harpsichord sheet music

What a piano edition adds that you do not want

The harpsichord cannot vary its volume by touch. Dynamic markings added by a nineteenth-century editor are therefore instructions you cannot follow, and the phrasing they imply is achieved instead through articulation and timing.

Pedal markings are worse than useless — there is no sustain pedal. And fingering in older piano editions assumes a thumb-under technique developed for a heavier action.

None of this makes a piano edition unusable, but it does mean an urtext is a genuinely better purchase here than for most repertoire: it gives you the text without the wrong instructions.

Ornaments are the substance

French harpsichord composers in particular — Couperin, Rameau, d'Anglebert — wrote ornament tables explaining their own symbols, and editions that reproduce them are the ones worth having. An edition that silently modernises the ornaments is giving you a different piece.

Continuo

A great deal of Baroque music needs a harpsichordist to play from a figured bass — a bass line with numbers rather than written-out notes. Editions vary in whether they print a realisation. If you do not read figures, check before buying, because a scholarly edition may give you the bass line and nothing else.