Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

162 ❧ chapter sixteen
revivals of the harpsichord involved instruments of a kind that were more or
less newly invented.
The Bach movement continued to be the major force in the revival of early
music and the polemics launched at German Bach congresses by Landowska
and her activities were certainly a strong infl uence. By now it was clearly the
crusading age of wilderness prophets and of sybilline apparitions, often clothed
in fl owing, shapeless, velvet gowns like the one that Landowska wore for fi fty
years. And until halfway through my career, the practitioners of this crusade
were almost invariably called by journalists “high priests and priestesses.”
In the peacetime of 1918 to 1939, the battle lines of the crusade were con-
solidated and the moral issues that dominate it even to this day become distin-
guishable. The main issue in this battle for purity or for supposed purity was
one of fi delity to composer and to text and all that this may imply, including
the controversial conceptions of what constitutes such a fi delity.
In Germany, the historicism generated by the scholarship of the late nine-
teenth century furnished a powerful motivation to the revival of early music.
Musicology had at least fi fty-years’ head start in Germany over that of other
countries. But there was also the infl uence of the cleanup movement that
later culminated in the “Neue Sachlichkeit.” As the Romantic movement in
Germany ended after the First World War in unparalleled national disaster,
there emerged many symptoms of emotional insecurity that manifested them-
selves in a deep distrust of personal feeling, in a desire for outside authority
and objectivity, all of this accompanied by a very high degree of intellectual
willfulness. One feels all through this period and even today that the concept
has come fi rst and the feeling afterward, that the ideas are worked out in terms
of the premises and not the premises in terms of the ideas.
In England, the motivation toward early music was less scholarly and theo-
retical than social, and served very largely in the interests of a long-standing
tradition of British amateurism. Its offshoots have been responsible for some
of the most horrendous performances of early music that it has ever been my
privilege to hear.
In France, as one might expect, there exists a healthy background of skepti-
cism and cynicism that serves to offset the moralistic implications of the cult of
early music. Governmental institutional education and conservatory musical
training have continued the tradition established at the end of the eighteenth-
century. Except for the activities of Landowska, most of the motive power for
what little interest existed in early music came rather from the French classical
tradition than from the relatively small proportion of that historical romanti-
cism which I have already mentioned.
Much of the moralistic battle that still rages in the world of early music is
based on the discrepancy between ancient and modern methods, between
present-day circumstances and the original context of performance, and
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