The search for Scarlatti's harpsichord is hardly separable from the search for the content of his music and for the means for the performer to make use of the instrument in bringing out what is in the music. I once again permit myself a certain autobiographical approach, not so much because of its inherent interest but because it may serve in some ways as an object lesson, and certainly certain fundamental generalizations emerge about the conflict between the desire of an interpreter to be faithful and the need of a performer to be effective. Most of the conflicts and mistakes that I can see in the forty odd years that I'm thinking of in connection with this search result from this conflict of aims and interests. When I left high school, I knew little more about Scarlatti than I did about the harpsichord. I knew a sonata in E minor called Pastorale in an edition by Carl Tausig, which I thought a rather trivial and slightly dull piece. In an extended senior essay that I wrote in 1931 as a senior on the history of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century harpsichord music is a sentence for which I did many years of well-deserved penance. Out of the opportunism and general lack of integrity that surrounds the production of examination papers and term essays emerges a disconcerting note of sincerity when I refer to Scarlatti, literally, as follows: “Domenico Scarlatti, the apotheosis of Italian brilliance, facility, charm, and superficiality.” Well, of course without knowing it, I was stating the received opinion of my time, an opinion that has not yet entirely been demolished. In any case, I persisted in my errors for many years, along with the rest of the world.

The next significant step that I recall is buying the complete Longo edition in Rome in the spring of 1933 and sitting in a café, marking the sonatas that I thought I would like to learn. And like all beginnings of Scarlatti, I picked out the technical problems, the fast and brilliant and instrumentally challenging pieces. A few weeks later, a friend in Florence presented me with the eighteenth- century edition of the Roseingrave sonatas. This was, for many years, the only unadulterated text that I had to deal with.