memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 13
“Schwärmerei,”^2 [was] already to be seen in the pseudo-heroic leading tenors
of Kleist’s Prinz von Homburg^3 or of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe,^4 not to mention
its outright confession by Max in Weber’s Freischütz,^5 “Ich bin schwach, aber
doch kein Bösewicht.”^6 I have always found most reassuring and refreshing the
readiness in Latin countries to dispense with “good intentions.” One is there
on fi rmer ground.
The attraction of Europe was overwhelming. There I had found much of
what I had longed for, and to this day I feel, in many ways, more at home in
Europe than in the United States. I inherited that sense of disparity between
the two sides of the Atlantic that dominated the generations of Whistler,
Sargent, and Henry James, and later of Eliot and Pound. If left free to choose,
I would have made their choice. It is quite probable that without the rise of
Hitler and its attendant disasters I would have been able to make a career in
Europe from the very start. But I cannot regret that my way was a longer and
more diffi cult one.
By the time it became possible for me to choose to live entirely in Europe,
I no longer wished to. Indeed, the necessity of the Jamesian choice had dis-
appeared with the arrival of quick air transportation. I now fi nd myself living
much the same way in the United States as I would in Europe. But when trav-
eling on concert tours, I feel the differences more strongly, because most of
the places to which I am called in Europe offer far more nourishment to my
art-historical and linguistic interests than their counterparts in the United
States. This is perhaps why, in reviewing the events of the past forty years, I
fi nd that a disconcerting preponderance of my memorable experiences have
taken place outside the United States. In the forty-three years since I fi rst
landed in Europe in 1931, there have only been twelve years during which I
have not returned there.
In my application in the fall of 1935 for the Guggenheim Fellowship, I had
laid out the plan for what I conceived to be my life’s work:
My principal function as a musician is the study and performance of seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century chamber music as nearly as possible in accor-
dance with the conception of the composer. Up to now, for the sake of doing
- Excessive sentiment.
- Play by Heinrich von Kleist, written in 1809–10. The play inspired an opera by
Hans Werner Henze, which premiered in 1960.
- Play by Friedrich Schiller which inspired two operas, Giuseppe Verdi’s Luisa
Miller and Gottfried von Einem’s Kabale und Liebe.
- Opera by Carl Maria von Weber, premiered in 1821.
- “I am weak, but I am no evildoer.” RK is not specifically discussing the plays
and operas, but is using the references as reflections of what was happening in
German society.
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