Harpsichord Notes

Lorraine S. Brugh and Richard Webster

Lorraine Brugh is senior research professor of music at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Richard Webster is interim director of music at Saint Paul’s Choir School and Church, Harvard Square, Boston, Massachusetts, and music director of Chicago’s Bach Week Festival.

The celebration

“These people will be your friends for life,” Karel Paukert pronounced to his organ class at Northwestern University in the mid-1970s. Looking around, we students likely smirked, unable to imagine this motley crew being lifelong friends. Almost exactly fifty years later, on November 17, 2023, many of those former students along with colleagues, family, and church members gathered to celebrate Karel’s life of teaching, leading, and performing.

Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, named Karel Paukert artist-in-residence on August 2, 2023. He has served at Saint Paul’s since 1979, first as organist and choirmaster, and now continues as organist for their Sunday early service. Most days he is there, practicing and working on a memoir he is writing at the request of two colleagues in the Czech Republic.

Kevin Jones, director of music at Saint Paul’s since June 2022 and a former student of Karel’s, organized an evening of celebration and tribute. Attended by more than 200 people, the evening opened with a recital by five of Karel’s former students. The rector, the Reverend Jeanne Leinbach, welcomed everyone to the recital. Performers were former students of Karel’s from Northwestern University—James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Lorraine Brugh—and the Cleveland Institute of Music—Brian Wilson and Kevin Jones. The recital displayed evidence of the wide range of Karel’s teaching and influence with works of Jehan Alain, Paul Hindemith, César Franck, Nicolas de Grigny, Richard Webster, Petr Eben, and Maurice Duruflé.

A gala reception followed the recital. Wine flowed freely, complemented by delicious canapés and desserts. The Reverend Leinbach again greeted and thanked all who came from near and far to attend. Lorraine Brugh, James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Kevin Jones all gave tributes, as well as a bit of roasting to Karel. Karel then closed the evening by recalling his love for Saint Paul’s and the staff and parishioners who continue to be a source of great love and support for him, his family, many of whom were in attendance, as were his former students. It was a grand evening of sharing across many decades and places where Karel continues to inspire with his music and wit. All shared admiration for his humanity. Indeed, we students had remained friends for life.

An interview

On November 17, before the festivities, Lorraine Brugh and Richard Webster interviewed Karel, focusing on his early life in Czechoslovakia (thereafter the Czech Republic and now Czechia), his escape to the West, and passion for lifelong teaching 
and learning.

Lorraine Brugh: You have been a lifelong mentor to so many students, including the two of us. Would you talk about that role and then tell us who your mentors were?

Karel Paukert: This is very interesting, because I never thought of you two as teenagers. I don’t think I treated you that way. You were both seventeen when you came to Northwestern. I simply saw two young people, extremely gifted; it was oozing from you. I was as excited as I used to be as a child when I was cultivating herbs and flowers. As a kid I loved to grow plants. This was fantastic for me.

I was first teaching young students as a young person myself when my teachers J. B. Krajs in Prague and then Gabriel Verschraegen in Ghent asked me to work with certain students while they were absent. I like to deal with people, especially young people. You two were very eager, like sponges. It was just a pleasure from the very beginning.

Richard Webster: It’s significant that you mention your love of people because many teachers don’t have that love as you do.

I really feel strongly about the role love plays in our lives. It surpasses language, racial, and geographical barriers. Also, good will. I felt it in abundance as soon as I left my oppressed native country and began my life in the West. It instantly changed me, and I became more trusting and harmonious within myself.

During my second week in Iceland, I was entrusted with the role of an oboe teacher in the music school. In my own mind I had no business being a teacher of oboe, but as a member of the Radio Orchestra and being one of the very few oboe players on the island, I fulfilled my task. My student Kjartan became the oboist of the Iceland Philharmonic a few years later.

I think that my positive instincts in that field are in my DNA, as most of my forefathers on one side of my family were teachers in the Sudetenland (frontiers drawn after the First World War in 1918–1919 and in 1938 appropriated by Adolf Hitler). Consequently, I have the need to share good things with other people.

LB: Which side of your family was that?

My father’s family. My grandfather just happened to come to my hometown Skuteč as the new postmaster. He married there. The object of his admiration was my grandmother Hedvika. He ate in a restaurant for ten years watching this young woman, the daughter of the owner, before he asked her to marry him. He had a dignity about him and thought we teenagers were rude for welcoming girls without shirts on, even though it was a hot summer. I was twelve, my brother eight, and he considered us loose, with no manners. He gave us an example of a time he was mortified when his teacher in elementary school took his class to the river and requested them to take their shirts off before swimming. His shyness did not allow him to do it. He was tearing up, sharing this episode with us. I would definitely say I got my love of teaching from his side.

LB: Can you talk about some of your mentors outside of your family?

There was a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jiri Sahula, who, though poor as a church mouse, had a great assortment of musical instruments. When I was about ten years old and was his acolyte for morning Mass in the local Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, he lent me books to read. They were way over my head, but I just perused them to please him and then brought them back. For a change he started to talk about the beauty and nobility of the church organ. That was before it began to mesmerize me. In the same context he talked about a composer, František Musil, a priest, who composed a beautiful sonata.

Many years later, when I played the sonata, I was often in tears, recalling Monsignor’s poverty and humility. You could see him from afar. He walked by our house to the next village, probably to visit ailing folks. Walking through the neighborhood, he would carry a huge leather bag, and village folks often offered him goods. “Just baked, Monsignor.” People loved him and took pleasure in feeding him.

Monsignor Sahula was well known as a published historian, rather conservative, but enlightened. It was moving to see him play a variety of instruments, including a musical saw, a zither, and a one-key flute. When I came home for a visit from the conservatory in Prague, he wanted us to make music together—violin and piano. I was pleased to oblige. Often it was painful because he did not practice and his intonation was painful. In the winter, around Christmas, his huge room with a high ceiling was atrociously cold. It was touching to see him tear up playing or talking about music. (I learned from him and others how much music moves people.) I loved those times with the Monsignor, nevertheless.

RW: Would you tell us about your teachers?

My organ teacher at the Prague Conservatory, Jan Bedřich Krajs, was the nephew of the composer and organ virtuoso, Bedřich Antonín Wiedermann. He was like a father to me, in part because he had the same kind of view on present-day government policy and was opposed to the Communists, as my father was.

Our discussions in the organ studio were without boundaries. At a certain point, perhaps in my second year, a recording line was installed, so that we could record our playing. That was a pretext, and what we did not think of was that they also could tape our conversations. We didn’t realize that when we talked politics, even students among ourselves, someone could record us, and they did. It was brought to the attention of the conservatory authorities, and they threatened to close the department if professor Krajs did not dismiss me.

I seemed to have been the chief culprit. My standing was magnified by an anonymous letter from my hometown Skuteč about my class origin: petit bourgeois. This indicated that I was not worthy to be part of the cadre, the working class in the new Socialist state, but should first prove myself in a factory.

Fortunately, the man who installed the telephone was our instructor of acoustics and the son of Comrade Prchal, a leader of the Revolutionary Movement of the Trade Unions (ROH). He was a friend of my teacher, who, among other maintenance tasks, oiled our organ motors. He asked Professor Krajs with urgency to dismiss me, to prevent the closing of the department of organ. On ideological grounds, Krajs said he was not going to do that. What followed was a search of the apartment of the Krajs family. Professor Krajs was a friend of Jan Masaryk, the son of the first president of the Czech Republic, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. He “died” in Czernin Palace [in Prague] in 1948, by suicide or was possibly thrown out of a window. To this day it isn’t certain how he died.

My father listened to Jan Masaryk and other Czech dissidents on regular shortwave radio transmissions from London on the BBC (London Calls) and from New York (Voice of America) during the War. Broadcasts were in the Czech language, received on our Telefunken radio. This was considered to be illegal activity and could be punishable by prison or even death, as the required orange tag on the dial indicated.

Before leaving the country, Masaryk left Professor Krajs his famous hat, books, letters, and other memorabilia. One day the secret police came to check his apartment, probably to look for objects that could compromise him so that they could take action against him. The Krajs family lived in Malá Strana, in a centuries-old house, below the Prague Castle in Thunovská Street. Upon hearing the doorbell, the professor peeked down from the upper floor and saw men in leather coats, a typical attire of the secret police. Before he opened the doors downstairs he took the things that might be compromising and threw them all into an oven, a ceramic stove that went up all the way to the ceiling in the large room, which housed a small two-manual organ. Unfortunately, later in the day when the professor was at the conservatory, Mrs. Krajs came back and lit a fire in the stove, not knowing what all the papers were about. She burned it all up. There were notes, letters, enough incriminating evidence that almost certainly would have resulted in incarceration.

The early 1950s were tough times after a few peaceful years following World War II. It was the “dictatorship of the working class on the way to Socialism and Communism.” In many ways it mirrored the German occupation and their beastly deeds.

RW: What year would this be?

It began after the February 1948 Revolution with the confiscation of properties of the rich and the nationalization of industry, and climaxed in the last years of Stalin. The years 1952 and 1953 were terrible, because any Soviet doctrine would be copied by the Czech Communists. It was the art and culture of social realism; everything had to be optimistic, with positive depictions of the Russians. Whatever it was, it had to be in agreement with the party line. This was the reign of Socialist realism. So we couldn’t play music that wasn’t relatable to the working classes, especially anything with religious titles. Music that named Jesus Christ or mentioned anything religious was prohibited, with a few exceptions. If a piece was called “Meditation” it might have passed the ideological control.

My colleague, Jan Hora, retired professor of the conservatory and the Academy of Musical Arts, often played in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. He said that there were never printed programs in the Soviet Union. The works would be announced from the stage so that any religious connotations would be erased.

Thanks to Jan I got to know Professor Verschraegen. Jan was my best friend from the conservatory years. He was a fine organist and was allowed to travel abroad. While still in school he won several competitions. In fact, Jan met Professor Verschraegen when he was taking part in the J. S. Bach competition in Ghent. He always brought back organ scores of contemporary composers published in the West. This was music that we never had access to in the “Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” I was able to borrow and copy some of them.

I also told you about Paul Hindemith and copying his Sonata I. When he came to Prague, I asked him if he would be so kind as to sign it. That much I could say in German. He was very upset—I might say furious. I must have been in a tearful disposition, as his kind wife, Frau Gertrud, had mercy on me, took me by my hand, and invited me to sit with her in the loge at Smetana Hall during the second half of his rehearsal with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. After I explained to her in broken German our situation, vis-à-vis new music from the West, she took me after the rehearsal to the green room. I could tell that she was explaining the predicament of music students to Hindemith. He obviously changed his mind, because he did sign the sonata (“With thanks to the copyist”!!). He also requested my address, and during one of the ensuing summer months I got a package from Schott in Vienna, addressed to my parents’ house in Skuteč, with all three of his sonatas.

Back to Professor Verschraegen. It happened that he was allowed to concertize in the Czech Republic. I was in military service between 1957 and 1959 in Pisek and Tabor. It was in 1958 that I met him. Mr. Palasek, who was the minister at the prayer house of the Czech Brethren, had for our circumstances a nice, small two-manual organ, and allowed me to practice there whenever I had permission to leave the barracks. He told me about an upcoming Verschraegen concert there and asked if I could assist him during his recital.

There was a youngish lady named Vera who was translating for him. The two seemed to have been affectionate with each other. She was a Jew and had spent several war years in the concentration camp. I could tell because she had a tattoo on her arm.

Later in Ghent, I realized that her story fascinated Verschraegen from the very beginning, and he was attracted to her. She asked me if I liked his playing; I said, yes, very much, and she asked if I would like to study with him. She talked to Gabriel about me, and the next time he came to Prague I played for him. He came there to premiere his Concerto for Organ and Strings with the Prague Chamber Orchestra in the Rudolfinum.

He loved Prague and stayed for several days. I tried to communicate with him in my elementary German. He spoke his native Flemish, French, and German. Afterwards, Vera convinced me that I had to improve my German to communicate with him. I listened to her and took private German lessons, making fairly rapid progress.

The Pragokoncert housed him in the Hotel Alcron, a hotel for guests from the West. One evening he invited me there for supper. As we spoke a waiter came to us and silently pointed above his head, toward the chandelier. That indicated to me that there was a recording device. Fortunately, I had not said very much. But I was so grateful, so grateful to the waiter for warning us.

The next day, through the help of Vera, I got to play for him. Later when I was in Belgium, he told me I was like some other Czech organists, who were so rhythmically undisciplined. (He had heard them in various competitions as a juror.) He said I had to buy a metronome and reached immediately for his wallet to give me money, but I did have some money. After two lessons with him I did what he asked me to do—to write in all the fingerings and pedaling in Bach’s Toccata in F (BWV 540i). Thereafter, I passed his requirement.

RW: Just like you, he was very generous to his students.

Thank you. Anyway, so then after two or three lessons, he said that he would like me to teach his son, Dirk. “You can play as you want, but I want you to teach him to use the metronome and note the fingerings.” Obviously, he wanted me to instill discipline in him.

After that I didn’t get many lessons from him. He would listen to me and make a few, always helpful comments. We discussed interpretations away from the organ as well. He was a deep thinker and liked to talk a lot about himself and life in general. I lived nearby, and he would often ring my doorbell in the evening and ask if I wanted to have coffee or a beer chat. We might also meet in the square at a brasserie in front of the cathedral where I was playing weekday Masses, Sunday morning Masses, and other important offices. Or we would talk and walk through the old town. He would talk politics, the world, and Vera in Prague, and I would comment here and there. He loved his city and was a proud “Vlamink” (Flemish citizen).

RW: Last year you received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague, and a week thereafter the Prize of the Ministry of Culture. What was it like for you to be there and to receive the award?

It was like a dream. My entire U.S. family and Czech relatives came to support me. When I legally left Prague in 1961 I had a suitcase containing some music scores and my oboe for a one-year engagement in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. By not returning for the obligatory summer military training and disregarding all the letters from the Czech authorities, the military court issued me a ten-year prison term. I did not think that even a short visit would ever be a possibility.

I never thought I would be going back. But things changed. The Velvet Revolution was a miracle. I told you about my mother. When I took a train to Skuteč to say goodbye before leaving for Iceland and told her I might not be coming back, she was standing in front of the armoire and was so startled she dropped a mirror on the floor. “You cannot do it.” I didn’t even say goodbye to my father because he was working in an ammunition factory and could only come home on the weekend. I didn’t know myself if I could get to the point where I could divorce myself from my past and never be back again.

Playing in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in Reykjavik, existing modestly, I had saved some money, made some more in Oslo with the recording of Czech organ music in the cathedral in Oslo for the Norwegian Radio. I kept my savings in my shoes, believing that with a little bit of luck I could survive two to three months.

In Oslo I put my suitcase into a railway depot before embarking by autostop to the west coast. I splurged on a pair of blue jeans (my first ones), a small backpack, and a navy t-shirt. Then in the harbor I was trying to find work. I did find it on a packet boat servicing Kristiansand and Bergen. I meditated about my future under the starlit sky when the boat moored at night in one of the magic fjords. The sailors would leave me on the boat alone, sleep somewhere on the shore, and would come back in the morning. I was to clean the kitchen and the deck. After I was finished I watched the stars and made my plans. My kingdom was the deck of the smallish boat.

On the way to Prague in 2022 I was again replaying in my mind the circumstances of my leaving in 1961. It took me many months in Reykjavik to tackle the parting step with my past. The final decision, the realization that I had to leave my past in order to at least touch my dreams, was made during my journey in 1962, hitchhiking from Bergen back to Oslo. After a nap in a haystack in the Telemark region of Norway, awakened by the scent of hay and hearing singing from a beautifully carved chalet (there must have been more than a dozen of them, scattered in the valley), I made the decision to stay in the West. I bought a ticket to Ghent, checked my suitcase, boarded the train, and was on my way to Belgium.

In Sweden there was no passport control from Norway. When we reached Denmark, however, there was a casual passport control at the border to Germany. The officer selected me and said I needed a valid visa. I told him I had one. He stated I needed a visa for each country since my passport was from a Communist country. He said I had transgressed Scandinavian rules. I explained what I was contemplating—to ask for asylum. He said he would let me go to Germany, and there I would need to ask for asylum.

The German border police got me off the train. The realization came to me too late that my suitcase, a “Mitgepäck,” was going to Ghent. Out of fear that I could be apprehended, I had left in it the letters from Verschraegen that could prove he had invited me to come to study with him, plus anything else that would reveal my intentions not to return home. This was August, and I didn’t get to Ghent until November. Meanwhile, I had to exist. The Germans said it would be possible to stay in Germany because I was a musician. But I would have to change my name and go to a camp for refugees, because I didn’t want to become a German citizen.

I was sent back to Denmark on the next train. The same officer, Mr. Poulsen, waited for me at the Padborg station and brought me to a small police station directly in the railway station. There he interviewed me and wrote a protocol. I was jailed overnight and taken with two men, obviously criminals, to Copenhagen by rail and boats. Today the bridges make that part of the voyage a delight.

They brought me to the officer for refugees. I deposited my Czech passport and the return airline ticket to Prague. His office would help me apply for a visa to Belgium. In the meantime, I was required to find housing and periodically report to his office. I was terrified that I would not have enough money to stay in the city while I waited for the visa.

I wrote a desperate letter to a friend in Iceland, Didda Gudrum Kristinsdottir. She was a pianist who studied with Bruno Seidlhofer in Vienna and was at that time the best pianist in Iceland. I gave her the address of the rented room where she could write to me.

Instead of receiving a letter, one day a Danish woman came to my door, introduced herself as Hanne Poulsen, a friend of Didda from Vienna, where she had studied broadcasting. She already knew that I needed help here and offered me the use of her apartment. “I am leaving my apartment and going on vacation. I will be with my mother for six weeks. I would like you to use it.” I just couldn’t accept it. She said she would come in the afternoon and would show me Copenhagen. She drove me all around the city in her beautiful Saab. We ended in Nyhavn with a glass of delicious Tuborg beer. During our sightseeing I decided to accept her kind offer. That helped me to survive in Copenhagen because I had no job. For many years thereafter, whenever I would be nearby, I would meet her for dinner.

I would go to the Belgian embassy to check on my visa almost every day, wearing sunglasses so that I would not be recognized. That feeling of being pursued stayed with me for a long time. It finally disappeared in 1964, when I arrived in the United States.

During my waiting time for the visa I was able to take advantage of the musical life in Copenhagen. Tickets were inexpensive. In Tivoli, the famous amusement park, I heard amazing concerts of all sorts, including Danish avant-garde composers, conductor Zubin Mehta with the Tivoli orchestra, even a piano recital by the seventy-five-year-old Arthur Rubinstein.

One day, in a cafeteria, I met a young man who looked at me quizzically and addressed me in English. By that time I could speak some English. He was a Fulbright student from the USA, Raymond Harris, studying with Finn Viderø. I knew the name of his teacher as he was well known as a prophet, specializing in the works of Buxtehude. Mr. Viderø didn’t mind if I came to his lessons. I learned a lot by observing him and listening to the beautiful Marcussen organ on which he taught. I summoned the courage to visit other organ lofts and was received cordially. Many of the organists were also composers. I could not believe the clarity of those instruments!

Then one day at the Belgian embassy, a kind consular officer, a distinguished older Jewish woman told me, “Do not despair. It will happen.” It wasn’t happening fast enough. I was writing desperate letters to Verschraegen, “Please, please, Herr Professor.” I got no answer. He needed to attest that he was inviting me to Belgium. We had made the agreement in 1961 that he would send me a Christmas card with his signature and an asterisk if the invitation was still valid. Shortly thereafter I received it and still have it. It’s a Christmas card, more than half a century old, with a landscape painting of an old Flemish master, and on the reverse, his signature and the asterisk.

After coming to Ghent I found out that Professor Verschraegen traveled during the summer with the whole family in Europe and was also giving concerts. His mail was collected by one of the sextons, Roger Van de Wielle, a musicologist and author, who was also one of the organists.

LB: Tonight you will be honored for another award, artist-in-residence at Saint Paul’s. Share some of your thoughts about this celebration.

The rector, in her generosity, and Kevin Jones, director of music here, made it possible for me to stay on. I treasure the office I have, because I can hopefully finish my memoirs. I also have a resting place here in the columbarium for Noriko [Fujii-Paukert, Karel’s wife] and myself. She agreed to be buried with me.

Look at this beautiful space. I’m often here until 8:00 p.m. working on details of the remembrances, making sure all the details are correct. Sometimes I come to pleasant, even stunning discoveries. Today, for example, I was reading about two musicians who concertized at the Cleveland Museum of Art in their early careers, Christine Brandes and Joshua Bell. Christine, a sought-after soprano in early music, shone in several of our concerts thirty years ago, and Joshua, now a world-class violinist, was scheduled for one of our summer concerts when he was thirteen or fourteen. He was the first winner of the Stulberg International Competition for string players under age twenty.

This competition was founded by the friends of Julius Stulberg, professor of violin in Kalamazoo [Western Michigan University], a year after his death. It was a stroke of luck, and it happened because of my skiing accident. I found out about Joshua from my orthopedist, Dr. Stulberg, whose father was a German immigrant and the famed violinist. The good doctor, who apparently frequented our concerts, raved about Joshua and put me in contact with his mother. I was fortunate in that regard; so many good things happened to me.

LB: How did the invitation to write your memoir come about?

It was the editor of Prague Radio, Eva Ocisková, who recorded a series of talks for her program Pameti (“Memories”). It was a successful program in many installments on Radio Vltava Prague. From that she must have gleaned some inspiration and asked me to consider writing the story of my life. Her husband, my close friend, renowned organist Jaroslav Tůma, supported it.

LB: They are planning a publication in Czech?

Yes, and there is support for the Czech edition from official circles. What happens further, with the English edition, I don’t know as yet.

LB: What accomplishments are you most proud of, or satisfied with, in your long professional arc?

Well, here in the church I am pleased with the acquisition of instruments. We acquired an Italian organ by Gerhard Hradetzky, the Italian harpsichord by Matthias Giewisch, and the positiv of Vladimir Slajch. Of course, we have the iconic Holtkamp organ.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) procurement was one of my chief preoccupations from the very beginning. I wanted to acquire instruments that would enable us to present a variety of musical styles. Those instruments included harpsichord copies for French, Italian, and German repertoire, an organ positiv, an original Broadwood fortepiano, a copy of Mozart’s Walter clavier, and a clavichord. We used them in the auditorium and in various galleries for concerts. This gave the musical arts also a visual artistic presentation. In both instances it required patience and perseverance to obtain the necessary funds from private individuals and foundations.

Unfortunately, the CMA instruments are now in storage and are not played. That situation pains me very much. Even more, the human capital we assembled through the many activities is no longer nourished by the CMA as it was for almost 100 years. You cannot measure such things with a yardstick, but you can see and feel the respect people paid to music over the years. I was not the first one. I simply continued in that trajectory of the first curators, following in the footsteps of my predecessor, Walter Blodgett.

There are many instrumentalists and composers who were studying here at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) and students at other institutions who, even now after many years have passed, acknowledge how much the CMA program enriched their professional lives through the concerts, listening to rehearsals, and meeting with the artists. We wanted it to be precisely that: a supplemental music laboratory for as many as possible. The young professionals who studied with Donald Erb at CIM got to meet William Bolcom, William Albright, Jacob Druckman, Messrs. Carter and Crumb, and dozens of others. Imagine the young organist to be a few steps away from such legends as Jean Langlais, Pierre Cochereau, Madame Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, or Yvonne Loriod. There is something sacred in meeting great artists.

It was the same with masterclasses. If we had harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt or Edith Picht-Axenfeld playing fortepiano, students would come from CIM, from Case Western, Cleveland State, or the Oberlin Conservatory, just to experience their artistry. It was the education tangent that I valued very much. What is heartwarming to me now are the occasional encounters with folks I meet in the street or a store, or musicians who participated in our endeavors, age-wise all over the spectrum, expressing gratitude for our musical mission.

LB: Was the new music direction your own, or had it been already established?

I was following Walter Blodgett. He was interested in new music. The CMA juried exhibitions of local artists. Walter complemented this with May festivals, mostly performances of new music. He had people like Karlheinz Stockhausen here before I came. I could not believe it.

So I felt very safe in pushing the envelope. Among others in programming music of different nations, I also wanted to promote Czech music. The general manager of CMA, Beverly Barksdale, previously assistant to George Szell, assured me that because Szell presented Czech music often [with the Cleveland Orchestra], programming Czech music would not be objectionable to Clevelanders. On the contrary, we would frequently combine resources from CMA, the choir from Saint Paul’s, as well as local instrumentalists, and present concerts in the CMA, the Bohemian National Hall, and elsewhere in the city. During the oppressive regime, ending with the Velvet Revolution (Prague, November and December 1989), local folks were unable to visit the homeland and enthusiastically supported our programs of Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček, and others.

RW: What are your regrets?

As humans we all sin. Perhaps I sinned more than others. Feeling guilty helped me do good things and helped me, in part, to overcome my guilt. I should have loved more. I should have spent more time with my family. I should have been more understanding of some of my students. I should have worked harder from the beginning.

RW: What advice do you have to young musicians, particularly organists, composers, and church musicians who are at the beginnings of their careers?

I just really think that, in today’s market, it is necessary to be multi-faceted, to be capable of stepping into diverse situations, in order to earn enough for the basic necessities. I am speaking now as the father of a family. The brilliant ones and those who are hard working will most likely make it. [Young musicians] do not need any advice from us. They just need to find a mentor and continue to love music and know what and why they are doing it.

LB: Well, there aren’t even enough church jobs to go around anymore.

I think you have to follow your call, whatever it is. My teacher at the conservatory, Mr. Krajs, said, when he taught me privately,

Darling, you are ready to take the exams at the conservatory. Think it over. You have to be sure you love music enough. You know how the government treats the church, and it may not change in your lifetime. You may have to play for free in the church, if they are even open, and be employed in a radio station as a sound engineer. But you play oboe; you will be okay.

The satisfaction of being a musician is enormous, especially in religious realms. I was fortunate to have a dream position at the museum (CMA), not in terms of financial rewards but in being an unofficial musical missionary in the city. To that end was added another dimension, serving people in the church, first [at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church] in Evanston and now in Cleveland Heights. I was fortunate to work under great rectors—in Evanston, Tom Ray, and in Cleveland Heights, Chave McCracken, Nick White, Alan Gates, Jeanne Leinbach, and a host of wonderful musical colleagues. I learned from all of them, and I am still learning.

RW: It’s a calling.

Yes.

Postscript by Karel Paukert

I wish Frank Cunkle were still alive. Thanks to him I made it all the way to the U.S. In 1963 Gabriel Verschraegen asked me to take care of an American music journalist, Mr. Cunkle, who was planning to visit the Festival of Flanders to see diverse organs and attend as many recitals as possible. I agreed to be his guide, not realizing that this encounter would change my life forever.

Frank was the editor of The Diapason, based in Chicago. As I quickly found out, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. organ scene. He let me know right away that he disliked certain organists, but did like very much the playing of Catharine Crozier and also Robert Noehren. I proudly told him that I met both in Haarlem and that they recommended me to come to the U.S. Frank did not promise me anything but indicated that he would contact a few acquaintances in churches and schools for a possible recital or a class on Czech organ music. It all became reality when I landed in Chicago on December 19, 1964. I was welcomed by Frank, organ builder John F. Shawhan, and two doctoral students at Northwestern University, Benn Gibson and James Leland. They brought me to Frank’s house (he did not drive) in Oak Park.

The Chicago Chapter of the American Guild of Organists invited me to play a recital for their midwinter conclave, undoubtedly, thanks to Frank’s recommendation. It was announced in the December 1964 issue of The Diapason.

In 1968 I returned to the Chicago area to teach at Northwestern University in Evanston and reconnected with Frank. Upon his retirement in 1970 he moved to our small house on Noyes Street and became a frequent babysitter of our children. He eventually fulfilled his plan to retire in Mexico. After he found the experience disappointing, he returned to the U.S. to live close to his sister in Chula Vista, California.

A child of the Great Depression, he was born in Arkansas and was accustomed to living frugally. In his younger years he earned his living in music as an organist, pianist, composer, and arranger. He possessed absolute pitch. His music education was broad. I am his grateful mentee, for imparting to me the skills of American life I would need for the rest of my life.

Special thanks to my friends, Lorraine and Richard, and also to Stephen Schnurr and The Diapason, for allowing me to share my memories.

 

Karel is currently receiving treatment at the University Hospital’s Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Mabel Zehner (photo credit: Ashland University Archives, Ashland, Ohio)

Larry Palmer

Giving thanks from A to Z, part 2: Moving to Dallas (1970)

During late spring of 1970 I was invited to present my Hugo Distler lecture and a masterclass on his organ music at the University of  Michigan, Ann Arbor. In conversations with the school’s late iconic organ professor Marilyn Mason she tried to dissuade me from accepting the offer from the Meadows School of the Arts of  Southern Methodist University to join its faculty to continue the harpsichord studio begun there by James Tallis who had passed away after only one year at the Dallas school. She warned me that I would be quite unhappy working with the head of the organ department, Robert Anderson, especially since I had been so independent and successful in Norfolk. In reality she was attempting to keep the Dallas position available for her student Allen Shaffer (a talented and delightful person whom I had known when he was studying at Oberlin). However, having worked with several difficult colleagues previously I strode forth into the fray and accepted the Dallas position even though it meant a demotion from my Norfolk full professorship and a huge reduction in salary. As it turned out Allen did extremely well by filling my Norfolk position, where he had fine success and succeeded Grover Oberle as the musician for Christ & St. Luke’s Episcopal Church—a plum position.

I did not have the difficult time with Robert Anderson that Mason had envisioned. We had a mutual respect for each other, and my forty-five years on the faculty of the Meadows School were mostly happy ones (and I did regain that full professorship and tenure, too). Among the early successes in Dallas were the interactions with the soon-to-be stellar harpsichord builder Richard Kingston. I introduced him to my beautiful two-manual harpsichord, commissioned from William Dowd in 1968 and delivered shortly after the dawn of 1969; it was Bill’s penultimate instrument to have foot pedals for changing the stops. This harpsichord served as a major influence for Richard’s instruments. He also benefited from several of the many harpsichord students that swarmed to SMU in those early years, several of whom took part-time jobs at Richard’s Dallas shop. We all benefitted from the generous leadership of the music department head Eugene Bonelli, who was promoted to dean of the Meadows School and somewhat later became CEO of the Dallas Symphony, which also benefitted from his leadership, as did the Dallas organ community, for it was under his guidance that the Meyerson Symphony Center acquired its C. B. Fisk, Inc., organ, Opus 100, and SMU its concert hall organ, Fisk Opus 101, as well as a Dowd double (complete with a Sheridan German soundboard painting) for the harpsichord studio! Guest artists of harpsichord renown included Isolde Ahlgrimm (who taught the harpsichord students during my first sabbatical leave in which I gathered much of the material for my second book, Harpsichord in America—suffering terribly during many visits to Honolulu for multiple  interviews with Momo Aldrich (Wanda Landowska’s first private secretary)—a generous and gracious person who was most worthy of the book’s dedication to her. Another important person who aided the book project was my longtime “older brother that I never had,” Richard Kurth, whom I first met during my father’s ministry in Neffs, Ohio, while we were both still in college. Richard’s career as a language teacher has been spent primarily at the Kamehameha School in Hawaii, and he was always a gracious and most helpful host during my working visits.

Not to be forgotten is the support that Dean Bonelli gave to the harpsichord curriculum through his support for the annual summer workshops that took place at Fort Burgwin, SMU’s New Mexico campus retreat near Ranchos de Taos. Helpful guest faculty members from California included: Neal Roberts and Tony Brazier; from London, Jane Clark and Stephen Dodgson; and closer to home, Susan Ferré and her husband Charles Lang, plus many others. It was during one of these early retreats that I met Dr. Charles Mize, who, with his wife Susan, had a delightful and welcoming summer home in Santa Fe, where they often provided post- or pre-workshop hospitality and other forms of support, as well as generously supporting many other harpsichord-related endeavors. To this list I must add my late partner Clyde Putman, who delivered many harpsichords to New Mexico, tuned them repeatedly as they adapted to the higher altitude, and brought them safely back home to Dallas. Without him I could not have organized and survived these intense (but glorious) summer retreats.

Among the many highlights of these forty-five years was that I gave an SMU faculty recital each fall, usually on the first Monday after Labor Day (an SMU record, I believe)—most often presenting works for both harpsichord and organ. Even more memorable, however, were the Dallas visits by Gustav Leonhardt, with whom I had studied during two of the summer academies that took place in Haarlem, the Netherlands. During the second of these summer events I found lodging in nearby Amsterdam and made the daily trip to Haarlem and back by train. Since it was my second workshop with the maestro we were on quite friendly terms, and would often meet at the train station to travel together to the daily masterclasses.

Having already introduced the Dallas arts community to the marvelous playing of Isolde Ahlgrimm, it was my great pleasure while I was dean of the Dallas Chapter of the American Guild of Organists to engineer a harpsichord recital as part of the chapter’s annual recital series. Leonhardt was the first, and he was my houseguest during several of his visits to “Big D.” Among the many memories from these visits were the rather erotic actions of my female dog Hunda Maris, who welcomed the great artist by trying to hump his leg. A second memory of that first attempt at hospitality came in the form of the thank you note in which “Utti” (as he was known to his close friends) displayed the sharp wit for which he was well known; the missive read, “Thank you for Kirkman and Breakfast,” referring to the fact that his bed was constructed above the 1797 Kirkman fortepiano that was stored in a wooden case below.

Leonhardt’s visit to SMU occurred in the form of a recital and masterclass during the festivities when SMU bestowed on him his first honorary doctorate. As part of my twelve years on the SMU faculty senate I had the opportunity to suggest that GL was a most worthy recipient. The senators and university president agreed, so one of the proudest moments of my life was reading the citation that I had written for the bestowal of the honor at Commencement. And thus it was that Leonhardt henceforward always addressed his missives to his “Doktor-Vater,” perhaps the first time in history that a student was father to the teacher?

Another exceptional artist who graced the AGO concert series was Don Angle, a graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston and a valued coworker in the shop of William Dowd. In my opinion Don was master of the best harpsichord technique of any American player, and his dexterity, largely in his performances of jazz and very audience-friendly repertoire, was absolutely mesmerizing in its ease and beauty. It was another honor to house such a fine artist as a houseguest on Cromwell Drive. Both Angle and Leonhardt are no longer with us in person, but each has left an unforgettable legacy in their recordings and the ease with which they presented great music each time they were seated at the keyboards.

Graphic artists also have influenced my life, and especially important for my submissions to The Diapason, were the caricatures created so expertly by Jane Johnson. Who could forget her illustrations for “A Letter from J. S. Bach,” or her drawings of Mozart, Purcell, the Harpsichord Murder Mystery Reviews, and even her affectionate drawing “Fast Fingers,” which accompanied several of my columns, as well as providing the graphic for my note pads? I miss her nearly every month when I attempt to find just the right illustration for my submission. She, too, has passed away, but is lovingly remembered, and sorely missed.

Another group of import must be “my” composers. Among the living I especially prize Gerald Near who composed both his impressive Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra and his equally lovely Triptych for Harpsichord for me. The Concerto filled a need for such a work to be featured at an AGO national gathering in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Gerald conducted the premiere in the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall, and the necessity was that it had to be for an instrument other than organ, since that hall did not have a “king of instruments.” He also conducted that first performance heard by 1,600 auditors. I have never before or since felt so loved by an audience that applauded for such an extended ovation. Many of the listeners commented that it was the best of the new works at that AGO event. And, to my knowledge, it was not performed again until SMU’s magnificent student orchestra under the direction of Maestro Paul Phillips (who was a freshman clarinet major at SMU when I arrived there) gave an even better performance of this major addition to the repertoire. Equally composed for a concert celebrating an art exhibition, the Triptych has been an audience favorite during many concerts. When I decided to move the aforementioned summer harpsichord workshops to venues other than the New Mexico home base, one of the places to be selected was in Alsace. The townspeople who attended the first of the concerts there requested a repetition of Near’s work at the festive reception that concluded the summer event.

Equally important are works from Glenn Spring, Rudy Davenport, Neely Bruce, Vincent Persichetti, and others. I refer you to Frances Bedford’s magnum opus Harpsichord and Clavichord Repertoire of the Twentieth Century (page 597).

So, if I do not draw this article to a close it will be next year before we know it! So many influential persons to mention, such as Ivar Lunde (who edited and published Letters from Salzburg when Indiana University Press sent it back to me with the note, “We do not publish memoirs.” Ivar came to the rescue with his Skyline Publications, Eau Claire, and even provided the beautiful photo of Salzburg (where he, too, had studied) for the front cover and even, bless him, created the index, not one of my favorite tasks as I remember from the previous publications. Also, I should remember Alfred Rosenberger, whom I first met in Haarlem, who became the European “manager” who arranged many organ recital dates for me and who shared his love of Amsterdam and Dutch culture freely. Another departed figure is the fondly remembered best friend of early Dallas days, Sue Stidham, who joined forces with me to establish the Limited Editions series of house concerts that is now in its thirty-sixth year! And I should thank the magnificent organist André Marchal, blind from birth, who, during a visit to Oberlin, graciously gave me an organ lesson on early French music and who was able to criticize some of my fingerings simply by listening to the results, and who would correct those fingerings by gently placing his hands over mine. The list could go on and on.

However, I should like to end these words of gratitude with a return to my first organ teacher, Mabel Zehner. As her gift to me when I graduated from Crestline High School, she presented me with a copy of the first edition of The Bach Reader by Hans David and Arthur Mendel (W. W. Norton, 1945). I had not consulted it for many years until recently when I opened the tome to re-read what she had inscribed on the title page: “To Larry Palmer—one of the most gifted organists it has been my privilege to teach. God gave you a wonderful talent and may you use it for a lifetime of Success and Happiness.” Signed: Mabel Zehner, May 17, 1956. While I do not think I deserve her highly complimentary remarks, it reminded me of her great kindness and the joy that I felt when I could please her at my lessons. She was truly an inspiring teacher, and I am grateful that I have lived long enough to share her memory with others. As teachers and human beings it behooves all of us to reflect and give thanks for those who have guided and aided us on our career paths and who have helped us to achieve what we are able to do.

§

The photograph of Mabel Zehner is provided courtesy of Ashland University Archives, Ashland, Ohio, and Archivist David Roepke (also an organist, whose mother studied with Miss Zehner). I wish also to give credit and thanks to my SMU colleague and friend Pam Pagels, Music and Arts Librarian at the Hamon Arts Library, for making the connection with Mr. Roepke.

Larry Palmer

Christmas gifts:
a few suggestions

Writing this column in mid-October means that I have not given much thought to Christmas shopping. Instead I have spent most working hours planning programs (and then practicing) for the second in our annual schedule of three house concerts, enjoyed the opening nights of Dallas Opera’s fall season by attending Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Bizet’s Carmen, and preparing for the first-ever wedding to take place in our spacious music room. (After all, with a pipe organ and seating for forty guests, why not?)

However, now as you read these December Harpsichord Notes, I hope they may contain some suggestions that could be of help for all who have yet to make gift selections. So, tally-ho and read on!

• Eagle-eyed subscribers to The Diapason will have seen the notice of J. William Greene’s new compact disc Christmas Ayres and Dances in the Here & There section (page 12) of our October magazine. The disc (Pro Organo CD 7281) comprises Greene’s performances of his genial compositions played on a Gerrit Klop continuo organ and a single-manual harpsichord by Peter Fisk. The clever Baroque-style arrangements of familiar carols and secular songs of the season are sure to delight the ears of music-loving friends. Among my personal favorites is Greene’s Bell Fugue (based on Jingle Bells), sure to be a hit. For colleagues who are fellow keyboardists, why not purchase not only the compact disc, but also the printed scores for these captivating arrangements? All three volumes are available from Concordia Publishing House. Bell Fugue is the final piece in Volume II.

• An earlier publication by Edwin McLean (born 1951) bears the title A Baroque Christmas—Carols and Counterpoint for Keyboard (New Interpretations of traditional seasonal pieces for piano, organ, or harpsichord), issued in 2003 by Frank J. Hackinson (FJH Publishing Company), Fort Lauderdale, Florida. With works somewhat easier than Greene’s compositions, McLean offers a single forty-page volume of charming and useful pieces equally suited for all the instruments mentioned in his introduction, including digital keyboards. Eleven tunes are set: Noël Nouvelet, God Rest You Merry, Greensleeves, Coventry Carol, Kings of Orient, Pat-A-Pan, In dulci jubilo, Veni Emmanuel, Tempus Adest Floridum, Stille Nacht, and Adeste Fideles. I have used most of these for church and concerts and continue to enjoy them very much.

• Now for something completely different: author Mark Schweizer has made a slight deviation from the fourteen murder mysteries that began with The Alto Wore Tweed and progressed through the various vocal ranges (The Tenor Wore Tapshoes, The Diva Wore Diamonds, The Organist Wore Pumps, etc.), a series of novels that has captivated so many of us.  A fifteenth story, also set in St. Germaine (Schweizer’s fictitious small town in North Carolina), is replete with the familiar cast of characters headed by Hayden Konig, police chief and organist/choirmaster extraordinaire of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. But in the shorter novella titled simply The Christmas Cantata the author deviates slightly from the others in his series. It is available in the original paperback format (95 pages) or as a more recent hardback edition, both of which present exactly the same text, but the second edition is in a slightly smaller book format that requires 128 pages—more elegant and better, perhaps, for stocking stuffing. ’Tis a gentle tale, still filled with hilarious episodes, musical references, and sly liturgical guffaws: available from St. James Music Press (SJMP Books). You may wish to include a special handkerchief in that stocking, for the denouement is beautifully touching and may bring tears to the eyes. Also, a warning: this author’s mysteries are habit forming; I sincerely doubt that anyone can read just one! In a surprise email, received as I write this essay, Schweizer announced the fifteenth, and final, St. Germaine mystery: The Choirmaster Wore Out. Definitely a brand-new entry for acquiring and giving away!

• Thanks to my mother I began listening to operas at a tender age. Each Saturday afternoon in fall and winter, beginning when I was nine years old, my ears would be focused on our radio speaker as Mom and I listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in our small town of Corsica, Pennsylvania. I am grateful for this background as well as for my grade- and high-school experiences as a wind player, especially the ones after I began to play oboe. That, plus the choral directing experiences that were part and parcel of my graduate work and early professional engagements taught me a great deal about phrasing and making the music “breathe” in natural ways. I firmly believe that every keyboardist needs this type of training to become a better musician. Later these experiences engendered many a humorous moment in organ or harpsichord lessons when I would stop a student to suggest some necessary phrasing here or there, and often end with the comment, “I still can’t believe that you pay all this tuition for me to remind you to breathe and count!”

As an aid to the development of vocally informed musicality I would suggest as a Christmas gift, both to “self” and “others”—and a most unusual one, at that: ARC, which is the title of the Decca Records debut CD performed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. This artist (who has been selected as “Vocalist of the Year” by Musical America) has put together a program that demonstrates his self-admitted 50% love of Baroque music and 50% devotion to contemporary works. On this magnificent disc Costanzo performs works by Philip Glass and George Frideric Handel. This modern mastersinger of both styles convinced me of the beauty to be found in each, and I have listened repeatedly, enraptured by his musicality. Costanzo made his Dallas Opera debut on October 30, 2015, in the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera Great Scott. Since that magical evening I have been following Costanzo’s brilliant career. His artistry, both as singer and actor, earns him my highest recommendation and admiration.

• Another Handelian who could bring tears to the eyes with her exquisite vocalism was the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who began a musical career as violist, but soon was discovered to have one of the great female voices of the twentieth century. Sample her exquisite singing on the Avie CD 30, released in 2002—only four years before her untimely death at age 52. Lieberson is ably abetted by the Baroque specialist, conductor, and harpsichordist Harry Bicket, playing an Italianate single-manual harpsichord by Douglas Maple (after Zenti). This recording is another musical experience that just might be life changing.

• August 16, 2019, will be the sixtieth anniversary of Wanda Landowska’s death. The “mother of us all,” this pioneering harpsichordist still resonates through her recordings and through the memoirs contributed by her devoted friends (and occasional detractors). I was incredibly fortunate to have known Mrs. Putnam Aldrich, known universally as “Momo,” Landowska’s first private secretary during the years they spent together at Wanda’s “Temple of Music” in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, France. I became acquainted with Momo through our mutual friend Richard Kurth, a fellow Ohioan who has spent most of his career teaching French and Spanish at the Kamehameha School in Honolulu. Richard, who drove Momo to the local Alliance Française meetings, actually accomplished our mutual introductions, and thus resulted my invitation for Momo to tell her account of those years for The Diapason. For many subsequent winters I spent my Christmas holidays visiting Richard and Momo in Hawaii (a tough choice, but someone needed to do it), interviewing Mrs. Aldrich year after year and taking notes that eventually found their way into Harpsichord in America: a Twentieth-Century Revival.

It was during one of these remarkable meetings that I, quite brazenly, asked Momo who might inherit a caricature of Wanda that was prominently displayed in each of Momo’s dwellings (she changed addresses several times during these years). That query remained unanswered until the last day of that year’s Honolulu sojourn when Momo handed me a wrapped package, approximately eight and a half inches by six and a half inches. I knew without looking what was enclosed in that brown paper, and I said, “You must keep this! I know what it means to you.” But Momo insisted, and, I confess, I did not argue with her for very long. The caricature, an unsigned watercolor, is widely considered to be the finest of all such drawings, especially in its perfect details.

When I arrived home in Dallas I immediately had some photographs made, and sent them to Momo so she would not be without that beautiful image. Eventually I loaned a professional high-decibel print of “my” Wanda portrait to Martin Elste for his 2009 Berlin Landowska Symposium and Exhibition, and it served as the signature work of that event. It also is published in Dr. Elste’s magnificent book Die Dame mit dem Cembalo [The Lady with the Harpsichord] (Schott Music, 2010, Order Number ED 20853; ISBN 978-3-7957-0710-1). The full-color print of the caricature may be found on page 98. The book’s text is entirely in German except for the four pages from the memoirs of American harpsichordist Irma Rogell: “Walks with Wanda,” on pages 146–150. Even if one is not fluent in German the comprehensive range of Elste’s illustrations (many of which are photographs that he travelled far and wide to make) places this deluxe 240-page volume at the top of the list as the most comprehensive pictorial history of our beloved “Mamusia.”

• I was tremendously moved by Martin Pearlman’s generosity with his Armand-Louis Couperin Edition, made available for all of us to download and print, free of any copyright restrictions. In a recent email Martin included a shorter URL for accessing his gift: http://tinyurl.com/ALCouperin. I pass it on to our readers as per Martin’s suggestion, and wish you, once again, a happy downloading experience.

It is with a small, Pearlman-inspired gesture that I offer my Christmas gift to our readers: free use of my Landowska caricature. Like Martin, I urge you to use it wherever and whenever you wish, copyright free. And, I would ask only that you use the credit “Larry Palmer collection, gift of Momo Aldrich.”

• As my final Christmas suggestion: if you have a friend or acquaintance who does not subscribe to The Diapason, why not present that lucky person with a year’s subscription to this journal? It would benefit your friends and help to ensure that the magazine continues in its beautiful, full-color format for many years to come. What could be nicer? And twelve times a year you make your friend(s) happy­—and perhaps more involved in your musical world.

Larry Palmer

Le Clavecin Mythologique

Le Clavecin Mythologique is the title of L’Encelade compact disc EL 1801, the most recent recording by harpsichordist Anne Marie Dragosits playing the Pascal Taskin harpsichord from 1787 now in the Prof. Dr. Andreas Beuermann Collection of the Museum for Art and Commerce in Hamburg, Germany. Ms. Dragosits studied with Wolfgang Gluxam in Vienna and with both Ton Koopman and Tini Mathot at the Royal Conservatory in Den Hague (Holland). She currently holds the position of harpsichord professor at the Anton-Bruckner-Conservatory in Linz, Austria.

For this recording she has created a fascinating program comprising seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music by Pancrace Royer, Jean-Philippe Rameau, François Couperin, Jacques Duphly, Jean-Henry D’Anglebert, and Antoine Forqueray—thoughtfully organized to form a narrative program based on ancient tales beginning with the sweet singer Prometheus and culminating with the king of the gods, Jupiter.

The playing throughout is musically satisfying, historically stylish, and technically agile. The instrument delights in each selection, and be sure to take the time to enjoy the seemingly endless reverberation as the musical bombast of Jupiter slowly dies away at the disc’s conclusion. This historic harpsichord’s resonance is nearly as long lasting as that of my own remarkable Richard Kingston Franco-Flemish double.

The historic harpsichord by Pascal Taskin is one of the builder’s reworkings of an even older instrument made by the Flemish master Andreas Ruckers. Taskin is usually credited with the invention of the Peau de Buffle stop for the harpsichord, just one of multiple attempts to add more dynamic possibilities to an instrument that was facing stiff competition from the newly popular fortepiano. The use of soft buffalo hide (thus the name) to stroke the strings rather than pluck them as did the usual quill plectra offered an additional gentle, quieter tonal possibility for music that seems to require it. Taskin also added pedals for changing the registers while playing, and he thus provided an historic example for the early twentieth-century revival instruments by Pleyel and the many other builders. Indeed, my 1968 harpsichord by William Dowd was the American builder’s penultimate two-manual instrument to be equipped with pedals for controlling the registers, and this instrument, like the Taskin, has four registers: 8′, 8′, and 4′ provided with the usual “quill” plectra (at this time replaced with plastic rather than bird-provided material), plus the added 8′ Peau de Buffle stop. I still own that instrument, but do not hear or use it very often since I placed it with a friend decades ago when I ran out of space in my spacious music room, as my inventory of keyboard instruments surpassed six widely varied examples. The Dowd may be heard, complete with buffalo hide, on my first Musical Heritage Society vinyl disc, The Harpsichord Now and Then, where it was particularly useful for the Busoni Sonata, one of the earliest compositions for the revival harpsichord. To hear such similar gentle tones on the current compact disc, reference Track 8: Royer’s La Sensible to be moved by five minutes of gently haunting music.

Editor’s note: see www.encelade.net or www.amazon.com to order the disc. Tracks are available for listening at www.youtube.com. For more information on Anne Marie Dragosits, visit http://dragosits.org.

A major instrument collection

The historic harpsichord featured on the compact disc and a recent rediscovery of an email sent from London to my partner Clyde Putman in July 2007 reminded me that I have been meaning ever since then to call attention to Alec Cobbe’s historic keyboard instrument collection housed at Hatchlands, an historic estate in Surrey.

Harpsichordist Jane Clark Dodgson arranged for me to perform the first of the two harpsichord recitals that I have been fortunate to play at London’s Handel House Museum—a truly memorable experience to make music on a beautiful Bruce Kennedy instrument in the very room where Handel composed his immortal oratorio Messiah. She also made arrangements for me to join Claire Hammett, an American harpsichord technician who served as tuner from “about 2000 to 2016” for the Alec Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, as she drove to the National Trust House in Surrey to prepare an instrument for a recital.

Quoting from my email of July 12, 2007: Yesterday at the country house Hatchlands was far more exciting than we had planned: I was allowed to tag along on a demonstration given by the collector of the instruments, Alec Cobbe, for The Friends of Wigmore Hall. He is quite unique in that he not only purchases all these fantastic rare keyboards, but he is able to play them quite well, too. Among the early keyboard gems are a Bach-period clavichord (Hoffmann) and a virginal from Whitehall Palace (marked with the royal accession initials from Charles II’s time, so it was most likely tuned weekly by Henry Purcell). Other instruments include ones by Kirkman, Shudi, and the newest prize, a Ruckers made into an expressive double by Henri Hemsch, fully decorated and absolutely gorgeous in sound, just restored to its playing condition.

Got to play a bit on each of them. And you should see the place—statues everywhere (mostly plaster casts of Greek and Roman originals). A nice lunch with the Collection staff and the day’s recitalist Robert Wooley, and all this was followed by a wonderful extended drive with Claire down into the Surrey countryside . . . absolutely magical.

For a summer visitor to the United Kingdom, if one is interested in historic keyboard instruments, Hatchlands is not to be missed. The catalogue lists five harpsichords: Zenti, c. 1622; “probably English,” c. 1623; Andreas Ruckers, 1636, reworked by Henri Hemsch, Paris, 1763; Jacob and Abraham Kirkman, 1772; Burkat Shudi and John Broadwood, 1787. Also of interest: a virginal by John Player, 1664; a spinet by Ferdinand Weber, 1780; and a clavichord by C. G. Hoffmann, 1784. Other non-plucked keyboard instruments include two organs: a chamber instrument by John Snetzler, 1754, and a larger organ by J. W. Walker and Sons, 1903.

Cobbe’s interest in pianos that have composer-connections has led to at least 28 accessions, of which several highlights are the 1836 Graf owned by Gustav Mahler, and instruments known to, and sometimes signed by, such outstanding figures as Frédéric Chopin, Edward Elgar, Franz Liszt, Sigismund Thalberg, Charles Dibdin, and Jane Stirling. There is even a Zumpe square piano from the 1770s autographed by Johann Christian Bach.

The collection is open to visitors from April to October. Since the stately home serves as the private domicile for the Cobbe family, the hours for public viewing are limited from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Claire Hammett

Since the October 2018 death of my partner Clyde, I have been at a loss when asked to suggest a tuner-repairer of harpsichords in the Dallas Metroplex. Thus, when I contacted Claire for information about her current status with such matters it was helpful to receive this information: Claire and her family have returned to the United States from London and now are settled in Florida, from whence she reports “few engagements as tuner/repairer.” However, she and her new Kevin Fryer harpsichord are scheduled for the Birdfoot Festival in New Orleans at the end of May, so she commented, “that is a proper job like I used to do six times a week rather than once in a blue moon.” She is also on the schedule of this year’s Historic Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA) conference in Huntsville, Texas (May 12–15), where she will lead a workshop, “Introduction to Quarter-Comma Meantone Tuning” from 1:00–1:50 p.m. on the final day of the meeting. One could purchase a day pass and, if so moved or merely curious, also attend my 25-minute paper, “Scarlatti’s Cat in London, Vienna, and Texas” from 10:00–10:30 a.m. on the same day.

Claire also wrote that she is available to fly out to repair and refurbish harpsichords or tune for recordings or festivals (“birthdays, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs . . . whatever”). She may be contacted via email at [email protected]. More information is available on her website: www.harpsichordservices.com.

Sally Gordon-Mark

Born in New York City, Sally Gordon-Mark has French and American citizenships, lives in Europe, and is an independent writer, researcher, and translator. She is also a musician—her professional life began in Hollywood as the soprano of a teenage girl group, The Murmaids, whose hit record, Popsicles & Icicles, is still played on air and sold on CDs. Eventually she worked for Warner Bros. Records, Francis Coppola, and finally Lucasfilm Ltd., in charge of public relations and promotions, before a life-changing move to Paris in 1987. There Sally played harpsichord for the first time, thanks to American concert artist Jory Vinikour, her friend and first teacher. He recommended she study with Huguette Dreyfus, which she had the good fortune to do during the last three years before Huguette retired from the superieur regional conservatory of Rueil-Malmaison, remaining a devoted friend until Huguette passed away.

During Sally’s residence in France, she organized a dozen Baroque concerts for the historical city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, worked as a researcher for books published by several authors and Yale University, and being trilingual, served as a translator of early music CD booklets for musicians and Warner Classic Records. She also taught piano privately and at the British School of Paris on a regular basis. In September 2020 she settled in Perugia, Italy. In May 2023 Sally will be the guest editor of the British Harpsichord Society’s e-magazine Sounding Board, devoted entirely to the memory of Huguette Dreyfus. For more information: www.sallygordonmark.com.

Read Part 1 here.

You had to be crazy to want a career. It was impossible to see what the possibilities were.

—Huguette Dreyfus¹

In 1950 Huguette Dreyfus was finding it difficult without a harpsichord of her own, a situation making it expensive to practice—a crucial problem in her case, since, like others in her generation, her training had been on the piano. She had just discovered the harpsichord in her first year (1949–1950) of Norbert Dufourcq’s music history class at the Paris Conservatory, then located on rue de Madrid. That year, he focused on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and Pleyel loaned him a harpsichord for his classroom. He also created an unofficial harpsichord class at the conservatory, taught by his former student, Jacqueline Masson. To practice, Huguette rented a rehearsal room upstairs in the Salle Pleyel concert hall, at 8:00 a.m. several days a week.²

During Ruggero Gerlin’s summer classes at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, which she attended from 1953 through 1959, Huguette was always among the few students who were invited to perform a short program in the end-of-term concerts in September. Finding time to rehearse on the class harpsichord, a contemporary one with pedals by an obscure Italian maker named Cella, was difficult because it was shared by all of Ruggero Gerlin’s students, so Huguette resorted to practicing discreetly during the Italian siesta from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.³

Huguette conferred with her mother Marguerite and her brother Pierre, knowing that it would be too expensive for the now fatherless family⁴ to purchase a new harpsichord. Her brother asked a friend who frequented auction houses to let him know if a double-manual harpsichord ever came up for sale. Nothing happened for a long time. Then in late 1957, Pierre found what was purported to be an original eighteenth-century Nicolas Blanchet double-manual harpsichord in a shop specializing in eighteenth-century French antiques—probably Maurice Bensimon’s at 5 rue Royale in Paris. Little was known about the instrument, except that it had once been in the collection of Raymond Russell. It was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in June 1956 to Pelham Galleries in London, and according to the gallery owner’s son, Alan Rubin, Bensimon was a client of Pelham’s.⁵

On January 16, 1958, Huguette flew to London to accompany violinist Madeleine Massart in a concert the next day at the French Institute. She may have met with Raymond Russell, because his address is noted in her agenda. Before flying home on January 25, she went to see the instrument collections at Fenton House and the Victoria & Albert Museum, for which Russell had recently written the catalogs. It is not known when her harpsichord was delivered or from where, but her agenda reveals that in March she was frequently in touch with Marcel Asseman, the harpsichord technician for Pleyel, Erard, and the Salle Gaveau. He worked on the instrument, but it is not known what he did.⁶ In an interview, Huguette admitted that when she first touched its keys, after having played Pleyel and Neupert harpsichords, she wondered how she would ever be able to play “the beast.” It had plectra made of plumes, making for a different attack. Huguette adapted to it: “This historical instrument was a good teacher for me. It completely changed my touch.”⁷

Huguette entered the international music competition in Geneva, Switzerland, in March 1958, and soon after gave her first radio interview on a French program, La Discothèque classique, which aired on July 29. She went to Siena as usual for her summer classes with Ruggero Gerlin at the Accademia Chigiana, and from there went directly to Geneva. 

The 14th Concours d’exécution musicale opened on September 20, 1958. Huguette arrived there alone and exhausted, and she could not speak at all as she had laryngitis. Seven harpsichord contestants had signed up—four women, three men. The first round was on stage with no audience. The players were separated by a curtain from the jury, composed of Isabelle Nef, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Thurston Dart, Ruggero Gerlin, Aimée Van de Wiele, Eta Harich-Schneider, and Eduard Müller. (With the exception of Dart and Müller, with whom Gustav Leonhardt had studied for a year, all had been students of Wanda Landowska.) The players were instructed to remain still and silent. Jill Severs, also a contestant, remembers that one of the men wore velvet slippers for playing the pedals. Huguette played a Bach prelude and fugue on a Neupert. Its sonority disturbed her, and she realized during the fugue that a coupler had been left only halfway in position. But, by listening to the music and playing with total concentration, Huguette maintained her composure.

The second round took place on October 1 at 2:00 p.m. in the conservatory auditorium. Huguette, the only remaining contestant, played before a paying audience a program of obligatory pieces by Bach, Scarlatti, and Rameau, finishing with three Mikrokosmos pieces by Bartók. The last round, a public recital, took place on October 3 in Victoria Hall:

Miss Dreyfus (France), harpsichordist, opened the round with the Concerto in G Major of Haydn, which seemed Lilliputian in the nave of Victoria Hall. Meticulous performance, faultless register, sometimes too weak given the surroundings, and a little prosaic over all.⁸

There was no winner in the harpsichord competition that year, but Huguette did receive a silver medal. Nonetheless, she was invited to perform in a concert of laureates in her hometown of Mulhouse on October 10, 1958. She received 10,000 francs for her performance of the Haydn Concerto in G. The fact that she did not win first prize did not diminish the attention that her distinction in the competition brought her. In her biography, the silver medal eventually metamorphosed into a gold one or a first prize, possibly at the insistence of her record labels because of the crucial importance given to credentials in France. 

Huguette continued traveling to Siena for summer lessons with Gerlin through 1959. On September 13, 1955, she and Jill Severs, who, like Huguette, had been coming since 1953, performed a four-hand piece written by Ferenc Sulvok, a Hungarian composition student at the Academy that summer. Another classmate was Kenneth Gilbert; the three became lifelong friends. Normally, the courses were limited to four summers, but on July 16, 1957, Gerlin wrote to Huguette, “Two words quickly to let you know that I obtained authorization from the Academy to bring back my former students to continue taking my courses for an unlimited number of times!”⁹ He invited her and Sylvie Spycket to attend and said he was happy to have acquired a Neupert harpsichord for Bach’s music, which delighted the students, too, because the Cella had been a difficult instrument to play expressively due to its hard touch.¹⁰

At the time, the important harpsichordists in France were Pauline Aubert, Marcelle Charbonnier, Marcelle Delacour, Marguérite Roesgen-Champion, Aimée Van de Wiele, and Robert Veyron-Lacroix, who played Pleyel or other contemporary harpsichords. Copies of historical harpsichords were not being made then in France. In October 1959, Huguette started meeting regularly with Michel Bernstein, founder of Valois Records and later Astrée, which specialized in early music played on period instruments. It was her former professor of musical aesthetics, Alexis Roland-Manuel, who had told Bernstein about Huguette. She invited Bernstein to her apartment so she could play her own harpsichord for him. Bernstein was dazzled; he had never heard a period harpsichord before. He asked her to sign a contract with Valois, one of the first record labels—along with Erato, Harmonia Mundi (France), and Archiv—founded after the first vinyl LP record had been invented in 1948.¹¹

There were reservations on Huguette’s part as to whether she was ready to record, but Gerlin encouraged her to go ahead and would help her by giving her extra lessons in Paris. On February 3, 1960, Huguette gave her first solo performance on the radio in the ensemble Norbert Dufourcq created, Histoire et Musique, composed of interested musicians and former students. With an immense and inspiring enthusiasm, Dufourcq presented the program: 

We and our young artists are hunting for early music manuscripts, hidden among thousands of documents, to get them published. What a joy it is for us! . . . I have tried to impart to my students the noble objective of reconstituting and reviving this music from texts that we have to transcribe.¹²

This is exactly what Huguette did; she played six pieces by D’Agincourt, which had not been published since 1733. 

Between April 26 and 28, 1960, Huguette recorded her first LPs for Valois in Copenhagen on a Bengaard harpsichord with pedals, which was felt by Michel Bernstein and Huguette to have the closest sound to a period one. François Couperin’s Pièces de clavecin, Livre II, sixième et onzième ordres (Valois, MB 798) was released in 1962 and received the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque de l’Académie Charles Cros, the first of many prizes her albums would receive.

Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin by Jean-Philippe Rameau (Valois, MB 920) followed that year. The LP received a favorable review in one of France’s leading newspapers:

On an excellent modern harpsichord of Danish fabrication, Huguette Dreyfus plays the Nouvelles Suites de pièces written for the harpsichord by J.-P. Rameau. Huguette Dreyfus is one of the rare contemporary virtuosos who know how to draw out of the harpsichord all its resources of sound and plunge the listener into the true atmosphere of compositions from the past.¹³

Huguette made her first appearance on national French television, resplendent in an eighteenth-century dress and wig, on March 30, 1961. In the program, Voyage au pays de la musique, she played La Poule by Rameau.¹⁴ Soon afterwards, Huguette played her first solo recital on April 7, 1961, in Lyon’s Salle Witkowski and received an enthusiastic review in a local newspaper:

Miss Huguette Dreyfus gave to her audience (more numerous than had been hoped for) a beautiful harpsichord recital (of music by Chambonnières, François Couperin, J. S. Bach, and Scarlatti). . . . Miss Dreyfus revealed herself as the most exquisite and energetic of harpsichordists. Faultless technique, quivering sensitivity, elegant style, and continual accuracy.¹⁵

In 1962 she met a harpsichord maker from Grasse, Claude Mercier-Ythier, who had just opened a shop and studio in Paris specializing entirely in the sale and rental of harpsichords, À la corde pincée, the first of its kind in France since the French Revolution. It was a pivotal meeting for both, as their amicable professional association would last over forty-five years. At the time, he represented the harpsichord manufacturer Neupert, a competitor of Pleyel that gradually stopped making harpsichords by the early 1960s. Claude restored a 1754 Henri Hemsch that would become Huguette’s favorite performing instrument for concerts, summer workshops, and recordings. When Huguette toured in Europe, he often traveled with her, bringing an instrument, as Huguette never traveled with her own. Claude enjoyed telling the story of having saved Huguette on tour, when the man next to her grabbed her skirt under the dinner table and would not let go when she got up to leave.¹⁶

Huguette’s career was blossoming that year; she was concertizing in France and abroad, and her first records were successful. During her long and rich career, Huguette would tour the United States, Canada, South America, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Japan, and most of Europe. She would perform in concerts and on recordings with other illustrious artists and conductors, including friends and former students: András Adorján, Marie-Claire Alain, Olivier Baumont, Nadia Boulanger, Pierre Boulez, René Clemencic, Alfred Deller, Ruggero Gerlin, Marie-Claire Jamet, Christian Lardé (with whom she recorded twelve albums), Lily Laskine, Yannick Le Gaillard, Maxence Larrieu, Gaston Maugras, Eduard Melkus (ten albums), Yehudi Menuhin, Pierre Pierlot, Rafael Puyana, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Luciano Sgrizzi, Henryk Szeryng, Luigi Fernando Tagliavini, and Blandine Verlet.

The ensembles she performed in regularly included the Quatuor Instrumental de Lutèce with flautist Jacques Royer, oboist Emile Mayousse, and cellist Jean Deferrieux; Norbert Dufourcq’s ensemble, Musique et Histoire; the Paul Kuentz Orchestra; and the other principal Parisian orchestras: L’Orchestre Lamoureux, Le Collegium Musicum de Paris, directed by Roland Douatte, the bassoonist Fernand Oubradous’ chamber orchestra, and an ensemble that gave private concerts, Fiori musicali, created and conducted by Robert Dalsace.

On May 24, 1962, she and Christian Lardé played with Yehudi Menuhin in an ensemble directed by Nadia Boulanger,¹⁷ in a performance for the Singer-Polignac Foundation.¹⁸ It may be that Irene Kedroff, whose vocal class Huguette had accompanied for several years at the Ecole Normale de Musique, had recommended Huguette; she had been the soprano in a quartet directed by Nadia Boulanger for many years before World War II. On another occasion, in an undated letter to Huguette from her office in the Fontainebleau castle, Miss Boulanger invited her to perform in a tribute to architect Louis Le Vau by the Institut de France: “It would give me a particular pleasure to organize this concert with the gracious participation of a small group of eminent artists.”¹⁹

Huguette’s collaboration with orchestra conductor Paul Kuentz (in his 90s, he is still conducting his orchestra in Paris) gave another boost to her career—over a period of ten years, she was a featured soloist in his orchestra, going on her first tour in 1962. They performed throughout France and Belgium. The Festival Franco-Allemand de la Jeunesse took them to Cap d’Ail on the Côte d’Azur for three days in December. While Paul Kuentz’s orchestra was rehearsing, Jean Cocteau was decorating the outdoor amphitheater. In a friendly gesture, Cocteau designed the cover of their program and posed for a photograph with the orchestra.²⁰

In 1952, a Dominican priest named Henri Jarrié²¹ was appointed chaplain to the artists’ colony in Nice, where he knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, and others. His love of music would have significant consequences for Huguette’s career in the 1960s. Being an amateur musician and composer, he supported the Fédération internationale des Jeunesses musicales by helping to organize concerts, such as those by the Kuentz Orchestra, and conference-concerts. In 1961, Father Jarrié became vicar of the Dominicans living in Saint-Maximin-La-Baume. The thirteenth-century Basilica of Saint Mary Magdalene in Saint-Maximin is home to a magnificent and historic organ with 2,692 pipes, constructed in the late eighteenth century by Jean Esprit Isnard, a Dominican brother, and his nephew, Joseph. Father Jarrié and Dr. Pierre Rochas undertook raising the funds necessary for its restoration. Philippe Bardon, one of the students in Huguette’s final class at the Conservatory of Rueil-Malmaison, now holds the title of organist at the basilica in Saint-Maximin.

The convent²² had been put up for sale by the Dominicans, and during the period in which it remained unsold, Father Jarrié opened its buildings to a summer academy and concerts. Dr. Rochas and others created the l’Académie d’été de l’orgue classique français, and Father Jarrié, with the collaboration of Bernard Coutaz, the founder of the record label Harmonia Mundi (France), created a series of concerts in the cloisters, which evolved into the annual festival, Les Soirées de musique française, the first opportunity for the modern French public to hear Baroque music.²³ Huguette regularly performed there, as did Eduard Melkus, Christian Lardé, Marie-Claire Jamet, and other eminent artists. In the audiences were intellectuals and artists who flocked to the convent every year, and this certainly helped her and others become known in the 1960s. Alfred Deller, signed to Harmonia Mundi, and Huguette performed a program of English Baroque music one year. In 1971, Father Jarrié left the priesthood to become a music teacher, giving Huguette a harpsichord piece that he had composed for her, Trois plaisanteries.²⁴

In 1963, Huguette and the Kuentz orchestra toured Canada and the eastern United States, performing mostly for universities. In the orchestra the year before, she had met flautist Christian Lardé, and they formed a trio with Jean Lamy on viola da gamba. They performed in concerts and recorded for Valois, with frequent appearances on radio and television. Their LP, Pièces de clavecin en concerts by Rameau (Valois, MB 798), released in 1963, received the Grand Prix de l’Académie du Disque Français and the Grand Prix des Discophiles in 1964. By then, Huguette had already recorded fifteen albums released on the labels Valois, Erato, and Harmonia Mundi, the latter two acting as distributors for Valois.²⁵

In 1965 Huguette met Eduard Melkus²⁶ during her first summer of teaching at the Summer Organ Academy of Classical French Music²⁷ in Saint-Maximin-La-Baume, which also offered workshops in harpsichord, flute, and chamber music. During the 1950s, the Viennese violinist had been one of a group of Austrian musicians and composers who, under the influence of Josef Mertin, professor at the Vienna Musikhochschule, created the Originalklangbewegung or “original sound movement.” This group also included René Clemencic, founder of the ensemble Musica Antiqua in 1958. The movement would influence Gustav Leonhardt, then a professor at the Vienna Music Academy, and Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt, all of whom Melkus, also a professor at the Academy, introduced to Mertin. 

Eduard had come to Saint-Maximin with his friend Lionel Rogg; the two were recording an LP together, Sonates galantes, for Harmonia Mundi, which had a recording studio in the convent. Huguette passed by during a rehearsal, they introduced each other, and she and Eduard ended up improvising. Out of this spontaneous combustion came a professional partnership that spanned over forty years and a close friendship that would last for the rest of Huguette’s life. They would regularly perform together in France, Austria, and abroad. She would often be a guest soloist with his chamber orchestra, the Capella Academica Wien, performing in Vienna’s prestigious Albertina Museum concert hall. Among the thirteen albums they recorded together were the “Mystery Sonatas” by Biber and award-winning LPs of Haydn trios that were recorded in Vienna, Huguette playing a historic fortepiano from Paul Badura-Skoda’s collection.²⁸

In 1967, the head of Valois Records, Michel Bernstein, launched a promotional campaign for his agents, announcing:

Since the artist’s career is becoming more and more international, and (her) records have received excellent reviews everywhere and are retransmitted on national radio, we are organizing a month of a Promotion Huguette Dreyfus, which will last from May 1st until the 31st 1967. Everyone knows Huguette Dreyfus counts among the four or five greatest harpsichordists in the world, alongside Kirkpatrick, Puyana, Malcolm and Ružicková. And on a purely national level, there’s no artist her equal.²⁹

That year, Huguette’s career was soaring, but the happiness that its success brought her was shattered by the sudden premature death of her beloved brother Pierre on May 2. He was only forty-six, and they had been very close. A surgeon, he had a sudden heart attack during an operation. Six months later, her mother passed away at the age of sixty-five. Huguette carried on with her busy schedule, but it took a long time for her to recover from her grief. She would spend the rest of her life in the apartment on Quai d’Orsay by Pont Alma that her father had purchased for the family in 1949.³⁰ At some point, she made the difficult decision not to marry, convinced that marriage was incompatible with a career, perhaps impossible if she were to have children.

The 1970s would be the apogee of the harpsichord renaissance in France. “Standing room only” was commonplace. People would wait two hours in line and still be content if they could stand in the back when all the seats were taken.³¹ The City of Paris hosted the annual Festival Estival de Paris and the semi-annual Concours international pour clavecin. In 1974, the Forum international du clavecin, sponsored by the Festival Estival, took place in Paris, featuring harpsichord makers and artists; among the soloists were Huguette, her former student Blandine Verlet, and Rafaël Puyana.³² Huguette sat on the jury of the concours many times, along with other distinguished harpsichordists like Kenneth Gilbert, Zuzana Ružicková, Scott Ross, and Rafaël Puyana.

In 1971 she left Valois Records to sign with Archiv, Eduard Melkus’s record label, which had released their recording of the Biber sonatas. He encouraged her to do so. One of her motives was her belief that she would have the chance to record Bach’s keyboard pieces in their entirety.³³ But it was her friend Zuzana Ružicková who had been given that opportunity by Erato.³⁴ Michel Bernstein would always remain bitter about what he considered her betrayal.³⁵ Huguette maintained that she had not abandoned him, that it was a reasonable decision in light of the evolution of her career. Valois, a small company, did not have its own distribution network and could not afford her the same benefits as Archiv, the early music division of its parent company, Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, Deutsche Grammophon being its classical division.

In May 1973, Huguette performed in the Fifth International Harpsichord Festival in Rome. It was a prestigious event; its concerts in the Basilica of Saint Cecilia were given by some of the twentieth century’s greatest harpsichordists: Huguette, William Christie, Gustav Leonhardt, Colin Tilney, and Kenneth Gilbert. The following year, Henryk Szeryng personally telephoned Huguette to invite her to go on tour with him in Italy in May. Because Szeryng was an international celebrity, Huguette was billed as his accompanist, and his agent accordingly booked her into an inferior hotel. Szeryng was outraged and covered the expense himself for her to have a room in his own hotel.³⁶

Huguette’s student and eventual close friend, Yannick Guillou, was on holiday in Venice then, and they all enjoyed meals and museum visits together. The last day, Guillou went to the hotel to say goodbye while Huguette and Szeryng were preparing to leave for Rome. Someone at the reception desk told Guillou that Szeryng wanted to see him: “I went up and found this master whom I’d venerated since my youth (. . .) dressed only in his shoes, black socks, underpants, and a towel around his neck.”

Szeryng dictated a press release to him, announcing that the City of Venice had made him a Commanditore, telling him to deliver it the next morning. Time was passing, and an irritated Huguette knocked impatiently on the door to remind Szeryng that they had a train to catch. When Guillou, peeking around the door, said she could not enter the room because Szeryng was in his underwear, she replied, “I saw worse horrors during the war,” pushed the door wide open, and strode in.³⁷ They would perform together on many other occasions and record an album of Handel and Corelli. Szeryng told Melkus that he considered her the best harpsichordist in France.³⁸

Huguette and Szeryng were invited to play in the seventy-fifth anniversary concert season at Wigmore Hall in London along with Arthur Rubinstein, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Julian Bream, and other illustrious performers. In June 1977, they performed a program of Bach sonatas; she played Bach’s Partita Number 2 for her solo. Lionel Salter in a review for The Gramophone, wrote: “Her phrasing is musical, her touch varied, and her registration, while subtly varied, is an object lesson to harpsichordists with fidgety feet or who are afraid to let the music speak for itself!”³⁹

Huguette was considered France’s pre-eminent harpsichordist. In 1978 Alfred Deller wrote to Huguette, asking if she would be interested in their performing together in a duo, to which she responded enthusiastically. Over the years, they had concertized and recorded together, and he had joined her in Saint-Maximin to give masterclasses. Deller proposed a ten-day tour in the 1979–1980 season.⁴⁰ Unfortunately this project never came to fruition; he passed away on July 16, 1979.

The Japanese flautist Miwako Shirao Rey made Huguette’s acquaintance while studying with Christian Lardé at the academy in Saint-Maximin. In the summer of 1978, Huguette called on her for assistance when the director of the group Tokyo Solisten came to Paris to discuss Huguette’s agreement to perform in concert with them in Japan the following year. Miwako acted as translator and helped to make the arrangements.⁴¹ The invitation had originated with Mariko Oguino Oikawa, soloist in the ensemble, a friend of Miwako’s and Huguette’s first Japanese student. She had come to her for private lessons between 1971 and 1974, while studying at the Paris Conservatory with Robert Veyron-Lacroix. Mariko accompanied Huguette to Japan in 1979 to assist her.⁴² The concert with Huguette and the Tokyo Solisten took place on April 23, and Huguette gave a solo recital the next day. On April 29 Huguette and the Tokyo Solisten recorded three concerti of Johann Christian Bach for Columbia Records; the CD was released by Denon. 

Huguette returned to Japan in 1981 to give a concert on April 10. A reviewer remarked: “Elegant and audacious, and full of liveliness at each moment, her music satisfied us with the charming sound of the harpsichord.”⁴³

In 1982 Huguette signed a contract with the Tokyo-based Denon label for whom she would record over thirty LPs and CDs.⁴⁴ She stayed for a month in 1983, spending time with the Oikawa couple and their child Reine, who later studied intermittently with Huguette and is now a harpsichordist in Japan.⁴⁵

Sometimes in her travels and concerts, the inevitable mishaps that plague every traveling artist occurred. Once on a makeshift stage when she stood up to take a bow, she found that one of her spiked heels had caught in the planks. Smiling, she slipped her foot out, took her bow, and walked off stage, with one foot on tiptoe. Another time, during a performance of a Bach concerto for four harpsichords, the page turner of the player next to her turned the page too soon, causing the player to lose her place and stop. With presence of mind and a practiced gift for improvisation, Huguette played her colleague’s part while maintaining her own until the woman could resume playing. When Huguette traveled to meet Eduard Melkus, his favorite gift from her was cheese, a gift that Zuzana Ružicková and her husband, composer Victor Kalabis, also appreciated. So Huguette never left home without a selection of fine French cheese. Once, however, her suitcase got lost by the airlines, and she had to wait a couple days in fear that her one evening gown would turn up, reeking of rancid cheese. Fortunately when the suitcase arrived, she found that the cheese had been successfully shrink-wrapped, so her gown was safe.⁴⁶

Huguette continued to give concerts until, for reasons of health, she stopped in January 2009, after seventy years of performing in public, something she had loved to do since childhood. The day of a concert, if she was out of town, she would visit a museum. Otherwise, she would devote her attention to the upcoming concert and rehearse in the morning.

I believe a lot in the relationship between music and other forms of beauty and of art. If it is possible, before a concert, I stop concentrating on the technical execution for a moment and look outside the music for other sources of beauty—an art exhibit, architecture, a landscape, contemplation that is good for the soul and for musical interpretation. It is like giving water to a flower for it to bloom easily.⁴⁷

When she stepped onstage, she could immediately feel if the audience was receptive to her or not, or just indifferent. “The artist has to make contact without forgetting the music.”⁴⁸ When she did make contact, she rejoiced in the “success of love” even if she was dissatisfied with her performance.⁴⁹ As she told harpsichordist Richard Siegel, “If you touch someone in the audience, that’s what counts.”⁵⁰ Love, on many different levels, was what she wanted to communicate when she played. It was as if she were on fire, as if she could hardly contain the music’s energy inside her. You knew she was not thinking of individual notes when she played; she had already studied the music thoroughly, mastering its complexities, its style. It was as if she were the conduit for electric, irrepressible currents of music, flowing from a distant inexhaustible source. Whether Huguette played a Scarlatti sonata rapidly and energetically or pieces by François Couperin—La Ménetou in a measured and tender way, and Les Lis naissans very delicately—her performance was always expressive.

Expression is essential no matter what the period of music—expression that touches the soul. Expression in early music approaches speech, the expression
of language.⁵¹

She could play expressively because she was entirely present in whatever she did, giving her total attention. This stemmed from the love and respect she had for life, its creatures, and creative expression . . . a mentality that would also make her an extraordinary teacher.

To be continued.

Notes

1. Huguette Dreyfus, radio interview, Musiciens pour demain, France Musique, July 1979. 

2. Agendas, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Site Richelieu, VM FONDS 145 DRE-3 (5).

3. Huguette Dreyfus, interview by Denis Herlin, December 8, 2008.

4. Huguette’s father, Fernand Dreyfus, was struck and killed by a car in front of their apartment building on October 10, 1951. (Interview with Françoise Dreyfus, July 25, 2016.)

5. Alan Rubin, email to author, March 14, 2021.

6. Jean-Claude Battault, interview with author, Cité de la Musique, Paris, March 9, 2022. 

7. Huguette Dreyfus, radio interview, France Musique, July 29, 1996. 

8. Journal de Genève, No. 232, October 4–5, 1958.

9. Ruggero Gerlin, BnF, VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (16).

10. Jill Severs, interviews with author, August 8, August 24, and September 6, 2022.

11. Michel Bernstein, Qobuz e-magazine, Les souvenirs de Michel Bernstein (VII), “Être toujours à la pointe,” https://www.qobuz.com/be-fr/info/magazine-actualites%2Fchers-disparus%2Fles-souvenirs-de-michel-bernstein32073.

12. Norbert Dufourcq, Concerts de Paris, radio program, March 31, 1960, Inathèque de France (INA), BnF, site Mitterand, Paris.

13. Colette Arnould, La Libération, Friday, May 12, 1961. 

14. Inathèque de France (INA), ID Notice CPF86642589, BnF, site Mitterand, Paris.

15. Le Dauphiné Libére, April 12, 1961.

16. Claude Mercier-Ythier, interview with author, August 5, 2016.

17. BnF VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (19). Nadia Boulanger was one of the founding members in 1921 of the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau and its director from 1948 until her death in 1979.

18. Concert program in author’s collection. The Princess of Polignac was born Winnaretta Singer. Her father, Isaac Merritt Singer, the sewing machine manufacturer, bequeathed her a fortune, and she became the predominant patron of the most important creative people in Paris, primarily musicians, before her death in 1943. The foundation still sponsors concerts, symposiums, and other cultural events.

19. BnF VM FONDS 145 DRE-1 (19).

20. Paul Kuentz, interview by author, Paris, France, 2017. 

21. Arcade Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, October 2007. https://www.yumpu.com/fr/document/read/5783360/henri-jarrie-arcade-paca. 

22. The convent is now a hotel. The term “convent” applied originally to the structure that housed priests in orders—not monks who lived in monasteries—and nuns. It is only in recent history that the meaning changed, applying only to nuns.

23. The festival in Aix en Provence had been created in 1948, but there was no emphasis on early music.

24. Conserved in the departmental archives of the Var region, No. 64 J 1-171-64 J 25.

25. “Huguette Dreyfus, Complete Discography,” compiled by Sally Gordon-Mark, https://www.dolmetsch.com/huguettedreyfusdiscography.htm.

26. In his nineties at the time of publication of this article, Eduard is still conducting his orchestra in concert.

27. The Academy summer workshops still exist, but only organ classes are given. 

28. Eduard Melkus, conversations with author from 2016 to 2022. 

29. BnF, site Richelieu, VM FONDS 145 DRE-3 (12). 

30. Françoise Dreyfus, op. cit.

31. Mario Raskin, interview with author, October 17, 2022.

32. Information from programs in the author’s collection.

33. Eduard Melkus, op. cit.

34. Ružicková was the only harpsichordist to have recorded Bach’s work in its entirety. A box-set of all the discs was released by Warner Classics in 2016.

35. Michel Bernstein, Qobuz, op. cit. 

36. Eduard Melkus, op. cit. 

37. Yannick Guillou, letter to author, March 2, 2017.

38. Eduard Melkus, op. cit.

39. Lionel Salter, The Gramophone, BnF, VM 145 FONDS DRE-5 (3).

40. Alfred Deller, letter to Huguette Dreyfus, BnF VM FONDS DRE-1 (3).

41. Miwako Shirai Rey, email to author, October 21, 2022.

42. Miwako Shirai Rey, phone interview by author, August 16, 2022. 

43. Shigeru Oikawa, interviews by author and written account, dated September
25, 2017.

44. “Huguette Dreyfus, Complete Discography,” op. cit.

45. Aozawa Tadao, Ongaku-no-Tomo. April 1981.

46. Anecdotes related by Huguette Dreyfus to the author.

47. Huguette Dreyfus, interview, Corriere dell’Umbria, February 18, 1999. Translated from Italian to English by the author.

48. Huguette Dreyfus, interview, France Musique, July 29, 1996.

49. Huguette Dreyfus, interview, 1979, op. cit. 

50. Richard Siegel, phone interview, summer 2021. 

51. From author’s notes of conversations with Huguette Dreyfus.

Larry Palmer

2019 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival features a harpsichordist

The genial genius who founded and organizes the annual East Texas Pipe Organ Festival in Kilgore, Texas, engaged a brilliant young artist to present a recital on Wednesday, November 13, as the first music on what happened to be my birthday. John Walthausen, a name new to me, opened the musical festivities of this mid-festival day with a splendid recital, the first half of which was played on my 1987 Willard Martin Saxon double instrument. When Lorenz Maycher telephoned to ask if I knew of an available German-style instrument I responded, “Yes, I was intimately familiar with an owner, and, yes, I would be happy to loan it to the festival for the recital.” Since a tornado had rocked the part of Dallas in which I live several weeks earlier causing immense damages tallied in the millions of dollars—including some lesser but still dramatic ones to my house—I had not intended to travel in November, but the harpsichord addition to the program as well as a Harold Lloyd silent movie to end that Wednesday schedule roused my interest, and I had decided, with the transportation help of a kind neighbor, to spend that one day in the organ capital of East Texas.

It was a pleasure to hear such a well-chosen program that the artist began by playing a magnificent rendition of J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D Minor. It was a performance that I believe might have been greeted with favor by Isolde Ahlgrimm (what higher praise could I offer?). Following that work with Polonaise in C Minor by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and two sonatas in D major by Domenico Scarlatti (K. 490, Cantabile, and K. 119, Allegro)—with superb control of the fiendishly difficult cross-hand top-of-the-keyboard notes—made for an exciting and jubilant conclusion to the first half of the concert.

Equally masterful was the ensuing organ half of the program, played on Roy Perry’s own instrument, Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company Opus 1173. It was thoughtful programming to follow the all-Baroque first half with an all-Romantic second half: Prelude and Fugue in G Minor by Brahms, two of the Sketches for the Pedal-Piano, opus 58, by Schumann, and a completely masterful rendition of Liszt’s magnum opus, Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen Zagen.

I was especially delighted to learn that the New York-born Walthausen was a fellow Oberlin alumnus (2011, only fifty-one years after I graduated) who furthered his education at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, studying organ with Olivier Latry and Michel Bouvard, following that with a master’s degree in historical performance from the Schola Cantorum of Basel, Switzerland, where he studied harpsichord with Jörg-Andreas Bötticher and organ with Lorenzo Ghielmi. An amazingly widespread series of concerts performed all over the world followed for Walthausen, including a year in Japan as organist in residence at the Sapporo Concert Hall in Hokkaido. He is currently organist and choirmaster of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Glenmoore, Pennsylvania. I, for one, look forward immensely to hearing this young artist again—and soon.

John’s inclusion of Friedemann Bach’s composition encouraged me to play through the complete set of twelve such pieces (found in my music library in six folios published as part of the Hausmusik series of the Oesterreichischer Bundesverlag Wien, on paper now as old as I am it seems, and equally crumbling, perhaps). Among these, several seem more suited to the fortepiano, but a goodly number of the earlier and shorter pieces sound wonderful on the harpsichord, and I encourage their inclusion in future recitals, both by John and the rest of us in the harpsichord community.

2019 Harpsichord Notes: topics and page numbers

January, page 8: Harpsichord Notes in The Diapason: A bit of history

February, pages 12–13: Jane Clark: “D’un goût nouveau:” The influence of Evaristo Gherardi’s Théâtre Italien in Francois Couperin’s Pièces de Clavecin

March, page 11: A fascinating book by Beverly Jerold, Music Performance Issues 1600–1800

April, pages 12–13: The Diapason Harpsichord columns in history part 2: front-page features

May, page 11: CD review of Le Clavecin Mythologique; A major instrument collection (Hatchlands, Surrey, UK) and Claire Hammett

June, page 11: The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord; Replica of George Washington’s harpsichord returns its sounds to Mount Vernon

July, page 11: Scarlatti’s Cat in London, Vienna, and Texas

August, page 11: From A to Z Harpsichord Notes: A duo and The Harpsichord Diaries; Twentieth-century harpsichord concertos; One Hundred Miracles by Zuzana Ru˚žicˇková (with Wendy Holden)

September, page 11: Program planning

October, page 13: Celebrating Herbert Howells

November, pages 12–13: Giving thanks from A to Z, part 1

December, page 11: Giving thanks from A to Z, part 2.

§

As we begin another year I have several questions for our readers. 1) Have any of you played one or more of the Friedemann Bach polonaises? 2) Does anyone know of a pedal harpsichord for sale (a separate unit with an organ-like pedalboard that is placed beneath the regular harpsichord comprising one or two manuals—the pedal unit consisting of independent registers? John Challis built several of these, most famously one for E. Power Biggs, and I am seeking such an instrument for a current student of mine). Meanwhile, best wishes for an exciting 2020 and the many musical adventures that surely lie before us during the coming months.