Harpsichord News

The Diapason’s Harpsichord Editor since 1969, Larry Palmer is author of the pioneering book, Harpsichord in America: A Twentieth-Century Revival, published by Indiana University Press in 1989 (paperback second edition, 1993). Of six international advisors for the Berlin commemoration, two were Americans: Teri Noel Towe (New York) and Palmer (Dallas). Poster and postcard images for the exhibition featured an anonymous caricature belonging to Palmer, the gift of Momo Aldrich, first secretary to the iconic Landowska.

The Power of the Press:
“A Living Legend”
Nicholas Slonimsky (1894–1995), writing about harpsichordist Wanda Landowska for the French journal Disques in 1932, introduced his subject with a three-stanza poem. It begins:

Her fingers on the cembalo
Type out the polyphonic lore
Of Bach’s Inventions—and restore
The true original edition
Unobfuscated by tradition.1
Twelve years later, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, habitually cranky New York music critic Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), reviewed the Polish harpsichordist’s Town Hall concert of 20 November 1944 under the adulatory headline “Definitive Renderings”:

Wanda Landowska’s harpsichord recital of last evening . . . was as stimulating as a needle shower. . . . She played everything better than anybody else ever does. One might almost say, were not such a comparison foolish, that she plays the harpsichord better than anybody else ever plays anything . . .
. . . [Her] playing of the harpsichord . . . reminded one all over again that there is nothing else in the world like it. There does not exist in the world today, nor has there existed in my lifetime, another soloist of this or any other instrument whose work is so dependable, so authoritative, and so thoroughly satisfactory. From all the points of view—historical knowledge, style, taste, understanding, and spontaneous musicality—her renderings of harpsichord repertory are, for our epoch, definitive. Criticism is unavailing against them, has been so, indeed, for thirty years.2
It seems that the divine Wanda had accomplished her objective, half a century in the making, of restoring the harpsichord to a recognized place in the cultural consciousness of music lovers, both in Europe and in the western hemisphere. Her personal style, based on an innate rhythmic certainty, a turn-of-the-century impressionistic use of tonal color, and, not incidentally, her careful perusal of historical source materials had made her name virtually synonymous with the word harpsichord, at least in the collective consciousness of the public.

True Believers:
Expatriated European and Native American Disciples
Landowska’s acolytes dominated those American venues where harpsichords were played: Alice Ehlers (1887–1981), Professor Landowska’s first student in 1913 Berlin, immigrated to the United States and taught for 26 years at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Among Ehlers’s fascinating oral history recorded vignettes she noted that Landowska did not talk much in those early lessons, but she relied heavily on playing for her students. Later, in Ehlers’s own teaching, at least one anecdote retold by her student Malcolm Hamilton (1932–2003) showed that Ehlers was less than impressed at his derivative details copied from Landowska’s style. When Hamilton added an unwritten trill to the subject of a Bach fugue Ehlers stopped him to ask why. “I heard a recording by Wanda Landowska,” he began. Madame Ehlers interrupted brusquely, “Wanda Landowska was a genius. You and I, Malcolm, we are not geniuses—‘spaacially you!”3
Two more Landowska students holding American academic posts were Marie Zorn (b. 1907?), who promoted the Landowskian style in her harpsichord teaching at Indiana University from 1958 until 1976, and Putnam Aldrich (1904–1975), who married Wanda’s own personal secretary Madeleine Momot in 1931 (with a somewhat-reconciled Landowska as witness for the bride). Eventually “Put” settled his young family in northern California, where he established a prestigious doctoral program in early music at Stanford University.
In concert halls, Madame’s final brilliant students, Rafael Puyana (born 1931), a South American of blazing virtuosity, and Texas-born Paul Wolfe (born 1929), both built solo careers in the decade following their teacher’s death.
In 1961 Puyana played a concert at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, during my first year there as a doctoral student. Rafael, the scion of a wealthy family, toured the country with a Pleyel harpsichord (the instrument of choice for Landowska’s students) and a personal driver. His Eastman recital was a dashing and colorful evocation of a Landowska program, including kaleidoscopic changes of registration; a repertoire firmly grounded in the major Bach works; but with at least one non-Landowska addition: his own harpsichord transcription of a Canción for piano by the Catalan composer Frederico Mompou.
Paul Wolfe, not from a moneyed family, set out to make his name through recordings. I came to know him when Nick Fritsch of Lyrichord Records decided to reissue a number of their 1950s vinyl issues on compact discs and asked me to write an introductory article explaining harpsichord pedals. Wolfe’s instruments—a 1907 Pleyel of wooden construct and a large concert instrument completed in 1958 by the young northeastern builders Frank Rutkowski and Richard Robinette—as well as programs that featured 17th-century works by Frescobaldi and the English virginalists, Spanish music, and all eight of the 1720 Handel Suites—presented both facile young fingers and an expanding repertory of early keyboard music to the American harpsichord scene.

A Contrarian’s View of Landowska
During the autumnal years of Landowska’s career, critics of her playing style were not legion. But one composer-critic who did not idolize the High Priestess of the Harpsichord was neo-classicist composer Robert Evett (1922–1975). In a 1952 piece for The New Republic, Evett wrote:

Mme. Landowska has seduced the brighter part of the American public into believing that she offers it an authentic reading of Bach and his predecessors. What this lady actually uses is a modern Pleyel harpsichord, an instrument that she employs as a sort of dispose-all. . . .
After fifteen years of incredulous listening, I am finally convinced that this woman kicks all the pedals in sight when she senses danger ahead. When she sits down to play a Bach fugue, I go through all the torments that a passenger experiences when he is being driven over a treacherous mountain road by an erratic driver, and when she finally finishes the thing it is almost a pleasure to relax into nausea.4
A Different Aesthetic:
Ralph Kirkpatrick
Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–1984), funded by a post-graduate John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University, set off for Europe in the fall of 1931 to hone his harpsichord playing skills. As described in his memoirs,5 the pre-eminent American harpsichordist of his generation had a difficult relationship with the priestess of St-Leu, eventually running off to Berlin for coaching and consolation with another Landowska student, the more congenial Eta Harich-Schneider (1897–1986). Kirkpatrick’s public playing, beginning with concerts and recordings during the 1930s, sounded distinctly unlike Landowska’s in its conscious avoidance of excessive registration changes and its near-metronomic regularity. Teri Noel Towe’s description of Kirkpatrick’s style, printed as a “disclaimer” in the compact disc reissue of these early solo recordings for Musicraft Records, puts it this way:

Some listeners confuse Ralph Kirkpatrick’s tenacious and unswerving commitment to the composer’s intentions with dullness and mistake his exquisite attention to detail and technical accuracy for dryness. These detractors would do well to listen again. There is a special beauty and unique warmth to Kirkpatrick’s sometimes austere but always direct, ‘no nonsense’ performances; his interpretations are always superbly conceived, often transcendent, and occasionally hypnotic. . . .6
For a balanced evaluation of Kirkpatrick the harpsichordist, one needs to sample some later examples from his extensive discography. A 1959 Deutsche Grammophon Archiv recording of Bach played on a Neupert instrument presents quite another aural document of a decidedly non-austere artist. And by 1973 when I experienced Kirkpatrick’s deeply-moving playing of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Rothko Chapel in Houston (Texas), I reported in The Diapason that “Kirkpatrick played magnificently with a prodigious technical command of the work as well as with spacious feeling for the overall architecture . . .”7
At the very end of a more than five-decade career, and now totally blind, the aged master could allow his innate musical sensitivity to triumph. Despite his end-of-career tongue-in-cheek comments about preferring the piano, the Yale professor was the most highly regarded and recorded native harpsichordist in the United States during the period of Landowska’s American residency.
Other noted American players of Kirkpatrick’s generation included Yella Pessl (1906–1991) and Sylvia Marlowe (1908–1981). Marlowe’s first instrument was a true Landowska Pleyel, by this time painted white, the better to be seen on the revolving stage of New York City’s Rainbow Room, where Sylvia played jazz arrangements of classical favorites under the catchy rubric Lavender and New Lace. Deeply influenced by Landowska’s playing, encountered while the New Yorker was studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Marlowe’s 1959 solo Bach recording for Decca demonstrates how much Madame’s long musical shadow dominated the American harpsichord scene.
Eventually Ms. Marlowe chose to play harpsichords built by the American maker John Challis, moving subsequently to those of Challis’s apprentice William Dowd (with lid-paintings by her own husband, the artist Leonid [Berman]). Non-night-club recital repertoire included 18th-century classics, soon augmented extensively by commissions to prominent living composers. Thus, important works by Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter, to cite only two, came into being through Marlowe’s sponsorship. Together with the impressive catalog of similar commissions from the Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer (1909–1973), Marlowe’s initiatives helped to provide the harpsichord with an extensive, new twentieth-century musical voice.
Influenced by Kirkpatrick during student days at Yale, Fernando Valenti (1926–1990) switched from piano to harpsichord, and also played important new works by Vincent Persichetti (that composer’s First Harpsichord Sonata composed in 1952) and Mel Powell (Recitative and Toccata Percossa). However, Valenti made his name primarily as the most exciting player of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas and specifically as the first harpsichordist to record such a large number of them—359 individual works performed on his Challis harpsichord in a series of albums for Westminster Records. In 1951 he was appointed the first harpsichord professor at New York’s Juilliard School. Several didactic books, published late in Valenti’s career, are as colorful and insightful as his playing. Who could resist a chuckle at words such as these?

Many years ago I promised myself that I would never put in print anything that even vaguely resembled a ‘method’ for harpsichord playing and this is it.8
One of the best-known harpsichordists to study privately with Valenti was Berlin-born Igor Kipnis (1930–2002), son of the prominent bass opera singer Alexander Kipnis. The family moved to the United States in 1938, where both Kipnises became familiar names in the classical music arena. Igor was particularly noted for his comprehensive and innovative repertory, recorded extensively. His playing was thoroughly representative of a more objective style of harpsichord performance.

Winds (or Strings and Quills) of Change?
One of the great services rendered by Kirkpatrick was his fervent advocacy for the historically inclined instruments of Frank Hubbard and William Dowd. As the years went by, these musical machines emulated ever more closely those from earlier centuries, albeit with some decidedly 20th-century materials, such as the plastics used for jacks and plectra. But with keyboards built to various baroque dimensions; sensitive, light actions; and registers deployed in a way that an 18th-century composer might have expected; together with the absence, for the most part, of the sixteen-foot register and pedals, these light and agile instruments gave the new generation of players sensitive tools for performing the music of the past. Emulating Hubbard and Dowd, a number of builders, in Boston and other American venues, and throughout the world, joined the “surge to the past,” and thereby changed both the dynamic and the expected sounds of harpsichord revival instruments.
Among Kirkpatrick’s allies in promoting these new “old” instruments were two Fullers—his student Albert (1926–2007) and the not-related David (born 1927), and harpsichordist/conductors Miles Morgan and William Christie. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, nearly every emerging teacher and player in the country seemed to be joining the pedal-less crowd. In 1966 I met Dr. Joseph Stephens and played the Hubbard and Dowd harpsichord in his Baltimore (Maryland) home. Shortly thereafter I ordered my own first Dowd double. It was delivered at the beginning of January 1969. As has happened for so many players in our small musical world, that sensitive instrument taught me as much as had the memorable hours spent studying with two of the finest teachers imaginable: Isolde Ahlgrimm (at the Salzburg Mozarteum), and Gustav Leonhardt (during two memorable July participations in his master classes at the annual Haarlem Summer Organ Academies).

Influential European
Artist-Teachers
Both of these superb artists made significant contributions to harpsichord playing in the United States: Ahlgrimm (1914–1995) through her teaching in Salzburg, Vienna, and during semester-long guest professorships at Oberlin and Southern Methodist University, as well as several American concert tours organized by managers, but aided and attended by her grateful students. Until recently, Ahlgrimm’s place in the story of the 20th-century harpsichord revival has been little celebrated. With the publication of Peter Watchorn’s major study Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival,9 that deficiency in our history has been rectified!
Leonhardt (born 1928), surely the most recorded of post-Landowska harpsichordists, has influenced virtually every harpsichordist from the second half of the 20th-century forward. His students seem to be everywhere. Even the most cursory of enumerations would include many of the leading teachers in the U.S: Oberlin’s first full-time professor of harpsichord Lisa Crawford; Michigan’s Edward Parmentier; Boston’s John Gibbons; University of New York at Stony Brook’s Arthur Haas; Florida State’s Karyl Louwenaar; Illinois’ Charlotte Mattax; and, particularly during the 1970s and ’80s, my own large group of harpsichord major students at Southern Methodist University. In the spirit of the early music excitement of those decades, SMU conferred his first doctorate on Leonhardt in 1984, citing the Dutch harpsichordist’s advocacy of “performance on period instruments,” as well as his “commitment to both stylistic authority and artistic sensitivity in recreating music of the past.”
To this day, more than 25 years after the conferral of that honorary degree, Leonhardt still refers to me in communications as his “Doktor-Vater.” Whereas Ahlgrimm referred to herself as a biological phenomenon since she “got more children the older she became,” Leonhardt’s humorous salutation presents me with a similar phenomenon: the “son” as father to the “father.” At any rate, I am pleased to have Dr. Leonhardt as my most distinguished graduate!
Ah yes, students—the new generators of harpsichord playing in America. Too many to list, but perhaps one graced with multiple “A’s” may serve as representative—Andrew Appel, American, who completed his doctoral studies with Juilliard harpsichord professor Albert Fuller in 1983, and now carries on that line from his teacher, who had been a pupil of Ralph Kirkpatrick, who was . . . and here we could circle back to the beginning of this essay. May Andrew Appel represent the achievements of so many of our fine young players: the late Scott Ross, the with-it Skip Sempé, the sensitive Michael Sponseller, the delightful teaching colleague Barbara Baird—Americans, all!
Ultimately all of us are indebted to those European “explorers” who have provided our inspiration and training: French/English Arnold Dolmetsch, Austrian Isolde Ahlgrimm, Dutch Gustav Leonhardt: all contributors to the variety and richness of the harpsichord’s presence in our contemporary musical life. And our Polish mother, Wanda Landowska: that vibrant musician who has brought us together for this celebration of her musical legacy.

Some Information about Added Aural Examples
This paper was presented at the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum on November 14, 2009, during a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Die Dame mit dem Cembalo [The Lady with the Harpsichord], in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Wanda Landowska’s death. The topic was suggested by the museum’s curator Martin Elste, who organized the event. To remain within an imposed time limit, I chose to include only seven short recorded examples, each one a performance of the same final 25 measures from the third (Presto) movement of J. S. Bach’s Italian Concerto (BWV 971)—with an individual duration of between 30 and 40 seconds.
The first example demonstrated one of the most unforgettable of all my musical experiences: Landowska’s unexpected slight agogic hesitation between top and bottom notes of the climactic downward octave leap in measure 199, the last return of that wonderfully energetic opening theme. Taken from her 1936 recording for EMI [reissued in Great Recordings of the Century, CDH 7610082], it served as an aural measuring rod with which to compare the following recordings, made “after” Landowska.
Example Two presented the young Ralph Kirkpatrick playing his early 20th-century Dolmetsch-Chickering harpsichord, captured in a 1939 recording for Musicraft, digitized on Pearl [Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume II, GEMM CD 9245]. Example Three: Kirkpatrick again, 20 years later, recorded in a thrillingly theatrical performance played on a powerhouse Neupert instrument for Archiv [198 032] (LP).
Example Four: Sylvia Marlowe, like Landowska, played on an instrument by Pleyel, recorded in 1959 for Decca [DL 710012] (LP).
Example Five: Leading Bach authority Isolde Ahlgrimm, recorded 1975, playing her 1972 David Rubio harpsichord, recorded by Philips [6580 142] (LP).
Example Six: Gustav Leonhardt utilized the sound of an actual 18th-century historic instrument for his 1976 recording on a 1728 Hamburg harpsichord by Christian Zell. Seon [Pro Arte PAL-1025] (LP).
Example Seven: Andrew Appel played a 1966 harpsichord by Rutkowski and Robinette in his 1987 recording for Bridge Records [BCD 9005), concluding the musical examples in just under four minutes! Fortunately for the word-weary, the next, and final, presentation of the two-day seminar was given by British record collector extraordinaire Peter Adamson, comprising a fascinating sound and image survey of early harpsichord recordings.

Buried Treasures: 

The Harpsichord Pages 

in Retrospect (2006–15)

Once upon a time (well, twice actually, in The Diapason issues of January 1974 and February 1979), we offered cumulative indices of harpsichord-related matters in the journal, from Philip Treggor’s first harpsichord column (October 1967), through December 1978. Treggor continued his responsibility for harpsichord news until December 1968. Following his resignation, harpsichord submissions were managed by the magazine’s Chicago staff until September 1969, at which point I took over at the invitation of Editor Frank Cunkle.

As it has been 36 years since we have offered a third cumulative listing of harpsichord-centered writings, it may be time to offer this “backward” look, covering the past ten years. I cannot begin to count the number of instances in which the previous retrospectives have been of use to me: so much so that I keep these indices filed next to my bound copies of the magazine. If this present list proves useful to you, please let me know. I could then plan to complete indexing the years 1979 through 2005. Our January issue includes the journal’s composite index of the previous year; this would be a logical target date for continuing such offerings.

In the following citations, the title or subject appears first, followed by the month and year of publication, page number(s) in parentheses, and author. My contributions are indicated by the letters LP; other, less-frequent contributors, by their full names. I have added a few articles not specifically published under the Harpsichord News rubric. Categories sometimes overlap, particularly those of Personalities
and Obituaries.

Instruments and Builders

William Dowd: An Appreciation, Jan 09 (22), LP; The Earliest Surviving English Spinet by Charles Haward [c.1668], July 09 (12, 14), Charles West Wilson; Harpsichord News: ARTEK Goes German, July 15 (13), LP; Autobiography of a Clavichord (Dolmetsch-Chickering 2006), Dec 15 (12–13), LP.

Repertoire and 

Performance Practice

Mozart and the Harpsichord: An Alternate Ending for Fantasia in D minor, K. 397, Nov 06 (20), LP; “Entartete” Music: Hugo Distler and the Harpsichord, Aug 08 (22–23), LP; Harpsichord News: Chris DeBlasio Dances, Soler, Scarlatti, Lully, the Borrel Manuscript, May 09 (14), LP; Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite at 100, Dec 09 (36–37), LP; The Chopin Bicentennial at the Harpsichord, Feb 10 (23), LP; Addenda to Chopin, Aug 10 (11), LP; A Harpsichord Piece by Henri Mulet, Aug 10 (11), LP; Mulet Petit Lied—a complete facsimile, Jan 11 (12), LP; Harpsichord Works of Asiko Hirabayashi, Nov 10 (12–13), LP; J. S. Bach’s English and French Suites with emphasis on the Courante, May 11 (24–25), Renate McLaughlin; Gathering Peascods for the Old Gray Mare: Some Unusual Harpsichord Music Before Aliénor, Dec 12 (27–29), LP; Soler’s Fandango: new edition from Ut Orpheus and recording by Diego Ares, Dec 13 (12), LP; Multi-Media Mozart—Words, Notes, and Sounds [Harpsichord News], Feb 14 (12–13), LP; Christmas Music for Harpsichord, Oct 14 (12), LP; Going [J. William] Greene—Music for Harpsichord, June 15 (11), LP; Pedaling the French: A Tour de France of Revival Harpsichordists 1888–1939, Aug 15 (10–11), LP; Harpsichord Plus: The Accompanied Harpsichord Music of Jacques Duphly, Nov 15 (10), LP. 

Personalities in the Harpsichord World

Helmut Walcha, Oct 07 (28–29), Nov 07 (21–23), Dec 07 (21–23), Paul Jacobs; Oscar Peterson, Feb 08 (12), LP; Gustav Leonhardt (anecdote, footnote 3 in AGO National Convention Review), Nov 08 (27), LP; Pavana Lachrimae: A California Tribute to Gustav Leonhardt, Aug 12 (18), Lee Lovallo; Crazy about Organs: Leonhardt interview from 2000, Nov 12 (20–22), Jan-Piet Knijff; Gustav Leonhardt—a Letter to the Editor from Hellmuth Wolff, Jan 13 (3); Mamusia: Paul Wolfe Remembers Wanda Landowska, Oct 12 (23–25), Craig Smith; Janos Sebestyen, May 12 (12–13), Robert Tifft; Harpsichord in the News: Mahan Esfahani, Jory Vinikour, Frances Bedford, and a 1615 quotation from Trabaci about the status of the instrument, July 12 (10, 12), LP; Remembering Irma Rogell (and a review of Martin Elste’s book Die Dame mit dem Cembalo), April 13 (11–12), LP; A Triptych for Rafael [Puyana], May 13 (11–12), Betina M. Santos, Jane Clark, and LP; Virginia Pleasants Turns 100, Feb 12 (11); Harpsichord Playing in America after Landowska, June 11 (19–21), LP; Ralph Kirkpatrick Centennial, June 11 (13–14), Gavin Black; Remembering Wm. Neil Roberts, Sept 11 (12–14), LP; Joseph Stephens—In Memoriam, Sept 14 (15), LP; Remembering Hilda Jonas, Dec 14 (11), Glendon Frank and LP; Remembering George Lucktenberg, Feb 15 (11), LP; Remembering Richard Rephann, Mar 15 (25), Allison Alcorn.

Pedagogy and Technique

Dear Harpsichordists: Why Don’t We Play from Memory?, Sept 11 (24–25), Paul Cienniwa; Continuo (On Teaching), Nov 11 (15–17), Dec 11 (11–13), Jan 12 (16–17); Gavin Black; Recital Programing, Aug 12 (13–14), Gavin Black.

Reports on Harpsichord Events

Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society 2006 Meeting in Rome, Georgia, June 06 (12), LP; Westfield Center 2006 Conference, Victoria, British Columbia (includes mentions of Colin Tilney and Edoardo Bellotti), Dec 06 (29), Herbert Huestis; Boston Early Music Festival 2007, Sept 07 (22–23), LP; East Texas Pipe Organ Festival 2012: A Harpsichordist in Aeolian-Skinner Land, Feb 13 (20), LP; Continuo: the Art of Creative Collaboration—Westfield Center 2013 Conference at Pacific Lutheran University, 2013, July 13 (20–21), Andrew Willis; Historic Keyboard Society of North America 2013 meeting in Williamsburg, VA, April 14 (10–11), LP; HKSNA International Conference in Montréal and Aliénor Competition, Aug 15 (10–11), LP; Broadening a Harpsichordist’s Horizons: Remembering 2014 ETPOF, Sept 15 (11), LP. 

Reviews of Books, 

Music, and Recordings

A Guide to Musical Temperament (Thomas Donahue), reviewed by G. N. Bullat, June 06 (16); Guilty Pleasures: Mark Schweizer’s The Soprano Wore Falsettos, Choices (a novel) by Paul Wolfe, CD of Landowska reissues, DVD: Landowska—Uncommon Visionary [Harpsichord News] Mar 07 (10), LP; Peter Watchorn Plays Bach’s WTC I [Harpsichord News] Aug 07 (12–13), LP; Fernando Valenti’s Scarlatti recordings, Feb 08 (12, 14), LP; Peter Watchorn’s Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna, and the Early Music Revival and a published score for Richard Strauss’ Capriccio Suite, June 08 (12), LP; The Best Medicine—a review of Schweizer’s The Diva Wore Diamonds, Aug 09 (10), LP; New Harpsichord Music, Oct 09 (18–19), John Collins; a new compact disc set of Bach’s Six Partitas, and the publication of A Medici Harpsichord Book from Ut Orpheus, April 12 (12), LP; Joys of Re-Reading: Blue Harpsichord, Early Music mystery series by James Gollin, and more, Aug 14 (11), LP; Harpsichord News: Words and Music—Ralph Kirkpatrick Letters and Frank Ferko Triptych, April 15 (12), LP. 

Obituaries

Daniel Pinkham (d. 2006), Feb 07 (8); A Pinkham Memoir, Mar 07 (20), James McCray; Albert Fuller (d. 2007), Dec 07 (10); Remembering Albert Fuller—Trombones in Dido and Aeneas?, Feb 08 (14), LP; Fenner Douglass (d. 2008), June 08 (8); Thomas Dunn (d. 2008), Mar 09 (10); Virginia Pleasants (d. 2011), Feb 12 (11); Gustav Leonhardt (d. 2012), March 12 (10); Christopher Hogwood (d. 2014), Nov 14 (10); Bruce Prince-Joseph (d. 2015), July 15 (10); Paul Jordan (d. 2015), May 15 (18–19); Roger Goodman (d. 2015), Sept 15 (10); Alan Curtis (d. 2015), Oct 15 (10).

Esoteric Ephemera

Nineteenth-century harpsichord citings: Bizet and a Chopin student [Harpsichord News], Feb 08 (12), information from John Carroll Collins reported by LP; Historic 20th-Century Harpsichordists in Hungary, Italy, and the Czech Republic [Harpsichord News], Feb 08 (12), Robert Tifft; Bytes from the Electronic Mailbag: Fandango, Misspellings of the Word Harpsichord, April 14 (10–11), LP; November Musings: Blessed Cecilia (In Honor of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s 100th Birthday), Nov 14 (12), LP; A mystery, a cautionary tale: Mark Schweizer’s The Maestro Wore Mohair and Simon Menges’ misadventure [Harpsichord News], Oct 15 (12), LP.

And Something New: Mysteries
with Musical References

The American expatriate author Donna Leon (born in New Jersey in 1942) has published 24 books in her series starring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian constabulary. Number one, Death at La Fenice (1992) introduces the soprano Flavia Petrelli who is singing Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata at the venerable opera house. German maestro Helmut Wellauer dies before the final act of the opera, and Brunetti finds that he has a complicated bit of detecting to do before solving this clever crime.

For Acqua Alta, book five in the series, Leon brings back this soprano, a “favorite character because of her voice.” By the novel’s end Flavia is off to sing her first Handel opera, a plot twist chosen so that, should Petrelli return in future books, Leon would be able to write about her best-loved music. In real life the author became closely associated with American conductor Alan Curtis; together they created an opera company, Il Complesso Barocco, to perform rare works by Handel and other baroque composers. References to harpsichord are found on pages 201–2 of Acqua Alta, and again on page 229 when Flavia’s companion Brett chooses Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony for listening rather than harpsichord music, the “plunky sound of which would snap her nerves.”

Volume 24 of the Brunetti stories arrived in 2015: Falling in Love is set in La Fenice again, this time with Petrelli starring as Puccini’s Tosca. Music figures prominently, the plot is gripping, and I particularly enjoyed a comment on page 154, where Brunetti is reminded of a CD shop owner who opined that “the weirdest customers were people who liked organ music. ‘Most of them shop at night,’ his friend said. ‘I think it’s the only time some of them ever leave their houses.’”

Further “baroquery” is to be found in Leon’s standalone novel The Jewels of Paradise (2012) which features a musicologist and a plot driven by the legacy of Italian composer Agostino Steffani (1654–1728). Highly recommended for all fans of mystery novels and baroque music. Finally, dear readers, should you come across references to the harpsichord, please send me the citations! ν

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

Larry Palmer is harpsichord editor of THE DIAPASON.

With some help from our readers

A harpsichord piece by
Henri Mulet?
In response to my article on Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his 1909 English Suite for Harpsichord (December 2009), Thomas Annand (Ottawa) wrote to ask if I was aware of a harpsichord piece by Henri Mulet? I was not, and asked Mr. Annand for further information. He referred me to Grove’s Online (now Oxford Music Online), where the catalog of Mulet’s works included a “Petit lied très facile, hpd/pf, 1910” among instrumental and chamber music listings.
Hoping to locate a score, I checked print sources, but was unable to find anything from the cited major publishers. So I turned to the leading authority on 19th- and 20th-century French organ music, Rollin Smith, who responded immediately that he knew of the piece, but did not have a copy of it. But only a few days later, he provided an Internet address (http://www.evensongmusic.net/muletfree.html) featuring a free PDF file of Mulet’s short piece in an organ adaptation by Stephen H. Best, made “from the harpsichord version.” Although this score is presented on three staves, the piece is indeed “simple” enough to play on the harpsichord manuals without any need for pedal. Beginning and ending in B minor, the “Little Song” comprises 17 measures in a gently asymmetric 5/4.
In notes to the piece, Mr. Best writes that “the Petit Lied was composed by Henri Mulet ca. 1909 and dedicated to Albert Périlhou, organist at Saint Séverin in Paris from 1889 to 1914.” He further points out that Mulet and Périlhou were colleagues at Saint Eustache during 1905.
While not an earth-shaking musical discovery, Mulet’s piece adds another charming item to the gradually increasing number of harpsichord compositions from the earliest years of the 20th-century revival.
I am grateful to Mr. Annand for directing attention to this overlooked item, and to Mr. Best for his online generosity. While visiting the website, note Best’s edition of several additional Mulet pieces for the harmonium.

More on Chopin’s Fugue in A Minor
Several readers responded to our February article, The Chopin Bicentennial: Celebrating at the Harpsichord?
Paul Cienniwa (Boston) sent word of the availability of a pristine score for Chopin’s 1841 work found at <http://www.imslp.org&gt;.
Church musician and clavichordist Judith Conrad (Fall River, MA) wrote to confirm the availability of a harpsichord for Chopin’s use at Nohant, George Sand’s country estate.
And ever-vigilant Dallas researcher John Carroll Collins continued his mining of Chopin source materials, with results shared in two extensive letters. In his letter of 28 February 2010, Mr. Collins cited page 227 of Tad Szulc’s Chopin in Paris [New York, 1998], where the author states (without documentation) that in addition to Chopin’s Pleyel, there was also “another piano and a harpsichord in the sitting room.” (This room, along with the guest rooms, dining room, and kitchen, was situated on the ground floor; the main bedrooms and library were on the second.)
In the same letter, Collins commented on my use of quotations from the authenticity-challenged correspondence between Chopin and Delfina Potocka:
The entire matter of the letters was discussed at length by Arthur Hedley in his essay “The Chopin-Potocka Letters,” which was published as an Appendix in Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin [London and New York, 1963]. In the seventh edition of Baker’s [Biographical Dictionary] it is stated on page 983 that “Hedley was instrumental in exposing the falsity of the notorious Potocka-Chopin correspondence produced by Mme. Czernicka (who killed herself in 1949 . . . after the fraudulence was irrefutably demonstrated by Hedley at the Chopin Institute in Warsaw)”.

In further correspondence (dated 14 March 2010), Collins provided information concerning a possible date of composition for Chopin’s fugue, as well as some documentation for the composer’s interest in counterpoint:

While reading an interesting little book by Gerald Abraham, Chopin’s Musical Style (London, 1939), I came across a clue that offers a [possible] solution [to the question of the date of composition]. In the Introduction (page xii), Abraham quotes from a letter Chopin sent to Julian Fontana, “undated but apparently written in July or August 1841,” in which Chopin requests that he “send without fail Cherubini’s traité; I think it’s du contrepoint (I don’t remember the title well.” This same letter is given in full on pages 195–6 of [the Hedley book cited earlier], where it is dated “Nohant, early June 1841.”
In Hedley’s translation, Chopin asks Fontana to send him a copy of Kastner’s Treatise on Counterpoint and requests him “to fit the things into a suitable box, have them well packed and dispatch them . . . to the same address as my letters. Do please be quick about it . . . don’t delay the dispatch if he [the bookseller] has not Kastner’s book in stock. Anyhow do send Cherubini’s Treatise—I think—on Counterpoint. I don’t know the exact title.” (This book would have been Cherubini’s Cours de contrepoint et de la fugue, published in 1835.)

Collins also sent several pages from The Journal of Eugene Delacroix (translated from the French by Walter Pach [New York: Grove Press]), in which the painter noted a relevant exchange with his friend, the composer, during the last year of his brief life:

Saturday, 7 April 1849: About half past three, accompanied Chopin on his
drive . . . During the day he talked music with me, and that gave him new animation. I asked him what establishes logic in music. He made me feel what counterpoint and harmony are; how the fugue is like pure logic in music, and that to know the fugue deeply is to be acquainted with the element of all reason and all consistency in music.

Comments and news items are always welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer, Division of Music, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275. E-mails to <[email protected]>.

Larry Palmer is harpsichord editor of THE DIAPASON.

According to his birth certificate,
Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin was born on February 22, 1810, a date confirmed by the composer’s father in a sworn statement to the parish priest Jan Duchnowski in April of that same year.1 Thus, this present anno domini 2010 presents us with an opportunity to celebrate another bicentenary; but of what practical use is this to harpsichordists or organists? Chopin was delightfully, but single-mindedly, a creator of music for the piano. Even his relatively small number of ensemble works (18 songs, four chamber pieces plus the late cello sonata, and two oft-performed concertos, plus an additional four compositions with orchestral accompaniment) employ the piano either as solo or collaborative instrument.
Nonetheless, some of us might wish to join the wider classical music establishment in commemorating the life of this poetic Pole, even though we had no music to perform. Thus it is with special delight that I share news of a Chopin composition in two voices (without specific indication of instrumental medium), a work almost completely unknown, but a worthwhile piece playable on the manuals of the harpsichord (or organ): the composer’s unique Fugue in A Minor, a single-page manuscript dated 1841.2
Listed in Maurice J. E. Brown’s Chopin: An Index of His Works in Chronological Order and included in volume 18 of the Paderewski edition of the solo piano works, this contrapuntal essay remains an unheard rarity. The only recent printing (outside the Collected Works) seems to be an overlooked 1998 publication edited from the original manuscript by Michel Leclerc, and offered by HIT Diffusion, 36, rue de la porte de Trivaux, 92140 Clamart (France). Comparison with a tiny facsimile of the holograph (pictured on the front cover)3 confirms an accurate transcription of the short work. Fingerings, dynamics, slurs, and suggested tempo are editorial additions.
These brief comments about the piece appear on the back cover:
• Composed in 1841—without opus number.
• The first edition, and the only previous one, appeared in Warsaw in 1862.
• This fugue had been attributed to the composer Cherubini for some time.
• Arthur Hedley [author of a 1947 Chopin biography and principal contributor to the Chopin entry in Groves VI] writes: “The fugue . . . is decidedly the work of the Polish composer. An examination of the manuscript leaves no doubt.”
With a duration of approximately four minutes, the Fugue in A Minor is built on an attractive tonal subject [Example 1] and is surely more than a mere exercise. It may be played on a single manual, but I have found it effective to utilize the second keyboard of the harpsichord for the right hand in the stretto passage [Example 2, measure 53], a move that clarifies the part crossing of alto and tenor, and which has the added advantage of softening the following two-and-one-half measure soprano trill. At the first note of measure 64, I return the top voice to the primary keyboard, rejoining the left hand. In some performances, depending largely on the instrument and my whim of the moment, I move one, or both, hands to the second keyboard for most of the last two measures, and I am equally free, according to my mood at the time, about the possible addition of a third to the final chord (either a C-natural, or even a C-sharp, thus accomplishing a “backward to the baroque” cadence by including a Picardy third).
So the work is by Chopin, unique to his catalog, and ultimately worth playing; but “why assign it to the harpsichord?”
For many years, I have hoped to discover some specific reference to Chopin’s playing of a harpsichord or spinet, and I continue to think it likely, in such an economically challenged territory as Poland was, that the older, pre-piano keyboard instruments may have remained in use during the first part of the nineteenth century. Fryderyk’s first keyboard teacher, Adalberg Zwyny, was an elderly transplanted native of Czechoslovakia. A friend of the family, he passed on to his young pupil his own two abiding passions: a love for the music of Mozart and J. S. Bach. In my mind’s eye, I see the sixty-year-old Zwyny seated at a harpsichord, just as Mendelssohn’s mentor Karl Friedrich Zelter was similarly placed in Eduard Devrient’s description of the events leading up to the first 19th-century performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. But of course, this is only conjecture.
However, Chopin’s tonal ideals are more substantially documented, particularly in the memoirs of Alfred J. Hipkins, who, as an employee of the Broadwood piano firm, tuned their keyboard instruments used in Chopin’s London concerts during the two trips the composer made to England during the last years of his life. Hipkins reminisced:

He was frequently at Broadwoods: of middle height, with a pleasant face, a mass of fair curly hair like an angel, and agreeable manners. But he was something of a dandy, very particular about the cut and colour of his clothes.
He was painstaking in the choice of the pianos he was to play upon anywhere, as he was in his dress, his hair, his gloves, his French; you cannot imagine a more perfect technique than he possessed! But he abhorred banging a piano; his forte was relative, not absolute; it was based upon his exquisite pianos and pianissimos—always a waving line, crescendo and diminuendo. . .
. . . He especially liked Broadwood’s Boudoir cottage pianos . . . two-stringed, but very sweet instruments, and he found pleasure in playing on them. He played Bach’s ‘48’ all his life long. “I don’t practice my own compositions,” he said to Von Lentz.5 “When I am about to give a concert, I close my doors for a time and play Bach.”6
Regarding keyboard instruments, then, it seems that Chopin preferred quiet, gentler sounds. Thus, he chose to play smaller, upright-style pianos rather than larger, grand instruments. He was, as well, a devotée of music from the previous century, including then little-known sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, as he wrote in letters to his Polish friend Delfina Potocka:7

My colleagues, the piano teachers, are dissatisfied that I am teaching Scarlatti to my pupils. But I am surprised that they are so blind. In his music there are exercises in plenty for the fingers and a good deal of lofty spiritual food. He sometimes reaches even Mozart. If I were not afraid of incurring disfavor of many fools, I would play Scarlatti in my concerts. I maintain that there will come a time when Scarlatti will often be played in concerts, and people will appreciate and enjoy him.
Bach will never grow old. . . . When I am playing somebody, I often think that I would make this note or that different. But that never happens when I am playing Bach. In his work everything is so ideally made that one cannot imagine it otherwise; the smallest alteration would spoil everything. Here, as in geometrical figures, the slightest change is impossible.
Genius has a big nose and a splendid sense of smell which enable him to catch the direction of the wind of the future. Don’t think that I am imagining that I am a genius, possessing as I do an enormous nose; you understand that I mean quite a different kind of nose.8
Biographies of Chopin refer to his 1825 performances on two experimental instruments (the aeolomelodicon—a hybrid between piano and organ, and a slightly later improved version, the aeolopantaleon), and point out that he served as a church organist regularly during his developmental years.9
Further evidence of mature engagement with the organ is documented by written accounts from the composer’s lover, the novelist George Sand, and in contemporary newspaper reports of Chopin’s playing the organ of Notre-Dame-du-Mont in Marseilles for the well-attended funeral of his close friend, the tenor Adolphe Nourrit in 1839. At the Elevation, Chopin played the simple strophic song by Franz Schubert, Die Gestirne, a personal favorite of the singer. That Chopin’s performance was not a virtuoso extravaganza is borne out by George Sand’s comment: “The congregation, which had come en masse exercising its curiosity to the extent of paying fifty centimes per seat . . . was disappointed, because they had expected Chopin to make a row that would bring the roof down, and at least break two or three organ-pipes.”10 And she was right there beside him in the organ gallery!
Ultimately, I cannot prove that Chopin ever played the harpsichord, but if Liszt could transcribe the Fourth and Ninth of the Opus 28 Preludes for organ, or Wanda Landowska include a harpsichord rendition of the C Major Mazurka Opus 56/2 in her RCA Victor disc Landowska Plays for Paderewski, perhaps my assimilation of the Fugue in A Minor may be permitted, and, dare one hope, both be emulated and forgiven? Or possibly one might consider this one further offering among many offbeat tributes to Poland’s favorite musical son in his bicentenary year. After all, why should the piano have all the good tunes?

Larry Palmer is harpsichord editor of THE DIAPASON.

A Love Letter to Ille: Peter
Watchorn’s Ahlgrimm Biography
Isolde Ahlgrimm (1914–1995), known as “Ille” to her close friends, was physically diminutive and personally self-effacing. She was also a woman of strong musical convictions, a prime mover in the 20th-century revival of the harpsichord and fortepiano, and one of the outstanding teachers ever to be encountered. Now, after a lengthy gestation period, her life story is available at last in Peter Watchorn’s book Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna and the Early Music Revival (Ashgate Publishing Limited: ISBN 978-0-7546-5787-3). The wait has been worth it! Dr. Watchorn has written a lucid, loving, and memorable prose picture of this pioneering Viennese figure, placing her, correctly, in the forefront of the early music revival, and documenting her contributions as one of the period’s leading keyboard artists.
Firmly based on interviews with the great harpsichordist, this is fascinating biography, moving from the Ahlgrimm family’s close connection to Johannes Brahms and Isolde’s formative study with Austrian composer Franz Schmidt and esteemed pianist and pedagogue Emil von Sauer, to the establishment of an extensive series of house concerts (Konzerte für Kenner und Liebhaber) with her husband, the instrument collector Erich Fiala, and the ultimate breakup of their marriage. Particularly moving is the picture of those harrowing years of Nazi hegemony in Vienna, including Ille’s account of her husband’s incarceration. Career highlights include Ahlgrimm’s monumental series of recordings for Philips, comprising nearly the complete harpsichord works of J. S. Bach, and the story, in her own words, of the association and friendship with Richard Strauss and the genesis of a unique page for harpsichord solo, created “for her exclusive concert use” by the master composer.
Additionally, this 264-page book contains Ahlgrimm’s complete discography; her own chronology of the concert series (in German, with English translation following); a list of her publications (as well as a complete text of the valedictory lecture “Current Trends in Performance of Baroque Music” [first published in Howard Schott’s English translation in The Diapason], re-transcribed by Mahan Esfahani, with musical examples uniformly set by Geoffrey Burgess); and Kim Kasling’s 1977 Diapason article “Harpsichord Lessons for the Beginner—à la Isolde Ahlgrimm.”
With more than thirty photographs from Ahlgrimm’s personal collection, a graceful foreword by Penelope Crawford and short preface from longtime friend Virginia Pleasants, this is a beautiful and indispensable volume, well worth its substantial price ($99.95; online orders from <www.ashgate.com&gt; may receive a discount). Even the book’s type-face (BACH Musicological Font by Yo Tomita) would almost certainly have delighted Ille, who during my student days, often referred to herself as “the Widow Bach” because she spent so much of her time practicing and playing JSB’s music.

Richard Strauss: Suite aus Capriccio for Harpsichord (with concert ending) in the arrangement by Isolde Ahlgrimm, edited by Rudolf Scholz. Schott RSV 9049 [ISMN M-50118-000-4] ($22.95).
Isolde Ahlgrimm received numerous requests from harpsichordists who wished to play this near-legendary single Strauss solo work for their instrument. She was consistently adamant in her refusals: after all, the composer had inscribed the two-page autograph of the work’s concert ending with these words “Für Isolde Ahlgrimm-Fiala/ als Eigentum und zum alleinigen Konzertgebrauch/ überlassen. [For Isolde Ahlgrimm-Fiala, given as her own property, with exclusive right of use in concert.] /s/ Dr. Richard Strauss.”
I was one of those who requested such permission in 1986, after she had retired from playing. Through the years she had made it evident that she was not being stingy with the work itself: she sent me a Xerox of the autograph ending, a complete facsimile of the original three-movement dance suite from the opera (as scored for violin, cello and harpsichord), with her fragmentary penciled “arrangement” notated below. She had, additionally, provided a taped copy of her unreleased recording of the work (made for Philips). But, just at the point at which we were discussing legal matters, Ille was overwhelmed by a trio of permission requests from Frau Alice Strauss, Hedwig Bilgram, and Professor Kohler of the Richard Strauss Institute in Munich. Better than upsetting all these important people, wrote Ahlgrimm, is that both arrangement and her ending “sleep the long sleep of libraries.” And that was that.
As an opera devoté and particular admirer of Strauss’s music, I determined that the best solution to this impasse would be to make my own arrangement based on the piano-vocal score of the opera, with a hint of the Strauss concert ending: the first four measures (readily available in the Müller von Asow thematic catalog), a brief bridge passage, and a “reminiscence” of Strauss’s final four measures (which I had in the Xerox from Ahlgrimm). These measures, as written by the composer, are not completely playable anyway, since they transcend (in two places) the top note found on ANY harpsichord. (Earlier, in measures 19–20 the composer had asked for high G#, A, and B in the right hand, while notating a sforzando/crescendo for the left!)
My solution has worked well for me, and I strongly recommend it to others. Now, with the publication of Ahlgrimm’s arrangement (insofar as it could be deciphered) a dedicated player is able to compare individual solutions with those chosen by the Viennese harpsichordist. As for frequently changing registrations, Ahlgrimm felt that it would be of little use to share her choices since they were for a German mass-produced harpsichord with pedals—an instrument, she pointed out, increasingly difficult to find.
Reading through the newly published score, I am struck with the strong feeling that Ille, coming directly from the opera’s Vienna premiere performances, attempted a too-literal transcription of Strauss’s many notes, thereby making the work both technically demanding and frequently unidiomatic for a plucked keyboard instrument. In her arrangement, many of the cello lines are placed an octave higher than written, creating close duets with the violin part, but leaving an empty stratum below, passages frankly better placed in the piano-vocal score. As for the composer’s ending, I long ago came to agree with Ille’s idea that “it should live the long sleep of libraries.” These pages do not add to the composer’s stature, but serve as reaffirmation for his love of instrumental color (he used harpsichord several times in orchestral and operatic scores). The concert ending shows that he regarded the instrument as a plucked piano—one that definitely suffers from the lack of a damper pedal.
Editor Scholz’s task, not an easy one, has been accomplished carefully. For every case in which I thought a note was wrong, comparison with sources proved his reading correct. (However, in the second dance, the Gigue, I still think the final soprano A in measure 20 sounds better as a G, even though all scores agree on the A). Perhaps the most interesting observation in Scholz’s “Notes” concerns the ending (labeled Cadenza): Scholz writes that in bar four Ahlgrimm corrected Strauss’s bass line [a-c#-e, b-d-f#] with a penciled notation [a-b-d, c#-d-e]—and that she used this version for her recording.
Isolde Ahlgrimm loved this piece, though she was unhappy about its difficulties (especially prior to concerts in which she played it!). I first heard it as she prepared for a performance at Vienna’s Auersperg Palace in August 1964. Several subsequent hearings occurred during her visits to the United States, including several in Dallas; concert performances occurring after 1965 did not make the list printed in Scholz’s commentary.
For now, lovers of Strauss’s music and admirers of Ahlgrimm’s artistry may appreciate having this printed memento, but certainly will continue to hope that the recording of her “own private Strauss” may eventually be made available.

Comments or news items for these pages are always welcome. Please address them to Dr. Larry Palmer, Division of Music, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275; <[email protected]>.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Memory
This month I will write about memorization. More precisely, I will introduce a discussion of memorization with two other related performance issues: sight-reading and looking (or not looking) at the keys. These three matters, considered together, provide an interesting and important take on what it means to have learned a piece of music and then to perform that piece. Most of this discussion will take place next month, however, since I want to borrow much of this month’s column for another purpose. This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the great keyboard performers, scholars, and teachers of the twentieth century—harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick. I want to begin with a tribute to him in honor of that occasion.

Ralph Kirkpatrick
Ralph Kirkpatrick was born on June 10, 1911, in North Leominster, Massachusetts, an area where, in the years when he was growing up, it was possible to hear a lot of good music in concert—after all, this was still an era when people heard most music live rather than through recordings. In his memoir Early Years—about which I will say more below—Kirkpatrick mentions having heard, among others, the singer Amelita Galli-Curci, pianists Sergei Rachmaninoff and Harold Bauer, violinist Jacques Thibauld, and the Flonzaley Quartet. He also notes that the quality and variety of music played by less-renowned performers and by local performing ensembles, especially choral societies, was extraordinary.
During this time he avidly studied piano, and was interested in the widest possible variety of music, acquiring scores of then very new works by, for example, Debussy and Ravel. Kirkpatrick arrived at Harvard University as a freshman in 1927 completely absorbed by music. It was there that, by utter chance, he discovered the harpsichord: a Dolmetsch/Chickering instrument that had recently been donated to the university. The first harpsichord sounds that Ralph Kirkpatrick ever heard were those of jazz played by a music faculty member who happened to have sat down at that instrument when Kirkpatrick was in the room. He was intrigued enough to seek out the opportunity to play the instrument, and that set the course of his career.

Concert performer
Ralph Kirkpatrick’s career comprised concert performance, recording, scholarship, and teaching. The latter two came together in his writings. As a concert performer Kirkpatrick was a pioneer: not the first ever to play on the harpsichord, but one of the first, and easily the most widely noticed after Landowska. He gave his first harpsichord recital at a meeting of the Harvard Music Club in May 1930. Already by the late 1930s, in his twenties, he was giving well-heralded concerts in what was then called Carnegie Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall). He was a strong presence on the concert stage through the 1960s, performing in specialized “early music” venues such as Williamsburg, mainstream venues (he was the first harpsichordist to play at Alice Tully Hall, for example), and on festival stages and concert stages throughout the world.
Although most of Kirkpatrick’s concert performance was as a harpsichord soloist, he also performed as a soloist on both clavichord and fortepiano, and, especially in his early years, as a chamber musician. He also was a frequent performer of the Bach harpsichord concerti. In about 1974, health problems forced Kirkpatrick to withdraw for a while from the concert stage. By the time his general health had stabilized to the point where he was able to consider resuming concert activity, he had completely lost his sight. At this point he decided that, rather than give up performing, he would take a new approach to playing: one that relied on his very strong memory and large, well-learned repertoire, but that also required him to play utterly unassisted by even any peripheral glimpses of the keyboards.
I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at his return concert on September 25, 1977 at Sprague Hall on the campus of Yale University. It was a vivid and exciting performance, and his decision to return to the concert stage at this juncture in his life struck me at the time (and still does today) as an act of great courage and dedication. This concert ushered in a final flowering of his work as a performer that lasted about four years and culminated in a recital at the first Boston Early Music Festival.

Recordings
Kirkpatrick’s recording career also began early in his life. In 1937 he recorded music of Bach—the Italian Concerto, the Ricercar a 3 voci from the Musical Offering, and the G-major Partita—for the now long-defunct Musicraft label (for which, by the way, the organist Carl Weinrich also recorded Bach, although it was primarily a jazz label). In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the most prolific recording artists, most famously recording Scarlatti for Columbia and Bach for Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft and DGG’s Archiv Production. The culmination of this latter series of recordings was a double trip through both books of the Well-tempered Clavier—first on harpsichord, then on clavichord. Many critics and listeners consider the clavichord half of this tour de force to be Kirkpatrick’s finest recording. He also recorded Mozart solo piano music on a restored 18th-century piano, Mozart concerti with several different ensembles, Haydn songs with mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, sonatas of Handel and Mozart with violinist Alexander Schneider, a certain amount of twentieth-century music, and various other things. Unfortunately, very few of Ralph Kirkpatrick’s recordings are in print as of this writing. Of course, this is always subject to change.

Scholarship
The most renowned aspect of Kirkpatrick’s scholarship was his work on Domenico Scarlatti. When he published his biography of Scarlatti in 1953, it was received as a work of great importance. The book concerns itself not only with Scarlatti’s life but also with his music, with the culture in which his music was created, and indeed with aspects of the overall history of that time and place. It served as a model for serious, accurate scholarship about matters bearing on music and musical performance. Indeed, Kirkpatrick, in the preface to the book, suggests that part of his own interest in taking on what became a long and difficult project was that he “had become painfully aware of the inadequacy of the available texts and the absence of information fundamentally necessary to me as a performer of his works.”
Nowadays we take it for granted that a performer needs information. This was not an idea that Kirkpatrick invented from scratch, by any means, but the thoroughness and common sense with which he carried out the Scarlatti project helped to advance the notion that artistic interpretive work can be enhanced greatly by historical knowledge. It did not hurt that the book was very well written: engaging and clear, a pleasure to read.
Other writings of Kirkpatrick’s include the well-known preface to his edition of Sixty Sonatas by Scarlatti—written in a question and answer format and giving a lot of food for thought about interpretation and performance—and articles and reviews touching upon subjects such as clavichord playing, Bach’s dynamics, Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le claveçin, and many others. Two books of his—the memoir Early Years and Interpreting Bach’s Well-tempered clavier: A performer’s discourse of method—were published shortly after his death. The first of these is my favorite of his writings. It covers some of his family history, his childhood and early musical education, his time at Harvard, and his year in Europe immediately following his graduation from college. Written with great craftsmanship, it is also heartfelt, informal, and engaging. Much of it deals directly with music, but not all of it—Kirkpatrick talks about his relationships with his parents, and other family, for example, with candor and insight. Almost every line provides something to think about. The second half of the book consists of the journal that Kirkpatrick kept of his trip to Europe in 1931–32, during which he studied with Wanda Landowska, among others.

Teaching
Ralph Kirkpatrick first taught as an undergraduate, when he gave some piano lessons to other students to help support himself. Later he taught briefly at Bennington College, and then, in 1940, joined the faculty of Yale University, from which he retired in 1976. Among his students at Yale were harpsichordists Albert Fuller, Fernando Valenti, Frederick Hammond, William Christie, Martin Pearlman, Mark Kroll, Louis Bagger, Howard Schott, Blandine Verlet, Seymour Hayden, and Richard Rephann, among many others, Duke University organist Robert Parkins, and musicians whose careers have been in fields other than keyboard playing, such as oboist Allan Vogel and guitarist Eliot Fisk.
Ralph Kirkpatrick was an exciting and path-breaking performer and one of the seminal influences on the early music movement and on the history of keyboard playing in the twentieth century. He died on April 13, 1984. It is an honor to remember him on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Memorization and sight-reading
Memorization, sight-reading, and looking or not looking at the hands and feet are three aspects of playing that are inextricably intertwined with one another. Some facets of these relationships are as follows:
1) If a piece is really, fully memorized, then the performer—rather obviously—does not need to read any music in performance.
2) If a player is a perfect sight-reader who can play pieces at first sight with the kind of accuracy and security that I and other mere mortals have to practice hard to achieve, then that player—at least for purely practical purposes—does not need to remember even the next note, let alone the whole piece.
3) Memorization and sight-reading, even though they are in a sense opposites, are both often considered essential hallmarks of good musicianship; for some people they even define good musicianship. They both often play a part in auditions for academic programs.
4) Good sight-reading can be a practical necessity, especially in circumstances involving accompaniment; memorization is rarely of practical import.
5) Neither memorization nor sight-reading necessarily has anything to do with musical understanding or artistically convincing performance. That is not to say that either of them cannot be a part of artistically great performance, or part of the process of preparing for such a performance.
6) If a piece is really well memorized, then the eyes are, by definition, not needed to look at music, and can perhaps afford to look at the hands and feet. If a player, however, has real command of the instrument and does not need to look in order to find notes, then this looking serves more to give the eyes something to do and to keep them from inviting distraction than to assist directly in the playing.
7) If a piece is being sight-read, then it is very important that the player not look at the keyboards or the hands and feet. A player who needs to look at the hands or the feet probably cannot become even a moderately good sight-reader.
8) Everyone has some point on the spectrum of easiness and difficulty below which he or she can sight-read, and above which he or she cannot. The placement of this point determines some things about the practical side of music learning for each player, but does not determine anything about technical, musical, or artistic outcome.
9) One traditional description of the process of learning a piece of music might be that it starts with sight-reading and ends with memorization. (One way of framing a consideration of sight-reading and memorization would be to discuss how each of them relates to the parts of the learning process that fall in between these two end points. That would naturally move into a discussion of whether either or both of the end points were really necessary or useful.)
Next month I will explore some of the nuances and implications of these points—which are presented here in a somewhat oversimplified way as a starting place for discussion—and various others. I will also discuss my own relationship with memorization and with sight-reading, both as a player and as a teacher.