Return to `Full Text of Recent Publications'
In the Musikinstrumenten-Museum des Staatlichen Institute für Musikforschung PK in Berlin there is a harpsichord which was said to have been in the possession of Johann Sebastian Bach. From 1899 on up to the second half of this century it was copied many times. These "copies" were rather far from the original.
In 1955 Friedrich Ernst, then restorer of the Museum in Berlin, published his booklet "Der Flugel Johann Sebastian Bachs", stating that the so called Bach-Cembalo cannot have been an instrument of Bach. In "Studia Organologica, Festschrift für John Henry van der Meer", published in 1987, Horst Rase (now restorer of the Museum) and I suggested, and I think with good reasons, that this harpsichord was made by Johann Heinrich Harrass in Grosbreitenbach, who died in 1714. At least in the second half of the eighteenth century this instrument belonged to Friedemann Bach, and so it was not unlikely that before it was in the possession of Johann Sebastian.
The goal of the conference was to establish some suggestions about the former states of construction of the "Bach-Cembalo", excluding the disposition of the stops which Horst Rase and I have examined in the Festschrift van der Meer. An important aid for this analysis is the harpsichord made by Harrass, which is preserved in Sondershausen. It seems to be in its original state. (I call this instrument the "Sondershausen Harrass", and thethe "Bach-Cembalo" the "Berlin Harrass".) We can understand the original state of the Berling Harrass as a modified version of the Sondershausen Harrass. The latter has 8' 4' on the lower manual and 8' on the upper manual; the Berlin Harrass had the same disposition, with the exception that instead of the 8' of the lower keyboard it had a 16' stop.
It seems reasonable to suppose that the original inner construction of the Berlin Harrass too was very similar to that of the Sondershausen Harrass. On the one hand the tension of the strings of the Berlin Harrass was less because the length of the 16' strings was considerably less than twice the length of the 8' strings. On the other hand there are some problems with the stability of the Sindershausen Harrass, so that it is unlikely that Harrass might have chosen a distinctly lighter construction for the Berlin Harrass. That the position of the rids of the soundboard in the Berlin Harrass once was similar to that in the Sondershausen Harrass, can be seen for instance by traces of glue. The ribs sis not cross the 4' hitchpin rail. The frame work of the Berlin Harrass still partly correspond to that of the Sondershausen Harrass.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, probably by Harrass himself, a second 8' stop was added. The distribution of the stops to the manuals was then presumably the same as today* lower keyboard 16', 8', upper keyboard 8' with buff stop and 4': the famous "Bach-disposition" as it was constructed by Zacharias Hildebrand too.
The gap had to be enlarged, the construction stabilised (the bottom was doubled). So it is not surprising that we now find the original belly rail as a part of the frame work, forming together, with another heavy bar, a point directed towards the tail of the harpsichord (numbers 5 and 9 of the illustration showing the framework). Some ribs may have been added near the belly rail and the tail, others may have been lengthened to the cut off bar (and perhaps cut out under the bridges). Elements of the frame work added inthe nineteenth and twentieth century may be numbers 10, 11 and 17.
A detailed version of this conference will be published in the Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
Read at the CIMCIM Meeting, Berlin, 11-17 April 1988.
Address for further information
© CIMCIM 1989.
This page updated: 31.12.98