[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.
CHAPTER II
THE GOLDEN AGE OF HARPSICHORD MUSIC
The period and the masters of the ‘Golden Age’—Domenico Scarlatti; his virtuosity; Scarlatti’s ‘sonatas’; Scarlatti’s technical effects; his style and form; æsthetic value of his music; his contemporaries—François Couperin, le Grand; Couperin’s clavecin compositions; the ‘musical portraits’; ‘program music’—The quality and style of his music; his contemporaries, Daquin and Rameau—John Sebastian Bach; Bach as virtuoso; as teacher; his technical reform; his style—Bach’s fugues and their structure—The suites of Bach: the French suites, the English suites, the Partitas—The preludes, toccatas and fantasies; concertos; the ‘Goldberg Variations’—Bach’s importance; his contemporary Handel.
In round figures the years between 1700 and 1750 are the Golden Age of harpsichord music. In that half century not only did the technique, both of writing for and performing on the harpsichord, expand to its uttermost possibilities, but there was written for it music of such beauty and such emotional warmth as to challenge the best efforts of the modern pianist and to call forth the finest and deepest qualities of the modern pianoforte.
It was an age primarily of opera, of the Italian opera with its senseless, threadbare plots, its artificial singers idolized in every court, its incredible, extravagant splendor. The number of operas written is astonishing, the wild enthusiasm of their reception hardly paralleled elsewhere in the history of music. Yet of these many works but an air or two has lived in the public ear down to the present day; whereas the harpsichord music still is heard, though the instrument for which it was written has long since vanished from our general musical life.