Chapter Two

On Performing

I am not sure to what extent I was really cut out to be a performer. My tenden-
cies toward self-reliance and toward the search for absolutes would appear to
indicate the contrary. Yet I had a fl uency and an adaptability that has served
me well. My poor coordination and lack of skill in sports and manual crafts
have never carried over to my dealing with the keyboard. That I was musically
gifted there is no doubt. I was also endowed with considerable intelligence
and a good memory. My early experiences in concertizing while still in college
certainly stood me in good stead. It is true that I have a large amount of the
performer’s vanity, but never have I been willing to orient my life exclusively
around performance. In some way, I feel that I became a performer by acci-
dent, and from time to time, I am overtaken by astonishment at fi nding myself
in the performing business and by the degree of acceptance I appear to have
achieved among some of those performers whom I most admire.
I suppose that I was pushed into performance by my early successes in
Europe and by an acute need to earn a living without being tied down by an
academic position or by irrelevant drudgery. I have indeed been fortunate that
almost all the work I have ever done, no matter how demanding, has led to my
continuing education and self-development quite apart from any questions of
fi nancial necessity. Perhaps even the seemingly repetitive and energy-draining
worries of harpsichord maintenance and transport increased my stamina as a
performer.
In retrospect, I connect my fi nal and all-determining decision to become
a performer with a little clavichord recital I gave in 1933 in the library of
Bernard Berenson’s villa outside Florence. This was my fi rst signifi cant paid
engagement on one of the instruments of my choice. It was followed by oth-
ers, and I managed to eke out an existence through performing that made
it possible to ignore other ways of earning a living. After the fi rst few years, I
discovered that performing for a living was not only possible but profi table and
infi nitely more challenging than any of the other activities for which I might
have been qualifi ed.
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