remov-
ing a tile. Strange and poetical fancies hover over these relics, to which
the makers had modestly refrained from affixing names or dates. What
had caused their retirement to these shades? Whose fingers had lin-
gered upon their ancient keys? Why had music become so lost an art
where such instruments still existed to tempt the yearning, poetic soul
of the Bavarian to give it expression on those tuneful strings?50

In the silent context of the museum display (or, for that matter, the
hush of the dusty garret), historical and visual qualities inevitably take
precedence over the musical, and it is not surprising to find that harp-
sichords so presented should become largely defined through their asso-
ciation with the figures of the past who had once played upon them—or,
at any rate, were imagined to have done so. For the most part such
instruments existed primarily as historical relics, objects used either to
exemplify the virtues of period style, or alternately offered up for vener-
ation in connection with whichever famous figure was thought to have
once ‘‘lingered upon their ancient keys.’’ In many ways the real story of
the harpsichord in the nineteenth century is one not of dormancy,
death, or even abandonment but of a transformation from musical tool
into visual and historical artifact; in the words of the anonymous author
-

The M. Steinert Collection of Keyed and Stringed Instruments, with Various Treatises on the History of
these Instruments, the Method of Playing Them, and Their Influence on Musical Art (New York:
Charles F. Tretbar, 1893). Additional information about Steinert can be found in Larry
Palmer, Harpsichord in America: A Twentieth-Century Revival (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 8–13.

49 Mayland, ‘‘Musical Ghosts,’’ 246.
50 Ibid.

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of ‘‘On an Old Harpsichord,’’ the instrument had become ‘‘a monument
to glories done, an ancient piece of lumber.’’

The Harpsichord’s Second Life

By the end of the nineteenth-century the harpsichord was indeed
haunted—if not by actual spirits, at least by persistent associations with
an abandoned musical past. From the otherworldly noises imagined to
be emerging from its case to the specters envisioned in its midst, the
supposedly ‘‘dead’’ instrument was in fact alive with the ghosts of its
fancifully imagined history. Ironically, the very elements that made the
harpsichord an object of fascination to nineteenth-century poets and
museumgoers alike posed significant challenges for those who wanted
to bring the instrument onto the modern concert stage. Although its
evocative appearance and potent historical associations had done much
to establish it as a venerable musical relic, this same reputation did little to
help make the case for its acceptance as a serious instrument in an era
preoccupied with its own modernity. How could an instrument so long
viewed as being creaky and quaint possibly be received by audiences as
anything other than a historical curiosity? How could a symbol of an
archaic musical culture be accepted as a modern musical tool? Such ques-
tions loomed large for the first generation of revivalists, who had to care-
fully balance the appeal of the harpsichord’s evocative history with the
practical requirements of modern concert halls and the aural expectations
of audiences weaned on a musical diet rich in Wagner and Brahms.

If there was a pivot point in the harpsichord’s modern ‘‘rebirth’’ it
would have to be placed somewhere between 1889 and 1912. During this
period of rapid musical and societal change a series of events critical to
the instrument’s revival took place: the construction of the first modern-
day harpsichords in 1889 (by the French firms Pleyel and Erard and the
instrument restorer Louis Tomasini); the growing success of the musical
activities of Arnold Dolmetsch, who built his first harpsichord in 1896;
the public harpsichord debut, in 1903, of Wanda Landowska, later the
instrument’s most tireless and successful advocate; and, finally, the
appearance in 1912 of the Pleyel Grand Modèle de Concert harpsichord,
which would dominate much of the professional early music scene for
nearly a half century after. Where prior to 1889 the harpsichord had
been little more than a historical curiosity, by 1912 the instrument was
well on its way to a full-scale cultural reentrenchment.

The early decades of the harpsichord revival can be seen as an informal
campaign to counteract the way the instrument had been portrayed during
the preceding century. Those who wished to perform early keyboard music

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‘‘on the instrument for which it was written’’ (to use the preferred revivalist
rhetoric of the day) had to contend with a range of negative biases, ranging
from objections to its appearance and tone to questions regarding its
relevance in the modern music world. In an age steeped in teleological
rhetoric it was easy to dismiss the harpsichord as a sort of paleolithic piano:
a knuckle-dragging ancestor whose very existence had been obviated two
hundred years earlier by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

The physical appearance of the historical harpsichord was a signifi-
cant liability when it came to the instrument’s revival. There were the lid
paintings and the often highly decorative casework, which had done
much to make it a symbol of antiquity in the preceding century. And
even the instrument’s shape and size flagged it as an anachronism.51

Although at the end of the eighteenth century the form of the average
piano was not so very different from that of its plucked-string relations
(wood-framed, narrow-compassed), by the middle of the nineteenth
century a widening morphological gap had formed between the piano’s
increasingly robust construction and that of the harpsichord, which by
comparison must have appeared more and more like a frail vestige of
a quaint yesteryear.52 In an age of factory-built pianos, the harpsichord’s
hand-crafted and wood-framed construction instantly marked it as an
atavistic intruder from the preindustrial past.

This was not lost on the critics. When Wanda Landowska presented
a concert in April 1905 at the Queen’s Hall in London, on which she
performed not only on harpsichord but also on a modern piano and
a fortepiano, a writer for the Bystander found the ‘‘clavecin’’ an incon-
gruous presence on the concert platform:

Sitting quietly in Queen’s Hall, and waiting for Miss Landowska to make
her appearance, one reflected that there was a tremendous advance in
mechanism from the long, thin somewhat anaemic-looking harpsichord
to the substantial, modern piano, which, if it has any self-respect (and
a self-playing attachment), will, nowadays, even play its own notes.53

51 In an unsigned 1910 article on the harpsichords designed for the Chickering Piano
Company, Arnold Dolmetsch called attention to the instrument’s relatively diminutive size,
declaring that the ‘‘magnificent’’ modern pianos were the ‘‘gigantic descendants of the
ancient claviers.’’ See ‘‘Busoni at the Harpsichord,’’ Music Trade Review 51, no. 10 (3 Sep-
tember 1910): 18, http://mtr.arcade-museum.com/MTR-1910-51-10/18/.

52 Writing in 1837, the novelist Thomas Love Peacock noted the dramatic change
between the contemporary piano and the instruments he saw while growing up in the
1790s. Recalling the harpsichords of his childhood, he wrote: ‘‘Over what a gulph of time
this name alone looks back! What a stride from the harpsichord to one of Broadwood’s last
grand pianos!’’ Thomas Love Peacock, ‘‘Recollections of Childhood,’’ Bentley’s Miscellany 1,
no. 2 (February 1837): 189.

53 Unsigned review, ‘‘Matters Musical,’’ Bystander 6, no. 73 (26 April 1905): 194.
Explaining the harpsichord’s presence on the modern stage, the reviewer wrote: ‘‘It is
fashionable now to choose one’s furniture and surroundings from the oldest models, and

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At the time Landowska was performing on an instrument that was
a descendant of the harpsichords the Pleyel-Wolff-Lyon Piano Company
had built sixteen years earlier for the Paris exposition. Although large by
historical standards, it still retained many of the hallmarks of traditional
harpsichord design. And although Pleyel had dispensed with the elabo-
rate case paintings found on its 1889 instruments, the ornamentation of
their newer instruments was at least historically suggestive.54 The
Bystander reviewer was also skeptical of the instrument’s tone, the quality
of which was described as being ‘‘thin and qualified by the scratching of
the plectra’’:

And when one actually heard the clavecin, it was apparent that as great
an advance has taken place from the musical point of view [as from
that of design]. One felt for Louis XIV, who, if he desired music in the
salon, was limited to the twanky utterances of this certainly elegant
instrument.55

Two years earlier Landowska had received a letter from Charles Bordes,
the director of the Schola Cantorum in Paris. Although Bordes enthusi-
astically endorsed Landowska’s interest in championing the keyboard
music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he entreated her not
to perform such music on the harpsichord, complaining that the instru-
ment—‘‘that cage for flies,’’ as he called it—reduces ‘‘superb and often
large-scale works to the size of its tiny, spindly legs.’’56

Moreover, there remained a lingering sense that the instrument
served little purpose beyond providing historical set dressing. This men-
tality can be seen in the instrument’s inclusion in a French dictionary of
furnishings, Dictionnaire de l’ameublement, first published in 1887.57 Here we
are presented with the harpsichord not so much as musical instrument
but instead as ornate furnishing and object d’art. Although the dictionary
explains the basic mechanism of the instrument and provides a brief over-
view of its history, the emphasis is firmly on issues of appearance, historical
provenance, and monetary value. Even the treatment of the particular

-
something of the same spirit may have been responsible for the two recitals of old harp-
sichord music recently given by Miss Wanda Landowska at Queen’s Hall.’’ The reference to
the self-playing piano reflects that instrument’s burgeoning popularity in both America
and Europe only a decade following the introduction of the Pianola, the first practical
pneumatic piano player.

54 See Jean-Claude Battault, ‘‘Les clavecins Pleyel, Érard et Gaveau, 1889–1970,’’ in
Music Ancienne: Instruments et Imagination, ed. Michael Latcham (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006),
193–206.

55 ‘‘Matters Musical,’’ 194.
56 Letter dated 31 July 1903, quoted in Landowska, Landowska on Music, 10.
57 Henry Harvard, Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration depuis le XIIIe siècle

jusqu’á nos jours, vol. 1 (Paris: May and Motteroz, 1887–1890), 870–76.

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instrument featured in the accompanying illustration is revealing (fig. 3).
That instrument, which today resides in the collection of the Musée de la
Musique in Paris, was constructed by Andreas Ruckers in 1646, followed by
an overhaul at the hands of the similarly renowned Pascal Taskins in 1780.
Despite this venerable pedigree the Dictionnaire only described it as ‘‘cla-
vecin décoré de grotesques.’’58 Interestingly, the Eudel Ruckers (named
after one of its owners, Paul Eudel) appeared in print a second time in
1887, this time in the pages of a periodical called the Art Amateur (fig. 4).59

Here the instrument is shown in what appears to be a drawing room filled

figure 3. Illustration of a ‘‘clavecin décoré de grotesques’’ from Henry
Harvard, Dictionnaire de l’ameublement (Paris: May and
Motteroz, 1887); though not disclosed in the Dictionnaire,
the instrument was a Ruckers harpsichord owned by Paul
Eudel

58 For more information and modern photographs of the 1646 Ruckers in the Musée
de la Musique, see http://mediatheque.cite-musique.fr/masc/play.asp?ID¼0162260. In
1887, when the Dictionnaire de l’ameublement was published, the instrument was privately
owned by Paul Eudel. It subsequently passed through the collection of Geneviève Thibault
de Chambure before being purchased by the museum in 1964.

59 I encountered this engraving only after it was (unfortunately) excised from its
parent journal and sold as a print. I was therefore not able to ascertain the date and page
number of the original publication.

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with rococo furnishings, accompanied by a label that erroneously de-
scribes it as a ‘‘clavichord.’’

Perhaps this emphasis is understandable in works dedicated to fur-
nishings and art, but the same bias has cropped up in more music-centric
sources as well. One of the earliest articles to speak explicitly of a ‘‘harp-
sichord revival’’ appeared in August 1901, in the unlikely pages of The
Girl’s Own Paper. The article’s author, Frederick J. Crowest, who was
known at the time for several books on music history aimed at a general
readership, described the growing interest in old keyboard instruments
as being part of what he poetically termed ‘‘the pause we make, betimes,
to look back a little through the vista into the past.’’60 Crowest was
particularly laudatory about the recent use of the harpsichord as a his-
torically accurate prop in the staging of plays set in the past:

Only recently have there been pieces produced, in which, to perfect the
ensemble, an actual harpsichord of last century date and make has been
brought upon the stage, with most interesting and artistic effect. That

figure 4. Illustration from Art Amateur (1887) labeled ‘‘Clavichord [sic]
of André Ruckers (1646)’’; in the collection of Paul Eudel

60 Frederick J. Crowest, ‘‘The Harpsichord Revival,’’ The Girl’s Own Paper 22 (August
1901): 744–46.

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this ‘‘actuality,’’ instead of its offshoot the modern ‘‘grand,’’ should
have been produced is not only an indication of the lengths to which
managers go to command success, but it gives the audience an oppor-
tunity of learning more about the qualities and capacities of the instru-
ment than would the reading of dozens of histories of music or treatises
on musical instruments.61

Although Crowest was certainly enthusiastic about the reappearance of
the harpsichord, for him its value was less as a serious musical instrument
than as a tool for the curious musical time traveler: ‘‘Of course, no one
wishes to see a harpsichord in the place of every pianoforte, even if that
were possible. None the less it and its music furnish a delightful field for
those lovers of music who feel betimes a longing for an excursion into
the far-off musical past.’’62

Among many critics there was a sense that the harpsichord was sim-
ply not up to the rigors of performing ‘‘serious’’ music. In a December
1907 review of Louis Diémer’s playing a ‘‘programme historique’’ in
Liège, Belgium, the critic for L’Art Moderne sounded ambivalent about
the instrument. He noted that Diémer performed ‘‘with his usual mas-
tery,’’ but he found the harpsichord itself to be ‘‘archaic and too
limited,’’ declaring it only successful when performing ‘‘the puerile
and ravishing evocations of a purely descriptive and picturesque art.’’63

That same year a writer for the German periodical Konzert came to
a similar conclusion while reviewing a recital given by Landowska at the
Hôtel de Prusse in Leipzig. Discussing a program that included works by
Bach ‘‘and his Italian and French contemporaries,’’ the writer noted:

Her harpsichord demonstrations provided us with proof that certain
ancient compositions of a playful character (for instance, ‘‘L’Hirondelle’’
and ‘‘Le Coucou’’ by Daquin, or ‘‘Le Dodo’’ by Fr. Couperin) can
achieve a certain charm from the sound of the harpsichord. But works
in which the composer has set forth a weightier argument (such as
Bach’s Italian Concerto and, to a lesser degree, even Couperin’s ‘‘Folies
françaises’’), require a power, weight, and the singing character far
beyond the expressive capabilities of the harpsichord.64

61 Ibid., 744. When Crowest spoke of a harpsichord ‘‘of last century date and make’’
he was, though writing in 1901, presumably referring to the eighteenth century.

62 Ibid., 746.
63 ‘‘Certes le clavecin reste archaı̈que et de moyens trop limités, mais il se prête à ravir

à ces évocations puériles et ravissantes d’un art purement pittoresques et descriptif.’’
Unsigned review, ‘‘La Musique à Liége,’’ L’Art Moderne 27, no. 52 (29 Dec. 1907): 411. The
program under review also contained symphonic works by Pergolesi, Stamitz, and Gossec,
with Diémer playing harpsichord continuo. Translation is mine.

64 ‘‘Ihre Cembalovorträge erbrachten für uns auch den Beweis, daß gewisse alte
Kompositionen spielerischen Charakters (so L’Hirondelle und Le Coucou von Daquin,
oder Le Dodo von Fr. Couperin) erst durch Klangfarben des Cembalo ihren eigenen Reiz

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This critic clearly felt that the harpsichord might suffice for playing the
occasional historic trifle, but that it is inadequate for weighty
masterpieces.

The famous aphorism credited to the British conductor Sir Thomas
Beecham is typical of the regard in which the harpsichord was held in
the early twentieth century. ‘‘The harpsichord,’’ Beecham is once said
to have quipped, ‘‘sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated
tin roof.’’65 Whether Beecham made this proclamation or not, the
sentiment expressed clearly resonated with many, and it quickly
became a popular catchphrase among those who found the harpsi-
chord’s tone to be inadequate (perhaps, it is tempting to suggest, due
to an absence of timbral flesh).66 This aphorism encapsulates the dif-
ficulties of the harpsichord’s struggles for acceptance in the early twen-
tieth century. The image of skeletons (those consummate symbols of
mortality) making love in a world of metal roofs and industrial cor-
rugation would instantly have punctured the vaporous romanticism of
the literary fantasies quoted earlier in this article. And beneath the
surface of witty scorn, the image suggests a deeper critique: just as
skeletons (frisky or otherwise) have no place on modern corrugated
roofs, so too does the antiquated harpsichord have no place in the
modern concert hall.

The Introduction of the ‘‘Modern’’ Harpsichord

The first new instruments to be constructed after the harpsichord’s
nineteenth-century hiatus were a group of three harpsichords produced
around 1889 and displayed that year at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.67

-
gewinnen. Andere und bedeutendere der von ihr vorgetragenen Kompositionen (so teil-
weise Bachs italienisches Konzert und zum geringeren Teile auch Couperins Folies fran-
çaises) gingen aber in ihren Anforderungen an die Kraft, die Wucht und den
Gesangscharakter des Tones weit über die Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten des Cembalo hinaus.’’
Quoted in Detlev Schultz, ‘‘Dur und Moll: Leipzig,’’ Signale für die Musikalische Welt 65, no.
35–36 (8 May 1907): 592. The recital was held on 1 May 1907. Translation is mine.

65 Quoted in Harold Atkins and Archie Newman, eds., Beecham Stories: Anecdotes,
Sayings and Impressions of Sir Thomas Beecham (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 34.

66 Jonathan Sterne has noted that a similar turn of phrase was used in a magazine
parody of the advertisements promoting Victor’s Orthophonic Victrola phonograph:
‘‘Every instrument sounds like a skeleton’s Charleston on a tin roof.’’ Jonathan Sterne, The
Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003), 272. Although Sterne does not date his source material, the term ‘‘orthophonic’’ was
introduced in 1925 and it seems likely that the quotation comes from the second half of the
1920s, when the technology was still a novelty, possibly suggesting an earlier coinage.

67 For a detailed account of the early musical activities at the 1889 Exposition Uni-
verselle, see Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. For more details about
the harpsichords newly constructed for the event, see Kottick, The History of the Harpsichord,
409–14.

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Two of these harpsichords were the products of leading Parisian piano
firms—Pleyel-Wolff-Lyon and Erard et Cie—and the third was built by
the instrument restorer Louis Tomasini. Each approached the challenge
of constructing new ‘‘old’’ instruments in a different way. Tomasini’s
approach was the most historical. At the Exposition Universelle he exhib-
ited two instruments side by side: the first was a genuine antique by Henri
Hemsch (built around 1755), beside which Tomasini displayed a new
instrument in which he had meticulously copied every detail of the mech-
anism and decoration of the original. Both Erard and Pleyel took more
liberties with their first creations. Each firm based its instrument on a his-
torical model—Erard on a 1779 instrument built by the firm’s founder,
Sébastien Érard, and Pleyel on a 1769 Pascal Taskin harpsichord—but
adopted modes of decoration that were modern reinterpretations of the
past.68 Whereas the Erard instrument featured a relatively restrained
scheme of garlands and floral sprigs (not far out of step with the aesthetics
of the nascent art nouveau movement), the decorators at Pleyel went for
a full-scale historical fantasy of splayed cabriole legs and resplendent vi-
gnettes painted in a style vaguely reminiscent of Watteau or Fragonard.69

But although the Pleyel harpsichord looked like it might be an
escapee from the museum case, there was more to the instrument than
was suggested by its historicist exterior. On the inside it employed some
of the same developments Pleyel used on its modern pianos, most evi-
dent in the battery of six pedals that allowed for seamless changes in
registration. As Martin Elste has observed, the Pleyel harpsichord was no
mere historical replica but an instrument that combined the late
nineteenth-century nostalgia for the musical past with an open embrace
of contemporary technology:

The outer instrument stood for nostalgia, but two keyboards and the
action with several registers and a variety of pedals operated with the
feet in order to change registers as quickly and as smoothly as possi-
ble—the action represents progress and mechanization, the very topic
of the world expositions.70

68 Schott, ‘‘The Harpsichord Revival,’’ 85–86. The Taskin instrument, which now
resides in the Russell Collection of Musical Instruments in Edinburgh, had come to
prominence as the harpsichord used in public performances and demonstrations by Louis
Diémer. Both the Erard and Pleyel firms studied it in preparation for building their own
new instruments. The 1779 Sébastian Erard harpsichord is now in the collection of the
Musée de la Musique in Paris. See also Sidney Newman and Peter Williams, eds., The Russell
Collection and other Early Keyboard Instruments in Saint Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1968), 32–35.

69 Battault, ‘‘Les clavecins Pleyel, Érard et Gaveau,’’ 194.
70 Martin Elste, ‘‘The Interaction of Visual Appearance and Sound: The Case of

Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska’’ (paper presented at the thirty-ninth annual meeting of
the American Musical Instrument Society, Library of Congress, 27–29 May 2010).

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The instruments produced by Pleyel, Erard, and Tommasini in 1889
were not the only new harpsichords to be built in the closing years of the
late nineteenth century. Seven years later Arnold Dolmetsch constructed
his first harpsichord, the now famous Green harpsichord. Named for the
verdant shade of its exterior paint, the Green harpsichord has often been
described in the scholarly literature as being historically modeled. In
truth its design reflected both Dolmetsch’s desire to be innovative and
his perception of what was required in an instrument that would be
used in a modern concert hall. Having been engaged to perform the
continuo for performances of Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro at the
Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Dolmetsch was keen on building
an instrument that could be heard in a venue capable of seating more
than two thousand.71 In an attempt to improve the instrument’s power,
Dolmetsch produced a novel design in which the strings pass over
a second soundboard placed in front of the jacks. Like the 1889 Pleyel,
Dolmetsch’s instrument also featured pedals for changing registration
and, in an attempt to provide the player with expressive control of
dynamics, an innovative knee lever that could instantly change the
plucking depth.

Landowska’s Pleyel

The most famous of all modern harpsichords made its debut at the 1912
Bach Festival in Breslau. This was Pleyel’s Grand Modèle de Concert,
which was designed at the behest of Wanda Landowska, who had been
exclusively playing on the company’s harpsichords since 1903. Having
grown unhappy with the instruments at her disposal, Landowska re-
quested a larger model that she would be able to use for her increasingly
prominent recitals. In preparation for its design, she toured several col-
lections of historic instruments with Pleyel’s chief engineer, M. Lamy,
ostensibly to gather ideas and inspiration from the instrumental achieve-
ments of the past.72 The final design, however, spoke more of the needs
of the present than of fantasies of the past (fig. 5). The new instrument
was nearly a wholesale reengineering of the harpsichord from the inside
out: a glance under the hood reveals a vast array of moving parts, includ-
ing a damping system of unprecedented complexity; an innovative (if
ultimately unsuccessful) double-pinned tuning system (which caused the
instrument to be widely loathed by those called upon to keep it in tune);

71 For more on the history of the Green harpsichord, see Edmond Johnson, ‘‘Revival
and Antiquation: Modernism’s Musical Pasts’’ (PhD diss., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 2011), 149–62.

72 See Landowska, Landowska on Music, 11.

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a simple decorative scheme; a solid piano-like construction, with cut-
aways on the sides of the keywell (which allow audiences to see the
performers hands on the two manuals); and, perhaps most notably,
a sixteen-foot register.73 Like its historic forebearers, the Pleyel was

figure 5. Wanda Landowska and her Pleyel harpsichord; undated
photograph, most likely taken in the 1930s; from the
Library of Congress’s George Grantham Bain Collection

73 A description of several of Landowska’s instruments, including the 1912 Pleyel, can
be found in Michael Latcham, ‘‘Don Quixote and Wanda Landowska: Bells and Pleyels,’’

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initially still wood framed, but it now wielded a formidable arsenal of tonal
options: two sets of strings at pitch, another an octave above, and one an
octave below; lute and buff stops; and the ability to couple the keyboards
together—all instantly changeable through the deft manipulation of its
seven radiating pedals.74 Though the 1912 Pleyel was not completely with-
out ornament—ironically, the ‘‘spindly legs,’’ about which Bordes had
complained a decade earlier, were one of the few decorative touches to
remain intact—its design was a far cry from the historically evocative
instruments that had so affected the nineteenth-century imagination.

Although the 1912 Pleyel did not look like a museum piece, it was
not completely lacking in historical justification. Had anyone questioned
either the size of the instrument or the presence of the sixteen-foot
register, Landowska could have pointed to the so-called Bach harpsi-
chord, an instrument that had been acquired by the Prussian state in
1888 after it was certified by the German scholar Philipp Spitta as having
belonged to J. S. Bach. Beyond the obvious appeal of an instrument with
such a prestigious provenance—however spurious it might be—the in-
strument’s large size, plain appearance, and plentiful tonal resources
made it a convenient historical antidote to the prevailing image of
a quaint and feeble-voiced antique.75 Likening it to ‘‘a harpsichord on
steroids,’’ Edward Kottick has noted that nearly all the instruments sub-
sequently modeled on the Bach harpsichord featured ‘‘heavy cases, beefy
framing, thick and heavily barred soundboards, open bottoms, leather
plectra, pedals, and half hitches.’’76

-
Early Music 34, no. 1 (February 2006): 95–109. According to Latcham, the tonal resources
on the 1912 Pleyel included ‘‘a 16’ stop, an 8’ stop, and an octave [4’ stop] on the lower
keyboard and on the upper keyboard an 8’ stop or alternatively the nasal lute stop, also at 8’
pitch.’’ Ibid., 99.

74 Wolfgang Zuckermann has written about the difficulties involved with the Pleyel
harpsichord’s complicated tuning mechanism: ‘‘Pleyels are blessed with a fine-tuning sys-
tem which is feared by professional tuners. This complicated system works something like
a fine-tuning peg on a cello, where many turns produce only a small change in pitch.
Neither the metal frame nor the tuning system does much to keep Pleyels in tune, but
changing a string becomes a chore, and I find that tuning Pleyels takes at least twice as long
as ordinary harpsichords.’’ Wolfgang Zuckermann, The Modern Harpsichord: Twentieth-
Century Instruments and Their Makers (New York: October House, 1969), 164–65. Several
excellent photographs and diagrams of the Pleyel harpsichord can be found in Claude
Mercier-Ythier, Les Clavecins (Paris: Éditions Vecteurs, 1990).

75 Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord, 414–18. For more on the history of the so-called
Bach Harpsichord, see Dieter Krickeberg and Horst Rage, ‘‘Einige Beobachtungen zur
Baugeschichte des ‘Bach-Cembalos,’’’ Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung
Preußischer Kulturbesitz (1987/88), 184–97; and Grove Music Online, s.v. ‘‘Bach harpsichord,’’
by Martin Elste, accessed 10 January 2013, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/arti-
cle/grove/music/41101.

76 Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord, 415–16. Other makers who produced modern
instruments inspired by the spurious Bach Harpsichord included Georg Steingraeber and
Karl Maendler.

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And so Landowska’s famous Pleyel began what would be nearly a half
century of dominance. During this time the instruments also became
equipped with a heavy iron frame, which Landowska requested to help
her instruments withstand the rigors of touring.77 Although harpsi-
chords by other makers were available, by the 1920s the Pleyel Grand
Modèle de Concert was undoubtedly the most commonly used instru-
ment among professional harpsichordists throughout the world—
including, in addition to Wanda Landowska, Alice Ehlers, Putnam
Aldrich, the duo of Philip Manuel and Gavin Williamson, and countless
others.78 Manuel de Falla used this instrument when he performed his
Harpsichord Concerto, and it was the instrument used in the debut of
the 1926 version of Ezra Pound’s Le Testament. At over eight feet long,
and weighing not far shy of five hundred pounds, the Pleyel was the
harpsichord reimagined for the modern age. In an interview published
in 1949 in the Saturday Review of Literature, Landowska described the
challenges she had faced in reviving her chosen instrument:

‘‘Some people are under the impression,’’ she told us, ‘‘that I rediscov-
ered the harpsichord, and that until I appeared on the scene the instru-
ment had been only a museum piece. This is only partly true. Arnold
Dolmetsch had already constructed harpsichords for Chickering in
Boston and Gaveau in Paris, while the French firms of Erard and Pleyel
had also brought out contemporary models of the instrument. But
these harpsichords, if I may say so, were only . . . ,’’ Mme. Wanda closed
her eyes groping for the right description, ‘‘well ‘toys’ is really not quite
accurate, but it will do until we think of a more appropriate word. You
see, these harpsichords did not exploit the grandeur and richness
which one finds in the masterpieces written for the instrument. Wealthy
amateurs would install them in their homes for the performances of
easy gavottes and minuets. That is all. The harpsichord then manufac-
tured was a quaint plaything, not a musical instrument in the truest
sense.’’79

In deeming the first generation of modern harpsichords instru-
ments to be little more than ‘‘quaint playthings,’’ Landowska seems to
have suggested that their historically evocative appearances posed

77 For the specifications of the later metal-framed Pleyel harpsichords, see Denise
Restout, ‘‘The Pleyel Harpsichord,’’ Diapason 70 (July 1979): 16. According to Restout, the
full metal frame of the instrument ‘‘was added to Pleyel harpsichords in 1923 at the request
of Wanda Landowska (prior to her first concert tour in America) to strengthen the outer
case of the instrument, so it can withstand rough handlings and changes of climate.’’ Ibid.

78 See the chapter ‘‘Landowska’s American Circle’’ in Palmer, Harpsichord in America,
68–82.

79 Roland Gelatt, ‘‘A Landmark for Landowska,’’ Saturday Review of Literature 32
(25 June 1949): 49–50, 61, esp. 49.

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a problem for the serious performer. Whereas ‘‘quaintness’’ was a desir-
able trait for both the museum display and the bourgeois parlor, it
proved to be a liability in the concert hall. Indeed, surveying the harpsi-
chords constructed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth
century, we find a striking rupture in the evolution of their design: by
1915 almost none of the instruments being built were decorated with
anything approaching the level of ornamentation given the laureates of
the 1889 exposition.80 This is surprising, given the historically inspired
custom casework available for many contemporary pianos. As Michael
Latcham has noted, Pleyel was offering several pianos during this time
that ‘‘looked more or less like historical harpsichords, with their exter-
iors painted in what appears today to be a pastiche of 18th-century
French taste.’’81 The firm was clearly capable of manufacturing instru-
ments replete with period details, but Latcham suggested that such lavish
ornamentation may have been far from desirable for a musician like
Landowska, who focused specifically on providing a ‘‘modern interpre-
tation of the past.’’82

Musical instruments live complicated lives. They are not just tools for
music making but inevitably exist within a framework of political, social,
and historical associations.83 The harpsichord is no exception. Its mod-
ern revival was particularly fraught because of the need to renegotiate
the instrument’s identity: at once to take into account its evocative his-
tories—both real and imagined—and to present it to modern audiences
in a way that would allow it to be taken seriously not just as a reliquary of
the musical past but as a functional musical instrument. In the end the
successful reintroduction of the harpsichord in the early decades of the
twentieth century relied on a sort of instrumental exorcism—a move
beyond the literary hauntings and historical confabulations of the nine-
teenth century toward a more sober conception of the instrument’s
identity and the adoption of a more vital and pragmatic approach to its

80 Exceptions to this rule can be found in a few of the instruments produced by Ar-
nold Dolmetsch that were generally closer to historical models than other instruments of
the time. Even Dolmetsch’s instruments, however, generally favored more restrained
decoration and often featured some modern appendages such as registration pedals. See
the illustrated catalogue Arnold Dolmetsch and His Instruments (Haslemere, UK: A. Dolmetsch,
1930), 1–6, 8–11.

81 Latcham, ‘‘Don Quixote and Wanda Landowska,’’ 99.
82 Ibid.
83 The instrument most studied for its social and cultural position is undoubtedly the

piano. The classic work in this area is Arthur Loesser’s Men, Women and Pianos: A Social
History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954). A more recent contribution is the collection
of essays edited by James Parakilas, Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

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performance. By the 1920s the instrument could legitimately be claimed
to belong to the modern world.

The harpsichord had also become a very different instrument from
the fragile antiques of the previous century. The following poetic extract
reflects the distance the instrument had come, both mechanically and
culturally. On a late night in 1924 a watchman at New York’s Steinway
Hall (credited only as ‘‘A. Bunte’’) was inspired to pen a short poem after
having watched Landowska practicing on stage on her massive Pleyel:

One evening I hear a knock on the door.
It was somebody I never seen before:
Madam Landowska with her harpsichord.
Of this instrument the Madam is very proud!
Because it is wonderful and the latest out.
The Madam herself is full of art:
And she certainly knows how to play her part.
With her energie [sic] and all her might,
She studies late into the night.
Please do not forget her worthy address—
As we all hope and wish her the best success.84

Gone are the spirits of composers past, or the images of distant times and
far-off lands. This modest verse, preserved in the pages of the Music Trade
Review, betrays none of the antiquating tropes so popular in the nine-
teenth century, concentrating instead on Landowska’s ‘‘energie’’ and
‘‘might,’’ and making a special note that the Polish virtuoso’s instrument
is ‘‘the latest out.’’

The generation of revivalists that came to maturity after World War II
reacted strongly against what they perceived as a lack of historical fidelity
in such instruments, reserving their choicest vitriol for Landowska’s
Pleyel. In a 1971 interview the preeminent builder William Dowd went
so far as to refer to the Pleyel as ‘‘the chief anti-Christ’’ of all modern
harpsichords.85 Joel Cohen and Herb Schnitzer, writing in 1985, effec-
tively articulated the postwar consensus:

While the Dolmetschniks proselytized among amateur musicians and
literary-artistic circles, Landowska was giving solo recitals in the same
halls, and for the same audiences, as the famous violinists and pianist of
those times. Not for her the timid tinkle of some antique keyboard: the
harpsichords she played . . . were robust, metal-cast contraptions. The

84 A. Bunte, ‘‘Music’s Inspiration Stirs Steinway and Sons Watchman: Night Guardian
of Steinway Hall Waxes Poetic After Hearing Madam Landowska Practice Her Art During
the Still Hours of the Evening,’’ Music Trade Review 78, no. 1 (5 January 1924): 16, http://
mtr.arcade-museum.com/MTR-1924-78-1/16/.

85 Harold Haney, ‘‘Portrait of a Builder,’’ Harpsichord 4, no. 1 (1971): 8–19, esp. 13.

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Pleyels she made famous through concerts and recordings were meant
to fill large halls with plenty of noise; built inside with modern piano
technology, they also contained almost as many oddball voicing con-
traptions as the Japanese electrical keyboards now invading our
department stores.86

Cohen and Schnitzer concluded that the Pleyel (the ‘‘metal monster,’’ as
they unaffectionately call it) ‘‘wasn’t really a harpsichord,’’ and they end
their diatribe with a parting shot: ‘‘The Pleyels boomed in the bass and
boinked in the treble like the true pieces of late Victoriana that they
were.’’87

Whether or not the Pleyel harpsichords ever actually ‘‘boomed’’ or
‘‘boinked,’’ they were anything but Victoriana. Asked late in life about
the historical veracity of her chosen instrument, Landowska provided an
astute answer: ‘‘I cannot sign a guarantee that this is how Bach wanted it.
But I feel it to be so. You know, there were no factories in Bach’s day, and
no standard harpsichord existed. I built mine as a ‘symbol’ of the early
eighteenth-century instrument. To the best of my knowledge it is a faith-
ful re-creation.’’88 In speaking of her harpsichord as a ‘‘symbol’’ and
a ‘‘re-creation,’’ Landowska seems to acknowledge, however tacitly, that
the instrument she had been playing exclusively for four decades was not
in fact Bach’s harpsichord—or that of any other eighteenth-century com-
poser—but instead a necessary and ingenious compromise, a representa-
tion of the musical past that had been reinforced and redesigned for the
audiences of the present.

Occidental College

ABSTRACT

Though far from being the only historical instrument to receive
renewed attention during the decades surrounding the turn of the
twentieth century, the harpsichord holds a special place in the history of
the early music revival. No other instrument played as visible—or, per-
haps, as controversial—a role in popularizing musical activities during
the revival. As a large and visually distinctive presence, the harpsichord
has a tendency to garner attention wherever it appears, whether in
a museum case or on the concert hall stage. In this article I explore the
harpsichord’s nineteenth-century ‘‘death’’ and its subsequent revival—

86 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 25.

87 Ibid.
88 Gelatt, ‘‘A Landmark for Landowska,’’ 50.

j o h n s o n

213



the two periods of its history that have been most neglected. By reexa-
mining the ways in which the harpsichord was portrayed in both words
and images, I show that the instrument’s eventual acceptance in the
twentieth century was far from being a fait accompli but depended
largely on an extensive and deliberate renegotiation of both its image
and its cultural identity.

In the first half of the article I explore the harpsichord’s nineteenth-
century existence as an evocative emblem of a vanished past: an instru-
ment turned relic that was frequently laden with supernatural literary
tropes and ghostly imagery. In the second section I examine the instru-
ment’s revival, focusing on the ways in which the harpsichord was
brought before modern audiences, ultimately in a form that was heavily
reengineered and reconfigured. Indeed, in its journey from museum
piece to modern musical instrument the harpsichord underwent
a marked transformation of both form and character. The process
involved a gradual rejection of much of the cultural baggage the harp-
sichord had accrued during its long dormancy in the nineteenth century
and resulted in a transformation that ultimately won it a place in the
modern musical world.

Keywords: early music revival, harpsichord, Wanda Landowska, organ-
ology

t h e j o u r n a l o f m u s i c o l o g y

214


	Occidental College
	From the SelectedWorks of Edmond Johnson
	Spring 2013

	The Death and Second Life of the Harpsichord
	JM3002_02_Johnson 180..214