26 ❧ chapter one
a conductor who has studied in Leipzig in Straube’s time, I know that I can
expect a turgid performance in which inarticulate vehemence is substituted
for eloquence, and that after the concert I must endure endless anecdotes
about Max Reger.
When I returned to Berlin, the blockade and the airlift were in full swing.
As I planned, I managed to avoid answering any tendentious questions from
journalists and returned via Frankfurt to Munich, where I boarded the train
for what to me has always been the happiest of all journeys, the crossing of
the Alps in the direction of Italy.
It was the end of July when I arrived in Rome to resume work on my Scarlatti
book. Laurence and Isabel Roberts of the American Academy had invited me
to stay with them in the Villa Aurelia, the house of the director of the Academy,
which, from the top of the Gianicolo,^12 commands a view of the entire pan-
orama of Rome. Indeed, they turned over the entire top fl oor to me as a work-
room, and for that summer and the next, papers and fi les for the Scarlatti
book were laid out on an eighteenth-century gilt marble-topped table and my
typewriter enthroned upon another.
I had much still to digest and work through of the material that I had gath-
ered in the previous summer in Italy and Spain. The results of my documen-
tary research are all embodied in the Scarlatti book, as is the distillation of
my experience of places and surroundings that had to do with Scarlatti. To a
certain extent my experiences in Italy were merely an expansion of what I was
already acquainted with, but my contact with Spain in 1947 was a revelation. I
started by keeping a journal of my impressions, but soon all my energies were
absorbed in the obstacle race of working in Spanish libraries and archives. I
began it [the journal entries], however, on June 22, 1947.
After waiting all night at the Rome airport, shortly after the red sun had
come up over the hills of the Campagna, we took off and disappeared into
the clouds. [I had] a very bad Italo-American breakfast and uneasy sleep until
suddenly, through a break in the clouds, I saw the edge of the Mediterranean
and the coast of Spain. Ribbed and furrowed, with fantastic contortions of
ridges and valleys, the barren landscape seems to bear some resemblance
to the character of the Spanish people and their handiwork. A strange rich-
ness of no color, made up of many colors, a terrifying desertedness of ter-
rain gave me that electric feeling, that hint of terror that I always have in
coming upon Spain. There is a hardness, all the harder for its juxtaposition
with extreme softness, and the cruel burning light of the upper plateaus is all
the more intense for the enveloping mystery of starlit darkness. Mountains
and arroyos, dun-colored villages, the twisted contours of upheaved strata,
the dividing line of the rivers, and probably the beginning of the Tagus, then
- Also known as the Janiculum, the second-tallest hill in Rome.
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