Handel’s harpsichords revisited Part I: Handel and Ruckers harpsichords

Abstract The harpsichords supposedly owned or played by Handel have long been the subject of scholarly enquiry, in recent years mainly to try to match their compasses and disposition to his solo music, a strategy also used, for instance, with instruments associated with J. S. Bach and Mozart. Similarly, Grant O’Brien, John Koster and others have tried to determine how Ruckers-family instruments might have been used to play early 17th-century keyboard music. In these two articles I will survey the plucked keyboard instruments that have been associated with Handel from the composer’s time to the present. The focus in Part I is on three surviving Ruckers harpsichords that were promoted as ‘Handel’s harpsichord’ in the 18th and 19th centuries. A good deal of new information about them has come to light as the result of the recent projects to digitize newspapers, journals and other 18th- and 19th-century documents. This has enabled me to trace their provenance in greater detail than before, and to place them in the context of the process of importing, modernizing and circulating instruments by the Ruckers-Couchet family of Antwerp in 18th-century England. Evidence has also come to light of three more Ruckers instruments said to have been owned and used by Handel or his followers, making six in all, helping us to understand how they were used and why they might have preferred these obsolete instruments to the larger and more modern ones by London makers such as Shudi and Kirkman.