memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 33
when it became impossible to go on, would sleep for three hours, resuming
work at the summons of an alarm clock and continuing for as long as I could.
On the day before the deadline, I drove to Princeton to deliver the manuscript.
Stopping in New York on the way back, I wondered why I was so tired!
Page proofs occupied me for much of the summer, but the day after I deliv-
ered the last installment, I found myself on the stage of Carnegie Hall making
my fi rst movie. I was playing Scarlatti sonatas. Once the music was recorded,
endless repetitions were needed in order to procure an adequate supply of the
shots necessary for the fi nal cutting and editing of the fi lm. The visual perfor-
mance had to be synchronized with the already-recorded sound as it came out
of a loudspeaker. Unlike other performers in this series, I was able to turn off
all the stops of the harpsichord and merely go through the motions of play-
ing without having to suffer the agony of hearing again and again the music
coming simultaneously from two different sources. In addition to my solo fi lm,
I made another one together with Jennie Tourel. I am sorry that these fi lms,
which were directed by Robert Snyder for the Carnegie Hall Corporation, were
never released because of contractual disputes. At any rate, few scholars who
have been buried as long as I was in footnotes, appendices, and proof reading
can hope for the exhilarating cure of being made to feel like a fi lm star.
On Scarlatti’s birthday, October 26, the book was published simultaneously
with the Sixty Sonatas that I had edited for G. Schirmer. Its reception was pro-
foundly satisfying and did much to heal the wounds I had previously suffered.
I had always expected that after this work of some twelve years I would immedi-
ately feel a dramatic release and that with a kind of savage joy I would toss the
microfi lm reader into Long Island Sound and the obsolete notes and drafts
into the fi replace. I spared the microfi lm reader, heaven knows why, but began
the holocaust of several wine cases full of papers that were no longer wanted.
Instead of producing roaring fl ames, my ceremonial incineration only fi lled
the house with smoke as the carbonized paper rose to block the screen that I
had put at the top of the chimney to keep out squirrels. I settled for an undra-
matic carting of all this material to the town dump (recycling was not yet fash-
ionable, and in any case I wished to see the stuff fi rmly destroyed).
The relief I had so long anticipated came only slowly, only in the way that
the pain of an aching tooth does not immediately subside once it is extracted.
But fi nally I realized that I had arrived at the happy state which Emmanuel
Winternitz had predicted to me in Rome in 1949: “Dopo Domenico,
Domenica.”^16 I proposed to savor the pleasures of the long awaited post-
Domenico Sunday, to forget about writing, and to devote myself entirely to
playing. Except for keeping abreast of Scarlatti material, I have hardly since
been concerned with a serious piece of scholarship. Continued experience
- “After Domenico [Scarlatti], Sunday.”
KKirkpatrick.indd 33irkpatrick.indd 33 2/8/2017 9:56:39 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 56 : 39 AM
