Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

72 ❧ chapter three
given occasion or during a given span of time when there is no opportunity
for further work and refl ection.
It stands greatly to the credit of Deutsche Grammophon that in all of these
recordings, I was never limited by an insuffi cient number of sessions or by any
lack of cooperation on the part of the engineering teams. Whatever shortcom-
ings they contain are my own or the product of outside circumstances. Grateful
recognition is surely due the idealism which prevailed in this company under
the leadership of Frau Else Schiller.
For the recording of the clavichord version of Book II of the WTC, it was
no longer possible to use the Polydor studio in Paris, and it was decreed that I
should return to Hamburg to the house in Blankenese where I had recorded
the French Suites ten years earlier. The months of May and June 1967 were to
be devoted to this project with a two-week break in the middle. In view of such
a long stay and in the hope of escaping some of the inconveniences of hotels,
restaurants, and transportation, and above all in the hope of altogether bypass-
ing German cuisine, I arranged to take an apartment and to hire a car. Since
nothing was available in Blankenese, an apartment was found in a ghastly mod-
ern suburb of which my dislike has obliterated even the name.
The white stucco-marble that had produced such confusion in the harpsi-
chord recordings of 1957 was now ideal for the clavichord. In order to avoid
the tuning problems that had beset me in previous sessions, I now used my
Challis clavichord, which has a phenomenal stability in holding tune. It had
unevenesses, however, and a bad sound in the bass and tenor registers. For the
purposes of recording, I was able to mitigate many of these disadvantages by
removing one choir of strings up to about middle C. A preliminary recording
of the whole work straight through enabled me to establish an overall view of
its pacing and sequence. Everything looked favorable.
But once we had begun recording in earnest, we discovered that in this idyl-
lic setting we were more at the mercy of sounds from the outside than ever we
had been in Paris. Throughout the day, at least every nine minutes or oftener,
an airplane made its way over our heads to or from the Hamburg airport. We
tried recording in the small hours of the night, but then the whistles of the
barges and steamboats on the Elbe made themselves heard. When I saw that I
was faced with an ordeal far worse than any I had been through in Paris, I sim-
ply sat shaking from head to foot and silently wept. Under no circumstances
could I have gone through with it.
Another studio was found on the other side of Hamburg, forty-fi ve minutes
away by car from my horrid little apartment. It had the one virtue of being
totally impervious to outside sound, even to airplanes, but otherwise it was the
exact antithesis of what we had been prepared to deal with in the stucco-mar-
ble foyer in Blankenese. The sound was as dry and stuffy as it could possibly
be, and manipulation of refl ecting bodies did relatively little to improve it. I
KKirkpatrick.indd 72irkpatrick.indd 72 2/8/2017 9:57:21 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 57 : 21 AM