Sapperlot!

A JOURNEY TO THE CLAVICHORD’S SOUND

For Alexander Gergelyfi and for me it was a very inspiring and gratifying experience to deal with the qualities needed to elicit the sound from his Admont clavichord that ideally slumbers in it, and to consider what spiritual content underlies the individual pieces of music. The sensitive revision of the instrument by Andreas Hermert shortly before the recording also greatly enhanced these sound processes.

Nowadays, a clavichord is all too often played almost like a harpsichord, but only a little more delicately. It would be more nuanced to be inspired by the richness of colour of quiet historical organ stops. In order to elicit original sounds from a clavichord, a completely different approach is needed, one that leaves active „doing“ and moves on to „letting things happen“, to the greatest possible inner listening and sentimental anticipating. This includes a deep insight into the inner essence of the music, a meditative immersion inward, a quasi „nocturnal silence“ from which something finer and new can be born. What is essentially musical happens between the tones. The interval experiences and a differentiated inner-gestural fulfilment of the pauses open the inner senses for the actual musical „movement“.

One leaves the outer, expressive play in favour of an essential conveyance of the innermost impression on which this music is based, by not playing from the inside to the “outside” (expression), but rather from the outside to in “inside” (impression). An intimate approach to the unconscious knowledge is also to be sought, to a musical experience about which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) wrote to the mathematician Christian Goldbach (1690–1764) on April 12th, 1712, that the music was “a secret arithmetical exercise of the unconsciously counting soul”.
What is required is therefore a highly sensitive listening to the mysterious vibrations and vibration ratio of the tones, which are given space when playing and which give sound in their harmonic and melodic development.

One of the important principles of the music of the 17th and 18th centuries was to become hierarchically quieter with ascending lines and correspondingly stronger with descending lines. This also applied to chordal harmonies or arpeggios and corresponded to the knowledge, already advocated in antiquity, that the deeper a tone goes, the more matter, physicality and strength it contains, and the higher it rises, more and more loses material and wins spirituality, in the sense of spirit, love and beauty. In short, this can be formulated thus: „Below is power, above is beauty“.

Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann (1669-1745) defined the „Music“ in 1706 as „a prelude to the angelic joys in that world / mankind in this world awarded by God / to praise him here daily and diligently / to do himself and his neighbour justice to serve”. A key to the angelic world is a loving heart. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-1791) was quite right when he wrote in 1786: „Behold, your clavichord breathes as gently as your heart.“ Of course, this does not exclude stronger affects, which nevertheless retain an inner guidance and are to be integrated within the framework of the sound limits of this subtle instrument.

I was deeply touched by the breathtaking sound experiences during the recording and the wonderful, typically Austrian „Clavier“-works and their spirit.

Prof. Gerhart Darmstadt
Hamburg, July 7th 2022

THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

The instrument used for this recording may be the oldest surviving Austrian clavichord. It is undated and unsigned, but was probably built around 1700.

Only local woods were used in its manufacture: Pine for the baseboard, case and lid, spruce for the soundboard, copper beech for the wrest plank and left hitch pin block, walnut for the bridge and maple for the rear hitch pin rail. The key levers are made of lime wood, the upper keys of plum, the lower key coverings are probably yew, but it could also be boxwood.

The instrument’s appearance is relatively simple; apart from the lid painting, it has only one other decorative element: A finely marbled paper is glued to the inside of the case and the name board. With a base of 852 mm x 266 mm, this clavichord is unusually small. Since only a few strings can be accommodated in such a small case, it is built as a fretted clavichord. Fretted means that two adjacent keys, such as c and c sharp, share the same string but strike it in two different places. However, this means that these tones cannot sound at the same time.

As a result, the instrument has fewer strings than keys; it is also single strung throughout – in brass and iron. The keyboard has a compass of four octaves from C–c3, though the bass octave is designed as a so-called short broken octave, which means that the low semitones C sharp and E flat are missing; the tones D and F sharp, as well as E and G sharp share a common but halved upper key, so called „split“ sharps.

The clavichord is tuned in a slightly modified mean tone; Due to the small size of the instrument, the pitch was deliberately chosen very high: the middle f has a frequency of 434.5 hertz, which corresponds to a pure major third below the middle a at 543.1 hertz. Historical keyboard instruments used to be tuned from c or f, not from a as usual today. Since the sounding string length of the middle f is exactly one Wiener Werkschuh (Viennese foot), this f was chosen as the tuning tone; A suitable tuning fork was especially made for this recording.

The instrument was extensively restored by Albrecht Czernin in Vienna in 2011; For the present recording, I set it up in my workshop in December 2021, whereby the stringing was renewed using the original wire numbers (= string diameters) noted on the keys. Also the functional reliability of the mechanics was optimised.

It is worth mentioning that the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum used to have an identical clavichord, which was unfortunately lost during the Second World War (Curt-Sachs catalogue, no. 1); Another clavichord, almost identical in construction, is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (KHM/SAM No. 817). Due to the fact that the Admonter clavichord has largely identical structural features compared to the Viennese instrument and the lost Berlin clavichord, it can be assumed that all three instruments came from the same Austrian workshop.

Andreas Hermert
Berlin-Friedenau, June 7th 2022

Recorded february 9-13, 2022

Location: Kleiner Festsaal Stift Admont, Styria (Austria)
Balance engineer & recording producer: Jonas Niederstadt
Instrument tuning & maintenance: Andreas Hermert
Musical mentoring: Gerhart Darmstadt
Booklet translation: Alexander Gergelyfi & Dominic Eckersley
Cover art & booklet photography: Flora Bacher
Corporate Design: Tim+Tim, timandtim.com

Produced by Jonas Niederstadt

©+℗ 2022 Carpe Diem Records