Classical and Romantic Music

David Milsom, David Milsom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351571746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume brings together twenty-two of the most diverse and stimulating journal articles on classical and romantic performing practice, representing a rich vein of enquiry into epochs of music still very much at the forefront of current concert repertoire. In so doing, it provides a wide range of subject-based scholarship. It also reveals a fascinating window upon the historical performance debate of the last few decades in music where such matters still stimulate controversy.

Part I
Style and Purpose: Appraising Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Aesthetics

[1]

PERFORMING CLASSICAL REPERTOIRE: THE UNBRIDGEABLE GULF BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE AND HISTORICAL REALITY

By CLIVE BROWN

In 1990 I was amused to see a CD of masses by Mozart, performed with period instruments, displayed in the window of Blackwell’s Music Shop in Oxford with the slogan: „Mozart as he would have heard it“. We might imagine that anyone who gave that statement a few moments of serious thought would quickly have dismissed it as naïve and absurd. But the very fact that someone believed it might be an effective marketing ploy calls attention to the curious lack of intellectual integrity lying behind the promotional hyperbole that has accompanied much of the output of the „period“ performance movement.

Whatever we call it, „authentic“, „period instrument“ or „historically-informed“ performance¹ means very different things to different groups of people. To the concert-going or CD-listening public it will generally have the allure of something slightly exotic; unlike, but not too unlike, conventional performance. This dissimilarity will probably be attributed to the performers’ use of techniques and practices associated with the composer’s time and place, and audiences will usually take it on trust that the performing practices are, if not quite what the composer might have heard, at least much closer to them than those employed in conventional modern performances.

Performers may share some of these feelings, depending on the sophistication of their involvement with historically-informed performance. To some, however, it may merely be a job; in London especially, many musicians who spend most of their professional lives performing in a standard contemporary manner will double as historically-informed performers when they have the chance to earn additional income by this means. The latter are often quite unreflective or casual about the activity they engage in, content to follow the instructions of the conductor or leader as best they can, but frequently using instruments that are not historically appropriate (violins with chin rests for late 18th-century music or, if no chin rest, shoulder rests; cellists with spikes for 18th- and early 19th-century music; wind players with instruments of unsuitable provenance or date and so on) and, in many cases, employing a scarcely modified modern technique. A few, indeed, may be frankly cynical about the whole business, seeing it as merely another means of making a living.

More commonly, though, musicians, especially younger ones, who are regularly involved in performing historical repertoires with period instruments, are genuinely interested and open to new approaches. But opportunities for them to engage seriously with scholars of performing practice, either in conservatories and universities or in the professional world, are severely limited; their engagement is thus almost inevitably with a style of historically-informed performance adopted by acknowledged practitioners, which has been sanctioned by public approbation. This style need not even pretend to be based rigorously on historical evidence. It is becoming increasingly common for more sophisticated performers to don the mantle of „post modernism“. Recognising the difficulties, both practical and philosophical, of recreating and employing a truly historical style, they draw upon features of the historical practices known to them through training, observation of other performers, or reading; a few of these, which suit their aesthetic predilections, are consciously or subconsciously adopted, giving their performing style greater individuality and a certain degree of „otherness“. But it is an unspoken principle that this „otherness“ must be sufficiently striking to rouse the interest of the listeners without alienating them.

Underlying this complex of intentions, reflections, aspirations, responses and reactions are some difficult scholarly and philosophical issues that have been discussed at length in recent years. The increasing sophistication of the debate has led to the virtual abandonment of the loaded term „authentic“ in favour of more neutral ones, such as period performance, early-music performance, or historically-informed performance. Even the most enthusiastic advocates of narrowing the gap between the composer’s notation and the expectations that lay behind it in the composer’s mind are acutely conscious of the limitations imposed upon them by the march of time. The more distant the period of composition from our own time, the fewer certainties we have about the range of possibilities inherent in the surviving notation; many of the aural effects that were understood to lie behind the notation are irrevocably lost to us. As the title of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s thought-provoking book The modern invention of medieval music implies, the performing practices and sounds of pre-sixteenth-century music are largely unknowable. For later periods we have ever increasing documentary evidence, but much remains highly speculative. Not until the advent of recording in the late 19th century do we begin to have reliable evidence of how performers understood the notation and what they actually did. But as Robert Philip has pointed out, this evidence too presents serious challenges to performers.² There seems little enthusiasm for performing the music of Mahler, Strauss or Elgar in the manner they or their contemporaries performed it. Even where the gulf may to some extent be bridgeable, therefore, the will to embrace different notions of „good taste“ seems weak.

Nevertheless, during the last decades of the 20th century the end date of „early music“ came ever closer. Until the 1970s „early music“ was generally considered to finish with the Baroque. Gradually „early music“ performers began to claim the repertoire of the Classical period, performing Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven on historical instruments. As late as 1980, Howard Mayer Brown still believed that although performing Beethoven’s symphonies with period instruments would be revealing, „the practical difficulties of assembling and equipping such an orchestra are almost insuperable.“³ But within a very short time of those words being written, performances with orchestras of supposedly Classical instruments became almost commonplace. The idea that later 19th-century music might be played in a „period“ style has taken longer to gain credence, though there is now a growing number of musicians who aspire to offer the public „period“ performances of later 19th-century compositions. The extent to which the majority of these efforts to perform Romantic repertoire in an historically-informed manner are based on a serious study and appraisal of the evidence remains questionable, yet, with the aid of early recordings, such an undertaking need not be regarded as hopeless. Whether early recordings may also be used alongside more conventional forms of written evidence to open up „Wege zur Klassik“ –„Paths to the Classical period“ – may be more problematic.

If we consider the stylistic changes that have taken place in the past century we might be highly sceptical about whether what we hear in the earliest recordings could possibly preserve any vestige of Classical practice. There seems to be a gulf of such breadth between what we do now and what the earliest recording artists did that, without the evidence of the recordings themselves, that gulf would undoubtedly be unbridgeable; how much more implausible, therefore, that we could bridge the even greater gulf between us and the 18th century. There are, nevertheless, good reasons to think that practices changed much more gradually during the century preceding the invention of recording. Ironically, although it was not the only agent of change in the 20th century, this very resource that provides us with aural knowledge of the past may have played a major part in accelerating change and encouraging a much more rigorous adherence to the written notation. With the advent of recording, musicians were unable to ignore features in their own playing that they had apparently been unaware of, but had often condemned in others. A nice example is provided by the prevalent 19th-century practice of using dislocation of the hands and arpeggiation in piano playing where these were not indicated in the score. It is clear from written accounts that towards the end of the century such practices were beginning to be seen as inappropriate. The constant demands of 19th-century composers that the performer should play „exactly what is written“ (whatever such statements may have meant to the composers who made them) were not without their effect.

Yet it seems clear that many traditional practices, which involved a departure from the literal meaning of the written notation, lingered for a long time, even in the playing of those who believed them to be outmoded and no longer in „good taste“. A comment by Sir Charles Hallé during a rehearsal of a Brahms Trio, in which his wife, the violinist Wilma Neruda, the pianist Leonard Borwick and the cellist W. E. Whitehouse were engaged, illustrates this nicely. Whitehouse recalled that

After the slow movement Sir Charles said, „Mr Borwick, do you mind if I say something?“ and of course Borwick said „Certainly not, Sir Charles.“ „Well,“ he said, „there is a very prevalent habit among pianists of ‚spreading‘ the notes of a chord with the idea of giving expression to a passage. It is a habit much to be deplored and should be discouraged.“ When he had quite finished his little „lecture,“ Lady Hallé said, „Yes dear, but you do it!“⁴

And presumably Hallé continued to use arpeggiation to the end of his life.

A few years later the pianist Max Pauer was shocked when he listened to one of his own recordings, commenting: „Was I, after years of public playing, actually making mistakes that I would be the first to condemn in any one of my own pupils? I could hardly believe my ears, and yet the unrelenting machine showed me that in some places I had failed to play both hands exactly together.“⁵ The evidence of recording shows that these practices in keyboard playing rapidly became much rarer, or disappeared entirely, during the first half of the 20th-century. There are good grounds to believe, therefore, that the earliest recordings may have captured the final manifestations of some practices that were deeply rooted in the past, for while many aspects of performance changed during the 19th century, others were more tenacious, particularly where specific repertoires enjoyed a continuous tradition of performance by musicians whose training was within those traditions. Two such bastions of tradition, of very different character, are considered here.

The papal chapel was the last institution to employ castrati. In the earlier part of the 19th century, they were to be found in a number of German court chapels, most notably Dresden, and their role on the operatic stage continued tenuously until about the middle of the century. The last important operatic castrato role was Armando in Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto (1824), written for Giovanni Batista Velluti (1781–1861). After unification in 1870, the Italian state quickly made castration illegal, and in 1878 a papal decree forbade the engagement of any further castratos for the Sistine Chapel, but the remaining castrato members of the choir continued to sing there, tacitly supported by the conservative Pope Leo XIII, until pensioned off by a decree of the new pope, Pius X, in 1903. This increasingly narrow role for castrati in the second half of the 19th century may well have encouraged the preservation of a number of older practices. One prominent feature in the performance style of the castrato Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), which is evident in his 1902 and 1904 recordings, seems especially likely to have 18th-century origins. He made very frequent use of a kind of un-notated grace note at the beginning of a syllable, swooping up to the written note from a pitch belonging to its harmony; this occurs from intervals as distant as a tenth, though more commonly from a third or fifth below.

The p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Style and Purpose: Appraising Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Aesthetics
• Part II Studies in Historical Sources
• Part III Instruments, Ensembles and Conducting
• Part IV Tempo and Rhythm
• Part V Aspects of Notation
• Series Bibliography
• Name Index