From the point of view of musical interpretation it is significant to note that when it was made, J.S. Bach, Domenico Scarlatti and G.F. Händel were still alive. The appearance of such an instrument in the first half of the eighteenth century testifies to the growing demand for technical devices to obtain a variety of colours and contrasts, one of the goals that harpsichord making gradually sought to achieve throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And this remains unquestionably true of the German tradition from a very early period. From the first known German harpsichord (Hans Müller, 1537) which has a lute register (nasard) up to the large instruments of the Hamburg School and the closely related Kirckmans and Shudi in England, German harpsichord making sustains a unity of thought, an adherence to a tradition and a conception of sound akin to that of the organ. German harpsichords, including those rather hastily attributed to Harras and Mietke, cultivate colour contrasts and are designed to render polyphonic music with great clarity. Their undeniably beautiful sound, though totally different in character, is on a par with that of the admirable Italian, Flemish and French seventeenth – and eighteenth – century instruments. Curiously, seventeenth-century French harpsichords of the Des Ruisseaux and Thibaut de Toulouse type, which like the German instruments also descend from early Italian harpsichords, and pursued a related sound ideal, are largely exempt of Flemish influence. A preference over the last fifty years for reproduction of Flemish and French harpsichords has caused the German tradition to be unjustly left aside in the twentieth-century revival of early keyboard instruments. Since the publication in 1965 of Frank Hubbard’s Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, and until recently, modern harpsichord makers and specialists banished an important school of sound-thought in harpsichord construction, relegating German and English instruments to oblivion in the museum reserves. When attempts were made to restore them, the results, out of ignorance and a lack of conviction, were unsuccessful. But of late a fresh curiosity has awakened about German harpsichords, stemming from the search for the appropriate sound and keyboards for the interpretation of J.S. Bach’s and Scarlatti’s works. If one cannot as yet prove that these masters knew the great harpsichords of the German School, one can at least be certain that they would not have relished the seductive sounds of harpsichords by Pascal Taskin (1723-93) and even less their present-day copies emasculated by the austere removal out of musicological prudery of genouillères and boîte d’expression, on which their works are now so often performed. As he told me, Frank Hubbard considered sound-colour “vulgar and unnecessary” with the result that many harpsichord makers, together with the northern school of harpsichord playing, have since come to accept without question the limitations of such instruments.