124 ❧ chapter twelve
of art accessible as much as possible to the listener or the beholder. And the
work involved in doing this is often far greater than that done by the creator
in producing his masterpiece. It costs most of us to achieve a really fi rst-rate
performance of a fugue of Bach a great deal more time in concentration and
effort than it probably cost him to write it down in the fi rst place or to impro-
vise it. We have to work from the other end, we have to work from the words
back, so to speak, into the original poetic idea. It is like deciphering a diffi cult
poem. We are faced on the page with dead letters and words which have to
be brought back to life. This, for the poet or the composer, was no problem
at all, because the problem was to make them stay still long enough to be set
down on paper. He had to, in certain measure, kill his inspiration rather than
stimulate it.
But I think these considerations of desired quality and intensity of perfor-
mance must also affect the evaluation of or confrontation with instruments.
Let us try to approach the question of the instruments known to Bach. We
know actually very little about them. There are a few inventories. We know that
he had harpsichords of various kinds. As usual, we know much more about the
organs that he played than we do about his harpsichords. There are some indi-
cations that he had clavichords. We know a few instruments of Bach’s time—
but very, very few. And we are faced constantly with a lack of evidence in any
attempt to trace back to historical sources Bach’s instruments. This attempt
is complicated in the case of a nonidiomatic keyboard writer like Bach, who,
except for certain pieces designated specifi cally for organ or harpsichord, did
not designate which category of keyboard instruments many of his pieces were
intended to be played on. And so much of his keyboard writing, even if not
actually transcription, is in a way a kind of transcription from the ideal. One
really wonders when attempting to fi nd the historical instrumental source for
Bach’s keyboard whether such a source ever existed really, whether Bach ever
cared enough about the specifi c relationship between his compositions and
his instruments for a search, even if we had an abundance of evidence, ever to
reward us really adequately. Are we not seeking something that perhaps never
existed? Perhaps we can say it existed in some sort of ideal sense, but then we
are thrown on the dangerous waters of legend, intuition, and arbitrary subjec-
tive judgment.
It is perfectly clear from Frank Hubbard’s book that the national school of
harpsichord building about which least is known is the German school. There
the eclecticism of German keyboard music did not make for specialized char-
acteristics, and the number of instruments that have survived do not allow us
to draw any but the most tentative general conclusions.
I think I have actually seen nearly all the surviving German instruments that
are in public hands. Many of them are not playable, many of them have been
falsifi ed by traditions stemming from the infamous “Bach harpsichord” of the
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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