on recording ❧ 69
the day. But, since this was not always possible, we were at the mercy of chance.
Again and again, I began a prelude or a fugue with the hope that one of these
explosions would not occur, for splicing them out of the clavichord recording
was impossible. After any one of these interruptions, there was nothing to do
but to begin all over again. It was like snatching brief moments of silence on
the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Eleven times one morning
I began the C-sharp minor Prelude before I myself exploded.
Throughout all these years of recording, the engineers displayed unbeliev-
able kindness, tact, and patience. The recording team always consisted of three
persons; a producer, a recording engineer, and a technician who handled the
tapes and who was responsible for the equipment. I had a set of producers of
whom I think with affection and respect: Hans Ritter, Wolfgang Lohse, Klaus
Fischer-Dieskau, and Hans Richter. The chief engineer who offi ciated at nearly
all my recordings was Harold Baudis. He was not only a monument of loyalty,
devotion, and diplomacy, but also a fi ne musician whose ears never missed any-
thing. The circumstances of his profession and the upside-down life it forced
him to lead gave me early premonitions that one day he himself would become
their victim.
In the summer of 1960,^1 I recorded not only the Inventions and Little
Preludes on the clavichord, but also a vast number of miscellaneous pieces
on the harpsichord. There was no heat wave this summer, but after sur-
mounting the usual diffi culties in recording the clavichord inside the newly
reconstructed shanty, we ran into problems of outside sound affecting the
recording of the harpsichord. There was the meat grinder of the butcher
shop in the building adjoining the control booth, which was at its noisiest
usually just before weekends. We devised such ways as we could of bypassing
its worst interferences. Then there were mysterious hammering sounds, often
at unpredictable times of day, coming from the side of the studio opposite
the tail of the harpsichord. Various studio attendants had been dispatched in
search of the sources of the noise but never discovered them. Finally, there
was nothing but for the members of the engineering team to sally forth; but
since none of them spoke any French, it was necessary for me to go along as
interpreter. Our little delegation canvassed the entire block surrounding the
studio in search of clues. We listened patiently to the life stories of innumer-
able concierges and inspected the premises of such establishments as the Bar
de L’Inconnu and of the adjoining Hotel des Délices. Ultimately, when we
came upon someone repairing a furnace in the basement of an elementary
school abutting the studio, we were assured that the work was nearly done
and that by four o’clock that afternoon there would be silence. There never
was any silence, and we could only conclude that the sounds came from a
- RK was not certain of the chronology of the recordings mentioned here.
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