Chapter Six
Elliott Carter’s
Double Concerto (ca. 1973)
In the late 1950s I suggested to my old friend and schoolmate Elliott Carter
that the enormous possibilities of a combination of piano and harpsichord
had not yet been fully explored. I was particularly interested by the way in
which the harpsichord tends to take over all that is linear and melodic, leaving
the background and mass effects to the piano. But since my musical think-
ing is primarily determined by the harmonic and tonal language that reigned
supreme from the era of basso continuo through Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre,^1
the examples I contributed were hardly stimulating in relation to Carter’s own
rigorous tone-row style.
It must have been a year or two later when Elliott told me that he had been
commissioned by the Fromm Foundation to write a piece for performance at
the Congress of the International Musicological Society in September 1961
and that he planned to make it a double concerto for harpsichord and piano,
and to add to each of these instruments its own group of strings and percus-
sion. When he asked me if I would be willing to play the harpsichord part in
the fi rst performance, I immediately promised my services. Charles Rosen was
to play the piano part and Gustav Meier to conduct.
Whatever calm there had been in my own bucolic activities and unhurried
meditations of the summer of 1961 was completely shattered by the arrival early
in August of the fi rst installment of Elliott’s Double Concerto. Never have I been so
frightened by a piece of music. It presented every conceivable diffi culty of deci-
pherment, ensemble, and balance. I had heard vague rumors about a patently
insuffi cient number of rehearsals—less than half a dozen—and when I had
- Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (Leipzig: Universal Edition, 1911).
Translated by Roy E. Carter as Theory of Harmony (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978).
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