CLAVICHORD.
THE PIANO-FORTE.
BY MRS. JOHN LILLIE.
I wonder how many young people who sit down to practice or take a lesson at the piano-forte know the story of the instrument now familiar in every household of the civilized world. Look at it as we have it to-day, almost perfect in size and quality and tone. It is capable of producing the fullest and the softest sounds, just as its name indicates, for piano means soft, and forte means loud. Can you realize that little more than a hundred years ago pianos were a rarity? Only one or two makers produced any instruments worthy of the name, and few households possessed one. "But," I can hear my young readers exclaim, "the music we play on our pianos—Bach and Haydn, as well as old English airs—were certainly played on some horizontal instrument." Of course they were, but not on our kind of piano-fortes; and the story I am going to tell will take you back far into the sixteenth century, when ladies of rank, and monks and nuns, and some troubadours, had the instruments from which our piano is descended. These were known as the clavichord and the virginal.
The clavichord was perfected about 1500, and the name was derived from "clavi" (a key) and "chorda" (a string); so you see at once that it contained the two principal elements of our piano-forte. Although it went out of use in Bach's day, yet that dear old master, whose gavottes all our young people are playing now, loved to use it. The piano-forte had been invented, but Bach loved his old clavichord. As he sat thrumming it, I think he liked to fancy himself away in the early sixteenth-century days, when Henry the Seventh's court enjoyed madrigals and queer little bits of music on the same sort of an instrument. Following the clavichord, we have that graceful, romantic instrument called the virginal. This was an improvement on the clavichord, and toward the close of the sixteenth century we find its name in poetry, romance, biography—indeed, in history.
VIRGINAL.
The virginal produced a low, tinkling sort of sound not unlike that of the German zither. Only ladies of quality, musicians, or nuns or monks in convents, performed upon the virginal, and so I think we associate it with all the grace and beauty and the slow stateliness of that romantic epoch. When I think of a virginal, it seems to me to bring many suggestions of rich colors, softly fading lights, the flash of jewels, or the movement of white hands, oak wainscoting, and tapestried walls—perhaps some very sad and sorrowing heart, perhaps some young and hopeful one, but always something that is picturesque and dreamy.
Perhaps we would not think it so sweet an instrument to-day, but assuredly in the sixteenth century it moved people to very tender, elevated thoughts. Shakspeare wrote of it with deep feeling, and there are some quaint lines of Spenser's about it. "My love doth sit ... playing alone, careless, on her heavenlie virginals."
In 1583, Sir James Melvil was sent by Mary Stuart to England as Ambassador, and in his memoirs he relates how he heard Queen Elizabeth play. He says that Lord Hunsden took him up into a "quiet gallery," where, unknown to the Queen, he might hear her play. The two gentlemen stood outside a tapestried doorway, from within which came the soft tinkle-tinkle of the virginal. I wish he had told us what the Queen was playing. Presently, it appears, his curiosity to see her Majesty overcame his prudence, and he softly raised the curtain, and went into the room. The Queen played on, "a melody which ravished him," he says, but for some moments did not see that any one was listening. Is it not a pretty picture?