How the harpsichord was made.

The first the record speaks of it, the instrument is already a rumour of novelty. In 1397 a jurist in Padua noted that a young physician from Vienna, Hermann Poll, claimed to have invented an instrument he called the clavicembalum — a "keyed dulcimer." The earliest known picture is carved into a 1425 altarpiece in Minden cathedral, in northwest Germany. The oldest survivor is older than any complete harpsichord: a small clavicytherium — an upright harpsichord — in the Royal College of Music, dated around 1480 and possibly made in Ulm, missing its action but very much itself.

For years the honour of "oldest complete harpsichord" went to a 1521 instrument signed Hieronymus Bononiensis — Jerome of Bologna — now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a Latin verse above the keys: see how whatever the sky, stars, earth and sea possess is brought out by the sweet modulation of its voice. Scholarship has since found an older one, a 1515–16 instrument by "Vincentius." The field's certainties tend to have that quality — firm until the next survivor turns up.

Italy built the harpsichord light. Case walls of cypress, sometimes only a few millimetres thick, so delicate the instrument lived inside a separate stout outer case and was lifted out onto a table to be played — a full-size Italian grand can be carried by one person. Later makers faked the effect, building a single thick-walled case and veneering it with cypress and mouldings to look like an inner instrument inside an outer box; makers call the two traditions "true inner-outer" and "false inner-outer."

The sound follows the construction: low string tension, a dry and prompt attack, a voice made for the quick clear articulation of continuo playing. Bartolomeo Cristofori — who would later invent the piano — worked in this tradition, and is recorded using vulture-quill plectra. The earliest surviving unaltered harpsichord, by Domenicus of Pesaro, is dated 1533.

In Antwerp, a family turned harpsichord building into something close to mass production without losing an ounce of quality. Hans Ruckers joined the city's Guild of St Luke as a master in 1579; his sons Ioannes and Andreas, his grandson Andreas the Younger, and the related Couchet family carried the shop to around 1680. They built heavier than the Italians — iron treble stringing, longer scaling, resonant soundboards, a standard 8′+4′ disposition — and the result was a fuller, more sustained, more powerful tone that became the foundation of all later Northern European building. Contemporaries ranked Ruckers instruments the way later ears ranked Stradivari violins.

You know a Ruckers by its dress: a gilt cast-metal rose in the soundboard showing an angel at a harp, flanked by the maker's initials — HR, IR, AR; block-printed papers imitating marbling and oak grain; and, lettered in bold black Roman capitals inside the lid, a Latin motto. The mottoes are half the romance of the instrument, and every one is true to the record.

The French took the second keyboard and made it expressive: two manuals with contrasting registers, playable together and against one another, the arrangement that became the international standard. The eighteenth-century Paris trade belonged to the Blanchet dynasty and their successor Pascal Taskin, who took over the workshop in 1766. Taskin gave the instrument knee-levers to change stops without lifting the hands, and in 1768 the peau de buffle — a register of soft buff leather that drew a velvety pianissimo from the strings, a quiet answer to the growing threat of the fortepiano.

The strangest French practice was ravalement: rebuilding revered old Flemish instruments to modern taste. A "petit ravalement" reworked the keyboards and registers inside the old case; a "grand ravalement" widened and lengthened the whole instrument, stretched its compass from four octaves to five, and repainted it in lavish Louis XV and XVI style — all while preserving the original Ruckers soundboard for its tone. So prized were these rebuilds that Taskin and others simply built new instruments and passed them off as reworked Ruckers. The Paris Musée de la musique keeps a 1646 Andreas Ruckers rebuilt by Taskin in 1780, still playable — the whole story in one instrument.

The German makers were the experimenters in sonority. In Hamburg, Hieronymus Albrecht Hass and his son added 2-foot and 16-foot choirs to deepen and brighten the sound; the Hass shop built, in 1740, the largest harpsichord known before the twentieth century — three keyboards, five choirs of strings (16′ 8′ 8′ 4′ 2′), six rows of jacks, with lute and harp stops — and remains the only source of surviving original 16-foot instruments. In Berlin, the court maker Michael Mietke built the elegant instruments that J. S. Bach travelled to collect for the Köthen court in 1719; Mietke's survivors are among the most-copied models among makers today.

Two immigrants dominated London. Jacob Kirkman, from Alsace, worked for the harpsichord maker Hermann Tabel and — in the field's most efficient career move — married Tabel's widow in 1738, acquiring the shop. Burkat Shudi, a Swiss joiner, built for Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa, Handel, and Haydn; the nine-year-old Mozart tried one in 1765. Their instruments were, in Frank Hubbard's judgement, "possibly the culmination of the harpsichord maker's art" — so rich and powerful he added, drily, "they are too good." To fight the rising piano they built in gadgets: Shudi's machine stop changed the registration by pedal, and his 1769 Venetian swell opened louvered shutters over the strings like a blind, for a crescendo.

The piano, which could play loud and soft under the fingers, displaced the harpsichord within a single generation. Kirkman's firm made its last harpsichord in 1809 and turned wholly to pianos; Shudi's had already become the great piano house of Broadwood. The Paris Conservatoire's founding charter of 1795 still provided for harpsichord professors, but the last harpsichord prize was awarded in 1798, and within twenty years the instrument had all but disappeared from professional life. For most of a century, almost no one built one.

The instrument came back first as a curiosity, then as a cause. The 1889 Paris Exposition showed revived harpsichords by Érard and Pleyel. Arnold Dolmetsch, urged on by his friend William Morris, built his first — the green-lacquered "Green Harpsichord," painted with fruits and ribbons and a peacock — for the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London; it survives in the Horniman Museum. He went on to run early-instrument departments at Chickering in Boston and Gaveau in Paris, and to found the Haslemere festival.

Then came Wanda Landowska, who made the harpsichord a concert instrument again by force of personality, premiering Pleyel's iron-framed "Grand Modèle de Concert" in 1912 and commissioning concertos from Falla and Poulenc. Her Pleyels were piano-like — metal frames, thick strings, a 16-foot stop, seven pedals — as far from a Ruckers as a harpsichord can be. That distance would become the next argument.

In the autumn of 1949, two Harvard English graduates, Frank Hubbard and William Dowd, opened a Boston workshop with a heretical premise: that the revival factories had it backwards, and the way to build a harpsichord was to study the old ones and copy how they were actually made — light all-wood construction, historical scalings, quill or Delrin rather than leather-over-metal. Hubbard had apprenticed at the Dolmetsch workshop in Haslemere in 1947 (Arnold Dolmetsch himself had died in 1940) and with Hugh Gough in London, and spent years measuring antiques across Europe. His 1965 book, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, is still the field's foundation.

In Bremen, entirely independently, the recorder-maker Martin Skowroneck reinvented the same historical approach from close study of surviving instruments; the harpsichord he built in 1962 for Gustav Leonhardt is a landmark of the early-music revival. And the movement went democratic: Wolfgang Zuckermann's $150 plywood "Slantside" kit, first sold in New York in 1960, put a buildable harpsichord in ten thousand living rooms by 1969, and his book The Modern Harpsichord argued the historical case to a wide audience. Hubbard followed with his own professionally designed kit after a Taskin in 1963. Today nearly all serious building follows historical models — makers work from museum drawings, string with research-based historical wire, and voice with quill or Delrin. The makers page is where that living trade is listed.