Ralph Kirkpatrick
Ralph Leonard Kirkpatrick (June 10, 1911 – April 13, 1984) was an American harpsichordist and musicologist best known for his chronological catalog of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas and for his performances and recordings.
He was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, and started studying piano as a child. He studied art history at Harvard and developed an interest in the harpsichord there, giving his first harpsichord recital in 1930. After graduating in 1931, he went to Europe on a John Knowles Paine Fellowship. In Paris he studied with Nadia Boulanger and Wanda Landowska; in Haslemere he learned from Arnold Dolmetsch; in Berlin with Heinz Tiessen; and in Leipzig with Günther Ramin. His European debut came in Berlin in January 1933, performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He also gave concerts in Italy and taught at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1933–34. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936 allowed him to study old manuscripts in Europe. In 1938 he started a Baroque music festival in Williamsburg, Virginia.
G. Schirmer published his edition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1938, with extensive discussion of ornamentation, fingering, phrasing, tempo, dynamics, and interpretation. In the late 1930s he began his major research on Scarlatti and published a highly regarded biography in 1953, which was translated into several languages. He also produced a critical edition of 60 Scarlatti sonatas. Today Scarlatti’s sonatas are usually given Kirkpatrick numbers (Kk. or K.), which is the standard, authoritative system.
In 1940 Kirkpatrick joined Yale University’s music faculty, where he taught until 1976, the year he became blind. He helped inaugurate the Ernest Bloch Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, delivering a series of lectures on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier; these lectures were published in 1984 as Interpreting Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: A Performer's Discourse of Method.
As a performer he toured widely in the United States and Europe from the 1930s to the early 1980s, both in recitals and with major orchestras. He continued performing after losing his sight, resuming in 1977 with a private recital at Versailles and a public recital at the Frick Collection in New York. One of his last recitals was at the first Boston Early Music Festival in 1981.
In the 1960s he recorded the complete keyboard works of Bach for Archiv, using revival-style instruments. His Bach recordings include performances on the harpsichord, clavichord, and fortepiano, and later he used a reproduction French harpsichord for some records. While best known for Bach and Scarlatti, he also performed and recorded works by Rameau, Couperin, Handel, Byrd, and Purcell. He played modern music as well, and several modern pieces were dedicated to him, including Carter’s Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras and Cowell’s Set of Four for Harpsichord (or Piano). He also performed works by Manuel de Falla and Stravinsky.
Kirkpatrick wrote a major Scarlatti biography (1953) and, after his death, published Interpreting Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (1984) and Early Years (1985). His writings were later collected and edited. He died in Guilford, Connecticut, at the age of 72. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. The asteroid 9902 Kirkpatrick was named in his honor in 1999. His niece Meredith Kirkpatrick maintains an online bibliography and discography of his work. His brother Clifford Kirkpatrick was a sociologist and also a Guggenheim Fellow in 1936.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 12:25 (CET).