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By a strange fate, the fragments of this precious clavichord, which was so highly esteemed in its day, have of late years found their way to the ancient palace of the dukes of Ferrara in Venice.
To say "tomorrow" and keep up a dignified tone was not difficult, but to go home alone, see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, confess and ask for money he had no right to after giving his word of honor, was terrible. At home, they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after returning from the theater, had had supper and were grouped round the clavichord.
When the concert was over he was anxious to speak to her, so that he grew impatient with the people who stopped his way. The back room was filled with musical instruments there were two harpsichords, a clavichord and an organ, and Mr. Innes insisted on explaining these instruments to him. He seemed to Owen to pay too slight a heed to his daughter's voice.
In a music room, which is really the living room of a house, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner, a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair, this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices.
At each extremity of this pipe are twenty-four wires that deviate from one another horizontally, and that are arranged like the keys of a clavichord; and, above this row of wire ends, are distinctly traced the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, while beneath there is a table covered with twenty-four small pieces of gold-leaf or other easily attractable and quite visible bodies."
He showed his inclination for music at a very early age, with such insistence indeed that his father forbade him to touch any musical instrument. There is a well-known story of his contriving to smuggle a clavichord into a garret without his father's knowledge in order to practise on it while the rest of the family were asleep, but for this tale Mainwaring is our only authority.
Unfortunately, when she wrote to inform Messer Lorenzo of her wishes, he was engaged in making a viol for the Duchess of Milan, and had also promised Messer Antonio Visconti a clavichord, so that he was unable to satisfy the impatient Marchesa as quickly as she would have liked.
In the sitting-room still remained the old clavichord, on which the brother and sister had frequently played duets together; and on its desk were some pieces of his composition, which were the last things his sister had played over previous to her illness."
Her relations intended her for Clement, who had been teaching her the clavichord for the last three years. She knew of the arrangement and had no objection, for though she did not love him she liked him very well. Most girls are wedded without love, and they are not sorry for it afterwards.
As a master of organ-playing, tradition tells us that no one has been his equal, with the possible exception of Handel. He was also an able performer on various stringed instruments, and his preference for the clavichord * led him to write a method for that instrument, which has been the basis of all succeeding methods for the piano.
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