84 ❧ chapter five
At the end of the Harvard days I had little fi rsthand knowledge of old instru-
ments. But on my fi rst visit to Yale during the spring of 1931, I was shown the
Steinert collection, and probably the fi rst old harpsichord that I ever played
was a one-manual Kirkman that a decade later was serving my fi rst Yale pupils
as a practice instrument. I marveled at the extravagances in cabinetwork and
decoration of the other instruments and joyfully manipulated the Venetian
swell of one of the large English harpsichords. On arriving in Paris in the fall
of 1931, I found in Salomon’s shop in the Rue Boissy d’Anglas what seemed
to be a paradise of old harpsichords. It swarmed with brilliantly decorated
French and Flemish instruments in what I then considered playing condi-
tion. From these instruments, and from a few others in private hands, as well
as from those I was later to see in England, I began to derive certain general
notions about old harpsichords and to realize how much closer to them the
Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument had been than any modern harpsichord I
was to encounter in the next twenty years.
My encounter with the Pleyel harpsichord was disastrous. I had seen a few of
the smaller models in America and must have carried away only the impression
that they resembled typewriters to which various pedals had been attached.
On arriving at Landowska’s studio, I was directed, like all new pupils, to buy a
pair of soft bedroom slippers for the purpose of negotiating the closest harp
pedals of the Pleyel harpsichord. I have always thought that these slippers were
responsible for that peculiar démarche characteristic of a Landowska pupil on
entering or leaving a stage. I had practice hours in a grim little studio at the
Salle Pleyel, which contained a small Pleyel harpsichord that antedated the
introduction of the iron frame but which sounded nevertheless no better. It
had square cheek-pieces like the old harpsichords, but the one on the right
could be hinged back in order to permit full view of the player’s spidery dex-
terity as she shifted from keyboard to keyboard. For me, with a background of
something more closely resembling old and better instruments, the horror of
these Pleyels was indescribable, and to this day, although I have played many
far worse instruments and have resorted to most of the subterfuges which they
extort, I have never played a Pleyel in public.
The alternatives in Paris were few, but among them was an unreliable instru-
ment produced by an offshoot of the Gaveau fi rm, which nevertheless more
closely resembled a harpsichord than the dreadful little Pleyel with the hinged
cheek-piece. I arranged to rent one of them. Its arrival at my room in the Rue
Jacob was preceded by innumerable delays that with any foresight at all, I could
have interpreted as indicating how in subsequent years I would spend hours
and days awaiting the arrival of other harpsichords.
Without seeing it clearly at the time, I was about to be swept into a great
wave of what I can only call aberration that affl icted harpsichordists and harp-
sichord builders for the next twenty-fi ve years, and which has only begun to
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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