in search of scarlatti’s harpsichord ❧ 141
. . . the kind of passage that begins with an outburst and ends up with a con-
ciliation. There are many modern harpsichords on which this is simply not
possible. A Scarlatti harpsichord must refl ect the quality of Scarlatti’s own writ-
ing. There are many modern harpsichords on which you hear exactly the same
texture, whether you’re playing two voices or four or fi ve. You play a two-part
invention and you play one of Scarlatti’s thickest crunches and all you get is a
sort of feeble, chilly, bland sound, which one is tempted to think refl ects the
lack of temperament and imagination on the part of its admirers.
The relation between the composer and an instrument and a performer
that I was talking about in our fi rst lecture of this last series is somewhat dif-
ferent in the case of Scarlatti, I think, than in the cases of some other com-
posers. There is no evidence that, apart from changes in range, the Italian
harpsichord made any conspicuous evolution in Scarlatti’s time or that it
made any changes necessarily that stimulated him as a composer or that
he imposed any particular changes. The one fact is that one can relate the
extension of the range of the sonatas with the probable availability of harp-
sichords having a full fi ve-octave range. But certainly the composer in this
case has, with main force, dominated an instrument. The infl uence in the
history of the instrument on the performer has been much greater. The suc-
cessive changes of style that I’ve gone through have refl ected nearly always
some kind of infl uence on the part of instruments, just as they have refl ected
the discrepancy between faithful interpretation and effective performance.
Instruments that I felt necessary [to use] for conditions of concert perfor-
mance led me astray in Scarlatti in very much the same way that they led me
astray in Bach. I think that this discrepancy exists less with the presence of
infi nitely better modern harpsichords today.
The future, however, of the search for Scarlatti’s harpsichord lies probably
not with the scholar and probably not even that much with the player—I think
now it is squarely in the lap of the instrument maker. A solution has got to be
found for the modern Italian fi ve-octave harpsichord. One that really repre-
sents the implications of Scarlatti’s music has not yet been constructed, but
I think when it is, it will provide the player with a new and rich set of further
revelations.
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