Italian Harp Music

Clementi • Donizetti • Pollini • Rossini • Viotti

The harp, one of the most ancient of musical instruments, underwent various technical changes over the centuries. The closing years of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth brought a very notable development in the creation by the French-born, London-based maker Sébastien Erard of the double-action harp, providing, in its perfected form, access to all keys. The existing single-action harp, with its limited modulatory possibilities, had already established itself as an elegant adjunct to the drawing-room, with a repertoire of sonatas and sets of variations calculated to appeal to the taste of the period in performance by young ladies of fashion, like Jane Austen’s Mary Crawford. At the same time there was a more technically adventurous repertoire for virtuosi such as the harpist-composers Krumpholtz and Dussek, Spohr’s wife Dorette, and, later i