18 ❧ chapter one
nor have I the actor’s talent nor the chutzpah to impersonate Bach or Mozart.
Only as an anonymous continuo player at the back of an orchestra could I ever
conceive of any such goings-on.
The historical conception on which Williamsburg is based resembles my old
notion of Renaissance Florence as arrested in time and stripped of all disturb-
ing features. In Williamsburg everything is immaculate. The garbage disposal
is perfect; there is no horse manure in the streets; the town jail is vermin-free,
and if any odors at all can be detected, they are those of Ivory soap. Everyone
from the Governor down to the humblest worker had impeccable taste. In fact
they must all of them have been interior decorators.
Meanwhile, I played the game, for in those days I desperately needed places
in which I could function at all. I oriented the programs toward chamber music
performances in subsequent “Festivals” and spent days and weeks in librar-
ies going through masses of English eighteenth-century editions of music in
various combinations to which the Williamsburg inventories alluded or which
could conceivably have been known in Williamsburg.
I felt the artistic limitations of such an approach to music. They were
worse even than the limitations imposed by the false conception of history
on which Colonial Williamsburg, Inc. is based. What earthly difference does
it make in compiling a program who published the music, or whether or
not it was known in a small town of an English colony? Are we obligated
to make sure that we play as badly as Thomas Jefferson and his daughters?
Furthermore, Williamsburg differs from many historic sites in Europe in that
none of this music originated there. For that matter, no music of any real
quality whatever originated anywhere during the eighteenth century in what
is now the United States.
I became conscious of the anachronism that really good music represented
in that tight little island of restored Williamsburg. In November 1941, as I sat
listening to the Budapest Quartet playing the Mozart C-major “Dissonance”
Quartet, I thought inwardly, “If these walls could understand what is going
on, they would burst, and if the authorities understood what was here being
said, they would forbid the performance.” But I felt that survival of the con-
certs depended on maintaining some sort of a documentary connection with
Williamsburg in the eighteenth century, and my increasingly frequent excur-
sions beyond the pale were all scrupulously explained by some kind of dou-
ble-talk in the program notes. From 1938 to 1946, I organized twenty-nine
programs, in all of which except one I played myself, and since each program
was done twice, the total came to fi fty-eight concerts performed in the ball-
room of the Governor’s Palace.
In 1940, I was appointed to the faculty of the Yale School of Music, an
association which has lasted until the present day. I welcomed the affi liation
with Yale, not only because of the opportunities it offered for teaching and
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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