Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

viii ❧ foreword
established as part of the musical mainstream. As a result, a fi gure such as
Kirkpatrick may seem less close to us than was the case thirty years ago, and the
contributions of such fi gures may easily be regarded as somehow more remote,
either as “preparatory” to what was later to come (which we tend to regard
as normative), or perhaps as idiosyncratic, and constrained by the supposedly
more limited understandings of a previous generation. Such pigeonholing is
understandable, and it has long been a tendency in the way each new gen-
eration regards the former, but of course it does not do justice to the stature
achieved by our more recent forebears in their own time.
The present collection of memoirs, essays, and lectures presents Ralph
Kirkpatrick as a musician of formidable intellectual breadth; a keen observer
of the cultural environment in which he found himself; a man of wide-ranging
interests that supported his friendships with some of the leading literary and
artistic fi gures of his time; and a highly self-critical performer whose expec-
tations of excellence in his own work far exceeded even the expectations he
had for his colleagues and students. He also had an elegant command of the
English language, and the apparent carefulness with which he wrote does not
obscure the fl ow of his writing. It is particularly in the memoirs that one appre-
hends these qualities; everything here refl ects the skill of a seasoned thinker
and writer and a keen observer of the world around him.
Like any good collection of memoirs and strongly personal essays, this one
provides a window through which situations and events may be viewed in ways
that are more likely to engage and arouse one’s curiosity than the simple histor-
ical accounts. For example, Kirkpatrick names those friends and acquaintances
who passed through his studio at the Mozarteum when he was teaching there
in 1933, the year after he graduated from Harvard. It is an astonishing collec-
tion of luminaries and future luminaries, ranging from the conductor Eugene
Ormandy and the composer Francis Poulenc to the poets Stephen Spender
and James Laughlin. One wonders what may have brought James Laughlin—
later founder of the New Directions publishing house and good friend of the
poet and (later) monk Thomas Merton—from his studies with Ezra Pound
in Rapallo (in northern Italy) to Salzburg, Austria. Likewise with Stephen
Spender, only two years older than Kirkpatrick, living in Vienna during that
same year, an ardent critic of the growing fascism of the thirties: one wants
to know more about the signifi cance, if any, of his meetings with Kirkpatrick.
Curiosity, even when unsatisfi ed, is nonetheless one of the delights that result
from reading the memoirs of one whose circle included such a diverse array of
prominent fi gures.
While Kirkpatrick’s accounts of his activities in Europe during the thir-
ties focus primarily on his artistic endeavors, one nonetheless apprehends
something of the mounting anxiety concerning Hitler’s rise to power, and
Kirkpatrick’s decision to leave Europe and to make New York thenceforth his
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