Music: Harpsichordists out of Tune

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The harpsichord went out when the piano came in. Nobody at the time seemed very sorry: the piano was easier to play, its notes carried further, and it had greater range of tone. But the harpsichord has made a startling comeback—thanks largely to one woman. There has probably been more harpsichord-playing in New York in the past year than any time since the days of George Washington. Last week Manhattan harpsichord fans, a serious-minded lot, could hear either the master herself, stately, 67-year-old Wanda Landowska, or her most successful ex-pupil, Ralph Kirkpatrick.

To the unschooled ear, the harpsichord jangles like a regiment of mice scurrying through a pile of coins. But its connoisseurs find in the harpsichord rarefied and rustling harmonies, comparable to a choir of flutes and mandolins. When Landowska began, nobody was writing harpsichord music; it was a dead art. Composers like Francis Poulenc (her student for a year) and the late Manuel De Falla wrote harpsichord music for her. Said she: "It was a battle, you have no idea what a battle it was, to impose the harpsichord upon the musical world. When I started before 1900, the tradition was not."

Most of the topflight harpsich rdists are Landowska-trained: Switzerland's Isabel Nef, Italy's Ruggero Gerlin, London's Lucille Wallace, Los Angeles' Alice Ehlers, Manhattan's Sylvia Marlowe (who sometimes swings it) and Ralph Kirkpatrick.

Collectors & Cranks. Kirkpatrick, who is now 35, was a sophomore at Harvard when he saw his first harpsichord—a museum piece. When he was graduated (he majored in art history) he went to France, studied at Landowska's academy at Saint-Leu-le-Forêt, gave his first public recital in Berlin in 1933. Today he plays about 70 recitals a season, and is glad to see his audiences spreading beyond the earnest, humorless cultists he once played to. Says he: "Audiences used to be largely record collectors and cranks who also liked folk dancing because it was pure and sexless." Kirkpatrick, a bachelor, lives in a tiny Manhattan apartment crowded with two harpsichords, an 18th Century piano, a clavichord and a thousand books. To keep his instruments in tune he seldom turns on the radiator ("My friends stay away in the winter to keep from catching cold"). He plays Bach and Mozart with a hard, dry purity—and sometimes, say critics, with a little too much banging. He long ago broke with Teacher Landowska, whose playing is more showy and dramatic. Says Kirkpatrick starchily: "Landowska is a great artist. But other artists take different ways. It generally means a break." Wanda Landowska also long ago stopped speaking of Kirkpatrick as her pupil. Says she: "Shall we say, my pupils must be my friends."