17 The Pedal Harpsichord

If you don’t want to get bitten by the harpsichord bug, don’t go near such an instrument—for if you do, you will!

The bite that Biggs warned his colleagues against in the January 1977 issue of Music was sustained by him more than fifteen years earlier. During the American Guild of Organists convention in Detroit in the summer of 1960, a number of participants responded to an invitation to visit the workshop of the noted harpsichord maker John Challis. Among the instruments to be seen there was an impressively sleek two-manual and pedal model, which drew the organists as flies to honey.

The harpsichord revival, in which Challis had been one of the pioneers, was just beginning to gather momentum. Most organists were already familiar with the increasingly ubiquitous little single-manual “kit” instruments and stock-model German imports. But this pedal harpsichord, standing large as life in Challis’s Detroit atelier, was something else—something previously only read about in music history texts. It was in fact the first such instrument to be made by Challis or any other American maker, and it was frankly experimental in nature. Most of the organists left Challis’s workshop nurturing heady dreams of one day seeing such an instrument carried into their living-rooms; Biggs had some bolder ideas.

Ideas, to Biggs, were something to be carefully filed for future reference, then acted upon when the time was ripe. In April 1962 he wrote to John McClure of Columbia Masterworks:

I have the possibly slightly goofy idea of acquiring a pedal harpsichord. Challis in Detroit has a pedal harpsichord, with independent strings, which is set under the usual instrument. I played it a year or two ago, and the sonority is wonderful.

The problem is, of course, to obtain the harpsichord, which involves a waiting list.

In effect, I’d hope to sell the Schlicker [the Cambridge Portative] and thus transform it into this pedal-harpsichord—which might be better for practice, and which just possibly might open up some very interesting sonorities for other uses.

McClure questioned the wisdom of getting one of Challis’s metal-framed instruments when the tendency among the younger makers was toward wooden frames and a less aggressive sound. Biggs, however, stuck with his choice of Challis. He liked the brash, varied sound, and he was probably thinking in terms of large concert halls, where such a sound was required. And the metal frame could be an advantage in an instrument that might have to be moved around quite a bit. Very shortly after writing to McClure, Biggs was off to Detroit to make a firm commitment with Challis.

Challis seemed a bit taken aback by this commission. In an interview in Harpsichord in 1969, he recalled that visit: “he [Biggs] came back and told me that he couldn’t take my pedal harpsichord off his mind. And he asked me if I would make him one. Suddenly, I got scared!” But once he had agreed to do it, plans rapidly progressed. “Together we worked out the stop arrangement so that it would be most convenient to him.” Biggs would stop by from time to time to check on progress. Challis had completed the pedal part of the instrument and was about to begin on the manual part when he was struck down by the first attack of a chronic disease that would claim his life a decade later. He was unable to do any work for six months, delaying the completion of Biggs’s harpsichord until the summer of 1964.

The pedal harpsichord was crated and shipped off to Cambridge, and as soon as it was unpacked—on the Fourth of July, as it happened—Biggs rang up Challis and astonished him by playing part of Charles Ives’s Variations on “America” over the telephone. Shortly afterward, he wrote jubilantly to Flentrop,

When you’re here, you may be tickled to try a Challis Pedal-Harpsichord, which has just been completed, after three years of waiting—just like a Flentrop organ! I’m hoping to sell the Schlicker, and thus graduate completely from electric action.

Biggs freely admitted that he did not know much about pedal harpsichords, but he thought his new acquisition “quite wonderful” and had no qualms about asking advice concerning its use. It was a whole new world to be explored, and he did so with characteristic openness and enthusiasm. In August he wrote to Leonard Burkat, vice president of Columbia, asking if he had any suggestions of repertoire to try on the new instrument, “for, frankly, I have never seen a Pedal Harpsichord before, and nor had Challis.” Biggs’s first impulse was to experiment with Bach. Trio Sonatas, as expected, worked just fine, but the instrument also sounded well in “more unexpected pieces, such as the Bach Toccata in D minor, the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, and other works with a good deal of bustle. In other words, the instrument doesn’t turn out the way one might think, but turns out wonderfully well in unexpected ways.” Burkat shared Biggs’s enthusiasm, suggested Bach’s Art of Fugue and pre-Bach pieces (and “impractical ideas like Robert Schumann’s pieces for pedal piano”) and encouraged Biggs to keep on exploring.

Before long Biggs was as hard at work on his new instrument as a heavy concert schedule would allow (taking time out to record at the Museum Bach Organ Favorites, Vol. 2, based on a famous recital by Mendelssohn at Leipzig in 1840). Biggs quizzed Challis on performance practice; Challis responded with some general suggestions and recommended reading Robert Donington’s book The Interpretation of Early Music. Biggs promptly acquired it and, judging from the dog-eared pages in the “Keyboard” chapter, read it more than once. In May 1965 the pedal harpsichord made its debut in a program of six Bach works given at the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Like some of Biggs’s other Museum concerts, this one was a trial run before a recording, and a few days later the pedal harpsichord was shipped to the Columbia studio in New York for a June recording session. John Challis flew in from Detroit to tune and regulate the instrument. Despite continued poor health and the added blow of seeing his workshop property summarily taken by eminent domain by the Michigan Highway Department, Challis continued to be helpful and enthusiastic.

Biggs, equally enthusiastic over the possibilities opened up by the new instrument, was putting to use some of the ideas on performance he had learned from Challis and from the sources he had been studying. And something else. Whether it was the rhythmic emphasis of the instrument, the difference in its response, or just the mood Biggs was in, his performances on this all-Bach recording, particularly of the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor and Prelude and Fugue in G major, are some of the liveliest he ever made of these works. Swinging, happy, driving, they stay always on the proper side of good taste, as do Biggs’s original cadenzas to some of the works. On the record jacket Biggs simply stated that he took “the opportunity to exploit totally the declamatory and improvisational aspect” of the music.

The record was released in 1966, and it seems to have taken the critics by surprise. The Diapason called it “the most controversial record of the month” and predicted “scandalized outcries” over Biggs’s “free, rhapsodic style,” cadenzas, and embellishments. But, “no one will be able to call this record dull or uninteresting; it may just accomplish for the harpsichord a bit of the kind of general introduction this artist has accomplished for the organ.” The American Organist spent some time comparing Biggs’s latest Bach Organ Favorites album with an Anthony Newman Bach release, but seemed at a loss to find anything with which to compare the harpsichord platter. “For the most part it comes off pleasantly enough, though I doubt the pedal harpsichord will ever replace the organ,” the reviewer concluded weakly. Outside the organ world the reviewers took Biggs’s harpsichord debut a bit more in stride. The only real criticism was of the engineering—some thought the microphone placement too close. Records and Recording for July 1966 provided a particularly long and perceptive writeup, in which the reviewer observed:

E. Power Biggs’ long experience with these works on the organ enables him to present them in this medium with a grandeur and spaciousness which harpsichord specialists might view with some suspicion. Personally, I found his interpretations quite thrilling. . . . No one would be so stupid as to claim that these performances in any way supersede ones of equal quality on the organ, but I can promise the inquisitive collector that new light is thrown upon the works by the pedal harpsichord.

Indeed, it is entirely possible that the pedal harpsichord threw new light on the music for Biggs himself.

Biggs’s Bach interpretations may have raised a few critical eyebrows, but his next harpsichord album was definitely a hair-raiser. The idea for what he was later to call “an amusing spin-off” seems to have originated with John McClure or someone else at Columbia, but Biggs was game, and early in the summer of 1965 he wrote to McClure: “Since returning I have been meditating day and night on HOLIDAY FOR HARPSICHORD. It really can be quite a whiz-bang, I think.”

This project represented the farthest Biggs had strayed from the traditional repertoire for either harpsichord or organ, for it turned out to be an unabashed and rollicking collection of music composed for neither instrument—a collection of popular classic “chestnuts,” including Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, Schubert’s Marche Militaire, and Saint-Saëns’s The Swan. In short, transcriptions. Biggs, in his tongue-in-cheek jacket notes, maintained that he was only paying the pianists and conductors back for all the works they had looted from the organ repertoire over the years: “Turn about is fair play.”

The album was released in the fall of 1966, and the hi-fi buffs loved it. So did some of Biggs’s fellow organists, although there were some humorless souls among them who seemed to feel that Biggs had somehow betrayed them and who briefly vented their outrage in the letters to the editors of the trade magazines.

At least one harpsichordist, Larry Palmer, admitted to having entertained such musically heretical thoughts himself. In a 1979 Diapason article, he wrote, “I must admit that the thought for such a concert has often entered my mind, but Biggs had the instrument on which to do it, and the contract with Columbia. And what a pretty record it turned out to be!” John Challis was delighted with Holiday for Harpsichord and claimed his friends were too, “except for one stuffed shirt who even admits he likes it, but is very concerned about your image—and mine!” The record seems to have sold rather well.

The pedal harpsichord, ca. 1966

But Holiday was only an interlude—and perhaps an experiment. Before it was released, Biggs was already working on another Bach album. This one, released in the fall of 1967, contained the six Trio Sonatas and two of Bach’s Italian Concerto transcriptions, to which Biggs brought the same yeasty interpretation that had distinguished the first Bach album.

John Challis continued his encouragement and counsel. In August 1966 he wrote Biggs a long letter full of helpful advice, urging him on to greater freedom, more liberal use of agogic accent, and imaginative registrations:

Why shouldn’t the Trio Sonatas use all the tonally significant possibilities of the Pedal Harpsichord! They must never be conceived as technical exercises, but as flights of imagination in the hands of a great genius of elegant good taste.

Challis approved of the finished product. In October 1967 he wrote,

Thank you very much for the recordings of the Trio Sonatas. . . . Of course I am prejudiced, but I think they have taken on a new life on the pedal harpsichord. I hope others find it so too. You may recall that I used to think they might not go too well on the p. h. and even you were not too sure at first. But you have shown that they do go and that superbly.

The critics agreed. One reviewer in Terre Haute, Indiana, found the Trio Sonata record “luminous”; another in Joplin, Missouri, called it “an adventure in an altogether different dimension of art.”

But there were also some detractors who argued that, historically, the pedal harpsichord was never meant to be anything other than a practice instrument and was therefore out of place in a concert application. Biggs answered them in an article in Music Journal for February 1968.

Such an idea is immediately dissipated by a few minutes of playing the instrument. . . . My chief interest, however, in the two years that I have had the Challis, has not been to raid the harpsichord literature, but rather to explore the possibilities of playing organ music in the novel sonorities of plucked strings rather than organ pipes. One can of course play organ music exactly as written on the pedal harpsichord, and the result is a challenging sound, combining as it does harpsichord sparkle and clarity with something of the bass richness and depth of the organ.

But for the next two years, the pedal harpsichord was indeed a practice instrument for Biggs. The Cambridge Portative had been sold to a party in California, and Challis’s instrument occupied its place in the sunny front parlor of the Biggs home. The two-record Bach Trio Sonata album was reissued as two separate discs in 1968, but it was not until the 1970s that Biggs recorded on the pedal harpsichord again—one “legitimate” album of Walther concertos, and (in Biggs’s own words) two “illegitimate” ones of Scott Joplin rags.