A keyboard instrument invented by Gottfried Silbermann of Freiberg, Lower Saxony, in about 1720. Although the name ‘cembal d’amour’ might appear to imply that the instrument was a harpsichord with sympathetic strings (by analogy with the viola d’amore) the instrument was not a harpsichord at all. Rather, it was a clavichord with strings of approximately twice the normal length that were struck by the tangents precisely at their mid-point. The invention of the cembal d’amour is announced in the Sammlung von Natur- und Medicin-, wie auch hierzu gehörigen Kunst- und Literatur-Geschichten (Breslau and Leipzig) for July 1721, where it is stated that the instrument’s name derived from the sweetness of its tone, which matched that of the viola d’amore. Although no example of the instrument has survived, it is depicted in the June 1723 issue of the Sammlung, in a coloured drawing among the papers of Johann Mattheson (reproduced in van der Straeten, 1924) and in a Swedish manuscript of about 1750 (S-Uu S29b; reproduced in Helenius-Öberg, 1986, p.53). There is also a description and diagram of it in J.F. Agricola’s annotations to Jacob Adlung’s Musica mechanica organoedi (1768). J.N. Forkel in 1781 stated that the tone of the cembal d’amour sustained longer than that of an ordinary clavichord, was far louder (though not so loud as a harpsichord, but, rather, ‘midway between the two’) and that its dynamic range was also greater than that of an ordinary clavichord though far inferior to that of a fortepiano.
The instrument had an irregular form dictated by the presence of two bridges, each resting on its own soundboard, one behind and to the left of the keyboard and the other in the normal position to the right of the keyboard (see illustration). The two segments of the strings vibrated independently when the tangent struck and, since the segments were of equal length, they sounded in unison and produced a louder tone than that of an ordinary clavichord, in which only the right-hand segment is allowed to sound, while the left-hand segment is damped by strips of cloth woven between the strings. Since this cloth, however, also serves to damp the strings as a whole when the key of an ordinary clavichord is released, Silbermann had to compensate for its absence in the cembal d’amour by devising another means of damping. The information given in Musica mechanica organoedi suggests that each of the strings of the cembal d’amour rested on the forward-projecting prongs of a U-shaped block covered with cloth. The tangent rose between the prongs of this U, lifting the strings from the cloth and undamping them at the moment that they were struck by the tangent.
Because of the double length of its strings the cembal d’amour tended to be quite large, even when its range did not extend below C, as in the Sammlung and Mattheson’s drawing. This disadvantage was partly overcome in an interesting variation on the instrument devised by the mathematician Leonhard Euler and described in the supplement to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1800) in which the string segment at the left was, for most of the range, only half the length of that at the right and sounded an octave above it, like the 4' strings in the bass of some large clavichords or the 4' register of a harpsichord. The author of the Britannica article, John Robison, praised the sound of Euler’s instrument, but claimed that in the bass (where, in the interest of saving space, the length of the left-hand segment was made a small fraction of the right-hand segment and where the strings were overspun rather than plain) the tone was inferior and that ‘the instrument was like the junction of a very fine one and a very bad one and made but hobbling music’.
Several other builders are known to have made cembals d’amour or variants thereof. Johann Ernst Hähnel of Meissen equipped his instruments with a device for silencing the strings on either side of the tangents if desired, and also a Pantalon stop, equivalent musically to a damper-lifting stop. During a lawsuit brought by Silbermann against Hähnel for patent infringement, Pantaleon Hebenstreit testified that in the 1690s the Dresden organ builder Johann Heinrich Gräbner the Elder had made instruments which incorporated the same principle as the cembal d’amour. Several modern makers, including Hugh Gough, have made reconstructions based on 18th-century descriptions.
J. Adlung: Musica mechanica organoedi, ii, ed. J.L. Albrecht (Berlin, 1768/R); ed. C. Mahrenholz (Kassel, 1931)
J.N. Forkel: Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland … 1782 (Leipzig, 1781/R), 19 only
J. Rühlmann: ‘Gottfried Silbermann und sein Cimbal d’Amour’, MMg, ii (1870), 129–40, 149–62
E. van der Straeten: ‘The Cembal d’amour’, MT, lxv (1924), 40–42
E. Flade: Gottfried Silbermann (Leipzig, 1952), 242ff
E.M. Ripin: ‘A Scottish Encyclopedist and the Piano Forte’, MQ, lv (1969), 487–99
E. Helenius-Öberg: Svenskt Klavikordbygge, 1720–1820 (Stockholm, 1986)
EDWIN M. RIPIN