I am not sure to what extent I was really cut out to be a performer. My tendencies toward self-reliance and toward the search for absolutes would appear to indicate the contrary. Yet I had a fluency and an adaptability that has served me well. My poor coordination and lack of skill in sports and manual crafts have never carried over to my dealing with the keyboard. That I was musically gifted there is no doubt. I was also endowed with considerable intelligence and a good memory. My early experiences in concertizing while still in college certainly stood me in good stead. It is true that I have a large amount of the performer's vanity, but never have I been willing to orient my life exclusively around performance. In some way, I feel that I became a performer by accident, and from time to time, I am overtaken by astonishment at finding myself in the performing business and by the degree of acceptance I appear to have achieved among some of those performers whom I most admire.

I suppose that I was pushed into performance by my early successes in Europe and by an acute need to earn a living without being tied down by an academic position or by irrelevant drudgery. I have indeed been fortunate that almost all the work I have ever done, no matter how demanding, has led to my continuing education and self-development quite apart from any questions of financial necessity. Perhaps even the seemingly repetitive and energy-draining worries of harpsichord maintenance and transport increased my stamina as a performer.

In retrospect, I connect my final and all-determining decision to become a performer with a little clavichord recital I gave in 1933 in the library of Bernard Berenson's villa outside Florence. This was my first significant paid engagement on one of the instruments of my choice. It was followed by others, and I managed to eke out an existence through performing that made it possible to ignore other ways of earning a living. After the first few years, I discovered that performing for a living was not only possible but profitable and infinitely more challenging than any of the other activities for which I might have been qualified.