Trio-Sonata No. 5, in C major
(S.529)
Concerto No. 2, in A minor after
Vivaldi (S.593) played on a pedal harpsichord by Stanislav Heller
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. German organists used to practise at home on clavichords and harpsichords fitted with pedal-boards: in our mechanised age we can easily forget that to practise on the organ in those days man-power was needed at the bellows. The pedal-harpsichord was built as a separate instrument with its own strings, the ordinary harpsichord standing over or upon it. Bach had several pcdalharpsichords although it is unlikely that he ever wrote any music specifically for them. However, such things as the organ trio-sonatas surely belong to the kind of non-liturgical repertoire that would have been used for pnvate performance at home.