Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

SORCERER, THE
SORDINO
Robinson, Mara, Banti, Catalani, Mrs. Billington,
and Miss Baton are some of the principal
soprani of bygone days, possessing exceptionally
good voices ;
and those of Grisi, Clara
Novello, Tietjens, Adelina Patti [and Melba]
may perhaps be considered the best natural
soprano voices of modern times. h. c. d.
SORCERER, THE. Comic opera in two
acts ; libretto by W. S. Gilbert, music by
Arthur Sullivan. Produced at the Op&a-
Comique Theatre, Nov. 17, 1877.
SORDINO, Mute,! gp Damper (Fr. Sourdine ;
Ger. Ddmpfer).
The violin Sordino is described
below.
In the pianoforte the contrivance is called in
English the damper. The first pianofortes, as
we find Cristofori's and Silbermann's, were made
without stops. In course of time a practice
common with the harpsichord was followed in
the pianoforte, and led the way to the now indispensable
pedals.
The first stops were used to raise the dampers ;
and by two brass knobs on the player's left
hand the dampers could be taken entirely off
the strings in two divisions, bass and treble.
C. P. E. Bach, in his Versuch, makes few references
to the pianoforte ; but in the edition of
1797 he remarks (p. 268) that the undamped
register of the Fortepiano is the most agreeable,
and that, with due care, it is the most charming
of keyed instruments for improvising (' fantasiren
'). The higher treble of the piano is not
now damped. These short strings vibrate in
unison with the overtones of deeper notes, and,
as a distinguished pianoforte-maker has said,
give life to the whole instrument. ^ The terms
'
Senza sordini ' and ' Con sordini ' applied to
the damper stops were used exclusively by Beethoven
in his earlier sonatas. He did not use
the now familiar 'Fed.' or 'Pedal,' because the
pedal was of recent introduction, and was less
commonly employed than the stops, which every
little square piano then had. The 'GenouiUiere,'
or knee-pedal, replaced the damper stops in the
German Grands. For the Italian words signifying
Without and With dampers the signs
and * were substituted by Steibelt, and eventually
became fixed as the constant equivalents.
The oldest dated square piano existing, one of
Zumpe's of 1766, has the damper stops ; as to
the Genouilli^re, Mozart tells us (letter, October
1777) how Stein had one in his improved Grand,
and M. Mahillon's Stein of 1780, or thereabouts,
accordingly has one. There is one in Mozart's
Walther Grand at Salzburg, and in each of the
two Hiihn (Berlin) Grands of 1790, or earlier,
preserved at Potsdam. The action of the
GenouilliSre consists of two levers which descend
a little below the key-bottom of the piano, and
1 It will be noticed that the metaphois at the root of the Italian
and English terms are deafness in one case and dumbness in the
other.
2 Even in Vlldung, A.D. 1511, we find the practice of leaving
sympathetic strings in the clavlchordH ; as he says to strengthen
i^e resonance.
meet opposite the knees of the player, who,
pressing the levers together, by an upward
thrust moves a bar which takes the whole of
the dampers off the strings. [See Hipkins's
Eistory of the Pianoforte, pp. 93, 108, and 110
(footnote).]
Contemporaneous with the employment of
the GenouiUiere was that of the piano stop
(German Harfenzug, Fr. CMeste), afterwards
transferred, like the dampers, to a pedal. An
interesting anonymous Louis Quinze square
piano belonging to the painter M. GosseKu of
Brussels had this Celeste as a stop. Its origin
is clearly the harp-stop of the harpsichord, the
pieces of leather being turned over so as to be
interposed between the hammers and the strings.
A note of directions for the use of the pedals
prefixed to Steibelt's three sonatas, op. 35,
gives an approximate date to the use of the
pedals becoming recognised, and put under the
composer's direction, insteadof being left entirely
'
to the fancy of the player. He says : The
Author wishing to make more Variety on the
Piano Forte finds it necessary to make use of
the Pedals, by which alone the tones can be
united, but it requires to use them with care,
without which, in going from one chord to
another. Discord and Confusion would result.
Hereafter the Author in all his Compositions
win make use of the following signs to denote
the Pedals.
^ The Pedal which raises the dampers.
* The Piano PedaL
To take the foot off the Pedal that was
used before.'
Steibelt's op. 35 was published in 1799, by
Longman, Clementi & Co.^
The leather was applied in one length to mute
the strings more effectually, and was then called
in French ' Sourdine.' John Broadwood was the
first to put the ' sordin '—as it is called in
his patent of 1783—upon a foot-pedal ; he put
the dampers upon a pedal at the same time, and
for fifty years the pedal-foot was cloven, to divide
the dampers into bass and treble sections, as the
stops had previously been divided for the same
purpose. The use of the pianissimo mute was
indicated by the Italian word Sordino.' Mr.
'
Franklin Taylor has pointed out to the writer
the use of this term in the sense of a mute as
late as Thalberg's op. 41 (Ashdown's edition).
The ' Versohiebung, ' or shifting pedal, for
shifting the hammer first to two strings and
then to one (una corda), ultimately gained the
day over the muted pedals or stops. The etteet
ofthe una ' corda ' was charming, and is expressly
indicated by Beethoven in his G major Concerto,
in op. 106, etc. The^ and^p^ soft pedal in
course of time shared the fate of the divided
3 Steibelt gives a description of the pedals, with his signs for them,
in his MitTutde de Piano, drat published by Janet, Paris, isos. He
names Clementi, Dussek, and Cramer as having adopted his signs.
They differ J!rom and are better than Adain's {StWiovte de Piano du
Oon-ervatoire). also published in Paris, 1802. Steibelt calls the 'una
corda ' celeite.