Introduction

Abstract

I n writing a book for which there is no precedent (the last textbooks about accompanying were written during the age of thorough bass or shortly thereafter — the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — and dealt exclusively with the problems timely then) one must make one’s own rules and set one’s own standards. This freedom makes the task somewhat easier, if, on the one hand, one looks to the past: there is no generally approved model to be followed and to be compared with one’s work; but, on the other hand, the task is hard because one’s responsibility to present and future generations of accompanists and coaches is great. In short, to break a new trail and to set a standard for the future is a most gratifying but also a most difficult undertaking.