100 ❧ chapter seven
not yet foresee that I would one day fi nd still more with which to disagree and
which I would wish to amend.
I fi rst played the Variations for a music class when a senior at Harvard in
1931, then for the fi rst time in public in Berlin in January 1933. My fi le of
surviving programs indicates at least ninety-nine performances through June
- I had twice recorded them, once in 1952 and again in 1958. All these
performances were without repeats. The performances varied and the inter-
pretation changed, but over the years certain notions remained constant—for
example, the desire to present the work as a complete whole and to respect
the rhythm and proportions with which its component parts are arranged. But
in later years I became conscious of vestiges of my early days of playing, and
observed that I was still doing many things which I would no longer allow a
pupil nor do myself on making a fresh approach to the work. Many of these
observations were brought about by a greater awareness of and control over
the relations between articulation, with its vocabulary of detachments and
legato, and rhythmic characteristics. The decision to stop playing the Variations
for a while, however, was precipitated by the occurrence of something I had
always dreaded, but hitherto avoided; a burst of applause, in Munich, of all
places, between the Quodlibet and the return of the Aria.
In the subsequent years, I fi rmly resisted invitations to play the Variations,
and was only provoked to take them up again by my desire to play them on
this occasion and on the occasion of three performances last month in excep-
tionally suitable circumstances. But before deciding in January of this year
whether or not to return to them, I thought the whole work through as I would
now like to play it, and realized that it was possible once again to make a fresh
approach. The most dramatic change, and the feature about which I had pre-
liminary doubts, was the inclusion of the repeats, and indeed of all of them, in
the interest of the symmetry of the work. The recent performances have given
me the reassuring impression that instead of endangering the unity of the span
of the work as a whole, the repeats actually offer the performer greater oppor-
tunity to strengthen it.
The new performances, however, have brought me even further from the
aesthetic and precepts of my youthful edition than I might have expected to go.
Any listener familiar with the edition or with my recordings will immediately
be struck, for example, by the substitution in the Aria of short grace notes for
long appoggiaturas, or by the elimination of double-dotting in the Ouverture.
Changes in conceptions of articulation and of tempo relations among varia-
tions make me thankful that my prescriptions of forty years ago for these fea-
tures were relegated to the preface and not imposed on the text. Registrations
have been simplifi ed to a degree I would never have conceived. They are infl u-
enced by a revival of techniques of harpsichord building which permit a much
greater variety of touch and articulation than hitherto thought possible; and by
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