70 ❧ chapter three
further undiscovered source. For the rest of the summer we sought to dodge
them in much the same nerve-wracking way as we had dodged the explosions
produced by the cracking beams in the previous year.
The harpsichord I had been using since 1959 had showed me once and for
all the limitations of German commercial harpsichord building. Furthermore,
the Boston revolution was now in full swing and I had already learned many
a lesson from the Hubbard and Dowd harpsichord which I had acquired in
- There could be no question now of recording the WTC on anything
else. In 1962, the instrument was dispatched to Paris, and in May and June I
recorded Book I.
I have always found the alternation between listening to playbacks and
returning to recording exceedingly grueling. In order to make sure that noth-
ing is accepted that might later cause embarrassment and regret, one is obliged
to listen to all playbacks in a hypercritical state, prepared to level at each per-
formance any destructive accusation or comment that can possibly be thought
of. In the minute or two before returning to the microphone, one must then
convert this attitude into something positive, fresh, and constructive. This is a
tall order. I prefer as much as possible to separate recording from listening to
playbacks, but there are moments at which immediate correction is necessary
for what one has just heard, or conversely, there are moments in a recording
session at which it is indispensable to know what the performance is sounding
like on the playback.
For extended listening to playbacks, I had worked out various methods of
noting my reactions, fi rst to isolated pieces or movements as they stood by
themselves, and later, whenever possible, in the light of their relation to each
other. I have before me a series of notes that appear to date from three stages
of listening to playbacks. As if marking an examination paper, I graded myself
on a scale of one hundred. The comments are in German because it was the
language spoken with the engineers during all the recording sessions. Among
them I fi nd such remarks as “Could perhaps be improved; too fast, but better
at the end; tired; try again; good, but could be more expressive; better than
before; the end not quite right; cold; good, but the voice leading could be
clearer; rushed, but has atmosphere, etc.” On what appears to be the fi nal
assessment of this series, I notice that I never conceded a grade higher than
ninety-fi ve nor accepted anything lower than eighty-fi ve.
Of all my recording marathons, the sessions of the spring and summer of
1965 were in many ways the best managed. They were scheduled in such a
way as to afford not only the maximum use of the engineer’s time, but also to
permit me some much-needed breathing space between groups of recording
sessions. The spring sessions were devoted to a recital album and to a prelimi-
nary run-through of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II to which the sessions of
the summer were to be devoted. Unfortunately, I was obliged to resort to a new
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