Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 15
playing and with the Italian language. I had carried forward my bibliographi-
cal research, and by the end of my Guggenheim tenure, I had a command
of all the printed material prior to 1800 that purported to deal with perfor-
mance as contained in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Museum, and
the Library of Congress. This was supplemented by material from the Berlin
Staatsbibliothek and by a considerable bibliography of keyboard and chamber
music. In addition to my mission as a keyboard player, I was now equipped to
organize and participate in chamber music in various combinations, to coach
instrumentalists and singers, to lecture or to teach courses concerning the his-
tory and execution of the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and to write several books.
We shall see that in subsequent years only a small portion of this program
was ever carried out. Scholarship gave way to performance, ensemble per-
formance gave way to solo performance, solo performance specialized in a
few composers, most notably Bach, Scarlatti, Couperin, Rameau, and Mozart.
Music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was never given adequate
attention. Teaching limited itself to the harpsichord, and courses in history
and in so-called performance practice were abandoned in favor of close stud-
ies of single composers or analyses of a few selected works. Publications lim-
ited themselves to a few titles and to a few editions. Perhaps this was the price
paid for attempting to do things either well or not at all. But in spite of the
fact that I consider myself a person of some integrity, it can also be said that
the ascendency of performance led to many considerations of expediency,
opportunism, and fi nancial gain, and that certain reiterated activities (like
the endless and endlessly profi table and unsatisfactory performances of Bach
concertos with bad or poorly rehearsed orchestras) obscured the distinction
between performance and prostitution. But I am proud of the fact that since
the Guggenheim in 1937–38, I have never had to call for fi nancial assistance
in preparing any project or publication and that the twelve-year preparation
for my Scarlatti book was fi nanced entirely by my own income from concerts
and recordings.
By 1935 it had become evident that New York must be my center of opera-
tions. I would have preferred Boston, and in some ways I have always consid-
ered myself an exile from there. But the outlook in Boston had its obvious
limits, and I was obliged to take an apartment at 228 Madison Avenue in New
York, which I occupied from September 1935 through January 1937. Already at
the end of 1933 I had written to my family, “How I hate New York!” Except for
minor fl uctuations, these sentiments have hardly changed in the subsequent
forty years.
It can perhaps be said that I hold a grudge against New York for the strug-
gles of my early existence there. What I wrote in 1935 when applying for a
Guggenheim Fellowship—“I live almost entirely on the income from concerts
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