ly drawing to a close. A small
hammer was made to strike the string, producing a marvelously clear,
precise, delicate tone, and the "scratch" with a sound at the end of it
was about to be consigned to oblivion for ever and a day.

Gottfried Silbermann, an ingenious musical instrument maker, of
Freyhurg, Saxony, was the first to give the new principle adequate
expression, about the year 1740, and his pianos excited a great deal of
curiosity among musicians and scientific men. He followed the mechanism
of Cristofori, the Italian, rather than of his own countrymen. Schroter
and his instruments appear to have been ingenious, though Sebastian
Bach, who loved his "well-tempered clavichord" (the most powerful
instrument of the harpsichord class) too well to be seduced from his
allegiance, pronounced them too feeble in tone, a criticism which he
retracted in after years. Silbermann experimented and labored with
incessant energy for many years, and he had the satisfaction before
dying of seeing the piano firmly established in the affection and
admiration of the musical world. One of the most authentic of musical
anecdotes is that of the visit of John Sebastian Bach and his son to
Frederick the Great, at Potsdam, in 1747. The Prussian king was an
enthusiast in music, and himself an excellent performer on the flute,
of which, as well as of other instruments, he had a large collection. He
had for a long time been anxious for a visit from Bach, but that great
man was too much enamored of his own quiet musical solitude to
run hither and thither at the beck of kings. At last, after much
solicitation, he consented, and arrived at Potsdam late in the evening,
all dusty and travel-stained. The king was just taking up his flute
to play a concerto, when a lackey informed him of the coming of Bach.
Frederick was more agitated than he ever had been in the tumult of
battle. Crying aloud, "Gentlemen, old Bach is here!" he rushed out to
meet the king in a loftier domain than his own, and ushered him into the
lordly company of powdered wigs and doublets, of fair dames shining with
jewels, satins, and velvets, of courtiers glittering in all the colors
of the rainbow. "Old Bach" presented a shabby figure amid all this
splendor, but the king cared nothing for that. He was most anxious to
hear the grand old musician play on the new Silbermann piano, which was
the latest hobby of the Prussian monarch.

It is not a matter of wonder that the lovers of