Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

60 ❧ chapter two
I have always found the criticism of journalists virtually useless. The less pre-
tentious among them sometimes convey a general idea of the reception of a
performance by the public, but one has only to look at several accounts of
the same performance to be dissuaded from taking these utterances too seri-
ously. It might be my fault that I have never been able to learn anything from a
journalist, but I doubt it. It would be dishonest, however, not to admit that my
vanity is fl attered by praise and wounded by censure, even when I am certain of
meriting neither one nor the other. But this is an unpleasant subject, and I can
achieve no Olympian detachment from it. Furthermore, I am well aware that
if I myself were to engage in this profession, I would commit all the sins and
escape few of the pitfalls that beset its most despicable practitioners.
I have the illusion that, of most of the works which I have played for thirty or
forty years, I can reconstruct the manner of my performances at various times
in my life. I have never put this to a test, and it is possible that my memory is
far less accurate than I now think. Sometimes, on listening to old recordings, I
have been surprised by the unsuspected presence of elements of which I only
later became aware.
In my fi rst ten or fi fteen years, my harpsichord playing was dominated by
a search for technical perfections and misled, I think, by a number of fun-
damental errors. These affected my playing of fast movements more than of
slow. While I committed many ineptitudes of articulation in slow movements,
I never allowed my native musicality to be dominated by considerations of
alleged instrumental perfectionism, whereas in fast movements I sincerely
believed that an accurate and rhythmically precise performance could suffi ce
to convey the character and inner content of a piece. I was a downbeat player,
not yet fully aware of the function and potential of upbeats. I lacked a con-
ception of articulation that would go beyond the more vocal declamation of
intervals and that would take into account its all-powerful rhythmic function.
But singing and clavichord playing had rendered me incipiently sensitive to
harmonic infl ections. Perceptive friends who knew both my clavichord play-
ing and my harpsichord playing felt that I played the clavichord better than
the harpsichord and said so. In my approach to the clavichord, I also com-
mitted many errors, especially those of being led by the rapid decay of sound
into tempi that were too fast and of being led by a blind reliance on instinct
unilluminated by the experience and knowledge of phrase construction in per-
formance which I was later to acquire. But never did I allow myself an exercise
or any kind of piecemeal approach that was not directly connected with my
innate musical instinct, or that could not service to sharpen my musical sensi-
bilities and perceptions.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, at the outset of my harp-
sichord playing, I had been less thrown off the track by the need to acquire
some kind of technical discipline of the fi ngers, and by the typewriter style in
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