44 ❧ chapter one
prepared little recitals which I played for the intimate circle of friends and guests
and which I have no intention of ever producing in public.
The sensation of again becoming a musical amateur after a long life of dis-
cipline as a professional is a curious one, both delicious and tantalizing. With
all the know-how and musical insights of the professional, on an instrument
on which one has not regularly practiced and performed, one becomes sub-
ject to all the fl uctuations and uncertainties of the amateur and thankful that
the only object at stake is that of fi nding pleasure for one’s self and for a few
well-wishing friends. The professional performer’s obligation is less that of cre-
ating pleasure for himself than of making sure that he will give pleasure to oth-
ers, whether friends or strangers, and of attempting with all his might through
excess of pleasure to conquer enemies. My little recitals took forms that many
members of my harpsichord audiences would hardly have suspected. In 1972,
I prepared a program containing some Brahms pieces. I would have liked to
spend some of the leisure of my old age playing chamber music with piano, but
new and permanent optical restrictions now hopelessly hamper my old facility
at reading from any kind of score whatever.
In 1969, I made some major expeditions that had nothing to do with con-
cert giving, one to Russia in May, and another to Egypt in December, which I
followed up in early 1970 with a week in Mexico, my fi rst since 1950. It was an
odd contrast to go from the teeming, importunate Arab world to the self-con-
tained dignity of a Mexico that had discovered its own historical consciousness.
From Karnak at midnight in full moon to the top of a pyramid in Teotihuacan
in broiling sun was an experience more complementary than antithetical. But
I know that I will never make my peace (in the sense of any identifi cation) with
either Egyptian or pre-Colombian civilizations, and that for me they remain in
the realm of the exotic.
My experience of Russia, however, coming after many years of intima-
cies with persons of Russian origin, was a genuine and revelatory expansion
of my consciousness. It touched the vital parts of my existence in a way that
continued the long line of surprise I have learned to expect from Russia and
Russians. I regret that I have never learned that language which I have so much
heard spoken.
By the end of 1969, signs of optical fatigue were showing. I had spent a
large part of the summer correcting proofs and rewriting parts of the German
translation of my Scarlatti book. Furthermore, since 1967, I had devoted a con-
siderable amount of time and effort to the eighteen volumes of the facsimile
publication of the complete keyboard works of Scarlatti which appeared in
- The touring of East Germany and the hopping back and forth across
the Atlantic in the spring of 1970 proved unusually fatiguing, and by the time
I arrived in Atlanta in May for concerts with the local symphony, I could no
longer read a newspaper with any ease.
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