4 ❧ introduction
that stretched from the wings to the harpsichord. He walked at a normal
pace, so one barely noticed that he was touching the string as he moved.
When I attended one of his last major public performances in the United
States at the fi rst Boston Early Music Festival in 1981, I also found it a very
emotional experience to see him walk on stage.
In addition to being an extraordinarily accomplished musician, Kirkpatrick
was fl uent in French, German, and Italian and read widely in these languages.
He used his knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese to translate documents for his
biography of Scarlatti. He was also a collector of books and prints, and his house
was fi lled with works by artists such as Dürer and Rembrandt. After Kirkpatrick
died in 1984 at the age of 72, his art collection was given to the Yale University
Art Gallery. The Gallery mounted a special exhibition of these works in 1985.
Kirkpatrick’s papers were bequeathed to the Music Library at Yale University.
According to the library, they include over one hundred twentieth-century works
for harpsichord, many either dedicated to or commissioned by Kirkpatrick. They
also include source materials, notes, and correspondence related to the various
editions and translations of his biography of Domenico Scarlatti.^2
In 2014, I published a compilation of Ralph Kirkpatrick’s letters^3 that pro-
vided a portrait of my uncle through his correspondence. When researching
that volume, I concentrated only on his letters, but a suggestion from harp-
sichordist Gavin Black led me to look at RK’s unpublished papers in the
archive at the Yale University Music Library. I knew that RK had addressed
only his younger years in his autobiography, Early Years,^4 but I was unaware of
how much interesting, unpublished autobiographical material existed in the
archives. Reviewers of Early Years lamented that he had only addressed his life
from childhood until the end of his studies in Paris in 1932, and they indicated
that it would be interesting to hear more about the rest of his career. The mem-
oirs included in this volume cover the rest of his career from 1933 to 1977 and
provide, among other things, fascinating descriptions of his travels to Germany
after World War II and his trip to South Africa in 1957, which generated a good
deal of publicity. The memoirs begin in Salzburg, where he was appointed to
teach at the Mozarteum at the young age of twenty-two. The list of individu-
als who came through his studio at that time is extraordinary, including such
fi gures as Eugene Ormandy, Clifford Curzon, Francis Poulenc, and Lili Kraus.
He performed there with a young conductor named Herbert von Karajan. He
- Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1953, updated reprint, 1983).
- Ralph Kirkpatrick, Ralph Kirkpatrick: Letters of the American Harpsichordist and
Scholar, ed. Meredith Kirkpatrick (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, 2014).
- Ralph Kirkpatrick, Early Years (New York: Peter Lang, 1985).
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