Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

6 ❧ introduction
Transport,” “they produced instruments which left me far more occupied with
expounding their beauties than with concealing their defects and which had a
profound and benefi cent infl uence on my own style of playing.”
This volume includes fi ve additional short essays, the earliest written around
1944 and the last in 1983. Most of these essays have distinctive and interesting
autobiographical elements. They include his perspectives on performing Elliott
Carter’s Double Concerto and on editing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In the essay on
the Double Concerto, he describes his fright upon fi rst seeing the score of this con-
certo and the vast amount of work required to make the fi rst performance possi-
ble. With regard to the essay on the Goldberg Variations, it was startling to read that
he edited the Goldberg Variations for G. Schirmer when he was only twenty-three
years old. This edition is still in print and widely used and referenced. In this
essay, he provides insights into how his views about the Variations developed over
the course of his career. Other essays include his perspective on the equipment
and education required of a musician (he doesn’t spare himself in this assess-
ment); his experiences arranging and performing musical programs at Jonathan
Edwards College at Yale University; and his insights into the performance of the
sonatas of Bach and Mozart for violin and harpsichord. I have included in this
section an illuminating presentation that RK made for the BBC in 1973 regard-
ing the early piano. This presentation, among other things, makes clear that
RK, perhaps unlike some other early music performers, had a love for the mod-
ern piano and its repertoire. He often put on intimate piano performances for
friends, particularly in the music room in France that his friend Annette Gruner
Schlumberger had created for him in her house.
In the archives, I found transcripts of a number of lectures, including two
series of lectures that RK gave at Yale University in 1969–71. Some of the lectures,
including “The Performer’s Pilgrimage to the Sources,” “Style in Performance,”
and “Private Virtue and Public Vice in the Performance of ‘Early Music,’” had
been prepared for publication with a date of fi nal revision indicated, but were
never published. Those three lectures are included in this volume. I excluded
three lectures—“Four Centuries of Keyboard Techniques,” “Composers and
Their Keyboards,” and “Couperin and the French Harpsichord”—because the
frequent interruptions in the text for musical demonstration made them unsuit-
able for print format. The lectures “Bach and Keyboard Instruments” and “In
Search of Scarlatti’s Harpsichord” had some interruptions, but there was enough
textual material to make them acceptable in print format. I have excluded the
commentary that was interspersed between musical demonstrations, because it
was very brief and not really meaningful without the demonstration. These last
two lectures were not revised for publication and are not as polished as the other
three, but they still seemed worthy of inclusion.
I was gratifi ed and surprised by the amount of unpublished material that I
found in the archives, and I wish that I could have included all of the lectures
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