in search of scarlatti’s harpsichord ❧ 133
both in this country and abroad, so that all of the normal procedures had to
be avoided, circumvented, and translated into equivalents. I felt, as I said in
my book in the chapter on Scarlatti’s harpsichord, that there were two kinds of
Scarlatti sonatas. There were some in which registration problems didn’t exist,
because the texture and mood of certain pieces were unifi ed throughout.
There was no question of change of color. But I pointed out that there were
many pieces with very strong contrasts and that one might well be justifi ed
under circumstances of modern performance in exaggerating these contrasts.
I did not yet realize, as I was to in subsequent years that, with the advent of bet-
ter instruments, much of this would be possible. It would be possible to arrive
at a certain degree, at least, of effectiveness in performance without sacrifi cing
interpretive faithfulness. There were further recordings—I recorded at least
one pair, I think, I don’t remember if I recorded anything more, in a mixed
album for His Master’s Voice in 1956, but I do remember that there was a great
deal of pedal pushing and that the instrument so little yielded to Scarlatti’s
own written-in textures of chord writings, about which we will talk a little later,
that I felt it was necessary to help it along, which I did, often in ways so subtle
that the average listener doesn’t detect them.
But gradually, all through this period and with the emergence of the Boston
school of instrument building, registrations began to thin out. A certain
stimulus from the instruments, a learning of devices of handling them made
changes in color through registration seem much less necessary in maintaining
the character and intensity of a piece. The most recent Scarlatti recording is
in another mixed album issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1965. There is
not much left except a few manual changes which I no longer make in those
same sonatas. In 1966 or thereabouts, I played my fi rst public performances on
harpsichords with hand stops. This revealed, once they were applied to instru-
ments with possibilities of sonority and touch comparable to those of ancient
instruments, that much of the pedal work that I had used in the past was not
only unnecessary but defi nitely undesirable.
At some period during these years, William Dowd was persuaded to build a
full fi ve-octave Italian-type harpsichord. I used one in one of these lectures two
years ago, a one-manual, two 8-foot instrument. It was not a terribly sonorous
instrument, but I played ten or twelve sonatas on it in Sprague Hall. I felt as I
sat at the keyboard that I was able to draw a considerable variety from it with-
out change of registration, that the fl uctuations that Scarlatti had written into
his chords and part-writing emerged fairly satisfactorily from this instrument,
that I was able to make even dramatic contrasts, not as dramatic as jumping
from part of an instrument to a full instrument suddenly, but it seemed to me
to reinforce all sorts of hunches and hypotheses that I had made about the
characteristics of Scarlatti’s harpsichord. The only hitch in the whole proceed-
ing was that after the performance, several people came to me with very long
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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