introduction ❧ 3
acclaimed biography of Scarlatti, published in 1953. In this book, he also cata-
logued Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas, and this catalogue has become the stan-
dard source for identifi cation of the sonatas. In 1953, Kirkpatrick’s edition of
sixty Scarlatti sonatas was published by the noted fi rm G. Schirmer, and he also
recorded these sonatas for Columbia.
In 1956, Deutsche Grammophon, the German recording company, selected
Kirkpatrick to record all of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach
(except the works for organ) for its Archiv label. He recorded most of the
works on the harpsichord, but recorded the entire Well-Tempered Clavier on
both the harpsichord and the clavichord. He fi nished the project in the late
1960s. A number of the recordings were received with great acclaim, particu-
larly the recordings of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
In 1964, RK was invited to inaugurate the Ernst Bloch Visiting Professorship
at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, he presented a number
of lecture-demonstrations on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and over a period of
years he edited these lectures for publication. They were fi nally published by
Yale University Press in 1984.^1 In the preface, written in February 1984, just two
months before his death, he credited a number of musicians who had infl u-
enced him and whom he admired, including Diran Alexanian, Artur Schnabel,
George Szell, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, Kirkpatrick continued to perform con-
certs throughout the world, playing at many of the major European festivals
and performing with a number of orchestras in the United States and Europe.
He was selected to perform at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center shortly after
its opening in 1969. He also gave a number of concerts at Lincoln Center’s
Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall), including a Mozart program in
which he played the harpsichord as well as an eighteenth-century pianoforte
and a modern piano. He had health issues in the early 1970s that caused him
to cancel a number of performances. He became totally blind in 1976, and
he handled this with remarkable courage and lack of self-pity; within a year,
he had the will and energy to resume his performing career. It is particularly
painful to imagine how diffi cult the loss of sight would have been for some-
one who had studied fi ne arts and visited museums and acquired art from
the time he went to Europe in the 1930s until the end of his life. His visual
memory was extraordinary, however, and even after he went blind he could
remember and describe in detail works of art he had seen throughout his
life. His musical memory was also exceptional, and he was able to learn new
music from tapes and continue performing even after the onset of blindness.
Many concertgoers found it moving to see RK come onstage using a string
- Ralph Kirkpatrick, Interpreting Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: A Performer’s Discourse
of Method (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).
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