Chapter I: Keyboard Instruments and the Development of Keyboard Technique (2)

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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