Musical Instruments

Favourite objects

Oktavcembalo/Ottavina, Italien, um 1720, Foto: MK&G/Angela Franke

Octave harpsichord / ottavina

This particular ottavina puts me in a melancholy mood with its subtle light blue tones, which fade into a soft dark blue, and the fragile construction of the curved legs. I put myself in the shoes of a well-heeled Italian woman of the 1720s and imagine the once wonderfully high-pitched sound of this small but fine piano-like object. I have the impression that as soon as I touch this delicate Ottavina, it would break into a million tiny pieces. It would be impossible to put it back together again in such a beautiful way. I often revel in the past. This object also seems to be stuck in the past. The pictures on the inside of the wings and the border tell many stories of their own, possible past or future stories. The many small details, for example on the keys, or the paintings of angels on the inside show how much work and sensitivity has been put into this octave harpsichord. An effort and attention to craftsmanship that would be almost unthinkable today. I find it all the sadder that nothing is known about the workshop.

Ela Nur Aydogdu, Intern Communication Department

Cembalo, Pascal Taskin, Paris, 1787, Sammlung Prof. Dr. Andreas Beurmann, Foto: MK&G/Roman Mishchuk

Harpsichord / Pascal Taskin

This instrument holds at least as many mysteries as a tangled detective story. First of all, a signature above the keys leads to the rich port city of Antwerp. There, in the 16th century, just a few streets away from the house of the painter Rubens, the Ruckers family ran their workshop. Their instruments were of such outstanding quality that they were still being traded in France as precious prestige objects a good century later. And indeed, there is a second signature on the top of the soundpost, this time by Pascal Taskin, the French king's harpsichord maker. He claims to have reworked the instrument in Paris in 1787. But is this true at all? Rather, it looks as if Taskin sold his client a new instrument as an expensive antique. The story doesn't end there, because inside the body there is a repair note from the Henri Herz piano workshop from 1866. As one of the rare harpsichords still preserved from the time before the French Revolution, it was lavishly restored at the time. The rediscovery of early music is beginning, but this is really a new story.

Olaf Kirsch, Curator Musical Instruments Collection

Piccolotrompete hoch-B, Wilhelm Leistner, Hamburg, 1967, Geschenk von Volker Wallrabenstein, MK&G, Foto: Torsten Kollmer

Piccolo trumpet

What looks like a normal trumpet is actually a piccolo trumpet! As the name "piccolo" - meaning "small" in Italian - indicates, it is a kind of miniature trumpet with a halved tube length. It was developed because the high notes in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries - which in the Baroque period were played on natural trumpets using the technique of "clarino blowing" - can no longer be played on modern valve trumpets. In the 1950s, the trumpet virtuoso Adolf Scherbaum helped the piccolo trumpet achieve a breakthrough with his outstanding technique and became its undisputed master. The Brandenburg Concerto was his bravura piece, which he performed over 400 times throughout the world and recorded no less than 15 times. Together with the Hamburg instrument maker Wilhelm Leistner, Scherbaum designed this "cheating trumpet", in which blind bows simulate a normal size. Apparently, this makes the impossible possible: Bachian highs on a completely normal trumpet!

Olaf Kirsch, Head of the Musical Instruments Collection

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