Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music

Lesley A. Wright, Scott McCarrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317081630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

PART I

How Composers Communicate

Chapter 1

Inside Rather Than Under the Composer’s Skin: Another Tilt at Being Authentic¹

Roy Howat

A linking thread that runs through this chapter was suggested by a radio program. While driving, I happened to tune in to one of those rather debatable programs in which a reviewer chooses recommended recordings of a particular work. That week the target was Bach’s Art of Fugue, which was being performed on different instruments or combinations from different eras. After one extract played on period instruments (which, to my ears, sounded beguilingly stylish), the reviewer confessed himself troubled by the way the performers “added” interpretation by dotting rhythms in ways “that are not marked in the score: Now let us listen to a group of performers who play it the way Bach wrote it.” We then heard the same passage played with stolidly equal eighth notes, reading Bach’s notation “literally”—in terms, that is, of mid-twentieth-century concepts of notation. It was not observed that this might unwittingly have imposed more interpretative gloss on the music than the other performance did. The unasked question was, what performing habits might Bach have regarded in his time as tacitly understood, to the extent of not requiring spelling out in the score? Although we know that Bach notated in more detail than most of his contemporaries, his music shows many passages that leave elements or details to the performer’s stylistic expertise. Several of these elements, as well as the composer’s more general trust in the performer’s understanding, continue through to the musical notation of Schubert, Debussy, and even twentieth-century light music. I will return to that reviewer’s assumptions later, for they invoke a crucial topic that we need to consider explicitly as either editors or performers.

Another question for discussion here concerns how scholarly editions deal—or alternatively ought to deal—with critical commentaries. Richard Langham Smith has suggested that the best place for these is now on websites.² An even more ticklish question is whether Urtexts are really affecting performance in useful ways.

Example 1.1 Schubert, Sonata in C minor, D. 958, movement 4, bars 631–42, “as Schubert wrote it”

A positive answer to this comes from the pleasing experience of repeatedly hearing well-informed musicians use new, cleaned-up editions of familiar repertoire that resolve chronic old problems of misprinted notes, dynamics, tempi, or even tempo relationships. It is rewarding to hear colleagues say—or just to hear from their playing—that the information in a new edition has made them reevaluate a piece and how to play it.

At the other end of the pendulum swing, do Urtext editions sometimes lead to bland performances? Think, for example, of Bach Urtexts that have eliminated all the interpretative paraphernalia of nineteenth- or early twentieth-century editions, leaving us just notes with no explicitly attached dynamics, articulation or (sometimes) tempo markings. As a very reputable teacher of children observed on being shown the most recent scholarly Urtext of the 48, “Very interesting, but it’s of no use for the children I teach. It doesn’t start to show them what to do with the notes, or how to get any style or musical expression from the pieces.”³ From these points, let us continue with four musical extracts, treated (to return to our radio reviewer) “the way the composer wrote them”—according, that is, to our era’s assumptions of what that would mean. The first of these—you may want to grit your teeth for this—comes from the coda to the finale of Schubert’s C-minor Sonata (Example 1.1; Recorded Example 1.1).⁴

This is clearly “what Schubert wrote,” as we would now read it: his manuscript unmistakably shows the three-flat key signature, repeated at each new system, with not a single flat marked before any of the Ds.⁵ We may think the result sounds dreadful, but an utterly strict Urtext made for bibliographical purposes would have to leave it thus, letting performers argue what to make of it. If it shocks us, this is because every extant edition since the first one of 1838 (ten years after Schubert died) has thought fit to flat each of those Ds editorially, which is what we are now accustomed to hearing.

Example 1.2 Bach, “Gigue,” from Partita no. 6 in E minor, BWV 830, bars 1–5

Experiment quickly endorses the necessity of what the 1838 edition added there. From this we may infer that a degree of musica ficta involving the notation of accidentals was still alive in 1820s Vienna. (The anonymous editor of the work’s first edition in 1838 evidently understood this and was aware that Schubert never prepared that manuscript for publication himself.) Such disparities between key signatures and local tonalities can, in fact, be found through to the twentieth century. Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse is a prime example: its manuscript and original edition omitted a necessary natural sign to the modal top G of the main theme for the first fifty years that the piece was in print. Over these years many performers intuited under the fingers that some adjustment was necessary and read in the appropriate natural, even if some more literal-minded readers of the mid-twentieth century were troubled by such an approach.

A second example comes from Bach’s keyboard Partitas. The final movement of the Sixth Partita, in E minor, launches a characteristic Bachian fugato texture notated in (augmented) simple time under the heading “Gigue” (Example 1.2).

Over the last half-century, practically minded scholars such as Thurston Dart and Howard Ferguson have argued that many such notations—even outside the French practice of notes inégales—were understood as being meant to be “swung.”⁶ Doing so transforms Bach’s finale from a rather earnest-sounding contrapuntal study into a merrily dramatic dance (Recorded Example 1.2). Partly because of the reverence we have been brought up with for Bach, many reputable performers still balk at treating his music with such apparent frivolity: “But it’s not what he wrote.” Yet how many of them would take that approach to accidentals in the Schubert example above? We may well conclude that what they’re really saying is “It’s not how I’m used to hearing or reading it.”

Howard Ferguson backs up this case by observing several other pieces from Bach’s era or earlier that survive in different sources that variously notate them in simple or compound (swung) meter.⁷ Had Bach’s Gigue survived in such a variant (that is, written out in

), we would certainly perceive the matter differently. As it is, there is no way we can read Bach’s rhythmic notation in this piece without disrespecting something. Either we challenge twentieth-century notions of what a string of eighth notes means or we pay Bach the ruder disrespect of assuming he didn’t know what a jig was. (The word basically means “fiddle tune,” from the German word Geige for “fiddle.”) It is perfectly reasonable to ask—and to leave the question open—why Bach opted not to write out his E minor Gigue in compound meter, as he did with some of his others. (One immediate answer may be that this would have necessitated either an unwieldy

meter or

with double the number of barlines, in either case losing the alla breve element that his notation brings to the fore.) Whatever we conclude, no answer will suppress the main question of why he headed the piece “Gigue.”

Bach’s Gigue relates directly, if surprisingly, to our third example, “La Soirée dans Grenade” from Debussy’s Estampes of 1903. Playing the opening rhythms of this piece literally as written might evoke images of a sadly staid Carmen (Example 1.3a; Recorded Example 1.3). In fact a squarely literal reading would not be wholly obedient to the page, for it would have to ignore Debussy’s instruction above bar 1, “in the tempo of a habanera.” Anybody acquainted with the danced habanera—a languid form of sung tango brought to vogue in nineteenth-century France by Chopin’s protégée Pauline Viardot—knows the sort of elasticity inherent in its dotted rhythms. In an era when such specifics were common knowledge, Debussy’s heading tells readers to treat it as a popular dance. A piano roll recording of this piece made by Debussy in 1912 reveals this treatment (Recorded Example 1.4), then becomes even more revealing on the piece’s second page: in bars 33–37 he audibly compresses and sharpens the rhythmic contour within every beat thus (Example 1.3b; Recorded Example 1.5).⁸ The printed rhythms

and

. are audibly snapped towards the values

and,

, while

is reciprocally stressed towards

thereby completing a sort of rhythmic-notational circle. Here Debussy does almost exactly what Bach did in his Sixth Partita, both of them telling us about the dance idiom through their headings rather than cluttering the page with fussy notation.

Example 1.3 Debussy, “La Soirée dans Grenade” (Estampes)

Our fourth example comes from Billy Mayerl’s ever-popular “Marigold” from the 1920s.⁹ Mayerl’s light-fingered idiom (“syncopated swing,” he called it) is still very much living memory, through many recordings and radio broadcasts (he was a major figure in British radio entertainment until his death in 1959). Playing a few bars of “Marigold” literally “as Mayerl wrote them”—in any pedantic sense—would surely have Mayerl spinning in his grave (Example 1.4; Recorded Example 1.6).

Anyone familiar with his playing or his idiom would laugh at us for a literal performance so hopelessly unsuited to light music. Perhaps more comic still is the idea of a Billy Mayerl Urtext Gesamtausgabe, complete with scholarly footnotes that read something like: “According to documentary evidence and contemporary scholarship, the different rhythmic values in these bars (triplet and duplet eighth-notes and dotted pairs with sixteenth notes) should probably be assimilated to the same sounding value.”

We accept the swung rhythm and the rhythmic assimilations of a piece like “Marigold” simply because that is how we have always heard it, not least as famously played and recorded by Mayerl. Nobody even bothers asking why he wrote different values for the same sounding durations. Most of us guess likewise that Debussy’s “La Soirée dans Grenade” should not be read with stiff squareness. Why, then, should many of the same musicians treat Bach as if he were the only one to eschew dance or popular idioms? Moving back again from the piano keyboard, it is interesting to see how existing scholarly editions cope with these examples (except, of course, for Mayerl). In the case of Schubert’s C-minor Sonata, the Neue Schubert Ausgabe, Howard Ferguson’s Associated Board edition, and Martino Tirimo’s Wiener Urtext edition all editorially flat the Ds in question, clearly indicating the accidentals as editorial. Seeing them thus flagged can be a jolt for readers who were unaware that the flats are not the composer’s: all prior editions (including Henle) print them in normal type (and without editorial comment), presumably on the basis that they are such “obvious” corrections as to need no editorial flagging.

Example 1.4 Mayerl, “Marigold,” bars 54–59

Besides the obvious risk such assumptions entail (who decides, for example, what are “obvious errors”?), tacit sanitization of that sort skews our perception of a composer’s notation, in this case by presenting a mythical Schubert who apparently left us pages devoid of errors or modal ambiguities. Such sterility of presentation then discourages readers from querying other passing details: several other places in Schubert’s late sonatas also could justify debate about accidentals, texture or rhythm but remain unchallenged in any edition to date. An edition that can somehow show on the page how the editor has adjusted the comp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• List of Recorded Examples
• Notes on Abbreviations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I HOW COMPOSERS COMMUNICATE
• PART II TEACHERS AS THE CONDUIT TO THE COMPOSER’S INTENT
• PART III HISTORICAL RESOURCES
• PART IV USING ANALYSIS FOR INFORMED PERFORMANCES: PIANISTS’ VIEWS
• Selected Bibliography
• Index