English harpsichord

England was one of the most important markets for Flemish keyboard instruments, and London was a key refuge for instrument makers from the continent who sought refuge from political or economic crises in their home countries. As such, many harpsichord makers in London came from Flanders or France. It wasn't until the 17th and early 18th centuries that a certain number of local manufacturers, such as the Hayward and Hitchcock families, John Player, or Thomas Mahoon, became notable. However, the greatest flowering period of harpsichord making in England, which came relatively late, only after around 1730, was associated with two German-speaking immigrants, the Alsatian Jacob Kirchmann (Kirckman) and Burkhard Tschudi (Burkat Shudi) from Schwanden in the Canton of Glarus.

Shudi opened his business around 1728, Kirckman ten years later, both based on Great Pulteney Street in Soho, within sight of each other: At Shudi, 1,155 harpsichords were produced in just over six decades, the last (already by John Broadwood at the time) in 1793. Kirckman built his last confirmed harpsichord in 1800 (possibly not until 1809; in total about 2000), nine years after Mozart's death and eight years after the London premiere of Haydn's Symphony No. 98, for which Haydn himself had written a harpsichord part. Haydn lived in London with Kirckman and took a harpsichord with him when returning to Vienna.

The English harpsichords of Shudi and Kirckman were, since around 1760/70 at least, in direct competition with the pianoforte and represent the last pinnacle in tonal development but also technical limitation compared to it. The exact time when the harpsichord was replaced by the pianoforte can be precisely determined from the surviving business records of Burkat Shudi: In 1783, the firm of Shudi & Broadwood sold more new pianofortes than new harpsichords for the first time.

The English harpsichords of this era were tonally impressive instruments with a rich tone and a range of technical refinements, such as pedal-operated machine stops for sudden register changes (for loud-soft contrasts) or the Venetian swell patented by Shudi in 1769, a jalousie swell designed to enable crescendo/decrescendo; similarly, but less efficiently, Kirckman's Nags head swell (literally: foal's head swell), developed a few years earlier, functioned.

More than half of the instruments had two manuals and four registers (3x8', 4', plus the lute stop, a special damper) and a case made of oak or mahogany. Their musical potential was no longer measured by the repertoire of French clavecinists or the German keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach, but by the works of Handel and his successors in what was then Europe's richest music metropolis, from Thomas Augustine Arne and Johann Christian Bach to Joseph Haydn. The piano music of this period after 1750, commonly attributed to the pianoforte due to its nuanced dynamics, could also be performed on these English harpsichords and may have, in part, been composed specifically for them, such as the sonatas by the composer and astronomer William Herschel.