Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

122 ❧ chapter twelve
of other instruments since, are entirely different. It is a very interesting check-
point to see how much I could have done thirty-fi ve years ago on this instru-
ment that I did not do.
We have often pointed out here that Bach’s keyboard writing is among the
most unidiomatic of that of any composer for keyboard instruments of the
eighteenth century. The truly idiomatic keyboard passages are rare exceptions.
If one goes through category by category—let’s say, the movements of a Bach
suite—one can nearly always fi nd that there are other composers who have
made the allemande or the courante or what-have-you sound better on the
instrument. There are composers who have written more idiomatic toccatas,
there are composers like Handel whose fugues sound better on a keyboard
instrument then many of those of Bach. And yet, the anomaly presents itself
that the keyboard music of Bach, the least idiomatic of the eighteenth century,
is most responsible for the revival of eighteenth-century keyboard instruments.
True, its virtues are many. Those movements that do not sound as well as a
given movement by another composer are usually very much stronger. Bach is
much richer in long, far-fl ung constructions. He is much less an exclusive pris-
oner of the binary form or the rondo form than most composers. Nobody else
can construct a variety and richness of form in fugues such as Bach. And this,
I think, is the reason that Bach was the main stimulus in the revival of early
keyboard music. Simply the musical content, per se, created such an enormous
prestige that even now one does not care that much how badly it sometimes
sounds. And in recent years, of course, it is impossible, as I have often pointed
out, or very diffi cult, to be allowed to play a program which doesn’t have some
Bach on it. The public demand has grown so universal and so consistent. The
revival of early keyboard instruments and the performance of Bach on them
have thrown the practice of transcription into very ill repute, indeed. The
buffed-up orchestral transcriptions of the 1920s of Stokowski and Respighi still
get played, but much less than they were played forty years ago. Busoni still has
an unjustifi ed and totally undeserved bad name for having done some of the
best and most fertile transcribing of any of the transcribers. There are timid
references to Bach as a transcriber himself. Indeed, he was an inveterate tran-
scriber. We know the activities of his early youth in arranging Vivaldi concertos
and concertos of other composers for keyboard instruments. We know of his
transcribing of his own music, of his transcribing of fi ddle concertos for harp-
sichord, or of unaccompanied fi ddle for organ. One is tempted to go further
than these examples and say that many a fugue of Bach or many a piece in a
more or less abstract vein is in a way also itself a transcription. It is a transcrip-
tion of an ideal music, music heard in the inner ear, and adapted to the exter-
nal consideration of the keyboard instrument. So we have this spectacle of the
eternal transcriber, which is Bach himself, eternally transcribed by other peo-
ple. One can say that a performance or an interpretation of Bach, much less
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