History of the harpsichord

The harpsichord was an important keyboard instrument in Europe from the 15th through the 18th centuries, and as revived in the 20th, is widely played today. This article gives a history of the harpsichord; for information on the construction of this instrument, its variant forms, and the music composed for it, see harpsichord.

The New Grove summarizes the earliest historical traces of the harpsichord: "The earliest known reference to a harpsichord dates from 1397, when a jurist in Padua wrote that a certain Hermann Poll claimed to have invented an instrument called the 'clavicembalum'; and the earliest known representation of a harpsichord is a sculpture (see below) in an altarpiece of 1425 from Minden in north-west Germany."

Whoever invented the harpsichord did not have to proceed from scratch. The idea of controlling a musical instrument with a keyboard was already well worked out for the organ, an instrument that is far older than the harpsichord. Moreover, the psaltery was a widely used instrument of the Middle Ages. Like the later harpsichord, it had metal strings which were held at controlled tension with tuning pins and transmitted their vibrations through a bridge to a soundboard, rendering them audible. The insight needed to create the harpsichord was thus to find a way to pluck strings mechanically, in a way controlled by a keyboard. The 14th century was a time in which advances in clockwork and other machinery were being made; hence the time may have been ripe for the invention of the harpsichord.

It is possible that the standard harpsichord mechanism, with jacks holding plectra mounted on retractable tongues, may only gradually have won out over alternatives. A Latin manuscript work on musical instruments by Henri Arnault de Zwolle from about 1440 includes detailed diagrams of three types of jack action, as well as a mechanism describable as a crude (and premature) predecessor of the piano action.See also: Clavicymbalum.

Another chain of development in the early harpsichord was a gradually increasing size. The psaltery was a hand-held instrument, far smaller than the fully evolved harpsichord. Early harpsichords were evidently small in both pitch range and string length. This can be seen, for instance, in the work of Sebastian Virdung, his Musica getutscht (Basel 1511). Virdung describes three instruments he calls the Virginal, the Clavicimbalum, and the upright Claviciterium. These had pitch ranges of 38, 40, and 38 keys, respectively, far smaller than later instruments. Frank Hubbard believed that all three must have been ottavini, meaning instruments that sound an octave above normal pitch. Since pitch range is linked to string length, an ottavino is one way of building a small instrument. Ottavini were also common later on in the early history of the harpsichord.

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