On the Harpsichord
Harpsichord Music. By Max Kenyon. (Cassell. 18s.)
THIS book is designed, as the author explains in his introduction, for "reading in the evening at home with one ear compulsorily on the wireless," and it therefore lays no claim to being a work of scholarship, though the very subject presupposes scholarly tastes and interests. Such passages as those dealing with the tuning of the clavecin or the right and wrong use of ornamentation certainly need the whole of an intelligent reader's attention ; and, though there is plenty of easy and entertaining gossip about composers, there is also a more or less serious consideration of a large body of music.
The difficulty of this approach, deliberately this side of scholarship and yet beyond any but the most cultivated amateur, becomes immediately plain in the matter of dates. Mr. Kenyon gives hardly any ; and when, to take but a single example, he speaks of Gabrieli's keyboard music after Cimarosa's he gives no indication that Gabrieli lived almost exactly zoo years earlier. In the same way his picture of Italian life is of no one date, but combines distinctive features of two or three centuries ; and similar inaccuracies are scattered all over the book. It is more than misleading to say that opera was "usually forbidden" in Rome. Mehul was not Belgin, though Givet is very near the Belgian frontier, and, if the expression "amateur finish" has any meaning, it is surely singularly inapplicable to the music of Benedetto Marcello. In the chapter on the harpsi- chord in Germany the German word for the instrument appears throughout as Flugel instead of Fliigel ; and there are a corresponding number of inaccuracies in French titles.
In spite of these serious blemishes much of the musical appre- ciation is interesting and stimulating. Mr. Kenyon's more scholarly readers will look with renewed, if not new, interest at the keyboard music of Cimarosa and W. F. Bach and possibly reconsider the Folies Franfaises of Couperin as "programme music of a psycho- logical Proustian sort." A slightly obscure passage on page 177 pro- claiming the complete divorce of art and life may renew a perennial controversy in some circles, though it reflects an attitude which recent history makes it difficult to uphold. Altogether there is much valuable material here, often attractively used. If, as would surely have been possible, a rather more scholarly attitude had been com- bined with the easy and unportentous manner, the book would have been a really valuable addition to English musical writing.
MARTIN COOPER.
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