About the Cimbalom

The cimbalom is an instrument found in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Hungary. It is played by striking or plucking metal strings stretched across a trapezoidal box. In the Sachs–Hornbostel¹ classification, its code is 314.122-4,5, within the category of board zithers with resonators (314.122). The harpsichord and early piano belong to the same family.

Alongside folk instruments distributed widely across Eastern Europe, the concert cimbalom developed by József Schunda is found particularly in Hungary. The concert cimbalom has at least 39 courses of strings and a range of more than four octaves.

Spellings include cimbalom, cimbál, cymbalom, cymbalum, țambal, tsymbaly, and tsimbl. Japanese spellings include ツィンバロン, チンバロン, and ツィンバロム² It is widely used in Roma music, and also appears in works by modern and contemporary composers including Kodály, Stravinsky, Kurtág, Dutilleux, and Andriessen. Kodály’s Háry János Suite, drawn from his opera and featuring the instrument as a solo voice in its third and fifth movements, is particularly well known and frequently performed.

History

Early depictions of zither-family instruments played with simple sticks appear in Assyrian reliefs dated to 3500 BCE³ Various forms of these string instruments subsequently developed in different regions.

This type of instrument reached Europe during the Migration Period. The earliest surviving depiction is dated to 1184 at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain (source: http://cimbalom.profitux.cz/; here too, it is uncertain whether the strings are being plucked or struck). By the fifteenth century, the following records suggest that it had spread widely and become a popular instrument.

• Date — Place — Name
• Around 1460 — Bohemia — dulce melos
• 1461 — Italy — dulcimelos, dulcemelos, salterio
• 1477 — Zurich — hackbrett
• 1499 — France — doucemer, tympanon

These instruments did not, however, share a uniform tuning system.

A major development came in the eighteenth century through the German virtuoso Pantaleon Hebenstreit (1667–1750). In 1697, in Merseburg, he built a large instrument 2.7 metres long, with double courses of gut and metal strings, and demonstrated it at the court in Dresden and elsewhere. His performances attracted considerable attention. In 1705, he visited Paris and played before Louis XIV, greatly impressing the king. Louis gave the instrument a new name, ‘Panteleon’⁴ At the end of the eighteenth century, the Italian salterio player Dall’Olio built a fully chromatic instrument.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Roma musicians also adopted the instrument, and it was played widely. After Hungarian independence in 1848, it came to be treated as a national symbol, particularly as a ‘Hungarian instrument’.

The cimbalom’s appearance in classical music is thought to date to Bánk bán (1861), an opera by Ferenc Erkel, known as the father of Hungarian opera. Inspired by the work’s success, József Schunda developed the instrument, expanding its range from two and a half to four and a half octaves and adding a pedal-operated damper system and legs. This ‘Hungarian-style cimbalom’ first appeared in 1874. Schunda produced concert cimbaloms in a piano shop opposite the Budapest Opera. After the instrument was exhibited at the Paris World’s Fair of 1878, its popularity and use grew in Hungary.

Lajos Bohák developed the instrument further, beginning production in his workshop in 1900. This is the type most commonly used today. Major makers include Opera Zongoraterem in Hungary, where Schunda had his workshop, Bohak in Slovakia, and Všianský in the Czech Republic.

The cimbalom and the piano

As noted above, a large version of the cimbalom developed in the 1700s was called the pantaleon. Popular in Europe at the time, its playing technique and characteristics are said to have had a considerable influence on early piano making⁵

A piano hammer rotates around a pivot to strike the strings. This mechanism was not found in earlier keyboard instruments and may well have drawn on the pantaleon’s playing technique. Silbermann, an early maker in the lineage of today’s piano builders, also made a piano with a mechanism that held the dampers open, seeking the undamped sound of the pantaleon. This mechanism eventually developed into the piano’s pedal system. In the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the instruction to keep the dampers raised similarly calls for an undamped sound. On pianos from the later nineteenth century onward, the sound sustains too long for this approach, whereas playing the music on a cimbalom can suggest the sound Beethoven may have imagined.

The cimbalom and the harpsichord

The principal cimbalom technique is to strike the strings with beaters, though they may also be plucked with the fingernails. The Italian cembalo was formally called klavicembalo, meaning a salterio (cembalo = cimbalom) fitted with a keyboard (klavi). The French word clavecin has a similar origin.

CLAVECIN, masculine noun (French dictionary entry)

Etymology and history: 1611 clavessins (Cotgrave); spelling repeated by Furetière in 1690, Académie française in 1694–1740 and Trévoux in 1704–71 (the latter also records the form clavecin); 1680 clavecin (Richelet). Borrowed, with loss of the final syllable, from Medieval Latin clavicymbalum in the same sense, composed of clavis (‘key’) and cymbalum (‘cymbal’); recorded in the form clavicembalum in 1397, then in 1404 as clavicymbalum by the German poet Eberhard von Cersne, Der Minne Regel, cited in Romania, volume 77, pp. 26–27; hence Middle French clavycimbale, 1447, cited in Gay.

Both the cimbalom and the harpsichord are classified as board zithers with resonators.

Music for the cimbalom

Although often regarded as an uncommon instrument in Japan, the cimbalom has a repertoire that includes works by well-known composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky.

• Franz Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3 (orchestral version by Doppler).
• Debussy: La plus que lente (the composer’s own chamber-orchestra version).
• Stravinsky: Renard; Ragtime.
• Bartók: Rhapsody No. 1.
• Kodály: Háry János Suite.
• Dutilleux: Mystère de l’instant; L’arbre des songes.
• Kurtág: …quasi una fantasia…, Op. 27; Stele, Op. 33.
• Andriessen: De Tijd (Time).
• Costello: Il sogno (spelled ‘IL SONGO’ in the Japanese source).
• Boulez: Répons.
• John Coolidge Adams: Scheherazade.2; The Gospel According to the Other Mary.
• Lehár: the operetta Zigeunerliebe (Gypsy Love).
• Kálmán: the operettas Die Csárdásfürstin (The Csárdás Princess) and Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza).
  • Operetta performances, particularly outside Hungary and Austria, often omit the cimbalom or replace it with the harp or another instrument.

In recent years, arrangements increasingly use an actual cimbalom in passages by composers such as Liszt that appear to have been conceived with its sound in mind.