Harpsichord News

More Duphly

November’s column on Jacques Duphly and his accompanied harpsichord pieces motivated two readers to send me their welcome compact disc recordings of solo harpsichord works by the 18th-century French composer. 

San Francisco-based harpsichordist Katherine Roberts Perl (www.kathyrobertsperl.com) serves up 68 minutes of Duphly favorites played on John Phillips’ superb replica of a 1707 Nicholas Dumont double harpsichord. Her chosen repertoire comprises five dance movements and the titled works La de Belombre, La Damanzy, Les Grâces, La Vanlo, La de la Tour, Médée, and La Forqueray, concluding with the composer’s most extended piece, his Chaconne in F (Dorian Recordings DOR-93169, recorded in 1996, released in 1998).

Yves-G. Préfontaine’s two-disc traversal of Duphly’s Pièces de Clavecin (ATMA Classique ACD2 2716) was recorded in November 2014 and issued in 2015. The Canadian artist utilizes a very lovely Hemsch-based two-manual instrument by Montréal builder Yves Beaupré. The extensive program, organized by keys, includes 27 works culled from all four books of Duphly’s harpsichord music.

Préfontaine also performs the lengthy F major/minor Chaconne, as does harpsichordist Medea Bindewald (on her Coviello Classics disc, cited in the November article). In comparing play-lists, I was fascinated to note the wide variance in tempi for this composition: Binewald plays it in 7 and a half minutes; Perl 8 minutes, 16 seconds; and Préfontaine 9 and a half minutes—wide enough variance that it sent me to the keyboard for my own read-through (since each of the recordings had seemed faster than I would play the piece).

I do not mean this to be critical of these fleet performances: references to Chaconne tempi in several widely-quoted sources (L’Affilard, 1705, and Pajot, 1732, for instance) suggest quick beats when these 18th-century remarks are translated into modern metronome markings. I was comforted to come across a 2007 reference to the findings of Dutch musicologist Jan van Biezen, who suggests that perhaps we read these arcane writings wrongly and points out that if we were to adjust the suggested speed to include both the back and forth movements of a mechanical device we might come closer to the more stately tempi that the music itself seems to suggest: approximately one beat equaling 78 or 79 MM (www.janvanbiezen.nl/articles.html—accessed “Tempo of French Baroque Dances,” February 28, 2016).

I have noticed for several decades that I now prefer slower tempi than I did in my younger years. Indeed students became quite used to my “I’d take that a bit slower” remark, especially when dealing with baroque music. It is a normal progression (or regression, if you wish): as we age, we move somewhat more slowly. I prefer to allow the music itself an unpressured time to unfold; the Chaconne seems to require both elegance and grace. Surely life must have moved more slowly in an age that did not have mechanized travel or instant communication. (I hope it is not too suggestive of a bad pun to conclude these thoughts with a phrase that composer Duphly might have understood: “chacun à son goût” [“each to one’s own taste”]?) 

Two more mystery novels

The harpsichord is mentioned thirteen times (the clavichord only once) in author Imogen Robertson’s novel Anatomy of Murder, set in the London of 1781. This second book featuring unlikely forensic sleuths Mrs. Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther is a well-written page-turner dealing with the British aftermath of the American Revolution, skullduggery that besets the (fictional) His Majesty’s Theatre production of a new Italian opera starring a phenomenal soprano of unexpected parentage and a favorite continental castrato singer, plus the daily joys and sorrows of both titled and lower-class inhabitants of the fast-expanding and radically changing urban metropolis. (Pamela Dorman/Viking Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-670-02317-2). 

A visit to Half Price Books, Dallas’s mega-emporium of previously owned reading material, resulted in the acquisition of another work from the pen of Donna Leone, the American expatriate author who resides in Venice. While musical references in Willful Behavior, the eleventh of her Commissario Guido Brunetti series (2002) are less frequent than those in the works I cited in my January 2016 column, there were four that stood out in this volume: an analogy to a Haydn Symphony, a similarity to a Scarlatti oratorio, the mention of Vivaldi’s baptismal church in Venice, and a plot twist reference to Puccini’s opera Tosca. Ms. Leone continues to be both lover and patron of classical music and her books serve as welcome guides to her adopted city for any musical armchair traveler. 

Semibrevity

Guest blogger Mandy Macdonald writes about Nelly Chaplin who performed on her 1775 Jacobus and Abraham Kirkman two-manual harpsichord early in the 20th century (illustrated with a picture of a similar 1755 Kirkman now in the collection of historic instruments at Musical Instrument Museums, Edinburgh). Free access is available at www.semibrevity.com, where you should also scroll down to read the amazing story of T. W. Taphouse, British collector of early instruments, who purchased his first Shudi and Broadwood 1773 harpsichord at age 19, in 1857!

The Semibrevity website continues to broaden our knowledge of these largely unfamiliar early proponents of early music on early instruments in its well-researched and beautifully illustrated postings.

Comments are always welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer [email protected] or 10125 Cromwell Drive, Dallas, Texas 75229.

Pedaling the French: 

A ‘Tour de France’ of Revival Harpsichordists 1888–1939

I. Near-death and slow rebirth

“Make what you want: this upstart piano will never replace the majestic claveçin!” Thus began my 1989 book Harpsichord in America: a Twentieth-Century Revival with these combative words from the composer Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799). Looking back from our historical perspective, we all know how that prediction turned out! Even for Balbastre himself: his capitulation was a work for the new “upstart” keyboard instrument, a Marche des Marseillois, “arranged for the Forte Piano by Citizen Balbastre, and dedicated to the brave defenders of the French Republic in the year 1792, the first of the Republic.” At least Citizen [Citoyen] Claude-B B survived!

Following a very few antiquarian-inspired appearances throughout the piano-dominated 19th century, the harpsichord’s return to the musical scene as a featured instrument occurred during the Paris Exhibition of 1888 at the instigation of Louis Diémer (1843–1919), a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Diémer was able to borrow a 1769 Pascal Taskin harpsichord to play in several concerts comprising concerted works by Rameau and solo pieces by various French claviçinistes. Of the latter the most popular composer was Louis-Claude Daquin, whose Le Coucou became one of the most-performed works during the early harpsichord revival period.

Diémer and his concerts must have inspired the salon composer Francis Thomé (1850–1909) to write a Rigodon for this most recent French harpsichordist, and thus provide history with the very first new piece for the old instrument. Inspired by Daquin, but also meant as a tribute to Diémer’s “legendary trilling ability,” Thomé’s pièce de claveçin was published by Lemoine in 1893. Around the middle of the 20th century this work was discovered and later recorded in 1976 by harpsichordist Igor Kipnis on a disc of favorite encores. After being captivated by its simple antiquarian charm, I too was able to acquire an original print of the work, thanks to my German friend and European “concert manager” Dr. Alfred Rosenberger, who found it at Noten Fuchs, Frankfurt’s amazing music store, where, apparently, the yellowed score had been on their shelves ever since its publication date. 

As a somewhat-related aside, the probable first harpsichord composition of the 20th century, or at least the earliest one to appear in print, is a Petite Lied by French organist/composer Henri Mulet (1878–1967). This aptly titled work of only 17 measures in 5/4 meter was issued in 1910. (See Harpsichord News, The Diapason, January 2011, p. 12, for a complete facsimile of the score.)

The solo harpsichord works of François Couperin, in a fine 19th-century edition by Johannes Brahms and Friedrich Chrysander, also found some popularity among pianists. From the musical riches to be found in Couperin’s 27 suites, came the lone musical example to be included in the 20th-century’s first harpsichord method book: Technique du Claveçin by Régina Patorni-Casadesus (1886–1961), a slim volume of only eight pages, most of them devoted to stop-changing pedal exercises (thus the genesis of my title—“Pedaling the French”). This one tiny bit of Couperin’s music is the oft-performed Soeur Monique from his 18th Ordre, a work admired and used by many church musicians—some of whom doubtless would be shocked to read in the authoritative reference work on Couperin’s titles, written by Historical Keyboard Society of North America honorary board member Jane Clark Dodgson, that “Sister Monica” may not be a religious “sister,” but refers instead to girls of ill repute, as in a “lady of the night,” according to the definition of the word Soeur by the 17th-century lexicographer Antoine Furetière (1619–1688), “our sisters, as in streetwalkers, or debauched girls.” (See Jane Clark and Derek Connon, ‘The Mirror of Human Life’: Reflections on François Couperin’s Pièces de Claveçin, London: Keyword Press, 2011, p. 170.)

II. Early recorded sounds

Beyond printed music and pedagogical writings, how did the classic French keyboard repertoire fare in the newly emerging medium of harpsichord recordings?

After giving a historical salute to the 16 rare 1908 Berlin wax cylinders that share surface noise with some barely audible Bach performed by Wanda Landowska, the earliest commercial recording of a harpsichord dates from about 1913 and was issued on the Favorite label. It preserves an anonymous performance of a work with at least tangential connections to France: the Passepied from J. S. Bach’s French Overture in B Minor (BWV 831). (See Martin Elste, Meilensteine der Bach-Interpretation, reviewed by Larry Palmer in The Diapason, June 2000.)

More easily accessible today are the earliest harpsichord recordings made in 1920 for the Gramophone Company in England by the Dolmetsch-influenced harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse (1871–1948). Her repertoire included Couperin’s L’Arlequine from the 23rd Ordre (as played on Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 3, Pearl GEMM CD 9242) and Rameau’s Tambourin, from his Suite in E Major. Mrs. Woodhouse became something of a cult figure among British music critics (George Bernard Shaw), upper-class society (the Sitwells), and adventurous musicians (including the avant-garde composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji [1892–1988]), who wrote of Violet’s powerful musical presentations that her playing was “dignified, moving, and expressive, and of a broad, sedate beauty, completely free from any pedagogic didacticism or stiff-limbed collegiate pedantry.” (Quoted in Jessica Douglas-Home: Violet, The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse, London: The Harvill Press, 1966, p. 228.) This should put many of us in our rightful places, although Sorabji’s own excursions into keyboard literature lasting from four to nine hours in performance (example: a Busoni homage with the title Opus Clavicembalisticum) just might call his own authority into question.

Eight years younger than Woodhouse, the better-known Wanda Landowska (1879–1959) made her first commercial recordings for the Victor Company in 1923, just prior to her American concert debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. These six sides included short pieces by the three 1685 boys (Handel, Bach, and Scarlatti) as well as the Rigaudon and Tambourin from Rameau’s Suite in E Minor, and what might be considered the first recording of a contemporary harpsichord work, Landowska’s own Bourée d’Auvergne #1. 

Lesser-known players got recorded, too: Marguerite Delcour recorded Couperin’s Le Tic-toc-choc [Ordre 18] in 1924. The following year, 1925, one of Landowska’s Berlin students, Anna Linde, recorded the ubiquitous Rameau Tambourin and the even more ubiquitous Coucou by Daquin. If you recognize Linde’s name it might well be for her edition of Couperin’s L’art de toucher le Claveçin—with its translations into English and German offered side by side with the original French, and the printed music made unique by her Germanically precise “corrections” to the composer’s picturesque (but occasionally unmathematical) beaming of some quick roulades in his preludes. Both of Linde’s recorded legacy pieces sound amateurish enough that I seriously doubt that Sorabji would have enjoyed hearing these performances.

As a matter of history, however, it is quite possible that Anna Linde’s 1925 disc was the first harpsichord performance to be recorded electrically (rather than acoustically), and the difference in sound quality became even clearer in the years immediately following. A 1928 Woodhouse performance of Bach’s Italian Concerto sounds surprisingly present even today, and the performance shows—perhaps best of all her recorded legacy—what her admirers so rightly admired. Indeed her artistry is such that I have thought, often, that had Mrs. Woodhouse needed to earn her living as Landowska did, she could have eclipsed the divine Wanda as a concert harpsichordist. However, as the wife of a titled Englishman she could not make a career onstage for money . . . and that was that! It would have been fascinating to have had two such determined women competing for the title of “the world’s most famous harpsichordist.” 

Realistically, however, Landowska’s tenacity, as well as her superb musical knowledge and sensitivity, should not be denigrated in any way. The 1928 recording of her own second Bourée d’Auvergne (Biddulph LHW 016) especially highlights the rhythmic dimension of her exciting artistry.

In the United States, where Landowska was a welcome visitor during the 1920s, there were several earlier players of the harpsichord; and, not too surprisingly, all of them attempted at least some pieces by French composers. Some of these participants in harpsichord history are nearly forgotten: one of more than passing importance was the Princeton professor Arthur Whiting: a well-received artist in nearby New York City and a campus legend at Princeton, he was known for his ability to attract huge crowds of undergraduates for his popular recitals on both piano and Dolmetsch-Chickering harpsichord. I have not located any recordings by Professor Whiting. The New York Times did mention his concert at Mendelssohn Hall (NYC) on December 11, 1907, which included a Gigue and Rigaudon by Rameau. The unnamed reviewer praised Whiting’s playing as “clear, beautifully phrased, and skillful in ‘registration’ if that term may be used to denote the employment of the different timbres that the instrument affords.”

Writing a letter to the editor of The Times on January 11, 1926, the prominent music educator Daniel Gregory Mason offered a response to a letter from Landowska in which she made the statement that she had “single-handedly [!] restored the harpsichord to its rightful position in the world of music.” In this correspondence Professor Mason called attention to some other “‘Harpsichord Pioneers’—among whom he named the Americans: Mr. Whiting, Miss Pelton-Jones, Miss Van Buren, and Lewis Richards.”

The two ladies differed greatly: Frances Pelton-Jones was one of those wealthy women who could afford to pursue her artistic ambitions (rather similar to the would-be soprano Florence Foster Jenkins). Her recitals in New York were of the club-lady variety; baffled critics most often mentioned the stage decoration and the beauty of Pelton-Jones’s gowns. Lotta Van Buren, however, was a thoroughly professional player and harpsichord technician whose work with Morris Steinart’s instrument collection at Yale was very beneficial, as was her association with Colonial Williamsburg and its program of historical recreations, including musical ones. 

As for Lewis Richards, Mason proceeds: “Mr. Richards, who has played the harpsichord throughout Europe as a member of the Ancient Instrument Society of Paris, was, I believe, the first to appear as a harpsichordist with orchestra (the Minneapolis Symphony) in this country, and contributed much to the interest of Mrs. F. S. Coolidge’s festival in Washington . . .” 

Richards did indeed precede Landowska as the first known harpsichord soloist with a major symphony orchestra in the U. S. He was one of the few American musicians to record commercially in the 1920s. His Brunswick 10-inch discs of The Brook by Ayrlton, Musette en Rondeau by Rameau, Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith, and the Mozart Rondo alla Turca were played for me by Richards’ daughter, whom I was able to visit in her East Lansing, Michigan, home (on the day following an organ recital I had played there). The sound is somewhat compromised, for I was recording a scratchy 78-rpm disc that spun on an ancient turntable in a garage; but one gets the impression that Mr. Richards was a charismatic and musical player.  

These discs went on to make quite a lot of money in royalties, and Richards actually taught harpsichord at the Michigan State Institute of Music in East Lansing, which almost certainly certifies him as the first formally continuing collegiate teacher of harpsichord to be employed in the United States in the 20th century.

All of these players played early revival instruments. All have, therefore, used their pedal techniques to obtain a more kaleidoscopic range of colors than we may be used to. Of great interest (at least to me) is the recent emergence of curiosity about, and interest in these revival instruments and their playing techniques, frequently demonstrated by questions received from students. One of the finest concert figures of the “pedal” generations was the distinguished Yale professor Ralph Kirkpatrick (now more knowable than previously, courtesy of his niece Meredith Kirkpatrick’s recently published collection of the artist’s letters; see our review in the April 2015 issue). In his early Musicraft recordings, especially those from 1939, we are able to hear the young player show his stuff, just before his 1940 appointment to Yale, displaying superb musical mastery of his Dolmetsch-Chickering harpsichord. From Kirkpatrick’s program that included four individual Couperin pieces, culminating in Les Barricades Mistérieuses, and five movements from Rameau’s E-minor set, I ended this essay with the Rameau Tambourin (as played on The Musicraft Solo Recordings, Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 2, Pearl GEMM CD9245). Kirkpatrick’s mesmerizing foot-controlled decrescendo gives a perfect example of his skill in “pedaling the French.”

(From a paper read in Montréal, May 23.)

HKSNA 2015 International Conference in Montréal

Hosted by McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, the fourth annual conclave of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America (May 21–24) offered lectures, mini-recitals, and evening concerts, far too many events for any single auditor to encompass. Two papers that followed mine, Elisabeth Gallat-Morin’s beautifully illustrated “The Presence of French Baroque Keyboard Instruments in New France” and Graham Sadler’s innovative “When Rameau Met Scarlatti? Reflections on a Probable Encounter in the 1720s” attested to the depth of innovative scholarship.

McGill’s instrument roster includes the superb Helmut Wolff organ in Redpath Hall and 15 harpsichords. One third of these came from the workshop of the Montréal builder Yves Beaupré; among the other ten instruments is a 1677 single-manual Italian instrument from the collection of Kenneth Gilbert. This unique historic treasure was available for viewing and playing for small groups of attendees.

The Vermont builder Robert Hicks was the only harpsichord maker who brought an instrument for display. Max Yount demonstrated this eloquent double harpsichord in a masterful recital presentation of Marchand’s Suite in D Minor. Clavichord took center stage for Judith Conrad’s program. Karen Jacob’s thoughtful memorial tribute to Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society founder George Lucktenberg was enhanced by several solicited remembrances from others whose lives had been touched by the late iconic early keyboard figure.

Evening concerts were presented by harpsichordist/organist Peter Sykes and six former students who organized a tribute to McGill organ professor emeritus John Grew. Saturday’s concert brought the final stage of the ninth Aliénor international competition for contemporary harpsichord music. Six winning works (selected by a jury from nearly fifty submitted pieces) were performed by HKSNA President Sonia Lee (Laura Snowden: French Suite), Larry Palmer (Sviatoslav Krutykov: Little Monkey Ten Snapshots), James Dorsa (Ivan Bozicevic: If There is a Place Between, and his own composition Martinique), Andrew Collett (playing his own Sonatina for Harpsichord), and Marina Minkin (Dina Smorgonskaya: Three Dances for Harpsichord). Following an intermission during which the audience submitted ballots naming their three favorite works, Aliénor presented world premieres of two commissioned works for two harpsichords: Edwin McLean’s Sonata No. 2 (2014), played by Beverly Biggs and Elaine Funaro, and Mark Janello’s Concerto for Two (2015), played by Rebecca Pechefsky and Funaro.

And the three pieces chosen by the audience? Smorgonskaya’s Three Dances for Harpsichord, Collett’s Sonatina, and Dorsa’s Martinique. Bravi tutti.

Comments, news items, and questions are always welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer, e-mail: [email protected].

Dandrieu’s harpsichord music

Hot on the heels of May’s review of a compact disc devoted to keyboard works by Haydn, June’s feature is a recording recently issued by the same company, Encelade, this time entirely devoted to harpsichord music by Jean-François Dandrieu (1682–1738).

Some organists may recognize Dandrieu’s name, especially if they play his best-known composition for our instrument, the Offertoire for Easter: O filii et filiae, a piece that occasionally appears on the playlist for organ competitions. Searching for a large volume of Dandrieu’s harpsichord music that I vaguely remembered as being somewhere in my music library, I came across Ernest White’s St. Mary’s Press edition of a hefty selection of organ pieces by Dandrieu in White’s spiral-bound Well-Tempered Organist series: fifty-five pages of French Baroque organ music that I had not perused since high school days.

A quick look at our composer’s biography raised my interest level. Born into an artistic Parisian family, Jean-François, a child prodigy, made his first known appearance as a harpsichordist at age five, performing for King Louis XIV and his court. (Shades of Mozart!) By age 18 he was playing the organ at the Church of St. Merry, made famous by the composer Nicolas LeBègue. Five years later, Dandrieu was named titular organist of that venerable religious edifice. In 1721 he was appointed one of the four organists of the Royal Chapel. 

David Fuller, in a brief Dandrieu article for the New Grove Encyclopedia of Music (1980) ranked Jean-François as the third most gifted composer of his era, after François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Another authority on French Baroque keyboard music, Mark Kroll, does not give Dandrieu so exalted a station, but he does suggest in his chapter on “French Masters” [published in 18th-Century Keyboard Music, edited by Robert L. Marshall; New York: Routledge, 2003] that there is much of interest to be noted in some fingerings and manual change indications found in the composer’s third (and final) major publication.

Like quite a number of the Haydn disc’s selections, Dandrieu’s harpsichord works were completely unknown to me. Eventually I did find that hefty tome containing the composer’s three major harpsichord publications of 1724, 1728, and 1734 in a single-volume twentieth-century edition by Pauline Aubert and Brigitte François-Sappey, Trois Livres de Clavecin, published by the Schola Cantorum, Paris, in 1973—a massive undertaking filling nearly 200 pages. Incidentally, friends whom I queried for information concerning more recent Dandrieu editions were not able to cite any.

The Dandrieu disc, in addition to an unfamiliar repertoire, also showcases a harpsichordist and three instrument makers who are equally unfamiliar. I am delighted to report that Marouan Mankar-Bennis plays superbly in his first solo harpsichord recording, and builders Andreas Linos and Jean-François Brun, the makers of the 2014 Flemish-style harpsichord after Joannes Couchet (seventeenth century), utilized for tracks 1–17, and Ryo Yoshida, builder of the eighteenth-century French-style instrument constructed in 1989, employed for tracks 18–24, maintain similarly lofty standards. Indeed, I could go so far as to suggest that this Encelade disc might well turn out to be my favorite harpsichord recording of 2018!

A clever program

[Note: page numbers in bold type indicate the location of the individual selections in the Schola Cantorum edition.]

Monsieur Mankar-Bennis has arranged his concert to form what he has dubbed a “harpsichord opera” comprising a Prologue (tracks 1–5) and Five Acts. In cogent program notes he describes this creation, beginning with the one piece not found in my Dandrieu volume, a two-minute youthful Prelude (1705), played on the Lute (Buff) stop to suggest an antecedent of the eighteenth-century harpsichord repertoire, followed by four selections from the composer’s Third Book (1734): La Précieuse [Courante, p. 144], La Constante [Sarabande, p. 145], La Gracieuse [Chaconne, p. 148], and Le Badin [Menuet, p. 151].

Act I (tracks 6–10) commences with an overture: La Magicienne, [p. 100], a sequence comprising La Pastorale (excerpts), Las Bergers Rustiques and Héroïques, and Le Bal Champêtre [from Book Two; pp. 107–108], ending with La Naturèle from Book Three [p. 134].

Act II (tracks 11–14), Les Tendres Reproches (Book II, p. 104), Le Concert de Oiseaux: Le Remage, Les Amours, L’Hymen (Book I) [pp. 32–35].

Act III (tracks 15–17), La Plaintive
[p. 1], La Musette and Double [p. 7], Les Caractères de la Guerre [Book I; p. 14].

Act IV (tracks 18–19), Le Concert des Muses, Suite du Concert des Muses (Passacaglia) [Book II, p. 92].

Act V (tracks 20–24), La Lully (p. 81), La Corelli and Double (p. 83), La Lyre d’Orphée (p. 86), La Figurée (p. 87) [Book II]; La Tympanon (Book I, p. 46).   

Further delights

The pieces heard on the recording total 24 individual movements, 23 of which are to be found in the Schola Cantorum edition. The entire volume contains 104 separate movements. (Dandrieu’s Book I comprises 37 individual character pieces in five suites. Book II, 31 movements in six suites. Book III, 36 works in eight suites.) I recommend many of these charming pieces, most of which seem to be less technically difficult than similar movements by Couperin and Rameau. Indeed, I am disappointed that I did not know these compositions earlier in my career. They would have made excellent additions to the French harpsichord repertoire, perhaps immediately following Couperin’s L’art de toucher le clavecin Preludes, especially for less technically gifted students! Oh well, as Oscar Wilde quipped, “Youth is wasted on the young.” I have been aware for quite some time that, ironically, by the time we know enough to teach others, it is nearly time to retire.

I have not checked every note in the Trois Livres compilation, but thus far I have found only one misprint: in the Double of La Champêtre (page 147) measure three of the Reprise is missing the bass clef, needed for the following measure to make musical sense. Should you find other suspect notes or missing alterations, please let us know.

For ordering information and performer’s biography, visit www.encelade.net.

HKSNA, Duphly, Skowroneck, Leonhardt, and Kreisler: A Twisted Tale

The 2016 meeting of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America took place in Oberlin, Ohio, March 20–24. Eschewing the expensive rooms at the about-to-be-replaced Oberlin Inn I decided to book lodging at the Ivy Tree, a charming bed and breakfast accommodation only a few blocks south of the Oberlin Conservatory. At breakfast on the penultimate day of the meeting I met the New York City-based harpsichordist Aya Hamada, a Japanese-American graduate of Juilliard, who mentioned that she had made a compact disc of works by Jacques Duphly. The following day she gave me a copy of that disc, recorded in France on a harpsichord “attributed to the builder Nicholas Lefebvre”—an instrument from the collection of Gustav Leonhardt.

The fourteen tracks comprising Ms. Hamada’s recording reward the listener with fine examples of Duphly’s oeuvre, chosen from all four of his published Pièces de Claveçin. Included are many favorites: Chaconne, Medée, Les Grâces, and La Forqueray from among those that have been mentioned in several recent columns. The playing is stylish and satisfying, the sound of the instrument resonant and exciting, and the explanatory notes, presented in both Japanese and English, recount the fascinating tale of a late twentieth-century “experiment” contrived by Leonhardt and the builder Martin Skowroneck.

Although the “Lefebvre” instrument was introduced to the public in April 1984, it was not until 2002 that Skowroneck published an article giving forth the information that the instrument was not by an eighteenth-century French maker, but one that the contemporary German maker had crafted utilizing historical techniques, hand tools rather than electrically powered ones, and old materials. The fake date for the two-manual instrument was given as 1755 (in tribute to the fact that it was Skowroneck’s 55th instrument), and Leonhardt utilized the resulting harpsichord for recording works by Bach, Forqueray, and other classic French composers. The instrument passed muster with most of the listening public—after all, it was our revered Leonhardt who was playing: thus all was well.

Hamada’s 2014 recording, made in the Chapelle de l’Hôpital Notre-Dame de Bon Secours in Paris, marks the first use of Skowroneck’s imitation French double-manual instrument since Professor Leonhardt’s death in 2012. This disc, issued as WCC-7784 (Nami Records Co. Ltd., Japan, available at Amazon.com) is thus not only Hamada’s debut recording, but also a tangible memento of an extraordinary prank concocted by two friends, who between them provided some of the most exhilarating instruments and playing heard in our time. The tale of their gentle hoax is well laid out in Hamada’s notes, which are based on Skowroneck’s article “The Harpsichord of Nicholas Lefebvre 1755: Story of a forgery without intent to defraud,” published in the Galpin Society Journal, vol. 55 (April 2002), pp. 4–14.

And what about Kreisler?

Being reminded of the successful attempt to dupe most of the antique instrument experts with their prank brought back to memory the somewhat similar decades-long practice of the elegant violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962), who, not wishing to have his own name appear so many times on his solo programs, labeled many of his own well-liked compositions with names from music’s past historical eras: Tartini, Boccherini, Porpora, Martini, Louis Couperin, Jean-Baptiste Cortier, Vivaldi, Friedemann Bach, Pugnani, Dittersdorf, Francoeur—most of them names not well known to audiences of the early twentieth century. 

When, in 1935, the New York critic Olin Downs queried the composer about the sources for these “early manuscripts,” Kreisler revealed his hoax. When various members of the critical fraternity expressed outrage at this nose-thumbing of their “expertise,” Kreisler responded, “You have already found the compositions worthy; while the name on them now changes, the value remains.” Today, known as Kreisler’s own creations, these works form a fairly important part of the solo violin repertoire. Favorites, dating from my earliest record collecting days in the mid-1950s, remain the exhilarating Concerto in C in the Style of Vivaldi from 1927 and the hauntingly beautiful Chanson Louis XIII and Pavane ‘in the Style of Louis Couperin’ from 1910 (decades before that Couperin became a staple of the French keyboard repertoire). Incidentally, I made my own harpsichord transcription of Kreisler’s gentle pastiche to play in a house concert several years ago.

Dredging up these memories reminded me that I had purchased an original edition of Kreisler’s autobiographical book Four Weeks in the Trenches: The War Story of a Violinist (published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, in 1915). The “Great War”—now quite familiar to contemporary audiences since the Masterpiece Theatre segments of Downton Abbey—was in its early stages when Kreisler’s work, translated from the original German, appeared in print. How close the violinist came to dying in this conflict is touchingly chronicled in this brief memoir of 85 small-sized pages. I purchased the volume (at that time totally unknown to me) during an annual summer visit to the bookseller Nicholas Potter in Santa Fe. Re-reading Kreisler’s book provided yet another connection: my copy had once belonged to the prominent American composer Elinor Remick Warren (1900–91), as evidenced by her printed bookplate on the inside front cover. A Google search yielded fascinating insights into her long struggle to gain acceptance as a major composer—a status acknowledged when her 69-minute work The Legend of King Arthur became only the third American work of such magnitude to be presented at England’s Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester in 1995. (The only works from this side of the pond heard previously were both by Horatio Parker: Hora Novissima in 1900 and the third part of his St. Christopher in 1902.)

A twisted path indeed . . .

One further item of interest: while the Early Keyboard Journal (formerly published jointly by the Southeastern and Midwestern Historical Keyboard Societies) has fallen somewhat behind during the five years in which the successor organization, Historical Keyboard Society of North America, has been functioning, word from the recent board of directors meeting in Oberlin indicates that volume 30 is nearing publication. I encourage our readers to consider joining this excellent organization and thus receive this journal, which will include a thought-provoking, carefully reasoned article on Louis Couperin by the American harpsichordist Glen Wilson.

Yves Rechsteiner studied organ and harpsichord in Geneva and specialized in fortepiano and basso continuo at the Schola Cantorum of Basel. A prizewinner in several international competitions, including Geneva, Prague, and Bruges, he was appointed basso continuo teacher and head of the early music department at the Conservatoire Supérieur of Lyon in 1995. He has recorded various projects involving a transcription process: Bach on pedal harpsichord in 2002, Rameau in 2010 (awarded “Diapason d’or”) and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique on the Puget organ of la Dalbade in Toulouse in 2013. Rechsteiner has founded a duo with percussionist H. C. Caget and developed further arrangement of Frank Zappa’s music to rock progressive music including an organ version of Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. He is the artistic director of the Festival Toulouse les Orgues, France.

Since the Renaissance, keyboard repertoire has included pieces originally written for other instruments. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the transcription became a genre of its own. Arrangements for organ have been popular since the nineteenth century, and they belonged to the virtuoso’s repertoire. From Edwin Lemare to Cameron Carpenter, arrangements range from spectacular showpieces to well-known tunes, treated so as to make use of the most up-to-date instruments.

Adapting pieces originally for other instruments to the organ (or another instrument) was not limited to the nineteenth century. Bach played his sonatas and partitas for violin on the clavichord. Earlier, Jean-Henri D’Anglebert made beautiful harpsichord pieces out of Jean Baptiste Lully’s best-known tunes. In the other direction, Jean-Philippe Rameau converted some of his harpsichord pieces into dances, airs, and choruses in his operas; these same pieces were played later by his pupil Claude Balbastre on the concert organ for Le Concert Spirituel in Paris. Haydn’s music was already arranged for organ in his lifetime, and from Liszt onwards, organ transcription became a strong tradition.

My interest in this transformative art form—whether called transcription, arrangement, or adaptation—has led me to focus on J. S. Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin, Jean-Philippe Rameau and the French Classic organists, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. This essay will describes some features of these period transcriptions, especially the surprising liberties that were sometimes taken with the original musical text, and will give a few examples of my own attempts at transcription.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach’s arrangements for organ or harpsichord are well known. In his youth he arranged several of Vivaldi’s concerti grossi for organ, and others for harpsichord. Much later he edited what are known as the Schübler Chorales, which are in fact movements from his church cantatas. But the most fascinating examples are the keyboard versions of part of his Three Sonatas and Three Partitas for Violin, BWV 1001–1006, because of the richness of the new parts added in the transcription. Examples 1–3 show various techniques. Reducing an orchestral texture for an organ implies other techniques than expanding a violin texture on the keyboard. Transferring a trio for voice, oboe, and continuo on the organ requires nearly no effort, since each part can simply be played by one hand or foot. 

Let us examine Bach’s way of playing Vivaldi on a baroque German organ. One approach Bach used was “interpreting” the original writing with little changes. Example 1 shows Vivaldi beginning his concerto (RV 565) with a duo of two solo violins. In Example 2, Bach takes the repeated bottom D notes and makes a continuous new “cello” part with it. He does not really change the notes, but reorganizes them slightly.

Another technique involved changing notes, adding ornaments or embellishments. Example 3 shows a short passage from a Vivaldi continuo part, with Bach’s version shown in Example 4. Examples 5 and 6 show again how Bach ornaments Vivaldi’s line and how he does not hesitate to add new material, if the musical logic suggests it. Analyzing Bach’s version, we find that he:

­• frequently plays a motive one or two octaves higher or lower than written

• changes notes in order to fit into a compass limit

• does not respect all of Vivaldi’s tutti/solo indications. 

The same liberties can be found in Bach’s keyboard version of his sonatas for violin. Bach’s transcriptions can reveal a “hidden polyphony.” This can be seen in Examples 7 and 8. An original violin part is shown in Example 7; its keyboard version is shown in Example 8. 

Changing of notes and adding ornamentation can be seen in comparing Examples 9 and 10. In the latter, Bach does not only embellish a cadence, a common practice in the Italian Corellian style, but he also adds entirely new figuration in place of plain notes. Bach would also add new parts, voices, or accompaniments. The original violin opening of the Sonata in C Major for violin, BWV 1005 (Example 11), becomes under Bach’s hand the passage shown in Example 12. Clearly “Bach the transcriber” makes no attempt to respect the characteristics of an original piece. On the contrary, in each transcription one is astonished by the creative hand of “Bach the composer” and “Bach the organist.”

Johann Friedrich Agricola gives this wonderful testimony: “Bach would often play them (the violin sonatas) on the clavichord, adding as many harmonies as he found necessary. Thus he recognized the need for a harmony of sound which he could not fully attain in that composition.”¹ 

Rameau, Daquin, and Balbastre

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) began his career as an organist in central France. He was employed in several cities, including Avignon, Dijon, Lyon, Clermont, and Paris.

He published harpsichord pieces with some success and later gained respect for his complex and rich theoretical writings. His impressive Traité de l’harmonie [Treatise on Harmony] was published in Paris in 1722. But it was only at the age of fifty that he begun his career as an opera composer!

Rameau left no music for organ, but his pupil Claude Balbastre (1724–1799) was already playing airs from the composer’s operas in 1757 on the organ in the Tuileries Palace, used for the Concert Spirituel, one of the first public concert series. This institution, which had been created in Paris by Anne Danican Philidor in 1725, housed the first French concert organ. Audiences appreciated the organ in its secular role, moreover, to the point that some listeners, though used to the virtuosic feats of other instruments, were literally “lifted out of their seats” by what they heard. 

Thanks to detailed programs, we know precisely what Balbastre played for his public. Apart from his own organ concertos, his favorite pieces were by Rameau—the overtures to Pygmalion and Les Sauvages. A couple of other overtures are mentioned among other pieces by Rameau, Jean-Joseph de Mondonville, and Pancrace Royer. Since no music is preserved, one can only guess how Balbastre treated Rameau’s melodies. In order to get some ideas, one must understand how the classical French organist used to play. The great names from that time include Louis-Claude Daquin (1694–1772) and Balbastre, both mainly known today for their Noëls, tunes that were traditionally played around Christmas by organists. Publications of Noëls appear regularly through the entire eighteenth century.

Interestingly, Daquin’s Noëls for organ look very similar to Rameau’s variations on “Les Niais de Sologne,” an air found later in the opera Dardanus. Both composers develop variations, called “double,” every time in a shorter note value. Examples 13 through 15 by Daquin show the theme, the first double, and the second double. Daquin also utilizes the various divisions and registrations of the organ to achieve dynamic effects, including interesting use of the French Grand Jeu, Petit Jeu, Cornet, and Echo. Compare them with the similar technique used by Rameau in Examples 16 through 18.

Regarding the lively dances like gigues, gavottes, or the pastoral musettes, one remembers Charles Burney’s testimony about Balbastre’s playing all these dances during Mass at Notre-Dame.² Luckily Dom Bedos de Celle helps us in giving detailed registrations for these typical pieces, recording again a regular playing of dance movement on the organ.³

Balbastre’s own descriptive pieces of battle, with clusters, rapid scales, and quickly repeated chords, anticipates the fashion of orage one or two generations later. It is therefore not too difficult to play a similar effect with some of the orchestral orages (storms) already present in Rameau’s operas. Examples 19 through 21 show the author’s version for organ of the “Air for the African slaves” from Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, realized in the same spirit: simple two-voice writing at the beginning, then a double, and finally a new harmonization.

Finally, if one looks into Rameau’s own way of transcribing his harpsichord pieces into orchestral movements, one is struck by the importance of melody. The Air is the only musical element that remains unchanged. Rameau seems to like composing new basses, changing arbitrarily the harmonies, and adding new counterparts when he needs it—using a simple melody successively as a solo aria, then in duo form, before becoming a quartet and a chorus! Again, “Rameau the transcriber” cannot be detached from “Rameau the composer.”

Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt

It seems rather provocative to play Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique on the organ. This music was very innovative in its refined and rich orchestration, but Berlioz is known to have had no interest for the organ. The impossibility to swell the sound was considered by Berlioz to be barbaric, and he considered the mixtures to be a series of parallel fifths and octaves. . . .⁴ 

It must be remembered that most of the French organs at the time of Berlioz’s composition of the Symphonie Fantastique (1830) had no swell boxes, and that the (de)crescendo possibilities were very limited. Departing from that evidence, it seemed necessary to imagine Berlioz on a later instrument equipped at least with a swell box and some appel d’anches. (See Examples 24–26.)

Let us examine some period transcriptions for organ, in order to again have some models. In France, Edouard Baptiste played a lot of arranged pieces (especially Beethoven) on the monumental organ at Saint-Eustache in Paris, but despite precise and inventive registrations, his organ transcriptions remain surprisingly similar to piano reductions. Obviously Liszt, a close friend to Berlioz, is a better model. Not only was he the first transcriber of the Symphony Fantastique on the piano, but he left an organ version of his own Orpheus, showing directly how he would proceed. Example 22 shows a passage from the orchestral version of Orpheus, while Example 23 shows Liszt’s organ transcription.

Like Bach, Liszt takes numerous liberties, which would not be prescribed today:

• no attempt to respect the orchestration through similar colors on the organ

• playing the melody an octave lower as soon as the limits of the keyboard are reached, without making further effort of registration to keep it entirely at its proper place

• modifying entire accompanying patterns. Some complex arpeggios on the violin and the harp are replaced by one slower arpeggio taken in the left hand. This new compositional element can even be used longer than in the orchestral version, in a measure where the orchestra pauses under the soloist

• abandoning secondary musical elements

• adding new measures in order to get a better crescendo

• composing entirely new passages when the orchestral version seems to be too difficult to reduce.

Conclusion

In all historical examples, we see a rather creative approach in the transcription process. During the Baroque period, few details had to be abandoned from the orchestral score; but sometimes, to enliven this keyboard version, various ornaments, embellishments, or new parts needed to be added. Obviously these additions were made in the style and according to the character of the piece.

In any case, when the complexity of the orchestral writing did not allow exact transposing on the keyboard, one chose carefully the parts to be kept, according to their musical importance. A subtle hierarchy existed between the main melody, important counterparts, the bass, and some accompanying material. These secondary parts, like broken chords and florid fast notes, were likely to be radically transformed in order to sound better on the keyboard instrument. It was also a way to make a passage more comfortable to play and avoid any useless difficulty due to its origin on a foreign instrument.

In this process, the transcription is no longer a reduced version of an original piece, but it becomes literally a new organ or harpsichord work, using the same idioms, techniques, and musical possibilities as the best pieces written explicitly for the organ. Bach’s versions of Vivaldi’s concerti grossi show that, on one hand, Bach loses some of the sound qualities of the concerto grosso for strings, without mentioning the stiff sound of the organ compared to the violins. But on the other hand, Bach introduces sufficiently new elements that enrich his keyboard version and make a proper organ piece of it.

This approach seems to be still alive at Liszt’s time, but the increasing development of transcription in the nineteenth century also created a rejection of it. The defense of the proper organ repertoire became until recently the rule; the transcription was despised because it would only be some virtuoso’s amusement and not suited to the character of the organ.

The above examples show that, on the contrary, a good transcription fits the nature of the instrument by using the right means, playing techniques, and registrations according to the style of music.

Notes

1. Johann Friedrich Agricola, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, Berlin, 1755.

2. Charles Burney, Music, Men and Manners in France and Italy, Paris, 1770, quoted in Preface to Claude-Bénigne Balbastre, Pièces de Clavecin d’Orgue et de Forte Piano, ed. A. Curtis, Huegel, 1973, p. viii.

3. Dom Bedos de Celle, L’art du facteur d’orgue, Paris, 1766, pp. 523–536.

4. Hector Berlioz, Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration, Paris, 1844, see chapters “Organ” and “Harmonium.”

Homage to Rafael Puyana (October 14, 1931–March 1, 2013)

Betina Maag Santos, Puyana’s musical producer and friend, is managing director of SanCtuS Recordings. 

Jane Clark is a leading authority on the keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti and François Couperin. Her most recent book, with Derek Connon, is The Mirror of Human Life: Reflections on François Couperin’s Pièces de Clavecin, published by Keyword Press in 2011.   

Larry Palmer, professor of harpsichord and organ in the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, has been harpsichord editor of The Diapason since 1969.

Memorial tributes by Betina Maag Santos, Jane Clark, and Larry Palmer

Homage to Rafael Puyana (October 14, 1931–March 1, 2013)

Rafael Antonio Lazaro Puyana Michelsen was born in Bogotá, Colombia. At age sixteen he entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston; later he studied at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. His passion for early music and harpsichord led him to the great harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, with whom he studied during the last seven years of her life. During summer months he traveled to France to enroll in the harmony and composition courses of Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau and Paris.

Puyana’s career as a harpsichordist began in 1957 with recitals at the Hotchkiss School, Jordan Hall in Boston, and Town Hall in New York City. He was immediately ranked as one of the most striking musical personalities of his generation. He gave numerous performances across several continents, performing with such musicians as Andrés Segovia, Leopold Stokowski, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, John Williams, Maxence Larrieu, and James Galway. He was an inspiring teacher who gave masterclasses for many years at the Santiago de Compostela, Prades, and Dartington summer schools. Trevor Pinnock, Christopher Hogwood, and Genoveva Galvez were among the students who attended these classes. He was also in charge of harpsichord instruction at the Curso Manuel de Falla, at the International Festival of Granada in Spain. He founded and was president of the International Harpsichord Forum of the Festival Estival de Paris, and was also a jury member for numerous harpsichord competitions.

A recognized authority in baroque music, Rafael Puyana also extended his repertoire to works for eighteenth-century fortepiano and to principal compositions composed for harpsichord in the twentieth century, including Master Peter’s Puppet Show and the Concerto by Manuel de Falla as well as the Concert Champêtre by Francis Poulenc. His refined yet strong and vital playing inspired several contemporary composers to write works for him, among them Frederico Mompou, Alain Louvier, Julian Orbón, and Xavier Montsalvatge.

King Juan Carlos of Spain invested Puyana with the highest decoration of that nation: the Orden de Isabel la Católica, in recognition of the artist’s merits in communicating his knowledge and appreciation of early and contemporary Spanish keyboard music. Puyana leaves behind an important discography, several recordings of which are deemed definitive.

Puyana had a longstanding relationship with SanCtuS Recordings, a collaboration that lasted over a period of fifteen years. During this time three new albums were released on this label: Magica Sympathiae and The Musical Sun of Southern Europe (I and II). For the past four years, I worked together intensively with the artist on previously unissued recordings, one of which is his magisterial recording of J. S. Bach’s Six Partitas, played on his celebrated three-manual harpsichord built in 1740 by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass. This album is currently being prepared for release. Others are to follow.

Rafael Puyana will be remembered by all those who recognize the greatness of his art for its exceptional beauty, intelligence, refinement, excitement, force, and vitality of his playing and, most importantly, his musical integrity. Those who had the privilege of knowing and collaborating with him will remember further qualities: the sharpness and brilliance of his unique mind, his incredibly vast knowledge and culture, his outstanding sensitivity and creativity, his aesthetic refinement, his sense of perfection, his impeccable memory, his force and intensity, his charm, his uncompromising nature and courage to stand by his beliefs, his loyalty, warmth, refined humor, and generosity.

The death of Rafael Puyana leaves those who admired and loved him as orphans. While Colombia lost one of its foremost internationally recognized cultural ambassadors, the world suffered an irreplaceable loss of one of the last artists from a golden era filled with larger-than-life musical personalities; Puyana was a direct link to the Landowska legacy as well as a player who possessed a striking individuality. His spirit and art will live on through the recorded legacy he has left behind, and in the hearts of those who loved and admired him.

—Betina Maag Santos

Rafael Puyana: an appreciation

‘Last of the harpsichord legends is buried in Colombia’ reads a headline on the Arts Journal website. Rafael Puyana, who lived for many years in Paris, suffered poor health during the last several, and was not allowed by doctors to fly home to Bogotá, a fact that saddened him. It is, perhaps, an ultimate irony that only his death allowed him such a journey. 

The other contemporary harpsichord legend, harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, three years his senior, died just more than a year ago, in January 2012. Comments on Puyana’s playing, prompted by his death, show that comparisons between these two major players are inevitable. Puyana had a head start on Leonhardt: he was an international celebrity before the Dutchman had gained any reputation at all. Unlike Leonhardt, however, Puyana was temperamentally unsuited to coping with the demands made by the commercial world of a present-day recitalist, and, sadly, was somewhat eclipsed by the Dutch player. 

This was understandable: many listeners felt Leonhardt to be more his teacher Landowska, Puyana was as well acquainted with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings as anyone. If he did not always act upon them, it was not because he was ignorant of these sources. His disadvantage was that he started life with a Pleyel harpsichord. Many listeners now accustomed to the sound of more classical instruments are unable to get past the sound of the Pleyel to hear the music being played on it. Interestingly, Puyana’s interpretations recorded on his magnificent three-manual Hass harpsichord, though unchanged, are often admired by those who rejected his earlier recordings. 

His playing had an old-world Hispanic dignity ideally suited to Hispanic music. This musical character was so strong that it invaded all the music he played. He excelled in works that owed a lot to the influence of Spain, those of the English Virginalists and the French and Italian seventeenth-century dance music influenced by Spaniards who were employed by Louis XIV’s Spanish queen, or affected by the Spanish domination of Naples. 

He was a loyal and entertaining friend. He once asked, when he was practicing a piece by my husband, Stephen Dodgson: “Jane, has your husband got a metronome?” “Yes,” I replied, “why?” “Well, it is not the same as mine,” came the answer. On another occasion when he was going to rehearse the Sonata for Guitar and Harpsichord by Manuel Ponce with John Williams: “Jane, will you come and turn my pages?” I was meant to be doing something else, so I asked: “Is it long?” “All bad music is long,” was the dismissive reply. 

It is sad that Rafael Puyana is not here to see his many recordings now appearing on the Internet as well as the many appreciative comments about him. Since he had stopped playing in public some years ago, he might be happily surprised to find that he was by no means forgotten. 

—Jane Clark

Memories of Rafael

In the years following those life-changing first harpsichord lessons at the Salzburg Mozarteum, I continued my interest in that fascinating instrument, which, sadly, was not one for which instruction was offered at the Eastman School of Music in the 1960s. I also continued my practice of writing letters to my parents. In addition to many Letters from Salzburg (now published as a memoir with that title), my mother saved all of my letters. Thus I was able to substantiate dates and some details of the beginning of my acquaintance with Rafael Puyana.

Rochester, New York

16 February 1961

Dear Mom and Dad,

. . . Tuesday afternoon [14 February] Rafael Puyana, harpsichordist, gave a lecture-recital in Kilbourn Hall. In the evening he played on the chamber music series there. This was such a treat—we were all very excited. [David] Craighead was so delighted that he dragged me off to his studio during intermission to talk about the playing. Puyana, a Colombian, studied for seven years with Landowska. After the concert a few of us were going out to celebrate Mardi Gras [which fell that year on Valentine’s Day!], and I invited him to go along. He had another date, but joined us about midnight. He’s friendly and very interesting. I’ll hope to hear him again. 

Yesterday, Ash Wednesday, was a full and most tiring day . . . [indeed it was, after such a late night of celebrations!]

As it turned out, that was the only time I heard Puyana in live performance. I remember the exhilaration and energy of his playing; his announcement to the audience that, although he usually played from memory, he had experienced a pre-concert night of fitful sleep, including the premonition of a memory failure in the Bach F-sharp minor Toccata, so he asked to be forgiven for placing the score on the music desk of his Pleyel harpsichord, “just in case.” And, as a foretaste of my subsequent repertoire interests, I remember how beguiling I found his playing of Catalan composer Frederico Mompou’s Canción y Danza XI (11), a new piano piece dedicated to him, which Rafael had transcribed for harpsichord. Equally memorable (and somewhat to be envied) was the relative ease of Puyana’s concert touring with such a large and heavy instrument, facilitated by his large Buick station wagon and a personally employed driver. As his fellow Landowska student Paul Wolfe reminded me recently, Rafael was the son of a wealthy family. Paul continued, “Of all WL’s students, he sounded most like her. [Also] like her, he had small hands . . . and he was extremely well educated.”

For the next forty years, Rafael remained on my musical radar screen through his masterful recordings. His first recording of Falla’s Concerto (Philips LP6505001) became my favorite interpretation of that iconic work. But even more exciting on that disc was a work totally new to all of us when the record was issued in 1970: Julián Orbón’s Tres Cantigas del Rey, sung with haunting intensity by soprano Heather Harper, supported by the London symphony String Quartet and Puyana, all conducted by Antal Dorati. A second, digital recording of these same pieces (Dorian 90214) dates from 1994, with soprano Julianne Baird, conductor Eduardo Mata, and Puyana performing on a 1993 Hass-copy instrument by Robert Goble. 

The Golden Age of Harpsichord Music, recorded in New York by Mercury Records during the springs of 1962 and 1964, showcased Rafael playing Landowska favorites, such as Bach’s transcription of Alessandro Marcello’s D-minor Concerto, Antoine Francisque’s Branle de Montirandé, works by Chambonnières and Rameau, together with some of Puyana’s beloved early English keyboard works by Bull, Peerson, Byrd, and Peter Philips, all played on a Pleyel harpsichord. This particular release was widely known as well for the strangely evocative photograph gracing the record jacket, portraying the young keyboardist in full white tie and tails, playing his harpsichord outside in a garden! Unfortunately, when this program was reissued on compact disc in 1995, someone turned the negative upside down, so the harpsichord lid appears attached to the right side of the instrument rather than the left (Mercury CD 434 364-2).

Occasionally other mentions of Rafael and his musical pursuits came from our mutual friend Jane Clark. At her urging I sent Rafael a copy of my book Harpsichord in America. What a delight to receive a handwritten communication from him, and thus reestablish personal contact after so many decades!

Paris, November 7, 2004

Dear Larry,

. . . Jane had mentioned your book about harpsichord life in the USA several times and I am now delighted to have some interesting reading for my hospital stay, after my operation on November 15th. Jane, in fact, suggested that I send you my latest recording effort, an album containing many splendid English pieces that have given me such a joyful time over the years. Two more records are in preparation (already recorded) and will eventually be released: Spanish and Portuguese music on original harpsichords and fortepianos. Our musical passion, I am glad to admit, is endless! 

The accompanying disc was the beautifully recorded and packaged Magica Sympathiae: Tudor and Jacobean masterpieces for keyboard, played by Puyana on an Italian harpsichord from the 16th-century maker Domenico da Pesaro [Domenicus Pisaurensis] and a 1998 copy by Willard Martin of a Flemish muselar virginal built by Jean Couchet in 1650. This elegant album from SanCtuS (SCS015) was recorded in France in 2000 and produced by Betina Maag Santos.

Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to accept Rafael’s generous invitation to visit him in Paris. Work does, indeed, interfere with one’s social life!

Quite often I turn to Louis Couperin’s F-major remembrance for a departed friend, the sublimely moving Tombeau de Mr. de Blancrocher, as a memorial tribute for someone I have known and loved. For Rafael, a more fitting postlude might be his own recording of Thomas Tomkins’ autobiographical A sad pavan for these distracted tymes—track 18 of Magica Sympathiae. Tomkins dated this work on the 14th of February 1649: indeed a sad time for the elderly organist of Worcester Cathedral, who, at age 78, endured the destruction of both political and musical worlds at the hands of the English Cromwellians. In a strangely apt concurrence, Tomkins’ composition, written just two weeks following the beheading of King Charles I, bears a date exactly 312 years before my first meeting with Rafael Puyana. 

—Larry Palmer