In the course of these years from 1500 to 1750 it was made more and more to impress the ear by means of added strings and stops and sets of quills, till it became the musical keystone of chamber music, of growing orchestra and flowering opera. At the same time it was made ever more beautiful to the eye. It grew fine in line and graceful in shape; its wood was exquisitely finished and varnished; it was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and was beautifully decorated and enscrolled. The keys were small and usually of box-wood, the diatonic keys often black, the chromatic keys white with mother-of-pearl or ivory. Artisan and artist lavished their skill upon it. What a centre it became! How did it sound under the fingers of Count Corsi, behind the scenes of his private theatre in the Palazzo Corsi at Florence, while noble men and gentle ladies sang out the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to a great king of France and Maria de Medici his bride, when the first Italian opera was sung in public? The great Monteverdi’s antique orchestra clustered about two harpsichords, only a few years later in Mantua, when ‘Ariadne’ brought tears to the eyes of princes. How was it in Venice when Cavalli was of all musicians the most famous, in the public theatre of San Cassiano? It supported the oratorios of Carissimi in Rome, and his cantatas as well. And in 1679 the great Bernardo Pasquini, organist of the people and the senate of Rome, presided at the harpsichord when the new theatre of Capranica was opened, and the amiable Corelli led the violins. And so they all presided at the harpsichord, these brilliant writers of operas now of all music the most discarded, down to the days of the great Scarlatti in Naples, of Handel in London, of Keiser and Graun in Hamburg, and Hasse, the beloved Saxon, in Dresden. Lully the iron-willed, he who watched alertly the eyebrow of great King Louis XIV of France, sat at his harpsichord in his lair and spilled snuff on the keys while he wrought his operas out of them. Then there was Mattheson, who would sing Antony, and die in the part, yet would come back and play the harpsichord in the Hamburg opera house orchestra after all the house had seen him die. He was determined to sit at the harpsichord, in the centre of the orchestra, and accompany his Egyptian queen to death, when all knew he should rightfully be waiting for her in Heaven with a lyre!