To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, or
clavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequate
instrument; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, the
infinite definite reasons for existence of those instruments of wires
and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so
entirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have once touched
it, feeling the softness with which one's fingers make their own music,
like wind among the reeds, is to have lost something of one's relish
even for the music of the violin, which is also a windy music, but the
music of wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such instruments
that Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us; and he plays to us also on the lute, the
theorbo, the viola da gamba, the viola d'amore, and I know not how many
varieties of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to most
of us from the early Italian pictures in which whimsical little angels
with crossed legs hold them to their chins.
Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who can read lute-music
and play on the lute, an instrument of extraordinary beauty, which was
once as common in England as the guitar still is in Spain.
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