(Fr. clavecin de pédale; Ger. Clavicymbelpedal, Pedalcembalo).
A harpsichord equipped with a pedal-board like that of an organ. Hardly any original examples survive, although a number of Italian harpsichords and virginals show clear evidence, in the form of attachments on the underside of the bass keys and holes in the bottom of the case, that at one time they were equipped with eight to 18 pedals connected to the lowest keys by cords. (Two Italian virginals in the Tagliavini collection, Bologna, of the 16th and early 19th centuries respectively, have been restored with reconstructions of their missing original pedal-boards.) Although this ‘pull-down’ system was also known in Germany, it seems that the more usual practice in Germany and France was to build a separate instrument with a pedal keyboard, to be placed on the floor underneath an ordinary two-manual harpsichord. The Weimar court organist J.C. Vogler (1696–1763), a pupil of J.S. Bach, possessed an extraordinary instrument (described in a contemporary advertisement, reprinted in Anthon, 1984) consisting of a two-manual harpsichord (with 2 × 8', 1 × 4', a buff stop, and a six-octave compass of C' to c''') and a pedal harpsichord in its own case underneath, disposed 1 × 32', 1 × 16', 2 × 8', with two buff stops and a door in the lid to adjust the volume.
The Encyclopédie méthodique (i, 1791) mentions a different type of pedal harpsichord in which a second soundboard was applied to the underside of a harpsichord; heavy strings stretched beneath this soundboard were struck by pedal-operated hammers. This system was also employed in some pedal pianos. A large harpsichord made by Joachim Swanen (Paris, 1786; now in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Paris) has a pedal mechanism of this kind with a range of two octaves, but the mechanism now on the instrument does not appear to date from the 18th century.
Like the more common Pedal clavichord, the pedal harpsichord seems to have been made and used primarily as a practice instrument for organists. While harpsichords and clavichords with pedals might be employed effectively in the literal performance of particular passages that J.S. Bach undoubtedly composed with stringed-keyboard instruments in mind (such as the cadenza in the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto no.5, bwv1050 and the A minor fugue of Das wohltemperirte Clavier, i, bwv865) in which there are a few bass notes that cannot be played by the left hand, the belief, advanced by 19th- and early 20th-century scholars including Spitta and Schweitzer, that certain of his works, such as the Trio Sonatas bwv525–30 and the Passacaglia in C minor bwv582, were conceived specifically for the pedal harpsichord rather than the organ is untenable. Nevertheless, organ works of Bach and his contemporaries can be performed effectively on the pedal harpsichord, as surely they were, upon occasion, in their day. Several 20th-century instrument builders have made pedal harpsichords.
F. Hubbard: Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA, 1965, 2/1967), 110ff, 270ff
C.G. Anthon: ‘An Unusual Harpsichord’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 115–16
L.F. Tagliavini and J.H. van der Meer, eds.: Clavicembali e spinette dal XVI al XIX secolo: collezione L.F. Tagliavini (Bologna, 1986), 136–43, 164–9
K. Ford: ‘The Pedal Clavichord and the Pedal Harpsichord’, GSJ, l (1997), 161–79
EDWIN M. RIPIN/JOHN KOSTER