Harpsichord News

Books about the phenomenon known as the 20th-century harpsichord revival continue to appear. Among recent publications, none is so engrossing as Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse, written by her great-niece Jessica Douglas-Home (The Harvil Press, 84 Thornhill Road, London N1 1RD; £20). The geneological connection is especially important in this instance, for the author has had full access to unpublished letters and family diaries, enabling her to give full exposure both to the public persona and the unconventional private life of the English harpsichordist and clavichord player.

Mrs. Gordon Gordon Woodhouse (Violet and her husband officially changed their name to become an unhyphenated double one) was placed by author Osbert Sitwell in that company of "human genius who form so rare a race." Critic and composer Kaikhosru Sorabji wrote that Violet's technique and musicianship "are not surpassed by any English-speaking musician whose medium of expression is a keyboard instrument." Various editions of Grove's Dictionary assign her the honor of being the first to record the harpsichord (in July 1920) and the first to play a radio broadcast on the instrument (March 1924).

Drawn to the harpsichord through the influence of Arnold Dolmetsch, she attracted to her musical salon such figures as the artists Picasso and Rodin; the impressario Diaghilev; authors Law-rence of Arabia, Wilfred Owen, Ezra Pound, Bernard Shaw, and the three Sitwells--Osbert, Sacheverall, and Edith; and eminent composers Bartok, Delius (who, in 1919, composed his Dance for her), Vaughan Williams, and Ethel Smyth (one of Violet's passionate admirers).

Passion constituted a large part of Violet's intriguing story!  Although she married Gordon Woodhouse, they agreed that the marriage would remain unconsummated, and Violet's friend Adelina Ganz even accompanied the bridal pair on their honeymoon. Four years into the marriage, Violet's lover Bill Barrington joined the household. Subsequently the ménage à trois became a ménage à cinq when Denis Tollemache and Maxwell Labouchère, in love with Violet, also took up lodgings chez Woodhouse.

In addition to this tangled web of male companionship there was a continuing saga of Violet's female friends Christabel Marshal, Radclyffe Hall (who dedicated a book of Lesbian erotic poetry to Violet), Ethel Smyth, and of Dame Ethel's friends Virginia Woolf and the Princesse de Polignac. Scandal was never far-distant from the Gordon Woodhouses, but the most titilating event of all was the murder of Gordon's two maiden aunts by their longime butler, an event that saved the Woodhouse family fortune for Gordon and allowed him to maintain Violet in the extravagent life to which she had become accustomed.

It was this pampered existence which kept her, for much of her life, away from a professional career and the recording studios. Aristocratic women of means did not play concerts for money! But when she did give concerts, Mrs. Woodhouse appeared not only as a soloist, but also with such leading musicians as Sarasate, Casals, and Lionel Tertis. Receiving glowing reviews which were the envy of many other players, she was the only possible rival to the great Landowska, and to many listeners Woodhouse was the finest harpsichordist of her generation. Jessica Douglas-Home's book presents a fascinating picture of English aristocratic and musical life from late in the Victorian era through the second World War. Well-written and beautifully produced, the book features line drawings at the beginning of each chapter, a bound-in purple bookmark-ribbon, and a generous portfolio of photographs. The author claims April 23, 1871 as Violet's birthdate (not 1872, as in Grove's), and she repeats the claim that Mrs. Woodhouse was the first artist to make harpsichord records.

But she probably wasn't. In Claude Mercier-Ythier's coffee-table extravaganza Les Clavecins (Expodif Éditions, Paris) he cites a 1914 cylinder recording on which French organist and harpsichordist Paul Brunold (1875-1948) played pieces by Couperin and Rameau on the 1732 Antoine Vater harpsichord--obviously an earlier entry for the "first to record" sweepstakes.  Mercier-Ythier's 1996 book (which I found remaindered in an Alsacian flea-market sale) carries a hefty price (750 French francs, or about $150), but it is a volume filled with elegant color plates and photographs of harpsichords and harpsichordists, historic and modern. The French text includes chapters on harpsichord history, the various national schools of harpsichord making, the harpsichord revival and modern instruments, decoration, and the recent trend toward more-or-less exact copies of historic instruments.

While coverage of French matters seems to be reasonably gounded in fact, other 20th-century items are treated with a somewhat cavalier attitude toward accuracy. In just five pages (121-126) I caught the following errors:  Landowska was born in 1879 (not 1877); her housekeeper Elsa Schunicke's name gained an extra syllable (and she was promoted to secretary); Dolmetsch did not work at Chickering's in Boston "from 1902 until 1909" (he was employed there from 1905 until 1911); Hubbard and Dowd started their harpsichord-making together in 1949 (not 1965), and Mercier-Ythier does not seem very certain about which one wrote the book Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making. Falla's puppet opera for the Princesse de Polignac (El Retablo de Maese Pedro) dates from 1923, not 1919; Poulenc composed his Concert Champêtre in 1927-28, not 1929; but why worry, it's only "modern stuff," right? Buy this one for the pictures and refer to my Harpsichord in America: A 20th-Century Revival for details!

I've not yet run across Brunold's "first" harpsichord recording, but for many years I have been a devotee of Violet Gordon Woodhouse's artistry, having searched out her too-few 78-rpm recordings. Now the complete recorded legacy is available on one compact disc: Violet Gordon Woodhouse (Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, Volume Three: Pearl GEMM CD 9242). To complete the picture of Mrs. Woodhouse gained from reading the new biography, listen to her supple playing of just about everything on this generous disc, but especially to her remarkable performance of Bach's "Italian" Concerto, made in 1927 (Woodhouse's first electric recordings). Here is music-making that confirms the high opinions of her contemporaries!

The other volumes of this series are also recommended.  Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, Volume One: Pearl GEMM CD 9124) contains 75 minutes of playing by Marguerite Delcour (1924), Anna Linde, Simone Plé; Landowska-students Alice Ehlers and Eta Harich-Schneider (disarmingly called "Harry-Schneider" in Mercier's book); Marguerite Roesgen-Champion, Julia Menz, Yella Pessl, Régina Patorni-Casadesus; and the best keyboard player from the Dolmetsch clan, son Rudolph, recorded between 1929 and 1933.

Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, Volume Two, features the first recordings by Ralph Kirkpatrick, made for Musicraft between 1926 and 1929.  Bach (Partita 5, Italian Concerto, Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue), Purcell, the Virginalists, Couperin, Rameau, and two Scarlatti Sonatas are all performed on the artist's 1909 Dolmetsch harpsichord, an instrument which had originally belonged to the composer Busoni. The record producer, Teri Noel Towe, comments, "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.  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."

Another recent release is A Recital of 20th-Century Harpsichord Music (Music and Arts CD-977), Kirkpatrick's unique recital at the University of California, Berkeley, given on 26 January 1961.  This unedited concert program features coughing, applause, and the world premiere performance of Henry Cowell's Set of Four, with its typical tone clusters and the specific octave trills for the left hand, so proudly pointed out later by Mr. Kirkpatrick in his introduction to the printed score.  I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this disc, but, unfortunately, I find the performances particularly lacking in suppleness and charm, especially in the decidely "non-grazioso" fast bangup of Delius' Dance, and the startling number of misreadings and wrong rhythms in the first movement of Persichetti's [First] Sonata for Harpsichord (at that time the only one there was). Kirkpatrick played only this one movement at his recital, and his reading sent me searching for my copy of the composer's manuscript to see if it really differed so markedly from the later printed version.  It didn't!

Other works chosen for this program included Lou Harrison's Six Sonatas, Ernst Lévy's Fantasie Symphonique, and works by Peter Mieg, Halsey Stevens, Douglas Allanbrook, and David Kraehenbuehl, whose Toccate per Cembalo, together with Mel Powell's exciting Recitative and Toccata Percossa, are the best-played selections.

What possessed the producers to include Igor Kipnis' fine review of Frances Bedford's Harpsichord and Clavichord Music of the 20th Century as a major part of the accompanying booklet defies logic!  There is no information about the music on the disc, but rather a general background of 20th-century composition for harpsichord and some very Kipnis-specific examples of how Bedford's catalog is useful.  With a full program of music unfamiliar to most players and (probably) all listeners, it surely would have been helpful to provide information about the specific composers and works found on this particular compact disc. All-in-all this release has historic and archival value, but it will not do much to garner general appreciation for 20th-century harpsichord music.

Fortunately that is not the case with Into the Millennium (Gasparo GSCD-331), a brilliant offering of attractive modern works, beautifully played by harpsichordist Elaine Funaro.  It was good to hear again the riveting Raga by Penka Kouneva, Dan Locklair's The Breakers Pound (especially its idiomatic and moving Prelude), and Tom Robin Harris' Jubilate Deo, a Ligeti-inspired two-and-one-half minute minimalist romp which truly is "joyful in the Lord."  (For those who follow the score of this work, Funaro chose not to play the composer's published new ending to this piece, preferring the original one!)  Other pieces on this appealing program from the Aliénor Harpsichord Composition Competitions include Edwin McLean's Sonata [I], Nicole Clément's Covalences Multiples, Stephen Yates' Suite, and two non-Aliénor works by Isaac Nagao and Peter B. Klausmeyer.  Two harpsichords (by William Dowd and Joop Klinkhamer) were lovingly recorded in a resonant acoustic (Duke University Chapel). Exemplary notes and a striking cover photo of  a flower-decorated Reinhard von Nagel harpsichord. Brava!

And the video? Landowska, a Documentary by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Diane Pontius (AGP Productions, 16 Levering Circle, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004; 610/664-7316). The great Wanda's life is detailed in a montage of period photographs, films of 20th-century historical events, and interviews with those who knew her well (companion--secretary--student Denise Restout, Polish baritone Doda Conrad, record producer John Pfeiffer), those who heard her play (author William F. Buckley, Jr., French harpsichordist Magdeline Mangin), authors who have written about her (Alice Cash, Larry Palmer), and several other leading figures from the contemporary harpsichord scene (the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Laurence Libin, harpsichord-maker Willard Martin, and star performer Skip Sempé).

Especially vivid are the Restout sequences filmed at the home she shared with the harpsichordist, now the Landowska Center in Lakeville, CT; and the unique anecdotes from Conrad, who first met Landowska in 1912, and Pfeiffer, who recorded her final discs for RCA Victor.  Both of these men have since died.  Conrad's description of Landowska and Restout taking up lodging in a New York hotel best known as a brothel and his reference to Landowska's husband Henri Lew's propensity for visiting such institutions gives a certain added piquancy to the biography.

But, as always, it is Landowska herself who is the star of this feature!  Liberal segments from her only filmed appearance (for NBC Television's Wisdom Series, 1953) document for a new group of listeners and viewers the virtuosity of her music-making, as well as her public persona, a savvy mix of humility and self-awareness.  Responding to Jack Pfeiffer's questions, she recounts highlights of her early career (such as her memorable visit  to Tolstoy to play for him outside Moscow during a Russian winter), her delight in the natural beauty of her Connecticut home and its surroundings, and her love for the music of the past, her love of performing, and her love for her audience.

For all Landowska afficionados, this film is a reminder of her continuing place in our cultural history and in our hearts.  For those who have not yet had the opportunity to experience Landowska's artistry, it should be required viewing. Her role in the 20th-century revival of the harpsichord and early music is so central that every one of her successors owes a debt of gratitude to this pioneering figure.  Besides, her dramatic life-story, played out amidst the upheavals of 20th-century history, is more engrossing than fiction could ever be!

Larry Palmer’s first article for The Diapason in November 1962 was “Hugo Distler: 20 Years Later.” Appointed Harpsichord Editor in 1969, he continues to write, record, play, and teach: since 1970 as Professor of Harpsichord and Organ in the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Entartete—“degenerate”—was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to characterize art works deemed to be “un-German” or “impure.” The word itself originated as a biological term to describe a plant or animal that has changed so much that it no longer belongs to its species.
In 1937 a large exhibition of entartete paintings and graphic arts was mounted in Munich, birthplace of the National Socialist movement. Works by Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and many others were displayed to show the degradation of modern art by artists unacceptable to the regime: Nazi-denounced “Jews, Bolsheviks, persons of color, and perverts.”
As contrast, directly across the plaza, there was another exhibition, many of its pieces chosen by Adolph Hitler himself. This show demonstrated “true German art”—realistic representations of heroic blond Aryan figures by the Führer’s favorite sculptor Arno Breker, and his “court painter” Adolf Ziegler.
That music, too, could be degenerate was a concept put forward as justification for denying performances of works by such contemporary masters as Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill. For the most part, the creators of these works were forced to flee Hitler’s oppressive totalitarian regime or face incarceration in concentration camps. To find a score by Distler among those deemed modernist and unfit for German ears seems unimaginable to present-day auditors, but such a travesty did occur.
During October of that same year, 1937, a week-long Festival of German Church Music took place in Berlin. Among a plethora of new music, several of Hugo Distler’s compositions were heard. In addition to the choral and organ music that had secured his reputation as one of the most talented composers of his generation, Distler’s secular magnum opus, the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, opus 14, was given a prominent place in a Sunday concert at the Philharmonic Concert Hall, with the composer’s Lübeck colleague, Marien-organist Walter Kraft, as soloist. The conductor was none other than Dr. Peter Raabe, president of the Nazi music regulatory board (the Reichsmusikkammer), so one might have expected that the official press would use only superlatives to praise the concert.
Not so! Here is an excerpt from one of the more scathing reviews:

. . . there was the general aggravation of Hugo Distler’s Concerto for Harpsichord, an “in-your-face” example of degenerate art. The delicate domestic harpsichord was utilized in an unnatural way—like a piano. At the Finale the young composer seemed to be driven by the devil! This motoric noisy music chattered endlessly on . . . Listeners could only laugh. Perhaps it would have been better had they whistled and pondered the biblical quotation: He mocked only himself . . .1

An earlier description of the Concerto’s 1936 premiere in Hamburg, read:

Stuttering rhythms, fractured mood and brutal background sounds fulfill the intellectual aspect of the formal side . . . only to a very limited extent. It appears to be difficult for some people to break loose from the idolatry of an outgrown, stereotypical [Kurt] Weill era. Distler must—in our opinion—change a great deal at the human level in order to properly exploit his considerable abilities.2

Distler’s music degenerate, brutal, diabolic? Possibly, perhaps, to ears deafened by militaristic brass bands or the loud general cacophony of the government propaganda, but otherwise, unlikely.
How did church composer Hugo Distler come to write a major composition for harpsichord, a far from ubiquitous keyboard instrument in the 1930s? As Wanda Landowska remarked (about J. S. Bach), to understand the greatness of a master composer, one needs to place it in the context of music by his contemporaries.
Urged by Leipzig professor Hermann Grabner to base his composition studies on music of the past, specifically that of the Baroque, and influenced further by his organ teacher, Günther Ramin, one of Germany’s pioneering harpsichordists during the 1920s,3 Distler was evidently drawn to the instrument. In addition to Ramin’s public performances, there was new music for harpsichord being created during Distler’s student days. In 1927 Carl Orff (who was to become a household name ten years later with his wildly successful choral/orchestral work Carmina Burana) composed a Kleines Konzert nach Lautensätzen for winds, harpsichord, and percussion. Based on lute pieces by Vincentio (Vincenzo) Galilei and Jean-Baptiste Besard, the work is a 13-minute precursor to a similar work by Francis Poulenc, the Suite Française (1935), also based on Renaissance dance music (by Claude Gervaise), and scored for the same instrumental forces.
Forced by economic necessity to leave the conservatory course before completing his degree, Distler auditioned for and won the position of organist at the Jakobikirche in the north German city of Lübeck, a position he assumed on January 1, 1931. There he began a brilliant career as composer of choral and organ music, with the smaller of the church’s two baroque instruments as his special muse and guide.4 Somehow, despite a meager salary, Distler managed to acquire a two-manual Neupert concert harpsichord in November of that same year5 and used it on November 29 for the first performance of his Kleine Adventsmusik, opus 4.6 Through the succeeding years of his tenure at St. Jakobi, Distler frequently employed his harpsichord for a series of vesper concerts, as well as for chamber music in other Lübeck venues.
Distler actually began writing an extended harpsichord concerto during the early 1930s, a fact that went unnoticed until I discovered fair-copy segments of it in a trunk of musical manuscripts recently found and sent from Lübeck, then stored beneath the guest bed at Frau Distler’s post-war home in Bavaria.7 The physical remnants of this work explained a seeming time discrepancy in his letter to Hermann Grabner (dated 17 April 1931): “Work on my harpsichord concerto, which would have soon been finished, was unfortunately interrupted by another task [a Luther Cantata for a Lübeck Reformation Festival] . . .”
In another communication dated 17 August, this one to Gerhard Schwarz, the young composer wrote, “I have also completed a Concerto for Harpsichord and Eleven Solo Instruments that I have given to Professor Ramin to look over; so far as I can tell, he would like to perform it this winter, perhaps even in Berlin. In addition, Frau Mann-Weiss wants to do it in Hamburg for the New Music series, also this winter.”8
However, it was more than additional commissions that prevented the first performance, expected in March of 1933. The presumptive dedicatee and soloist of the Chamber Concerto for Harpsichord and Eleven Solo Instruments, Günther Ramin, did not like the score as it was presented to him, and asked for extensive revisions. In a letter to his fiancée, Waltraut Thienhaus, Distler expressed anger at his former teacher’s request. The work, missing many pages by the time of its rediscovery in 1968, was not performed until 1998. Although it is now available in a performing edition by Michael Töpel, I find it a flawed and unpleasant work.9 Score one for Professor Ramin!
Further annoyance for the young composer may have been triggered by the fact that Ramin DID play a Chamber Concerto for Harpsichord and String Orchestra in the spring of 1933, but it was a work by Distler’s exact contemporary Kurt Hessenberg,10 later to be associated in Frankfurt with another Leipzig fellow student, the blind German organist Helmut Walcha. Although I have not seen a score of Hessenberg’s Concerto, if it holds as much musical charm as several of the Zehn Kleine Präludien für Klavier oder Clavichord, opus 35 (published by Schott in 1949), it may be a work worth searching for.
Hessenberg, too, endured the political idiocy of the 1930s. He recounted,

My Second String Quartet . . . has a special “history”: its premiere by the Lenzewski Quartet was on the program of a concert [sponsored by] the Reichsmusikkammer in Berlin [1937]. However, because I was still very much unknown, the piece was performed before a board from the aforementioned institution in my absence for approval, and provoked the displeasure of that body. So the piece, which in spite of its adherence to tonality reveals the influence of Hindemith, perhaps also of Bartòk, was dropped from the program. This decision was criticized at that time in a music journal, as a result of which more attention was directed toward me than probably would have been the case if a public performance had taken place. The Quartet was premiered soon after in Frankfurt by the Lenzewski Quartet, excellently, and with success, and not much later in an independent concert of this ensemble in Berlin as well.11

Hessenberg apparently had a more sanguine outlook than Distler (whom, he wrote, he had met only twice, despite the fact that both were students at the same time in the same city). Balanced and genial in character as in music, Hessenberg adapted well to pre- and post-war necessities, living until 1984.
Other harpsichord offerings from the Germany of the 1930s include Music for 2 Violins and Cembalo 1932 by Heinrich Kaminski (1886–1946), composed in post-Regerian thick texture by a favorite composer of Thomaskantor Karl Straube, and the appropriately spare 1934 Spinettmusik by Rudolf Wagner-Régeny (1903–1969), composer, pianist and clavichordist of Romanian origin, perhaps historically shunned because he was one of two approved surrogates who wrote pure “Aryan” alternative music to replace the banned Midsummer Night’s Dream music of Felix Mendelssohn (for performance at the 1935 Reichstagung of the Nazi Kulturgemeinde in Düsseldorf).12
Wagner-Régeny’s seven short pieces compare favorably with Distler’s Dreissig Spielstücke of 1938,13 and since Distler, too, joined the Nazi party on May 1, 1933, perhaps one need no longer cast neither aspersions nor stones at either composer for such ancient political miscalculations. At least in Distler’s case, it is evident that he became increasingly unsympathetic with the government authorities, and finally committed the ultimate act of civil disobedience by removing himself from earthly existence altogether.
Unquestionably the compositional high point encountered thus far among examples of Third Reich harpsichord music is Distler’s (Second) Harpsichord Concerto, with its vivacious Stravinskian first movement; hauntingly lovely, lyrical second movement featuring arching solo violin lines above percussive, insistent rhythmic figures from the harpsichord; and culminating with a rollicking third movement based on Samuel Scheidt’s four-part harmonization of the folk song Ei, du feiner Reiter. Distler’s variations on this sturdy German tune certainly display wit and good humor, especially in a solo harpsichord parody of the mechanistic technique-building keyboard exercises of Carl Czerny. Two further keyboard solo variations (six and twelve) show an idiomatic variety of texture. The note C held over by the second violin serves as a breathtaking common tone modulation for the A-flat major return of the theme, set as a phrase by phrase dialog between strings and harpsichord, concluding with a whimsical employment of ever-longer periods of silence, à la Haydn, from which the final expected answer by the harpsichord never occurs at all. This lengthy silence is ended when the exasperated strings plunge, pall-mall, into a repetition of the wildly motoric tenth variation to provide a vigorous finale. Quirky, or even sarcastic, yes, but scarcely degenerate!
At the first performance of this Concerto the work had an additional movement, Allegro spirituoso e scherzando, expanding by more than six minutes a work that already clocked in at more than half an hour! Several critics suggested pruning the composition by deleting this extra movement, and the composer took their advice. Subsequent performances utilized only the three movements described above, and the printed score presents this three-movement version. The additional movement works as a stand-alone piece with strings, the manner in which I played its modern premiere during the 1980 American Guild of Organists national convention in Minneapolis.14
That the composer found the harpsichord to his liking was shown in one further extended work, until recently known only as a reference citation, the Schauspielmusik zu Ritter Blaubart [Theatre Music for Knight Bluebeard]. Parts for this incidental music assembled for a cancelled Berlin production of Ludwig Tieck’s play were among manuscripts turned over to the Bärenreiter-Verlag by Waltraut Distler, a few years after the end of the war. Since there were other items both complete and more marketable to bring into print, the stage music was basically overlooked. Reassembled and organized by Michael Töpel, the score was published, at last, at the turn of the new millennium, and given a first performance in 2002. Now there is a recording (Musicaphon M 56860), issued early in 2008.
Distler recycled quite a lot of his Harpsichord Concerto for this incidental music, with very interesting additions of wind instruments to the original strings. Three short, newly composed vocal insertions have secco harpsichord accompaniments. One movement [War Music] is an orchestral version of two pieces from Distler’s Eleven Piano Pieces, opus 15 [Fanfare; With Drums and Pipes]. Most appealing is the sarabande-like Overture to the Second Act (arranged for harpsichord and strings from the second movement of String Quartet in A minor, opus 20/I), truly one of the loveliest of Distler’s instrumental works. (The recorded performance, however, has the harpsichord consistently anticipating the strings!) A welcome bonus of the recent disc is the digital remastering of the first recording of the opus 14 Concerto, made in 1964 by the superbly musical French harpsichordist Huguette Dreyfus and the Deutsche Bach Solistin, conducted by Martin Stephani.
Concerning his Concerto Distler wrote to a pupil: “It is an angry piece . . . If it is so ‘modern’, then it is not because I wanted to appear really ‘modern’ for once, but because I am such a dislocated puppet.”15 As his last sacred motets demonstrate, he was willing to disregard the government’s strictures against writing new church music. Published after the war as part of his cycle of Sacred Choral Music, opus 12, the two motets conceived as opening and closing choruses for a planned St. John Passion, never to be completed, showed the composer’s increased mastery of form and expanded use of chromatics. (The fugue subject of the last motet, Fürwahr er trug unsere Krankheit [Surely He hath borne our griefs], contains ten of the twelve pitches found in the chromatic scale.)
Five years after the Concerto performance so stigmatized by the Nazi press, the composer’s mounting dread of military conscription fueled his descent into depression, and led him to turn on the gas in the Berlin apartment where he ended his life on November 1, 1942. Ironically, only a few days later his name appeared on the Führerliste—a register of those individuals permanently exempted from the military draft, persons deemed to be more important at home than in the armed forces.
Hitler’s much-vaunted “thousand year Reich” survived Distler by only three years, falling 988 years short of its self-proclaimed longevity. But as we celebrate the composer’s centenary, his music continues increasingly to move and beautify our musical life. Political movements are transient; artistic worth endures.

Hugo Distler’s compositions
for (or with) harpsichord
Opus 4. Kleine Adventsmusik [A Little Advent Music], Breitkopf und Härtel 4967. First performed 28 November 1931, using harpsichord as the keyboard instrument. English edition (Concordia Publishing House).
Opus 6/I. Christ, der du bist der helle Tag [Christ Who Alone Art Light of Day], Bärenreiter 636. First performed 26 Februrary 1933, with harpsichord. English edition (Concordia).
Opus 9/I. An die Natur (1933). First performed 16 August 1933 at the Nationalsozialistischen Musikfest in Bad Pyrmont. Bärenreiter 683.
Opus 11/I. Choralkantate Wo Gott zuhaus nit gibt sein Gunst, harpsichord or organ. Composed 1933, published 1935. Bärenreiter 758.
Opus 14. Konzert für Cembalo und Streichorchester (1935–1936). First performed 29 April 1936, Hamburger Musikhalle, Hugo Distler, harpsichordist, Dr. Hans Hoffmann, conductor. Published October 1936; Bärenreiter 7393. An additional movement, deleted from the original published edition Allegro spirituoso e scherzando is now available as Bärenreiter 7393, edited by Michael Töpfel.
Opus 17. Geistliche Konzerte für eine hohe Singstimme [Three Sacred Concertos for High Voice and Keyboard: Organ, Harpsichord, or Piano]. Composed in 1937, published 1938. Bärenreiter 1231. English edition (Concordia).
Opus 18/I. Dreissig Spielstücke für die Kleinorgel oder andere Tasteninstrumente. 1938. Published June 1938. Bärenreiter 1288.
Opus 21/II. Kleine Sing- und Spielmusik: Variations on “Wo soll ich mich hinkehren?” (Piano or harpsichord). Composed 1941 (doubtful according to Lüdemann), published 1952. Bärenreiter 2046.

Without opus number
Kammerkonzert für Cembalo und elf Soloinstrumente (1932). Mss incomplete. First performed 28 November 1988, Martin Haselböck, harpsichordist and conductor. Published 1988. Bärenreiter 7687.
Ritter Blaubart (1940)—Theatre music for Ludwig Tieck’s play. Chamber orchestra includes harpsichord (prominently). First performed 29 September 2002. Bärenreiter 7711, published 2001.
Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her. Kleines Konzert and Choral. Neue Weihnachtsmusik für Klavier, Orgel, und andere Tasteninstrumente. Bärenreiter Collection (1935), edited by Reinhard Baum.

A basic bibliography
Books
Larry Palmer: Hugo Distler and his Church Music. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1967. (Out of print; often available through Amazon.com or Alibris.com).
The most comprehensive (and recent) book on Distler is available only in German, Winfried Lüdemann: Hugo Distler—Eine musikalische Biographie. Augsburg: Wissner-Verlag, 2002 [ISBN 3-89639-353-7]. An exhaustive biography based on all available letters and archival holdings. Complete listing of Distler’s works, analysis of the music; many photographs and musical examples.

Periodical literature in English
Jan Bender: “Hugo Distler and his Organ Music” [An interview conducted by William Bates], The American Organist, December 1982, 42–43.
Mark Bergass: “Hugo Distler’s First Vespers at St. Jakobi in Lübeck,” The American Organist, April 1982, 174–177.
Larry Palmer: “Hugo Distler’s Harpsichord Concerto,” The Diapason, May 1969, 12–13. “Hugo Distler: Some Influences on His Musical Style,” The American Organist, November 2002, 50–51. “Hugo Distler: 60 Years Later,” The Diapason, November 2002, 22.

Discography
The most satisfactory way to “know” Hugo Distler is through his music. The following compact disc recordings are recommended:

Organ works
Complete Organ Works (two discs, also included are works by Bach, Buxtehude, and Scheidt). John Brock plays two Brombaugh organs. Calcante Recordings, Ltd CD022 (1998).
Of historic interest (primarily for the instruments—Distler’s house organ and the Jakobi instruments, all of which have been changed since Distler played them): Complete Organ Works played by Armin Schoof. Thorofon CTH2293 and CTH2294.
Also of “historic” interest: Larry Palmer plays the large partitas and several smaller chorale works: Musical Heritage Society LP 3943 (out of print). Robert Sipe organ of Zumbro Lutheran Congregation, Rochester, MN (1978).

Choral works
Liturgische Sätze (selections from opus 13, opus 5, opus 11, and opus 6/2). Thorofon CTH 2420.
Choralpassion, opus 7. Kammerchor der Universität Dortmund, conducted by Willi Gundlach. Thorofon CTH2185.
Totentanz, opus 12/2 (same choir and conductor), plus Motet and Organ Partita on Wachet auf. Thorofon CTH 2215.
Die Weihnachtsgeschichte, opus 10. Thomanerchor Leipzig, Hans-Joachim Rotzsch. Berlin Classics 0092462BC.
Totentanz und Mottetten, opus 12 (including the opening and closing choruses for the never-completed St. John Passion). Berliner Vokalensemble, conducted by Bernd Stegmann. Cantate C 58007.

Instrumental works
Harpsichord Concerto, opus 14, and Incidental Music to the Play Ritter Blaubart. Musicaphon M 56860 (issued 2008).
Harpsichord Concertos, Martin Haselböck, harpsichord and conductor, with the Wiener Akademie. Both early and late concerti, plus the deleted movement from opus 14. Thorofon CTH 2403.

Special appreciation to my former organ student Simon Menges (Berlin) for sending the Musicaphon compact disc before it became available in the United States.

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.

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].

When The Diapason published an overview of "Harpsichord and Organ Duos" by Bruce Gustafson and Arthur Lawrence (April, 1974), the authors noted "Unfortunately . . . this ensemble has not yet attracted many 20th-century composers. . ." but they were able to cite four works specifically composed for two harpsichords.

In Harpsichord and Clavichord Music of the 20th Century (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1993), author Frances Bedford included 59 compositions in her listing of works for 2-6 harpsichords (of which five were composed specifically for the Gustafson/

Lawrence harpsichord duo). Bedford lists an unpublished Sonata (1948) by Dorothy Dushkin, composed for America's first harpsichord duo, Philip Manuel and Gavin Williamson of Chicago, a reminder that harpsichordists playing concerts together dates back at least to the 1920s.

The earliest recordings of multiple harpsichords are those by Manuel and Williamson, four albums issued by Musicraft Records. There have been other notable examples of this genre since then, including several marvelous excursions into the older repertoire by harpsichordists William Christie and Christophe Rousset (François Couperin: L'Apothéose de Lulli, L'Apothéose de Corelli; and their rousing pairing of Boccherini's six Quartets with his Fandango--both discs recorded by Harmonia Mundi in the 1980s).

Pour 2 Clavecins--Old and New Music for Two Harpsichords is the recent compact disc by duo harpsichordists Vera Kochanowsky and Thomas MacCracken issued on Titanic Records (TI-256). Playing fine two-manual harpsichords by John Phillips (1991, after Ruckers) and Willard Martin (1981, after Blanchet), the artists utilize instruments which are similar enough to blend well but with enough difference to be heard individually.

From the arresting first notes of Bartok's Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm (Mikrokosmos, Book VI) to the exciting conclusion of Peter Planyavsky's Caprice fugée (Quatre pièces pour 2 clavecins, 1978) this CD offers the pleasure of hearing a fresh and unfamiliar repertoire. If one harpsichord and harpsichordist is appealing, two making music together more than doubles that appeal!

First recordings of the Planyavsky work as well as of The Elements (1986), an engrossing 131/2-minute suite by San Francisco composer Léonie Jenkins, make this recording especially valuable. The composer writes, "The five Chinese elements [Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire] form a continuum: from each the next is created, while each created element carries the seeds of destruction of another. The whole represents the universe, stemming from the void [the first movement], and at the end, falling back into the void." Jenkins's musical representations of these elements are strikingly characteristic: slow-moving and static for the void, hammering and repetitive for metal, a flowing 6/8 for water, pyrotechnics (!) for fire.

Three works from the earlier golden age of the harsichord complete a varied program: the Suite in F by Gaspard Le Roux (arranged for two harpsichords as the composer suggested in the preface to his Pièces de Clavessin, 1705); Concerto in D Major by Georg Philipp Telemann (from Six Concerts, 1734, a publication in which the composer offered varied possibilities for performance, although this arrangement for two keyboards is the work of the present performers); and Quintet in D Major (1774, originally for Flute, Oboe, Violin, Viola and Continuo) by Johann Christian Bach, in an arrangement for two keyboard instruments from an only-slightly-later manuscript now found in the Saxon State Library.

The striking cover features harpsichord lids decorated in chinoisserie and modern decor, photographed from above; the booklet offers excellent program notes by the two players; and the playing documents vibrant performances on superb instruments (with appropriate tunings by Barbara Wolf). Highly recommended.

Features and news items are welcome for these columns. Send them to Dr. Larry Palmer, Division of Music, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275, or via E-mail:<[email protected]>.

Larry Palmer is a contributing editor of THE DIAPASON.

Edward L. Kottick: A History of the Harpsichord.

"There may be those whose knowledge of the harpsichord encompasses the whole of its six-hundred-year history, but I am not among them." Thus begins Edward Kottick's 557-page magnum opus, now handsomely in print, courtesy of Indiana University Press. Such modesty, both courteous and engaging, brought an immediate reaction, "If not Kottick, who?" With his outstanding career as music historian and university professor, his successful sideline of harpsichord making, and the writing of two earlier books, one an invaluable guide to the instrument's care and maintenance, the other (with George Lucktenberg) a guide to European keyboard instrument collections, who could be better qualified to write such a comprehensive survey?

And comprehensive it certainly is! Kottick divides his book into five large sections, tracing the harpsichord's story, century by century. Part I: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries mines the distant past ("From Psaltery and Monochord to Harpsichord and Virginal"), introducing the putative (and colorful) "inventor" of the harpsichord, Hermann Poll, Henri Arnaut's manuscript drawing and description of the instrument, and a comparison of  Arnaut's description with an actual surviving instrument, a Clavicytherium now in the Royal College of Music, London.

Part II: The Sixteenth Century deals with the development of the harpsichord in northern Europe, Antwerp harpsichord building between Karest and Ruckers, and early Italian harpsichords, virginals, and spinets. In Part III: The Seventeenth Century the story progresses via the Ruckers-Couchet dynasty of harpsichord makers to those of the later Italian style, the seventeenth-century international style, and the national "schools" of harpsichord making in France, Germany, Austria, and England.

Part IV: The Eighteenth Century, not surprisingly the lengthiest section of the book, has chapters concerned with the decline of the Italian harpsichord, the increasingly-important instruments of the Iberian Peninsula, harpsichord building in France until the Revolution, instruments of the Low Countries in the post-Ruckers era, and discussions of the harpsichord in Germany, Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain, and colonial America.

Part V: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries details the "hibernation of the harpsichord" in the 19th century, its revival from the 1889 Paris Exhibition until  World War II, and the subsequent period of the "modern" harpsichord from historically informed builders such as Gough, Hubbard, and Dowd, through the introduction of electronic instruments and the popularity of harpsichord kits.

A short postscript ("Into the Future") brings the 470 pages of text to a thoughtful conclusion. The remainder of the volume consists of a glossary, nearly fifty pages of end notes, an extensive bibliography, and the index.

Each chapter ends with a helpful "summing up" of the author's main points. The book is illustrated copiously with black and white pictures on nearly half its pages. There are 23 color plates, each one of a beautifully-decorated historic harpsichord, save for a single 17th-century painting: Andrea Sacchi's Apollo Crowning the Singer Pasqualini. Boxed "sidebars" present detailed information about many topics of interest, allowing the reader to sample various short snippets of engaging history, such as "The Guild of St. Luke," "Goosen Karest the Apprentice," "Italian Roses," "A Digression on Nonaligned Keyboards," "Raymundo Truchado's Geigenwerk," "J. S. Bach and Equal Temperament," "Kirkman's Marriage," or "The Delrin Story."

As if all this rich variety were not enough, the book comes with a companion compact disc comprising nineteen aural examples of plucked keyboard sounds from the Flemish Spinett Virginal by Marten van der Biest [1580] heard in Giles Farnaby's Why Ask You? to Landowska's iconographic performance at her Pleyel harpsichord of the first movement from Bach's Italian Concerto, and Kathryn Roberts playing Louis Couperin on a 1987 John Phillips instrument based on a 1707 harpsichord by Nicholas Dumont. All of these choices are apt; all, except for a poorly-recorded (but extremely interesting) example of a 17th-century German harpsichord transferred from a scratchy Hungaroton disc, demonstrate recorded sound ranging from good to superior. Most of the performances are winners, too, such as the arrangement and playing by Kenneth Mobbs of the 25-second Introduction to Handel's Zadok the Priest, demonstrating the Venetian swell of a 1785 Longman and Broderip harpsichord made by Thomas Culliford.

For anyone wishing to know the particulars of the two Scarlatti sonatas played by Ralph Kirkpatrick (listed only as Sonatas 35 and 36), they are K 366 (L 119)--an Allegro in F, and K 367 (L 172)--a Presto, also in F Major.

I did not find many errors in this extensive volume, but I was surprised to read Kottick's assertion that Sylvia Marlowe had used a blue William Dowd harpsichord for her engagements at the Rainbow Room Night Club in New York (note 51, page 522). This is a minor aberration, for the instrument employed was not a Dowd, but Marlowe's white Pleyel (purchased with funds borrowed from composer/critic Virgil Thomson). These well-received appearances were the real life inspiration for the fictional accounts in Francis Steegmuller's mystery novel Blue Harpsichord, published in 1949--the very year in which Frank Hubbard and William Dowd set up their first shop in Boston. Dowd did not build harpsichords under his own name until 1959.  Late in her career Marlowe did play a Dowd instrument, following many years of performing on her Pleyel and subsequent harpsichords built for her by John Challis.

A History of the Harpsichord [ISBN 0-253-34166-3] is printed on alkaline (non-acidic) paper that meets the minimum standards of permanence for printed library materials. Would that these pages could have been offered on thicker stock, for there is a fair amount of unwanted print bleed-through, especially from the illustrations. This book is priced at $75. It offers a compendium of interesting and detailed information, engagingly presented, and eminently readable. Kottick has produced a winner with this one.

Mimi S. Waitzman: Early Keyboard Instruments: The Benton Fletcher Collection at Fenton House.

Major George Henry Benton Fletcher (1866-1944) assembled a small but significant collection of early keyboard instruments in the early years of the 20th century. From the very beginning he held the view that his instruments should be restored, that they should be available to professional musicians and students, and that they should be housed in a suitable setting.

From 1934 until the building's destruction during World War II the instruments were displayed at Old Devonshire House, Boswell Street, in London. Since the collection had been turned over to England's National Trust, Fletcher's death did not result in the dispersal of his instruments. Five did not survive the war, but all the rest of them had been moved to rural England shortly before the bombing of Devonshire House. After the war Fletcher's instruments were reinstalled in a Queen Anne terraced house at 3 Cheyne Walk. From there, in 1952, the Trust moved them (together with an additional instrument --a 1612 Ruckers harpsichord belonging to Her Majesty the Queen) to Fenton House, a stately Georgian building in Hampstead. At present there are nineteen instruments dating from 1540 (the Italian virginals of Marcus Siculus) to 1925 (a clavichord built in Haselmere by Arnold Dolmetsch). Thirteen are by English builders.

Mimi Waitzman, curator of the Benton Fletcher Collection since 1984, is the author of a new, elegantly produced hardbound volume listing all the instruments, comprising virginals, spinets, harpsichords, clavichords, grand and square pianos. Beginning with a short history of the collection, the Introduction continues with descriptions of the various action types utilized in the instruments, illustrated by line drawings. Each of the instruments is given a full description, followed by listings of case materials and dimensions, compass, disposition, and details of stringing and scaling.

A companion compact disc contains appropriate musical examples played by Terence Charleston on fourteen of the instruments; these tracks are listed within the chapter for each instrument. Lavish color illustrations and high-quality duotone photographs add to the value of this publication, and the whole makes for a satisfactory "self-guided tour" or a private study in early keyboard instruments.

Published by The National Trust [ISBN 0-7078-0353-5], 112 pages, £24.99.