Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

bach and keyboard instruments ❧ 125
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and have been restored into a condition
for which they were never built. But those few that are in reasonable playing
condition and presumably in original condition, I do not myself fi nd terribly
attractive. Actually, this one we have here is one of the most satisfactory I know.
I give you my impression of German harpsichords for what it’s worth. It’s an
impression derived out of massive ignorance and out of subjective reactions.
The instruments seem to me rather plain, a little on the heavy side, and their
sonority is a little bit in correspondence with the manifest inelegance of their
proportions. I have always been tempted to make tenuous and dangerous anal-
ogies between national schools of cuisine and national schools of instrument
building. The transparency of fi rst-class French cuisine, its elegance and lack
of superfl uity, is certainly to be found also in French harpsichords. The basic
simplicity and the unchanging staple materials of classic Italian (and I don’t
mean Italo-American) cuisine can be compared with the unchanging, plain,
modest tradition of the Italian harpsichord, of which we will say more next
week. The German harpsichord tempts me to recall German cooking, which
is usually not transparent and not light—in fact, it is usually rather massive.
While rich, it is not refi ned. And the whole impression is that of a rather sono-
rous organ in a rather sonorous loft, abundantly well-nourished and rather fat.
And I think there is some reason to believe that much German harpsichord
building was dominated by the traditions of organ music. The aspects in which
German harpsichord building were gadget-prone are certainly related to the
German organ tradition. The tendency to add, as in these big Haas instru-
ments, 16-foot, two 8-foot [choirs] onto the basic 8-8-4 tutti, refl ects the habit
of massive registration on the part of organists, and perhaps a failure to realize
that so much thickness is not necessarily counterbalanced in the harpsichord
by the upper pipework that characterizes the German eighteenth-century
organ. But even the classic German harpsichords, such as an 8-8-4 Haas in the
Russell collection, or the Gräbner in the Ruckers collection in Nürnberg, seem
to me rather plain instruments in themselves, not very interesting in tone. But
there may have been instruments of much greater distinction, although nearly
all old German instruments in Germany have been very badly restored. It may
happen that some of the Silbermann instruments in Leipzig, or the Silbermann
in the Bach house at Eisenach, will one day get a decent restoration instead of
being restored periodically in the image of Neupert or Maendler-Schramm.
Poor Bach. I think we have indirectly to blame him for the greatest aber-
rations of modern harpsichord building. It’s not really his fault, except that
Bach—as an organist; as the patron saint of heavy-handed generations of
organists; as the reputed connection with a mythical harpsichord rediscovered
in the mid-nineteenth century that formed the basis of the so-called Bach dis-
position the world over; the unsmiling, the relentlessly solemn, where possi-
ble, sacred, not secular, composer—has wreaked immeasurable havoc on the
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