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Updated: June 10, 2025


"And there's nothing for you to say. I shall speak to him myself," said the countess, indignant that they should have dared to treat this little Natasha as grown up. "No, not on any account! I will tell him myself, and you'll listen at the door," and Natasha ran across the drawing room to the dancing hall, where Denisov was sitting on the same chair by the clavichord with his face in his hands.

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of those instruments of wires and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so entirely to have superseded.

"Ah, dear friend," replied Princess Mary, "I have asked you never to warn me of the humor my father is in. I do not allow myself to judge him and would not have others do so." The princess glanced at her watch and, seeing that she was five minutes late in starting her practice on the clavichord, went into the sitting room with a look of alarm.

Something of the same feeling, too, attaches to those cadences in which an unexpected major third usurps the place of the minor which the ear was expecting, as in the "Incarnatus" of Mozart's "Twelfth Mass," or in Bach's sublime "Prelude," Part I., No. 22 of the "Well-tempered Clavichord."

A considerable time elapsed before her wish was gratified, but in the end her perseverance triumphed over all difficulties, and on the last day of July, 1501, she wrote to tell Messer Lorenzo that the beautiful clavichord which he had made for the Duchess of Milan had been given her by Galeazzo Pallavicino, the husband of Niccolo da Correggio's half-sister, Elizabeth Sforza, and would be doubly precious to her as his work and because of its rare excellence.

He had a good ear for music, and was no indifferent performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol, seated on a chair with the instrument between his legs. To the music of the harpsichord and clavichord he was extremely partial, but the smallness of his hands made it impossible for him ever to perform upon these instruments.

Such musicians as Do-menico Scarlatti in Italy and John Sebastian Bach in Germany had developed a wonderful degree of skill in treating the clavecin, or spinet, and the clavichord, and, if we may trust the old accounts, they called out ecstasies of admiration similar to those which the great modern players have excited.

The drawing room was brilliantly lighted: there was a constant stir of peacock silk, of yellow and apple green and coral lutestring, of white shoulders, in the gold radiance of candles like stiff rows of narcissi. Caroline drifted finally into the chamber back of the dining room, and they could hear the tenuous vibrations of the clavichord. Soon David had disappeared.

Nothing daunted, however, Isabella returned to the charge, and addressed a letter in her sweetest and most persuasive strain to Count Antonio Visconti, begging him, since her desires were so ardent and she had already waited so long, of his courtesy to allow Messer Lorenzo to begin her clavichord as soon as Duchess Beatrice's viol should be finished.

He was most anxious to hear the grand old musician play on the new Silbermann piano, which was the latest hobby of the Prussian monarch. It is not a matter of wonder that the lovers of the harpsichord and clavichord did not take kindly to the piano-forte at first.

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