CliveBrown

Rediscovering the language of Classical and Romantic performance

n the 40years of its existence Early Music has played a vital role in disseminating information about historical practices in musical performance. From an initial focus on medieval to Baroque music its scope soon extended to later repertories, and by the 1980s the concept of early music encompassed the 19th and even the 20th centuries. Arecurrent theme in its pages has been the relationship between notation and performance. The influence of scholarship on professional practice, however, remains problematic. This is particularly acute in the case of Classical and Romantic music. The material from which we can draw our knowledge and understanding of performing practice during that era is far more extensive and detailed than for earlier periods; it is different not only in quantity, but also in kind. Documentary evidence becomes increasingly detailed and richer in range, but perhaps most crucially we have recordings made by performers whose musical experience began as early as the 1820s, when the practices of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were still in living memory. These recordings frequently cast revealing and sometimes astonishing perspectives on written texts and notation, which can never adequately describe the finer details of musical performance; as Ferdinand David commented in the Foreword to his 1864 Violinschule :

If it is difficult to learn a language from a grammar, it is virtually impossible to learn the complicated mechanism of violin playing without the help of a teacher ... This is especially true of style and expression [Styl und Vortrag], which cannot simply be conveyed to someone through words and musical examples.1

Hearing how 19th-century musicians actually played (notwithstanding the limitations and

ambiguities of the earliest recordings) immediately reveals to us how difficult it is to understand from written sources alone what music sounded like in the past. The extent of the disjunction suggests that much of the language used to describe musical performance conveyed quite different things to those who originally wrote and read it than it does to us. It shocks many who hear recordings of Mozart by the pianist Carl Reinecke (18241910), regarded by his contemporaries as guardian of a genuine tradition of Mozart performance, to think that his approach, utterly alien to the modern listener, may plausibly preserve important features of the composers own practice.2 Such recordings of major 19th-century musicians, judiciously employed, can serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone for unlocking aspects of the documentary material that would otherwise remain enigmatic tous. In some ways this cornucopia of information about Classical and Romantic practices provides an embarrass de richesse. It presents a dilemma for established early music performers (whether they currently recognize this or not) when they tackle the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or even more so those of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, on historical instruments. The style that has been created during the past half-century for performing earlier repertory depends on relatively scanty sources, leaving a wide field for speculation. But with later repertory, obvious discrepancies between contemporary performing practice (both on modern and period instruments) and the historical evidence become inescapable. Some established modern performers and teachers may like to ignore historical evidence on the grounds that we should cultivate a contemporary style of performing older repertory, having no obligation to perpetuate or re-create the practices of the past; yet they

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Early Music, Vol. xli, No. 1 The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/em/cat004, available online at www.em.oup.com

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may simultaneously subscribe to the fallacious notion that by rendering a musical score with conscientious fidelity to the notated text and all its performance markings (as they understand them) they discharge the pious duty of fulfilling what is commonly referred to as the composers intentions. This misguided reverence for the superficial meaning of the notation is still surprisingly tenacious, both among modern and period performers. Afew deviations are unconsciously permitted in modern performance. Prominent among these is continuous vibrato, which is seen only as an essential element of good tone, not an extemporary ornament. In recent period performance, in contrast, continuous vibrato is now generally avoided (except in the case of singers), though it is rare to hear it employed in a genuinely ornamental manner. Portamento is commonly heard in modern performance, as a pallid hangover from the mid-20th-century style of playing, but rarely in period performance, where the rich variety of types employed by late 18th- and 19th-century musicians properly belongs. And very few professional musicians, either modern or period, have begun seriously to experiment with un-notated rhythmic freedoms and flexibilities, extempore keyboard arpeggiation, contra-metric tempo rubato, or subtle accelerando and ritardando within a fundamentally constant tempo, all of which were integral to Classical and Romantic practice, and can be heard on early recordings. The professional world is still largely in thrall to the agenda of the reformers of the early 20th century who incrementally rejected all the freedoms of their predecessors, stigmatizing them as accumulated abuses, and established the notion that respect for the composers conception consisted in adhering closely to the literal meaning of the notation. This attitude led, among other things, to the veneration of Urtexts in preference to editions annotated by important 19th- and early 20thcentury editors, which in reality may often convey much more about the ways in which composers expected to hear their works.3 An Urtext may well embody the composers intentions for the notation, but to make a nave connection between this and the composers intentions for the performance is nonsensical. For Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Brahms, the notation carried many subliminal messages that have been obscured with the passage of time. Thus, for instance, slurred notes of equal length were not intended by any of these composers to be performed scrupulously evenly, and

longshort patterns such as dotted quaversemiquaver were not intended to be performed exactly as written, nor was the relationship between melody and accompaniment intended to be confined in the straitjacket of the notatedscore. Overwhelming historical evidence makes it clear that composers expected skilful performers to inflect the notation in ways that were governed by well-understood conventions and to employ a range of expressive practices that, although un-notated, were an essential part of their conception. These conventions are still alive in some branches of jazz and popular music, where the notation, if it exists, is equally unrepresentative of the musical conception. Composers were well aware that notation is too inflexible to embody the flexible nuances necessary for effective performance, and in any case there was no expectation that the same extempore practices should be employed in the same way each time a piece was performed. So we might rather talk about the composers intentions for the notation and expectations for its effective realization. Throughout the Classical and Romantic periods, a more or less literal performance of the kind we generally hear today, observing all the note values, pitches, dynamics and tempo terms, was regarded merely as a stage on the road to mastery; the aim of every gifted musician was to understand and give life to the subliminal messages behind the notation. This is clearly conveyed by Hummels distinction in his 1828 Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel, and Spohrs in his 1833 Violinschule, between correct and beautiful performance. Both authors attempted to explain the distinction, but confessed like many other authorities that it can only be properly understood through hearing performances by great musicians. The growing body of scholarly writing about late 18thand 19th-century practice has as yet had limited impact on contemporary performance. Period performers have adopted a few documented practices, often in a partial way, but neglect others, which are felt to depart further from the norms of modern taste. To some extent the nature of scholarly writing is itself responsible for failure of communication. Making connections between musical practice and academic texts, sometimes contradictory, and inevitably couched in balanced and cautious scholarly language, is not easy for busy professional musicians. And then there is the question of public and critical response to the performances and recordings that are their livelihood. Many talented musicians, especially

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younger performers, are intrigued and stimulated by the possibilities inherent in a style of performance that gives them the licence to bend rhythms, arpeggiate chords, employ accelerando to enhance a crescendo, use expressive portamento, and a host of other welldocumented expressive gestures and practices essential to the musical language of Classical and Romantic music. With encouragement they are often excited to experiment; but in public performance or recording all but a courageous few draw back from implementing them, except in the most tentative manner.4 They fear, perhaps, that their employment of historical practices may simply be taken as inability to achieve the clean, rhythmically regimented style of performance that is erroneously believed to reflect the composers intentions. Changes of outlook and taste, leading to changes in performing style, occur gradually in music as they do in every area of life, but occasionally there are periods of more rapid and radical change. Ibelieve we are on the verge of such a transformation. Working internationally with young musicians in conservatoires and with a number of professional ensembles to explore and experiment with the implications of historical evidence for Classical and Romantic performance has convinced me that there is a growing and ultimately irresistible urge to reassess our understanding of the practices that turned correct into beautiful performance. The weight of published evidence now makes it untenable to claim that the 20th-century concept of fidelity to the composers intentions represents historical or musical truth in any meaningful sense. Ahealthy future for classical performance depends on bold investigation and implementation of the extempore practices that lie behind the notation.

Our great inheritance of classical music no longer occupies the exalted cultural position it once enjoyed; audiences are getting older, and among the young it seems largely to be regarded as esoteric, unexciting or simply irrelevant. This undoubtedly stems in part from the constant repetition of a limited repertory in predictable ways. The period performance movement has played a vital part in revivifying familiar works, but its efforts so far have been limited by inadequate communication between scholarship and performance, constraints of professional time, the exigencies of the recording studio and the understandable reluctance of established musicians to reassess and substantially modify their hardwon skills. The rising generation of performers on both modern and period instruments, however, is already questioning the tenets of current practice; and there are encouraging signs that our conservatoires are beginning to recognize and embrace an approach based on serious engagement with the historical evidence. Musicians need to find new ways to communicate with their public. One of these might be through the medium of recording, perhaps offering multiple versions of the same performance on a single disc to simulate the spontaneity and variety of live music-making. The age of regimented performance is surely over and this core repertory of great music must now be re-created in ways that return it to its quasi-improvisatory roots. If classical music is to regain its cultural significance, musicians must engage more courageously with the historical evidence, in a quest to read between the lines of the score. Only then will they recapture the full measure of freshness, beauty and excitement that Classical and Romantic composers expected their notation to convey to skilful performers and, through them, to the listener.

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Clive Brown is Professor of Applied Musicology at the University of Leeds. His research interests include Classical and Romantic performing practice, historical violin playing, scholarly editing, 18thand 19th-century German music, early Romantic opera, and the music of Eberl, Beethoven, Spohr, Mendelssohn, David, Brahms and Elgar. J.C.A.Brown@leeds.ac.uk
1 Ferdinand David, Violinschule (Leipzig [1864]), Vorwort (n.p.). 2 This and other aspects of 19th-century pianism have been tellingly investigated in N.Peres Da Costa, Off the record: performing practices in Romantic piano playing (Oxford, 2012). The implications of Reineckes recordings for modern Mozart performance are also considered in C.Brown, Reading between the lines: the notation and performance of Mozarts chamber music with keyboard, in Mozarts chamber music with keyboard, ed. M.Harlow (Cambridge, 2012), pp.23564 (the missing word in the first sentence of my chapter was present in the final proof!). More general studies of string-playing practice in the period are D.Milsom, Theory and practice in late nineteenthcentury violin performance (Aldershot, 2003), and G.Kennaway, Playing the cello (forthcoming). 3 String editions of this kind have been collected and evaluated on the AHRCfunded website www.Chase.leeds.ac.uk 4 The few will know to whom Irefer.

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