The Pleyel Harpsichord

Known as the Grande Modèle Concert, this harpsichord has the date of manufacture on its keyboards of 14 August 1963. The old French piano making companies of Pleyel and Erard, together with one Louis Tomasini, motivated by the opportunity to display French technology to the world, exhibited at the Paris exhibition of 1889 which, of course, marked the opening of the Eiffel tower. The three harpsichords exhibited were loosely based on a surviving Pascal Taskin harpsichord which had also been made in Paris in 1769, and so began the instrument’s rebirth after almost one hundred years of neglect. Serendipitously, there was an increasing public interest in the performance of ‘music of the past’, so it was surely a timely renaissance.

The Polish keyboardist, Wanda Landowska, had eloped to Paris in 1900 and began her harpsichord playing career using early model Pleyels. Her memoirs record that she was soon to decide she wanted something more and she persuaded Pleyel’s chief designer to go with her to museums and collections, to study their instruments. Eventually, after more than two years of work, Landowska played the new model harpsichord, for the first time in public, at a concert given in Breslau, Poland, in 1912. Vastly different from an original instrument, it was provided with a full cast iron frame like a piano and was also equipped with overhead dampers and seven pedals, to enable register changes without taking ones hands from the keyboards. The plectra were all hard leather, and it boasted a 16’ stop as well as an English style ‘cut through lute’ stop.

There are 4 sets of strings: 1x16’, 2x8’, and 1x4’, plucked by five registers of jacks, two working from the upper manual and three from the lower manual. There is also a ‘Buff’ stop for the upper manual, and a manual coupler.

It has been described as the ultimate achievement of the piano-maker’s art. Piano-like it may have been, but it was undeniably a harpsichord. It has been estimated that, over the next fifty years, Pleyel made as many as eighty such harpsichords; there exists an early model Pleyel in Canberra but this is the only concert grand known to be in Australia.

The restoration of this harpsichord, over two and a half years of spare time, involved (apart from a myriad other detail) a complete set of new jack tongues which have been voiced in delrin in place of the original leather. It is not possible for the listener to determine the plectra material of a harpsichord from any distance, and it is perhaps still not clear cut even under the probing ears of the microphone. However, the difference is sensed by the fingers of the player very readily indeed, and given the current fashion for authenticity, has perhaps made the instrument of more than passing interest to the historically minded performer. Nothing of the grandeur of the sound has been compromised but the change of voicing material perhaps suggests some untapped possibilities for Pleyel, had they had the opportunity to take advantage of the development of such space age products as Delrin, Celcon, low tensile iron wire and so on. Sadly, such instruments are no longer being manufactured.