The harpsichord returned to concert life at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the instrument that returned was not the one that had departed. Its makers were reviving something they had never heard. They had surviving instruments to measure, but those instruments had been silent for a century and a half and had warped, and they possessed treatises describing stringing and temperament in terminology that presupposes a practice nobody could still demonstrate; the surviving instruments disagreed with one another besides, having been assembled in different decades for different rooms. What they also had, and could not put down, was a concert hall constructed for the piano, an audience whose ears had been trained on it, and a repertoire of recitals in which the harpsichord would have to hold a room of a thousand people.
The instrument they built answered that room. It was framed in metal, strung under tensions no eighteenth-century case could have sustained, and furnished with pedals that permitted the player to change registration without lifting a hand from the keys. Its tone was even from end to end and it did not go out of tune -- a combination no earlier harpsichord had managed. Judged as a reconstruction it was a failure so complete that later scholars found it difficult to describe politely. Judged as an answer to the question its makers were actually asked -- how is this music to be played, tonight, in this hall -- it was an ingenious success, and it is why anyone heard the music at all.
The recordings of the period are customarily played now as evidence of how much was not yet understood, and they do serve that purpose. But they are better heard as documents of a different undertaking. A player working on such an instrument was not producing a poor approximation of an eighteenth-century performance. She was producing a twentieth-century performance on a twentieth-century instrument, and the decisions audible in it -- the long lines, the pedalled changes of colour, the refusal of anything the back row would miss -- follow from the instrument and the room rather than from ignorance.
The generation that followed dismantled all of this, returned to the surviving cases, and constructed copies. The copies sound nothing like the revival instruments and considerably more like what the treatises describe. It is tempting to read the sequence as the correction of error. It is more accurate to read it as a change of question. The second generation asked what an eighteenth-century instrument sounded like, and answered it well. The first asked how this music could be given back to an audience, and answered that. Neither question is the wrong one, and only one of them is answerable by measurement. The revival instruments themselves survive, and are now played as period pieces of a period of their own.
