This morning went out about my affairs, among others to put my Theorbo out to be mended, and then at noon home again, thinking to go with Sir Williams both to dinner by invitation to Sir W.
And every night the player of the theorbo left the wall, approached him, and spoke in a clear voice mingled with soft breathing.
The demons were somewhat displeased at this; they ceased their clamour, and the girl with the theorbo no longer continued her magic arts, but remained quietly on the wall.
The girl with the theorbo looked fixedly at him from underneath the long lashes of her eye.
His chief fear was that the girl with the theorbo and the dead man might come together, as they did in their lifetime, and that he should see them unite.
Early in the morning Mr. Hill comes to string my theorbo, [The theorbo was a bass lute.
Then to my lyra viall, [The lyre viol is a viol with extra open bass strings, holding the same relation to the viol as the theorbo does to the lute.
More years passed, when, upon seeing a Theorbo in a picture of Van Dyck, he concluded that the Theorbo must be a fine instrument.
For as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there still existed bass instruments of the lute family, such as the double-necked theorbo and the largest bass lute, the chitarrone, which were struck with a plectrum.
The complete family consisted of the pandura, tanbur or mandoline as treble, the lute as alto or tenor, the barbiton or theorbo as bass, and the chitarrone as double bass.
Handel wrote a part for a theorbo in Esther (1720); after that date it appears no more in orchestral scores, but remained in private use until nearly the end of the century.
The theorbo or arch-lute had at last to give way to the violoncello and double bass, which are still used to accompany the "recitativo secco" in oratorios and operas.
Theorbo and chitarrone appear together at the close of the 16th century, and their introduction was synchronous with the rise of accompanied monody in music, that is, of the oratorio and the opera.
This ingenious contrivance, which renders the bass strings more useful in compositions having modulations into distant major or minor keys, occurs also on a French theorbo dating from about the year 1700, which is in my collection.
It was often strung with wire instead of catgut; the same was the case with the common theorbo of Germany and England.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "theorbo" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
