Chapter Twelve

Bach and

Keyboard Instruments

Once again, the title of today’s lecture is slightly misleading. It speaks of key-
board instruments but with the continued failure to give adequate coverage
to the organ. The organ will be as much neglected today as it has been in pre-
vious sessions. And perhaps a more appropriate title for this afternoon’s talk
would have been “Bach and Keyboard Instruments and US,” or possibly “Bach
and Keyboard Instruments and ME!” The reason for this is that many of the
topics that I wish to lay before you this afternoon are concerned with my own
experiences, and I will simply have to risk the appearance of excessive egocen-
tricity. However, I shall very likely be posing more questions then I answer this
afternoon. Much of what I have been thinking about appears to end with a
question mark rather than with a period.
The reason for associating Bach and keyboard instruments with a certain
amount of autobiography is the realization that forty years ago next May 15, I
fi rst played a work of Bach on harpsichord in public. Twenty-seven years later,
when I recorded that work, I was still using an adaptation of the registration
that I made in 1930. The ups and downs of fashions in Bach playing, of aber-
rations of which I partook richly, are interesting to look back on. I have seen
certain fashions defi nitely abandoned, I have seen certain circles unpredict-
ably close in on themselves, particularly with respect to instruments. I began
with an instrument that, in the light of current aesthetics, would be considered
eminently respectable, and much closer to the eighteenth century then many
instruments I used in the intervening years. This curiously enough was a harp-
sichord which came into my hands out of those of the famous Bach transcriber,
Busoni. It has just been fi xed up again and shows that it can stand up rather
well against the present-day aesthetic; but whereas the instrument is now very
much the same as it was thirty-fi ve years ago when I fi rst acquired it, so many
attitudes about playing it that I believed I had acquired from the stimulation
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