32 ❧ chapter one
would probably take me a large part of the summer. Meanwhile, I had devel-
oped notions of building on my property in Connecticut, and when I found
that I could rent an apartment in a nearby boat club, I decided to devote the
summer to my footnotes and appendices, to the supervision of building opera-
tions, and to the clearing away of trees and underbrush. The instincts of my
pioneer forebears had not altogether died out in me, and my architects Carl
and Diana Granbery (bless them!) had some trouble in dissuading me from
confi ning myself to a hand pump for the drawing of water and to a fi replace
and kitchen stove for heating. Were I not such a poor carpenter, I might even
have tried to build the house myself.
By the end of the summer, the entire manuscript of the Scarlatti book was
ready. But questions had been raised by the publisher who, in 1940, had con-
tracted with me for the writing of the book, and I saw trouble ahead. Blanche
Knopf, who, for twelve years had urged its completion, never bothered even
to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript, and in February 1952, too late to
fi nd another publisher for that year, I was informed that Knopf would not
risk publishing it. Fortunately, I did not obey my fi rst reaction, which was to
throw the whole thing into the fi re. A year later it was accepted unchanged
by the Princeton University Press and published in a format that was happily
designed to conceal many of its ponderosities of scholarship as represented
in the footnotes and appendices. After publication, the success of the book
was such that any risks that had been taken by the publisher were quickly and
amply compensated.
The deadline for returning the galley proofs was June 1, 1953, a fact which
I had not fully realized when I agreed to participate in a performance of The
Rake’s Progress which Stravinsky was conducting in Boston in late May. As a
result, I was faced with the choice of delaying publication for another year or
of correcting the proofs of the whole book in a little over a week. Fortunately, I
began my proofreading at the end of the book, with the catalogue of Scarlatti
sonatas. To my horror, I discovered an error in numbering that affected some
four hundred sonatas and every reference to them throughout the entire book!
Once I had overcome my consternation, I found a way of reducing the quantity
of sonata numbers that had to be changed from four hundred to only about
sixty, and in an area to which I had made few references. But this compromise
is perpetuated in the catalogue by the appearance of small letters after certain
arabic numerals.
The warning was as salutary as it was frightening, and from then on I com-
bined proofreading with checking of every sonata number, never relying on
memory, and with checking of every source and page reference as well as veri-
fi cation of all quotations throughout the entire book. I can no longer under-
stand how I was able to do this in such a short time and with such a maximum
of accuracy as afterward proved to be the case. I worked day and night, and
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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