Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

46 ❧ chapter one
But as I had earlier stood being photographed on the balcony of La Fenice
with a volume of the Scarlatti facsimile in my hands, I was overtaken by one
of those feelings of mortality that sometimes show their grinning skull in the
midst of earthly pleasures. Instead of forgetting these premonitions, I had
occasion to remember them during the next years. In February 1974, it was
discovered that the neglect by a dentist of antibiotic precautions had caused an
infection of my previously perfectly functioning heart. By April, I was thought
well enough to embark on a heavily booked European tour, but I collapsed
after the second concert. Heart surgery put an end to the season of 1974–75
before it had begun. The ensuing convalescence made it possible to compose
the present memoirs and to revise some earlier writings. For the moment, I
have abandoned the Deed in favor of the Word.
I have often been cited as a person who bridges the gap between making
music and writing about it. This is not the case. I united the two sides of this
enormous split only by an uneasy consciousness that, in reality, they are irrec-
oncilable. Writing the Scarlatti book obliged me to engage in both musician-
ship and in scholarship, but in every chapter in which I wrote about the music
itself, I found myself running head-fi rst into the ultimately insurmountable
barrier that prevents words from conveying musical meaning other than in a
sense that is approximate, limited, and beset with potential distortions. Nor do
I know a piece of writing about music of which this is not true.
The Word may state an ideal, it may contribute directions toward the Deed,
yet it is powerless. It cannot perform a Deed—only after a Deed can the Word
comment on what has happened. Words about music are sterile except when
aided by music for an instant to become incarnate in the musical Deed.
To what extent I will return to the Deed remains to be seen. I now realize
and accept the probability that the main part of the program of my life has
been played, and that there remains only a coda (and perhaps a few encores)
to add to it. But if neither the Word nor the Deed can reach fusion, neither
can they exist alone. Perhaps I may yet come to feel the unity that is constituted
by their irresistible alternating surge.
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