Large Italian theorbo

Photographs courtesy of David Van Edwards

This is a copy of an instrument by Magno Dieffopruchar (Tieffenbrucker) III, made in Venice in 1608. The original is in the Donaldson collection, in the Royal College of Music, London, and can be viewed. Click here for museum opening hours. My copy was made by David Van Edwards. This is a BIG instrument, (the photos show it next to a normal G lute for comparison) with string lengths of 93.5 and 170cm. It has an especially large body and a correspondingly short lower neck with only 8 frets, but its string lengths are not unusually long by the standards of its day. The modern tendency is to play theorbos which are improbably small by historical standards. Like virtually all surviving Italian theorbos, the original has 6 double courses on the fingerboard, and 8 single diapasons. A very small minority of surviving theorbos are fitted for single strings on the fingerboard, and all evidence suggests that the double-strung ones would have been used for more intimate music-making such as the accompaniment of monody, or the very earliest non-commercial operas, and the single-strung ones for projecting bass parts in large venues and/or large ensembles. Mine is currently set up with single strings because I use it most often in large concert halls and opera houses, in repertory which requires this volume. The tuning is in A, with two re-entrant strings (a e b g d A / G F E D C B' A' G'). This means it plays in the bass and tenor registers. The sound is bright, rather nasal and very penetrating, with an especially powerful bass register. It is the perfect instrument for 17th century Italian or Italian-influenced operas (Monteverdi, Cavalli, Rossi, etc), sacred music (Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Carissimi), and instrumental music (Gabrieli, Uccellini, Biber). Theorbos of this size and style continued to be built and maintained in Italy until well into the 18th century, and there is no reason not to use such an early model for high Baroque Italian music.

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