Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

the early piano ❧ 115
craftsmanship, but new problems and new solutions obtruded themselves con-
stantly. I have the impression that only toward the end of the fi rst quarter of
the nineteenth century did the piano begin to work with the effi ciency and
reliability of a good eighteenth-century harpsichord. In short, the early piano
is an instrument from which one can never cease to learn, but it is not an ideal
instrument, nor even one that ever had time to come fully into being on its own
terms. We will never know how much certain composers could obtain from the
instruments themselves or whether their imaginations did not outstrip the pos-
sibilities of the instruments in a manner which later served as a challenge to
instrument makers. But one thing is certain: Mozart, the eminently practical
Mozart, who prided himself on tailoring melodies for the specifi c vocal quali-
ties of his interpreters, even in the greatest hurry would never have performed
in public the slow movements of his piano concertos as they sound today on
the average museum-preserved early piano, or under the hands of an undis-
criminating antiquarian performer.
Judging early pianos is fraught with diffi culty, because of the deterioration
that appears almost irreversibly to take place in the instruments of the piano
and clavichord family. Plucked-string keyboard instruments such as the harp-
sichord seem to lend themselves to much more plausible restoration than
those whose strings are struck and which appear to depend on a much more
complex and less easily reconstituted set of relationships among the various
sound-affecting parts of the instrument. I have never seen an early piano,
whether original or reconstructed, which did not reveal inadequacies in cer-
tain registers, most commonly the treble, that made it impossible to execute
certain works in a musical rather than an antiquarian manner. And I, for
one, would submit to the tortures of a thousand hells rather than be guilty
of playing antiquarian Mozart. On no early piano of my acquaintance is it
possible to make a program for a genuinely musical performance without
subjecting it to the same merciless scrutiny with which an experienced singer
with an aging voice expects to prepare the way for a successful comeback.
Furthermore, the early piano, or its reconstruction, can and often does pres-
ent a collection of rattles and buzzes that even the worst harpsichord can
scarcely rival.
The best lessons to be learned from the early piano are those that stimulate
musical imagination, that reveal possibilities of color and balance, which, once
envisaged, cannot but help affect one’s performance on the modern piano.
One learns the importance of lean transparent basses; the unimportance of
many a bit of treble passage-work that might have been mistaken for exhibi-
tionist virtuosity; the delicacies of articulation and shading; and, above all, the
life-size proportions that never deviate into the miniature or into the colossal,
to mention only a few more of the things which these pathetic wrecks of never-
totally-developed instruments can teach us.
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