Burkat Shudi Harpsichord

We're in Kew Palace, where this remarkable harpsichord lives, which was made in 1740 for Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George Augustus, who became George II. And it's rather appropriate it should be here because when he first came to England, when he was 21, lived in another part of Kew Palace, which is no longer here. The maker of the instrument was Birkert Schude, who came from Switzerland. He came to this country when he was only 16, as a train cabinet maker, and he then worked with a shadowy but very important figure called Hermann Tabel. But Schude is possibly the most patronised by royalty of all the 18th century builders. So a very significant maker, and they were the most elaborate and most complex harpsichord you could buy in the 18th century. This instrument started life as a clave organ. A clave organ is in fact a harpsichord on an organ, placed on top of an organ. The two can be played separately or together. And underneath would have been a case, the same profile as the harpsichord, and in it would have been laid the organ pipes, many of them horizontally. As it is now, it is a classic two manual, or that is a two keyboard, 18th century harpsichord. You'll see along here the stop knobs, which you can turn the registers on and off. The look of this instrument, and the other early instruments of Schude, define the look of the English harpsichord and even of the early English piano for the rest of the 18th century. Now here you can see the soundboard, the essential element of the instrument, on which sit the bridges and over which the strings run. The larger bridge carries two sets of strings at unison pitch, which is what we might call normal pitch, and the smaller bridge here carries the four foot strings an octave higher. So these can be played separately or in combination. And the actual sound producing element is under here. You've got three rows of jacks, and the jack is simply a little latch-like structure, a pivoted tongue, and in that pivoted tongue is the bird quill, which actually plucks the string. So there are three rows there, and under this rail another row, which plucks the strings very near their ends, which gives the nasal effect, which is called the lute stop. The harpsichord was really intrinsic in 18th century musical society. Noble households would have definitely had collections of harpsichords, and even more humble domestic settings would have probably had a spinet, which is a smaller version, a little bit like the upright piano compared to the grand piano of today. If you went to the opera and you heard your favourite aria, of course the only way to hear it again before the age of CDs and recordings was to actually go home and play it yourself. I've chosen the air and variations from the suite in E major by Handel to demonstrate this wonderful instrument. It really shows everything it can do. It starts off with a melodic passage, which is the air itself, the song if you like. For the first variation, I use the pedal mechanism on the harpsichord to activate the lute stop. The lute is a very distinctive sound on this instrument, very reedy, quite nasal, and it allows the instrument to sing in a different way altogether. In the inventory from Windsor of 1820, there is a wonderful reference to this harpsichord, and it actually says, shooty harpsichord by Handel, and it quite clear that the word played has somehow been dropped from the inventory. So in all likelihood, Mr Handel himself played on this instrument. The distinctive thing about the harpsichord sound is that it's a plucked sound. This action, of course, is very different from the piano, which came later on. For the piano, you have a hammer that hits the string, so this can make dynamic shading, hence piano forte, soft and loud. With the harpsichord, we have to use certain tricks to make phrasing happen within the musical phrase. So if I play two notes, they come out at the same dynamic level, neither one louder nor the other. But if I play the first one shorter and the second one longer, the second note comes out louder. This is known as the agogic accent.