THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE The intricacies and challenges of musical performance have recently attracted the attention of writers and scholars to a greater extent than ever before. Research into the performer’s experience has begun to explore such areas as practice techniques, performance anxiety and memorisation, as well as many other professional issues. Historical performance practice has been the subject of lively debate way beyond academic circles, mirroring its high profile in the recording studio and the concert hall. Reflecting the strong ongoing interest in the role of performers and performance, this History brings together research from leading scholars and historians, and, importantly, features contributions from accomplished performers, whose practical experiences give the volume a unique vitality. Moving the focus away from the composers and onto the musicians responsible for bringing the music to life, the History presents a fresh, integrated and innovative perspective on performance history and practice, from the earliest times to today. C O L I N L A W S O N is Director of the Royal College of Music, London. He has an international profile as a period clarinettist and has played principal in most of Britain’s leading period orchestras, notably The Hanover Band, the English Concert and the London Classical Players, with whom he has recorded extensively and toured worldwide. He has published widely, and is co-editor, with Robin Stowell, of a series of Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music, for which he co-authored an introductory volume and contributed a book on the early clarinet.
is Professor of Music and Director of the Centre for Research into Historically Informed Performance at Cardiff University. He is also a violinist/period violinist, and he has performed, broadcast and recorded with the Academy of Ancient Music and other period ensembles. He is the author of Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (1985), and his more recent major publications include The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet (2003) and The Early Violin and Viola (2001).
ROBIN STOWELL
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE * C OL I N L A W S O N
and RO BI N S TO WEL L
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521896115 © Cambridge University Press 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN
978-0-521-89611-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of illustrations ix List of musical examples x Notes on contributors xiii Editors’ preface xxi PART I PERFORMANCE THROUGH HISTORY 1
1 . Performance today
3
NICHOLAS KENYON
2 . Political process, social structure and musical performance in Europe since 1450 35 WILLIAM WEBER
3 . The evidence
63
ROBIN STOWELL
4 . The performer and the composer
105
COREY JAMASON
5 . The teaching of performance
135
NATASHA LOGES AND COLIN LAWSON
6 . Music and musical performance: histories in disjunction? DAVID WRIGHT
PART II PRE-RENAISSANCE P E R F O R M A N C E 207
7 . The Ancient World
209
ELEONORA ROCCONI
8 . Performance before c. 1430: an overview JOHN HAINES
[v]
231
169
vi
Contents
9 . Vocal performance before c. 1430
248
JEREMY SUMMERLY
10 . Instrumental performance before c. 1430
261
STEFANO MENGOZZI
11 . Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’ 279 JOHN HAINES
PART III PERFORMANCE IN THE RENAISSANCE ( C . 1 4 3 0 – 1 6 0 0 ) 295
12 . Performance in the Renaissance: an overview
297
JON BANKS
13 . Vocal performance in the Renaissance
318
TIMOTHY J. MCGEE
14 . Instrumental performance in the Renaissance
335
KEITH POLK
15 . Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music in performance, 1549–1599 353 OWEN REES
PART IV PERFORMANCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH C E N T U R Y 375
16 . Performance in the seventeenth century: an overview
377
TIM CARTER
17 . Vocal performance in the seventeenth century
398
RICHARD WISTREICH
18 . Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century DAVID PONSFORD
19 . Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610) JONATHAN P. WAINWRIGHT
448
421
Contents
vii
PART V PERFORMANCE IN THE ‘LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY’ 471
20 . Performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’: an overview
473
SIMON MCVEIGH
21 . Vocal performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’
506
JOHN POTTER
22 . Instrumental performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’
527
PETER WALLS
23 . Case study: Mozart, Symphonies in E flat major K543, G minor K550 and C major K551 552 COLIN LAWSON
PART VI PERFORMANCE IN THE NINETEENTH C E N T U R Y 575
24 . Performance in the nineteenth century: an overview
577
MICHAEL MUSGRAVE
25 . Vocal performance in the nineteenth century
611
WILL CRUTCHFIELD
26 . Instrumental performance in the nineteenth century
643
IAN PACE
27 . Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
696
ROBIN STOWELL
PART VII THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND B E Y O N D 723
28 . Musical performance in the twentieth century and beyond: an overview 725 STEPHEN COTTRELL
29 . Vocal performance in the twentieth century and beyond JANE MANNING AND ANTHONY PAYNE
752
viii
Contents
30 . Instrumental performance in the twentieth century and beyond
778
ROGER HEATON
31 . Case study: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen für drei Orchester WILLIAM MIVAL
PART VIII
815
32 . The future?
817
COLIN LAWSON AND ROBIN STOWELL
Select bibliography 834 Index 894
798
Illustrations
5.1a–c.
8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 10.1.
10.2.
10.3.
15.1. 15.2. 22.1. 22.2. 22.3.
Illustrations of the façade, the concert hall and stairwell of the building Hochschule für Musik und Theater ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’, Leipzig. Bibliothek/Archiv, A, II. 3/1: from the prospectus Das Königliche Konservatorium der Musik zu Leipzig, 1900 page 155 Conventional view of medieval music repertoires 232 Revised view of medieval music repertoires 234 Standard medieval repertoires revised 234 Country scene with players of tabor and pipe, and gittern. From Lyon Municipal Library, MS 27, fol. 13r (fourteenth century) (Photo, Lyon Municipal Library, Didier Nicole) 266 Giovanni del Biondo, Musical angels (fourteenth century), showing two players of organette and fiddle (courtesy of the National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery) 273 Glorification of St Francis (attributed to Antonio Vite, School of Giotto); detail showing a wind ensemble (two shawms and bagpipe), organistrum and psaltery (fourteenth century). Church of St Francesco, Pistoia, Italy 277 Medallion on the choir stand in the coro of Seville Cathedral, showing a group of singers 362 Medallion on the choir stand in the coro of Seville Cathedral, showing the ministriles 364 Haydn instrumental works – percentage distribution by key 538 Mozart instrumental music – percentage distribution by key 538 Chopin distribution of works by key 539
[ix]
Musical examples
8.1. 8.2.
8.3. 8.4. 9.1.
9.2.
10.1.
10.2.
11.1.
15.1. 18.1. 18.2.
Opening of the lament for Charlemagne page 238 Opening of ‘Bele Yolanz en ses chambres seoit’ (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, f. fr. 20050, fol. 64v) 239 Prose of the Ass from the Feast of Fools 243 Banquet song from Renart le nouvel 244 The opening of Léonin’s Viderunt omnes transcribed in measured rhythm (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1, fol. 99) 257 The opening of Léonin’s Viderunt omnes transcribed as free rhythm (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1 fol. 99) 258 In seculum viellatoris (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS. Lit. 115, fol. 63v), opening. The example is modelled after G. A. Anderson (ed.), Compositions of the Bamberg Manuscript (American Institute of Musicology, 1977), pp. 138–9 (used by permission of the American Institute of Musicology, Inc., Middleton, WI) 274 T’Andernaken al op den Rijn (Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS. 87, fol. 198v–199r), opening. The example is modelled after T’Andernaken: Ten Settings in Three, Four, and Five Parts, ed. R. Taruskin (Coconut Grove, FL: Ogni Sorte Editions, 1981), pp. 9–10 276 Machaut’s ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’, edited from the Reina Codex (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, nouv. acqu. fr. 6771, fols. 54v–55r) 288 Guerrero, Duo Seraphim, opening 373 Froberger, Toccata 3, bars 5–7 428 Froberger, Toccata 1, bars 1–3 429
[x]
List of musical examples
18.3. Louis Couperin, opening of Prélude à l’imitation de Mr. Froberger 429 18.4. Buxtehude, Praeludium in G minor (ostinato theme, fugue subjects and time signatures) 430 22.1. Francesco Geminiani, The Art of playing on the Violin (London, 1751), Essempio VIII, section 20 546 25.1a. Schumann, ‘Die beiden Grenadiere’ 618 25.1b. Handel, Judas Maccabeus, ‘Sound an Alarm’ 618 25.2a. Bellini, La sonnambula, ‘Ah, non credea mirarti’ 619 25.2b. Verdi, La traviata, ‘Pura siccome un angelo’ 619 25.3. Verdi, Ernani, ‘O sommo Carlo’ 621 25.4a. Portugal (Portogallo), La morte di Mitridate, ‘Teneri e cari affetti’ 626 25.4b. Cimarosa, Penelope, ‘Ah, serena il mesto ciglio’ 626 25.5. Pacini, Niobe, Didone, ‘Il soave e bel contento’ 627 25.6. Mercadante, Andronico, ‘Soave immagine’ 627 25.7. De Garaudé, Méthode de chant 628 25.8. Appoggiatura-based ornamental patterns in Bellini, Norma, and Verdi, Nabucco 628 25.9. Zingarelli, Giulietta e Romeo, ‘Sommo ciel’ 629 25.10a–c. Nineteenth-century final cadenzas 630 25.11. Verdi, Ernani, ‘Infelice, e tu credevi’ 630 25.12. Bellini, Norma, three fragments from the role of Pollione as altered by Giovanni Mario 632 25.13. Facsimile from García the younger’s Treatise 639 25.14. Haydn, ‘She never told her love’ (Hob. XXVIa:34) 641 26.1. Beethoven, String Quartet in B flat Op. 130, opening of fourth movement 646 26.2. Schubert, Symphony No. 9 in C D944, finale 647
xi
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List of musical examples
26.3a. 26.3b. 26.4a. 26.4b. 26.5. 26.6. 26.7. 26.8. 26.9.
26.10. 26.11. 26.12a. 26.12b. 26.12c. 26.13. 26.14. 26.15. 26.16. 26.17. 26.18a. 26.18b. 26.18c. 26.19.
Schubert, String Quartet in G D887, first movement 649 Schubert, Impromptu D899 No. 2 649 Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in E flat major, opening 650 Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in E flat major, opening, as played 650 Portamento as suggested in treatises of Habeneck and de Bériot 651 Liszt, Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur la Clochette de Paganini 653 Chopin, Waltz in A flat Op. 69 No. 1, execution as ski 654 described by Kleczyn Berlioz, Overture to King Lear, bars 364–8 661 Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto Op. 64, Allegro molto appassionato. Edition of David, with implied portamenti notated 666 Schumann, Fantasy Op. 17 667 Robert Schumann, Arabeske Op. 18 668 Liszt, Sonata in B minor, opening 673 Liszt, Sonata in B minor, towards end of first ‘movement’ 674 Liszt, Sonata in B minor, conclusion 674 Liszt, Consolation No. 3 677 César Franck, Violin Sonata, from fourth movement 679 Wagner, Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, bars 89–90, 97–8 681 Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, Adagio. Funeral Music 684 Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 119 No. 1 685 Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, opening of seventh movement, ‘Selig sind die Toten’ 686 Brahms, String Quartet in C minor Op. 51 No. 1, third movement. 686 Brahms, Violin Concerto, first movement, bars 347–52, 460–3, solo part 687 Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian Easter Overture 691
Contributors
J O N B A N K S combines a career as a Senior Lecturer in Music at Anglia Ruskin University with a full performing schedule. He specialises in the medieval harp and gittern as well as Oriental string instruments such as the santur and qanun, and has toured and recorded with groups including the Burning Bush, the Dufay Collective, Red Byrd, Joglaresa, Al-Ashekeen, the Jocelyn Pook Ensemble, Sirinu and the Tivoli Café Band. Recent publications include a book, The Instrumental Consort Repertory of the Fifteenth Century, and current research interests include a project on the repertoires of music preserved on Oriental clocks. Other activities include regular performances at the Globe Theatre, work with Iranian and Middle Eastern ensembles and freelance recording for film and TV. T I M C A R T E R was born in Australia and studied in the United Kingdom. He is the author of the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1987), Jacopo Peri (1561–1633): His Life and Works (1989), Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy (1992), Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence and Monteverdi and his Contemporaries (both 2000), Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (2002), and ‘Oklahoma!’ The Making of an American Musical (2007). In 2001 he moved from Royal Holloway, University of London, to become David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was chair of the Music Department from 2004 to 2009. He is currently preparing an edition of Kurt Weill’s first musical composed in the US, Johnny Johnson (to a play by Paul Green). S T E P H E N C O T T R E L L is Professor of Music at City University, London. His research interests fall into three interrelated areas: ethnographic approaches to musicians and music-making, especially within the Western art-music tradition; the study of musical instruments, particularly the saxophone; and the study and analysis of musical performance. A monograph on Professional Music-Making in London was published in 2004, and a further volume on The Saxophone is forthcoming. He has contributed to a range of other publications, including the British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology, and Twentieth-century Music. He is an associate editor of the latter, and on the executive committee of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. He is also an Artistic Adviser to the record label
[xiii]
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Notes on contributors
Saxophone Classics. As a performer he has released several CDs of contemporary music, both as a soloist and previously as the leader of the Delta Saxophone Quartet. W I L L C R U T C H F I E L D is the Director of Opera for the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York. He has also served as Music Director of the Opera de Colombia (Bogotá) and Principal Guest Conductor of the Polish National Opera (Warsaw), and has been a guest conductor in various theatres, specialising in Italian opera. He has written on music for the Grove Dictionaries of Music, the New York Times, the New Yorker and various academic publications, and has served on the faculties of the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music and the Mannes College of Music. J O H N H A I N E S is Professor at the University of Toronto, where he is crossappointed at the Faculty of Music and Centre for Medieval Studies. His publications include Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Medieval Song in Romance Languages (Cambridge University Press, 2010). R O G E R H E A T O N , clarinettist and conductor, has worked closely with some of the world’s leading composers including Henze, Feldman, Bryars, Radulescu and Volans, and performs with such groups as the Fidelio and Archduke Trios, Kreutzer and Smith String Quartets. He was a member of the London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern, and has been a member of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble since the early 1980s. He was Music Director and Conductor of Rambert Dance Company during the 1990s, Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (1982–94) and is currently Professor of Music at Bath Spa University. His most recent CDs include music by Tom Johnson (Ants/Silenzio), clarinet quintets by Morton Feldman and Christopher Fox (Metier), Hugh Wood’s chamber music (Toccata) and Schoenberg’s (Greissle) Clarinet Sonata (Clarinet Classics). His book The Versatile Clarinet was published in 2006. C O R E Y J A M A S O N is a harpsichordist and conductor and is artistic director of the San Francisco Bach Choir and principal keyboardist of the American Bach Soloists. He has performed with a variety of ensembles including LA Opera, San Francisco Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and has appeared in recordings with American Bach Soloists, the violinist Giles Apap and the ensemble El Mundo. He is also co-director and conductor of Théâtre Comique, an ensemble that specialises in recreating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American musical theatre according to historical performance practices. He teaches historical keyboards at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he is director of the Historical Performance Program.
Notes on contributors
xv
N I C H O L A S K E N Y O N is Managing Director of the Barbican Centre, London. He was Controller of BBC Radio 3 1992–8 and Director of the BBC Proms 1996– 2007. He was a music critic of the New Yorker 1979–82, Editor of Early Music 1983–92 and edited the influential volume Authenticity and Early Music (1988). He is the author of The BBC Symphony Orchestra 1930–80 (1981), Simon Rattle: From Birmingham to Berlin (rev. edn 2001), The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart (2005) and The Faber Pocket Guide to Bach (2011). He has been a council member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a Governor of Wellington College, and is now a member of Arts Council England and a Board member of English National Opera and Sage Gateshead, and a Trustee of Dartington Hall. C O L I N L A W S O N is Director of the Royal College of Music, London. He has an international profile as a period clarinettist and has played principal in most of Britain’s leading period orchestras, notably The Hanover Band, the English Concert and the London Classical Players, with whom he has recorded extensively and toured worldwide. Described by Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung as ‘a brilliant, absolutely world-class player’ he has appeared as a soloist in many international venues, including London’s major concert halls and New York’s Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. His recent discography includes two volumes of sonatas by Lefèvre in their original scoring for C clarinet and cello. Colin has published widely, especially for Cambridge University Press. With Robin Stowell, he is co-editor of a series of Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music, for which he co-authored an introductory volume and contributed a book on the early clarinet. N A T A S H A L O G E S gained her B.Mus. in piano performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and her M.Mus. at King’s College, London. She completed her doctoral thesis at the Royal Academy of Music, before taking up her current post as Assistant Head of Programmes at the Royal College of Music. She has published articles on Brahms’s Lieder in Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2006), Indiana Theory Review (2005) and in Music and Literature in German Romanticism (2004). Natasha also works as an accompanist, and has performed in St John’s, Smith Square, London and the Holywell Music Room, Oxford; she has also broadcast live for BBC Radio 3. T I M O T H Y J . M C G E E is a music historian whose areas of research include performance practices before 1700 and Canadian music. His latest book, The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence was published in 2009. Other publications include The Sound of Medieval Song (1998), Medieval Instrumental Dances (1989), Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer’s Guide (1985) and The Music of Canada (1985). In 2002 he retired from the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Currently
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Notes on contributors
he is an Honorary Professor and Adjunct Professor in the departments of English and History at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. S I M O N M C V E I G H is Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published extensively on eighteenth-century instrumental music and on music in Britain, including Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (1993) and, with Jehoash Hirshberg, The Italian Solo Concerto 1700–1760: Rhetorical Strategies and Style History (2004). He also co-edited with Susan Wollenberg a volume of essays entitled Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004). Current research projects include a study of the British symphony in the eighteenth century and a collaboration with Leanne Langley on London concert life around 1900. In addition he is a Baroque and Classical violinist, with a particular interest in the north Italian violin repertoire and in the development of the concert string quartet. J A N E M A N N I N G is an internationally known soprano, specialising in twentiethand twenty-first-century music, who has given more than 300 world premieres. An extensive recording catalogue includes many twentieth-century classics. She founded her own ensemble, Jane’s Minstrels, in 1988 and still enjoys an active career. Currently Visiting Professor at Kingston University, her academic work includes three terms as Visiting Professor at Mills College, six years as Honorary Professor at Keele University, and many shorter international residencies, including seminars at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale Universities. Her published works include two volumes of New Vocal Repertory, a chapter in The Messiaen Companion, and the forthcoming Voicing Pierrot, the product of three years of research at Kingston University funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of York, Keele and Durham and is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music. S T E F A N O M E N G O Z Z I is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His research focuses on the history of music theory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. His publications include The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo between Myth and History (2010). W I L L I A M M I V A L is a composer, broadcaster, writer and teacher and is Head of Composition at the Royal College of Music in London. He has written works for, amongst others, the Belcea String Quartet, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Welsh Chamber Orchestra and the harpsichordist Sophie Yates. As a broadcaster he has been a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 3’s CD Review and Building a Library and was invited to discuss the concept of musical ‘resonance’ on BBC Television’s The Culture Show.
Notes on contributors
xvii
M I C H A E L M U S G R A V E is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of London, Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music, and serves on the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School, New York. His fields of research are nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German music, and English concert life in the same period. He is author and editor of six books on Brahms, including (with Bernard D. Sherman) Performing Brahms. Early Evidence of Performance Style (2003); this won the 2003 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Best Research in Recorded Classical Music. His recent work includes a biography of Robert Schumann. He is author of The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (1995), and editor of George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (2003). He is also a member of the Trägerverein of the ‘Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe’, for which he has edited the two orchestral serenades Op. 11 and Op. 16 (2006); other editions include the Liebeslieder Waltzes of Brahms in different versions for Carus Verlag and Edition Peters, and Schumann’s Piano Concerto, also for Peters (2009). He received the Fellowship of the Royal College of Music in 2005. I A N P A C E is a pianist and musicologist specialising in areas of nineteenth-century performance practice, the post-1945 avant-garde, and issues of music and society. He is a Lecturer in Music at City University, London, and has previously taught at Dartington College of Arts and the Universities of Southampton and Cardiff. He has published many articles, and co-edited the volume Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy (2008). His book Brahms Performance Practice: Documentary, Analytic and Interpretive Approaches was published in 2010. As a pianist he has played in over twenty countries, recorded numerous CDs, and given world premieres of over 150 works, by composers including Richard Barrett, James Dillon, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Horatiu Radulescu, Frederic Rzewski and Gerhard Stäbler. He is also writing a book on the history of instrumental performance between 1815 and 1890, as well as researching the emergence of the avant-garde in West Germany after 1945. A N T H O N Y P A Y N E , composer, was born in London and studied at Durham University. His commissions include three orchestral works for the BBC Proms, and works for the BBC Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta and Cheltenham Festival. His discography includes two complete CDs of chamber music. He has published books on Schoenberg, Frank Bridge and Elgar’s Third Symphony, the completion of which, in 1997, brought him international acclaim, as well as South Bank and Evening Standard awards. It has been performed by the Philadelphia and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, as well as all the major UK orchestras. There are now six CD recordings in existence. He has been Visiting Professor at Mills College, California and Composition Tutor at the New South Wales Conservatorium, and is a frequent broadcaster for the BBC. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Birmingham, Durham and Kingston, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Music.
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K E I T H P O L K has produced numerous articles and several books on instrumental music of the Renaissance. He is also a French horn player, having performed with the San Diego Symphony, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Boston Baroque, and the Smithsonian Chamber Players, among others. He is Professor Emeritus, University of New Hampshire, and has also taught at Brandeis University, the New England Conservatory and Regents College, London. D A V I D P O N S F O R D is a scholar, organist and harpsichordist, and an authority on keyboard music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An organ scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he studied the organ with Peter Hurford, Lionel Rogg and Piet Kee, and the harpsichord with Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. He is an Associate Lecturer at Cardiff University, where he conducts the University Choir and the University Chamber Orchestra. He also teaches the organ and harpsichord at Bristol University, and gives series of lectures at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. Recent recordings include Bach’s complete violin sonatas with Jacqueline Ross, ‘Parthenia’ (1612), J. S. Bach’s Clavierübung Part 3, and the complete Handel recorder sonatas with Alan Davis. He has recently published an edition of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (2007) and French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV (2011). J O H N P O T T E R is a singer and writer. He was a member of the Hilliard Ensemble for many years and currently sings with the Dowland Project, Red Byrd, and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble. He collaborates with a number of instrumentalists and performance artists. He records for ECM and has an eclectic discography of some 150 titles which include five gold discs and several Grammy nominations. He is the author of Vocal Authority (1998) and Tenor: History of a Voice (2009), edited The Cambridge Companion to Singing (2000) and has contributed to several Cambridge Histories. O W E N R E E S specialises in Spanish, Portuguese and English sacred music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is Reader in Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of the Queen’s College. Previously he held posts at St Peter’s College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and at the University of Surrey. He has published studies of the music of Cristóbal de Morales, Francisco Guerrero and William Byrd, and of musical sources and repertoires from Portugal and Spain. His first book, Polyphony in Portugal, considers music at the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, Portugal, and he is co-editor (with Bernadette Nelson) of Cristóbal de Morales: Sources, Influences, Reception. His work as a scholar regularly relates closely to his performances and recordings; he directs Contrapunctus, the Choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and the Cambridge Taverner Choir. E L E O N O R A R O C C O N I ’ S research interests focus on Ancient Greek Music and Music Theory, in which she specialised at the University of Birmingham under
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the supervision of Professor Andrew Barker. Since 1999 she has been working for the Faculty of Musicology in Cremona (University of Pavia), where she is a Lecturer in Greek Language and Literature. Since 2000 she has been a member of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology (ISGMA), and in 2008 she became a member of the ‘Kommission für antike Literatur und lateinische Tradition’ within the ‘Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften’. She is charter member of ‘MOISA: International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and of its Cultural Heritage’. Among her publications is Le parole delle Muse (2003). R O B I N S T O W E L L is Professor of Music and Director of the Centre for Research into Historically Informed Performance at Cardiff University. Educated at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, he is also a violinist/period violinist, and he has performed, broadcast and recorded with the Academy of Ancient Music and other period ensembles. Since his pioneering book Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (1985) he has published widely on issues of performance practice, organology, music of the ‘long eighteenth century’, violinists, chamber music and string playing in general. His more recent major publications include The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet (2003), The Early Violin and Viola (2001), a monograph on Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (1998) and a co-authored volume (with Colin Lawson) on historical performance (1999), the first of a series of which he is co-editor. J E R E M Y S U M M E R L Y is a conductor, musicologist, broadcaster and recording producer. He studied music as an undergraduate at Oxford University and musicology as a postgraduate at King’s College, London. He is founder-director of Oxford Camerata and the Royal Academy Consort, has conducted almost fifty original commercial recordings of music spanning nine centuries, and has directed choirs and orchestras in locations as far afield as San Francisco and Melbourne, Helsinki and Cape Town. He has edited four volumes of medieval and Renaissance music for Faber Music, presents programmes for BBC Radios 3 and 4, and produces location recordings for Hyperion Records and Naxos. He is the recipient of a European Cultural Prize and is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music. J O N A T H A N W A I N W R I G H T is Professor and Head of the Department of Music at the University of York. He is a musicologist and performer and from 1996 to 2001 he was Director of the Girls’ Choir at York Minster. His research interests focus upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Italian Music and his publications include Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England (1997) and From Renaissance to Baroque (ed. with Peter Holman, 2005), and his edition of Richard
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Dering’s Latin Motets for 1–3 voices and continuo was published in 2008 in the series Musica Britannica. P E T E R W A L L S is Emeritus Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington and from 2002–2011 was Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. A Baroque violinist and conductor, he is the author of Music in the English Courtly Masque (1996), History, Imagination and the Performance of Music (2003) and numerous articles on historical performance practice. He is the editor of Baroque Music (2011) in the Ashgate series The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice and of two volumes of treatises in the Geminiani Opera Omnia (General Editor, Christopher Hogwood). W I L L I A M W E B E R , Professor of History Emeritus at California State University in Long Beach, has written Music and the Middle Class (1975/2003), The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992), and The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (2008). He edited Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics and The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914 (2005). He has been a member of doctoral committees in France, Finland and Canada as well as the United States and is an Associate of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. R I C H A R D W I S T R E I C H is a scholar, singer and teacher whose work centres on the cultural and social history of music-making in Europe in the period between about 1500 and 1800. More specifically, he investigates how vocal performance of all kinds contributes to the construction of individual and collective identities. His book Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance was published in 2007, as was The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, co-edited with John Whenham; he is also co-editor, with Iain Fenlon, of The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music. He has an international profile as a singer of both early and contemporary music, specialising in the performance of fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century solo and ensemble song. He is Professor of Music History and Dean of Research and Enterprise at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. D A V I D W R I G H T ’ S recent work has focused on British musical life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly its institutional, social and concert history aspects. His publications include revisionist accounts of the founding of the Royal College of Music, nineteenth-century music examination culture, the London Sinfonietta and the Prom seasons of Sir William Glock. With Jenny Doctor and Nicholas Kenyon he edited The Proms: A New History (2007). He is writing a social and cultural history of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. He was formerly Reader in the Social History of Music at the Royal College of Music.
Editors’ preface
Over the past generation the intricacies and challenges of musical performance have attracted the attention of writers and scholars to a greater extent than ever before. The net has been cast widely, as research into the performer’s experience has begun to explore such areas as practice techniques, performance anxiety and memorisation, as well as professional issues such as alcohol and drug abuse. There has even been greater recognition that a true understanding of musical excellence draws fruitfully upon such diverse fields as exercise science, psychophysiology, sports psychology, cognitive science and medicine. Furthermore, a relatively recent sub-discipline loosely embraced by the term ‘performance studies’ has circled around a large range of subject matter while not always fully engaging the attention of the executants themselves. At the same time, historical performance practice has been the subject of lively debate way beyond academic circles, mirroring its high profile in the recording studio and the concert hall. Histories of music nevertheless continue stubbornly to be based on composers and their achievements rather than on those musicians who have been responsible for bringing the music to life. Like Heinrich Schenker, many theorists have considered ‘the mechanical realization of the work of art . . . superfluous’, not least because ‘a composition does not require a performance in order to exist’.1 Whatever the reason, ‘we have regarded performance as a totally secondary aspect of music, merely a clothing or a realisation of “the real thing”, which are the written dots on the page’.2 The complex relationship of score, musical work and performance demands a more flexible and detailed approach. ‘For generations, we wrote the story of music as the history of compositions. But it is surely a mistake to think that music actually exists on library shelves in weighty collected editions. It is the history of performance that has shaped the course of music, and the history of
1 H. Schenker, The Art of Performance, ed. H. Esser, trans. I. S. Scott, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3. 2 N. Kenyon, ‘Musical Tradition in a Time of Anxiety’, Twelfth Leverhulme Memorial Lecture, The Leverhulme Trust (2005), p. 6.
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performance has never been written. The history of repertories and institutions and taste and reception is only beginning to be written.’3 The Cambridge History of Musical Performance takes up the challenge, aspiring to be nothing less than the largest and most comprehensive history of musical performance to be published in the English language. Apart from Frederick Dorian’s The History of Music in Performance (New York, 1942), a now outdated book and of limited value, it can reasonably be claimed that there has been no previous publication on the subject, and certainly none matching the scope of the content and scholarly expertise represented within its pages. A collaborative project by leading music scholars, historians and practitioners, it seeks to trace the rich panorama of performance history, conventions and practices from the Ancient World to the present day, aiming to provide not only an invaluable and up-to-date source of reference about the subject but also an appreciation of the historical interrelationship of style and interpretation during the various musical epochs. The format of this volume aligns with others in the ‘Cambridge History’ series. It reflects the research and performance experience of an international authorship, presenting a synthetic historical overview of a fascinating and complex subject that demands distinctive treatment. Much of the book addresses performance and performance practices in specific periods of history from times ancient to modern. From the Middle Ages onwards, an overview chapter for each period lays the historical foundations on which the immediately succeeding chapters are built, devoted respectively to vocal and instrumental performance. Case studies outline the performance history and the performance practice issues involved in interpreting a particular work or works from six of the periods under scrutiny. By way of introduction to this investigation of chronological developments, the opening chapters address broader issues that are immediately relevant to the performance of music, focusing respectively upon ‘Performance today’, ‘Political process, Social structure and musical performance in Europe since 1450’, ‘The evidence’, ‘The performer and the composer’, ‘The teaching of performance’, and ‘Music and musical performance: histories in disjunction?’ With classical music increasingly being challenged in our society by pop music, world musics and a vast range of alternative mass entertainment, advocacy is clearly an important aspect of any performer’s work. Yet the digital age has brought new opportunities, as the ways in which musical performance is disseminated have become subject to radical change. Contributors discuss these technological developments along with other performance-related topics 3 Ibid.
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such as repertoires, audiences, criticism, careers, patronage and venues. An analysis of the complex and ever-changing relationship between composers and performers centres upon several areas of enquiry such as notational conventions, leadership roles and the cult of personality. Performance through the ages has been subject to a variety of didactic practices, often focusing on musical learning within institutions, whether church, court, university or conservatoire. An appropriate curriculum for performers beyond the immediate study of music has been promulgated in many different contexts, one eighteenth-century source prescribing for music students ‘the whole of worldly wisdom, as well as mathematics, poetry, rhetoric and many languages’.4 This idealism scarcely found long-term favour, though in more recent times theory and analysis have gradually been supplemented by a host of other performance-related subjects, such as acoustics, performance practice, psychology and world music. In addition, the increasing interaction of performers with their communities has brought into focus the benefits of music to disadvantaged members of society. Recording has made musical performance durable, its natural evanescence captured and preserved by technology. No longer is music’s sound necessarily inseparable from the actions of the performers creating it, with a perishability once described by Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) as ‘leaving behind no tangible, vendible commodity’.5 And social, economic and cultural change after Smith’s day – with new expectations of a more leisured society for its edification and entertainment – meant that the virtuoso eventually became a social achiever, acclaimed for his skills and exploited for his marketability. This was a new situation compared with Smith’s observation (1776) that being a professional performer was an essentially discreditable occupation, ‘a sort of public prostitution’. Such change over so short a time underlines the advisability of examining concepts of canon, repertoire and music reception in relation to the ways in which musical performance has been marketed and distributed. Traditionally, music was listened to within some sort of social context, such as a concert or a liturgical setting. This experience generated a collective aesthetic response in groups of listeners, giving rise to a common understanding of what constituted a canon of exemplary works. But today’s digital miniaturisation, and the unparalleled choice of recorded repertoire now available, puts consumers (with their own individual sensibilities and musical preferences) in complete control of what they listen to, when they listen and whether they listen to favourite moments or an entire work. Increasingly, 4 P. Poulin, ‘A view of eighteenth-century musical life and training: Anton Stadler’s “Musick Plan” ’, Music & Letters, 71 (1990), 215–24. 5 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. E. Cannan, New York, Random House, 2000, p. 361.
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therefore, today’s listening habits reflect little experience of music’s original social environments and conventions. This moves us away from the old acceptance of a hierarchy of works to more contingent and less codified musical values – effectively a disruption that challenges established patterns and ideologies of reception, and questions the continuing relevance of the canon. Given that musical performance takes place within the elusive medium of sound there is of course a sense in which much of its history before the invention of ‘non-human storage of music’6 has entirely disappeared. ‘Time and again, therefore, earlier epochs characterize performance as something valid only for the present, or for veiled, mediated recollection; and though performance may have been reflected, represented and even to some extent “recorded” in literary or visual art, music in performance was not essentially open to scientific or even philosophical inspection.’7 When Thomas Edison shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into a phonograph in 1877, the musical world began to change; some twenty-five years later the recordings of Enrico Caruso acquired a mass market and the nature of the evidence for performance was revolutionised. Early recordings have recently attracted a great deal of attention, as have the attitudes and achievements of those pioneering musicians who embraced studio work with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance during the first half of the twentieth century. Among pianists Wilhelm Kempff recognised the opportunity to achieve a perfect interpretation and over his long life became a studio master, exclusive to Deutsche Grammophon from 1935 until his death in 1991; yet on stage he was all too prone to disappoint, unable to reproduce the raptness or subtle variants of colour. During his lifetime, the art of recording and live performance became radically different in scope and intent.8 By contrast, Artur Schnabel argued that recording went against the very nature of performance, by a dehumanising elimination of contact between player and listener. Though later convinced to record, he found the process difficult; ‘I suffered agonies and was in a state of despair. . . . Everything was artificial – the light, the air, the sound – and it took me quite a long time to get the company to adjust some of their equipment to music.’9 In Beethoven and Schubert an inspirational spontaneity (unfettered by insistence on accuracy) was his legacy.
6 J. Dunsby, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 19, p. 346, art. ‘Performance’. 7 Ibid. 8 N. Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness: the Secret Life & Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry, London, Allen Lane, 2007, p. 8. 9 A. Schnabel, My Life and Music, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1970, p. 98, cited in Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness, p. 9.
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In charting what he regards as the death of the classical recording industry, Norman Lebrecht has observed that Karajan, Pavarotti and Solti are the topselling classical artists (respectively 200, 100 and 50 million records). He claims that classical sales as a whole amount to somewhere between 1 and 1.3 billion records, a similar number to the Beatles. Lebrecht’s all-time classical chart is topped by Solti’s Ring Cycle (18 million), the Three Tenors (14 million) and I Musici’s Four Seasons (9.5 million). He excludes non-classical or crossover submissions such as Titanic (25 million) and Charlotte Church (10 million).10 It is worth recalling here that much of today’s terminology had no place in earlier times, with ‘crossover’ itself an obvious example. The same caveat applies to words such as ‘genius’ or ‘masterpiece’. In other words, historical evidence for performance needs to be read in the spirit of its own times. Audiences for performers before the age of recording inevitably had different priorities. The appearance of Paganini or Liszt for a one-night musical stand was about more than just music, or worse still, musical accuracy. Moving back in time, it is clear that in Mozart’s day musical cities such as Vienna and Prague boasted quite distinctive musical personalities. In earlier historical periods the question arises as to what can reasonably be defined as music (with or without notation). In recreating medieval song that is manifestly raw, dramatic and arresting, today’s singer might be forgiven for feeling shackled by concerns such as the replication of ‘correct’ tempos, ‘effective’ dynamics and ‘appropriate’ textures, to say nothing of issues of pitch, temperament and pronunciation. How, for instance, might latter-day performers recreate the medieval sound world of lone minstrels, choirs of monks, troupes of liturgical dramatists, ensembles of early polyphonists or gatherings of enthusiastic scholars? Clearly, any investigation of any performances from before the age of recording will pose many more questions than can readily be answered. This book is intended to stimulate intelligent thought about the role of performers and performance and shed new light on issues of performance history and practice. It includes contributions not only from scholars but also from accomplished performers, whose practical experiences have shaped their chapters and lent the volume a unique vitality and cogency. It aims to be wideranging but can never be exhaustive. Limitations of space have inevitably forced authors to be highly selective in their individual dissertations. Some have opted to use the microscope to address key issues relevant to their allotted topic/period, while others have considered a telescopic approach more appropriate to their needs. This decision has been theirs, but the final responsibility for content and coverage is ours. 10 Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness, pp. 136–8.
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As a final preliminary, some words of acknowledgement are in order. We should like to thank all our contributors, especially those who submitted their chapters on schedule, for their cooperation in discussing details of their material with us and with each other and making modifications as necessary. Many of them have shown enormous patience in waiting for the final pieces of a complex jigsaw to be put in place. We have also greatly valued the advice and encouragement of Andrew Parrott, who read some of the drafts and provided us with editorial guidance appropriate to some historical periods in which we questioned our own expertise. We are also grateful for financial support for the project from our respective institutions, the Royal College of Music and Cardiff University, some invaluable administrative support from Emma McCormack and Amy Blier-Carruthers (Royal College of Music) and, of course, the orderly input from our eagle-eyed copy-editor, Mary Worthington and proofreader, Sheila Sadler. Finally, thanks are due to Vicki Cooper, Commissioning Editor for the volume, and her team for their ideas and practical guidance throughout the project. Colin Lawson Robin Stowell
.
PART I
.
PERFORMANCE THROUGH HISTORY
. 1 .
Performance today NICHOLAS KENYON
Once upon a time, before Music television, before remote controls, before books on tape and Internet streaming media, a possible method of enjoying a basic art form was this: a person would sit down and listen to an entire symphony, for however long that took. It is not so easy anymore . . . Halfway through the adagio they feel a tickle somewhere between the temporal and occipital lobes and realise they are fighting an impulse to reach for a magazine . . . With all the arts making their small sacrifices to hurriedness, music lovers can hardly expect to be immune. There is a special kind of pain, though. Music is the art form most clearly about time. James Gleick, Faster1
Please play I am in the middle of the Roundhouse, North London. The only thing in the centre of the bare circular space, once used for reversing trains, is an old harmonium. On the floor in front, it says PLEASE PLAY. It looks like a normal harmonium, except that out of the back of the instrument, an array of wires and leads stretches away, up and around the building. So I sit down. I press the keys, but instead of familiar sounds from the instrument, the whole circular building comes alive. Some keys produce metallic clanks on the pillars, some produce motor noises far away in the ceiling, some produce wheezing notes of indeterminate pitch . . . There is no skill required, no score of instructions: whatever you do is the performance. During the time I am there children, backpackers, a virtuoso with a self-timing camera to record the incident all try. The sounds are varied, random, striking. This is David Byrne’s Playing the Building.2 As I leave, I notice an advert for another event, Longplayer Live: ‘Lasting 1000 years, Jem Finer’s Longplayer is the longest non-repeating piece of music ever
1 J. Gleick, Faster, New York, Random House, 1999, pp. 191–3. 2 See www.davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/playing_the_building.
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composed. For its live debut, a 1000 minute section will be performed by 25 musicians on a 20 metre wide instrument, made up of six concentric circles of Tibetan singing bowls. Alongside the unfolding music, there will be a 12-hour series of one-to-one conversations between 24 speakers.’3 In the Daily Telegraph, art critic Richard Dorment writes about a Heiner Goebbels installation under the heading ‘Who cares what it is, it’s terrific’: ‘Stifter’s Dinge is a performance with no performers and a concert with no musicians. As you take your seat in the windowless vault (once used to test concrete for the Channel Tunnel by dropping it from great heights), you are confronted with a formal sculptural arrangement consisting of five pianos and a few bare branches. On the floor below are three shallow rectangular pools and three fibreglass cubes. Of the five pianos, two are uprights, played in the traditional way by hammers hitting strings – except that the keys are struck by invisible fingers, like player pianos. The rest are played by robotic “arms” sliding either across or up and down the strings. Other sounds include shivers, shakes, rattles, scrapes, thumps and booms made – as far as I could figure out – with tin sheets, a tennis ball, concrete blocks, and blasts of air forced down a long drainpipe.’4 This is performance today. You feel that all bets are off, and no rules apply. However, in another great circular building in London, the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall are presenting a wealth of newly written work alongside the central classics of the repertoire, played by supremely accomplished examples of that most traditional of Western cultural inventions, the symphony orchestra. So while the outer reaches of performance are explored, equally prominent is the regular recreation of the great achievements of Western music. The repertoire changes and expands constantly: in the 2010 Proms season, the music of Stephen Sondheim, which first slipped into a Prom in a late-night concert in 1996, had a whole high-profile, televised evening of its own, as did the partnership of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It is not so long since Gershwin and Bernstein would have had a battle to make it into the Proms canon.5 In the 2011 season, the net widens again to include Havergal Brian’s massive ‘Gothic’ Symphony, music by film composer Ennio Morricone, rock musician Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and Hungarian folk music. The developments can be traced in a complete online database of Proms performances since 1895, which has taken some years to assemble and publish,6 whose bald but fascinating statistics conceal the traditional controversies
3 See Longplayer.org/live. 4 R. Dorment, ‘Who cares what it is, it’s terrific’, Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2008. 5 BBC Proms Guide 2010, London, BBC Books, 2010; BBC Proms Guide 2011, London, BBC Books, 2011. 6 www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive.
Performance today
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around the season’s repertoire, often fought out in the correspondence columns of the press: too little English music? Too much contemporary music? Too few central classics? What about women composers? Why so much jazz, and non-Western music? These debates expose the whole issue of the changing canon, the formulation of the repertoire that determines performance today. Repertoire is also shifting fascinatingly in our opera houses. A Purcell semiopera, The Fairy Queen, joined the Glyndebourne repertoire for the first time with huge success in 2009. Until quite recently Handel opera was unknown in our major houses, yet now it is a regular part of their seasons. In British opera houses, the core of great popular operas from Figaro to Bohème, Traviata to Rosenkavalier are now complemented by a huge range of ancient and modern pieces, from Monteverdi and Cavalli to Kurt Weill and Thomas Adès. The 2010–11 season at the Royal Opera House started not only with the staples of Così fan tutte and Don Pasquale, but also with the totally unknown Niobe, Regina de Tebe, by Agostino Steffani. At English National Opera, directors new to the art-form stimulate new perspectives about music drama: Terry Gilliam in Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, Mike Figgis in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. The art-form, previously the preserve of the few, has in recent decades become increasingly available and professionalised as new companies have become established in Leeds, Wales and Scotland; many small-scale groups from the Classical Opera Company to Music Theatre Wales have established themselves. Each summer from June onwards, ‘garden opera’ is a newly popular experience, weather permitting, from the well-protected Grange Park Opera (in a distinctive theatre set within a dilapidated Hampshire mansion) to Garsington Opera (now in a temporary auditorium on a private estate near High Wycombe) and Opera Holland Park in London. Meanwhile in churches and cathedrals, a variety of choral groups continue to provide the music for Sunday and other services, with a repertoire stretching all the way from Tye, Tallis, Byrd and Tomkins, to the church composers of today. The annual Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge, in many respects a perfect example of an invented tradition, has admirably commissioned a carol each year from composers including Arvo Pärt, Judith Weir, James Macmillan and Gabriel Jackson.7 In April 2011, millions watched a royal wedding in Westminster Abbey, whose traditional musical values were articulated through the dominance of the music of Hubert Parry, a commission from John Rutter and a work by Welsh composer Paul Mealor. Choral music from across the centuries continues to be heard in the
7 On Christmas Day: New Carols for King’s. King’s College Cambridge Choir/Stephen Cleobury. EMI 107243 5 5807021.
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context of numerous liturgies, from Anglican Evensong or the Roman Catholic Mass to those services which celebrate the rich wealth of other devotions that have become part of our diverse country over recent decades. Pentecostalism and inspirational religious gatherings have brought new musics into worship; elsewhere it tends to be the predominately unchanging nature of religious celebration and its use of a musical repertoire from the distant past, leavened with new work, that maintains its function and its appeal. New generations of children will receive the specialised training offered by choir schools and cathedrals, and be drawn into a historical repertoire of music that has helped to define our culture over centuries. Specialist institutions such as the Purcell School and Chetham’s School of Music offer an increasingly broad educational and musical experience. The future of music in the curriculum of state schools, however, is currently under question and the subject of extensive review.8 How many young people of diverse backgrounds will continue to be drawn to music if it is not at the core of school activities throughout the country? Still, in educational institutions from schools to conservatoires, aided by teachers, animateurs and creative leaders of many kinds, students gradually discover a repertoire through which they can develop their own personal skills of interpretation and understanding. They are developing skill and craft: as The New Grove sternly reminds us, ‘the requirements of musical performance in Western culture are stringent’.9 Richard Sennett has recently suggested a reason why young people would undertake this laborious and difficult work: ‘the motivation is lodged in an experience fundamental to all human development: the primal event of separation can teach the young human to become curious’.10 In learning and practising, they are discovering their own identities. But the structures within which they learn, and the principles on which they are taught, are shifting rapidly. This too, then, is performance today: it is based on a wealth of varying traditions which are rapidly being challenged by a multiplicity of new forms of listening, creation and reception. For not all of these performances depend on fidelity to a score, a skill acquired over years, and the active participation of a listening, concentrating audience. Many are much more open in their conception, and much freer in their reception. They can be posted on the web without the mediation of agents, producers or record companies. Around the world, there are radically different situations in both performance and education, in
8 D. Henley, Music Education in England, London, Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media, Olympics and Sport, 2011. 9 J. Dunsby, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 19, p. 348, art. ‘Performance’. 10 R. Sennett, The Craftsman, London, Allen Lane, 2008, p. 158.
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America, in Africa, in the Far East, particularly in the emergingly powerful and influential musical world of China. That is beyond the scope of this chapter – such is the range of experience today that what is touched on here can only be a personal, partial picture. It attempts to provide a necessarily limited snapshot of current trends, from the perspective of the classical music scene, surveying its radically changing delivery and context. It glances into a world in which classical music takes its place among a huge range of musics, and no longer necessarily enjoys its habitual prominence or status.
The availability of everything Tastes change all the time . . . You do your research, of course, but all musical performance is to do with feeling, and the ways of feeling music tend to change through the generations.11 Sir Charles Mackerras 1925–2010 Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.12 T.S. Eliot
What is instantly available to us today is fascinating, disorientating and disturbing. You can click on YouTube to search for conductors and find archive clips of Thomas Beecham, Henry Wood, Toscanini or Karajan, endless snippets of rare performances, a cornucopia of research possibilities. Enter ‘Furtwängler + Beethoven 9’ and you can find several newsreel versions of the dreadful sight of him conducting that symphony on 19 April 1942 with Nazi banners draping the stage; Beethoven’s utopian vision of brotherhood is followed by Goebbels approaching the stage to shake the conductor’s hand. (Does Furtwängler somehow move his handkerchief to clean his hand afterwards? The film is not quite clear . . .) The images of wounded German soldiers, intently listening in the audience, have a strange resonance: they are not so different from those on the other side of the conflict. In Humphrey Jennings’s pioneering documentary Listen to Britain (also 1942), the famous National Gallery concerts in London are used to characterise the war, with empty picture frames as a reminder of the conflict, listened to by a British wounded soldier, with listeners placed by iconic pictures from the collection, as Myra Hess plays Mozart to the delight of Queen Elizabeth and Kenneth Clark.13 11 A. Clark, ‘Open to interpretation’, Financial Times, 25 July 2009. 12 T. S. Eliot, ‘Poetry in the eighteenth century’, in B. Ford (ed.), Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 4: From Dryden to Johnson, London, Penguin, 1957, p. 271. This seminal essay was written in 1930. 13 Included in the British Film Institute compilation Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930–50, BFI DVD 756.
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To such uses has performance been put across the ages: to glorify power and to give hope to nations, to heighten the vanity of monarchs and prop up the power of potentates, to propagate a cultural view or to celebrate a dynastic marriage.14 It has marked key moments in political change: when musicians rushed to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein went so far as to rewrite the text of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the occasion, turning it into an Ode to Freedom.15 The power of performance – in both its musical and iconographical aspects – is deployed on major occasions, such as the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and the inauguration of the American President in Washington (both these occasions, ironically, having been shown to involve pre-recording and lip-synching, making their claims to be live performances at all somewhat dubious). Performance – its nature, purpose and reception – is a rich subject for debate and analysis. Yet this has not always been recognised by musicologists and music historians, focused as they have been on composers and their work. In the twenty-first century, thanks to cheap and easily available technology, performance is more than ever totally democratic. Since the 1920s you have been able to listen to the radio broadcasts of music for absolutely nothing (in the UK, listening to the radio now does not even require the purchase of a TV licence); but what you listened to was selected – you heard what the BBC felt it right for you to listen to. Now, at a modest price, you can download any music you need onto your iPod, or listen to it online via Spotify. Some conventional means of dissemination, like radio, still flourish, and since 1992 in the UK, Classic FM has offered a commercial classical music station within the context of an advertising-funded, pop-music format, offering a much more limited repertoire than BBC Radio 3, but attracting a wider audience. (This mirrors the relationship in the post-war years between highbrow culture on the BBC Third Programme, and light classics on the BBC Light Programme.) The BBC runs orchestras, invests in new commissions and promotes the Proms; that reflects its public service role. Classic FM helps live music by marketing and on-air promotion, but in the end is judged by making money for its owners’ shareholders. Both are now active in offering online services, streamed content, and (where permitted) downloads.16
14 See T. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, Oxford University Press, 2002. 15 The powerful live recording with an international orchestra is available on CD. Deutsche Grammophon DG 429861–2. 16 The internationally successful Radio 3 free downloads of the nine Beethoven symphonies, offered to complement its complete on-air Beethoven survey, proved controversial with the record companies, and the BBC Trust prevented a repeat of this offer, though individual programmes including music can now be downloaded as podcasts.
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Reissues of historic recordings are now a staple of the recording business, on labels such as BBC Legends and ICA Classics, and increasingly on video as well. Robert Philip has pointed out that as late as the 1970s, orchestral recordings of the past were ‘virtually ignored’,17 but now they are reissued with fervour and greeted with fascination (they are certainly cheaper than originating new orchestral recordings in the studio). The whole century and more of recorded music is out there, somewhere. But where? In this new world of availability and interactivity, do you know what music you want, and if not how do you find out? If you do know, can you find what you need? This is not so easy, given the present chaotic nature of classical music cataloguing on downloading sites (an interesting example of how material can be endlessly available, but informed access is still limited).18 There is a previously unimaginable variety of music available to all, but the traditional routes by which a teacher, critic, commentator or broadcaster selected it and recommended it for you are challenged. You are more likely to be listening to what your friends recommend to you one night, or, trying a web link someone somewhere sends you, or randomly searching YouTube. Serendipity and instant access rules. Is there too much dizzying choice in performance today?
Defining performance When we recently moved out of our house, I was struck by the variety of musical elements in the front room. We had a harmonium, a piano, a cello, several recorders and a bassoon. Then there was a bookcase full of orchestral scores on one wall, and another wall full of books about composers, performance and the history of music. There was a sound system, and piles of CDs. Instruments, scores, books, discs. What are they? Are they all ways of making music? Aids to performance? Help in listening to music? Which of them actually is ‘music’? The CDs certainly sound like music when you put them in the machine; you only need to know how to switch it on. The instruments make some sort of music if you know how to play them. The books explain music, or help you listen to it, if you can read. But the scores? Would anybody say, if casually asked
17 R. Philip, ‘Historical recordings of orchestras’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 203. 18 In an early encounter with iTunes, doubtless due to my own incompetence, I downloaded a complete performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni which played not in numerical track order, but in alphabetical track order, a truly bizarre experience.
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in that room, that it is the scores that are music while the rest are not? (What you can do with a score on its own is extremely limited, unless you have the very specialised ability to read it and hear in your mind what it suggests.) Yet for generations musicologists have behaved as if scores were the only real thing about music. The original focus of musicology on the establishing of authoritative texts was derived from philology, and helped give the emerging discipline in the nineteenth century a positivist sense of scientific authority. The consequence has been that the text has come first: the lines of collected editions on library shelves have somehow acquired a primary status in discussions about music. A distinguished scholar wrote not so long ago of the ‘notated essentials’ of music, to which is applied its ‘performative clothing’.19 But the vast majority of us – the audience, and indeed performers – experience music exactly the other way round. The performance is the primary experience, while the notes, along with many other things, account for how it came to sound that way. The notes are indeed critical to determining how the music sounds, but it is surely the sound which ‘is’ the music. Some different key elements affecting performance can be highlighted by a few recordings of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.20 There is one which actually changes Beethoven’s notes: Herbert von Karajan’s first recording of 1941 with the Berlin Staatskapelle,21 where the horn parts in the first movement have been rewritten (it must be deliberate as they do it twice) to play in thirds the way people think horns play, instead of playing with the harmony. (So they play a written D in bar 90 instead of the written C.) No doubt this was some old edition or corrupt tradition which was subsequently corrected: I have never found an origin for this tradition. In contrast, one of Furtwängler’s recordings, recorded a decade later than Karajan’s, in 1953,22 changes Beethoven’s metronome marks – a much more common practice this, indeed at one time almost universal. The Trio of the Scherzo sounds the battle hymn of some distant republic at dotted minim equals 42 (as against Beethoven’s mark of 84). Toscanini, on the other hand, performed it at Beethoven’s speed as early as 1935 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.23 There would be many who would argue that the metronome marks are not part of ‘the piece’ at all, but just an aid to interpretation to be followed or ignored at will. In the second movement of the symphony there is an issue about the articulation at the end of the movement. This is the question of which notes are arco or pizzicato in the 19 N. Cook, ‘Music as performance’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, New York and London, Routledge, 2003. 20 See my Royal Philharmonic Society lecture ‘Tradition isn’t what it used to be’, 24 February 2001. 21 Berlin Staatskapelle/Herbert von Karajan, DG 423 526–2. 22 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwängler, DG 427 401. 23 BBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini, BBC Legends BBCL4016–2.
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violins, as the manuscript is not ideally clear at this point. A new proposal was made in the recent edition of the symphonies by Jonathan Del Mar for Bärenreiter,24 and was recorded by Claudio Abbado in his last Berlin Philharmonic cycle.25 It has not been generally followed in recent accounts I have heard, and is not a detail which makes a huge difference, but in a purist sense it does change ‘the work’. The question this raises is: what is part of ‘the work’ and what is part of ‘the performance’? Of the three things glanced at here, the notes, the metronome marks and the articulations, traditional thinking would of course say that the notes are most critical. But in this case, in terms of the effect of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as we heard it, it was undoubtedly what many would regard as the least central, the metronome mark, that had the greatest effect. Furtwängler’s thought about that Trio was far more characterful in determining how we heard Beethoven’s Seventh than was an altered note from Karajan. The evidence of Furtwängler’s performance is that the piece meant something very different to him from whatever it meant to Toscanini. Surely this is how we react to performances generally, even if the wrong notes are not so deliberate and the product of the heat of the moment. (Who could possibly say that a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata with a sprinkling of unachieved attempts at certain notes was actually not a performance of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata? I did, however, once hear on the radio a performance of the first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata with all the right notes in place, which, however, was so unimaginably slow that it made you question whether you were really hearing ‘the piece’.) A performer of genius sets his own terms and takes a view in a performance around which the notes of the music swirl, and a genius in that context is surely someone who can persuade us that this is the only possible performance for the length of time it takes. I loved the testimony of an orchestral player about taking part in a performance of the great Carlos Kleiber. ‘You can imagine it being done differently, but not done better!’ He then thought and added with a laugh, ‘actually you can’t imagine it being done differently!’ You feel there’s a core of interpretation, surrounded by the notes – exactly the opposite of the traditional musicologist’s view that there is a fixed score, realised in differing interpretations. Lawrence Rosenwald surely took a sensible middle view when he wrote that the identity of a piece of music is ‘something existing in the relation between its notation and the field of its performances’.26 24 Beethoven Symphonies 1–9, ed. J. del Mar, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1996–2001. 25 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Claudio Abbado, DG 469 004–2. 26 L. Rosenwald, ‘Theory, text-setting and performance’, Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), 52–65. Discussed by Cook, ‘Music as performance’, p. 207.
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All this is, of course, to reduce to banality a point over which great philosophical minds have laboured long and hard, often to little effect.27 All we need to agree is that performance matters. It is the means by which we, audiences and performers, actually experience music. Such a view has not been traditionally popular, but it is gaining in importance in the scholarly community, and it is one of the impulses that lie behind this book. A head-on challenge to conventional thinking has come from Nicholas Cook: ‘It is only when you have started thinking of music as performance that the peculiarly timeresisting properties of works in the Western “art” tradition come fully into relief.’ He attacks ‘the extraordinary illusion, for that is what it is, that there is such a thing as music, rather than simply acts of making and receiving it [my italics], [which] might well be considered the basic premise of the Western “art” tradition’. While some claim a transcendental permanence for pieces of music, Cook points up the ‘fragility of this snatching of eternity, as it were, from the jaws of evanescence’.28 Because of our valuing of its achievement and its impact on us, there is a tendency to think of great music as a monument, a supreme example of Western civilisation, and that therefore it must be a ‘thing’. There is a limited sense in which that is true, but we must accept that its effect is transitory and depends wholly on re-creation. This is not negative but a richness: to a far greater extent than in other art-forms like literature or the visual art, in music we the performers and listeners have to be the cocreators. We are empowered participants. The result is that for generations, we have written the history of music as the history of composers and compositions, sometimes extending to context and social change. But the history of performance has been as potent an influence on the course of the history of music, and the history of performance has never really been written.
Why study performance? If performance is the primary means by which we experience music, then the issue of how and why it has changed over time should be important to us. Moreover, in our lifetime there have been acute challenges to received performance style: on the one hand from creatively based, often non-score-based approaches to composition, and on the other by the revival of historically based
27 See for an extreme example S. Davies, Musical Works and Performances: a Philosophical Exploration, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001; more fruitfully, P. Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1995. 28 Cook, ‘Music as performance’, p. 208. This chapter is by some way the most powerful summary of the case for music as performance.
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styles by the period-instrument movement. As such new areas open up, performers have become more thoughtful and questioning about what lies behind their work, and this is a trend noticeable in British conservatoires; performance as creative practice has finally become accepted as a subject for academic research. Even so, there were some raised eyebrows both in the scholarly world and in the world of musical conservatoires when the Arts and Humanities Research Council gave a major research grant of nearly £1m to establish CHARM, the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music from April 2004. There were many mutterings: what did studying recordings of the past have to do either with the central business of analysing the score, which had been the traditional role of musicology, or with the present-day task of teaching students to play, the traditional role of the conservatoire? In fact CHARM, and its more practice-based (but less memorably named) successor CMPCP, the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, both engage valuably with the practicalities of performance in a reflective context. Both complement and drive forward the work that had begun in both universities and conservatoires in using recordings and studying performances. The study of changes in performance style can be illuminating for scholars and performers alike, as they tussle with the question of what is an appropriate performing style for today in various repertoires. Do performers need to acquire what Will Crutchfield, nicely reflecting the technologies of a couple of decades ago, called ‘a floppy-disc mentality’ towards a bank of performance styles in the brain, all equally ready to be drawn on for different kinds of music?29 Recordings make such a databank easily available, and perhaps encourage students to react to that, rather than start from scratch: a good or bad challenge? Daniel Leech-Wilkinson suggests that living performance styles change by tiny mutations which accumulate, and it is only when you hear old recordings that you can identify and isolate those changes.30 The problem in adopting an academically rigorous approach to the study of performance is that at present we are only working towards agreed methodologies for undertaking such analysis, whereas those analysing scores have generations of argument and agreement about how to do it.31 Perhaps printed and broadcast music criticism over the years has something to answer for in this 29 W. Crutchfield, ‘Fashion, conviction and performance style in an age of revivals’, in N. Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 19–26. 30 D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Recordings and histories of performance style’, in N. Cook, E. Clarke, D. LeechWilkinson and J. Rink (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, Cambridge University Press, 2009, a major advance in thinking about this subject. 31 A different avenue not explored here is ‘a mode of analysis which might benefit rather than constrain performers’: J. Rink, ‘Analysis and (or?) performance’, in Rink (ed.), Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 35; and N. Cook, ‘Analysing performance and performing analysis’, in N. Cook and M. Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, 1999.
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context. I would plead guilty to the charge that the habitual language of such discourse – in an average newspaper concert review or an edition of ‘Building a Library’ on BBC Radio 3’s CD Review – is largely anecdotal and descriptive, rather than analytical. That may be appropriate for its purpose (which is in the case of ‘Building a Library’ to recommend a chosen recording for the audience to buy) but it has set the parameters for the subject of discussing recordings in what now seems an unfortunately loose way.32 I recall the composer and critie Virgil Thomson demolishing the rich British critical tradition at one New York dinner party along the lines of ‘you are all just gentlemen amateurs: you went to Oxbridge and were part of Brideshead Revisited and thought that gave you some qualification to write about music!’ And, historically, the great gentlemen of British musical criticism were indeed amateurs in the truest sense, enthusiastically knowledgeable music-lovers who could communicate with a wide audience: to Ernest Newman, Neville Cardus, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Peter Heyworth and Andrew Porter we owe much for the popularisation of informed thinking about music in the United Kingdom. That tradition of writing from curiosity and interest goes back to George Bernard Shaw, who can still be read with pleasure (as can Virgil Thomson); but the attempt to make truly analytical writing accessible peaked with the brilliant programme notes of Donald Tovey.33 It was not until the supremely communicative analysis of the American Charles Rosen that the trend of popularising analysis was reinvigorated.34 Rosen is a performer, and the writings of another exceptional performer, Alfred Brendel, have brought together analysis and performance in a stimulating way, encouraging thinking about how the deep investigation of musical gesture and structure can actually be reflected in performance.35 Recent scholarly activity has begun to formalise and to codify the study of performance. The pages of the Oxford University Press journal Early Music under Tess Knighton’s enlightened editorship and after have amply demonstrated this in earlier repertoires. In later music, to take at random one example, Bernard D. Sherman’s meticulous analysis of speeds in performances of the Brahms symphonies36 makes comparisons not only between movement timings in a wealth of recorded versions, but also approaches the study of 32 Daniel Leech-Wilkinson takes a rather more generous view of this activity in The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Musical Performances, London, CHARM, 2009, online at www.charm.kcl.ac. uk/studies/chapters/intro.html, section 1.2.2. 33 D. Tovey, Studies in Musical Analysis, 5 vols., Oxford University Press, 1935. 34 C. Rosen, The Classical Style, London, Faber, 1971. 35 A. Brendel, Alfred Brendel on Music: Collected Essays, 2nd edn, London, JR Books, 2007. This volume combines essays from Brendel’s Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out. 36 B. D. Sherman, ‘Metronome marks, timings and other period evidence regarding tempo in Brahms’, in M. Musgrave and B. D. Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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flexibility in tempo within movements. The 2010 yearbook of Keyboard Perspectives from the Westfield Center includes both an attempt to suggest how the reconstruction of Chopin’s performing style might also re-create the ‘ineffability’ of his playing, as well as a stimulating consideration of historically informed performance in Webern’s Variations Op. 27.37 One of the major research projects of CMPCP will be about ‘shape’ in musical phrasing, and how that is developed and perceived by performers.38 It was hardly surprising that when scholars eventually turned from analysing works to analysing performances they would try to do so in equally scientific, positivist and provable ways. This has produced some fascinating results, one of which had an impact on the story of performance today far beyond the narrow realms of academe. CHARM carried out a study into different performance styles of Chopin mazurkas, involving detailed scientific analyses of performance variations. In the middle of this something very odd happened.39 They had developed a clever graphic demonstration which could compare different recordings of a Chopin mazurka, with coloured sections showing different degrees of variation. One chart showed the similarities between a 1988 recording of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 68 No. 3 by the pianist Eugen Indjic and one by the British pianist Joyce Hatto, who died in June 2006 (she had given no live performances for many years, but had released on the Concert Artists Recordings label a whole flood of recordings over the previous years). The analysis proved that these two recordings are not only similar but actually identical. The same conclusion was suggested by a listener who put a Hatto recording into his iTunes system, and had it immediately identified as a different recorded performance. Conclusive proof followed that most of the 119 recordings issued under Hatto’s name were versions, sometimes manipulated, slowed down or speeded up, of existing recordings, made by her husband William Barrington-Coupe and released on his label Concert Artists Recordings. This was a bizarre fraud which has a salutary message for performance today. What technology gives us – the ability to fake or manipulate a recording – technology can take away – via iTunes technology and computer analysis. We are conditioned to believe that live recordings are what actually happened, but how many versions and edits go even now into what are today referred to as ‘live’ recordings? Perhaps two or three live recordings are brought together 37 J. D. Bellman, ‘Chopin’s pianism and the reconstruction of the ineffable’, in A. Richards (ed.), Keyboard Perspectives III, The Yearbook of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, Ithaca, NY, Westfield Center, 2010, pp. 1–22; N. Mathew, ‘Darmstadt pianism. “Historically informed” Webern and modernism’s vanishing performer’, ibid., pp. 49–74. 38 www.cmpcp.ac.uk/research.html. See Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s project. 39 www.mazurka.org.uk.
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and the best results taken from each. If there was only one ‘live’ performance, usually the rehearsal has been recorded to cover any problems. It is often suspected (see Stephen Cottrell, Chapter 28) that recordings have changed our expectations of musical performance away from spontaneity and towards mere accuracy. Some musicians feel they can achieve perfection more readily in the confines of a recording studio than in the concert hall,40 but many others feel the real experience of music-making is better captured live. For the audience, nothing beats the experience of seeing the person do it in front of our own eyes.
Tradition or Chinese whispers? This leads to a second reason why studying performance is essential, one which is perhaps more controversial. The alarmingly cosy assumption of too much music teaching has been that there was a single, clear way to create a good performance, in a tradition handed down from composer to teacher to pupil. (The New Grove puts it that ‘the history of performance shows multigenerational chains of apprenticeship and pedagogy’.)41 This was always suspect, dangerously complacent and always challenged by the best teachers and the most individual pupils. Perhaps it has almost disappeared. But the primacy of influence lay as an unspoken seal of good housekeeping upon certain stylistic approaches – if the piano was taught by a pupil who learned from someone who was taught by Czerny, the outcome must be right, or at least respectable. This was how different national schools were defined, replicated and handed down to new generations, even if the conditions that created them had ceased to exist. The extent to which the tradition was actually continuous or whether it had been interrupted by seismic cultural shifts was rarely debated. Yet the result could very easily be like one of those games of Chinese Whispers in which A whispers a phrase to B, B whispers what he thinks he heard to C – and by the time it reaches Z the phrase is completely different – especially in this case as many years may have passed between A and Z. (Richard Taruskin, in one of his typically acerbic asides, characterised the historical performance movement as cheating at this game, where Z just goes round to A and says ‘Is this chair free?’ and sits in it 200 years later.)42
40 R. Philip, Performing Music in an Age of Recording, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004. 41 Dunsby, ‘Performance’, p. 348. 42 R. Taruskin, ‘Tradition and authority’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 318, reprinted in Text and Act, Oxford University Press, 1995; he calls the same game by its American name, ‘Telephone’.
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There is also the familiar appeal to continuous tradition as validation, something repeatedly stressed by long-running institutions like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. This is an orchestra that genuinely does pass down its skills from generation to generation, sometimes actually from father to son, and from teacher to pupil within the same orchestral family. In the symposium for their 150th anniversary, they spoke proudly of their continuous links to the sound world of Beethoven’s Vienna, as if nothing could have changed in those 150 years.43 The clear implication was that the continuity of the institution guaranteed the continuity of the sound world, or at least guaranteed its connected spirit. Somewhat overlooked were the whole growth and establishment of public concerts, the development of instrument technology, the demands of larger performing spaces, the codification of the repertoire, the political upheavals that drove musicians into exile all over Europe, to merely begin a list of the radical changes further explored by Michael Musgrave in Chapter 24. The relationship between continuity and discontinuity in both teaching situations and performing organisations is an important area for further investigation. In the notes to the Vienna Philharmonic’s Beethoven symphony cycle recorded with Simon Rattle, issued in 2002, the orchestra’s president writes in the old mode: ‘There are bona fide reasons why the Vienna Philharmonic should regard itself as a guardian of musical authenticity’ but then adds: ‘like all timeless works of art, Beethoven’s symphonies have to be discovered afresh and appropriated by each new generation. Simon Rattle has brought the new forms of expression of the 21st century to bear on them’.44 These ‘new forms of expression’ are of course, in this case, mainly the insights of the early music movement that had for so long been ignored by the Vienna Philharmonic!
Technology abolishes tradition Our experience of performance today is radically different from that of previous eras. The central experience that has transformed our approach to performance is the development of new technology: the sheer availability of music has created a sea-change in our whole approach to repertoire, tradition and performance style. To vastly oversimplify, for a long time tradition developed directly. The only places where a corpus of the music of the distant past existed were in the cathedral tradition (where old music was always sung), and in some aspects of 43 O. Biba and W. Schuster (eds.), Klang und Komponist: 150 Jahre Wiener Philharmoniker, Tutzing, Schneider 1992, pp. 431–5. 44 Booklet note to Beethoven symphonies, EMI Classics, 7243 5 57445 2.
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the teaching tradition (where counterpoint was taught through old models, as Mozart learned from Fux). Until the revival of ‘ancient music’ began in concerts in the eighteenth century, most people listened essentially to contemporary music. Otherwise it was the immediate past that existed alongside the music of the present. New composers accepted, developed, rejected or modified that tradition, sometimes in revolutionary ways. Composers deliberately placed themselves in a great tradition. When Brahms struggled with his First Symphony, he felt powerfully the influence of Beethoven. He did not reject that influence, and when the great scholar and critic Friedrich Chrysander reviewed the symphony he wrote that ‘the reference to Beethoven’s last or Ninth Symphony is so obvious here that we cannot postulate a weak, unproductive imitative intent. What we have here is a conscious intent, an artistic will that gives the work its historical significance.’ It was not a coincidence that it was those composers such as Brahms, feeling closely bound to tradition, who became most interested in the music of the past: Brahms owned the manuscript of Mozart’s 40th Symphony; he edited the Requiem for the new collected edition, and revived the choral heritage of Schütz and Gabrieli in his own concerts. The references to Bach in his Fourth Symphony are overt and deliberate; some also hear the relentless tread of the opening of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the timpani strokes that underpin the opening of his First Symphony.45 Transmuting, not abandoning, tradition was what writing ‘new’ music was all about. There is a similarity here with what T. S. Eliot wrote about ‘the main current’ of poetic development: ‘we do wrong, when we praise a poet, to insist upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. We shall often find that not only the best but also the individual parts of his works may be those in which the great poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.’46 That notion of a single developing tradition persisted for a long time. If you were going to experience orchestral music in the nineteenth century, you went to concerts, and perhaps bought chamber arrangements or piano duet arrangements to play at home. Performance style was hardly reflected on by the public, though Wagner’s On Conducting47 and other key pieces of thinking perhaps created a self-consciousness of style that had not existed before. The growth of a canon of accepted pieces of the past grew very gradually out of the antiquarian interests of the enlightened eighteenth century and the writing of music history by Charles Burney and John Hawkins. 45 Booklet notes for EMI recording by Roger Norrington and London Classical Players, EMI Classics 54286. 46 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the individual talent’, in The Sacred Wood, London, Methuen, 1920. 47 R. Wagner, Wagner on Conducting, trans. E. Dannreuther, New York, Dover, 1989.
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(The stages in this formulation of the canon have been documented by William Weber,48 see also his Chapter 2, and discussed by Joseph Kerman, see below.) It took root during the growth of public concerts in the nineteenth century, where institutions like the Royal Philharmonic Society in London and the directors of the orchestral bodies such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Vienna Philharmonic first formulated, consciously or unconsciously, a canon of ‘great music’. They wanted to feel that there was a validated, respected repertoire of music which should be communicated to the public. The impulse behind these educative intentions needs to be explored further; the effect was certainly longlasting, because a remarkable number of the decisions about what was important (like many other features of nineteenth-century concert practice, including orchestral players’ concert dress, a ridiculous anachronism) survive today in the need and desire to agree what constitutes the significant core elements of classical music. The canon was never fixed: it changed and developed. We would now take a more nuanced view of the influences on the canon than Joseph Kerman’s bald but influential statement: ‘Repertories are determined by performers, and canons by critics.’49 The key question of how reception influences the canon, and why performers choose to perform what they perform, has been the subject of very little reflection. (For every performer who wants to expand the repertoire, there are many, perhaps especially conductors, who want to perform what they know audiences want to hear.) ‘The test of time’ is often talked about in this context, but this is actually shifting and highly volatile. In the literary field, Barbara Herrnstein Smith has identified those involved in that process: ‘schools, libraries, theatres, museums, publishing and printing houses, editorial boards, prize-awarding commissions, state censors and so forth . . . are, of course, all managed by persons . . . and, since the texts that are selected and preserved by “time” will always be tend to be those which “fit” their characteristic needs, interests, resources, and purposes, that testing mechanism has its own built-in partialities.’50 For ‘texts’ read ‘music’, add ‘orchestras’ and ‘festivals’, and you have at least the beginning of an explanation of why some music gets performed and survives while some does not.
48 W. Weber, ‘The history of musical canon’, in Cook and Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, especially p. 341. 49 J. Kerman, ‘A few canonic variations’, Critical Inquiry, 10 September 1983, 107–26, reprinted in R. van Hallberg (ed.), Canons, University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 182. 50 B. Herrnstein Smith, ‘Contingencies of value’, in Critical Inquiry, 10 September 1983, 1–35, quoted by Mark Everist in ‘Reception theories, canonic discourses, and musical value’, in Cook and Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, pp. 392–3, an ideal introduction to this subject.
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The impact of recording and broadcasting Why has all this happened? Now that we can look at it from the perspective of the twenty-first century, the answer is blindingly clear. There have been huge changes in taste, and there have also been huge parallel changes in compositional style and the social circumstances of music-making. But the essential change from all previous eras is that we have now lived through a century of recording and broadcasting, which has made a vast range of music continuously available to us in a way that has never existed before. How could this overwhelming change not have a decisive impact on our way of listening to and understanding music? We are not in a linear development any more: the simultaneity of all music is something fundamentally new. Recording was originally thought of as just preserving a live performance, a faithful transcript of what happened (though the constrictions of early recording techniques made the performances that were captured in awkward circumstances often anything but natural).51 Radio broadcasting was thought of as something that simply made live performances more available to a wider audience. The influence of the possible repeated hearings that lay at the heart of recordings was central but overlooked. As the recording business grew, marketing became critical; through recording, Enrico Caruso was the first singer to become more than a touring artist: he became an international phenomenon. We were rather slow to grasp the implications of that preservation and that wider communication. As Timothy Day and Robert Philip have pointed out in their important recent studies of recordings,52 and Stephen Cottrell explores further in Chapter 28, recording began to affect musicmaking in many ways. The emphasis on accuracy is only one way in which recordings created new expectations of the concert experience – in that case, a change which may have had an inhibiting effect on performers. One result was that special styles of recording grew up which created a new genre of music-making suited purely to that medium. Leopold Stokowski was the first major conductor consciously to use the power of recording for his own ends.53 Another example, which deserves to be explored further, is the distinctive style of orchestral performance pioneered by Walter Legge with the Philharmonia Orchestra which he founded after the Second World War 51 However, for an important qualification about photographs of early recording sessions, see R. Philip, ‘Historical recordings of orchestras’, in Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, p. 270, n. 1: ‘players have been grouped closely together to bring them into the field of view of the camera’. 52 T. Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000; Philip, Performing Music. 53 E. Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 2005, p. 126.
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especially to make recordings: surely a direct response to the opportunities offered by the new LP, it cultivated a rich, vibrato-heavy string sound which was perfectly suited to the possibilities of the new medium, as it bore repetition and made the music more immediately attractive in the living room.54 Equally, when the compact disc and digital recording arrived in the mid1980s, they put a premium on clear, sharp, transparent sounds, which suited perfectly the taste of the times; in particular, it enhanced the attractiveness of the emerging period-instrument orchestral movement. It was precisely that period which saw the triumph with the CD-buying public of old-instrument Bach Brandenburg Concertos and Handel Messiahs, and then periodinstrument Beethoven symphony cycles as the record companies rushed to re-record familiar repertoire with the frisson of a new clarity and excitement. Unfortunately it was the short-sightedness of those record companies, which believed that this triumph of reinterpretation could last for ever, without sensing the potential of new media, that created the crisis for the larger companies in the 2000s. Smaller companies flourished, however, finding new hoards of rare repertoire and new performers to present, while their larger counterparts struggled with the challenge of a business model for digital downloads and web-based delivery. Similarly, radio from the beginning had created new music and formed taste. Jenny Doctor has written illuminatingly about the BBC’s enlightened support for the most advanced modern music in the late 1920s and 1930s,55 thanks to the presence on the staff of such figures as Edward Clark, and conductors as open-minded as Adrian Boult. Boult conducted the UK premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck after weeks of rehearsal in 1934; he and others introduced a vast range of new and recent music by Bartók, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Falla, often with the composers present, performing or conducting, especially in the famous Concerts of Contemporary Music.56 That alignment of the BBC with adventurous music, particularly from the Continent, has been a leitmotif – ignored at times, in the conservative Proms of the 1950s under Malcolm Sargent, but then recurring in the 1960s when William Glock introduced to the Proms and the Third Programme works of the Second Viennese School, Messiaen, Boulez and Stockhausen (alongside an equally wide-ranging and
54 See M. Katz, Capturing Music: How Technology has Changed Music, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2004 , pp. 85–99; for a different analysis of vibrato in violin playing, and for a polemical view see R. Norrington, ‘The sound orchestras make’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 2–6. 55 J. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes, Cambridge University Press, 1999. 56 Listed in detail up to 1936, ibid., Appendix B, pp. 366–89; see also N. Kenyon, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, London, BBC Books, 1981, pp. 488–98.
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adventurous early music repertoire from Machaut to Monteverdi).57 It continues today in the regular BBC commissions heard at the Proms and in the concerts of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, while in recent times there has been a definite increase in the commitment to new music in the work of most UK orchestras. Another key trend is that, through discs, radio and the web, ‘world music’ has become as available to us as music from near to home. It is no use debating whether this trend (or the much disputed label for it) is a good or a bad thing: it simply is. Back in the 1920s musicians argued blindly against broadcasting, because it would supposedly diminish the provision of live music. It had exactly the reverse effect, stimulating a dramatic expansion in the appreciation of great music across the country. As Michael Tippett once said, ‘without the BBC, our musical life could never have become so rich and so thriving’. From The World in 100 Objects to Fairest Isle and Sounding the Century, radio has been crucial to our cultural lives. In Simon Garfield’s book, Our Hidden Lives, compiling Mass Observation diaries from the post-war period, there are moving testimonies to the power of radio as vehicle for music.58 Simon Frith argues for radio as ‘the most influential 20th century mass medium’, writing that ‘it was radio that shaped the new voice of public intimacy, that created Britain as a mediated collectivity . . . radio transformed the use of domestic space, blurring the boundary between public and private, idealising the family hearth as the site of ease and entertainment’.59 And even though the family hearth may be a thing of the past, radio is still a dominant influence on popular and classical musical taste. The influence of recordings on performance was, for a while, equally topdown. The record companies chose the great artists, and it built them up, nurtured them, marketed them and then had to follow their demands and their whims. This was a complex process in which commercial acumen joined hands with the growing popular thirst for great culture to be widely available. (One of the very few important studies of this area is Paul Kildea’s work on the recordings of Benjamin Britten.)60 Some conductors and performers acquired a remarkable cultural and financial power through the years of the LP and then the CD, and created a radical imbalance in reputations. Because of their limited recorded activity, Henry Wood, Malcolm Sargent, Adrian Boult and even Thomas Beecham did not have anything like the international profile and reputation of Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan, whose effective 57 D. Wright, ‘Reinventing the Proms: the Glock and Ponsonby eras 1959–85’, in J. Doctor, N. Kenyon and D. Wright (eds.), The Proms: A New History, London, Thames & Hudson, 2007. 58 S. Garfield, Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain , London, Ebury Press, 2004. 59 S. Frith, ‘Music and everyday life’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music, New York and London, Routledge, 2003, p. 96. 60 P. Kildea, Selling Britten: Music and the Marketplace, Oxford University Press, 2002.
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manipulations of the record companies may be read about in enjoyably gruesome detail.61 Those conductors and other leading classical artists were perhaps at their peak of influence in the 1960s, when the EMI royalty lists interestingly reveal that in the first quarter of 1964 Karajan earned £10,903, and Maria Callas £10,022, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau £7,165 and Klemperer £6,234 (against Cliff Richard’s £18,848 and the Beatles’ £46,983).62 The pre-eminence of conductors today as varied as Bernard Haitink, Colin Davis, Mariss Jansons, John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with their huge discographies, all richly deserved in musical terms, was made possible by an extensive network of record-company contracts over the years, which ensured that they were partnered with some of the world’s leading orchestras and artists, and were marketed by the major companies (all those named have worked, for example, with the Vienna Philharmonic, and most have recorded with the Concertgebouw Orchestra). The result of the economic challenge to record companies has not been their disappearance, but their reinvention. John Eliot Gardiner’s public split with Deutsche Grammophon over his Bach cantata cycle and the emergence of his own Soli Deo Gloria label to release and complete that major series was just the most visible example of ruptures taking place behind the scene.63 The most characteristic sign of our times is the emergence of orchestral and opera house own-label ventures, supported by the musicians themselves, from the LSO, the Mariinsky Theatre, the London Philharmonic, the Hallé, often combining archive releases with new recordings in a way that builds a brand for the companies rather than the record label. Today the smaller companies are extremely active; overall there are fewer new recordings, but that is surely because there were so many unnecessary ones in the past. The doom-mongers who said that the classical recording industry is dead have been proved decisively wrong,64 but the correct analysis to which they pointed is that the industry is having radically to reinvent itself.
Live music, modern and postmodern There have been voices over recent decades to suggest that the era of live music is over, that you will experience music better in a great recording than in a
61 J. Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, New York, Knopf, 1987; R. Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music, London, Chatto & Windus, 1998. 62 www.overgrownpath.com entry for 6 October 2009. 63 See a nice reading of the meaning of the label title SDG in T. Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicans and their Art, London, Allen Lane, 2008, p. 400, n. 9. 64 N. Lebrecht, When the Music Stops, Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music, London, Pocket Books, 1997, a tendentious book which begins with a quotation from T. S. Eliot attributed to the wrong poem.
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noisy concert hall, that in a time of ever more sophisticated recording techniques and digital distribution, all you need is an iPod and a deep armchair. It was that great pianist Glenn Gould who, forswearing the hurly-burly of the concert hall in 1964 for the deep peace of the recording studio, said he hoped people would not be going to live concerts in the next century. Think what you could avoid: struggling through the public transport system, over-priced coffee, people next to you coughing and spluttering, the struggle to get a drink in the interval and not to miss the last train home. Yet thousands upon thousands of people continue to do it, regularly, for the unbeatable inspiration of the live event. There is every sign that audiences are continuing to flock to great experiences, and in the recent economic crisis this has still proved to be true. Audiences have increased consistently over the last decade and more, partly thanks to a bedrock of sustained funding, which enabled artistic development. However great the funding challenges following the economic crisis, this resilience of the framework for concert-giving provides great hope for the future of performance, and a solid base on which to build. (Naturally, as I am responsible for a venue, I take a more positive view of the future of live performance than David Wright’s conclusion in Chapter 6 below that the reception of music will increasingly take place in the ‘self-constructed meanings of the private domain’, though we agree that the impact on canon and repertoire is likely to be radical.) Like every other area of activity, live performance too has been reinvented. Over the years I was involved in the BBC Proms from 1996 to 2007, there was a revolution in their dissemination: the arrival of free-to-air digital television allowed a far greater number of Proms than ever before to be televised, at a time when some other arts programming on television was under threat. The arrival of sophisticated big-screen technology allowed the invention of Proms in the Park for large audiences. Eventually every concert was streamed on the BBC website, and that meant they were instantly, freely, internationally available. There was much more interaction, participation, reviews from the audience, message-board debates. Surely one of the great excitements of performance in our time, which has made it the subject of debate and controversy, is the fact that we have not just been reproducing or continuing old styles, but have moved forward so that the idea of live performance has been moulded and remoulded, to mirror our changing tastes. The innovations of the historical performance movement remain to be fully documented: I was very struck by Daniel LeechWilkinson’s recent conclusion that the ‘outstandingly interesting’ aspect of this was that ‘probably for the first time since at least c1600, perhaps for the first time ever, an entirely new performance style was forged deliberately from
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nothing more than the will to change, and – most remarkable of all – it was made to work’.65 The question remains: what brought about this will to change? The process was surely driven by a cultural imperative, a subliminal dissatisfaction with the prevailing ways of doing things that led to a decisive shift in taste. Changes in approaches to performance have fascinatingly mirrored changes in approaches to composition. How very similar, in contrasting ways, are the statements of two post-war leaders of radical change, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the composer Pierre Boulez. Harnoncourt’s dogmatic declaration in the 1950s was that ‘an interpretation must be attempted in which the entire romantic tradition of performance is ignored . . . today we only want to accept the composition itself as a source, and present it as our own responsibility. The attempt must thus again be made today . . . to hear and perform [pieces] as if they had never been interpreted before, as if they had never been formed nor distorted.’66 Pierre Boulez has pleaded for a return to amnesia: ‘In an age ever more burdened with memory, to forget surely becomes of the utmost urgency . . . In straining for authenticity, we achieve only a sterile memory.’ He believes that today we need only memory of ‘an ungraspable, distorting, unfaithful kind, which retains of an original source only that which is directly useful and ultimately perishable.’67 Boulez’s are the words of a creator, while Harnoncourt’s are those of an interpreter. What they have in common is a strong strain of aggression towards the recent, immediate past, a desire to wipe the slate clean and start again: Harnoncourt the performer by appealing to history, Boulez the composer by creating the totally new. The fact that both of these were, in practice, impossible does not undervalue the importance of the position they took. We have experienced, both in composition and performance, a short-lived period of total rejection of the past, followed by a much longer period of increasing integration. The heady days of post-war serialism, just like the strident early days of the authenticity movement, even if wrong-headed, were a time of absolutely inevitable and necessary rejection of the past, an act of reaction to the biggest turmoil in European history. Some really valuable music, some really worthwhile performances, emerged: the boundaries had to be explored to their limits. The damage was done as usual not by the innovators, but by those who thoughtlessly copied them without the same range and imagination, turning originality into clichés. What happened in the later 1980s was a reintegration of contemporary composition in an extremely exciting way, 65 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Recordings and histories’, pp. 253–4. 66 N. Harnoncourt, ‘On the interpretation of historical music’, (1954) repr. and trans. in Baroque Music Today, Portland, OR, Amadeus, 1988, pp. 14–18. Quoted in Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music, introduction, p. 4. 67 P. Boulez, ‘The Vestal Virgin and the fire-stealer: memory, creation and authenticity’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 355–8.
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one that paralleled what was to happen a decade or two later with the early music movement. It was not the death of the avant-garde, any more than the development of performance saw the death of the early music movement. It was the absorption of that avant-garde onto a much broader musical canvas, where elements of recent tradition, far-off influences, the avant-garde and the minimalist tendency could come together. The result in Britain today is the music of Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson and Luke Bedford, Harrison Birtwistle and Colin Matthews, Oliver Knussen and Mark-Anthony Turnage, Helen Grimes and Anna Meredith, a compositional range of amazing richness and variety.
Integrating historical performance As with composition, so too with performance today. There was a period of extreme innovation, of polarised change, defined in opposition to mainstream performance, which has gradually been integrated into a renewed performance tradition. There was a moment when, in trying to escape the bounds of an increasingly sterile and hidebound practice, the historical performance movement made unwarranted claims for itself. The attraction of a ‘neutral’ performance that connected directly with the composer was one of the aspects that gave the argument around ‘authentic’ performance such a powerful edge when that controversy was at its height. One of the attractions of the early music movement was that it seemed to offer the possibility of performances that were just the notes on the page: as one optimistic review put it, ‘a performance not merely under-interpreted but un-interpreted offers potentially an experience of unequalled authenticity’.68 We can be sure that none of the great early music revivalists, such as Gustav Leonhardt or Nikolaus Harnoncourt, would have subscribed for a moment to the idea of uninterpreted music-making, but it did underlie a lot of the thinking: ‘letting the music speak for itself’ became a late twentieth-century mantra, and not only among early music people, but in contemporary music circles too. Laurence Dreyfus, memorably but I believe mistakenly, said that the early music revival ‘drew a wondrous curtain on reality, forcibly repressed every sign of the present, and provided escapism from the horrors of the new’.69 On the contrary, maybe to the irritation of a generation of composers, early music was the new, and opened our ears to a whole new
68 E. van Tassel, review of Academy of Ancient Music’s Mozart symphonies, in Early Music, 12 (1984), 129. 69 L. Dreyfus, ‘Early music defended against its devotees: a theory of historical performance in the twentieth century’, Musical Quarterly, 49 (1983), 297–322.
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way of making music that sounded as contemporary as the newest piece of music. What is happening now is increasing cross-fertilisation. It is a generation since the pioneers of the period performance movement began to work with modern orchestras to encourage them to change their sound: Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner with the Vienna Philharmonic, Simon Rattle and William Christie with the Berlin Philharmonic, several period-instrument conductors including Trevor Pinnock and Christopher Hogwood with the American orchestras and opera houses. Partly this has been a question of bringing conductors who have worked with period-instrument orchestras more into the centre of our musical life: Norrington’s work with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, pursuing a strictly non-vibrato string sound but on modern instruments, is typically individual. At the same time conductors brought up with conventional instruments have begun to work in the period field: recent conductors of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment have included Ivan Fischer, Vladimir Jurowski, and now Robin Ticciati and Edward Gardner. Near the centre of the performing picture are some chamber orchestras having the best of all worlds: Nikolaus Harnoncourt recording Beethoven symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe to great acclaim with modern instruments but vigorously individual period insights; Daniel Harding conducting Beethoven with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra using natural trumpets but modern horns; Ivan Fischer giving a Beethoven cycle in New York in 2010 shared between his own Budapest Festival Orchestra on modern instruments and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on period instruments; Ivor Bolton working with the Mozarteum Orchestra, as well as in the opera houses of Munich and Salzburg. It is not an exaggeration to say that these performers and others have transformed public taste over the last thirty years. Almost more remarkable is the change in those who have not used period instruments at all but whose performance style has evolved dramatically as a result of change around them: Bernard Haitink in his increasingly sharp-edged, lithe performances with the LSO and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; and Claudio Abbado, posing a special problem with his new Orchestra Mozart – can you tell which of his fine recordings are made on period instruments and which not? The clarity and transparency of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s conducting of Berg’s Wozzeck or Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder surely owes a debt both to Boulez and to period-instrument practice. Meanwhile Simon Rattle, almost a decade into his Berlin chief conductorship, absorbs the traditional sound of the Berlin Philharmonic to create in 2009 a recorded Brahms symphony cycle owing
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more to Furtwängler than Norrington. The melting-pot of performance styles bubbles away busily, creating new and unexpected brews.
Reinventing the big institutions All this radical questioning might well have led to the death of many of our major institutions. But our traditional orchestras and opera houses are continuing to survive and change their priorities. At one stage composers seemed to be moving away from the symphony orchestra as the favoured means of expression towards different smaller ensembles, and orchestras were resolutely failing to commission adventurous composers. In the 1950s the Proms commissioned little, and the ‘Cheltenham symphony’ backed itself into a siding. In the 1960s the impetus moved to the Pierrot Players founded by Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, and then to the Fires of London and the sensational achievements of the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton, Nicholas Snowman and then Michael Vyner, all fully reflected in William Glock’s dynamic Proms seasons of the 1960s and early 1970s. That emphasis has shifted subtly in recent years. There has been a noticeable pull back to well-established institutions such as the symphony orchestra and the opera house as a framework for performance and commissioning at the start of the twenty-first century. Perhaps this is because of their comparatively stable economic model, enabling them to take the risks that produce, for example, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera. Orchestras, perhaps finally conscious of the very threat to their existence, have committed themselves both to contemporary composition and to a great variety of performance styles. Opera houses have embraced period style: the first was Glyndebourne, which became a pioneer when Simon Rattle brought the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to the house for his Mozart/Da Ponte cycle in the late 1980s; Handel followed there under William Christie. Covent Garden hosted a visit by Christie’s Les arts florissants in 1995 for Purcell’s King Arthur, and in 2009 the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment played there for a Handel/Purcell double bill, bringing periodinstrument bands into the orchestra pit, diversifying the musical experiences on offer to the public, just as directors have diversified (more than some would like) the range of responses to the dramatic language of opera. How far have our professional performing institutions changed? Just sixty years ago, a neglected book was published called Music: A Report on Musical Life in England, sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees as one of a series of investigations, begun in 1941 but not completed until after the war, giving some account of the economic structure of our cultural life. It was finally
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published in 1949.70 (Among those involved in the preparation of the report were David Webster, Frank Howes, Thomas Russell and Michael Tippett, with Imogen Holst and Steuart Wilson as advisers.) What emerges very clearly is that this was the decisive moment for the establishment of a system of state support for music that has survived surprisingly intact to this day. The early years of the Arts Council of Great Britain (now Arts Council England), which grew out of the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, saw the support of a small number of orchestral and operatic companies to give them a sounder footing, and they are still at the core of provision today: the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Hallé, the Liverpool Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic. Four chamber orchestras, interestingly none still extant, received small sums. Sadler’s Wells Opera and the newly refounded Covent Garden were supported, but the report was able to point out that in Paris the Opéra and Opéra-Comique received far more and that in Germany eighty opera houses were subsidised by nation, state or municipality. Looked at simply in terms of public support through funding by Arts Council England, although there are now small amounts of money going to support all manner of new ventures, the vast majority of subsidy funding still goes into relatively few, big organisations. Within Arts Council England’s funding for 2009–1071 the largest recipients of music funding, supported by over £1m a year, are the Royal Opera House (£27.7m), South Bank Centre (£20.8m), English National Opera (£17.9m), Opera North (£9.6m), Welsh National Opera (£6.6m), Sage Gateshead (£3.7m), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (£2.7m), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (£2.3m), LSO (£2.3m), Hallé (£2.1m), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (£2.2m), Philharmonia (£2.1m), London Philharmonic (£2.1m), Glyndebourne Touring Opera (£1.5m), English Touring Opera (£1.5m), Aldeburgh Festival (£1.4m) and the Roundhouse (£1m). It is notable how relatively few new entrants to that list there have been in sixty years. Those figures will represent a peak of public funding as the cuts of the years 2011–14 begin to take effect, but it was striking that Arts Council England in its decisions of early 2011 made no radical changes to the balance of symphony orchestra provision, maintaining an equally small cut across all their budgets, while adding to the ‘canon’ of the national portfolio one new smaller orchestra, the Aurora, and two wellestablished period-instrument bands, the Academy of Ancient Music and the English Concert. 70 The Arts Enquiry: Music: A Report on Musical Life in England, sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees, Political and Economic Planning, 1949. 71 www.artscouncil.org.uk.
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Among the conclusions of the 1949 report was that ‘Britain is at last recognised to be producing some of the great music of our time . . . London has the chance of becoming the musical centre of Europe. British musical life has thus become exciting in itself, full of promise, and important to the British people as a whole.’ However ‘conditions today, though much improved as still far from satisfactory. Few musical organisations have any guarantee of permanence and the chance of doing excellent work. The lack of good buildings for music remains a constant hindrance.’72 This promise has certainly been fulfilled in the area of both performance and buildings: we have world-class orchestras around the UK, new opera companies, ensembles which have flourished in a period of increasing public support but now face challenges from a contracting economy. Public and private funding has provided outstanding buildings for music: Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Sage Gateshead, the Anvil in Basingstoke, the Lighthouse in Poole, the Lowry in Salford, and most recently Aldeburgh Music’s fine new spaces for teaching and performance at Snape Maltings.
Towards a new generation This funding pattern represents a considerable continuity in the musical institutions of the post-war era, and new areas such as non-Western music, the support of diverse cultures, and early music have always had a struggle to establish themselves within a funding system that has so much committed to the continuance of present structures (witness the several failed attempts to reduce the number of London orchestras receiving public subsidy). Now the audience is changing, and changing fast. Thanks to crises in our education system, the assumptions about how new generations enter the world of classical music have been repeatedly challenged in recent years. (The arguments about applause at concerts between movements in symphonies and song cycles surely relate to varying levels of knowledge among the audience, and uncertainty about concert behaviour.) The picture of grants to venues, orchestras and opera houses conceals radically changing agendas in each of these performing organisations. In particular each is making an increasing commitment not only to creating performance at the highest level, but to programmes of education and outreach that complement and nourish that work. The vast growth and flourishing of those programmes of work over the last two decades deserve a special study: because they have become a central part of arts
72 The Arts Enquiry: Music, p. 14.
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organisations’ activities during that period, they have been and continue to be a key agent in changing performance today. This occurred for two linked reasons: first that the governments of the time were failing to provide adequate support for this activity within the education system, and second that it was possible to attract funding from others – trusts and foundations, corporate supporters and private individuals – for this work. A history remains to be written of the visionary efforts that the education departments of ensembles such as the London Sinfonietta under Gillian Moore undertook to build up a creative interaction with schools, communities and young people, inspiring a new generation to look towards them for a model of how to engage with performance and composition. The coming-together of performing groups, for example the London Symphony Orchestra with its well-established LSO Discovery programme in London, and conservatoires, notably the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with its pioneering work under Peter Renshaw, have transformed activity in this field over the last twenty-five years. In the City of London we have now brought the Barbican Centre and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama led by Barry Ife together in a joint department of Creative Learning under its director Sean Gregory, which in an ‘alliance for creative excellence’ with the LSO will offer new pathways to young people, linking local achievement with international excellence. The rapid growth of these outreach programmes has also affected performance directly. Composers have begun to work in a much more interactive way with performers: musicians like Peter Wiegold write collaboratively within a framework which mixes the performers’ creativity with that of the composer. Students from the Royal Academy of Music travel to Bosnia with schoolchildren to create a new version of The Soldier’s Tale across the ethnic divide. At first in pre-concert events, but increasingly also in the concerts themselves, audiences have been involved in the self-generated, imaginatively created music produced by young performers, and this has begun to shift our understanding of what contemporary music and performance should hope to achieve. The National Youth Orchestra has involved its players not just in the recreation of great masterpieces but in the creation of their own new work. Invisible Lines, a project for the BBC Proms in 2005, enabled the cellist Matthew Barley and project leader Lincoln Abbotts to work with four groups of skilled teenagers around the country, and bring them to London for a week which resulted in a semi-improvised, un-notated piece performed in the arena of the Albert Hall, broadcast both on radio and television, which captured the imagination of those present through its technical skill and emotional impact.73 73 BBC Proms, Saturday, 30 June 2005, Royal Albert Hall.
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This kind of work draws on a radically different approach to performance and composition. As Sean Gregory has put it: ‘this emerging generation of musicians comes from a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines and experiences, with many of them interested in extending the nature of creativity and communication as performers, collaborators and listeners. They go into projects without fixed ideas, welcoming collaborators, be they instrumentalists, singers, electronic musicians or whoever, and create a shape out of sound sources they are given. The question now is whether arts and educational organisations can truly demonstrate their capacity to engage with this evolution.’74 It is beginning to happen: now a new thrust of orchestral work is likely to be towards collaboration and partnership, alongside the recreation of the changing canon of great work. Orchestras Live, the new Arts Council ‘national development agency for orchestral music in England’, reported case studies including Urban Orchestra: ‘young people in South Bedfordshire teamed up with the Orchestra of the Swan to create their own Urban orchestra’; ‘Messin’ with Mozart: young people from Medway worked with the City of London Sinfonia on creating new music for performance’; and Sounds of China, part of the Essex Jiangsu Festival; the report stresses ‘enabling creative projects’, and ‘addressing social agendas’ as key parts of its mission. This would have been impossible to imagine a generation ago.75 Not just for children but for adults too, the concept of added value and reflection on performance has lain behind such initiatives as developing the Centre for Orchestra being led by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Guildhall School, which will combine advanced training and continuous professional development for professional musicians with active reflection on performance. Courses, study days, discussions, pre-concert talks are in demand, mounted both by performing organisations and by academic institutions like the Institute for Musical Research (part of the School for Advanced Studies at the University of London) taking seriously their remit to reach the wider public; this is all part of the desire to take performance seriously, and to explore its background, which could provide a new agenda for all those academics and researchers anxious to achieve greater public impact with their work. If freshness and vitality in performance during the 1980s and 1990s were most frequently to be found in the early music movement, then in the 2000s the newest source of vitality has surely been from the spectacular achievements of the young. The annual appearances at the Proms of the National Youth 74 Sean Gregory, email to the author, October 2009. 75 Orchestras Live, Annual Review 2008–09, A Vibrant Landscape for Orchestral Music, also available online at www.orchestraslive.org.uk.
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Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and the European Union Youth Orchestra have become ever more inspiring; youth proms and the choirs assembled by Youth Music have made a similar impression. The recreation of traditional pieces takes place side by side with improvised work that brings the young players’ own creativity to the fore. This is a major development that will shape both performance and composition tomorrow. The overwhelming impact made by the young players of the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel at the BBC Proms in 200776 (they returned in 2011) and at the Southbank Centre in 2009 (returning in 2012), cannot be explained just by its novelty or its coloured Venezuelan jackets, or even by the deeply inspiring story behind its creation.77 Venezuela’s system of music education, El sistema, under the visionary leadership of José Antonio Abreu, took young people from the streets of Caracas and throughout the country, and created over thirty years a nationwide social programme that has transformed young people’s lives and has led to the creation of many orchestras. It is an inspiring and enlightened concept, but not necessarily one that can be simply replicated in this country (where a social programme needs to be integrated with the music education system that exists here). In the case of the top-notch Simon Bolivar Orchestra, the sophistication and exuberance of the playing, the boundless commitment of every musician to the end result, and the sense of communal team spirit, added to the liberating freedom of physical movement on stage, represents an ideal of performance today to which many aspire.78
Beyond ‘classical music’ Classical music has had to contend in recent years with a change from its privileged position in our society to one in which it is repeatedly, and in my view rightly, challenged by pop music, world music and a vast range of alternative mass entertainment. Its coverage in the press, especially the broadsheet press, which regarded it as a natural constituency, has diminished visibly (certainly since the years when as a reviewer I would write one of four or five classical concert reviews in the pages of a daily paper, sometimes of events attended by a handful of people). If this means that classical music is ignored by those who teach our children, plan our national events, support our institutions and edit our newspapers, then that is negative. If it means that classical 76 Chosen by the Daily Telegraph as one of the landmark cultural events of the 2000s, 31 October 2009. 77 M. Marcus, ‘From street to stage’, Guardian, 4 April 2009. 78 Unofficial video recordings, especially of the Proms encores, are searchable on YouTube by entering Dudamel + Simon Bolivar Orchestra.
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music has more strenuously to argue its case and earn its place in our society, and prove every day the insights and excitements that it can bring, then surely that is absolutely positive. Classical music now exists alongside, interacts with and overlaps with many other musics in our culture, which command equal status and attention. A leading music critic of the present generation, Alex Ross of the New Yorker, writes passionately and engagingly about music from the classical tradition, but embedded within the experience of all kinds of music.79 The patrician assumption of the past that classical music is the only truly valuable part of our musical activity cannot be sustained. The biggest challenge to classical music performance today would be if it became irrelevant, and if those who practised it were content to see it become an esoteric sidelight in our national life. In a volatile and economically challenging time, we want that music to speak with passion and eloquence to the next generation, all of whom use music in many different ways as the soundtrack to their lives. Many are thirsting to participate, and to originate their own music in whatever genre. That route to performance today may be a very different one from that of earlier generations, but it is equally valid and equally to be respected; our responsibility is not to put classical music in a box, locked and marked ‘only for those in the know’, but to let it take its natural place in the firm belief that, once encountered, it will provide the appetite for a lifetime’s study and performance. Enabling us to unlock the continuous development of this essential, elemental excitement is what the future will be about. This is performance today; that will be performance tomorrow.
79 A. Ross, The Rest is Noise, New York, Harper Perennials, 2009, and his blog, the best of all classical webbased sites, formerly www.therestisnoise.com, now ‘Unquiet Thoughts’ at www.newyorker.com/online/ blogs/alexross.
. 2 .
Political process, social structure and musical performance in Europe since 1450 WILLIAM WEBER
I will examine the history of musical performance by, in political terms, seeing how a cultural community is shaped by differing groups and forces. Performing involves interaction among people involved in organising, paying, listening and interpreting. Their relationships may vary at any time from close collaboration to intense conflict. Different kinds of communities interact in this political process, variously the performing institution, a court or a city, and the state or a region of states. Negotiation must go on among participants, according to organisational rules, musical practices and financial constraints. Tradition and change compete with each other under pressure from social movements and individual opportunism. While these factors are usually just taken for granted, crises often make them articulated in print. An efficient way to enquire into these social and political processes is to examine dualities which have recurred in Western musical life since the late Middle Ages. Involving collaboration and conflict to varying extents, the dualities within performing relationships can help us go beyond the banal phrase ‘Music and Society’ by identifying the dynamics aspects of musical culture. The first section of this chapter briefly examines musical dualities under three headings – Location, Production and Taste. The second section discusses how the dualities generally played out during four periods of music history since around 1450. Scholars typically agree that a public musical world emerged by around 1450 in Western and Central Europe, and we can see lines of continuity from that time to the present.1 It is indeed enlightening to see how the origins of modern practices can reach back so far. Even though the dualities affecting musical life changed in nature from one period to another, they largely retained certain basic roles throughout our period: (A) Location: Court and city Nobles and bourgeois Cosmopolitan versus local or national 1 R. Strohm, The Rise of European Music (1380–1500), Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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(B) Production: Amateurs and professionals Entrepreneurship versus association Vocal and instrumental music Virtuoso versus ensemble (C) Taste: Old and new music Performer and composer Different modes of listening
Location Location is the basis of the first three related dualities in musical life. A dialectic between the court and the city lasted to the end of the nineteenth century, involving competition among noble and bourgeois, and tension between the cosmopolitan, the national and the local which continues to this day. Much of modern music history has been wrapped up in the dialectic between the court and the city. On the one hand, the royal or aristocratic patron exerted personal leadership in idiosyncratic ways to shape musical activities in a court. Although court patronage could bring vital musical leadership for a period of time, the shift from one generation to another could have disorienting consequences for the musical community. On the other hand, the highly institutionalised nature of governance in a city could generate regular musical activity over succeeding generations.2 The funding available for musical activity was, none the less, often more limited in a city than in a court, especially for instrumental ensembles. The Italian cities of the early modern period most strikingly illustrate this contrast, as the differences between the extraordinary continuity in Venice and the discontinuities in courts such as Ferrara or Florence.3 Yet because a court was often based in a city, a court and the city’s government worked closely together, as can be seen in the evolution of opera houses in the early modern period. In Italian cities opera was based on different kinds of institutions – a major court in Naples, a small one in Parma and patrician leadership in Venice. During the eighteenth century, when the court was usually located a moderate distance from the capital city, the urban theatre then rivalled the one at the court. Whereas Louis XIV and English monarchs
2 Richard Leppert illustrates Flemish musical life in The Theme of Music in Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, Munich, Musikverlag Katzbichler, 1977. 3 I. Fenlon, ‘Music and Society’, in I. Fenlon (ed.), The Renaissance from the 1470s to the End of the 16th Century, London, Macmillan, 1989; E. Selfridge-Field, Song and Season: Science, Culture and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice, Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 2007.
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after 1688 took little leadership in opera, Frederick II in Prussia and Joseph II of the Habsburg Empire involved themselves considerably in such affairs. Rulers in the smaller courts in this period developed significant opera companies, as Daniel Heartz has shown in fascinating detail for Stuttgart and Mannheim.4 Courts continued to play important roles in musical life during the first half of the nineteenth century despite the burgeoning of urban music publics. Franz Liszt shifted his career from the concert stage to the court of SaxeCoburg-Meiningen in 1848; Louis Spohr, one of the most important composers in the first half of the century, was based in the court of Hesse-Kassel from the early 1830s until his death in 1859. While Liszt had considerable latitude from his patron, Spohr was burdened by traditional restrictions as to residence and repertoire. Continuity can also be seen in opera houses. Even though control of them gradually shifted from courts to municipalities, traditional leadership remained strong, as in Parma until Italian unification began in 1859 and in Dresden until the end of the century.5 During the twentieth century a dualism between state and private funding in effect replaced that of court and city. By the 1870s the value of public funding of concerts or opera was much debated in numerous countries. The greatest public support for music emerged in nineteenth-century German municipalities, not for the most part the Austrian Empire or individual German states. Until 1945 the least such funding existed in Britain. Publicly funded radio provided a major new source of funding for classical music from the 1920s in Britain and almost all other countries. The United States was the last major country where state funding developed. The steady public funding for opera and concerts in Germany led German emigrants to the United States to hold back from donating to local institutions.6 Music benefited considerably less than painting or sculpture from the National Endowment for the Arts begun in 1965.7 Nobles and bourgeois both collaborated and vied with one another on the historical stage. Nobility arose in the tenth century, only a century earlier than did the bourgeoisie. Once feudal relationships established titled families with control of land in the tenth century, bankers and professionals emerged in cities to manage the growing money economy. To be sure, because the 4 D. Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780, New York, Norton, 2003. 5 J. Toelle, Oper als Geschäft: Impresari an italienischen Opernhäusern, 1860–1900, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2007; Philipp Ther, In der Mitte der Gesellschaft: Operntheater in Zentraleuropa, 1815–1914, Vienna, Oldenbourg, 2006. 6 J. Hecht-Gienow, ‘Trumpeting down the walls of Jericho: the politics of art, music and emotion in German–American relations 1870–1920’, Journal of Social History, 36 (2003), 585–613; and Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920, University of Chicago Press, 2009. 7 D. Binkiewitz, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965– 1980, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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bourgeoisie did not control land – the principal source of wealth – it appeared secondary to the nobility and therefore seemed to ‘rise’ in subsequent periods. But its source of capital and cash was vital to the nobility, some of whom became involved with business leaders in many regions of Europe as of the seventeenth century. One could find numerous nobles in southern England and northern France who took mortgages on their lands to develop mines and small arms factories.8 Nobles and bourgeois likewise collaborated extensively in musical life, serving as patrons, commentators and organisers of opera or concert institutions. Although much was written condemning the musical education of boys in eighteenth-century England, Horace Walpole served as a talent scout for the King’s Theatre, and John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, was the principal founder of the Catch Club and the Concert of Antient Music.9 The opera companies in Venice, London and Prague were led in large part by men of the two classes. The original chamber-music concerts in the first half of the nineteenth century owed their existence to support variously from high nobles, bankers, socially prominent intellectuals and music teachers. The collaboration of people from different social strata was crucial to these concerts, which were unprecedented for involving no pieces for voice. Concert societies of the twentieth century likewise flourished only if their managers worked hard to maintain support from wealthy patrons and a large paying public. The dialectic between cosmopolitan and local or national music has been closely related with the dualities of court and city and noble and bourgeois.10 As applied here, the term ‘cosmopolitan’ indicates the authority carried by a genre – Italian opera most of all – that dominated repertoires and taste over a wide geographical region. No single country or region could exist on its own; involvement internationally was basic to musical culture, whether in collaborative or competitive terms. As Reinhard Strohm has shown, the dissemination of music across geographical boundaries was closely linked with diplomatic activity in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.11 A sovereign often took his or her leading musicians to other courts while negotiating for marriage, war or commerce, and numerous high-level musicians thereby served as secretaries
8 H. M. Scott (ed.), European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols., Harlow, Longman, 1995. 9 R. Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 10 For discussion of national styles, see C. Lawson and R. Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 42–7, 81, 179. 11 R. Strohm, ‘European politics and the distribution of music in the early fifteenth century’, Early Music History, 1 (1981), 305–23.
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or emissaries. George Frideric Handel’s first visit to London occurred in 1708 chiefly because his patron, King George of Hanover, wanted to hear about the crisis-bound situation of English politics at the time. Cosmopolitan authority was vested in particular genres in musical culture.12 By 1700 opera originating in various Italian cities had become established as the principal repertoire in almost all courts and cities. Though still holding an Italian identity, operatic works became the cosmopolitan standard throughout Europe, being applied by locally born composers in their local communities. M.-P.-G. Chabanon might have been speaking for Italian opera when in 1785 he declared that ‘in their free circulation, the arts lose all of their indigenous character . . . [i]n this regard Europe can be thought to be a mother country of which all the arts are citizens’.13 Yet at the same time, genres rooted in a given region often rivalled cosmopolitan genres. The politics of musical life revolved around competition between local and cosmopolitan opera and the struggle of local composers to be recognised within the international community. Opera in the vernacular – called opéra comique, Singspiel, or English opera – thereby challenged cosmopolitan Italian opera. Not only did intellectuals challenge the hegemony of cosmopolitan opera, so did many members of the elites who often attended opera performances. Moreover, the concertos and symphonies by central European composers – not just Germans – acquired a similar if less powerful such role in the late eighteenth century. Less hierarchy among regions developed in performance of the highly international concerto, as was also usually the case with sacred music prior to the rise of classical repertoires during the early nineteenth century. The nature of cosmopolitan music changed fundamentally in the middle of the nineteenth century. The hegemony of Italian opera waned as the Parisian theatres acquired greater international prominence and proponents of German opera mounted a pointed ideological campaign, now taking Mozart into their company more fully than had been the case earlier. A crisis in Italian opera was even more evident in 1868, when the recently unified but deeply problematic Italian state ended all subsidies for opera from the nation or its provinces. Furthermore, by 1850 repertoires of classical music performed by orchestras and string quartets had become central to cosmopolitan culture, rivalling opera vigorously. Even though it was conventional to refer to classical music as German in origin (despite the presence of Italians and others from Central
12 See further discussion in W. Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, Cambridge University Press, 2008, and ‘Cosmopolitan, National, and Regional Identities in Eighteenth-century European Musical Life’, in J. Fulcher (ed.), Oxford Handbook to the New Cultural History of Music, Oxford University Press, 2011. 13 Quoted in M. Noiray, Vocabulaire de la musique de l’époque classique, Paris, Minerve, 2005, p. 119.
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Europe), it was expected that every orchestra would perform some of the classical repertoire for orchestra or quartet. The primacy of cosmopolitan classical repertoire in concert life by 1850 stimulated composers to define their music in nationalistic terms.14
Production The production and performance of music entailed three related dualities concerning relations between amateur and professional musicians, the entrepreneur and the association and practices of performing vocal and instrumental music. Both the amateur and the professional musician can be considered to have had careers. Amateurs followed extensive and in some cases significant careers in many periods, even though the term ‘patron’ may be more appropriate for amateurs in some contexts. There was a long tradition of a patron performing alongside a high-ranking professional musician in private. Isabella d’Este, wife of the Marchese Francesco Gonzaga in the late 1400s, was a distinguished singer, as was Empress Therese of the house of Habsburg between 1792 and 1807.15 British gentlemen sang with leading musicians of the Chapel Royal at the gatherings of the Noblemen’s Catch Club (1760).16 In the early nineteenth century amateur string players performed in private with musicians who were putting on public concerts of chamber music. This tradition still survives; for example, during the 1980s and 1990s Edward Edelman, elected Supervisor of Los Angeles County (which has authority over the Music Center and the Hollywood Bowl) often played with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his home. During the eighteenth century the growing prominence of public concerts created tensions between amateurs and professionals in some contexts. Music societies in Britain often experienced this problem. There was great protest against bringing London singers to perform in an oratorio concert in Halifax in 1767, and the Edinburgh Musical Society all but collapsed in 1798 as a result of dispute of the same kind.17 The Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna worked out an interesting compromise over the question of amateur performance during the first three decades after its founding in 1814. Professionals
14 See Toelle, Oper als Geschäft, and Ther, In der Mitte der Gesellschaft. 15 W. Priser, ‘Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este as patrons of music: the frottola at Mantua and Ferrara’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 1–33; J. Rice, Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792–1807, Cambridge University Press, 2003. 16 B. Robins, Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2006. 17 A Plain and True Narrative of the Differences, between Messrs. B–S, and Members of the Musical Club, holden at the Old-Cock, Halifax, In a Letter to a Friend, Halifax, 1767; D. Johnson, Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1972.
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could not appear in its orchestral series (the Society Concerts), but they did perform opera selections and virtuoso pieces at the smaller-scale Evening Entertainments. The ‘idealists’ in the society, unhappy about its repertoire and performing standards, created a semi-professional orchestral series called the Concert Spirituel (1819–48), where the first systematic classical repertoire appeared in Europe as a whole. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1842, involved only members of the opera orchestra but failed to present more than a few concerts a year until 1860. The Revolution of 1848 had the effect of dividing fundamentally amateur from professional concerts.18 Concerts by amateur choral societies were often performed with professional soloists and orchestral players by the middle of the nineteenth century. The English oratorio festivals originally involved professional singers, either from cathedral choirs or theatre choruses. But by the 1840s choruses made up of amateurs had become common, most prominently in London’s Sacred Harmonic Society, many of whose members came from the lower middle class. The new-found ability to train large numbers of amateurs to sing with some success in performances of choral-orchestral pieces expanded the resources of music-making greatly for the rest of the century. Professional singers seem sometimes to have helped lead the sections of otherwise amateur choruses. Choruses of varying size, social status and musical ability sprang up all over Europe and America, making Handel’s best-known oratorios as widely performed as the operas of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi. The British choral festivals nevertheless went into serious decline towards the end of the nineteenth century. The impresarios found it increasingly hard to please the public and get it to accept new works.19 Choral groups took a particular path in the United States, where college glee clubs kept active the English catch and glee tradition, with its special blend of sociability, through the twentieth century. The division between amateur and professional musicians became increasingly distinct during the twentieth century, in orchestras and choruses alike. A new kind of interaction between amateurs and professionals nonetheless arose in rock music. Since the 1960s young people have been building rock bands in local communities with the ambition of becoming high-level professionals, motivated by the success of such stars as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Moreover, areas of popular music began to develop their own pedagogy.
18 Weber, Great Transformation of Musical Taste, pp. 197–207, 255–8. 19 G. Cumberland, ‘Musical Problems: IV. Musical Festivals’, Musical Opinion and Trade Review, 398 (November 1910), 90–1; H. Antcliffe, ‘Musical festivals and modern works’, Musical Opinion and Trade Review, 391 (1 April 1910), 483. See also R. Demaine, ‘Individual and institution in the musical life of Leeds, 1900–1914’, Ph.D. thesis, University of York (1999).
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Whereas many singers and songwriters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were educated in conservatoires or with traditional music teachers, musicians in rock, country and folk music now are often trained within their own professions.20 We can differentiate between two ways of producing music: through entrepreneurship or association. It is possible to produce music either as a personal speculation, for either profit or loss, or through an association whose members intend to pursue larger collective goals. In present-day language, entrepreneurism is usually defined as the attempt to expand capital resources through corporate organisation. Yet prior to the late nineteenth century the term was used to denote individuals who performed services with limited, if any, economic resources, and included even those who bartered in a town’s market.21 Entrepreneurism goes far back in musical culture, for the travelling entertainer had to learn how to manipulate expenses and income in different kinds of places. Music publishing was highly entrepreneurial from the start. James Haar pointed to the ‘entrepreneurial urge’ and the ‘shrewd sense of self-promotion’ in the career of Orlando di Lasso.22 Though not a publisher as such, Lasso served as editor and business adviser for those who put his many volumes of music into print. During the eighteenth century the growing size of the musical world in some major cities led an increasing number of musicians to work on a freelance basis, putting on subscription series, giving lessons and sometimes even establishing music schools. Promenade concerts, finally, were almost always highly commercial enterprises from their creation by Philippe Musard in 1832 until after the Second World War.23 Aspirant rock groups likewise function today in entrepreneurial fashion even though they have to work through corporate management agencies. To be sure, a fine line exists between the two types of venture, because an association might make money, and a speculation can be driven in part by high principles. Yet the moral implications seen in the profit motive have often led to conflict between entrepreneurial and associative goals. As early as the 1770s musicians who published a lot of music for amateurs – Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, for example – came into considerable disrepute for being overly 20 For a picture of one such world, see R. Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1993. 21 W. Weber, in W. Weber (ed.), The Musician as Entrepreneur and Opportunist, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans and Idealists, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004, Introduction. 22 J. Haar, ‘Orlando di Lasso, composer and print entrepreneur’, in K. van Orden (ed.), Music and the Cultures of Print, New York, Garland, 2000, pp. 129, 131, 126. See also P. A. Starr, ‘Musical entrepreneurship in fifteenth-century Europe’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 119–33. 23 A history of the enterprises sponsoring Musard’s concerts, and a proposal for a mixture of dance music and classical symphonies, can be found in the Archives Nationales, F 21 1157, ‘Concerts Musard, rue Vivienne, 1836–37; Concerts Vivienne, Concerts de la salle Montesquieu, 1833–36’.
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commercial. The word ‘charlatan’ was often used to criticise a virtuoso or a promenade concert conductor, whose ambitions were thereby contrasted with the higher goals seen in the concerts presented by groups of professional musicians. Joseph Joachim employed the term in January 1857 to accuse Louis Jullien of performing classical works in showy fashion.24 In the 1970s widely known experimental composers such as Philip Glass and George Crumb were derided by university composers for pandering to the commercial aspects of popular music. The musical association differed from entrepreneurial activity because it was collective and often indeed egalitarian in nature. A group of musicians would form a society to present concerts on a long-term basis. The earliest such organisations borrowed the term ‘academy’ from Italian or French societies that were devoted to intellectual dialogue rather than performance, even though sociability among colleagues existed in both cases. Thus the Academy of Ancient Music in London (1726–1802) brought together singers from the Chapel Royal and the cathedrals with a few of their patrons to sing works of ‘ancient’ music that were as old as the late sixteenth century. Almost all of the professional orchestras founded in the nineteenth century were likewise collective undertakings run by musicians, most prominently the Philharmonic Society of London (1813), the Société des Concerts in Paris (1828), the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (1842) and the New York Philharmonic Society (1842). The subscription series held at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, however, was governed by a board of laymen, as was often the case with American orchestras in the twentieth century. In the world of opera, however, blended forms of governance tended to arise, because the court or the state was often involved in some fashion along with an entrepreneur. At its founding in 1669, the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris was directed by Pierre Perrin, Jean-Baptiste Lully and a succession of directeurs, but received necessary financial support from the court.25 Holding a monopoly over French opera, the Opéra in 1725 then gave a privilège over all public concerts to the Concert Spirituel, the city’s central series, whose directeurs developed concerts at their own behest. By contrast, in London the Royal Academy of Music, which acquired the privilege of the King’s Theatre in 1720, was led by a collegial board of directors as well as
24 J. Joachim, ed. and trans. N. Bickley as Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, London, Macmillan, 1914, p. 141. Emphasis is original. 25 J. de la Gorce, L’Opéra à Paris au temps de Louis XIV: Histoire d’un théâtre, Paris, Éditions Desjonquères, 1992; V. Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
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an impresario. Made up of leading nobles and gentlemen, the board continued to exercise authority until the early 1830s.26 From the start, Italian opera companies were controlled in diverse fashion by a court, an impresario, box-owning patrons, or a combination of all three. From the early eighteenth century most Italian halls were governed by an impresario who obtained funding, an association of boxholders that protected their investments, and often a monarch who served as patron. In Venice the boxholders dominated, in Milan and Naples the patrons and in other cities all three interest groups.27 In German cities municipalities provided funding for opera during the nineteenth century. Yet close links between noble and bourgeois patrons underlay the functioning of the theatre in cities such as Dresden.28 The dualism between vocal music and instrumental music has been fundamental to Western musical culture. The two types of music needed and rivalled one another throughout this history. Until the twentieth century it was unusual for a court or public performance to involve just vocal or instrumental pieces. Even though string quartets were giving concerts with no vocal component in Vienna and Paris by 1815, singers continued to appear in some such concerts, and the great majority of orchestral series included solo or choral pieces until the First World War. This tradition reflected a deep fascination with virtuosity in its contrasting forms. Voices and instruments had long been thought to interact with one another in what Rodolfo Celletti called the ‘love duet’ inherent in the tradition of bel canto.29 During the late 1780s, for example, listeners would flock to a concert to hear a rondo by Domenico Cimarosa, followed by a violin concerto by Giovanni Viotti. The long prevalent ‘miscellaneous’ concert of opera selections and instrumental virtuoso pieces gave a coherent set of expectations and practices to the tradition. A programme of fifteen opera selections and virtuoso pieces, each half introduced by an overture, may seem unappealing to listeners today, but it was among the most sought-out kinds of musical entertainment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A musician who put on such a concert followed what amounted to a political process in choosing performing forces, genres, composers and pieces, based on his or her sense of what the public
26 E. Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music 1719–1728: The Institution and its Directors, New York, Garland, 1989; J. Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880, Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. 27 J. Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario, Cambridge University Press, 1984. 28 See Ther, In der Mitte der Gesellschaft. 29 R. Celletti, Storia del Bel Canto, trans. F. Fuller as A History of Bel Canto, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 3.
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expected in taste and in popular performers. The blending of short vocal and instrumental pieces lives on in our day in school concerts and recitals organised by music teachers. Still, performances in court or in private rooms might include only vocal or instrumental pieces. The need to accommodate a public did not apply as strictly to an aristocrat presenting music in a stately home as it did to a musician performing in public. For example, around 1800 the Habsburg Empress Marie Therese, a singer in her own right, presented several concerts a week made up almost entirely of vocal pieces, usually either opera buffa or opera seria.30 The patrons of Beethoven’s chamber music likewise held private performances dedicated strictly to quartets and related genres. The English heir apparent gave a concert in Devonshire House in 1823 made up of ensemble numbers from Rossini’s Il turco in Italia (1814), each half introduced by a sonata for horns.31 Philosophical, indeed often ideological, dispute developed over the aesthetic dichotomy between vocal and instrumental music. A critique of performing numerous opera selections at concerts began as early as 1800, and by the 1860s a few orchestras (the Prussian Court Orchestra in Berlin most of all) offered little vocal music. Opera and classical-music concerts became increasingly distant from one another, since the rationale for performing old operas evolved on a commercial rather than an idealistic basis intellectually. Such aesthetic dispute has persisted among scholars today. Music historians tend to disparage the eighteenth-century principle that aesthetic meaning must arise from poetic communication, leading to the argument that instrumental music became ‘emancipated’ from that principle as the idea of ‘absolute’ music arose in the early nineteenth century.32 Other scholars countered that commentators used poetic language to interpret Beethoven’s music and that vocal music remained central to aesthetic thinking, suggesting that ‘absolute music’ appeared much later.33 Distinctive types of homogeneous as opposed to miscellaneous programmes emerged in the nineteenth century. The recital – that is, performing entirely 30 J. Rice, Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792–1807, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 90–2, 170–3. 31 ‘London’, Quarterly Music Magazine and Review, 5 (1823), 252. 32 J. Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-century Aesthetics, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1986. For a critique of this argument, see D. A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1995. 33 R. Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer’s Lifetime, Cambridge University Press, 1986; M. E. Bond, ‘Idealism and the aesthetics of instrumental music at the turn of the nineteenth century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50 (1997), 387–420; M. E. Bond, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven, Princeton University Press, 2006; Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language.
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alone or just with an accompanist – did not develop until Franz Liszt experimented with it in the late 1830s. Pianists such as Clara Schumann and Marie Pleyel followed suit, and by the 1870s such programming was common in most cities. Concerts by string quartets became more homogeneous as well. While in 1850 their programmes almost always included several genres – a trio, quintet, or even octet – by 1900 a concert might offer just string quartets. In 1907 a London violinist put on a recital made up entirely of Nicolò Paganini’s Caprices, a programme that would have appealed to the virtuoso’s fans in the 1830s.34 Since the 1990s first the Juilliard Quartet and then the Pacifica Quartet have played all six of Elliott Carter’s string quartets in two sittings. Devoting a concert to a single work – an oratorio or a symphony most commonly – was by definition foreign to traditional practice in musical life. Still, performing a single work has come about when the genre has included contrasting solo, choral and instrumental elements. Unusually ambitious composers have made their careers in large part by framing choral-orchestral works in that fashion. Handel established the oratorio concert successfully because he knew how to write for his public and could control what went on in a London theatre. Gustav Mahler likewise monopolised many programmes with his long symphonies, in a time when orchestral programmes included relatively few recent works. He convinced orchestras to give a programme of this kind because he was so much in demand as a conductor and because his symphonies blended musical forces and evocative topoi.35 The relationship between the virtuoso and the ensemble is inherently a source of either collaboration or tension. The self-promoting individual can either threaten other musicians or open up opportunities for them as an ensemble. The instrumental performers who toured courts and cities from the time of the Middle Ages had to woo patrons and participate with local performers. Susan McClary has shown how Italian singers began touring as stars during the 1580s, applying something of the same tactics as instrumentalists.36 A city’s musical connoisseurs, listeners deemed to be good judges, helped facilitate negotiations between local and touring musicians. It was customary for such a person to invite a visiting musician to perform in private before musicians, learned listeners and potential patrons, making it possible for the performer to make contacts for teaching or performing and to organise a concert. The leading such figures during the late eighteenth century were J.-F.-K. Baron von Alvensleben in London, Gottfried Baron van Swieten in Vienna and Alexandre Le Riche de la Pouplinière in Paris. In the late nineteenth century concert agents often 34 Extant copy of the programme in the Centre for Performance History, Royal College of Music. 35 I am indebted to Paul Banks for this information and insight. 36 See forthcoming article ‘Soprano as fetish: professional singers in early modern Italy’ by Susan McClary.
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assumed this role. Pianist Artur Schnabel wrote that the Viennese agent Albert Gutmann presented ‘a star parade’ of both performers and composers in his home on Sunday afternoons.37 A crisis without precedent arose in the relationship between virtuosos and the rest of the musical profession between about 1820 and 1850. The very principle of virtuosity came into question in this period as idealistic commentators made a harsh critique of commercial exploitation, targeting especially the fantaisie on themes from a well-known opera.38 In 1843 a critic in the Musical Examiner went so far as to demand that the Philharmonic Society of London forbid pianist Alexander Dreyshock from playing any of his own music at its concerts.39 By 1860 most performers had abandoned the opera fantaisie and focused their programmes on classical works. The relationship between virtuoso and ensemble was re-established upon the classical repertoire, because many concerts involved chamber works led by the star performer. Clara Schumann, for example, often opened a concert with a piano quartet or quintet. Still, most virtuosos did continue to perform their own works, at least in genres for their instrument.40 An expansion in notoriety parallel to that of Paganini and Liszt occurred in the careers of Elvis Presley and the Beatles during the 1950s and 1960s. In both epochs new commercial frameworks were evolving which opened up wide new horizons for musical stardom. Yet rock music became established on a firmer basis than instrumental virtuosity, which had to share the stage with classics. Rock stars quickly learned how to work with the large-scale commercial world evolving in recording, radio and commercial publicity. The dichotomy between the star and the ensemble was mediated by managers and by the growing popular music press, which wielded great power over what individuals did musically or socially.
Taste A particularly strong dichotomy has existed in Western musical culture between old and new music. A balanced relationship between the old and the new usually existed in the worlds of painting and sculpture, even when academic styles retained hegemony during the nineteenth century.
37 A. Schnabel, My Life and Music, ed. E. Crankshaw, New York, St Martin’s, 1963, p. 9; W. Weber, ‘From the self-managing musician to the independent concert agent’, in Weber (ed.), The Musician as Entrepreneur, p. 119. 38 D. Gooley, ‘Battle against instrumental virtuosity in the early nineteenth century’, in C. Gibbs and D. Gooley (eds.), Franz Liszt and his World, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 75–112. 39 ‘Fair play to all parties’, Musical Examiner, 11 March 1843, 133–4. 40 K. Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Traditionally, new music was thought inherently superior to the old. Johannes Tinctoris made an iconic statement along these lines in his treatise on counterpoint in 1477, declaring that ‘there does not exist a single piece of music, not composed within the last forty years, that is regarded by the learned as worth hearing’.41 Major disputes occurred when a new style began to replace an old one, as happened around 1375, 1600, 1710, 1800 and 1900. Canonic repertoires emerged in a few places before the nineteenth century, though without holding hegemonic authority over musical life in general. During the late fifteenth century a key musical canon developed in the Sistine Chapel prior to 1500, providing the context where Giovanni Palestrina’s music was performed after his death in 1594.42 No comparable repertoire has been found in Italian churches, but his hymns were sung in the Habsburg court chapel during the eighteenth century. Secular canonic repertoires began to arise at that time in the opera houses of Paris and Berlin, and in the concert life of London and other British cities. Practices shifted fundamentally during the early nineteenth century, as recent works became less and less common in some – though by no means all – concert programmes. Canonic repertoires gradually evolved in opera houses after 1850, but a coherent aesthetic rationale for it did not evolve until at least 1900. Classical music reached a peak in its hegemony in the 1950s, when orchestras and chamber groups played little else, and popular music was another world save perhaps for the efforts of Leonard Bernstein. Interest in new music came alive under the influence of minimalism in the 1970s, as groups such as the Kronos Quartet combined old, new, popular and classical works on the same programmes. The relationship between the performer and the composer changed in less categorical terms during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, a great many church musicians of the 1600s and 1700s were expected to produce anthems or psalm settings as a matter of course, a professional expectation unusual today. Moreover, a virtuoso was by definition both composer and performer until the time of Charles Hallé or the later career of Clara Schumann. But some of the leading opera composers of the eighteenth century – such as Johann Adolf Hasse and Christoph Willibald Gluck – had so much to do setting new texts that they had relatively little to do with conducting in the pit or preparing singers for new productions. Late nineteenthcentury virtuosi such as Anton Rubinstein and Ignacy Paderewski continued to compose for their own concerts. From the 1920s the line between the 41 Quoted in H. M. Brown and L. K. Stein, Music in the Renaissance, 2nd edn, Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1999, p. 7. 42 J. Dean, ‘The evolution of a canon at the Papal Chapel’, Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 138–66.
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performer and the composer became particularly indistinct in experimental music, thanks to new practices in performer choice and instrumentation. John Cage and the pianist David Tudor worked as colleagues in such a fashion, and the latter also toured alone playing his own works.43 The authority of the composer over the performer and performing institutions became a major issue professionally and ideologically at various points in music history. A patron of Josquin des Prez in the late fifteenth century admitted that the composer would not produce the proper kind of music for a court nearly as efficiently as less brilliant musicians. Claudio Monteverdi used his high reputation as cultural capital when he bargained with the Duke of Mantua over his demand that he be able to travel much more often than was conventional.44 The composer’s control of opera production grew significantly under Luigi Cherubini in Paris in the 1790s and then with Giuseppe Verdi in the middle of the nineteenth century. The independence of the highest-level composer expanded with Joseph Haydn’s freedom from the Esterházy court, Ludwig van Beethoven’s private patronage in his ailing years and Franz Liszt’s leadership of the Saxe-Coburg court in Weimar. Richard Wagner drew upon the rhetoric of revolutionary politics to assert his ability to control everything in an opera house. Composers began building institutions to defend their interests through the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein (1861) and the Société National de Musique (1871). The different modes of listening in different social contexts have also required negotiation among those involved in musical performance. Today’s readers bring to the subject firmly established sets of assumptions which originated in the break between what was eventually called classical music and popular music. It was often assumed in classical music concerts by around 1870 that the higher mode of listening takes place in a formal context where no movement or sound is permitted from the audience, although dispute breaks out periodically over applause anywhere other than at the end of a work.45 Practices vary today in the diverse kinds of jazz, rock, crossover or world music; audiences may be just as strict as in the classical world, or much less so. The intense moral assumptions which arose in the classical-music world make it difficult for us to understand etiquette prior to the early nineteenth century. Concert and opera came about recently, after all. The primary contexts where music was performed from the Middle Ages through the
43 W. Weber, ‘John Cage: his life and time changes’, Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1976, and ‘ “Rainforest”: an electronic ecology’, Los Angeles Times, 20 November 1975. 44 P. Weiss and R. Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, New York, Schirmer, 1984, pp. 97–100, 121–3, 180–4. 45 A. Ross, ‘Why so serious? When the classical concert took shape’, New Yorker, 8 September 2008, 79–81.
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seventeenth century were in church services and before or after dinner. Purposes other than musical performance were always involved, and in some contexts people might move, speak or indeed sing during the performance. Social custom preserved a certain decorum by regulating what happened through an implicit negotiation between people with different interests. In the fifteenth-century Burgundian court, Howard Brown tells us, dinner, sweets and drink were consumed, then dancing would commence, and finally courtiers would sing solos or duets, seemingly to an attentive audience.46 During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries etiquette was the most varied in opera houses, since they were a key social gathering-point for the upper classes, and less disruption must have gone on in concerts.47
Four historical periods We will now examine the character which the patterns of collaboration and conflict in musical performance acquired in different periods. What was the nature of political structures in a period, and how did that influence the nature of performing institutions? How did dualities between court and city or old and new music play out in a period? In what respects did the structure of the musical community change from one period to another?
1450–1700 Historians agree for the most part that the four centuries from about 1300 to 1700 comprised a distinct period in economy, society and politics that is often called the ‘early modern’ period or the ancien régime.48 By around 1300 settled cultivation had become the norm in most parts of Europe, bringing something of a money economy focused on the cities. A limited but workable state sovereignty was achieved by rulers in France, England, Bavaria, Austria and Spain, and in different ways by the Holy Roman Empire and archbishoprics such as Mainz, Trier and Salzburg. Nobility and monarchy vied for power within complicated frameworks of authority and justice. Kings, dukes and 46 H. M. Brown, ‘Songs after supper: How the aristocracy entertained themselves in the fifteenth century’, in M. Fink, R. Gstrein and G. Mössmer (eds.), Musica Privata: Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben, Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen, Innsbruck, Helbling, 1991, pp. 37–52. 47 J. H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995; W. Weber, ‘Did people listen in the eighteenth century?’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 678–91; M. Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004. 48 J. Merriman, History of Modern Europe, 2 vols., 2nd edn, New York, Norton, 2004, ch. 1; ‘Forum: the general crisis of the seventeenth century revisited’, American Historical Review, 113 (2008), 1029–99, especially J. Dewald, ‘Crisis, chronology and the shaping of European social history’; P. Goubert, trans. S. Cox as The Ancien Regime: French Society, 1600–1750, New York, Harper & Row, 1973.
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archbishops accordingly competed with one another on a relatively equal plane in displaying the cultural pre-eminence of their courts.49 As usually discussed, the term Renaissance means a congeries of cultural, economic and political aspects with a period whose perimeters are difficult to define. Whether the revival of ancient works was related to the other aspects is a moot point, for as Randolph Starn put it, scholars look at the period with either fascination or denial.50 A longer period is now of greater interest to some historians, since so much of what was developing in the 1400s – economic expansion, state formation and growing literacy – can be traced back to the 1300s. The growing independence of secular from sacred music did not flow from any set of ideas such as humanism, but rather resulted from the growing power and centrality of secular institutions and the reshaping of Christianity. Sacred and secular music ended up mutually interdependent in the long run. Musical culture reached a new level of performing activity in both public and private contexts by around 1450, from southern Italy to eastern Germany and north to England. Reinhard Strohm characterised what went on in that period as ‘like a breaking of barriers everywhere, a flooding of ideas, an irrigation of deserts’.51 A set of practices for polyphonic as well as homophonic music spread widely across Europe, based on the composition of individualised pieces of music and the recognition of greatness in certain ones. Competition among magnates expanded musical activities enormously in scale and in quality. Ordinary people in many cities could easily hear masses or concerts in churches or plazas, the music often written by major composers from different parts of Europe. The most privileged members of the upper classes enjoyed a new kind of ‘privatised devotion’ when they sat down and listened to a singer, a lute duo and perhaps an instrumental ensemble. Composers began to acquire a selfconscious identity, though opinions as to when that occurred range from Guillaume Dufay in the early fifteenth century to Josquin des Prez a century later.52 During the early modern period the musical life in courts and cities tended to be fairly separate from one another, even though music and musical practices were often related and similar in many respects. A gulf lay between courts of the major monarchs and the cities they governed, as is best seen in the German states
49 For discussion of European history, 1300–1700, see Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, ch. 1; and Goubert, The Ancien Regime. 50 Brown and Stein, Music in the Renaissance, pp. 1–7; R. Starn, ‘Renaissance redux’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 122–4, and other articles on the problem in the same issue. 51 Strohm, Rise of European Music, pp. 1–10. 52 R. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470–1530, New York, Routledge, 2005; A. Planchart, ‘The early career of Guillaume Du Fay’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 342–68.
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around 1450. In any one city bourgeois and nobles interacted continuously, nobles living either inside or outside the walls, and city officials setting the standard of conduct. By 1500 at least 150 German courts and 100 cities provided strong musical activities, chiefly for processions, banquets and dancing. Sacred and secular music flowed back and forth from one to another, for they could not do without one other. But no other European city save Venice could equal the scale of musical activities found in a major court such as Dresden.53 Only in the eighteenth century did capital cities come to rival the courts. The world of opera emerged within the dualism of court and city. The complex of theatres in Italian cities included a multitude of mixtures between court and city institutions. Court productions and their audiences were sometimes larger than those in the city, but in neither context did the opera public involve many people outside the upper classes and professionals attendant upon their needs.54 Opera provided a place where political and social exchange could go on despite the disruptions of war, political upheaval or economic change. In Italy talented men tended to go into the theatre rather than business or government after economic decline and diplomatic irrelevance set in after the late sixteenth century.55 The social ambience in theatres – keen attention to key scenes yet talking and walking at other moments – suited the needs of European elites generally. By 1700 the musical and social strength and stability of Italian opera had afforded a model of elite entertainment for the rest of Europe. Italian vocal music began to serve as a cosmopolitan standard even where, as in France, listeners only heard it at concerts.
The eighteenth century European politics changed fundamentally in the late seventeenth century, following a hundred years of widespread civil war and economic decline. A new order developed whereby monarchs built standing armies and enjoyed territorial sovereignty unchallenged by dissident dukes. Countries achieved varying solutions to the threat of civil war as the nature of monarchy changed: nervous absolutism in Bourbon France, mixed authority in England, and dependence on Habsburg or Bourbon rule among the diverse Italian states. The notion of the public sharing in state authority – part of what Jürgen Habermas termed the public sphere – began to arise in Britain and France, 53 K. Polk, German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons and Performance Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 68 and passim. 54 T. Walker and L. Bianconi, ‘Production, consumption and political function of seventeenth-century opera’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), 209–96. 55 H. Koenigsberger, ‘Republics and courts in Italian and European culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Past and Present, 83 (1979), 32–56.
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then Italy, Germany and the Habsburg lands. The vast expansion in the circulation of books and periodicals and the concentration of elites in capital cities limited state authority in significant ways. As freewheeling discourse began in salons and coffee shops, cultural life apart from courts took on a new primacy in the marshalling of public opinion. Musical life took on an increasingly urban and public focus in this context. Capital cities were much larger and more powerful than they had been a century earlier, and some musicians were motivated to take on more or less freelance careers. By 1700 many musicians in London and Paris were working variously with the court, the theatres, wealthy families, concert productions and the publishing business. A court was often now dependent upon the city near it, and principal court theatres came under municipal control. Cities differed in the relative importance of monopolies and entrepreneurism for musical activities within the city. Paris possessed by far the strictest set of cultural monopolies, followed fairly closely by Leipzig once the subscription concerts in the Gewandhaus were founded in 1781. Entrepreneurism went the furthest in London, where a sequence of political upheavals in the seventeenth century limited municipal control over concerts almost completely; Viennese musicians became equally adventurous from the 1780s. The growth of periodicals and the broadening of political participation for the better-off classes gave birth to the notion that the public held a form of political authority, even though that amounted essentially to the manipulation of opinion towards partisan ends. Those who wrote about opera and concert performances reified the Public in order to sway taste and give a new kind of authority to learned or opinionated listeners. Essays expressing controversial opinions set off episodes called querelles in France and these had close parallels in other countries. In 1706 John Dennis began a querelle over Italian opera in London with the Essay on the Operas after the Italian Manner, just as François Raguenet had done in Parallèle des Italiens et des François, en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras (1702). It is wise to be careful with usage of the term ‘public sphere’, which can easily amount to cliché. Jürgen Habermas defined it as open-ended discourse on affairs of state authority, which ought not be seen as always extending into realms of society in that period. While cultural worlds interacted with state political issues, they had their own political institutions which need independent definition.56 Members of the nobility as well as the bourgeoisie participated in this intellectual activity; anyone able and ready to
56 C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992; and T. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 1–25.
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offer an opinion by definition formed part of the new framework of public discussion. Cosmopolitan taste, primarily for Italian opera, came to wield a specially strong hegemony in eighteenth-century musical life, its authority based in the capital cities. To be sure, wealthy or influential families had long defined their high status by flaunting the internationalism of their culture. But that tendency became more pronounced at the turn of the eighteenth century, by which time elite families were residing for a substantial part of the year in London, Paris, Madrid and Vienna. The metropolis predominated over the court in upperclass social life in these cities, and offered a new culture of upper-class consumption. A redistribution of wealth from countryside to capital city thus came about, enabled by the state, and fuelled the development of the capital cities.57 Those who led this culture were often called the beau monde or ‘the World’, which included people from the high nobility, influential professionals and the female demi-monde. London and Paris became the arbiters of taste within Europe as a whole. A new kind of consumer-oriented magazine kept readers informed about elite pleasures in those two cities – dress, promenading, equipage, politics, theatre and a lot of Italian opera. Germans, knowing how weak Berlin seemed compared to London or Paris, saw the change with particular clarity while reading the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, begun in Weimar in 1787, and the journal London und Paris begun in Leipzig in 1798. The latter periodical published articles only from London and Paris. Tensions sharpened during this period between the cosmopolitan and the local in musical taste. In Italy works written to texts in regional dialects were performed in the leading theatres, where educated – in effect, cosmopolitan – Italian was the norm. As historian John Rosselli put it, by 1720 opera with educated Italian became ‘a regular and foremost entertainment’ within northern and central Italy and from the Iberian peninsula to London and Central Europe.58 Yet many of the same opera-goers trooped to entertainments written to vernacular texts, the British ballad opera, the German Singspiel and regional Italian dialects. Even though cosmopolitan taste usually held sway over the domestic, local traditions and professional interests remained very much in play in the process of negotiation among these different musics. France was a special case in this regard. With only a few exceptions, the Opéra presented only works set to French texts by French composers until the 1770s. France had remained unusually inward-looking socially; its regional diversity in language, law and culture made the upper classes suspicious of 57 D. Ringrose, ‘Capital cities and urban networks’, in B. Lepetit and P. Clark (eds.), Capital Cities and their Hinterlands in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1996. 58 J. Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 20–1.
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foreigners, Italians particularly. Yet a cabal of connoisseurs spread taste for Italian vocal music among the public, encouraging performance of selections from Italian opera at the dominant concert series, the Concert Spirituel (1725– 91). The admission of Italian and Austrian works to the Académie Royale de Musique during the 1770s formed part of the rethinking of French politics, often called libération, which presaged the Revolution of 1789. In London the King’s Theatre followed a different – indeed, the opposite – policy with equal rigour: almost no work set by British-born composers was performed there until the premiere of Michael Balfe’s Falstaff, with Italian text, in 1838. British politics had a good deal to do with this: the Whiggish nobles, who dominated both the Hanoverian Succession and the King’s Theatre, defined their new authority culturally in the supremacy of Italian opera. Yet music by British composers was widely performed in the theatres, pleasure gardens, music clubs and benefit concerts. Operas by Thomas Arne, William Shield and Charles Dibdin drew a wide and passionate public, and during the nineteenth century a canon of their music developed in editions of songs from their works. What role did the Enlightenment play in musical life of the eighteenth century? The set of movements led by les lumières in France and called die Aufklärung in Germany – then dubbed the Enlightenment by American college professors in the 1920s – interacted with musical culture in complicated ways. The term is too often reified and made a simplistic label. The most specific definition of Enlightenment is to see it as a critique of tradition or custom, an effort to reform that was directed most intensively at the established Church, whether Catholic or Protestant. Daniel Heartz followed a broader definition in Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780.59 Finding great differences between the movements across Europe, I tend to favour the strict definition, following Robert Darnton in distinguishing between the Enlightenment and the cultural life of the eighteenth century in general.60 We can speak of ‘enlightened’ opinion in the musical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in efforts to systematise musical knowledge in essays by such writers as William Addison or Johann Mattheson. Yet relatively few ideological campaigns against tradition comparable to those made against the Church can be found in musical life in this period. After all, most repertoires continued to be self-renewing, as new works succeeded the old, and printed musical commentary was in its infancy. The nature of the Austrian Aufklärung is particularly 59 D. Heartz, Music in European Capitals, New York, Norton, 2003. 60 R. Darnton, ‘In search of the Enlightenment: recent attempts to create a social history of ideas’, Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), 113–32; R. Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-revolutionary France’, Past and Present, 51 (May, 1971), 81–115.
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problematic. Hermann Abert and Derek Beales have shown that Mozart avoided political or religious controversy and indeed followed Catholic dogma carefully in his settings of sacred works. Dorothy Koenigsberger pointed out that the Masonic ideas in Die Zauberflöte are rooted in late medieval ideas just as much as in enlightened thought.61 Despite the continuing predominance of new works over the old, a few canonic repertoires began to appear, chiefly in France and in Britain. The two countries possessed the most fully developed states, and music tended to remain in performance longer there because the monarch no longer served as the patron bringing in new works. The operas and ballets of Jean-Baptiste Lully were revived regularly at the Paris Opéra, and selections from them appeared in concerts in cities such as Lyon and Bordeaux.62 The unusually long performing season in Paris – with closure only for two weeks after Easter – made the Opéra need more repertoire than did its counterparts in London or Naples. An even longer canonic tradition existed in Britain, where sacred works from the late sixteenth century survived in the some cathedrals and chapels, and madrigals of the same vintage were sung in a few homes and clubs. The persistence of operas by Hasse and Carl Heinrich Graun in Berlin, the Prussian capital, confirms the pattern that canonic repertoire appeared in the most fully developed states where the monarch ceased to be patron. Lacking both money and will, Frederick II, King of Prussia, kept the operas in performance after the Seven Years War.63 The world of cultivated music existing in the 1780s was a tightly bound set of institutions and tastes that had been developing for a century and a half. Concert programmes tended to be similar in most contexts, mixing opera selections, concertos, symphonies, pieces from sacred works and in some contexts chamber pieces. Even though some genres were regarded as more elevated than others, sometimes performed in separate theatres, their links within the tightly bound musical community proved much more significant than any aesthetic hierarchy. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the word ‘popular’ did not carry strong ideological implications; it simply meant that a particular number of people liked a piece. A set of political 61 H. Abert, W. A. Mozart, trans. S. Spencer and ed. C. Eisen, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007; D. Beales, Mozart and the Habsburgs: 1992 Stenton Lectures, University of Reading, 1993; D. Koenigsberger, ‘A new metaphor for Mozart’s Magic Flute’, European Studies Review, 5 (1975), 229–75. J. Van Horn Melton, ‘School, stage, salon: musical cultures in Haydn’s Vienna’, Journal of Modern History, 76/2 (2004), 251–79. 62 Weber, Great Transformation of Musical Taste, pp. 65–81; and W. Weber, ‘Les programmes de concerts, de Bordeaux à Boston’, in P. Taïeb, N. Morel-Borotra and J. Gribenski (eds.), Le Musée de Bordeaux et la musique de concert, 1783–93, University of Rouen, 2005, pp. 175–93. 63 J. Mangum, ‘Apollo and the German muses: opera and the articulation of class, politics and society in Prussia, 1740–1806’, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles (2002).
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processes – conflicts and compromises – endowed contrasting musical activities and tastes with a tenuous unity. Some people complained about noise at the opera, others about cliché-ridden ‘occasional’ pieces or virtuoso numbers. But save for a few exceptions – the idealistic commentator John Hawkins most prominently – idealists basically kept their peace in this period.
The nineteenth century By the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 the musical world just described had begun to fall apart. The ‘crisis of the old order’, as historians have long termed it, began with a series of internal crises as early as one in Geneva in the early 1760s, leading to upheaval of some sort almost everywhere in Europe and the Americas. The Napoleonic Wars now seem as important as the French Revolution of 1789 in widely bringing about a questioning of the nature of political authority. That instability helped produce change in cultural worlds that could be related to, but not necessarily derived from, national politics. Musicians and leading amateurs took advantage of the situation to start creating new kinds of musical presentation, either to take advantage of growing commercial markets or to apply idealistic principles of high-level music-making, or a mixture of both. A half century of turbulent change ensued, until the Revolutions of 1848–9 contributed to forcing the question of how musical life should be defined, and a new order came into existence within a decade or so. Much of the musical world found in 1870 still exists in our experience today. Thus did the periods of change in national politics and musical culture evolve in tandem. The expansion of musical activities and the public involved in them grew from the rapid growth in urban population, creating a set of social structures which could not be united in the fashion attempted in the 1780s. The rise of new kinds of production and marketing in cultural goods drew more people from the general population into musical life than had been the case previously. In 1837 the journalist and publisher Léon Escudier introduced the new periodical, France Musicale, by stating that ‘Music is proliferating with astonishing speed today. The art has passed from the theatre into the salons, from salons into the shops, from there onto the street, seeking to become a force among the masses.’64 The operas of Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer and the virtuosity of Sigismond Thalberg and Franz Liszt appealed to the new publics much more than did any concerts devoted chiefly to classical music. Nineteenth-century musical culture became deeply divided in its values. One can speak in relatively neutral terms about a dichotomy between commercial 64 ‘Prospectus’, France Musicale, 31 December 1838, p. 1.
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and idealistic notions of musical activity. Commercial efforts sprang up most dynamically in the repackaging of well-known opera selections and virtuoso pieces for amateurs, as well as in piano transcriptions of classical works. Idealistic principles were part of the discourse emanating from orchestral societies and string-quartet series, which aimed to raise the taste of the heterogeneous new public. The term ‘classical music’ became standard by 1830 and was understood to denote firmly works by revered, usually deceased composers, their music being thought to elevate taste beyond the ‘trash’ of fantasies on opera melodies. By the 1860s the word ‘popular’ carried an ideological edge, which editors of booklets of opera selections used to their own advantage. Producers of concerts might borrow from the language of both classical music and popular song as they probed opportunistically to build new publics. Even though the opera fantasy was unusual in orchestral concerts by 1870, the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna still offered selections from ageing operas and folk songs popularised by Jenny Lind. By the same token, the entrepreneurs who built ‘promenade’ concerts – where listeners could walk during the performance – would perform one or two movements from a Beethoven symphony along with opera medleys and quadrilles, waltzes and polkas. A new kind of ‘miscellaneous’ programme developed in promenade concerts and is still widely produced today. Musical institutions and professions became rooted in the new aesthetic vocabulary. During the 1830s music critics assumed for themselves an authority far stronger than any connoisseurs or commentators in music life had claimed previously. Such critics – almost entirely men – asserted their power variously by interpreting the classics and identifying the best performers. By the 1870s musicology was emerging as a scholarly discipline of sorts, rooted variously in the music conservatoires appearing in many cities, and also in some cases in universities. The breakup of traditional musical culture occurred most fundamentally in the rise of song concerts, usually called the music hall, the café-concert, or variété. Performing traditions in semi-private venues existed in almost every country, offering songs in rooms where listeners could eat and drink. The song-and-supper clubs in London resembled somewhat Paris’s cafés-chantants and goguettes where chansons were performed to airs du couplet related to skits of vaudeville; in both contexts one can find connoisseurs knowledgeable about the idioms presented. The musical venues which appeared during the 1840s and 1850s were much more public and commercial, focusing on star singers and involving a small orchestra rather than a piano. People from the lower middle class who attended these events had experienced music in public chiefly at theatres featuring songs
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and skits, what was called vaudeville in France. Opera selections – Italian, British or French – were also performed at almost all theatres. For example, in 1862 Weston’s Music Hall in Holborn advertised that it would offer ‘Mozart’s great works’, a Rossini medley and a piece from Daniel Auber’s Gustavus III (1833), but, interestingly enough, a medley for four instruments based on music by Felix Mendelssohn and Vincent Wallace. For that matter, Canterbury Hall, located in Lambeth across the river from Westminster, presented the first British rendition of Charles Gounod’s Faust, in concert style in 1859.65 Yet the great majority of the repertoire comprised well-known songs such as ‘Look out for a rainy day’ and ‘Champagne Charlie’. The term ‘popular music’ – which was written occasionally – was just as much a novelty in 1850 as ‘classical music’ had been in 1810. That is why one has to be impressed with the prominence, scale and professionalism achieved by music halls and cafés-concerts in their early decades. Although these events grew out of strong traditions of music-making, what emerged by 1870 affected a far wider range of social classes and stood proudly independent from elite institutions. If the British music halls constituted the largest scale of entertainment, and ballad concerts the most distinct national taste, French cafés-concerts acquired what Bernard Gendron called a ‘cultural empowerment of popular music’, taking on an authority parallel to the Conservatoire concerts.66 Particularly significant divisions occurred over matters of taste in Britain as quarrels arose over who ‘possessed’ opera selections – the classical-music orchestras or the music halls. The city with the freest market in musical life was thus the most fragmented in taste. But the early opera galas stood apart from popular music. Opera was identified with neither classics nor with popular songs, and it was thereby able to contribute a common culture to the increasingly fragmented musical world.
The twentieth century The framework of institutions and tastes formed around 1850 continued to exist in the twentieth century to a considerable extent. Some old conflicts became even sharper than before, especially those surrounding the dichotomies between the popular and the classical, and between the new and the old. But fresh opportunities emerged in the exploitation of technology for novel performing techniques and expanding publics beyond the concert hall.67 Wholly new types of music revitalised public life: jazz, big-band dance music and rock ’n’ roll. 65 Weber, Great Transformation of Musical Taste, p. 292. 66 B. Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-garde, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 5. 67 See R. P. Morgan, Modern Times: From World War I to the Present, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1993.
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Even though canonic repertoires became hegemonic over musical taste for many genres by 1870, many parts of the music public remained open to hearing new works for the most part. But around 1900 an ideologically driven position emerged that rejected new music categorically, including pieces written in conservative as well as advanced styles. For example, in 1913 a Leipzig magazine for amateur choral societies, whose music was rarely ‘progressive’, declared, ‘So you want even more modern music? Haven’t we had enough already? Isn’t it clear that as soon as a conductor brings on a new piece, the hall empties out immediately, and that is the best way to scare people off?’68 Thus did the twentieth-century suspicion of new music arise after Arnold Schoenberg turned towards atonality or Igor Stravinsky began his experiments in rhythm and texture. The feverish ideological climate of the pre-war period must have had something to do with this change. Prototypical examples of the twentieth-century conflict between classical and modern music are to be found in books by the British critic Henry Pleasants and the Russo-American encyclopedist Nicolas Slonimsky. Pleasants opened The Agony of Modern Music (1955) by declaring that ‘Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for three hundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through the slagpile.’69 Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time (1953) pre-dated Pleasants’s book by two years, and indeed his Music since 1900 (1937) prefigured it.70 Essential to his dogmatic construct is the erection of a modernist counter-canon, founded upon the principle that great works will eventually be recognised. The opening chapter, ‘Nonacceptance of the unfamiliar’, uses vocabulary just as blunt as Pleasants’s ‘slagheap’, pointing to the ‘fossilised senses’ of the anti-modernists. ‘To listeners steeped in traditional music, modern works are meaningless, as alien languages are to a poor linguist. No wonder that music critics often borrow linguistic similes to express their recoiling horror of the modernists.’71 Yet in the long term the rhetoric that highlighted the dichotomy between classical and contemporary music served as a means of negotiation between the two sides. The stalemate between new and old music became institutionalised, but in the process practices emerged which enabled new music to maintain at 68 R. Oehmichen, ‘Mehr moderne Musik fürs moderne tägliche Leben’, Deutsche Sängerbundeszeitung, 7 (June 1913), 374; Weber, ‘Consequences of Canon: institutionalization of enmity between contemporary and classical music, c. 1910’, Common Knowledge, 9 (2003), 78–99. 69 H. Pleasants, The Agony of Modern Music, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1955, p. 3. 70 N. Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time, New York, Coleman-Ross, 1953, p. 8. 71 Ibid., p. 4.
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least a limited standing within general concert life. The language of deprecation of the new proved politically malleable despite its harshness; those who spoke it ended up working out new arrangements which permitted the new and the old to relate with one another to some fashion. Thus did the British Broadcasting Corporation fund extensive performances of avant-garde works beginning in the late 1920s, and four decades later the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States began requiring ensembles to be given grants to offer some new music. Whether that helped or hurt public appreciation of contemporary music is an open question, of course.72 Ideological conflict flourished in such contexts. In the United States, the committee awarding the distinguished Pulitzer Prize in Music (1943) came under harsh attack for its narrow selection in terms of style and the gendering of composers.73 Early examples of New Music concerts can be found as early as the 1830s, specifically in the meetings of the Society for British Musicians, and such events flourished from the 1860s under the auspices of the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein and the Société National de Musique.74 Arnold Schoenberg brought a harsh ideology to this kind of concert in barring members of the press from the Society for Private Performances in Vienna (1919–21). A counter-canon of music composed after 1900 began at a remarkably early date. Founded in 1922, the International Society for Contemporary Music gathered together composers of very different kinds, offering programmes which parallel the present-day canon closely. In the course of the twentieth century government support replaced private patronage to a great extent, thereby changing many dimensions of musical life. National identities became sharper than in the early nineteenth century as conservatoires and concerts came under the aegis of the nation-state, the (to some minds dubious) idea of a national music became deeply institutionalised. Even though some monarchs had previously set the tone for opera, resistance to the music they championed encouraged quite different composers and styles.75 The regimes in the Third Reich, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the German Democratic Republic enforced policies on music in some ways more restrictive than can be found in the nineteenth century.76 72 J. Doctor, The BBC and the Ultra-modern Music 1927–36: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes, Cambridge University Press, 1999; J. Pasler, ‘The political economy of composition in the American University, 1965–1985’, in J. Pasler, Writing through Music, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 318–62. 73 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Music. 74 Weber, Great Transformation of Musical Taste, pp. 138, 140, 238, 240–5, 252, 305. 75 G. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle, University of Chicago Press, 2008. 76 J. H. Calico, ‘“Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper”: Opera in the discourses of unification and legitimation in the German Democratic Republic’, in C. Applegate and P. Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity, University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 190–204.
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Resistance to official policy did of course occur; many historians of these regimes in fact now avoid using the term ‘totalitarian’. Technology opened up a wide range of opportunities for different musical cultures. The phonograph and the radio widened the range of potential listening to an extent little imagined in 1900. The recording business almost started from scratch in conceiving and organising its lists of repertoire. Classics and popular songs were originally mixed together in lists of recordings, rather as was the case with early nineteenth-century editors of musical editions. A sorting out of musical and aesthetic categories came about as groups of listeners would meet in club-like gatherings to hear new recordings.77 Canonic frameworks took form as people began to hear works at their own leisure. During the twentieth century opera ceased to provide a common ground between classical and popular music as opera repertoires became even more rigidly canonic than orchestral ones by 1930. With the rise of rock music and the rage for the Beatles in the 1960s, intellectual links began growing among the widely separated regions of musical taste. In 1970 Richard Meltzer, claiming to have been expelled as a student from Yale University, published The Aesthetics of Rock. ‘So what’ he wrote, was ‘a fine aesthetic judgment – because it sums up a valid experience and leaves the work itself untarnished’.78 Much of the music Meltzer heralded eventually entered a canon parallel to that in the classical world. Likewise, by the late 1980s a jazz canon had become so firmly established that young jazz players struggled to be recognised just about as much as ‘new classical’ composers did. The process of fragmentation that broke up the eighteenth-century musical world around 1800 thus continued in incremental stages for two more centuries, as types of music and musical sociability expanded in number and variety. Crossover styles between jazz, rock, pop and classical music proved problematic; the main worlds remained stubbornly separate from one another. ‘Early music’ brought about a vital new musicality beginning in the 1960s but its self-definition – the much debated principle of ‘authenticity’ – remained controversial.79 Once again we find the main story of this book: the multiplication of musical cultures competing for public attention.
77 S. Maisonneuve, ‘La constitution d’une culture et d’une écoute musicale nouvelles: le disque et ses sociabilités comme agents de changement culturel dans les années 1920 et 1930’, Revue de musicology, 88 (2002), 43–66, and L’Invention du disque, 1877–1949: Genèse de l’usage des médias musicaux contemporains, Paris, Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 2009. 78 R. Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, New York, Something Else Press, 1970, p. 12. See also C. W. Jones, The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008; and M. Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008. 79 See Lawson and Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music; Nicholas Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music, Oxford University Press, 1988.
. 3 .
The evidence ROBIN STOWELL
Evidence in musicology may be described, as in jurisprudence, as information discovered or provided in an investigation to establish conclusively the truth about something in question. It offers the vital raw materials for the progress of research in numerous musicological sub-disciplines, and it is especially important in performance for those who wish to recover knowledge and attempt to recreate a former sound world – and mostly without the benefit of any aural legacy from the period concerned. Such evidence takes a rich variety of forms, as illustrated by a memorial volume to Thurston Dart in which each contributor uses a particular type of source-study, creating a veritable ‘case-book of musical research’.1 Such diversity is also demonstrated in the present volume, especially in those chapters in Parts II–VII inclusive. Most performers utilise the evidence of source materials to forge so-called ‘historically informed performances’, implementing technique, styles and tastes appropriate to the music and attempting to establish features of it that conventional notation does not detail – these may comprise anything from musica ficta provision to the determination of, amongst other issues, instrumentation, pitch levels, tuning, rhythmic considerations, specific and extempore ornamentation, articulation, accentuation, dynamic nuances and, in Baroque music, the realisation of continuo accompaniments. Authoritative interpretation of the evidence for this variety of performance issues requires detailed historical study, and the potential exists for a diversity of interpretations of the information acquired, as well as for more than one acceptable solution. And, of course, all the evidence in the world will never guarantee performances that are convincing and vivid. There will nearly always be gaps in the total picture, as Colin Lawson verifies in his case study of Mozart’s last three symphonies.2 The situation worsens the further one ventures back in time from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as John Haines verifies in Chapter 8. Much music of ‘the medieval millennium’ was transmitted orally and little written-down music of that era has survived the 1 I. Bent (ed.), Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music, London, Stainer & Bell, 1981, preface, p. 11. 2 See Chapter 23.
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ravages of time. It is only rarely that a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century writer about music will inform us about the musical instruments or performance practice of his age. The relationship between the performer, the instruments and the evidence is a constantly fluctuating one and the most meaningful performances result from an open-minded interaction between the three. What is vitally important is that the evidence furnished by the various sources prompts scholars and performers to raise questions and seek answers through enquiry, thought and experiment, applying performance practices as appropriate; and there has been an increasing understanding that the use of the fullest possible contexts around performances is helpful in amplifying and correcting sometimes simplistic approaches to performance practice. Stephen Crist, for example, demonstrates how information gained from biblical and hymnological sources can enhance the interpretation of music manuscript sources of Bach’s church cantatas;3 and the same parent volume includes Ellen Harris’s case study of Mozart’s Mitridate, in which she uses Mozart’s text and ornamentation practice, epistolary evidence, a contemporary treatise by Corri, practical experiment and her own musical experience to create a credible interpretation.4 Glen Haydon’s two principal categories of historical evidence used in musicology, ‘material remains’ and ‘written records’, will provide the cornerstones of this chapter and dictate its shape.5 ‘Material remains’ embraces musical instruments, sound recordings and film, pictures and reliefs, and all buildings used for musical purposes, whether churches, concert halls, theatres or opera houses; ‘written records’ include materials as wide-ranging as musical monuments (all music preserved in notation, whether printed or in manuscript), historical writings of all kinds, general literature, public documents containing records and data, private documents such as letters, diaries, household accounts and estate records, and newspapers, journals and concert programmes. Evidence from these sources is sometimes supplemented by oral tradition, as, for example, in instrumental and vocal pedagogy, in the addition of ornamentation to vocal and instrumental music, in musical performances involving improvisation, and in the fields of secular music of the Middle Ages, Gregorian church music, folk music and jazz.
3 S. A. Crist, ‘Historical theology and hymnology as tools for interpreting Bach’s church cantatas: the case of Ich elender Mensch, wer wird mich erlösen, BWV 48’, in S. A. Crist and R. M. Marvin (eds.), Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations. Festschrift for Robert L. Marshall, University of Rochester Press, 2004, pp. 57–84. 4 E. T. Harris, ‘Mozart’s Mitridate: going beyond the text’, in Crist and Marvin (eds.), Historical Musicology, pp. 95–120. 5 G. Haydon, ‘The sources of musical history’, in G. Haydon (ed.), Introduction to Musicology, New York, Prentice Hall, 1941, p. 267.
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Material remains Musical instruments Surviving instruments furnish much historical and ethnological evidence about performance issues and provide the vital apparatus for ‘laboratory’ experiments in matters of technique, interpretation and style. Even so fierce a critic of literal approaches to historical performance as Richard Taruskin acknowledges ‘the inestimable and indispensable value of the old instruments in freeing minds and hands to experience old music newly’,6 an importance amply demonstrated by, for example, Fenner Douglass, whose experiments with the realisation of ornaments on seventeenth-century French organs have proved far more instructive than reading theorists’ descriptions.7 Furthermore, the light touch, clear articulation and expressive flexibility of Viennese-action pianos are as much key to the understanding of Mozart’s music for performance as the recognition that Haydn intended his keyboard sonatas for the more sonorous English action piano by the mid-1790s;8 and Kerman concedes that ‘Certain notorious problematic Beethoven markings . . . make immediate sense in the sonorous world of the actual instrument he played when he wrote them’.9 The study of musical instruments in performance history before 1600 is very much in its infancy and is based almost entirely on secondary evidence, including paintings and ‘lists of instruments in literary works of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (such as Machaut’s enumerations in his poems Remède de Fortune and La prise d’Alexandrie, and the lists in the anonymous fourteenthcentury Echecs amoureux)’.10 Howard Mayer Brown outlines the various kinds of evidence required to ‘form plausible hypotheses, or to reach defensible conclusions’, about the ways in which musical instruments were employed in the Middle Ages.11 It includes reliable information about which instruments existed at particular times and places, when each was invented or introduced into the major European countries, how each was played, how techniques and performance conventions may have varied nationally over the years, and which musical repertoires (written and unwritten) were regularly associated with instruments. Brown recognises the shortcomings of the various sources, bemoaning, for 6 R. Taruskin, Text and Act, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 148. 7 See F. Douglass, The Language of the Classical French Organ, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1969, rev. 2nd edn, 1995. 8 See Chapter 22. 9 J. Kerman, ‘The historical performance movement’, in J. Kerman, Musicology, London, Fontana, 1985, p. 213. 10 In S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 19, p. 354, art. ‘Performing practice’. 11 See H. M. Brown, ‘Instruments’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 15–36.
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example, that the history of the medieval fiddle, like that of many other instruments, has still only partially been traced, Bachmann’s acclaimed study of the origins of bowing in Western Europe notwithstanding.12 Still unknown is ‘how the instrument changed its shape and function from decade to decade and from country to country’, and ‘how both flat and rounded bridges were used (and when, why, and with which repertories)’; and some hypotheses must be offered ‘to explain the presence, in a number of pictures, of what looks like a second bridge between the bow and the fingerboard’.13 In traditional musical cultures instruments are artefacts which not only produce sounds but also convey meaning, thereby extending their value as historical evidence. This extra dimension is determined by their functional and symbolic role in society and the factors regulating their use, which is often linked ‘to beliefs, to the spiritual or temporal power, the institutions, the cycle of life, and various other circumstances, some codified and some not’.14 It thus follows that ‘the specific ceremonies accompanying the consecration of an instrument, the underwritten rules defining its part in ritual, the taboos presiding over its making and its use, and the myths (written or orally transmitted) about its origin (natural or supernatural)’ serve as evidence of its importance to that particular social grouping.15 The complex web of evidence yielded by research in this field may embrace any combination of musical, technical, aesthetic, symbolic, historical and ethnological issues. It may inform us how playing techniques influenced sound production (for example, continuous or discontinuous blowing in various aerophones), how instruments were constructed and how people used and developed the creative skills applied to that end (basket-making, pottery, metal-casting and forging, wood-carving or whatever). It may also lead us to conclude whether an instrument is indigenous or whether it was imported from another culture, and it may yield numerous musical ‘leads’ such as detail about the genre or general repertoire, the composer, the language of any text (if relevant), the ensemble, playing techniques and the mode of performance, or the circumstances of performance. Private and public collections worldwide have proved invaluable in preserving instruments, whether for use in performance, as objects of veneration or visual art, artefacts for financial investment, or to furnish ethnological and historical evidence, illustrate technological developments or serve as models for new construction. Some of the most significant early collections of Western 12 W. Bachmann, The Origins of Bowing and the Development of Bowed Instruments up to the Thirteenth Century, trans. N. Deane, Oxford University Press, 1969. 13 Brown, ‘Instruments’, in Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, p. 18. 14 In H. Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, New York, Norton, 1992, p. 291. 15 Ibid.
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musical instruments were amassed by the Este family in Modena, the Contarini family in Venice, Prince Ferdinando de Medici in Florence and, during the sixteenth century, the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck. One of the oldest institutional collections still prospering is that (est. 1824) of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. The acquisition of Clapisson’s collection by the Paris Conservatoire in 1864, the creation of the Brussels Conservatoire’s museum from the private collections of Fétis, Mahillon and others in the 1870s and the Berlin Königliche Hochschule für Musik’s procurement of Paul de Wit’s first collection in 1888 were matched by private collectors such as Auguste Tolbecque in France, Carl Engel and Alfred Hipkins in Britain and Morris Steinert in the USA. The explosion in the number of specialist instrument collections established since these sparks of interest is attested by the lengthy lists included in relevant publications.16 Among other leading centres of conservation today are the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), Musikinstrumenten-Museums in Munich, Leipzig and Markneukirchen, the American Shrine to Music Museum (University of South Dakota, Vermillion) and the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), and various British collections in London (Boosey and Hawkes, Horniman and Victoria and Albert Museums, the Wallace Collection, and the Royal College of Music), Gloucester (Folk Museum), Oxford (Bate Collection), Wigan (Rimmer Collection) and Edinburgh (University). Photographs, descriptions, construction plans, measurements and other detailed information included in the catalogues of many of these collections have also proved valuable in disseminating knowledge about organology. Some instruments have not survived outside museums – the crwth, pommer and viola bastarda, for example – while others have survived in modified forms, due to progress in their construction methods and, in some cases, radical technical developments. The increased practice of collecting instruments has inevitably raised the controversy over the relative claims of preservation and investigation through use. The potential benefits of restoration have had to be weighed continually against the possible destruction of original evidence.17 Most museums and institutions have taken the conservative option and preserved their instruments in stable conditions and in scientifically monitored environments, but some have attempted reconditioning and some private collectors and
16 A comprehensive list of instrument collections worldwide is provided in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, pp. 432–67, art. ‘Instruments, collections of ’. 17 The complex set of issues surrounding the preservation, restoration and use of old instruments is discussed further by Robert Barclay in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, pp. 468–70, art. ‘Instruments, conservation, restoration, copying of ’.
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conservatoires have taken the bolder step of allowing their instruments to be loaned to careful users. The preservation of early instruments has proved of inestimable value to modern makers of reproductions; it made a reality of Harnoncourt’s dream to differentiate between oboes, oboes d’amore and the prescribed oboes da caccia for Nos. 48, 49, 59 and 60 in J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Harnoncourt commissioned replicas of oboes da caccia from Leipzig prototypes (by Eichentopf) discovered in museums in Stockholm and Copenhagen during the 1970s.18 A special form of taille or tenor oboe in F covered in leather and bent in a semicircle, with a brass bell like a hunting horn,19 the oboe da caccia had a unique dark timbre and dynamic flexibility. Bach employs it for especially tender moments, sometimes in combination with the transverse flute (as in Nos. 48 and 49). The replicas gain most of the advantages of restoration without endangering the original instrument and, thanks to organological research, may represent the original state even when the original instrument has been modified. More recently, sophisticated computer modelling software has been used, along with acoustical and other evidence, to recreate the long, slender trumpet-like instrument called the lituus for period performance of J. S. Bach’s motet ‘O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht’ BWV118.20 Examination of exhibits in the world’s collections has also provided instrument researchers with a rich mine of clues about issues of performance history. For example, the development of techniques such as dendrochronology for dating and authenticating wooden objects and instruments has led to a realisation that many bowed instruments may be of more recent manufacture or more drastically altered than had been previously thought. Long-held attributions have thus been challenged, notably the origins of Stradivari’s ‘Messiah’ violin, and a more realistic view of the development of viols and violins, especially in Italy, has begun to emerge. Some of the information gained is often frustratingly insufficient, notably that concerning pitch in the period and geographical area of some instruments’ construction (particularly woodwinds and organs). However, as David Ponsford reminds us in Chapter 18, much can be gained from their examination, provided that the problems of general wear-and-tear, as well as wood shrinkage in woodwinds and tuning damage and changes of wind pressure in organs, are taken into account.
18 N. Harnoncourt, ‘The oboe da caccia’, notes to Das Kantatenwerk, vol. 7, Teldec Records, 1973, p. 13. 19 Johann Heinrich Eichentopf was a distinguished Leipzig maker of brass instruments; models by other eighteenth-century makers generally have wooden bells. 20 This has been a collaborative project between the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and acousticians at the University of Edinburgh.
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Historically accurate replicas of accessories such as reeds, brass mouthpieces and strings are also essential, otherwise the perception of an instrument and its repertoire may be entirely transformed. Musical boxes, musical clocks, barrel organs and other mechanically governed ‘instruments’ from the eighteenth century onwards also provide fairly accurate information about relative pitch and rhythmic values.21 Some insight into absolute tempo values can also be gained by timing performances so preserved. Eleanor Selfridge-Field has drawn attention to some of the advantages and disadvantages of modern reconstruction of instruments for historical performance and demonstrates how the problems that modern makers have attempted to overcome can sometimes have a negative impact. She cites the Charles Fisk Organ (1983) at Stanford University, with its duplicate pipes for ‘mean-tone’ and ‘well-tempered’ tunings, pointing out that ‘it creates a corresponding need for “push button” adaptability among collaborating instrumentalists and singers that was not a requisite of earlier times’.22 Similar earlier attempts at conflating past and present to facilitate the performance process, such as the so-called ‘Bach bow’, various hybrid keyboard instruments and other organological freaks, have not gained currency. However, makers have allowed compromises in the construction of replica period instruments, notably the use of modern materials which have been proven to be more reliable (e.g. the use of ebonite rather than wood for early clarinet mouthpieces), the relocation of finger-holes on wind instruments to ‘improve’ intonation, or even the addition of some keys to woodwind instruments to facilitate accurate execution.
Sound recordings The evolution and development of recording technology from the late nineteenth century onwards have provided musicologists and ethnomusicologists with vital means for preserving, duplicating and moving raw data in a way that many other disciplines were unable to achieve until the advent of computer technology.23 For ethnomusicologists, recording (using sound recorders and photographic and video cameras) has become one of the primary methods of collecting evidence systematically during essential fieldwork. It has complemented the irreplaceable notebook since Jesse Fewkes first used the Edison cylinder machine in the field during his research with the Passamaquoddy Indians of the north-eastern USA (1890) and the Zuni and Hopi Pueblos of 21 The instruments of the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, for example, suggest that he played at a0 =440, lower than the norm in many places for his time. See Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, p. 376, art. ‘Performing Practice’. 22 In H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, p. 16. 23 Krister Malm offers a useful history of technological developments in ethnomusicological research in ‘The Music Industry’, in Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, pp. 349–64.
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Arizona (1890–1).24 The phonograph and its numerous later developments enabled easy capture and transmission of evidence for oral, unwritten traditions and offered playback potential for transcription and analytical purposes (e.g. analysing ornamentation practices). Once considered merely as old-fashioned curiosities, acoustic and electrical commercial recordings furnish vital aural evidence of past performing practices, preserving some of the most distinguished readings of our forebears, often given or conducted by the composers themselves (for example, Rachmaninov, Elgar, Stravinsky and Bartók) or by musicians with whom they were associated, or whose interpretations they approved.25 We can even hear on record the vocal range, timbre and expressive vocabulary of the last castrato of the Cappella Sistina, Alessandro Moreschi, offering us clues as to the sound quality of a voice type which, though now obsolete, was so important in the performance of Roman Catholic church music and eighteenth-century opera. Recordings also illustrate performance practices of the early twentieth century in far greater detail than any prose account in any instrumental treatises or other printed documentation, as well as bearing witness to the evolution of more recent performing trends. Most importantly, they force us ‘to question unspoken assumptions about modern taste, and about the ways in which we use it to justify our interpretation of earlier performance practice’.26 The radical re-evaluation of early recordings as crucial evidence for mapping the history of style, interpretation and performance was assisted by various forwardlooking collectors, many of whom donated their collections to university and other archives such as the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound (est. 1958),27 the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive at Syracuse University (est. 1963), the Smithsonian Collection of Early Jazz, the Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies Archive Collection, and the Marr Sound Archives (University of MissouriKansas City Special Collections Department). Such archives have been matched elsewhere in the world, notably by the UK’s National Sound Archive (British Library), and include a diversity of recorded materials across various musical styles in formats ranging from wax cylinders through private tape recordings, 78rpm and LP discs to compact discs. 24 Béla Vikár was the first to record Hungarian folk song (1896); Béla Bartók used the phonograph from 1906. Other researchers such as Percy Grainger (1882–1961) in England (from 1906) began recording folk songs on wax cylinders. 25 Stephen Cottrell outlines the impact of recording technology on early twentieth-century performance history in Chapter 28. 26 R. Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900–1950, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 2. 27 The Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound was one of the first major collections devoted to the acquisition, preservation and dissemination of historically and artistically significant sound recordings at an educational institution.
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The accessibility of these collections and the increasing dissemination of historic recordings have created exciting new avenues of performance research, with projects focusing on the evidence yielded by empirical study of early recordings. Recorded performances have been analysed using aural means or relevant computer software to provide evidence for vibrato usage (including the length, breadth and speed, as well as the incidence of vibrato), portamento, tempo flexibility, tempo proportions, ornamentation and improvisation practice, and other such performance considerations;28 and in ethnomusicology, Racy, Spiller, Stillman and others have used early recordings of Arab, Sundanese and Hawaiian musics to track changes in performance practice.29 Early recordings have also assisted in shedding new light retrospectively on nineteenth-century performance and have revealed some of the artistic roots of early recording artists as far back as about the 1860s. One case in point is the particular German style of vocal performance advocated by Julius Hey (1832–1909), the first singing teacher at Munich’s Königliche Musikschule as part of Wagner and Ludwig II’s scheme to reform vocal instruction in the city, particularly with performances of Wagner’s operas in mind. Hey coached many of the singers involved in the first complete Ring cycle in Bayreuth (1876), notably the tenor Georg Unger (Siegfried), and published a systematic, three-volume treatise on singing instruction, Deutscher Gesangunterricht (Mainz, 1885).30 Characteristic of Hey’s style, which gained a mixed reception overall, was his insistence on clear enunciation of the text as a springboard for expressive singing. Numerous singers, among them Felix von Kraus and Ernestine Schumann-Heink,31 adopted Hey’s principles and left recordings that furnish vital evidence regarding period singing of Wagner.32
28 Examples of published research using the evidence of early recordings include: Robert Philip’s Early Recordings and Musical Style and his Performing Music in the Age of Recording, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004; Timothy Day’s A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2002; and Will Crutchfield’s ‘Vocal ornamentation in Verdi: the phonographic evidence’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1983), 3–54, as well as projects undertaken by the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM; established 1 April 2004). 29 A. J. Racy, ‘Sound and society: the Takht music of early twentieth-century Cairo’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, 7 (1988), 139–70; H. Spiller, ‘Continuity in Sundanese dance drumming: clues from the 1893 Chicago Exposition’, World of Music, 38/2 (1996), 23–40; A. Stillman, ‘Sound evidence: conceptual stability, social maintenance and changing performance practices in modern Hawaiian hula songs’, World of Music, 38/2 (1996), 5–22. 30 A condensed, single-volume edition of this treatise was later published as Der kleine Hey (Mainz, 1912) and has remained a standard German singing text. 31 Kraus made his Bayreuth stage debut in 1899 as Hagen (Götterdämmerung) and Gurnemanz (Parsifal). He later played the roles of Hermann (Tannhäuser), Titurel (Parsifal) and King Mark (Tristan und Isolde). Schumann-Heink became renowned in the roles of Erda, Fricka and Waltraute (Der Ring), and Brangäne (Tristan und Isolde). Her recordings as Erda and Waltraute (c. 1930) are particularly good examples of Hey’s principles of textual delivery. 32 See also Chapter 27.
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Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has warned of the limitations of arguing backwards about performance styles. He claims that the evidence of a century of recorded music demonstrates that performance styles change very quickly, suggesting that significant change in general performance styles occurs over about two decades.33 Early recordings have also called into question the meaning and accuracy of some of the musical publications and documents that have long been used to interpret styles; the relationship between some performers’ publications and the evidence of their recordings is uneasy, and sometimes conflicting. Auer, a Joachim disciple, railed against the over-use of vibrato in his violin-playing manual,34 but some of his most celebrated pupils, notably Jascha Heifetz, were its masters, using it more as a continuous constituent of a pleasing tone than sparingly as an embellishment. Leech-Wilkinson cites a similar dichotomy between Lilli Lehmann’s instructions to avoid vibrato in her How to Sing with the strikingly wide vibrato evident in her recordings.35 Leech-Wilkinson offers us ‘three crumbs of comfort’: first, he suggests that performance styles probably did not change as quickly before as they did after recording was introduced; secondly, he opines that the evidence of the earliest recordings (by, for example, Joachim and Adelina Patti) suggests that a generally simpler performing style was cultivated ‘compared with the more demonstrative music-making of the next generation’;36 and thirdly, he argues that most performers develop a personal style by their late twenties and tend to retain it thereafter with limited change. Bearing in mind exceptions to this argument such as Artur Rubinstein and Fritz Kreisler, he concedes that it may be justifiable to use, for example, Joachim’s 1903 recordings as evidence for playing style c. 1860. However, he urges selectivity and caution in such back-tracking and stresses that knowledge of the performance circumstances and status of any recording so used is crucial if any accurate aesthetic or stylistic conclusions are to be drawn.
Film and video The media of film and, more recently, video or DVD have also served as evidence for performance history, particularly in the twentieth century. Film of celebrated conductors and performers of the past in rehearsal, concert and conversation can provide valuable insights into their performing ethos, as well as into issues of technique, interpretation and performance practice. Further, many renowned jazz musicians made appearances on screen in the early sound cinemas, among 33 D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Early recorded violin playing: evidence for what?’, www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/ humanities/depts/music/dwlpubs.html. Last accessed 22 June 2009. 34 L. Auer, Violin Playing as I Teach it, London, Duckworth & Co., 1921, pp. 22–4. 35 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Early recorded violin playing’; L. Lehmann, How to Sing, New York, Macmillan Company, 1914, rev. 1924, pp. 140–5. 36 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Early recorded violin playing’.
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them Duke Ellington (Black and Tan, 1929) and Bessie Smith (St Louis Blues, 1929). Jazz styles also became associated with the cartoon industry, especially in the 1940s, and several jazz performances were preserved as ‘shorts’, notably those of Louis Armstrong (Rhapsody in Black and Blue, 1932), Ellington and Billie Holiday (Symphony in Black, 1935) and the filmed jam session of Lester Young, Red Callender, Harry Edison, Marlowe Morris, Barney Kessel et al. (Jammin’ the Blues, 1944). Even the RCM Corporation’s short ‘soundies’, made for reproduction on optical jukeboxes in the 1940s, offer insights into a chapter of performance history, and the full-length films involving the Beatles (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964; Help!, 1965) and their ‘promo films’ marketing particular songs (for example ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’) have been used as evidence by writers about them and their performances. Video has been increasingly employed in the music industry since the 1970s, whether in ethnomusicology as another means of collecting pictorial evidence, in Western art music as a means of preserving examples of the work of celebrated conductors, performances and masterclasses, or in popular music as a marketing tool for a particular recording artist, group or song.37 Film archives have been established to preserve examples of such source materials. In addition to national archives, the Stanford Archive in California houses one of the world’s foremost collections for classical music; it holds film of approximately 300 conductors in rehearsal, concert and conversation, including extensive footage of Otto Klemperer.
Pictures and reliefs A picture is ‘worth one thousand words’, as the saying goes, and reconstructions of musical performances or events may be all the more convincing if they can be related directly to surviving iconography, whether pictures, the bas-reliefs on cathedrals, paintings, engravings, photographs, illustrated manuscripts, tapestries or other relevant material. Such sources can provide us with wide-ranging evidence about performance issues, including the history and construction of instruments, and knowledge about composers’ and performers’ lives and the social and intellectual atmosphere in which they worked. Howard Mayer Brown describes how they not only assist in explaining ‘the place of actual sounding music in society, but they also reveal the characteristic ways in which musical subjects were used symbolically or allegorically, and how music was used to illuminate the mythical, philosophical, theological or educational doctrines of an age’.38 37 For more information about video evidence, see S. Frith, A. Goodwin and L. Grossberg (eds.), Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 1993. 38 In S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1st edn, 20 vols., London, Macmillan, 1980, vol. 9, p. 17, art. ‘Iconography’.
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Iconographical evidence should not always be taken at face value, however, and must be interpreted with care. The accuracy of the illustrations in Virdung’s Musica getutscht (Basle, 1511), for example, is questionable, their function being simply to enhance the text by giving some idea of an instrument’s appearance. That said, the clavichord keyboard is represented accurately (though in mirror image) and the depiction of the family of recorders offers valuable information about consort performance, showing that these instruments came in three sizes a fifth apart (discant, alto/tenor and bass) rather than four, as many have assumed.39 It is therefore prudent for researchers to compare a substantial number of illustrations before making firm conclusions regarding the physical characteristics of any given instrument or family. In so doing, Woodfield was able to conclude that artists depict particular types of viol (for example, the Valencian vihuela de arco and the early sixteenth-century German gross Geigen) with reassuring consistency and thereby assist the identification of ‘normal’ and ‘variable’ features.40 One of the most reliable early treatises on instruments appears in the second volume, De Organographia (1618), of Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum (1614–18).41 Following almost a century after Agricola’s pioneering Musica instrumentalis deudsch (1529), the range and clarity of its information and the accuracy of its scaled drawings have enabled instrument makers to model their reconstructions precisely on the evidence provided. However, so authoritative a source is an exception rather than the rule, and conclusions from similar publications should ideally be corroborated from literary, archival or other sources, and by direct comparison with surviving instruments. And pictures of instruments obviously cannot reveal the impossible regarding the materials used, the size and shape of a bore, the thickness of a soundboard or the tension of a string. Pictorial evidence from newspapers, treatises or other sources may also supplement important textual detail about playing techniques and positions (engravings of bow holds, embouchures and fingering charts in treatises), the various accessories employed by performers (music stands, footstools etc.), and even whether the music was written or printed. Artists can often mislead on technical detail even if they are likely to prove fairly reliable regarding gesture, body movement and physical expression, but most seem to reproduce, if also enhance, reality. As Woodfield points out, ‘almost all fifteenth-century Aragonese 39 See B. Bullard, Musica getutscht: A Treatise on Musical Instruments (1511) by Sebastian Virdung, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 40 For example, the position, number and size of the sound-holes of the Valencian vihuela de arco tended to vary; see I. Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 6. 41 M. Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum II: De Organographia I and II (Wolfenbüttel, 1618), trans. D. Z. Crookes, Oxford University Press, 1986.
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depictions of angels playing the rabab illustrate the downwards playing position (a gamba – that is, on or between the legs – if the angel is seated) and the underhand bow grip’.42 Similarly, Peter Walls concludes that there is a consistency about the way in which violinists are represented in seventeenth-century iconographical sources, with a low right-elbow position and the left thumb posted high.43 Iconographical sources may also furnish information about the social context and conditions of performances (whether indoors or outdoors, whether the performers were seated or standing, and whether or not an audience was present), the particular groupings of instruments and/or voices for various types of music at a given place and time,44 the constitution and distribution of orchestras and choirs, and whether or not there was a conductor. They have also proved a mine of information regarding dance postures appropriate to particular kinds of pieces, operatic costumes, scenery and stage settings, the machines used in opera performances, and the size, design, proportions and conditions of theatres and concert venues. Performers should always exercise caution in their interpretation of iconographical evidence, which must not be accepted as a reflection of contemporary reality without careful evaluation in its artistic and historical contexts. Investigation into the artist’s original intentions is of paramount importance in such assessment, and conclusions must be based on a broad sampling of sources in the same tradition. The truth may well have been distorted to satisfy aesthetic, social or political ends; artistic licence or ‘interpretation’ may have resulted in inaccurate representation of instruments, the telescoping of a whole evening’s events on one canvas,45 or even the invention of completely nonfunctional instruments for an intellectual or symbolic reason best known to the artist. Many drawings and engravings of performances had some satirical or other purpose, incorporating deliberate exaggerations of selected details, as attested, for example, by the numerous surviving caricatures of Paganini.46
42 Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, p. 6. 43 P. Walls, ‘Report: Study Session 12’, in D. Greer et al. (eds.), Musicology and Sister Disciplines. Past, Present, Future: Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the International Music Society, London 1997, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 490–1. 44 Especially pre-1600, when composers scarcely indicated specific groupings. 45 See W. Weber, ‘Did people listen in the eighteenth century?’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 678ff. 46 For further discussion of general questions associated with the study of musical iconography, see H. M. Brown and J. Lascelle, Musical Iconography. A Manual for Cataloguing Musical Subjects in Western Art before 1800, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1972; E. Winternitz, ‘The visual arts as a source for the historian of music’, in J. LaRue (ed.), International Musicological Society, Report of the 8th Congress, New York, 1961, vol. 1, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1961, pp. 109–20; and J. W. McKinnon, ‘Iconography’, in D. K. Holoman and C. V. Palisca (eds.), Musicology in the 1980s: Methods, Goals, Opportunities, New York, Da Capo Press, 1982, pp. 79–93.
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Buildings Few of the buildings in which performances took place through history were designed specifically with concerts in mind. Ranging from those whose grand architecture was politically inspired to cathedrals and churches, small theatres, general-purpose halls, assembly rooms, taverns and other small spaces, they reflect the fact that the formal public concert developed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries out of occasions where music coexisted with other social activities such as dining or religious worship. Simon McVeigh’s study of eighteenth-century concert life in London offers a unique snapshot of the situation; only two of the capital’s major halls were built primarily as concert venues – the Hanover Square Rooms (from 1775) and (from 1794) a room alongside the new King’s Theatre in the Haymarket.47 While some churches and theatres could accommodate large audiences,48 most halls were modestly proportioned. London’s largest at that time was the Pantheon, whose cruciform shape could accommodate over 1,000 people.49 The 3,000+ capacity (1,294 seats, standing room for about 1,850, and an additional 130 when there was no choir)50 of the Queen’s Hall for the Newman–Wood Promenade Concerts (est. 1895) reflected the increasing popularity of public concerts and established a completely different scale for concert venues. Descriptions of concert venues through history tended to dwell on their furnishings, artistic holdings, general decor and audience comfort; evidence of musicians’ concerns about acoustics is comparatively rare until the early nineteenth century. However, it is known that efforts were made (during the 1770s and in 1788) to suppress the over-resonant acoustics of London’s Pantheon by introducing a false ceiling;51 and both Kufferath and Spohr wrote positively about the sonority of the hall of the Leipzig Gewandhaus.52 Evidence suggests that performing venues (as well as the availability of players) frequently dictated the size and constitution of the performing forces (and often did so rather more than the demands of the music).53 Beethoven, for
47 S. McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 56. 48 McVeigh (ibid., p. 57) states that the new Drury Lane Theatre of 1794 seated 3,611. 49 Ibid. 50 J. Doctor, N. Kenyon and D. Wright (eds.), ‘Audience Capacities’, The Proms: A New History, London, Thames & Hudson, 2007, p. 285. See also Chapter 6. 51 McVeigh, Concert Life, p. 57. 52 M. Kufferath, L’art de diriger. Richard Wagner et La ‘Neuvième Symphonie’ de Beethoven. Hans Richter et La Symphonie en ‘ut’ mineur. L’Idylle de Siegfried – Interpretation et Tradition, 3rd edn, Paris, Fischbacher, 1909, p. 116, n. 1; L. Spohr, Lebenserinnerungen, ed. F. Göthel, 2 vols., Tutzing, Schneider, 1968, vol. 1, p. 78; L. Spohr, The Musical Journey of Louis Spohr, trans. and ed. H. Pleasants, Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1961, p. 50. 53 See D. J. Koury, ‘Constitution of the orchestra in the eighteenth century’, chapter 2 of his Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century: Size, Proportions, and Seating, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1986.
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example, related the desired size of his performing forces to that of the performing venue. ‘The larger the hall, the more players’, was his maxim; and he questioned Ferdinand Ries about such issues when contemplating a projected visit to London with two new symphonies for the Philharmonic Society. ‘How powerful is the Society’s orchestra?’, he asked, ‘how many violins and so forth?; and are there one or two of each wind instrument? Is the hall large and resonant?’54 Further, Berlioz confirms in his memoirs and orchestration treatise his belief in the close relationship between the performing venue, the numbers of performers and their placement, and the style of the composition, particularly when large forces are involved.55 Some scholars have lent support to the argument that the increase in orchestral size in the nineteenth century may have been directly related to the increased number of public concert venues, which became ever larger to accommodate a growing middle-class audience.56 Indeed, the old Gewandhaus in Leipzig, built in 1780, underwent modifications such as the addition of side balconies (1842) in order to increase its audience capacity but eventually proved inadequate for demand; the Neues Gewandhaus was built in 1886 to a much larger scale, offering a seating capacity almost three times as great.57 The supposed merits of its rounded corners found no favour in the design of most twentieth-century concert halls. A similar expansion of buildings, orchestras and audiences also applied for opera.58 Orchestra pits, however, tended to be spatially restricted, resulting in countless unusual placements for some players, and sometimes even the conductor.59 Wagner’s plans for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus demonstrate the results of his lengthy musings over the problems of concert and opera buildings and performing practices; along with reference to his correspondence, they allow us to enter the mind of a musician who had clear views about the representation of his music dramas and the roles of the musicians involved.60
Written records Musical monuments61 Although the various sources for the history of performance differ considerably by century and period, musical monuments in decipherable notation form 54 Ibid., p. 327. 55 Ibid., p. 328. 56 Ibid., p. 327. 57 This Neues Gewandhaus was destroyed in the Second World War. 58 Koury (Orchestral Performance Practices, pp. 328ff.) provides various dimensions as evidence. 59 See Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices, ch. 14. 60 See Chapter 27. 61 For an informative discussion of the trustworthiness of written or printed musical texts, see S. Boorman, ‘The musical text’, in N. Cook and M. Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 403–23.
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perhaps the most significant materials for the music of the last thousand or so years. The further back in history, the less common these ‘monuments’ are and the less information they impart for the performer, sometimes offering only very limited and tentative clues. Take, for example, the staffless neumes of some medieval manuscripts, which outlined the overall shape of generally known melodies but did not indicate exact pitches or intervals. Nevertheless, certain types of liturgical books – for example, ordinaries, customaries and ceremonials – include nuggets of information about the performance of sacred music, notably the participation (and sometimes the identity) of singers in services, as well as details of their number and distribution; but the information naturally refers (and may only be relevant) only to one specific venue or locality. Performers are thus required to understand the notational system used in the music to be performed and how such systems changed through history, as well as to interpret the meaning of the symbols in terms of sound, especially when working from a composer’s manuscript (holograph), or an autograph or printed edition approved by the composer. Questions must be asked such as: Does the written text represent the composer’s fixed intentions? How precise is the syllabic presentation (if relevant)? Was additional ornamentation frowned upon, permitted or expected? And are there indications of an intended tempo or tempo proportionality? If a modern edition is used, performers must be able to evaluate it, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and decide if the editor was suitably informed about the composer’s intentions. They may also seek additional information from secondary sources, especially if no holograph exists. Some forms of notation in Western music are limited in content. Tablatures for the lute or, for that matter, the Chinese qin, instruct players where to place the fingers of their left hand but include little interpretative information. Other notations are imprecise, concealing many well-understood performing conventions and leaving much for performers to add (including ornamentation, rhythmic alteration and expressive considerations). Although chant manuscripts are the principal source of information about the performance of Western medieval sacred monophony, they generally lack crucial details and throw up various contradictions, thereby demanding a substantially subjective interpretation. Descriptions of liturgical ceremonies date from seventh-toninth-century Ordines romani, and the monastic Rule of St Benedict (c. 530) also sets out guidelines regarding performance of the canonical Hours.62 Sources became more detailed in time and the Rules of religious orders such
62 See M. Andrieu (ed.), Les Ordines romani du haut Moyen-Age, Louvain, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense Administration, 1931–61.
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as the Cistercians and Dominicans incorporate more specific information about liturgical usage. Early printed materials often raise questions of practicability such as those discussed by Jon Banks regarding Petrucci’s Odhecaton in Chapter 12. They may inform or mislead. For example, the printing of separate, unbeamed notes (where beaming would otherwise be expected) in some early seventeenthcentury sources may suggest implications for phrasing or articulation.63 But sources may not reveal the whole story about the instrumentarium used in performances of, say, Handel’s music; some scores seemingly laid out only for strings often involved oboes and bassoons doubling the string texture, as is revealed by in-text indications such as senza oboi, senza fagotto or even senza violini.64 Further, it appears from several title pages that, if available, horns, or trumpets, or timpani might be added to an instrumentarium for certain works as appropriate, even if no printed parts for them existed.65 Not until the nineteenth century did the musical autograph become the ‘more or less immutable record of the composer’s intention and the inviolable mandate for the performer’.66 Holographs and some autograph copies and early printed editions may include some annotations by the composer which provide useful clues as to his interpretative intentions or preferences. Fingerings, for example, may clarify the intended articulation or phrasing of a passage, the realisation of an ornament, or even the tone colour and projection in a texture. Beethoven, for example, added fingerings occasionally in his keyboard works and his string music, whether in his sketches or autographs, in other manuscripts such as fair copies supervised by him for the engraver, in the earliest editions of his works, which he may or may not have supervised further, or in the revisions that he addressed to publishers. Some fingerings are clearly non-interpretative and seem gratuitous, but most reveal something of Beethoven’s own approach to the performance of his music.67 Haydn, among other composers, also occasionally included some fingerings to indicate matters of expression or interpretation.68 One of his most unusual examples appears in the second movement of his String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2, his prescribed fingerings in 63 E. Darbellay, ‘Peut-on découvrir des indications d’articulation dans la graphie des tablatures de clavier de Claudio Merulo, Girolamo Frescobaldi et Michel-Angelo Rossi?’, in H. Glahn, S. Sørensen and P. Ryom (eds.), Report of the Eleventh Congress Copenhagen 1972, Copenhagen, Hansen, 1974, pp. 342–50. 64 See W. S. Rockstro, The Life of George Frederick Handel, London, Macmillan, 1883, p. 259. 65 See T. Dart, The Interpretation of Music, London, Hutchinson, 1954, pp. 67–8. 66 B. Friedland, ‘Some reflections on performance practice, musicology, and aesthetics’, Current Musicology, 12 (1971), 57. 67 W. S. Newman, ‘Beethoven’s fingerings as interpretive clues’, Journal of Musicology, 1 (1982), 171– 97. 68 See W. Drabkin, ‘Fingering in Haydn’s quartets’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 51–2.
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the Trio (bars 34–68) having timbral implications and calling for specific portamento effects.69 As well as playing from old notations, an exercise that illuminates many aspects of performing practice by requiring musicians to solve problems in the same manner as their earlier counterparts, performers can glean evidence about appropriate phrasing, articulation and other interpretative issues from using early prints or facsimiles. Eugene Cramer has even demonstrated how various handwritten emendations made through history to extant sixteenth-century prints of works by Tomás Luis de Victoria can serve as useful evidence for performance practice.70 Such emendations range from simple corrections to musica ficta annotations, text underlay or textual change, the addition of vocal parts or changed cadences and endings to sections, the use of alternate settings, and the addition of new music or even complete pieces to some works. Several music publications furnish vital evidence on specific ornamentation practices. In Chapter 18, David Ponsford lists numerous ‘ornament tables’ relevant to singers and instrumentalists spawned by the highly embellished Italian style of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many French composers matched this trend, prefacing their works with a table of ornaments employed, the signs used to indicate them and the manner in which they should be performed. The best-known eighteenth-century exemplar for extempore ornamentation in instrumental music is Roger’s 1710 issue of Corelli’s Op. 5 violin sonatas, which includes ornamentation for the adagios of the first six sonatas supposedly provided by the composer. Telemann’s twelve Sonate metodiche (1728, 1732), C. P. E. Bach’s Sechs Sonaten (1760) and Kurze und leichte Klavierstücke mit veränderten Reprisen (1766, 1768), the celebrated castrato Luigi Marchesi’s fourteen different embellished versions of a theme by Cherubini,71 Franz Benda’s thirty-two three-movement sonatas for violin and bass (c. 1760) and Haydn’s ornamented versions of arias in Il ritorno di Tobia (1775) are among other notable eighteenth-century models for extempore ornamental practices. Interesting examples of Mozartian ornamentation also survive, notably for arias in Lucio Silla (1772) and for Pharnaspe’s aria, ‘Cara, la dolce fiamma’ in J. C. Bach’s Adriano in Siria.72
69 See R. Stowell, The Early Violin and Viola: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 134–5. 70 See E. C. Cramer, ‘Extant sixteenth-century prints as performance practice sources’, in J. Daverio and J. Ogasapian (eds.), The Varieties of Musicology. Essays in Honor of Murray Lefkowitz, Warren, MI, Harmonic Park Press, 2000, pp. 65–72. 71 See R. Haas, Aufführungspraxis der Musik, Wildpark-Potsdam, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion m.b.h., 1931; repr. 1949, pp. 225ff. 72 KV293e, written in Wolfgang’s or Leopold’s hand.
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Editions Responsible editions can do much to assist performers by providing reliable evidence on which to base their performances. Most modern editions take the form of either scholarly critical editions, complete with critical commentary and other Revisionsberichte, or practical (‘performing’) editions, which mostly present authoritative texts, but without detailed critical notes and other scholarly apparatus. A vogue for Urtext (‘original text’) editions started in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to the perceived unreliability of ‘performing editions’ of that era. Purporting to present the composer’s original, approved notation as the authoritative text, Urtexts normally used the earliest or safest sources (the MS or first printed edition) free of editorial intervention, and allowing performers to form their own interpretations.73 However honourable the concept’s intentions, even its staunchest proponents, such as Günter Henle and Georg Feder, eventually conceded that an editor’s critical intervention was inevitable.74 The term ‘Urtext edition’ is now largely discredited, hastened by the commercialisation of the concept in the period immediately after the Second World War.75
Scholarly critical editions The principal role of a scholarly critical edition is to present, normally in printed form, an ‘established text’ that most fully represents the editor’s conception of the work as it developed in composition and performance at the hands of the composer. Determined by a critical examination of the music, its textual history, the evidence and filiation of its sources and its historical context and style, an edition may represent only a snapshot in a work’s complex profile; by contrast, it may incorporate all of the work’s variant forms as found in the sources, or its aim may be, for example, to reproduce the Fassung letzter Hand – the composer’s final version. Indeed, most modern editors seem to prefer to base a new edition on one good source than to publish a conflation resembling nothing that actually existed during the work’s evolution. Difficulties arise if an autograph and an early printed edition supervised or used by the composer both survive and 73 The concept had begun to take root earlier in the work of musical antiquarians such as Charles Burney and Samuel Arnold (Arnold’s incomplete and inaccurate attempt to create a complete Handel edition was a pioneering effort); it was prompted further by a parallel trend set by the Bach-Gesellschaft in 1851 with the first of its historical editions devoted to the complete works of J. S. Bach. 74 See G. Feder and H. Unverricht, ‘Urtext und Urtextausgaben’, Die Musikforschung, 12 (1959), 432–54; G. Henle, ‘Über die Herausgabe von Urtexten’, Musica, 8 (1954), 377–84; W. Emery, Editions and Musicians, London, Novello, 1957, p. 9. 75 Primarily through the elegantly printed, but woefully unexplained editions published by Günter Henle Verlag, Munich, although Henle was not the only publisher to capitalise on the term to sell editions.
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supply contradictory evidence; in such cases some editors (e.g. Georg von Dadelsen and Wilhelm Altmann) have favoured the printed edition, while others (e.g. Heinrich Schenker and Paul Mies) have given preference to the manuscript as the principal source. It is therefore vital for performers to understand fully an editor’s aims, objectives, working methods and dilemmas before formulating firm ideas regarding interpretation. It is also important that they seek editions for which the various primary sources (autograph sketches, autograph composing scores, autograph fair copies, autograph orchestral parts, secondary copies of orchestral parts corrected by the composer, scores/parts published during the composer’s lifetime, autograph arrangements) have been thoroughly examined, dated (using watermarks or other relevant procedures), evaluated and prioritised, and due importance has been accorded to any secondary material. Performers must be able to distinguish between editorial suggestions for realising the composer’s intentions and those markings found in the musical sources (perhaps regarding rhythmic issues in Baroque music such as overdotting, notes inégales or passages in which triplets coincide with dotted figures;76 the incidence and content of cadenzas and Eingänge in Classical concertos; or ornamentation in general), and correction of errors or inner inconsistencies (whether by conjecture or on the evidence of readings from other sources) must be noted, either in footnotes or, better still, as part of a detailed critical commentary. The evidence of the editor’s investigations must be accessible. His work, in Dart’s words, ‘is no longer a coat of protective varnish through which the composer’s picture shines undimmed, but a whole set of brush-strokes using the same painting technique and materials as the original artist’.77
‘Performing’ editions If scholarly critical editions are sometimes difficult or impossible to use in performance without more or less extensive re-editing, so-called ‘performing editions’ often fail to include sufficient evidence or information to allow a critical user to challenge editorial decisions. While they attempt to include all the information necessary for satisfactory performance, they place little emphasis on variant readings and the less obviously practical features of the original notation, and many obscure or obliterate altogether the composer’s intentions, not least by introducing precepts and prejudices of the editor’s own era.
76 See Chapter 18 for a discussion of sources for rhythmic conventions such as overdotting and notes inégales. 77 Dart, The Interpretation, p. 14.
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The period during which some of the most extravagant and, in modern terms, irresponsible ‘performing editions’ appeared and were most readily accepted was around the middle of the nineteenth century, when many fêted virtuosi and teachers simply updated earlier music to suit technical (and sometimes organological) developments. Such heavily edited publications have been scorned because they often obscure the composer’s original notation with undeclared editorial performance annotations (e.g. tempo markings, dynamics, phrasing, bowing and articulation indications, fingering and, where relevant, pedalling, cadenza suggestions, metronome marks and supplementary verbal instructions). The outcomes sometimes more closely approximated arrangements than editions, resulting in performers being deceived into seeing earlier music through the eyes of someone other than the composer. Nevertheless, these editions are becoming increasingly valued nowadays as historical evidence of the technique, style and performing practices that were understood by such renowned interpreters to lie behind and beyond the composer’s notation. Some editions are of repertoires with which the editors had close connections, such as David’s editions of Beethoven, Schubert, Spohr and Mendelssohn, and preserve practices that reflect those with which the composers will have been familiar.78 Others are less concerned with style than technical facilitation. Comparative studies of edited performing material can help us to discern historical trends as well as increase our knowledge of ‘schools’ of performance and other pedagogic relationships. They may also illuminate composers’ performance expectations, particularly when there is a direct and close relationship between editor and composer. One obvious compromise for publishers has been a ‘combined-purpose edition’ which offers the best of both ‘scholarly’ and ‘performing’ worlds: an established text, essential source information, and adequate interpretative advice, with every editorial addition, interpolation or interpretation clearly distinguishable.
Annotated scores/parts used by conductors/performers Preservation in collections and archives of performing materials used by conductors and players has provided another valuable source of evidence of performing practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Annotated instrumental parts
78 See, for example, C. Brown, ‘Ferdinand David’s editions of Beethoven’, and R. Stowell, ‘The Violin Concerto Op. 61: text and editions’, in R. Stowell (ed.), Performing Beethoven, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 117–49, 150–94.
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and conductors’ scores have preserved for posterity the performing approaches and preferences of many distinguished artists of the period. Study of the handmarked scores of the Austrian conductor Hans Swarowsky (1899–1975) has revealed, for example, the extent of the influence of Gestalt theory towards the fulfilment of his Werktreue objectives, an ethos he perpetuated through many of his pupils, notably Claudio Abbado, Zubin Mehta and Ralf Weikert.79 Archive collections of the performing materials of conductors such as Arturo Toscanini (New York Public Library) and Leonard Bernstein (Library of Congress, Washington, DC), soloists such as Yehudi Menuhin (Royal Academy of Music, London)80 and orchestras such as the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics also preserve valuable evidence of the various performing practices of their times, allowing researchers and performers to re-evaluate the artistry and cultural roles of the practitioners concerned. ‘The Toscanini Legacy’, for example, comprises a vast collection of copiously annotated scores, letters (including some of the conductor’s correspondence with Puccini), recordings (some unpublished of rehearsals and broadcasts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra), films and memorabilia.81 Evidence from similar sources can be used to reconstruct or, at least, approximate closely historical practices and styles. For example, Walter Blume’s copious annotations have been used to inform the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 1997 recording of Brahms’s four symphonies under Sir Charles Mackerras (Telarc, CD-80450).82 These annotations record some of the Brahms interpretations of the German conductor Fritz Steinbach, a friend of the composer who followed Hans von Bülow as Kapellmeister of the Meiningen Hofkapelle (a chamber-sized orchestra which, under Bülow, had become one of the best in Europe) and became the accepted interpreter of Brahms’s orchestral music into the second decade of the twentieth century. Brahms is himself known to have favoured the more intimate orchestral blend of the Meiningen orchestra’s forty-eight players, as testified in a letter of 1886 from Bülow to Richard Strauss, and to have declined an offer to augment the strings for a performance of his Fourth Symphony (2 April 1886) in celebration of the birthday of the orchestra’s patron.83 According to Brahms’s friend and 79 Keith Griffiths has researched Hans Swarowsky’s legacy to the art of conducting, under the author’s supervision at Cardiff University. 80 The Royal Academy’s collections also include materials relevant to other distinguished musicians, including Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Henry Wood and Sir John Barbirolli. 81 Details of the holdings of other conductor-related archives in the USA may be found in H. Bloch, Directory of Conductors’ Archives in American Institutions, Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 2006. 82 W. Blume, Brahms in der Meininger Tradition, Stuttgart, Suhrkamp, 1933. 83 W. Schuh and F. Trenner (eds.), ‘Hans von Bülow/Richard Strauss: Briefwechsel’, Richard Strauss Jahrbuch 1954, Bonn, Boosey & Hawkes, 1953, pp. 7–88, trans. A. Gishford as Hans von Bülow and Richard Strauss: Correspondence, London, Boosey & Hawkes, 1955, p. 27.
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biographer Max Kalbeck, Steinbach modelled his interpretations on those of Brahms. Blume, Kalbeck’s pupil, detailed Steinbach’s conducting of Brahms’s symphonies and ‘Haydn Variations’ bar by bar in his 1933 publication. He indicates some violent changes of tempo unmarked in Brahms’s scores, as well as individual features of articulation and lingering upbeats.84 Mackerras and the SCO recreate much of the detail of Blume’s work, embracing also period practices regarding orchestral placement, instrumentation (e.g. the use of leather-skinned timpani, ‘Vienna’ horns, rotary-valve trumpets and narrowbore trombones) and other appropriate interpretative issues. Attitudes towards the metronome have varied since its introduction in the second decade of the nineteenth century. For some years, twentieth-century performers ignored most metronome markings indicated by composers of the previous century, the perceived inappropriate results causing them to believe that the metronomes of that time were inaccurate. The period performance movement has shown more respect for original metronome markings as evidence of a composer’s intentions, even if some composers’ intentions wavered through the years.85 However, Brahms distrusted the metronome, and Wagner eventually renounced the use of metronome markings after Tannhäuser.86
Historical writings Historical writings of many different kinds constitute important evidence for the history of performance and performing practices. Sources range from practical and theoretical treatises, histories and concert programmes to documents such as memoirs, diaries, travelogues, letters, descriptions/eyewitness accounts of music-making or references in general literature to accepted performing conventions and actual practices in various eras. Evidence furnished by these sources establishes perspectives in the performance of music through history, brings performers’ personalities and conditions into sharp focus, offers an overview of musical thought and practice and provides justifiable solutions to often vexing problems. It reveals what constituted a concert in other times, how
84 See W. Blume (ed.), ‘Brahms in the Meiningen tradition: his symphonies and Haydn Variations in the markings by Fritz Steinbach’, in M. Musgrave and B. D. Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 244–76. 85 For further discussion on metronome markings, see, for example, P. Stadlen, ‘Beethoven and the metronome – I’, Music & Letters, 48 (1967), 330–49, and ‘Beethoven and the metronome – II’, Soundings, 9 (1982), 38–73; C. Brown, ‘Historical performance, metronome marks and tempo in Beethoven’s symphonies’, Early Music, 19 (1991), 247–58; B. D. Sherman, ‘Tempos and proportions in Brahms: period evidence’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 462–77; L. Somfai, ‘Tempo, metronome, timing in Bartók’s music: the case of the pianist-composer’, in J.-J. Dunki and A. Haefeli (eds.), Der Grad der Bewegung, Bern, Peter Lang, 1998, pp. 47–71. 86 See Chapter 27.
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musicians performed their music, how their audiences heard and received it and what liberties were taken with it, adding the flesh and blood to the bare bones of the notation of much of the music of the past and facilitating the re-creation of music-making in the sensibility of the relevant period.
Practical treatises Instrumental and vocal treatises offer the most direct access to information about the preferred technical practices and interpretative solutions for the musical problems of approximately their times; some also embrace more general matters such as notation, music history, expression, taste and aesthetics. Most practical treatises up to the middle of the eighteenth century were addressed to educated amateur musicians or provincial music teachers. They focused on matters pertinent to a single instrument or family of instruments but few discussed technique in detail.87 Nevertheless, Conrad von Zabern’s De modo bene cantandi (1474) far outstrips for detail the accounts of chant singing before or since,88 although the neumes in a few tenth-century chant books are supplemented with small letters, most of which indicate issues of pitch, rhythm or delivery (notably attack, tone, rhythm or tempo). Diego Ortiz’s Tratado de glosas (1553), a treatise on ornamentation for viols, also reveals that a detached style of performance was the norm;89 Simpson’s The Division-Violist (1659) documents not only the growing interest in consorts and ensembles but also the emerging recognition of instrumental music as a genre distinct from, yet closely associated with, vocal music. Mace’s Musick’s Monument (1676) specialises in the needs of lutenists and theorbo players; and keyboard instruments were the principal focus of attention for seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury writers such as Adriano Banchieri (1605), Agostino Agazzari (1607), Andreas Werckmeister (1698), Francesco Gasparini (1728), Johann Heinichen (1728) and Johann Mattheson (1731), who incorporated detailed discussion of continuo playing.90
87 Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1601–2; repr. 1934) and Bénigne de Bacilly’s Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter (Paris, 1668; repr. 1971, 4th edn, 1681, trans. A. B. Caswell, Brooklyn, NY, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968) are notable exceptions for their times. 88 See Chapter 13. 89 D. Ortiz, Tratado de glosas, sobre clausulas y otros géneros de puntos en la musica de violones, Rome, 1553. 90 A. Banchieri, L’organo suonarino Op. 13, Venice, 1605; A. Agazzari, Del sonare sopra ’l basso con tutti li stromenti e dell’uso loro nel conserto, Siena, 1607; A. Werckmeister, Die nothwendigsten Anmerckungen und Regeln, wie der Bassus continuus oder General-Bass wol könne tractiret werden, Aschersleben, 1698; F. Gasparini, L’armonico pratico al cimbalo, Venice, 1708; J. D. Heinichen, Der General-Bass in der Composition, oder Neue und gründliche Anweisung, Dresden, 1728; and J. Mattheson, Grosse General-Bass-Schule, Hamburg, 1731. Peter Williams (Figured Bass Accompaniment, Edinburgh University Press, 1970), provides a useful ‘handlist’ of the principal seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publications devoted to thoroughbass; F. T. Arnold (The Art
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On a generally higher technical level were treatises such as François Couperin’s L’art de toucher le clavecin (1716), which represents a more independent approach to solo keyboard performance, and Hotteterre’s Principes de la flûte traversière (1707), which includes instructions for playing the flute, recorder and oboe, and is an important source of information about early woodwind practice in general, particularly tonguing and ornamentation. Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni (1723) reflects the growth in popularity of opera, incorporating significant instruction about ornamentation, expression and tempo rubato. Significantly, Geminiani’s progressive The Art of Playing on the Violin (1751) was the first treatise addressed to violinists of advanced standard.91 Three other major treatises appeared in the 1750s whose content combined comparatively advanced technical instruction regarding their specialist instruments with copious details regarding performance practice and style: Quantz’s Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752), C. P. E. Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753, 1762) and Leopold Mozart’s Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (1756). The influence of the ‘class of the 1750s’ and the various editions of their work was far-reaching. The establishment of the Paris Conservatoire (1795) prompted a new development: the production of faculty-based treatises offering systematic courses of technical and interpretative instruction for aspiring professionals.92 Practical treatises also provide vital evidence for the concept of national style, which concerns not only the ways in which composers wrote their music, influenced by considerations such as tradition, function, social context and even language, but also its performance; the concept also extends to aspects of instrument construction and sound ideal. Like many writers before him,93 Quantz compares the Italian and French styles at some length, directly contrasting their respective approaches to composition, singing and playing, especially with regard to ornamentation.94 He also advances the case for a of Accompanying from a Thorough-Bass as Practised in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1931, repr., 2 vols., New York, Dover, 1965), also summarises the content of such treatises, with relevant extracts in translation. 91 See Chapter 21 regarding other significant aspects of Tosi’s treatise. 92 The merits of the Conservatoire’s first singing treatise (1804), for example, are also discussed in Chapter 21. 93 For example, F. Raguenet, Parallèle des Italiens et des François en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras (1702), in O. Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, New York, Norton, 1950, repr. 1965, pp. 463–88; J. L. Le Cerf de la Viéville, ‘Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française’ (1704) in Strunk, Source Readings, pp. 489–507. Georg Muffat’s descriptions of the French style of his teacher, Lully, and the influence of Corelli’s style on him during his sojourn in Rome are also important. See, for example, his Florilegium secundum, Passau, 1698; Armonico Tributo, Salzburg, 1682; Ausserlesene Instrumental-Music, Passau, 1701; and his eclectic combination of French and Italian styles in his Apparatus musico-organisticus, Salzburg, 1690, for organ. 94 J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, trans. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber, 1966, pp. 334–5. See also Chapter 22.
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‘mixed’ German style which makes ‘use of the good things in all types of foreign music’.95 Although both Couperin and Campra had earlier striven for a mélange des genres, it was left to German musicians to integrate French ‘delicacy’ and Italian ‘vitality’ into an expressive, ornate ‘galant’ idiom, thereby realising Quantz’s vision of ‘a good style that is universal’.96 Even with the emergence of a more ‘international’ style, various factors have often distinguished the music-making of one country from another, ranging from the influence of folk music and dance to extra-musical elements or even the use of instruments with specific ‘national’ sounds and characteristics.97 Among the most significant practical treatises published since c. 1760 were those of Türk (1789), Milchmeyer (1797), Clementi (1801), Adam (1804), Hummel (1828) and Czerny (1839) for the piano,98 and L’Abbé le fils (1761), Galeazzi (1791), Cartier (1798), Rode, Baillot and Kreutzer (1803), Spohr (1832), Baillot (1835), Habeneck (c. 1840), Bériot (1858), David (1864), Joachim and Moser (1902–5) and Flesch (1923–8) for the violin.99 Baillot, Levasseur, Catel and Baudiot (1804), Duport (c. 1806), Dotzauer (1832), Kummer (1839), Romberg (1840) and Piatti (1878) best represent the cello as does Labarre (1844) for the harp.100 Tromlitz (1791), Lefèvre (1802), Ozi (1803), Hugot and Wunderlich (1804), Brod (1825–35), Klosé (1843), Sellner (1825), Müller (1825), Berr (1836), Baermann (1864–75), Almanraeder (1843) and Jancourt (1847) were among those who bolstered the market for woodwinds.101 Prominent contributors to instruction materials for brass instruments were Altenburg (1795), Dauprat (1824), 95 Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 338. 96 Ibid., p. 342. 97 Examples include: the contrast between the light, shallow key action, thin, bright resonance, efficient damping mechanism and clear, ‘transparent’ sound of Viennese pianos and the greater cantabile potential and volume of ‘English action’ models; and the tonal differences between nineteenth-century French and German double-reed instruments. See also Chapter 28 regarding national styles of playing. 98 D. G. Türk, Clavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Clavierspielen, Leipzig and Halle, 1789; J. Milchmeyer, Die wahre Art das Pianoforte zu spielen, Dresden, 1797; M. Clementi, Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Pianoforte, London, 1801; J.-L. Adam, Méthode de piano du Conservatoire, Paris, 1804; J. N. Hummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel, 3 vols., Vienna, 1828; C. Czerny, Vollständige theoretisch-practische Pianoforte-Schule Op. 500, 3 vols., Vienna, 1839. 99 L’Abbé le fils, Principes du violon, Paris, 1761; F. Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-pratici di musica con un saggio sopra l’arte di suonare il violino analizzata, ed a dimostrabili principi ridotta, 2 vols., Rome, 1791 and 1796; J.-B. Cartier, L’art du violon, Paris, 1798; P. Rode, P. Baillot and R. Kreutzer, Méthode de violon, Paris, 1803; L. Spohr, Violinschule, Vienna, 1832; P. Baillot, L’art du violon: nouvelle méthode, Paris, 1835; F.-A. Habeneck, Méthode théorique et pratique de violon, Paris, c. 1840; C.-A. de Bériot, Méthode de violon, Mainz, [1858]; F. David, Violinschule, Leipzig, 1864; J. Joachim and A. Moser, Violinschule, 3 vols., Berlin, Simrock, 1902–5; C. Flesch, Die Kunst des Violinspiels, 2 vols., Berlin, Ries & Erles, 1923–8. 100 P. Baillot, J. Levasseur, C.-S. Catel and C.-N. Baudiot, Méthode de violoncelle du Conservatoire, Paris, 1804; J. L. Duport, Essai sur le doigté du violoncelle, et sur la conduite de l’archet, Paris, c. 1806; J. J. Dotzauer, Violonzellschule Op. 165, Mainz, 1832; F. A. Kummer, Violoncello-Schule Op. 60, Leipzig, 1839; B. Romberg, Méthode de Violoncelle, Berlin, 1840; A. Piatti, Method for the Violoncello, London, 1878; T. Labarre, Méthode complète pour la harpe, Paris, 1844. 101 J. G. Tromlitz, Ausführlicher und gründlicher Unterricht die Flöte zu spielen, Leipzig, 1791; X. Lefèvre, Méthode de clarinette, Paris, 1802, repr. 1974; E. Ozi, Nouvelle Méthode de basson, Paris, 1803; A. Hugo and J.-G. Wunderlich, Méthode de flûte du Conservatoire, Paris, 1804, repr. 1975; H. Brod, Méthode pour le hautbois, Paris, 1825–35; J. Sellner, Theoretische-praktische Oboeschule, Vienna, 1825, rev. 2nd edn, 1901; I. Müller,
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Meifred (1840), Gallay (c. 1845) and Arban (1864),102 and Mancini (1774), Hiller (1774), Corri (1810) and García (1847) authored influential methods for the voice.103 Vocal treatises are especially helpful as evidence for ornamentation, extempore embellishment and improvisation, but few other than García’s venture into detail about the physiology of voice production. Evidence of how singing might have sounded in the past or changed during the course of history is thus somewhat limited – it is naturally closely related to linguistic issues such as speech patterns, rhythms, inflections and verbal articulation in general.104 However, Italian singers were predominant, adopting a smooth, euphonious style of singing, which was somewhat loosely described as bel canto. Early recordings clearly demonstrate that even within the last one hundred years or so radical changes in tastes and practices have occurred. The evidence of practical treatises can mislead, for several present the fruits of many years of thought, experience and observation and incorporate instructions that may lag well behind actual practice.105 Care should therefore be taken in the application of, say, Quantz’s instructions (1752), published when he was fiftyfive and beholden to practices fashionable in his formative years, to, say, performances of works by the young Mozart.106 Further, many treatises have led performers to devise theories mistakenly, make inferences from sources too hastily and use performing conventions erroneously, problems arising from either the use of wrong sources or the wrong use of sources. Neumann believes that treatise writers should be regarded not as ‘prophets who reveal infallible verities’, but rather as ‘very human witnesses who left us an affidavit about certain things they knew . . . believed in, [and] . . . wished their readers to Méthode pour la nouvelle clarinette et clarinette-alto, Paris, 1825; F. Berr, Méthode complète de clarinette, Paris, 1836; C. Baermann, Vollständige Clarinett-Schule, Munich, 1864–75; C. Almanraeder, Die Kunst des Fagottblasens, Mainz, 1843; E. Jancourt, Grande méthode pour le basson, Paris, 1847. 102 J. E. Altenburg, Versuch einer Anleitung zur heroisch-musikalischen Trompeter- und Pauker-Kunst, Halle, 1795; L. F. Dauprat, Méthode pour cor alto et cor basse, Paris, 1824; P.-J. E. Meifred, Méthode de cor chromatique ou à pistons, Paris, 1840, rev. 2nd edn, 1849; J. F. Gallay, Méthode complète pour le cor, Paris, c. 1845; J.-B. Arban, Grande méthode complète pour cornets à pistons et de saxhorn, Paris, 1864. 103 G. B. Mancini, Pensieri, e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato, Vienna, Ghelen, 1774, rev. and enlarged 3rd edn, 1777 as Riflessioni pratiche sul canto figurato; J. A. Hiller, Anweisung zum musikalischrichtigen Gesange, Leipzig, 1774, enlarged 2nd edn, 1798; D. Corri, The Singer’s Preceptor, London, Silvester, 1810; M. García [fils], Traité complet de l’art du chant, Paris, 1847. See Chapter 21 for details of the content of the treatises of Mancini, Hiller, Corri and others. 104 See P. H. Lang, ‘Performance practice and the voice’, in A. Mann and G. J. Buelow (eds.), Paul Henry Lang: Musicology and Performance, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 185–98. 105 P. H. Lang, ‘Performance practice and musicology’, in M. Bente (ed.), Musik. Edition. Interpretation. Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, Munich, Henle, 1979, pp. 316–17. 106 Burney, when visiting the elderly Quantz, found his music ‘truly stationary’ and his taste ‘that of forty years ago’. In P. Scholes (ed.), Dr. Burney’s Musical Tours in Europe, 2 vols., London, 1959, vol. 2, pp. 207, 156.
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believe’.107 He likens the principles required of music researchers to the procedures of evaluating testimony in jurisprudence and claims that sources such as historical treatises cannot be used safely without thorough and satisfactory assessment of the personality, background, knowledge, status and influence of the writer, the credibility, reliability and consistency of both the treatise’s textual content and the musical style and aesthetic it propounds, the readership to whom it is addressed, its relationship to other sources, its geographical and temporal limitations, and its relationship to the repertoire (and the composers) to which it is applicable.
Theoretical treatises Numerous treatises on theoretical musical issues appeared through the centuries, ranging from the writings of Lanfranco (1533), Zarlino (1558), Praetorius (1614–18), Mersenne (1636–7), Zacconi (1592, 1622), and Kircher (1650) to those of Mattheson (1739), Avison (1752), Adlung (1758), and Mosel (1813).108 They were prepared largely for academicians and tended to explain the rules and aesthetics of composition, to provide inventories or descriptions of existing (or at least of theoretically possible) instruments, or to discuss mathematical and somewhat idealised historical aspects of music. While they help to exclude some avenues regarding interpretative issues, they rarely offer straightforward advice of immediately practical assistance, their authors often being closer to the ranks of philosophers than of musicians. Nevertheless, the works of Lanfranco and Zarlino incorporate important rules for the satisfactory realisation of text underlay;109 aestheticians provide useful descriptors of the character and ‘colour’ of specific tonalities;110 and the treatises of Praetorius, Mersenne and Adlung, among others, give vital clues on matters of tuning or pitch. Several specialist publications were also
107 F. Neumann, ‘The use of Baroque treatises on musical performance’, Music & Letters, 48 (1967), 316. 108 G. Lanfranco, Scintille di musica, Brescia, 1533; G. Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche, Venice, 1558; M. Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, 3 vols., 1: Wittenberg and Wolfenbüttel, 1614–15, repr. 1959, 1968; 2: Wolfenbüttel, 1618, 2nd edn, 1619, repr. 1958, 1980; trans. 1962, 1986; 3: Wolfenbüttel, 1618, 2nd edn, 1619, repr. 1958, 1976; M. Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, Paris, 1636–7, repr. 1963; L. Zacconi, Pratica di musica, 2 parts, Venice, 1592, repr. 1967 and 1622, repr. 1967; A. Kircher, Musurgia universalis, Rome, 1650, repr. 1970, and Phonurgia nova, Kempten, 1673, repr. 1966; J. Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Hamburg, 1739; C. Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression, London, 1752; J. Adlung, Anleitung zu der musikalischen Gelahrtheit, Erfurt, 1758; I. F. von Mosel, Versuch einer Ästhetik des musikalischen Tonsatzes, Vienna, 1813, 2nd edn, 1910. 109 G. M. Lanfranco, Scintille di musica, Brescia 1553; G. Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche. 110 Colin Lawson relates the work of Daniel Schubart to his Mozart case study in Chapter 23 but maintains that eighteenth-century aestheticians held a remarkable consistency of opinion regarding key colour.
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devoted to these latter issues, different temperaments having the potential to inflect a performance with a variety of nuances.111 Orchestration manuals also became fashionable towards the mid-nineteenth century, commencing with the works of Kastner (1837 and 1839) and continuing with those of, for example, Berlioz (1843), Strauss (1905) and RimskyKorsakov (1913).112 They have proved invaluable reference material for the technique and potential of orchestral instruments, orchestral placement and other performance details, as have also the conducting treatises of Berlioz (1856), Wagner (1869) and Weingartner (1895), and many lesser studies.113 Several chapters of the present volume cite evidence for the vocal or instrumental forces available in various centres of creativity through history. A fair proportion of such evidence has been drawn from practical and theoretical treatises. In the first half of the eighteenth century orchestral size and constitution were dependent as much on circumstance as on the demands of the work to be performed. Available players and the size of the venue were important factors; thus a surviving score might not necessarily indicate how a work was originally performed, and fluidity of numbers and personnel could even characterise successive performances of individual operas.114 Further, as Selfridge-Field points out, ‘At the Cöthen court during Bach’s employment there (1717–23) the total number of instruments, between 13 and 15, was relatively stable, but their specific distribution in both the string and wind sections varied from year to year and from genre to genre.’115 Bach’s requirements ‘for a well-appointed church music’ stated in his famous memorandum to the Leipzig Council (23 August 1730) amounted to a mere 18–20 players; it thus seems clear that he lacked even what resources he deemed necessary.116 This memorandum has also sparked debate about the instrumental and vocal forces Bach used for Leipzig performances of his choral works, Rifkin proposing, on the evidence of surviving performance parts, that Bach probably
111 See Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, Bibliography, pp. 507–11. Authorities such as Zarlino, Praetorius, Mersenne and Werckmeister clearly demonstrate that quartercomma mean-tone was predominantly employed throughout the seventeenth century. Peter Walls discusses the significance in the eighteenth century of Vallotti’s tuning in Chapter 22. 112 J.-G. Kastner, Traité général d’instrumentation, Paris, 1837, Cours d’instrumentation, Paris, 1839; H. Berlioz, Grande traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes Op. 10, Paris, 1843, trans. 1856; R. Strauss, Instrumentationslehre, Leipzig, 1905, trans. New York, 1948 [= Berlioz’s Grand traité rev. and enlarged]; N. Rimsky-Korsakov, ed. M. Shteynberg, [Principles of Orchestration], St Petersburg, 1913, trans. 1922, 2nd edn, 1964. 113 H. Berlioz, Le chef d’orchestre, Paris, 1856, trans. 1917; R. Wagner, ‘Über das Dirigieren’ (1869) in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 1–10, Leipzig, 1871–83, vol. 8; F. Weingartner, Über das Dirigieren, Leipzig, 1895, rev. 3rd edn, 1905, trans. 1906. 114 In Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, p. 7. 115 Ibid., p. 8. 116 Entwurff einer wohlbestallten Kirchen Music. See H. T. David and A. Mendel (eds.), The Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, New York, Norton,1945, repr. 1966, pp. 120–4.
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used a small number of performers in his cantatas and Passion settings with, typically, one voice to each part.117 Zaslaw warns against too dogmatic a reading of the evidence for the constitution of orchestras and stresses the need to ‘study an orchestra over a period of time’ in order to discover its normal working size. Further, payroll entries can deceive regarding actual participation in performances and mathematical conclusions may be distorted by the common practice of musicians playing two or more instruments.118 Quantz’s recommendations range from an orchestra with four violins to one with twelve; there must therefore have been many occasions when equivalent instruments were freely substituted, according to what was available. Take Handel’s orchestras as examples. The orchestra at the Haymarket Theatre on his arrival in 1710 comprised (at full strength) 1 trumpet, 2 oboes, 4 bassoons, strings (11–2–6–1) and 2 harpsichords. His Rinaldo, premiered in February 1711, has 4 trumpets and drums in the famous march and elsewhere a flageolet, 2 recorders and a violetta in place of viola. Burrows has surmised that extra players were hired for the march and the rest of the requirements were fulfilled by ‘double-handed’ members of the orchestra.119 It seems likely that Handel’s orchestra remained fairly consistent between 1727 and his Foundling Hospital orchestra of 1754, whose strings comprised 14–6–3–2. A redistribution in the balance of the lower string parts involved a reduction in cellos and an increase from one to two double basses; and a gradual increase in viola strength reflected that instrument’s heightened role in the accompaniment of four-part oratorio choruses.
117 J. Rifkin, ‘Bach’s chorus: a preliminary report’, Musical Times, 123 (1982), 747–54 (revised as ‘Bachs Chor – Ein vorläufiger Bericht’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 9 (1985), 141–55); ‘Page turns, players and ripieno parts: more questions of scoring in Bach’s vocal music’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 728–34. Rifkin’s proposals sparked a verbal conflict, particularly with Robert Marshall (Musical Times, 124 (1983), 19–22, 161–2) and Ton Koopman (Early Music, 25 (1997), 303–7, 541–2; 26 (1998), 109–21, 380), but received support from Andrew Parrott (‘Bach’s chorus: a “brief yet highly necessary” reappraisal’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 551–80; ‘Bach’s chorus: Who cares?’, Early Music, 26 (1998), 297–301; The Essential Bach Choir, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2000). John Butt (‘Bach’s chorus: what can it mean?’, Early Music, 26 (1998), 99–107), among others, joined in the debate. The principal evidence in Jonathan Wainwright’s discussion in Chapter 19 of the performing forces used through history in Monteverdi’s Vespers (1610) also supports a one-per-part vocal interpretation. 118 N. Zaslaw, ‘Toward the revival of the classical orchestra’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 103 (1976–7), 180. See also J. Spitzer and N. Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650– 1815, Oxford University Press, 2004, for more information on the size and distribution of orchestras, including four appendices with detail about sample orchestras within specified periods, and orchestral performance practices. Koury (Orchestral Performance Practices) also includes information on the constitution of various orchestras. 119 D. Burrows, ‘Handel’s London theatre orchestra’, Early Music, 13 (1985), 349. Among Burrows’s later evidence are lists of performing musicians from 1714 and 1727 when George I and II respectively attended festivities at the Guildhall on the first Lord Mayor’s Day of their reigns.
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Some festive occasions involved exceptional numbers of participants, notably the Handel Commemoration of 1784, where the concert in Westminster Abbey featured a chorus and orchestra of over 500.120 However, large-scale performances of works by Handel and other composers were also heard elsewhere in Europe, and Mozart was delighted by a performance of one of his symphonies using strings comprising 20–20–10–8–10, 6 bassoons and otherwise doubled wind.121 Pictorial evidence survives for a variety of orchestral layouts, and further commentary is provided in the theoretical works of Quantz, Junker, Petri, Reichardt, Galeazzi and Koch,122 as well as other instruction books, dictionaries, autobiographies, letters and more general musical literature. The role of the concertmaster in the eighteenth century is also described in various publications, Quantz and Galeazzi both stressing the concertmaster’s responsibility for distributing, placing and arranging the players in his ensemble.123 Evidence shows that some concert orchestras, like the Gewandhaus Orchestra, stood to perform and most eighteenth-century ensembles had the first and second violins facing each other, with principal cellist and bassist on either side of the harpsichord. Haydn introduced to London an amphitheatre arrangement, which has been reconstructed from surviving evidence.124 But in general there were no standardised placements, each hall, repertoire and orchestra having its own requirements. A sketch of the pit and stage of the Kärtnertortheater (1821) and layouts for a performance of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast (arr. Mozart) in 1812 and for the Concert Spirituel c. 1825 differ strikingly from today’s commonly employed placements,125 as do Verdi’s views on the placement of the string ensemble around the wind instruments (with the double basses grouped together) and Wagner’s theories, discussed in Chapter 27.
120 Burney, in discussing the commemoration, wrote that ‘Foreigners, particularly the French, must be astonished at so numerous a band moving in such exact measure, without the assistance of a Coryphaeus to beat the time, either with a roll of paper, or a noisy baton or truncheon’. 121 W. A. Mozart, letter of 11 April 1781; see N. Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 455. 122 Quantz, Versuch; C. L. Junker, Zwanzig Componisten: eine Skizze, Bern, 1776, Einige der vornehmsten Pflichten eines Kapellmeisters oder Musikdirektors, Winterthur, 1782; J. S. Petri, Anleitung zur practischen Musik, Lauban, 1767; J. F. Reichardt, Über die Pflichten des Ripien-Violinisten, Berlin and Leipzig, 1776; F. Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-pratici di musica con un saggio sopra l’arte di suonare il violino analizzata, ed a dimostrabili principi ridotta, 2 vols., Rome, 1791 and 1796; H. C. Koch, Musikalisches Lexicon, Frankfurt am Main, 1802. 123 See R. Stowell, ‘ “Good execution and other necessary skills”: the role of the concertmaster in the late eighteenth century’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 21–33. 124 See McVeigh, Concert Life in London, p. 212. 125 In C. Brown, ‘The orchestra in Beethoven’s Vienna’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 4–20.
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Other treatises A wide variety of other treatises holds clues as to performance issues of their times, even as far back as philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Boethius. Plato’s pivotal role between past and future practices, for example, yields interesting insights into attitudes towards musical instruments, number theory, harmonia, rhythm and the modes.126 On another tack, evidence for the accurate reconstruction of period pronunciation of texts in vocal music may be found in linguistic sources such as Hart’s An Orthographie (1569) or Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530).127 The implementation of accurate period pronunciation can have important consequences for tuning, rhythm and expressive effect. Familiarity with characteristic dance steps and patterns through history can provide clues regarding tempo and performance style. Dorottya Fabian, for example, argues that the Loure from J. S. Bach’s Partita No. 3 (BWV1006) for unaccompanied violin, often interpreted as ‘a somewhat sad or lyrical “romance with exaggerated sentiment” ’, is actually a ‘ “dance of Spanish origin with a certain amount of temperament and pronounced stresses on the strong beat” but not on the third or last (sixth) beats’.128 She concludes that its tempo ‘should be fairly fast and the articulation should recall the hopping character of the dance’. She also bemoans the fact that the characteristics of the Sarabanda (in Bach’s Second Partita (BWV1004) ), a slow, stately dance in triple metre with an accent on the second beat, are rarely replicated faithfully in performance, most violinists playing the movement ‘legato, in a sustained style, rhythmically even, and literal’.129 Despite Fabian’s convincing arguments in the limited repertoire with which she deals, performers should exercise caution in using dance treatises as evidence for the determination of precise tempos for specific dances. Dance steps and figures (and with them the tempos) varied widely at different times and places – compare, for example, the quick seventeenth-century English saraband with the moderate Italian and the slow French sarabande; and dances often underwent considerable transformation in the instrumental domain. As
126 See Chapters 7–9. 127 J. Hart, An Orthographie, London, 1569, facsimile repr. Menston, 1969; J. Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, London, 1530, facsimile repr. Menston, 1969. See A. Wray, ‘Authentic pronunciation for early music’, in J. Paynter, T. Howell, R. Orton and P. Seymour (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, 2 vols., London and New York, Routledge, 1992, vol. 2, p. 1055. 128 D. Fabian, ‘Toward a performance history of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin: preliminary investigations’, in L. Vikárius and V. Lampert (eds.), Essays in Honor of László Somfai on his 70th Birthday, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 97. Fabian here quotes from a transcription of a talk by Jaap Schröder included in the Journal of The Violin Society of America, 3 (1977), 19. 129 Ibid., pp. 97–8.
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Peter le Huray points out, the allemandes in Corelli’s Op. 2 Trio Sonatas are variously headed presto, allegro, largo and adagio and the sarabandes of his Trio Sonatas Opp. 2 and 4 carry equally diverse markings.130
Histories Several histories of music offer valuable insights into important performance issues. Praetorius’s Syntagma musicum (1614–18) has already been mentioned for its second volume’s detailed organological drawings, and, despite its ‘characteristic digressiveness and occasional uncritical reporting’, Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636–7) ‘contains his most developed and perceptive ideas on music, both theoretical and practical’.131 The writings of Roger North shed light on musical life in Restoration times and public concerts in London and range from socio-musical aspects, as discussed by John Potter in Chapter 21, to understanding how certain wind instruments produce sound and theories about harmony and the origins of music. National music and style form the chief aspects of Bonnet-Bourdelot’s Histoire de la musique et de ses effets (Paris, 1715) and Marpurg’s Der critische Musicus an der Spree (Berlin, 1749–50). Marpurg’s Historisch-Kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (Berlin, 1754–62, 1778) and Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (Berlin, 1759) adopt different formats but cover a variety of theoretical issues, including many on performance allied to his instrumental treatises. The expressive aspects of music and performance form the principal focus of Brown’s Dissertation (London, 1763) and Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1788–1801), while Martini’s Storia della Musica (Bologna, 1757–81) incorporates valuable observations on plainchant (canto fermo). Two outstanding examples of historiography were published in direct competition in London in 1776: Burney’s A General History of Music and Hawkins’s A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. Hawkins’s work provides vast quantities of information and data, but often includes prejudices of a bygone era, while Burney’s eloquent prose evaluates and interprets the events recorded, with a heavy bias towards the history of music in England.132 La Borde’s Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1780) includes insights into eighteenthcentury theory and opera performance and the works of Ambros (Geschichte der Musik (Breslau, 1862–8) ), Fétis (Histoire Générale de la Musique (Paris, 1869–76) ), and others nearer our time contribute to the picture’s completion.
130 P. le Huray, Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 38. 131 A. Cohen in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 16, p. 469, art. ‘Mersenne, Marin’. 132 K. S. Grant’s Dr Burney as Critic and Historian of Music, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1983, includes (pp. 283–306) an assessment of ‘Burney’s achievement as critic and historian of music’.
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Autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, travelogues and letters Autobiographies as sources are variable in their reliability, not least because musicians writing about themselves ‘seem often to be self-conscious or to yield to the temptation to dramatize their achievements’;133 but, whether by Dittersdorf, Grétry or Michael Kelly in the eighteenth, Spohr, Berlioz, or Wagner in the nineteenth, or violinists Auer, Spalding, Mannes or Flesch in the twentieth century,134 they cast light on many facets of the lives, conditions and practices of performers in their times. Spohr records, for example, how touring musicians arranged and presented concerts on their travels in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Biographies such as Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (1760), Forkel’s first biography of J. S. Bach (1802), or Helen Henschel’s When Soft Voices Die (1944) are often similarly informative, if not always accurate. Henschel’s book provides a vivid picture of her family, its circle of musical friends (including Paderewski, Sargent and other prominent figures), and the music-making of their times (including Georg Henschel’s reminiscences of Brahms), combining hard facts with interesting anecdotes and shrewdly sympathetic characterisations of contemporary musicians. Memoirs and personal recollections of distinguished performers have also proved useful sources.135 But they should be interpreted with caution, not least because descriptions of particular sound worlds still leave readers with their own conjectures and imaginative interpretations. Schindler’s description of Beethoven’s piano playing from first-hand experience and Blume’s detailed notes on Steinbach’s conducting of Brahms are cases in point, as are the English pianist Fanny Davies’s or Ethel Smyth’s descriptions of Brahms’s playing.136 Berlioz’s Mémoires and other writings are especially informative
133 J. Westrup, An Introduction to Musical History, London, Hutchinson, 1955, p. 36. 134 Karl von Dittersdorfs Lebensbeschreibung, seinem Sohne in die Feder diktiert, Leipzig, 1801; repr. 1967, trans. London, 1896, repr. 1970; A.-E.-M. Grétry, Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique, Paris, 1789; M. Kelly, Reminiscences, London, 1826, ed. R. Fiske, Oxford University Press, 1975; L. Spohr, Selbstbiographie, 2 vols., Kassel and Göttingen, 1860–1, trans. 1865, repr. 1969, 2nd edn, 1878; H. Berlioz, Mémoires, Paris, 1870; ed. and trans. D. Cairns, London, Victor Gollancz, 1969, rev. 3rd edn, 1975; R. Wagner, Mein Leben, privately printed, 1869, 1875 and 1881, 1st authentic edn, Munich, 1963, trans. A. Gray, ed. M. Whittall, Cambridge University Press, 1983; L. Auer, My Long Life in Music, New York, Stokes, 1924; A. Spalding, Rise to Follow, London, Muller, 1946; and D. Mannes, Music is My Faith, New York, Norton, 1938; C. Flesch and H. Keller (eds.), The Memoirs of Carl Flesch, London, Rockliff, 1957. 135 For example, E. Devrient, Meine Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy und dessen Briefe an mich, Leipzig, 1869, trans. 1869, repr. 1972; H. F. Chorley, Thirty Years’ Recollections, London, Harst & Blackett, 1862, repr. 1984; G.-H. Roger, Le carnet d’un tenor, Paris, 1880. 136 F. Davies, ‘Some personal recollections of Brahms as pianist and interpreter’, in W. W. Cobbett (ed.), Cobbett’s Cyclopaedic Survey of Chamber Music, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1929; 2nd enlarged edn, Oxford University Press, 1963, vol. 1, pp. 182–4; E. Smyth, Impressions that Remained: Memoirs, 2 vols.,
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about musical conditions in Paris, the problems of touring and concert organisation, playing standards, rehearsal practices and other such issues.137 The personal diaries of, for example, Pepys, Burney and Zinzendorf offer insights into performance traditions and social behaviour of their times, and the travelogues of such respected musicians as Burney or Reichardt provide vivid snapshots of an artist’s life ‘on the road’. Some refer to instruments,138 concert organisation, impressions gained in various significant musical centres and reactions to concert and opera performances and specific works, as well as performance practice issues and relevant non-musical factors such as the rigours and timeframe of travel, the conditions experienced and matters of safety en route. Some even supply a vital perspective and a structural framework on which to appreciate more specialist sources such as instrumental treatises.139 Burney’s observations and critical evaluations especially enrich the reader’s acquaintance with musicians and musical events in much of Europe in the eighteenth century; they have long carried authority as those of an intelligent and perceptive musician, even if Burney’s judgements may occasionally have been misplaced.140 Reports from missionaries, explorers and other travellers during the age of exploration have also informed the work for ethnomusicologists such as Philip Bohlman and Joep Bor.141 In Chapter 16, Tim Carter cites Giacomo Razzi’s written attempts to entice Giacomo Carissimi to succeed Monteverdi as maestro di capella of the Basilica of St Mark in Venice as evidence for the constitution of its musical establishment c. 1643.142 Similarly, the letters of Monteverdi himself, Mersenne, C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, the Mozart family, Brahms, Wagner and others provide invaluable insights into musical performance of their times, often highlighting philosophical considerations that influenced musical practices, explaining the
London, Longmans, Green, 1919, and Female Pipings in Eden, London, Davies, 1933. See also G. S. Bozarth, ‘Fanny Davies and Brahms’s late chamber music’, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, pp. 170–219. 137 In addition to his Mémoires, see Berlioz’s Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie, Paris, 1844; Les soirées de l’orchestre, Paris, 1852; and A travers chants, Paris, 1862. 138 For example, Charles Burney (The Present State of Music in France and Italy, London, Bechet, 1773, repr. 1969, pp. 262–3) verifies the existence of Zarlino’s microtonal harpsichord. See also Chapter 12. 139 Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, and The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, London, 1775, repr. 1969; J. F. Reichardt, Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend, 2 vols., 1: Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1774; 2: Frankfurt and Breslau, 1776. 140 Burney managed to offend numerous German musicians, and he was also especially critical of the Paris Opéra. 141 P. V. Bohlman, ‘Missionaries, magical muses, and magnificent menageries: image and imagination in the early history of ethnomusicology’, World of Music, 30/3 (1998), 5–26; J. Bor, ‘The rise of ethnomusicology: sources on Indian music c1780–1890’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 20 (1988), 51–73. 142 See also T. S. J. Culley, Jesuits and Music, Rome, Jesuit Historical Institute, 1970, p. 186.
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reasons behind their or other composers’ particular revisions, or making other revelations of practical consequence.143
Dictionaries and general literature The work of lexicographers such as Rousseau, Koch, Sulzer and Rees is also especially informative about their particular national tastes and times.144 Many kinds of general literature, too, such as novels, plays, poems and essays, may offer useful, if limited evidence regarding the history of music and performance through depicting the musical life and thought of past epochs. Sometimes, of course, they may mislead on account of their terminology or ‘literary licence’. Nevertheless, some nuggets of information about musical instruments and performance have been gleaned, for example, from Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of Tristan und Isolde (c. 1210).145 Five centuries later, Fanny Burney paints a clear picture of the social status of concerts in her novel Evelina (1778), suggesting that their function was as much as a vehicle for conversation as for musical entertainment; this is confirmed by her father, who complained that even ‘the best Operas and Concerts are accompanied with a buzz and murmur of conversation’.146
Documents and records Documents and records, whether public or private, can offer all kinds of evidence about performers and performance traditions. Historical archives of English, French and Austrian courts, as well as of Italian churches and various sacred and secular institutions have furnished useful general information about musical activities, occasionally supplying extensive details of particular events.147 Annual almanacs summarising cultural events in a city or country and providing liturgical and civic calendars for the following year often elucidate details of repertoire and personnel,148 and the minutes and publications of learned
143 See, for example, S. Avins, ‘Performing Brahms’s music: clues from his letters’, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, pp. 11–47. 144 J.-J. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, Paris and Amsterdam, 1768, repr. 1969, trans. W. Waring, London, 1779, repr. 1975; H. C. Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon, Frankfurt am Main, 1802; J. G. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, Leipzig, 1771–4; A. Rees (ed.), The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, London, 1802–20. 145 See I. Finlay, ‘Musical instruments in Gotfrid von Strassburg’s “Tristan und Isolde”’, Galpin Society Journal, 5 (1952), 39–43. 146 C. Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3rd and 5th, 1784, in Commemoration of Handel, London, 1785, p. 40. 147 For example, the minstrel guilds of the Middle Ages, the courts, cathedrals and academies of the Renaissance and Baroque, or the concert societies of the nineteenth century. 148 For example, Almanach musical, Paris, 1775–83, repr. 1972; Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland, ed. J. N. Forkel, Leipzig 1781–8, repr. 1974.
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societies often incorporate information on performance issues.149 Descriptions of festive events have reproduced their pomp and splendour in vivid detail. Recognising Zaslaw’s warning, mentioned earlier, lists of personnel according to dates of hire or retirement, or those which reveal rates of pay, though ‘generally purely factual and non-committal’, have nevertheless assisted in both determining the general dimensions of choral and instrumental groups and providing information about the itineraries of peripatetic musicians.150 In Chapter 13, for example, Timothy McGee discusses the contentious issue of the number of singers normally involved in singing a sacred polyphonic composition in the Renaissance, using evidence from papal, cathedral and other records. And Keith Polk demonstrates in Chapter 14 how iconographical, theoretical and archival sources combine to inform us about instrumentaria and instrumental practices in the fifteenth century, even though instrumentalists of the period performed almost entirely without written music. However, such archives relate only to situations within an institutional framework;151 they often present problems of decipherability or incorporate mistakes regarding the names of personnel. Furthermore, they will not necessarily explain any system of rotation that the musicians may have served or indicate whether the lists include retired musicians and apprentices or ‘extras’ such as students, amateurs, town waits or military bandsmen. As Selfridge-Field observes: ‘the names of young musicians who served, but who could not officially be hired until a vacancy was created by the death of a senior musician, were not recorded’; changes in responsibilities were not consistently documented, ‘positions were sometimes sold, especially at the court of St James, without official note being made’; and, as already noted, one performer might serve in two distinct roles – ‘in eighteenth-century Venice oboists were often flautists as well, while in Vienna oboists doubled as trombonists and in Paris those who played the horn also played the viola’.152 Exploration of past records has also yielded clues as to the types of singers who participated in certain performances in medieval times, the numbers of voices involved, and whether or not those singers were accompanied.153 Inventories may provide clues about those instruments which were in or out 149 See A. Cohen, Music in the French Royal Academy of Sciences, Princeton University Press, 1981; L. Miller and A. Cohen, Music in the Royal Society of London, 1680–1806, Detroit, Information Coordinators, 1987. 150 Westrup, An Introduction, p. 45. 151 The Court of Burgundy, for example, during a certain period. See C. Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419: A Documentary History, Henryville, PA, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979. 152 In Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, pp. 14–15. 153 See, for example: C. Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100–1300, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1986; David Fallows, ‘Specific information on the ensembles for composed polyphony’, in S. Boorman (ed.), Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 109–59.
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of fashion.154 And McVeigh’s survey of London’s concert life in the eighteenth century uncovers detailed evidence about the financial aspects of commercial concert promotion, including receipts, artists’ fees, concert hall and other costs, gleaned from consulting ledgers, minute-books, archives and other such records.155 Opera production books and the sketches of cadenzas and ornaments for Italian arias preserved by singers such as the French soprano Laure Cinti-Damoreau also offer valuable insights into performance history.156
Newspapers and other print Journals, diaries and the monthly and weekly forerunners of modern daily newspapers have included significant observations on concert programme content, concert dates and touring schedules, the deployment of resources and the reception of particular musical events. Contemporary accounts of musical activities are rare before the eighteenth century. However, many periodicals of the eighteenth century and thereafter, whether specifically musical or general, apprise us about concert or opera performances and new publications and include performance reviews and other relevant articles. Although writers in the ‘press’ often had their own political, rather than aesthetic or musical, agenda when writing their critiques, the reviews of composer-critics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weber, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, and critics such as Scheibe, Hanslick or Shaw incorporate invaluable detail about performance style and interpretation.157 Among the most important eighteenth-century specialist music periodicals were the Journal de musique (Paris, 1770–7), the Magazin der Musik (Hamburg and Copenhagen, 1783–9) and the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig, from 1798/9), while general publications such as the Journal de Paris, Mercure de France, the Gentleman’s Magazine or the Wiener Zeitung have also proved informative. The almost insatiable demand for such music periodicals in the nineteenth century prompted the production of A. B. Marx’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1824) in Berlin, Fétis’s Revue musicale (1827) and Schlesinger’s Gazette musicale (1834; amalgamated from November 1835 with the Revue musicale to become the Revue et Gazette musicale) in Paris, and Schumann’s
154 An inventory of instruments owned by the Württemberg court (1718) evidently includes a separate section listing disused instruments (e.g. rackets, crumhorns and cornets); in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, p. 367, art. ‘Performing practice’. 155 See McVeigh, Concert Life, chs. 10 and 11, pp. 167–205. 156 L. Cinti-Damoreau, Méthode de chant, Paris, Heugel, 1849. 157 J. A. Scheibe, Der critische Musikus, 2 vols., 1: Hamburg, 1738, 2: Hamburg, 1740; H. Pleasants (ed. and trans.), Eduard Hanslick: Vienna’s Golden Years of Music 1850–1900, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1950, rev. 2nd edn, New York, Dover, 1963, as Music Criticisms 1846–99); A. Robertson (ed.), G. B. S. on Music, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962.
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celebrated Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1834) in Leipzig, as well as the Musical World (1836) and Musical Times (1844) in London, the Gazzetta musicale (1842) in Milan and Dwight’s Journal of Music (1852) in Boston. Printed concert programmes are another valuable source of information about concert-giving, the content and length of concerts, and period repertoires, particularly in the nineteenth century. They reveal that concerts normally comprised a series of short items (including single movements from large works) set in a clearly defined order and with variety as an essential consideration, so that genres, vocal and instrumental music and categories of performer were alternated; it was unusual, for example, for two arias or two symphonic movements to be performed in succession. Each half of a Gewandhaus concert’s strict programme format in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries offered an overture, an aria, a solo instrumental work and a vocal/choral finale, from either an opera or an oratorio. Programmes also reveal that vocal music was pre-eminent in the eighteenth century, as in musical culture generally at that time, and that ‘ancient music’ featured prominently in eighteenth-century concert life, particularly in England, where the Academy of Ancient Music (est. 1726) and the Concert of Ancient Music (est. 1776) nurtured its popularity. Concerts devoted solely to instrumental music-making were comparatively rare, particularly in the century’s first half. Only when the Italian concerto and the German symphony grew in popularity and scale did instrumental idioms begin to play a more significant part. A particular genre of oratorio concert, built initially around a small number of Handel’s works, became established in many major British and European cities by the end of the eighteenth century and thereafter caught on in America. Programme notes about the works to be performed began to appear during the eighteenth century, especially in Germany.158 English venues were somewhat later off the mark, with Sir George Smart (Amateur Concerts) and John Ella (Musical Union) taking the lead. Programme notes gradually became standard ‘enhancements’ of concert life during the nineteenth century. Advertisements in the press provide all kinds of information regarding concerts, performers, major patrons and the genres of music to be performed. Closer to our times, they have trumpeted the merits of patented inventions, and new instruments and accessories, as well as a wide range of publications relevant to music making and performance.
158 See W. Salmen, Das Konzert: eine Kulturgeschichte, Munich, Beck, 1988.
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Musical taste ‘Taste’ serves as the final arbiter in the interpretation of historical evidence in performance. It is no twentieth-century phenomenon – detailed reference is made to it in a variety of sources, particularly of the eighteenth century.159 For Geminiani, it involved ‘expressing with Strength and Delicacy the Intention of the Composer’; for Mattheson it was ‘that internal sensibility, selection, and judgement by which our intellect reveals itself in matters of feeling’.160 Taste requires performers to exercise discrimination and judgement concerning issues that will best serve the interests of the music and is informed by a thorough understanding of the parameters within which the composer was operating, the consequent national or other stylistic boundaries which should be heeded and a detailed acquaintance with relevant musical conventions. For the optimum tempo, for example, taste involves consideration of a range of factors such as the rate of harmonic change, the character of the figures, the type of texture and so on, right down to the acoustics of the performance venue. Similarly, the effective application of dynamics, stylish continuo playing (where appropriate), flexibility of rhythmic nuance, rubato and appropriate realisation of matters of expression, phrasing, articulation and ornamentation will often necessarily be dependent on sound judgements made in the light of thorough knowledge of the relevant repertoire. Taste is not an immutable quality; it has been in a state of flux through history. Burney commented that Geminiani’s two treatises on taste161 appeared ‘too soon for the present times. Indeed,’ he added, ‘a treatise on good taste in dress, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, would now be as useful to a tailor or milliner, as the rules of taste in Music, forty years ago, to a modern musician.’162 Mozart adapted Handel’s Messiah (1789) to the taste of his times, using a wider range of instrumental colour, implementing changes of order, length and key of various solo items, dispensing with continuo and
159 See, for example, F. Couperin, Pièces de clavecin: troisième livre, Paris, 1722, Preface; Quantz, On Playing the Flute, pp. 22–3; P. F. Tosi, Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni o sieno osservazioni sopra il canto figurato, Bologna, 1723, trans. M. Pilkington, I.29, II.1, III.15 and 19, V.15, VII.4, VIII.4–5, IX.41–2, 63, X.8, 31 and VII.22–4. 160 F. Geminiani, The Art of Playing on the Violin, London, Johnson, 1751, p. 6; J. Mattheson, Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiele, nebst beygefügter musikalischen Geschmacksprobe, Hamburg, 1744, p. 123. 161 F. Geminiani, Rules for Playing in a true Taste on the Violin, German Flute, Violoncello, and Harpsichord particularly the Thorough Bass . . . Op. VIII, London, c. 1748; A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick, London, 1749. 162 C. Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols., London, 1776–89, ed. F. Mercer, 2 vols., London, Harcourt Brace, 1935, repr. New York, Dover, 1957, vol. 2, p. 992.
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adding expressive indications.163 Beethoven and Brahms wrote cadenzas in their own styles for Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor K466, and Mahler, Wagner and others ‘retouched’ Beethoven’s symphonies in keeping with the taste of their era. Further, Leech-Wilkinson has observed how tastes in singing style and interpretation of Schubert’s ‘Wandern’ (Die schöne Müllerin) changed from the simple, straightforward approaches of Elisabeth Schumann, Gerard Hüsch and Lotte Lehmann up to the early 1940s to the more dramatic postSecond World War accounts of, for example, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.164 In order to accommodate changes in musical taste through history performers must devise appropriate solutions to problems for which there may be no definitive or widely accepted answers. Well-considered application of musical taste can give interpretations individuality, variety and their intrinsic value within the flexible, though not indefinitely elastic boundaries of style. Evidence relating to the history of musical performance is wide-ranging and ever-expanding in line with the discoveries of musical research and the continued progress of music as a creative art. If it is to be used beneficially, such raw material must be amassed, criticised, arranged, evaluated and interpreted in accordance with its origin, content, quality and purpose. Problems often arise, for example, in assessing a writer’s background, his motives, his relation to his contemporaries, and his intended or actual readership; and it is rarely clear how widely most of any generation’s music or treatises were known. The various sources themselves may be unreliable to a greater or lesser extent, selfcontradictory or contradictory with one another in some respects and tiresomely repetitive in others. Nevertheless, either singly or as a group, they can assist towards completing a jigsaw which may have several missing pieces. Of course, the sheer weight and complexity of historical, archival and ideological considerations give rise to an extraordinary variety of interpretative possibility. Brown thus urges musicians to construct interpretations that fit as much of the available evidence as possible, drawing in all the various sources ‘to gain a three-dimensional view (admittedly always slightly fictional and coloured by our own preoccupations) of past societies’. The best hypotheses will be ‘those that take most into account and are best able to reconcile apparent contradictions’.165
163 Mozart also ‘modernised’ Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Alexander’s Feast and the Ode for St Cecilia’s Day for Baron van Swieten’s Sunday musicales. 164 D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Musicology and Performance’, www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/ music/dlwpubs.html, p. 8. Last accessed 23 June 2009. 165 In Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, p. 4.
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While performers have to rely substantially on their intuitive response to the music’s expressive implications, their purpose in educating themselves as musicians is to enable them to play instinctively and express themselves imaginatively within a given stylistic framework. They should always be mindful of the dangers of allowing their attempts at stylish interpretation of the music of their forebears to be conditioned by the musical fashions of the intervening years or to be governed too much by rules. As Marpurg remarks concerning embellishments, ‘it is impossible to derive rules suitable to all possible occasions as long as music remains an inexhaustible sea of change, and one person’s feelings differ from another’s’.166 But in their efforts to express themselves within a style, they must attune their imaginations as closely as possible to the taste of the period of the music. In so doing, the knowledge gained from the quasi-archeological process of digging for, and uncovering relevant evidence is crucial.
166 F. W. Marpurg, Anleitung zum Klavierspielen, Berlin, 1755–61, p. 43. See also, for example, Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 298; C. Czerny, Complete Theoretical and Practical Pianoforte School Op. 500, 3 vols., London, 1839, vol. 3, p. 118.
. 4 .
The performer and the composer COREY JAMASON
His execution is not polished – that is, his playing is not unblemished . . . his improvising gave me much pleasure . . . sometimes he does astonishing things. Besides, he ought not be thought of as a pianist, because he is dedicated totally to composition and it is very hard to be at once a composer and a performer.1
This remarkable observation would have astonished earlier generations of musicians. In all likelihood it would have astonished Beethoven and most of his contemporaries as well. The idea that a composer could not be equally skilled as a performer was at the beginning of the nineteenth century revolutionary. Pleyel’s comment, however, is representative of a shift of perspective in many aesthetic considerations during this period. It signals the beginnings of a century-long transition towards a separation of the roles of composers and performers, when the very nature of their relationship changed at a rate unprecedented in history. This chapter will address this relationship by examining the perceived selfidentity of composers and performers, the leadership of ensembles and the changing views regarding so-called ‘fidelity to the score’. It will also survey relevant performance issues which inform this relationship, such as improvisation, tempo and rubato, focusing on increased notational specificity introduced during the nineteenth century.
Communication and collaboration The composer–performer relationship, at once both intimate and remote, is certainly among the most remarkable phenomena in Western music. Co-creators, like actor and playwright, choreographer and dancer, composer and performer have long collaborated fruitfully, but at the same time the relationship has been fraught with tension and potential misunderstandings. 1 Camille Pleyel on Beethoven (1805), cited in W. Newman, Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing his Piano Music his Way, New York, Norton, 1988, p. 80.
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Chief among them have been matters difficult if not impossible to communicate through notation (e.g. tempo, melodic rubato) and improvisation, by its nature resistant to notation. Consider the various contexts in which the confrontation and exchange of ideas between a performer and a composer, or in the composer’s absence, performer and score, may occur in terms of actual music-making: a composer performs his own music alone; a composer leads other performers in the performance of his own music; a composer is not involved in the performance but his music is performed by contemporaries who share his performance practices; a composer’s music is performed in a style remote from his own, separated in time and place from his own epoch and performance practices; a composer’s music is performed by musicians separated from him in time and place but acquainted with the performance style of his era through the study of performance practice and the use of period instruments. One might examine the implications of any of these circumstances to any single era, composer or even specific composition, making the history of the performance style for any one era/composer/composition numbingly complex. As such, the possibility of identifying any one composer–performer relationship in relation to specific repertoire is untenable, since the context of every composition has undergone numerous transformations. Composers seek to express their ideas as precisely as necessary in notation, indicating all that is required for a successful performance. During most of music history, composers led performances of their own music, so confusions as to their intentions could easily be clarified if not through interaction with the composer himself then through the shared performance practices of the day. Beginning with fourteenth-century accounts of Francesco Landini, the most celebrated musicians were almost always performers and composers, practical musicians as well as creative artists.2 The interaction between composers and performers, always developing and changing, nevertheless had one fundamental element that remained essentially the same over many centuries across widely differing compositional and interpretative styles, namely, a belief that the relationship between composers and performers was highly collaborative. Prior to the nineteenth century ‘fidelity to the score’ meant that performers were expected to ‘complete’ the notation through a variety of means.3 Performers sought not only to express an individual composer’s
2 See Filippo Villani’s Liber de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus, cited in P. Weiss and R. Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World, New York, Schirmer, 1984, pp. 72–5. 3 See ‘Negotiating between work, composer and performer: rewriting the story of notational progress’, in J. Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 96–122.
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particular style but were also very much working within a larger framework of shared performance practices within their time period and geographical area. Performers in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods were expected to complete musica ficta.4 Renaissance composers began to add notated accidentals in the sixteenth century, although as Howard Mayer Brown has written, composers in the Renaissance functioned within a highly collaborative system in which performers ‘had to know how and where to add accidentals, how to place the words under the notes in vocal music, and how to arrange compositions for effective combinations of voices and instruments, all crucial decisions that in later times became the exclusive privilege of composers’.5 Flexibility of instrumentation continued in the seventeenth century with Baroque performers expected to organise appropriate continuo bands.6 Tempo was indicated through a developing system that included mensural notation, proportional relationships, metre and its relationship to note values and representative dance movements, and, eventually, tempo words and metronome marks.7 As composers have sought to indicate their ideas clearly, performers have sought to render a composer’s work in a manner believed to be faithful to the score and the composer’s intentions. For almost a millennium, a notation which indicated pitches and later rhythm and metric organisation was sufficient to impart the information needed for a successful performance, since implied in these pitches, rhythms and metres was a host of signals specifically understood by performers to indicate appropriate affect, tempo, strong and weak relationships, as well as a variety of other interpretative decisions. For most of music history, performers could justifiably consider themselves co-creators. The remarkable changes in the nature of the composer–performer relationship during the nineteenth century were concurrent with new, individualistic approaches to composition, an increasing sense of the uniqueness of each creative artist, a newly found reverence for the composer as ‘hero’, as well as the emergence of a new reverence for compositions as important entities unto themselves.8 The intensely collaborative nature of the relationship, many centuries old, ended in what in retrospect seems a remarkably short period of time. Tempo, 4 For a fine introduction to issues relating to musica ficta and other important Renaissance theory and performance practice issues see S. Mead, ‘Renaissance theory’, in J. Kite-Powell (ed.), A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music, New York, Schirmer, 1994, pp. 289–316. 5 H. M. Brown, Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. vii. 6 See J. Ashworth and P. O’Dette, ‘Basso continuo’, in S. Carter (ed.), A Performer’s Guide to SeventeenthCentury Music, New York, Schirmer, 1997, pp. 291–5 for an extremely useful summary of norms of continuo band instrumentation. 7 See G. Houle, Meter in Music: 1600–1800, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987. 8 See T. Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and their Art, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2008.
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long determined by metre and a relationship to note values and related dance movements, began in the late eighteenth century to be indicated by a succession of tempo words. These signalled both affect and relative tempo, particularly in relationship to the metre employed. The ambiguity of these words led the new technology of the metronome at the beginning of the nineteenth century to be greeted with the greatest of enthusiasm followed quickly by disillusionment as to its limitations. It should be noted that the nineteenth century was also the period in which many performing composers and important instrumentalists began to perform music of earlier composers in so-called ‘historical recitals’ as part of the newly developing tradition of the ‘solo’ recital.9 It is not hard to conceive that these artists’ confrontations with scores of Baroque and Classical composers may have inspired them to develop a more precise notation to transmit interpretative ideas in their own music. Their performances of ‘early’ music were the direct antecedent of the practice in our era in which most twenty-first-century performers perform music exclusively from the past. However, nineteenthcentury performers clearly were not so concerned with performance practice issues in their performances of Baroque and Classical repertoire. The idea of posterity had arrived on a wide scale, born both from a Beethovenian sense of the greatness and individuality of the creative artist, as well as inspired by this first wave of an early music revival in the nineteenth century, fired primarily by an intense interest by composers such as Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann and Brahms.10 A sense of the viability and necessity of performing music of the past arose, illustrated by Franz Liszt’s call in 1835 for the ‘inexpensive publication of a Collection of the most remarkable works of all early and modern composers. This publication, embracing in its entirety the development of the art, starting with folk song and arriving gradually, and in historical order, at the choral symphony of Beethoven, might take the title of MUSICAL PANTHEON.’11 This is echoed by Brahms, himself instrumental in the publishing of much ‘early music’, writing to Eduard Hanslick in 1884: ‘how little is being done about new editions of various works whose study and dissemination seem desirable. Specifically, older vocal music of every kind. True, you’ll say it’s not used, either – but it should be, and will be, more and more, without any doubt.’12 9 K. Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 33–71. 10 H. Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988. 11 F. Liszt, ‘On the situation of artists and their condition in society’, in C. Gibbs and D. Gooley (eds.), Franz Liszt and his World, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 300. 12 J. Brahms, Life and Letters, selected and annotated by S. Avins, trans. J. Eisinger and S. Avins, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 614.
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There are two broad categories of notation and the subsequent transmission of a composer’s ideas. First, all those matters which are firmly in the composers’ control: pitch level and relative duration. Secondly, almost all other matters (tempo, articulation, metric stress, dynamics etc.), which, while indicated by composers, are largely subjective and ambiguous. One might add to this list of subjective interpretative decisions important concerns regarding rhythmic freedom and general pacing. How an interpreter of any era responds to these ambiguities is largely what makes each performer unique. The relationship between composers and performers in all its implications is clearly too large to cover comprehensively in the space allowed here, but it is hoped that by addressing several of the most important elements influencing this dynamic relationship we may better understand the complex and changing elements of this fruitful collaboration.
Identity and leadership Surviving accounts of actual performances prior to the twentieth century describe performances by both performers and composers. Indeed, many, if not perhaps the majority of the most celebrated interpreters were also composers. Non-composing performers have, of course, been celebrated from the beginning of recorded history. We learn, for instance, of numerous performers in a c. 1480 treatise of Tinctoris, a work among the first to describe specific musicians celebrated for their playing as distinct from any compositional activities.13 Composer-performers were seen to possess all the supernatural abilities later accorded to the well-known virtuosi of the nineteenth century – often bordering on the fantastic, like this account of an observer of the young Domenico Scarlatti playing the harpsichord, pre-dating similar descriptions of Paganini and Liszt by well over a hundred years: he thought ten hundred devils had been at the instrument; he never had heard such passages of execution and effect before. The performance so far surpassed his own, and every degree of perfection to which he thought it possible he should ever arrive, that, if he had been in sight of any instrument with which to have done the deed, he should have cut off his own fingers.14
A fourteenth-century account of a similar nature is found in one of the earliest biographical accounts of a ‘composer’, Filippo Villani’s description of the blind
13 Cited in Weiss and Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World, p. 158. 14 From C. Burney, A General History of Music, cited in Weiss and Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World, p. 235.
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Francesco Landini found in a discussion of fourteenth-century Florentines.15 He writes that when the youthful Landini: had come to perceive music’s charm and sweetness, he began to compose, first for voices, then for strings and organ. He made astonishing progress. And then, to everyone’s amazement, he took up a number of musical instruments – remember, he had never seen them – as readily as if he could still see. In particular, he began to play the organ, with such great dexterity – always accurately however – and with such expressiveness that he far surpassed any organist in living memory. All this, I fear, can hardly be set down without some accusation of its having been made up . . . it is worth mentioning however, that no one ever played the organ so well. All musicians grant him that.16
Even accounts of composers perhaps not the most brilliant performers concede a great ability and authority, as in Samuel Wesley’s description of Haydn’s playing in 1792 in which he reports that Haydn’s ‘performance on the Piano Forte, although not such as to stamp him a first-rate artist upon that Instrument, was indisputably neat and distinct. In the Finale of one of his Symphonies (No. 98), is a Passage of attractive Brilliancy, which he has given to the Piano Forte, and which the Writer of this Memoir remembers him to have executed with the utmost Accuracy and Precision.’17 To compose has naturally always been considered the height of the art. A feeling of reverence for composers particularly characteristic of the twentieth century was expressed by Gustav Leonhardt: ‘No, I have nothing to say, I am only a player.’ ‘As opposed to?’ asks the interviewer, Leonhardt’s response being ‘to a real musician, which is a composer’.18 The gulf between composers and performers offered wonderful opportunities for satire. Johann Kuhnau mocked would-be composer-performers in his satirical novel The Musical Charlatan: Music is one of those arts that demand the greatest industry to be learned. I shall ask only those who from childhood on have seriously pursued music along with their other studies – for I desire no answer from those scholars who are not at home in this noble science – whether they wouldn’t say that one could appear in the Frankfurt Catalog of Learned Authors more readily than compose a concerto of good invention and one without reproach . . . There are people who may understand how some notes go together or may even only 15 See R. Wegman, ‘From maker to composer: improvisation and musical authority in the Low Countries, 1450–1500’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 409–79, for an important discussion of the development of the concept of a ‘composer’. 16 F. Villani, Liber de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus, cited in Weiss and Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World, pp. 74–5. 17 S. P. Rosenblum, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 19. 18 B. D. Sherman, Inside Early Music, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 203–4.
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scratch out ‘La folie d’Espagne’ on the lute or saw away at ‘The Angel’s Bell’ on the viola da gamba, who always act as if Jupiter were their father and everyone has to revere them as Apollo.19
Prior to celebrated teachers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Theodor Leschetizky and Leopold Auer, it was composers who were the teachers of the greatest fame, both of other composers and also of instrumental and vocal performers. A description of Josquin provides an early example: ‘My teacher Josquin des Prez never rehearsed or wrote out any musical exercises, yet in a short time made perfect musicians, since he did not hold his students back with lengthy and frivolous instructions, but imparted precepts in few words, while teaching practical singing.’20 In his 1702 discourse on harpsichord playing, M. de Saint-Lambert describes the merits of what makes a great teacher, recommending that ‘the knowledge of a teacher does not simply mean that he must be a skilful player of the harpsichord and an excellent composer of music; it must be understood that in addition to these two assets he should have the gift of demonstrating, which is a very distinct quality from that of being a famous musician’.21 Interestingly, Saint-Lambert seems to suggest that being a famous teacher and composer is in fact not necessarily enough to produce a great teacher, one must also have the capacity to ‘demonstrate’ as well. The basis of teaching composition during the Baroque era was largely achieved through the study of continuo playing, a performance art. C. P. E. Bach described his father’s teaching as such: ‘His pupils had to begin their studies by learning pure four-part thorough bass . . . the realization of a thorough bass and the introduction to chorales are without doubt the best method of studying composition, as far as harmony is concerned’.22 Direct involvement with a composer was clearly considered the most important means to learn that composer’s style. Musicians of the past frequently report that even contact with those who knew the composers, or who had heard them, was useful. Jean de Gallois, writing in 1680, provides an interesting instance of this concept in his discussion regarding Chambonnières: Some have imitated him because they were indeed his pupils and because, having taken lessons from him, it was easier in this way for them to absorb his style. The others did it simply on the basis of the impression they had retained 19 J. Kuhnau, The Musical Charlatan, trans. J. Russell, Columbia, SC, Camden House, 1997, p. 3. 20 A. P. Coclico, Compendium musices (1552), trans. A. Seay, Colorado Springs, CO, Colorado College Music Press, 1973, p. 16. 21 M. de Saint-Lambert, Les principes du clavecin, Paris, 1702, trans. and ed. R. Harris-Warrick as Principles of the Harpsichord, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 6. 22 C. P. E. Bach, cited in J. Lester, Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 65.
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of his style of playing from having heard him; and others, merely on the imaginary idea which they had formed of his playing from having heard it described.23
Indeed, Johann Jacob Froberger (and presumably most other composers) thought it essential to have studied directly with himself, as Caspar Grieffgens, a Froberger pupil, recalled that the composer ‘indicated that the master was loath to part with his works to any but the best players, judging them impossible to play unless they had been taught by himself ’.24 J. F. A. von Uffenbach, a German student visiting Venice in 1715, recalls Vivaldi’s desire to demonstrate the performance of his works: ‘Vivaldi came to see me this afternoon, and brought me what I had ordered, namely 10 concerti grossi, some of which, as he said, he had composed expressly for me; and so that I might hear them better, he wished to teach them to me at once and come to see me from time to time.’25 The most celebrated professional musicians of the eighteenth century were at some level both composers and performers; however, non-composing eighteenth-century singers (as well as instrumental soloists) notoriously did as they pleased. Performers frequently rearranged works of their own as well as of other composers, and all solo performers, of course, improvised.26 This paints a picture in which we may assume even in performances led by the composer, leading soloists had a great deal of latitude in what they actually played or sang. Nevertheless, specific accounts of performances led by composers frequently suggest a certain level of control even within this period of tremendous freedoms accorded to performers. A report on Buxtehude provides a fine example: ‘Whoever does not like this should hear sometime the incomparable Mr. Buxtehude perform at Lübeck. He puts not two or three violins on a part, but twenty and thirty and even more. But all these instrumentalists must not change a single note or dot, or bow otherwise than he has directed.’27 Even in a not so subtle criticism of a composer’s performance, such as is found in this description of Vivaldi’s playing, there was a powerful sense of the authenticity of the interpretation: 23 D. Fuller, ‘French harpsichord playing in the 17th century: after le Gallois’, Early Music, 4 (1976), 23. 24 G. B. Sharp, ‘J. J. Froberger: 1614–1667: a link between the Renaissance and Baroque’, Musical Times, 108 (1967), 1094. 25 E. Preussner, Die musikalischen Reisen des Herrn von Uffenbach, cited in Taruskin and Weiss (eds.), Music in the Western World, p. 236. 26 See J. Spitzer and N. Zaslaw, ‘Improvised ornamentation in eighteenth-century orchestras’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39 (1986), 524–77, for an important discussion of improvisational trends among ripieno players in eighteenth-century orchestras. 27 K. Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, New York, Schirmer, 1987, p. 383.
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the manager of this theater is the famous Vivaldi, who was also the composer of the opera. . . . Vivaldi played an admirable solo to accompany an aria, at the conclusion of which he added an improvisation that really frightened me, for I doubt anything like it was ever done before, or ever will be again: he came within a hairsbreadth of the bridge, leaving no room for the bow, and this on all 4 strings, with imitations and at an incredible speed. He astonished everyone with this, although to say it touched me would not be true, because it was not as agreeable to listen to as it was cunningly contrived.28
There do exist some accounts of composer-performers having less than successful leadership turns. A description of Francesco Geminiani provides an interesting example of a brilliant performer and a fine composer not necessarily always successful in a leadership role, as described by Charles Burney: (after studying with Corelli in Rome) he went to Naples, where from the reputation of his performance at Rome, he was placed at the head of the orchestra; but, according to the elder Barbella, he was soon discovered to be so wild and unsteady a timist, that instead of regulating and conducting the band, he threw it into confusion; as none of the performers were able to follow him in his tempo rubato, and other unexpected accelerations and relaxations of measure. After this discovery, the younger Barbella assured me, that his father, who well remembered his arrival in Naples, said he was never trusted with a better part than the tenor, during his residence in that city.29
It is a mistake to assume that early forms of leadership, either by beating time or by leading from the violin or keyboard,30 were in any sense ineffective. Adam Carse provides an example of this opinion: The mental pictures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century orchestras playing under the direction of ‘conductors’ seated at and playing the clavicembalo, of violinist-leaders struggling to control their forces with nods of the head and stamps of the foot, of Paris conductors thumping out the beats with a pole, of Gluck conducting ‘violin in hand,’ of Mozart who ‘thought it well to sit at the piano and conduct,’ or ‘taking the violin out of the hands of M. La Houssave, and conducting myself,’ of the ludicrous scene between Dr. Hayes and Mr. Cramer at the first Handel Commemoration Festival, even of Beethoven conducting the Choral Symphony without being able to hear it; these and dozens of similar stories of the musical past more than hint at standards of performance too harrowing for present-day composers to think about.31
However difficult some circumstances may have been, it was largely composers, leading by beating time or while playing the violin or keyboard, who founded 28 E. Preussner, Die musikalischen Reisen des Herrn von Uffenbach, cited in Taruskin and Weiss (eds.), Music in the Western World, p. 236. 29 J. Tarling, Baroque String Playing for Ingenious Learners, St Albans, Corda Music, 2000, p. 31. 30 See J. Spitzer and N. Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 387–93. 31 A. Carse, The History of Orchestration, New York, Dover, 1964, pp. 336–7.
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the art of orchestral excellence. And although these forms of leadership would be eventually superseded by independent conductors at the beginning of the nineteenth century (begun largely, it should noted, by conducting composers, i.e. Spohr, Berlioz, Mendelssohn etc.), earlier composers such as Lully, Corelli and Handel led what were in their day the most famous ensembles in Europe.32 The mechanics of these pre-conducting forms of leadership were entirely suitable for the repertoire as well as the disposition of the instruments performing. Still, it is clear that composer-leaders occasionally attempted to improve the mechanics of their contact with the players. A fascinating example is found in a report by Handel’s frequent librettist Charles Jennens of a new organ, apparently designed by Handel himself: Mr. Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever. . . . His second maggot is an organ . . . this organ, he says, is so constructed that as he sits at it he has a better command of his performers than he used to have, and he is highly delighted to think with what exactness his Oratorio will be performed by the help of this organ; so that for the future instead of beating time at his oratorios, he is to sit at the organ all the time with his back to the Audience. (1738)33
Most leaders in the eighteenth century led while playing, as evidenced in Johann Mattheson’s opinion that ‘things always work out better when I both play and sing along than when I merely stand there and beat time. Playing and singing in this way inspires and enlivens the performers.’34 This was leadership at the most active level, actual participation in the creation of sound as opposed to leadership through beating time or later, by conducting.35 In the present day, it is a commonly expressed belief that composers are not necessarily considered the best interpreters. This somewhat paradoxical view would likely have astounded most musicians in the past since almost all composers prior to the twentieth century were performers themselves. However, we do begin to encounter the first stirrings of this opinion expressed as early as the 1750s by Quantz, in his discussion of the qualities needed for orchestral leadership: The greatest skill required of a leader is that he have a perfect understanding of how to play all types of compositions in accordance with their style, sentiment, and purpose, and in the correct tempos. He must therefore have even more experience with regard to what distinguishes one piece from another than a composer. The latter often troubles himself only with what he has written 32 For an account of Lully’s orchestra and for a discussion of Corelli’s leadership see Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, pp. 70–104 and 105–36. 33 Letter of Charles Jennens, 19 September 1738, London, cited in Weiss and Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World, pp. 243–4. 34 Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, p. 389. 35 For a discussion of the demise of this system, see ibid., pp. 390–1.
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himself. Many do not know how to execute their own things in the correct tempos, whether from excessive indifference, too much ardour, or too little experience. A clever leader, however, can easily correct these errors.36
Quantz’s view was the wave of the future. Robert Schumann, writing some eighty years later, went much further, suggesting that composers are not the best interpreters of their own works: Experience has proven that the composer is usually not the finest and most interesting performer of his own works, especially his most recent ones, which he has not yet mastered from an objective point of view. Other people often know how to express our meanings better than we do ourselves. (Eusebius) Right. And should the composer, who needs rest at the conclusion of a work, strive at once to concentrate his powers on its performance, his judgement – like overfatigued sight that tries to fix itself on one point – would become clouded, if not blind. We have seen instances when composers have wholly misinterpreted their own works by such a forced operation. (Raro)37
As musicians in the nineteenth century began to reconsider the distinctive roles of composers and performers in actual performance, it may be safe to assume that composers initially gave up their participatory role as performers unwillingly. A removal from the process of preparation and performance would have been unthinkable to most composers in prior eras. In an account of Giuseppe Verdi leading rehearsals of Macbeth in the late 1840s, we gain a fascinating picture of a composer rehearsing his music with tremendous ardour: ‘The implacable Verdi spared no thought for his artists: he tired and tormented them with the same number for hours on end, and he never moved to a different scene until they had managed to perform the piece in a manner which fell least short of his ideal.’38 ‘Which fell least short’ of the ‘ideal’ performance as imagined by the composer may be assumed to be a worthy goal of any performer! The opinion expressed by Schumann may be thought to have taken hold in the minds of most musicians by the beginning of the twentieth century. As such, new problems and frustrations arose among composers from this newly established independence of performers, particularly when not involved with either the performance or preparation of their works, as expressed by Arnold Schoenberg in an indignant letter to fellow composer Edgard Varèse in 1922:
36 J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, trans. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber, 1966, p. 208. 37 R. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. K. Wolff and trans. P. Rosenfeld, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1946, p. 50. 38 M. Conati, Encounters with Verdi, trans. R. Stokes, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1964, p. 25.
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What offends me equally, however, is that without asking me whether you CAN and MAY do so you simply set a definitive date for my ‘Pierrot lunaire’. But do you even know whether you can manage it? Have you already got a suitable speaker [Sprecherin]; a violinist, a pianist, a conductor, etc.? How many rehearsals do you mean to hold, etc . . . etc.? In Vienna, with everyone starving and shivering, something like 100 rehearsals were held and an impeccable ensemble formed with my collaboration. But you people simply fix a date and think that’s all there is to it! Have you any inkling of the difficulties of the style, of the declamation, of the tempi, of the dynamics and all that? And you expect me to associate myself with it? No, I’m not smart enough for that! If you want to have anything to do with me, you must set about it quite differently. What I want to know is: 1. How many rehearsals? 2. Who is in charge of rehearsals? 3. Who does the Sprechstimme? 4. Who are the players? If all this is to my satisfaction, I shall give my blessing. But for the rest I am, of course, powerless and you can do as you like. But then kindly refrain from asking me about it. I regret not being able to say anything more obliging. But I must reject this exclusively business approach. I sincerely hope that another time I may have the occasion to be more cordial.39
With music of dead composers being performed with greater frequency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a host of new problems and concerns arose; as not only the balance of control had shifted in the performance of new music, composers in particular could look upon performances and performers of ‘early’ music with dismay, as in this hilarious fantasy imagined by Claude Debussy: This one hurries, that one takes his time, but it’s always poor old Beethoven who comes off worse in the end. The informed will declare that so-and-so conductor’s got the ‘correct’ tempo. But who are they to know! Are they in receipt of communications from Above? It’s nothing more than posthumous chitchat – astonishing coming from Beethoven. If his errant spirit were to wander into a concert hall, I’m sure he would fly back as quickly as he could to the place where the only music is that of the spheres! And old Father Bach could say to him, with the hint of a reprimand, ‘but my dear Ludwig, I can see from your wilting soul that you’ve been down to that dreadful place again.’ Perhaps that would be the last time they’d speak to each other.40
The performance of music of the past (by independent, non-composing interpreters) brought about a torrent of concerns relating to fidelity and interpretation. At the same time the performance of new music was largely out of the hands of composers by the beginning of the twentieth century. This occurred at the same 39 E. Stein (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg Letters, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser, London, Faber, 1964, pp. 78–9. 40 C. Debussy, Debussy on Music, collected by F. Lesure, trans. and ed. R. L. Smith, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 23–4.
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time, it may be said, that from a notational point of view, composers were enjoying more control than ever before. These developments lead to a reconsideration of what may be considered the real revolution of the nineteenth century. Frequently and accurately understood as an age of the virtuoso, the period from 1800 to 1900 may perhaps be better framed as an era in which composers succeeded in developing far greater control of the performances of their music than ever before, ironically in the next century to the very period in which they largely ceased to be performers themselves.
Improvisation The interaction between composers and performers was decisively changed by the banishment of improvisation as an important element of performance. Music history can be divided into two broad periods: a long period of time, which may be described as the age of improvisation, and a post-improvisational era. The first period, encompassing the entirety of music history until around 1850, may with some justification be defined as an age of creative collaboration and is notable for its intensely collaborative interaction between composers and performers in the creation of a ‘final’ product, achieved largely through free improvisation among other interpretative decisions. Our present era is largely absorbed in the performance of music composed during this improvisational age, indeed the predominant repertoire of many performers today stems from the compositions of the last flowering of improvising composers (i.e. Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt et al.).41 Examining the psychology of performers active during the improvisational age is thus crucial to understanding the expectations of composers active during this large period. Because of wide areas for potential abuse or disagreement, improvisation has always been among the most difficult of interpretative problems, with most composers urging restraint and sobriety. It started from the beginning of the era in which one can properly identify individual composers. Guillaume de Machaut provides a particularly early example: and by God it is long since I have made so good a thing to my satisfaction; and the tenors are as sweet as unsalted pap. I beg therefore that you deign to hear it, and learn the thing just as it is, without adding or taking away; and it is to be sung in a goodly long measure; and if anyone play it on the organs, bagpipe, or other instrument, that is its right nature.42
41 For an interesting discussion of Mendelssohn’s distaste of public improvisation see Hamilton, After the Golden Age, pp. 45–9. 42 G. Machaut, Le Livre du Voir-Dit, c. 1363, cited in P. Weiss (ed.), Letters of Composers through Six Centuries, Philadelphia, PA, Chilton Books, 1967, pp. 1–2.
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Machaut, clearly prescribing the tempo as well as indicating a flexibility of instrumentation typical of the fourteenth century, appears to insist that his work be performed ‘as written’, ‘without adding or taking away’. But this is perhaps an unusual example. While it is clear that composers have always been concerned about over-zealous embellishment it is also clear that the art of improvisation by performers was an expected, crucial responsibility of performers within the collaboration between composers and performers, indeed, the success of a composition was largely dependent upon it.43 A recollection by Manuel García the younger regarding a c. 1815 rehearsal involving his father Manuel García, is a fine example of a performer fulfilling the intentions of the composer through improvisational co-creation: When his first aria had been reached he sang it off with perfect phrasing and feeling, but exactly note for note as written. After he had finished the composer said, ‘Thank you signor, very nice, but not at all what I wanted’. He asked for an explanation, and was informed that the melody was merely a skeleton which the singer should clothe with whatever his imagination and artistic instinct prompted . . . The elder Garcia was skillful at improvising . . . he made a number of alterations and additions, introducing runs, trills, roulades and cadenzas . . . The old composer shook him warmly by the hand. ‘Bravo! Magnificent! That was my music as I wished it to be given’.44
This fascinating recollection, relatively late within the period of improvisation, is representative of a centuries-old practice of active collaboration between composers and performers. But the practice was largely over by this time; as Clive Brown explains, the composer in question was of the ‘old Italian school’. Regardless of the account of Beethoven’s apparent delight with Bridgetower’s embellishments during a performance of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, the act of adding embellishments to set compositions was essentially finished by the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the exception of continued improvisation in bel canto repertoire. As Beethoven wrote in his famous letter of apology to his student Carl Czerny: ‘you must forgive a composer who would rather have heard his work performed exactly as it was written, however beautifully you played it in other respect.’45 This proves that Czerny did ornament as a matter of course. Beethoven appears to be apologising for demanding a complete fidelity to the written notes because it was an exceptionally unusual request at the time. For all of history prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century, performers were indeed expected to ‘beautify’ a work, as explained by Thomas Mace in 43 See D. Fuller, ‘The Performer as Composer’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 117–46. 44 M. S. Mackinlay, Garcia the Centenarian and his Times, Edinburgh, 1908, p. 34, cited in C. Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 419. 45 The Letters of Beethoven, trans. and ed. E. Anderson, 3 vols., London, Macmillan, 1961, vol. 2, p. 560, letter from Beethoven to Czerny, 12 February 1816.
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1676: ‘For your Foundations being surely Laid, and your Building well Rear’d, you may proceed to the Beautifying, and Painting of your Fabrick.’ 46 ‘Beautifying’ meant adding both small graces as well as melodic embellishments. Small graces were to be added by performers for it was ‘troublesome’ for a composer to indicate them, as in this 1682 instruction by Nicola Matteis: ‘To set your tune off the better, you must make several sorts of Graces of your one Genius, it being very troublesome for the Composer to mark them.’47 A hyper-awareness of national style took hold in the Baroque era, in no area perhaps as distinct as in discussions of ornamentation, Quantz’s statement being representative of many commentators: ‘French composers usually write the embellishments with the air, and the performer thus needs only to concern himself with executing them well. In the Italian style in former times no embellishments at all were set down, and everything was left to the caprice of the performer.’48 This ‘caprice’ of the performer, however, frequently inspired enormous anxiety among composers as evidenced by innumerable statements by composers warning against excessive ornamentation in their works. These comments evoke an at times collegial, but more frequently, confrontational relationship between composers and performers. Of particular concern was the fear that performers would destroy the intended expression of the composition, as Count Bardi strongly stated, c. 1580, that ‘the noblest function a singer can perform is that of giving proper and exact expression to the canzone as set down by the composer, not imitating those who aim only at being thought clever (a ridiculous pretense) and who so spoil a madrigal with their ill-ordered passages that even the composer himself would not recognize it as his creation’.49 And from C. P. E. Bach, some 170 years later: Above all things, a prodigal use of embellishments must be avoided. Regard them as spices which may ruin the best dish or gewgaws which may deface the most perfect building. Notes of no great moment and those sufficiently brilliant by themselves should remain free of them, for embellishments serve only to increase the weight and import of notes and to differentiate them from others. Otherwise, I would commit the same error as orators who try to place an impressive accent on every word; everything would be alike and consequently unclear.50 . . . My feelings are these: Not everything should be varied, 46 T. Mace, Musick’s Monument, London, 1676. 47 N. Matteis, The False Consonances of Musick, London, 1682. 48 Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 163. 49 Count Giovanni de Bardi, Discorso . . . sopra la musica antica, c. 1580, cited in F. Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 24. 50 C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2 vols., Berlin, 1753 and 1762, repr. 1957, trans. and ed. W. J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, New York, Norton, 1949, p. 81.
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for if it is the reprise will become a new piece. Many things, particularly affettuoso or declamatory passages, cannot be readily varied. Also, gallant notation is so replete with new expressions and twists that it is seldom possible even to comprehend it immediately. All variations must relate to the piece’s affect, and they must always be at least as good as, if not better than, the original. For example, many variants of melodies introduced by executants in the belief that they honor a piece, actually occurred to the composer, who, however, selected and wrote down the original because he considered it the best of its kind.51
Echoing this, Quantz wrote that: Some persons believe that they will appear learned if they crowd an Adagio with many graces, and twist them around in such fashion that all too often hardly one note among ten harmonizes with the bass, and little of the principal air can be perceived. Yet in this they err greatly, and show their lack of true feeling for good taste.52
These exhortations for discretion were one method for encouraging restraint, but by also notating their music more completely, composers began to take away the liberty of improvisation from performers by simply ornamenting the music for them. Music was changing and these changes were initially met with some degree of resistance, as found in Johann Adolph Scheibe’s 1737 diatribe against J. S. Bach: this great man would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more amenity, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art . . . Every ornament, every little grace, and everything that one thinks of as belonging to the method of playing, he expresses completely in notes: and this not only takes away from his pieces the beauty of harmony but completely covers the melody throughout.53
Bach’s friend Johann Abraham Birnbaum responded to Scheibe’s criticism by invoking the practice of the French: ‘the Hon. Court Composer is neither the first nor the only man to write thus. From a mass of composers whom I could cite in this respect, I will mention only Grigny and Du Mage, who in their Livres d’orgue have used this very method.’54 J. S. Bach’s ornately composed music was representative of a new style of composition and may be considered an important example of the beginning of a transformation in the nature of the composer–performer collaboration. Echoing Scheibe’s complaint is this illuminating example from Anselm Bayly, writing in 1777, in which he both criticises composers for writing
51 Ibid., p. 165. 52 Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 120. 53 H. David and A. Mendel, The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, rev. C. Wolff, New York, Norton, 1998, p. 338. 54 Ibid., p. 346.
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their own graces and admits that most singers are not adept at the art of improvisation: the business of a composer is to the air and expression in plain notes, who goes out of his province when he writes graces, which serve for the most part only to stop and confine the invention and imagination of a singer. The only excuse a composer can plead for this practice, is the want of qualifications in the generality of singers.55
Singers, however, were generally considered well versed in the art, as J. F. Agricola, in his 1757 translation of Pier Tosi’s 1723 vocal treatise, notes in an amusing description of what to him was a pretence of certain composers: ‘Appoggiaturas have become so familiar through regular practice that the student who has been correctly taught them, though just out of school, will laugh at composers who indicate them by notes because they either think this custom fashionable or want to give the impression that they know how to sing better than the singers themselves.’56 It is clear that in the area of melodic embellishment there were repeated calls for restraint. Regarding small ornaments, as observed above generally notated by the French, there exists no better example of a composer seeking to exercise complete control of the performance of his works than this famous passage written by François Couperin in 1722: I am always surprised (after the great care I have taken to indicate the appropriate ornaments for my pieces, which are rather completely explained in my description of my playing method known by the title L’Art de toucher le clavecin) to hear of persons who have learned these pieces without following my rules. This is an unpardonable oversight, the more so because it is entirely improper to add whatever ornaments one wishes. I affirm that my pieces should be executed exactly as I have marked them, and that they will never make the correct impression on persons of true taste so long as the performer does not observe to the letter all that I have marked, adding and removing nothing.57
Composers of the Classical era began to ornament their andantes and adagios with increasing complexity. The Artaria and Schott edition of W. A. Mozart’s Piano Sonata in B flat Major K332 (1772), gives a highly ornamented version of the Andante which may be compared with the far more simple version found in the autograph score. Clearly, much improvisation is necessary in Mozart’s music, particularly in numerous slow movements of his piano concertos and 55 A. Bayly, Practical Treatise on Singing and Playing with Just Expression and Real Elegance, 1771, cited in Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, p. 417. 56 J. Agricola, Anleitung zur Singkunst, Berlin, G. F. Winter, 1757, trans. J. C. Baird as Introduction to the Art of Singing, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 91. 57 P. Beaussant, François Couperin, Paris, Fayard, 1980, trans. A. Land, Portland, OR, Amadeus Press, 1990, p. 288.
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in his earliest operatic arias; nevertheless, by publishing the ornamented version of this Andante as well as other similarly ornamented andante and adagio movements, Mozart was an important figure in the move towards notated ornamentation.58 Improvisation in the nineteenth century was largely practised by bel canto performers as well as in performances by virtuoso pianists.59 Here too, we find amusing examples of frustrations of composers as in Rossini’s reaction to an exuberantly embellished performance of his ‘Una voce poco fa’ by the celebrated soprano Adelina Patti: ‘very nice, my dear, and who wrote the piece you have just performed?’60 Chopin’s performing style was largely based on performances of celebrated bel canto singers. As reported by his pupils ‘his playing is entirely based on the vocal style of Rubini, Malibran and Grisi’.61 Chopin’s own improvisations were described by his pupil Karol Mikuli, writing that Chopin ‘took particular pleasure in playing Field’s Nocturnes, to which he would improvise the most beautiful fiorituras’.62 The practice of adding embellishment to Chopin’s own music appears to have lingered until the end of the nineteenth century and may be heard in the alternate figurations performed by Theodor Leschetizky’s 1906 WelteMignon piano roll performance of the Nocturne in D flat major Op. 27 No. 2. The act of improvising introductions, ‘preluding’, also appears to have been a common practice by many nineteenth-century pianists.63 As performers increasingly ceased to improvise, however, it was found necessary to find a manner of imitating the spontaneity of improvisation. A recommendation that ‘improvised’ cadenzas be learned, memorised and then offered in a spontaneous manner is described in 1789 by Daniel Gottlob Türk: ‘From what has been said it follows that a cadenza which perhaps has been learned from memory with great effort or has been written out before should be performed as if it were merely invented on the spur of the moment, consisting of a choice of ideas indiscriminately thrown together which had just occurred to the player.’64 The practice of freely improvising Classical era concerto cadenzas was in actuality 58 See R. Levin, ‘Instrumental ornamentation, improvisation, and cadenzas’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 276–84. 59 On the lingering tradition of improvisation in nineteenth-century vocal music see Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, p. 418. 60 Ibid., p. 420. 61 J. -J. Eigeldinger (ed.), Chopin, Pianist and Teacher: As Seen by his Pupils, trans. N. Shohet, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 45. 62 Ibid., p. 52. 63 For a fascinating discussion of this practice see Hamilton, After the Golden Age, pp. 101–38; and for a discussion of textual fidelity and improvisation among nineteenth-century pianists, ibid., pp. 179–223. 64 D. G. Türk, Clavierschule, Leipzig and Halle, 1789, trans. R. H. Haggh as School of Clavier Playing, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 301.
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short-lived. By 1811 we find the following instruction from Beethoven in his socalled ‘Emperor’ Concerto (composed between 1809 and 1811): ‘Do not improvise a cadenza, but begin the following (written-out cadenza) immediately.’65 Imitating the ‘feeling’ of spontaneous improvisation was recalled by Chopin’s pupil Wilhelm von Lenz: ‘It looks so simple! Chopin used to say of these ornaments that “they should sound as though improvised”.’66 The necessity to sound as if one was improvising was to become a major focus of the postimprovisational era, essential to foster a sense of believability and spontaneity, and largely achieved through the employment of rhythmic freedom.
Tempo and rhythmic flexibility As noted above, composers have sought to indicate tempo through a variety of means. Composers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, employed a precise system through which they were able to indicate general tempi through the use of specific metres, note values employed, and their relationship to corresponding dance movements utilising the same metre. These relationships indicated general tempo, affect, relative degrees of accentuation, strong and weak relationships as well as a general articulation scheme. Beethoven’s repeated enquiry after performances of his works, as reported by Schindler, ‘how were the tempos?’ was a question unlikely to be posed by Baroque composers.67 This is not to say that the Baroque sources are not littered with composers begging performers to use discretion. But Baroque performers shared a well-developed performance practice in determining tempo. The understanding of these Baroque tempo indications could be difficult to ascertain, as explained by Saint-Lambert: ‘The imprecise meaning of the time signatures is a defect in the art for which musicians are not responsible and which may easily be pardoned them.’68 But there was widespread agreement by many commentators as to the general signals regarding affect implied by the various metres. On the relationship of metre to tempo and accentuation, J. P. Kirnberger explained that: every piece of dance music has its particular ‘beat movement’ which is determined by the meter and by the note values which are used within it. With regard to meter, those with longer beats, such as the alla breve, 3/2 and 6/4, move more heavily and slowly than those with shorter beats, such as the 2/4, 3/4 and 6/8, and these in turn are less lively than the 3/8 and 6/16.69
65 66 68 69
See Rosenblum, Performance Practices, pp. 289–309. Eigeldinger, Chopin, Pianist and Teacher, p. 52. 67 See Rosenblum, Performance Practices, p. 321. Saint-Lambert, Principles of the Harpsichord, p. 65. Cited in A. Newman, Bach and the Baroque, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon, 1985, p. 25.
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As Baroque dance forms in the early Classical era became increasingly obsolete and as the new compositional style became more varied, the system began to disassemble. To address the problem, composers began to add tempo words to existing means of indicating speed with greater frequency, replacing in some sense the function of the old-fashioned dances in the equation. Mozart’s report to his father on a performance of Muzio Clementi serves as an example of a concept of notation in which the indication of tempo was achieved through the combination of tempo words and metre: ‘Clementi is a Ciarlattano like all Italians. He writes Presto and even Prestissimo and alla Breve on his sonatas–and plays them Allegro in 4/4 time – I know, I heard him play.’70 A fundamental problem with tempo words was widely discussed during the late eighteenth century, namely, what did the words actually mean? Did they imply affect and character or actual tempo? Beethoven clearly had no certainty he could successfully communicate his ideas to performers through tempo words, due to their ambiguity. Addressing the relationship of note values to metre, his comments written on a working draft of his ‘Klage’ WoO 113 (c. 1790), provide insights into the composer’s attempt to comprehend the differing implications of notational decisions: ‘In the past, longer note values were always taken more slowly than shorter ones; for example crotchets slower than quavers. The smaller note values determine the tempo, for example. Semiquavers and demisemiquavers in 2/4 time make the tempo very slow. Perhaps the contrary is also true.’71 Beethoven’s frustration with tempo words provides a further example of his compositional/notational process, as indicated in an 1813 letter regarding his arrangements of British folk songs: If among the airs that you may send me to be arranged in the future there are Andantinos, please tell me whether Andantino is to be understood as meaning faster or slower than Andante, for this term, like so many in music, is of so indefinite a significance that Andantino sometimes approaches an Allegro and sometimes, on the other hand, is played like Adagio.72
There is no doubt that in many instances tempo words implied expression perhaps more than an absolute tempo; in this way tempo words replaced the dance and became an indicator of affect.73 Yet even as an indicator of affect, Beethoven expressed real frustration with tempo words, as he explained in a letter addressed to Ignaz von Mosel:
70 Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life: Selected Letters, ed. and trans. R. Spaethling, London, Faber, 2000, p. 353. 71 R. Kramer, ‘Notes to Beethoven’s education’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18 (1975), 75. 72 Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, rev. and ed. E. Forbes, Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 555. 73 For a discussion of the multiple implications of tempo words see Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, p. 337.
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I am heartily delighted to know that you hold the same views as I do about our tempo indications which originated in the barbarous ages of music. For, to take one example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which really signifies merry, and how very far removed we often are from the idea of that tempo. So much so that the piece itself means the very opposite of the indication . . . As for me, I have long been thinking of abandoning those absurd descriptive terms, Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto; and Maelzel’s metronome affords us the best opportunity of doing so.74
The introduction of the metronome promised to be one of the most important developments in the transmission of a composer’s intentions to performers. Indeed, no composer was initially more enthusiastic than Beethoven, as may be observed in his request to his publisher to wait for his metronome markings for the Missa solemnis: ‘Do wait for them. In our century such indications are certainly necessary . . . We can scarcely have tempi ordinari any longer, since one must fall into line with the ideas of unfettered genius.’75 This is a quotation of extraordinary importance, demonstrating Beethoven’s belief in the individuality of the creative artist as well as the success of the metronome in dealing with the newly found problem of communicating tempo, independent of commonly understood, comparative models like the dance. Beethoven and Hummel, indeed a whole generation of musicians, believed that the problem of communicating tempo had finally been solved. As Hummel optimistically wrote: to composers it offers the great advantage, that their compositions when marked accordingly to the degrees of the metronome, will be performed in every country in exactly the same time; and the effect of their works will not now, as formerly, (notwithstanding the most carefully chosen musical terms), be lost by being played in a hurried or retarded movement.76
Of course, almost immediately a sense of the limitations of the new technology arose, diminishing this initial enthusiasm.77 The practice of assigning any one tempo to a composition was realised almost immediately to be absurd. Igor Stravinsky mused on the problem: ‘The metronome marks one wrote forty years ago were contemporary forty years ago. Time is not alone in affecting tempo – circumstances do too, and every performance is a different equation of
74 The Letters of Beethoven, vol. 2, p. 727. 75 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1325. 76 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 10 (1809), 603, trans., in Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, p. 305. 77 See Rosenblum, Performance Practices, ch. 9, and Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, ch. 8, for thorough examinations of late eighteenth-century tempo conventions and issues related to Beethoven’s metronome markings.
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them. I would be surprised if any of my own recordings follow the metronome markings.’78 It was also observed that the use of the metronome was problematic for performers as it had the potential to disrupt an essential part of a tasteful performance, namely, subtle modifications of the pulse. The danger, as Hummel wrote in 1828, was that ‘many persons still erroneously imagine, that, in applying the metronome, they are bound to follow it in equal and undeviating motion throughout the whole piece, without allowing themselves any latitude in the performance for the display of taste or feeling’.79 Hummel’s concern is remarkably similar to Gustav Mahler’s on the necessity for flexibility. Expressing his almost mystical concept of tempo, Mahler purportedly stated that: of all the most important things–the tempo, the total conception and structuring of a work–are almost impossible to pin down. For here we are concerned with something living and flowing that can never be the same even twice in succession. That is why metronome markings are inadequate and almost worthless: for unless the work is vulgarly ground out in barrel-organ style, the tempo will already have changed by the end of the second bar.80
Subtle modifications of the pulse had been frequently described in the eighteenth century as a key ingredient in a tasteful performance. Again, on this matter, there were frequent exhortations for restraint. Nevertheless, many commentators, most importantly C. P. E. Bach, Türk and Czerny, described contexts with great specificity when pulse modifications were indeed appropriate.81 Türk explained: In compositions whose character is vehemence, anger, wrath, fury, and the like, the most forceful passages can be played with a somewhat hastened (accelerando) motion. Also, certain thoughts which are repeated in a more intensified manner (generally higher) require that the speed be increased to some extent. Some, when gentle feelings are interrupted by a lively passage, the latter can be played somewhat more rapidly.82
He then proceeds to describe contexts in which he considered ritardandos appropriate. 78 I. Stravinsky, ‘Dialogues and a diary’, in E. Schwartz and B. Childs (eds.), Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, New York, Da Capo, 1978, p. 57. 79 J. N. Hummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel, Vienna, 1828, unattrib. trans. as A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Instructions, on the Art of Playing the Piano Forte, London, Boosey, 1828, pt. 3, p. 65. 80 Cited by R. Philip in Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, p. 472. 81 See Rosenblum, Performance Practices, pp. 369–73, for an important discussion of sectional changes of tempo as well as appropriate contexts for accelerandos and ritartandos as suggested by Türk, Clementi and Czerny. 82 Türk, School of Clavier Playing, p. 360.
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Of equal importance, melodic rubato was frequently linked with pulse modification in discussions of rhythmic nuance. As described by Louis Adam in 1805, a successful performance was largely dependent on a balancing act between the two distinct but obviously related forms of rhythmic freedom: it is not permissible to alter the beat unless the composer has indicated it or the expression demands it; still it is necessary to be very sparing of this resource. . . . Doubtless expression requires that one holds back or hurries certain notes in the melody, but these rallentandos should not be continual throughout a piece, but only in the those places where the expression of a languid melody or the passion of an agitated melody requires a rallentando or a more animated tempo. In this case it is the melody which must be changed and the bass should strictly mark the beat.83
Descriptions of melodic rubato abound in the literature, perhaps most famously in Mozart’s letter in 1777 to his father in which he remarks that ‘everyone is amazed that I can always keep strict time. What these people cannot grasp is that in tempo rubato in an Adagio the left hand should go on playing in strict time. With them the left hand always follows suit.’84 He is clearly describing a style of performance in which a solo part employs great rhythmic freedom over a steady, unchanging accompaniment. In the employment of rubato in ensemble playing, C. P. E. Bach cautioned that one must make judicial use of the technique depending on the context as well as the quality of the other performers: Yet certain purposeful violations of the beat are often exceptionally beautiful. However, a distinction in their use must be observed. In solo performance and in ensembles made up of only a few understanding players, manipulations are permissible which affect the tempo itself; here, the group will be less apt to go astray than to become attentive to and adopt the change; but in large ensembles made up of motley players the manipulations must be addressed to the bar alone without touching on the broader pace.85
Contradictions abound in the literature as to what was the proper degree of rhythmic nuance. Chopin provides a particularly interesting and problematic case study. The contradictory statements of Mikuli and Berlioz, to cite just two examples, are indicative of their differing tastes and point of view. As described by Mikuli: In keeping time Chopin was inexorable, and some readers will be surprised to learn that the metronome never left his piano. Even in his much maligned 83 L. Adam, Méthode de piano du Conservatoire, Paris, 1804, p. 160, trans. in Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, p. 397. 84 The Letters of Mozart and his Family, trans. and ed. E. Anderson, London, Macmillan, 1966, p. 340. 85 C. P. E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, pp. 150–1.
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tempo rubato, the hand responsible for the accompaniment would keep strict time, while the other hand, singing the melody, would free the essence of the musical thought from all rhythmic fetters, either by lingering hesitatingly or by eagerly anticipating the movement with a certain impatient vehemence akin to passionate speech.86
This is certainly in sharp contrast to Berlioz’s criticism that Chopin ‘was impatient with the constraints of meter; in my opinion he pushed rhythmic independence much too far . . . Chopin could not play in strict time.’87 While there have been widely differing views on appropriate degrees of rhythmic freedom, its general use was certainly never in question prior to the twentieth century, indeed the innumerable comparisons to rhetoric and the delivery of an oratory to musical performances were largely concerned with rhythmic nuances. Why performances in the twentieth century were largely devoid of pulse modification (and even melodic rubato) has been the subject of much recent debate. Roger Smalley has written convincingly of the rhythmic norms appropriate in much French music as well as the music of Webern and other modernists: pure sonority has always been particularly characteristic of French music, and it is significant that the music of Alkan, Berlioz, and Fauré responds very badly to injudicious choice of tempo and willful use of rubato. This particular trend is epitomized by the music of Debussy and Ravel, and initiates a turning point in the relationship of composer and performer. The significance of Debussy’s instrumental writing has been very well defined by Stephen Pruslin: ‘In Debussy, the succession of sounds no longer represents the meaning, but is the meaning, so that no mental process other than simple aural reception is necessary to grasp the full musical statement . . . This quotation is almost equally true of the later music of Webern and of much of the music which followed. If a performer realizes accurately all the indications in the score then his performance will be an authentic projection of the composer’s intentions.’88
This concept of the ‘accurate’ rendering of a score is problematic when applied to almost all music prior to the twentieth century (Alkan and Berlioz being exceptions, according to Smalley) as it ignores overwhelming evidence regarding the use of rhythmic freedoms by performers in the past. Indeed, many modern performers have unwittingly deprived themselves of an interpretative freedom that performers of the past utilised as part and parcel of the expression of their individuality as performers. Recorded performances of nineteenthcentury artists provide modern-day performers with fascinating models of this
86 Eigeldinger, Chopin, Pianist and Teacher, p. 49. 87 Ibid., p. 272. 88 R. Smalley, ‘Some aspects of the changing relationship between composer and performer in contemporary music’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 96 (1969–70), 75.
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individuality expressed largely through the rhythmic sophistication of their interpretations. Arnold Schoenberg, reacting to these trends in 1948, responded with a rather unique perspective as to the causes of the mystery: Today’s manner of performing classical music of the so-called ‘Romantic’ type, suppressing all emotional qualities and all unnotated changes of tempo and expression, derives from the style of playing primitive dance music. This style came to Europe by way of America, where no old culture regulated presentation, but where a certain frigidity of feeling reduced all musical expression . . . All were suddenly afraid to be called Romantic, ashamed of being called sentimental . . . to change tempo, to express musical feelings, to make a ritardando or Luftpause. A change of character, a strong contrast, will often require a modification of tempo . . . It must be admitted that in the period around 1900 many artists overdid themselves in exhibiting the power of the emotion they were capable of feeling . . . Nothing can be more wrong than both these extremes.89
Other causes of this mysterious, self-imposed restriction may be reactions by performers to the realities of recording, namely the combination of multiple ‘takes’ to create a new, unreal, recorded ‘performance’ as well as a general austerity felt in response to harsh political and cultural changes in the first half of the twentieth century by the artistic community. Most convincingly, however, is the argument that modern interpretative approaches may be born from a misplaced respect for ‘the score’ by the Urtext movement, ‘misplaced’ as rhythmic freedoms were obviously never ‘notated’ and thus cannot appear in a score. This factor, as well as a retroactive application of certain modernist composers’ call to simply ‘play what is written’, resulted in a style of performance never imagined by composers prior to the twentieth century.
Changing views of ‘fidelity’ Towards the end of the improvisatory era new issues relating to fidelity arose, related to a concept of the individuality of each composer-creator. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, we begin to encounter the idea, as expressed by Quantz and others, that a performer should ‘divine the intention of the composer and seek to enter into the principal and related passions that he is to express’.90 Quantz was of course working very much within a context of the
89 A. Schoenberg, ‘Today’s manner of performing classical music’ (1948), in L Stein (ed.), Style and Idea: Selected Writings, trans. L. Black, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1975, pp. 320–1. 90 Quantz, On Playing the Flute, pp. 124–5.
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improvisational age, in which expressing the ‘intention of the composer’ still included ‘completing’ their ideas through improvisation. In the nineteenth century a distinctly new view arises: a composer was considered a unique artist, an individual independent of long-established rules of art, as Beethoven had written, ‘unfettered’. Robert Schumann suggested that: The compositions of a man who understands Shakespeare and Jean Paul, will be different from one who draws all his wisdom from Marpurg, etc., alone. Did not Beethoven, on the title page of his Overture in C use the expression ‘Gedichtet von’ instead of ‘composed by’. There are hidden workings of the soul, which a suggestion in words, by the composer can make more comprehensible, and these should be gratefully accepted.91
According to Schumann a composer should not derive his ideas through the study of theoretical writers such as Marpurg, that is, through a study of the ‘rules of art’, but engage in an expression of his own ideas, expressing the inner ‘workings of his soul’. A pride in the existence of compositional rules, studied as well as observed in practice, had always been central to those engaged in the craft. Haydn’s famous description of his compositional process provides a fine example: I sat down (at the keyboard) and began to fantasize, according to whether my mood was sad or happy, serious or playful. Once I had seized an idea, my entire effort went toward elaborating and sustaining it according to the rules of art . . . And this is what is lacking among so many of our young composers; they string together one little bit after another, and they break off before they have barely begun, but nothing remains in the heart when one has heard it.92
How did late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century performers respond to this newly developed sense of the individuality of composers and the uniqueness of their compositions, as illustrated by Schumann’s comments? Rather than a complete suppression of the individuality of the performer, many commentators at this time began to express a concept describing the merging of the two souls of composer and performer.93 Mary Hunter cites J. A. P. Schulz on this subject: ‘Every good composition has its own character, and its own spirit and expression, which it broadcasts throughout; the singer or player must transmit this so exactly in his performance that he plays as if from the soul of the composer’ (emphasis added).94
91 P. Nettl, The Book of Musical Documents, New York, Greenwood Press, 1969, pp. 228–9. 92 Cited in E. R. Sisman (ed.), Haydn and his World, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 136. 93 M. Hunter, ‘ “To play as if from the soul of the composer”: the idea of the performer in early Romantic aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58 (2005), 361. 94 Ibid., 364.
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Composers occasionally expressed enormous pleasure with the performances of their works by specific artists, recognising that these performers had, in a sense, entered into the hearts of the composer. As Beethoven wrote in 1817 to Marie Pachler-Koschak: ‘I have never yet found anybody who plays my compositions as well as you do, not even excepting the great pianists, for they either have nothing but technique or are affected. You are the true guardian of my intellectual offspring.’95 A similar sentiment was expressed much later by Claude Debussy, describing Mary Garden’s performance of the death of Mélisande: ‘At last came the fifth act– Mélisande’s death–a breathtaking event whose emotions cannot be rendered in words. There I heard the voice I had secretly imagined–full of a sinking tenderness, and sung with such artistry as I would never have believed possible.’96 When composers encountered performers they believed successfully fulfilled the responsibility of expressing the ‘inner workings of their souls’, these performers became in a sense, re-creators, displacing the earlier role of co-creator during the improvisational era. As explained above, there were multiple forces at play determining performers’ interpretative choices in new as well as in old music during the first half of the twentieth century. As the century was a dynamic period of change in the composer–performer relationship any attempt to identify a dominant trend is stymied by a fragmentation and multiplicity of activities of both composers and performers. Most strikingly, many performers ceased to perform new music entirely. According to composer Lukas Foss: Around 1915, composition withdrew underground, leaving the field to the performer and to the music of the past. That this created a sterile state of affairs ‘above’ ground was perfectly clear to the more educated virtuoso, who has been trying ever since to resolve the conflict, often leading a Jekyll and Hyde existence on account of it. Thus, Arthur Schnabel gave his audience Beethoven and Schubert; his lifelong involvement with Schoenberg was kept to himself.97
Those performers who were actually engaged in the performance of new music were told not to ‘interpret’ a work, but rather, to simply ‘play what is written’, leading the performer of new music in the early twentieth century ever closer to a complete suppression of their individuality.98
95 W. Newman, Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing his Piano Music his Way, New York, Norton, 1988, p. 82. 96 Debussy, Debussy on Music, p. 227. 97 L. Foss, ‘The changing composer–performer relationship: a monologue and a dialogue’, Perspectives of New Music, 1 (1963), 45–6. 98 Smalley, ‘Some aspects’, p. 23.
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At the most extreme level, newly developing technologies of electronic music made possible the total absence of the performer. This appears to have been a source of delight to some twentieth-century commentators. Patric Stevenson, after bemoaning the interference by performers between the composer and the audience, writes in what almost reads like a satirical proposition that: This state of affairs is very unsatisfactory. What we want to get at through music is the mind of the composer, and fallible mediums which come between us and him must be regarded as necessary evils until some new invention or development renders them obsolete. Science is now making the abolition of the ambiguous score and the erring performer a practical proposition.99
The phenomena of electronic music, in which the performer is entirely removed from the expression of a composer’s ideas to an audience, had unexpected consequences however, as explained by Lukas Foss: Electronic music showed up the limitations of live performance, the limitations of traditional tone production, the restrictiveness of a rhythm forever bound to meter and bar line, notation tied to a system of counting. Electronic music introduced untried possibilities, and in so doing presented a challenge, shocked live music out of its inertia, kindled in musicians the desire to prove that live music ‘can do it too’.100
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, notational development, as Roger Smalley has written, did not initially develop past nineteenth-century models: The minutiae of performance were indicated with increasing meticulousness (often with copious verbal explanations) by composers such as Brahms and Mahler, and by the beginning of the twentieth century this whole complex notational system was accepted as the norm. The music of the father-figures of twentieth-century music – Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg – although revolutionary in many ways – did not necessitate the evolution of new methods of notation. The relationship of the performer to the score remained as before. Naturally the increasing conciseness of Schoenberg’s and, especially, Webern’s music caused the number of directives to proliferate to an unprecedented degree. In fact in some of the later works of Webern signs of dynamics, articulation and phrasing, previously considered only to be aids to performance became integrated into the actual structure of the music and pose quite new problems for the interpreter.101
By mid-century, as composers began experimenting with new forms of notation as well as a return to improvisatory-like freedoms in aleatoric music, new collaborations between composers and performers developed resulting
99 P. Stevenson, ‘Exit the Performer?’, Musical Times, 77 (1936), 797–8. 100 Foss, ‘The changing composer–performer relationship’, 47. 101 Smalley, ‘Some aspects’, 73–4.
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in a re-examination of traditional roles. Lukas Foss addressed this newly rediscovered collaborative spirit: The methodical division of labor (I write it, you play it) served us well, until composer and performer became like two halves of a worm separated by a knife, each proceeding obliviously on its course . . . The conflict still rages, and yet the feud between composition and performance is over. The factor which led to the conflict, the division of labor (performance/composition), will remain with us. The procedural advantages are too great to be sacrificed. But a creative investigation is under way. Composers have had to abandon Beethoven’s proud position: ‘Does he think I have his silly fiddle in mind when the spirit talks to me?’ Composers are again involved in performance, with performance. More–they work with handpicked performers toward a common goal.102
Foss then identifies numerous celebrated composer–performer teams such as John Cage and David Tudor, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian, and so on, as evidence of this newly discovered ‘joint enterprise’. According to Aaron Copland, performers should largely shoulder the responsibility for the continuance of a vibrant new music scene: Every composer has had occasion to think about what he might say or do to reawaken these musicians to a sense of responsibility to the art they serve, to reanimate their interest in the whole corpus of musical literature, old and new. What, after all, is the responsibility of the performer to the art of music? Isn’t it to keep music fully alive, renewed, refreshed? And how is that to be accomplished if the interpreter fails us?103
A greatly influential development in the twentieth century was the rise of the early music movement. Performers throughout the world began to pursue the original performance practices of music of the past as had never been done before. In the process of returning to a creative partnership between composers and performers they hoped to approach the spirit of the past. Unlike other developments in the composer–performer relationship, frequently driven by composers and changes in compositional style, this movement has been entirely generated by the activities of today’s performers, completing a process begun in the late eighteenth century with the first performances of ‘old’ music in Vienna and London.104 The philosophies of the early music movement re-energized many sectors in today’s classical music world, inspiring performers on modern and period instruments alike to re-examine long-held interpretative assumptions in a wide 102 Foss, ‘The changing composer–performer relationship’, 46. 103 A. Copland, ‘Interpreters and New Music’, in A. Copland, Copland on Music, New York, Pyramid, 1963, p. 263. 104 See Haskell, The Early Music Revival, pp. 13–26 for a discussion of Baron van Swieten and John Pepusch’s energetic support of the performances of old music in the eighteenth century.
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variety of repertoire. For the first time in history, performers have actively sought to comprehend and recreate, as much as is possible, performance practices of the past, however distant from present tastes. This attempt by early music performers to recreate past practices of improvisation and rhythmic freedoms may serve as a reminder of a largely forgotten collaborative spirit between composers and performers of the past and inspire composers and performers alike to seek and develop new, similar, partnerships, resulting in a continued new music scene which is ‘fully alive, renewed, and refreshed’.
. 5 .
The teaching of performance NATASHA LOGES AND COLIN LAWSON
Throughout history the ability to perform has been transmitted in different ways that naturally reflect music’s position within particular societies. Yet while the underlying educational issues have remained remarkably constant, as is illustrated throughout this book, musical training within each part of the world continues to inspire a wide variety of educational practice in a range of contexts. A comparison of the UK, America and Russia amply demonstrates the point, while the developing love affair between China and Western music bears witness to an ever-changing global landscape. Performance training occurs at various levels; witness the continuing popularity of the independent examination boards across the world, which cater to a vast amateur market while also identifying potential in the very young. In addition, as has recently been observed, musicians have a continuing didactic influence on others outside a conventional teaching environment. Contemporary examples might include competition adjudicators, orchestral players, studio engineers, writers of programme notes, critics or composers.1 One relatively recent phenomenon that forms part of the training of most young professionals is the music competition, ranging from local amateur events, including children, chamber groups and choirs to international, highly pressured events. The value of competitions is hotly debated, with some deploring the attempt to judge objectively between practitioners of an art that is, at least in some aspects, subjective. As one correspondent in 1885 put it, ‘it is degrading to any art to turn it into a means for commercial advancement’.2 A further issue is that instrumental competitions tend to encourage conservatism in repertoire choice. Educationally, their value is suspect; arguably the main use of such events is to give exposure to the competitors to further their professional chances. A multi-authored comprehensive historical survey of music education has been published relatively recently, comprising articles on the ancient (classical) 1 See K. Swanwick and P. Spencer, ‘Education’, in The Oxford Companion to Music, www.oxfordmusic online.com. 2 The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, 26, No. 512 (1 October 1885), 613–14.
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world, schools, conservatoires and universities.3 Hence the present chapter will not venture a chronological survey of the teaching of performance, but rather will seek to touch on a variety of didactic practices, focusing largely on musical learning within institutions. While few would argue that the core of successful performance training lies in long-term instruction from a professional, no less important are the institutions which have played a major part in formalising this training, whether church, court, university or conservatoire. An appropriate curriculum for performers beyond the immediate study of music has been promulgated in many different contexts, one eighteenthcentury source prescribing for music students ‘the whole of worldly wisdom, as well as mathematics, poetry, rhetoric and many languages’. Within the broad study of music, theory and analysis have gradually been supplemented by a host of other performance-related subjects, such as acoustics, performance practice, psychology and world music. In addition, the increasing interaction of performers with their communities has brought into focus the benefits of music to disadvantaged members of society.
Musical education before the rise of the conservatoires Noting Plato’s belief that music and physical education were crucial for the development of young people, Swanwick and Spencer have suggested that music’s status was possibly higher in ancient Greece than at any subsequent period of Western civilisation. For the Greeks, ‘music’ was the generic term embracing dance, the visual arts and drama, making an important contribution to the formation of a person’s character. ‘The person educated in music would be able to discriminate between the ugly and the beautiful in art and nature, and rhythm and harmony are thought to enter the soul, “bearing grace with them”.’4 The richness of Greek musical culture projected by Eleanor Rocconi in Chapter 7 was based initially on individual tuition, often an apprenticeship model in which a younger man was associated with an older one. Choral training was undertaken for each religious festival and was sometimes given continuously, often involving young girls who had been schooled in singing and dancing. Systematic education dates from the fifth century BC, where a kithara teacher taught both instrumental technique and lyric poetry. Later were added a grammatistēs and paidotribēs to teach ‘letters’ and physical training respectively. From vase paintings it is clear that kithara instruction was 3 See ‘Education’, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 4 Swanwick and Spencer, ‘Education’. In the sixth century BC the Chinese system of education promoted by Confucius also valued corporate music-making as a means of promoting disciplined character.
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individual, but with other pupils present; teacher and pupil played simultaneously.5 In Roman society professional performers enjoyed relatively high status and played an important part in the many entertainments. Still, music was not regarded as a suitable occupation for the aristocracy, though in the Empire a number of emperors became accomplished amateurs. Indeed, the musical legacy of Rome turned out to be more theoretical rather than practically based. Early Christian communities rarely included music-making in the curriculum, but as Charles Plummeridge points out in his New Grove article, the Judeo-Christian tradition of psalm and hymn singing always provided an important medium for worship, and the founding of the Schola Cantorum in Rome during the fourth century ensured firm and lasting connections between music, the liturgy and education. When song schools were established throughout Europe to disseminate Roman church music they were to have a seminal effect on institutional music education for centuries to come.6 In the Middle Ages (discussed by John Haines in Chapter 8) one could expect to encounter an enormous range of musical performance. The chief source of formalised musical (and other) education was the church schools, which also fostered the study of Latin grammar and general religious training. The musical training represented the cutting edge of practice; Reinhard Strohm includes within the teaching content ‘plainsong, extemporized descanting techniques, music theory (solmisation, mensural notation, counterpoint) but also keyboard playing, for example’.7 Universities, guilds and hospitals added to the numbers of these schools, which flourished for hundreds of years in some cases. The training of the large body of secular professional musicians from the twelfth century onwards, included chiefly under the title of ‘minstrel’, is harder to trace. In an historical era notable for its lack of emphasis on the individual, it is interesting to note Stephen Nichols’s comment that ‘the early troubadours . . . created the first “modern” European examples of the individual artist, a genius set apart from the common folk’.8 A troubadour might be a member of the aristocracy or the humblest itinerant instrumentalist. Despite the disparity in backgrounds, these musicians would have shared the common ground of largely oral transmission of their repertoire, an improvisatory approach to performance and a dedication to technical expertise.9
5 W. Anderson, ‘Music education, classical: Greece’, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline. com. 6 C. Plummeridge, ‘II. From the Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century: 1. Christian education’, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 7 R. Strohm, The Rise of European Music 1380–1500, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 288. 8 S. G. Nichols, ‘The early Troubadours: Guilhem IX to Bernart de Ventadorn’, in S. Gaunt and S. Kay (eds.), The Troubadours: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 66. 9 See Gaunt and Kay, The Troubadours, pp. 68ff.
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More formally, the minstrel schools of the late Middle Ages provided opportunities to share practice and repertoire.10 These annual meetings convened mainly in cities in Franco-Flemish and German towns in Holy Week. Minstrels would make long and hazardous journeys to attend these ‘conventions’, in which instruments could be purchased, jobs could be negotiated – and new melodies could be taught and learnt by the attending virtuosi. Furthermore, not all of these schools were temporary conventions; there is evidence of the existence of professional teachers and continuous minstrel schools in larger cities such as Paris and Bruges.11 The eventual formation of musicians’ guilds took place in conjunction with the greater prosperity of European towns and consequently the growing need for professional civic musicians.12 The existence of a guild was a not unmixed blessing; however, it did facilitate the formalisation of musical apprenticeships in imitation of other crafts.13 Details of the actual nature of the teaching are typically scarce, although one can imagine that it involved technical study and, most importantly, the learning (through memorisation) of repertoire. At the Parisian Confrérie of St-Julien des Menestriers, 1321, the duration of the apprenticeship was six years. It is likely that each master was allowed to take only one or two apprentices; this made sure that all masters could benefit from the system (ultimately the apprentice functioned as an unpaid colleague) and that the numbers were carefully controlled. In addition, there is evidence that these musicians tended to live in particular areas of cities and that musical skills were passed on within the family, from father to son, or shared between musical families through intermarriage.14 How useful might apprenticeship have been? At its best, as within the Mozart and Bach families, it produced outstanding and technically competent musicians, but Pamela Poulin cites the introduction to F. E. Niedt’s treatise
10 The earliest known gathering of this sort was in 1318 at Bruges (though there may have been one at Ypres in 1313) and the last was in 1447 at Damme. L. Gushee and R. Rastall, ‘Minstrels’, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 11 For more background on this topic see M. Gomez and B. Haggh, ‘Minstrel schools in the Late Middle Ages’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 213–16. 12 See, for example, K. Polk, German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons and Performance Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 110ff. for an account of the guilds of instrumentalists in towns of the German-speaking region. 13 Kay Slocum argues that this move not only ensured that their needs were met, that the monopoly was controlled, but also that high standards could be achieved and maintained. See K. B. Slocum, ‘Confrérie, Bruderschaft and Guild: the formation of musicians’ fraternal organisations in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Europe’, Early Music History, 14 (1995), 257–74, for a detailed discussion of the development of guilds. Keith Polk presents an alternative view that suggests that the guilds were as much a hindrance as a help to their members, creating tension between high-status and usually foreign guild members and local musicians. See Polk, German Instrumental Music, p. 124. 14 See for example F. Kisby, ‘Royal minstrels in the City and suburbs of early Tudor London: professional activities and private interests’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 199–219; and G. Peters, ‘Urban ministrels in late Medieval southern France: opportunities, status and professional relationships’, Early Music History, 19 (2000), 201–35.
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Musicalische Handleitung (1700–21), with its hint of other less successful pedagogical methods: Once, however, [my master] became especially inventive and attempted to kick Art into my body, because any treatment without foundation could not drive the thoroughbass into my head. He pulled me by the hair off the organ bench where I was sitting in front of the keyboard, threw me onto the ground and yanked me up by the hair, to let my head fall back with a crash onto the ground. Then he stepped on my body, stamped around on it for a good while until the Basso Continuo finally so robbed him of his senses, that he dragged me out of the parlour near a staircase leading on to the street and said, ‘this shall be the end of your apprenticeship years and with this you shall receive your certificate, which I shall throw into the bargain’.15
The remark by Quantz that ‘there was no instruction available other than that which one apprentice gave, as well as he could, to the other’ suggests little improvement in the guilds during the eighteenth century.16 Poulin observes that as least as important as the apprentice’s training was travel and the copying out of manuscripts by other composers, so that overall the system in Germany and Austria was haphazard and poor.17 There were alternatives; Ruth Halliwell has usefully charted Mozart’s likely options if his father had not been a firstrate teacher: Had Leopold Mozart not taught Mozart himself, the alternatives would have been a choir school education, like that received by the Haydn brothers, an apprentice-style education, like that received by Leopold’s resident pupils the Marchands: or education at an Italian conservatory . . . The Mozarts belonged to a community whose common values formed an integrated whole, accommodating musical expertise within the social and religious framework.18
Halliwell notes that besides music Leopold also gave systematic tuition in arithmetic, French, Italian and Latin, reflecting his own Jesuit education and his strong beliefs that ‘young minds were broadened and sharpened by good literature in different languages’. Mozart was also exposed to ‘enormous
15 F. E. Niedt, The Musical Guide: Parts I (1700/10), 2 (1721) and 3 (1717), trans. P. L. Poulin and I. C. Taylor, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 15. 16 ‘Herrn Johann Joachim Quantzens Lebenslauf, von ihm selbst entworfen’, in F. W. Marpurg, Historischkritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1754), trans. in P. Nettl, Forgotten Musicians, New York, Philosophical Library, 1951, p. 281. 17 See P. L. Poulin, ‘A view of eighteenth-century musical life and training: Anton Stadler’s “Musick Plan” ’, Music & Letters, 71 (1990), 215. 18 R. Halliwell, ‘Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: education’, in C. Eisen and S. P. Keefe (eds.), The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 323. In her entry ‘Marchand family’ (p. 267), Halliwell notes that the Mozart correspondence and Nannerl’s diary give an engaging idea of the educational experience of Gretl, Heinrich and Hanchen, Mozart family resident pupils. ‘They lived as part of the family, helping with household tasks and joining in all social activities, including the musical jamborees planned by Leopold whenever the children’s parents visited.’
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quantities of European drama’, the family being passionate patrons of the theatre. The comments that Mozart was to make regarding his own piano pupils give some indication of his own concerns as a performer and judge of character. For example, he wrote of Josepha Auernhammer’s ‘enchanting’ playing, while noting that in cantabile ‘she has not got the real delicate singing style’.
Treatises as a pedagogical tool: some strengths and limitations A number of practical treatises are discussed by Robin Stowell in Chapter 3, where he makes the important point that most such sources were addressed to educated amateur musicians or provincial music teachers until the middle of the eighteenth century. This was a trend that continued in Britain until well after 1800. Stowell rightly warns against making inferences from particular treatises without due regard for the status of the writer, the textual content and likely readership, as well as geographical and temporal limitations. Nevertheless, Alec Hyatt King was a touch too cautious in suggesting that, whilst valuable in relation to contemporary style in performance, Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule of 1756 was relevant to the south German school of composers rather than acting as a guide to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus.19 Certainly, a great deal of historical information needs to be read in the spirit of the times, occasionally bordering on the idiosyncratic. In relation to diet, for example, J. F. Agricola observed in 1757 that the castrato Farinelli was in the habit of eating one uncooked anchovy before going on stage. Agricola’s more general recommendation for singers was a healthy diet of pheasant, lark and trout, noting that ‘the old teachers specifically prohibited herring’.20 In the early nineteenth century, when health was still a relatively fragile affair, Joseph Fröhlich’s Vollständige theoretisch-praktische Musikschule (Bonn, 1810–11) recommended for wind players a moderate lifestyle and the avoidance of anything that could damage the chest, such as running, horseback riding and the excessive consumption of hot drinks. One should not practise after a meal, so the afternoon was best avoided; furthermore, one should not drink immediately after practising if the lungs are still warm, since this had been the cause of many an early death. In the case of dry lips – very bad for the embouchure – the
19 A. H. King, note to 1985 reprint of L. Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, Augsburg, author, 1756, trans. E. Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamentals of Violin Playing, Oxford University Press, 1948, p. vii. 20 J. F. Agricola, Anleitung zur Singkunst, Berlin, 1757, trans. and ed. J. C. Baird as Introduction to the Art of Singing, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 86–7.
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mouth should be rinsed with an alcoholic beverage to give the lips new strength.21 Treatises contribute significant evidence of performance practice to many of the chapters within this book. For example, Timothy McGee’s survey of vocal music in the Renaissance uses organised singing instructions from 1474 onwards to illustrate objectives and priorities in the period; the chapters by Richard Wistreich and John Potter draw on later vocal sources as a central focus for their studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century practice. The mid-eighteenth-century treatises by Quantz (1752), C. P. E. Bach (1753, 1762), L. Mozart (1756) and Türk (1789) variously encourage an holistic approach to what it is to be a performer. The hugely influential Quantz found it desirable for a musician to have at least some knowledge of mathematics, philosophy, poetry and oratory. Significantly, only ten out of his original 334 pages are devoted exclusively to the transverse flute, ranging over such topics as ‘Of the qualities of those who would dedicate themselves to music’ and ‘How a musician and a musical composition are to be judged’. Quantz writes that a would-be composer ‘must have a lively and fiery spirit, united with a soul capable of tender feeling; a good mixture, without too much melancholy, of what scholars call the temperaments; much imagination, inventiveness, judgement and discernment; a good memory; a good and delicate ear; a sharp and quick eye; and a receptive mind that grasps everything quickly and easily’. He suggests that instrumentalists need many of the above qualities, as well as appropriate physical attributes. He then remarks: ‘My last counsel for someone who wishes to excel in music is to control his vanity, and to hold it in check . . . since it can easily cloud the mind and obstruct true understanding.’22 C. P. E. Bach’s technical advice is complemented by a chapter on performance that states at the outset, ‘Keyboardists whose chief asset is mere technique are clearly at a disadvantage’. It contains a celebrated passage emphasising the importance of characterisation in which Bach observes that ‘a musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must of necessity feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his audience, for his own humour will stimulate a like humour in the listener.’23 The scholarly and well-read Türk also aims to instruct the teacher as well as the student, offering a commentary that informs the practical aesthetic of his time, the state of historical information and 21 See E. E. Rousseau, ‘Clarinet instructional methods from 1732 to ca.1825’, thesis, University of Iowa (1962), pp. 161–4. 22 J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, trans. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber, 1966, pp. 12–13, 25. 23 C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2 vols., Berlin, 1753 and 1762, repr. 1957, trans. and ed. W. J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, New York, Norton, 1949, pp. 147, 152.
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contemporary pedagogical views. His chapter on execution is nothing less than an introduction to the classical style, admitting that some musical effects cannot be described, since they must be heard.24 Like Quantz, Leopold Mozart similarly warns against empty virtuosity, entering a plea for sound musicianship. He ranges across various aspects of performance practice, with a glossary of technical terms and specific chapters on written and improvised embellishments. His book immediately won the praise of F. W. Marpurg, whose Historisch-kritische Beyträge in 1757 remarked: ‘One has long desired a work of this kind but hardly dared to expect it. The sound and skilled virtuoso, the rational and methodical teacher, the learned musician; qualities, each and all of which make a man of worth, are manifested here.’25 In the nineteenth century, treatises continued to proliferate. The more honest authors admitted that their uses were limited. The tenor Manuel García, in the preface to his Exercises and Method for Singing (1824) declares that he has written his treatise ‘in a progressive manner so as to remove every obstacle that can be met with in the management of the voice’, but also mentions that ‘to others who may chose [sic] to adopt them the instruction of a Master will explain any difficulty they may meet with’. This treatise by one of the most celebrated singers and teachers of the century glibly states of an aspiring singer: ‘it is not precisely singing the note but the manner of singing it which constitutes the distinguished singer, and raises him above mediocrity.’26 In the absence of a teacher, it is hard to see how an aspiring student could capture this ‘manner’. García’s son continued the tradition with the immensely successful Traité complet de l’art du chant (1840–47), which reflected newer preoccupations with the scientific approach to singing. Manuel García the younger enjoyed a successful teaching career, particularly in London where he taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1848 and 1895. García the younger attempts to explain intricacies of vocal technique through physiology and the results are occasionally baffling, for example: The following is the process by which the glottis shortens its dimensions. The moment it emits a sound, it changes the triangular form, which it holds during repose, for the linear form, which it assumes during vocal action; and its sides firmly fixed, and meeting at their extremities, leave towards the centre alone, a space, for the escape of air when required. Of these extremities, however, the posterior, which alone are of cartilaginous substance, have the 24 D. G. Türk, Clavierschule, Leipzig and Halle, 1789, trans. R. Haggh as School of Clavier Playing, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 337. 25 A. Einstein, in preface to L. Mozart, A Treatise on the Fundamentals of Violin Playing, p. xxviii. Marpurg, Historisch-kritische Beyträge, vol. 3, 1757, p. 160. 26 M. García, Exercises and Method for Singing, with an Accompaniment for the Piano Forte, London, Boosey, 1824, preface.
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power of motion; opening the glottis by separating, and closing it by collapsing; the anterior extremities are always fixed.27
On the thorny issue of successful expression, García recalls C. P. E. Bach when he states: Expression is the great law of all art. Vain would be the efforts of an artist to excite the passions of his audience, unless he showed himself powerfully affected by the very feeling he wished to kindle; for emotion is purely sympathetic. It devolves, therefore, upon an artist to rouse and ennoble his feelings, since he can only appeal successfully to those analogous to his own. The human voice, deprived of expression, is the least interesting of all instruments.28
Despite their obvious limitations, both these treatises are invaluable guides to the elements of performance training which are easy to describe on the page: hence the advice on the different styles of Italian opera singing, and notated elements such as ornamentation of arias, in particular on cadenzas, is a very useful document of historical practice.
Conservatoires in Venice and Naples The modern conservatoire developed from charitable institutions of Venice and Naples, the ospedali, which existed to house and care for the needy.29 Between the start of the seventeenth century until their eventual bankruptcy at the end of the eighteenth century, the identities of these institutions shifted greatly: what began as a means of providing musical support for the Mass mutated into a specialised and competitive industry, responsible for training some of the greatest vocal and instrumental performers of the day. The seeds for the development of the conservatoire were already sown by the time of Pope Eugenius IV, who in the 1430s issued a series of papal bulls that resulted in the establishing of a number of charitable schools with a strong emphasis on music-making, known as the scuole Eugeniane.30 Practically, there were strong reasons why the resident orphans might benefit from a musical education: musically trained children were useful to the orphanage chapels, and would be 27 M. García, Traité complet de l’art du chant, Paris, author, 1847, trans. as Garcia’s New Treatise on the Art of Singing, London, Cramer, Beale & Chappell, 1857, p. 5. 28 Ibid., p. 64. 29 The four main Venetian ospedali were the Ospedali della Pietà (for foundlings), degli Incurabili (for syphilitics), dei Mendicanti and dei Derelitti, also called the Ospedaletto (both for the chronically ill). See D. Blichmann, ‘Anmerkungen zur Musik an den venezianischen Ospedali im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Acta Musicologica, 74/1 (2002), 77–99. In Naples, there were a number of institutions including Sant’ Onofrio, Santa Maria della Pietà dei Turchini, San Pietro a Majella, Santa Maria di Loreto and Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo. See, for example, D. Arnold, ‘Instruments and instrumental teaching in the early Italian conservatoires’, Galpin Society Journal, 18 (1965), 72–81. 30 For a more extensive discussion of this, see Strohm, The Rise of European Music, p. 288.
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able to support themselves upon their departure; typically, the institution would retain half of the income from the collection plate, the libretto sales and the pew hire, and the orphans would receive the other half.31 Thus an excellent orphanage choir could generate not only a regular income to supplement the state support and donations, but also be able to accumulate a fund for each child to take away upon their departure. The main repertoire associated with the conservatoires was the oratorio, although other vocal genres such as the motet were also common. The genre was brought to Venice by the members of the Order of St Philip Neri (the Oratorians) around 1660. These early oratorios required small forces; Denis Arnold suggests a small group of singers and a continuo group with a theorbo and violone, possibly an organ, and occasionally a string quartet.32 This repertoire rapidly became more ambitious; by the 1730s the virtuosic demands were equal to anything on the operatic stage. Instrumentally, the great strength of the Venetian conservatoires was stringed instruments, but Arnold has shown that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Pietà taught every possible instrument.33 There were many admirable aspects of the curriculum at the conservatoires; thanks to healthy competition between the conservatoires, the girls were rigorously trained. Martinelli, teaching at the Derelitti, mentioned giving four lessons per week to each chorister.34 Although the teachers might be of the highest calibre, the training was expected to be carried out on a shoestring budget, in keeping with the charitable (and permanently financially overstretched) nature of the institutions. The reputable maestri would teach only the most gifted of the girls in the coro. At the Pietà, this was just twelve, and later fourteen girls, who were known as the figlie di coro (later maestra). These figlie enjoyed certain privileges, such as higher pay, but were therefore expected to teach in turn the main chorus members, who themselves were responsible for training the beginners.35 They were also allowed to teach two fee-paying pupils (the figlie in educatione), who might be boarders from an aristocratic or musical family. The most gifted teachers could remain part of the choir or become teachers at their own institutions, perhaps eventually attaining the post of maestra di coro or 31 The first mention of this practice of the choristers retaining half the alms is at the Derelitti in 1575. See M. Constable, ‘The Venetian “Figlie del Coro”: their environment and achievement’, Music & Letters, 63 (1982), 186. 32 See D. and E. Arnold, The Oratorio in Venice, London, Royal Musical Association, 1986, p. 10. 33 Between 1703 and 1708, the Pietà made many instrumental purchases including oboes, flutes, violas; by 1740 they had clarinets, by 1747, they had horns, and eventually they also purchased timpani. See D. Arnold, ‘Instruments and instrumental teaching’, 80. 34 Constable, ‘The Venetian “Figlie del Coro”’, 201. 35 M. Talbot, ‘Tenors and basses at the Venetian Ospedali’, Acta Musicologica, 66/2 (July–December 1994), 126.
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even of prioress, the highest rank possible, whose job it was to administer the music education overall.36 In that sense, the ospedali provided a rewarding career path for women with few other options. Alternatively, this ‘privilege’ might be perceived as a life sentence; in 1604 the Mendicanti expected that gifted girls should be retained by the institution as teachers; ‘not to be sent away from the pio luogo for any reason, but be obliged to train the other girls’.37 The Neapolitan conservatoires furnished similar opportunities for male musicians. Margaret Constable’s 1981 study of conditions at the Mendicanti presents the fullest picture of the experience of being a music student at one of these institutions.38 Many of the teaching staff were high-profile musicians with flourishing careers outside the institution. By the eighteenth century many teachers had what can only be described as ‘portfolio careers’, writing church music for large churches like San Marco, composing opera seria and buffa for the numerous opera houses, teaching and performing with the ospedali students, and to some extent administering the teaching too. Earlier, in the seventeenth century, the maestri were chiefly known for the leading positions they held at large churches. At the Ospedaletto, for example, members of the teaching staff such as the singer-composer Baldassare Donato and his successor the great cornettist Giovanni Bassano both held leading positions in the San Marco (Donato held the post of maestro di cappella at San Marco; Bassano led the instrumental ensemble).39 But with the rise of opera, theatre connections grew more common – and it became increasingly difficult to retain staff. Some of these musicians virtually used the conservatoires as resting places between promoting and composing operas. The composer Nicola Porpora (1686– 1768) is a classic example: educated at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo as a fee-paying student aged thirteen, he was teaching junior pupils within three years. Although he enjoyed an operatic career that spanned London, Vienna, Dresden, as well as Naples and Venice, his lasting reputation arguably rests upon his fame as a vocal teacher. Over the course of his life he taught at no less than five ospedali. This extraordinary range was not untypical; Porpora’s operatic career was not a consistent success, and the conservatoires seem almost to have been a refuge and reliable source of income. One can compare Porpora’s patchier career with that of his more successful 36 See Blichmann, ‘Anmerkungen zur Musik’, 82. 37 Quoted in Constable, ‘The Venetian “Figlie del Coro”’, 189. 38 Ibid., 181–212. 39 See D. Arnold, ‘Music at the Ospedali’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 113/2 (1988), 156–67. Arnold lists various musicians who enjoyed a high reputation in the Church and taught at one or more of the ospedali. He also suggests that the performance forces of the ospedali may have been frequently reinforced by musicians from San Marco; ‘The Mendicanti used the singers and players of S. Marco so freely’ (p. 158).
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contemporary Antonio Vivaldi. Vivaldi’s longest period of teaching at the Pietà was between 1703 and 1709, and then again in 1711; after this, his career as an international opera composer took off. Nevertheless he maintained his association with the institution for most of his life. By the mid-eighteenth century, the training itself was an international attraction and the church services were more akin to public concerts. Individual pupils started to gain star status; from the start of the eighteenth century, specific pupils’ performances garnered praise, and by the 1740s, soloists’ names were included in the librettos for the Masses.40 As the training attracted international attention, it became common to take in fee-paying boarders from privileged and/or musical backgrounds.41 According to Constable, this led to internal problems. Despite their musical reputations, all the ospedali maintained their charitable work; thus the privileged music students would have been surrounded by the poor, the sick and the orphaned, while themselves being permitted to dress up for gala occasions and enjoy luxurious meals and entertainments. Meanwhile the increasingly woeful finances of the ospedali meant that the governors had to beg for additional support from the state. Finally, the conservatoires had undertaken financial commitments which were to have disastrous implications; they undertook to invest money on behalf of the wealthier fee-paying pupils at an agreed rate of interest, which meant that they were committed to paying this money even as their income declined, leading to their eventual bankruptcy.
Towards the nineteenth-century conservatoire One of the many visitors to the conservatoires was Charles Burney, who was inspired to transfer the model of the Venetian conservatoire to England; these hopes were fulfilled only during the early nineteenth century.42 His ‘Sketch of a plan for a public music-school’ was proposed to the governors of the Foundling Hospital in 1774 and ultimately rejected by them.43 Kassler notes that it was one of only five British proposals to have been written between 1762 and 1822, when London’s Royal Academy of Music was founded. The others were by John Potter (1762), G. F. Graham (1816), F. W. Horncastle (1822) and Philharmonic Society plans transmitted by J. F. Burrowes (1818) 40 Ibid., 156–67. 41 For the Mendicanti and the Derelitti, the date was 1749. See Constable, ‘The Venetian “Figlie del Coro”’, 195. 42 J. C. Kassler, ‘Burney’s sketch of a plan for a public music school’, Musical Quarterly, 43 (1972), 210–33. This article cites Burney’s complete text. 43 Burney’s manuscripts containing the sketch form part of the Osborn Collection housed at Yale University.
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and T. F. Walmsley. Kassler usefully charts the background of educational theory and its application to music noting that while British gentlemen had the benefit of a liberal education, traditions handed down to the late eighteenth century warned against the inclusion of music in such an education. Since reason was thought to be the guide of man, the method of attaining proficiency was directly related to the amount of scientific understanding required. C. J. Dorat remarked that gentlemen should be scholars and study music as a science, facilitating the knowledge of its practice. Yet ladies should ‘be taught music so as to understand what they perform [i.e. to read notation], and perform no more than what falls within the easy compass of their execution’.44 The lack of a liberal education and the desirability of better training for native Britons were among the catalysts for the establishment of a national academy of music. Burney had lamented the prevalence of ‘the productions and performances of Strangers’. As Kassler notes, ‘While the Royal Academy of Music represented a radical departure from the past in providing Britain with its first music school devoted solely to the professional education of girls and boys, its support by private subscription and its purpose and curricula adhered to tradition.’45 Yet R. M. Bacon immediately criticised the plan because ‘the intellectual cultivation of the pupils is not sufficiently provided for’.46 The Academy’s committee of patrons stated in the prospectus that ‘the first object to be attended with respect to the pupils, shall be the strict propriety of their education in religion and morals, and in the study of their own and the Italian language; and next their general instruction in the various branches of Music, particularly in the art of singing, and in the study of the pianoforte, of harmony, and of composition’.47 A more formal curriculum of musical education emanating from the Mozart circle was brought to wider notice in the 1960s by Ernst Hess. He published a transcription of the fifty-page German document comprising the clarinettist Anton Stadler’s so-called ‘Musick-Plan’, a response (dated July 1800) to sixteen questions contained in a letter (now lost) by Count Georg Festetics, the answers to which were to serve as the basis for a music school in Hungary on the count’s estate at Keszthely on what is now Lake Balaton.48 In 1990 Pamela Poulin published an authoritative article on the subject, to which much
44 Anon., Euterpe; or, Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Music, as a Part of Modern Education, London, c. 1780, published anonymously. 45 Kassler, ‘Burney’s sketch’, 225. 46 Unsigned editorial, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 4/15 (1822), 370–400. 47 Cited from Kassler (‘Burney’s sketch’, 225), who notes that the curricula for boys and girls continued to differ; while the boys were copying music, the girls were to spend that hour doing needlework. 48 E. Hess, ‘Anton Stadler’s “Musick-Plan” ’, Mozart-Jahrbuch (1962–3), 37–64.
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of the following paragraph is indebted.49 According to Stadler the count’s goals in founding a music school were: to improve and staff the church music of the region; to set up a small chamber group for Stadler; to create the opportunity for the landed aristocracy to have their young people instructed in music; to instruct schoolmasters in organ playing and music. Classes, rooms, staffing, grades, levels, textbooks, musical aesthetics, repertoires and library resources are all matters for consideration. Recognising three aspects of music – theory, performance and composition, Stadler’s ambitious six-year curriculum supplemented practical matters with the observation that anyone wanting to understand music must acquire a broad knowledge of the world, and mathematics, poetry, rhetoric and several languages. All students would be required to participate in singing, piano, organ or thorough-bass, violin and wind instruments. Two of Poulin’s quotations from Stadler’s text are worth citing again here. Conductors should remember that instrumentalists ‘are not to be shouted at when they make a mistake, or made [to look] ridiculous, or treated with sarcasm, because then [they] lose their composure; their attentiveness is lost even more because their heart is put to shame or [they] become embittered; and [they] are no longer capable of a gentle and co-operative spirit if once the presence of mind is upset’. Secondly, there is no accounting for the particular mood of an audience on a particular evening: ‘for example, yesterday the cards were unfavourable for this lady [in the audience], this young gentleman has been jilted by his sweetheart, this official was passed over in advancement . . . the banker has won only 99% [interest], the malicious denouncer has failed to catch his prey, the junior officer who has served only 24 hours is not already at least a brigadier-general [and] in such a mood in a large part does the public condemn the author, composer, actor, performing artists’.50 Poulin notes that four months after the plan was signed, the music school opened under a local musician, Peter Stark, in November 1800. She has traced documents in the estate archives that show that it was organised according to Stadler’s precepts. Zaslaw and Spitzer have recently commented on the ‘enlightenment sensibility’ of the Musick-Plan. In its musical and educational aspirations it was to be unmatched among fledgling European conservatoires for some time to come.
The Paris Conservatoire The Conservatoire de musique, founded in 1795 in the wake of the French Revolution, was the first truly modern institution for music education, 49 See Poulin, ‘A view’.
50 Ibid., 220–2.
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organised on a national basis, free from charitable aims and with an entirely secular, indeed anticlerical background. It was founded on the new democratic principle of education for the qualified, irrespective of social status. Its development was the result of careful planning, artistic vision and astute political action. The staff was to serve both as performers and teachers; students of both sexes, admitted between the ages of eight and thirteen, were to be chosen from each geographical area by means of competitive examination. There would be prizes at the end of each school year. In this way, many features of institutional musical life today were set in train, with consequences which remain subject to vigorous debate. Because of its initial function of providing ceremonial music, many of its teaching staff specialised in wind instruments. But the curriculum catered for all the usual instruments, together with singing and keyboard skills, as well as the theory of music. Examinations were introduced on a regular basis. The staff included many distinguished composers, such as Gossec, Méhul, Cherubini and Boieldieu. From the outset, teaching was taken very seriously at the Conservatoire. In the words of Méhul, ‘To perpetuate oneself through numerous students of distinguished merit means to crown with dignity a long and honourable career; it means to discharge the indebtedness of one’s talent towards his country.’51 And as Schwarz has observed, the Conservatoire elevated the teaching profession to a position of unprecedented dignity and importance; the professeur de musique, formerly a call boy for the nobleman, became a pillar of musical culture and tradition.52 But, as with many such situations, not everything was as rigorous as the syllabus might imply. In 1798 the twenty-three-year old François-Adrien Boieldieu from Rouen was appointed to the piano faculty and his teaching was described by one of his pupils, François-Joseph Fétis: ‘Too occupied with his career as a dramatic composer to take an interest in lessons of instrumental technique, Boieldieu was a rather bad piano teacher, but his conversation was studded with very fine remarks on his art, full of interest for his students and not without profit for their studies.’53 If conservatoire culture attracted idiosyncratic teachers, talented student rebels were soon to be represented by Berlioz, who encountered a characteristic institutional conservatism and felt that his early career was blighted by the Conservatoire Director, Cherubini (whose music he none the less admired).
51 E. Méhul, Éloge on Gossec (1808), quoted in A. Lavignac and L. de la Laurencie (eds.), Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire, Paris, Delagrave, 1913, part 1, vol. 3, p. 1639. 52 B. Schwarz, French Instrumental Music between the Revolutions, New York, Da Capo, 1987, p. 44. 53 F.-J. Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd edn, 8 vols., Paris, Didot, 1860–5, vol. 2, p. 3.
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In Chapter 3 Robin Stowell has already mentioned the faculty-based Conservatoire treatises that offered systematic courses of technical and interpretative instruction for aspiring professionals, incorporating exercises and studies for advanced players. But this tended to be at the expense of the philosophy of musical rhetoric and the communication of emotion. In the eighteenth century an understanding of musical language had been an integral part of learning a language, but the new tutors replaced verbal descriptions with pictorial elements. Institutions were bound to encourage competition and virtuosity was an element that could easily be measured and encouraged. Visitors to Paris in the 1820s and 1830s such as Spohr, Mendelssohn and Chopin were all appalled by the sheer quantity of empty virtuosity they encountered. In our own time Nikolaus Harnoncourt has gone so far as to argue that developments in France after the Revolution marked the beginning of a shift from music’s position as one of life’s moving forces to a mere adornment.54 By 1805, bassoon, cello, clarinet, flute, piano and violin had newly written manuals for them. Jean-Louis Adam’s Méthode de piano remained in use for many years and was translated into German in 1826 by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny. His advice on pedalling is important: ‘the large [damper] pedal is to be employed only during consonant harmonies, when the music is very slow and when the harmonies do not change.’55 This reflects Beethoven’s notation in his Sonatas, and Czerny’s recollection that he pedalled much more frequently than indicated may well reflect practice as it had developed by the 1840s. Defining the trill as a structural rather than an ornamental device, Adam is among the first writers to suggest that it might well start on the principal rather than the upper note. The multi-authored treatise for violin by Baillot, Rode and Kreutzer regarded flexibility of tempo as an essential musical effect, an aspect of interpretation that is especially difficult to characterise in words. As a whole it emphasises musical taste and certainly cannot be accused of advocating mere virtuosity. Characteristically, wind tutors offered fewer hints as to musical taste, though Étienne Ozi’s bassoon method has some useful hints about the articulation of staccato notes and also about extempore ornamentation, which was still widely practised. Xavier Lefèvre’s Méthode de clarinette (1802) was still being translated into other European languages as late as the 1930s. He notes the importance of musical characterisation and admits that the coldness and monotony often ascribed to the clarinet is in fact the responsibility of the performer, whose 54 N. Harnoncourt, Musik als Klangrede, trans. M. O’Neill as Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech, Portland, OR, Amadeus, 1982, pp. 22–7. 55 J.-L. Adam, Méthode de piano du Conservatoire, Paris, Magasin de musique du Conservatoire Royal, 1804, p. 219.
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armoury must include a good knowledge of harmony and sound musical taste. His technical groundwork would be sufficient for most Austro-German music written by the generation of Mozart, though not for the radically expanded horizons within the Beethoven symphonies. Conservatoire students soon began to set new performing standards in orchestral music. Already in 1800 a critic in the Décade philanthropique could write: ‘A numerous orchestra, consisting entirely of young people, performed with unity, precision and firmness, using intelligence and discretion in the accompaniments, which is even more difficult.’56 Later, especially under the direction of the violinist François Habeneck, the unified and disciplined bowing of the string players won particular praise. Despite variable audience reactions – after the ‘Eroica’ Symphony was played in 1811, a reviewer in the Courier de l’Europe et des spectacles showed an equal measure of understanding and horror, referring to ‘a few harsh germanisms, which [the composer] used by force of habit’57 – the role of the Conservatoire in performances of Beethoven became a celebrated part of its early history,
Leipzig – advantages and disadvantages of the conservatoire model Following Paris, the concept of a state conservatoire for music soon spread throughout Europe, to Prague (1811), Graz (1813) and Vienna (1817), as well as London’s Royal Academy of Music. The Regio Conservatorio di Musica in Milan was established in 1824, with a curriculum which modified that of Paris and with students recruited partly on a fee-paying basis and partly by state subvention. Somewhat later, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in Leipzig proved a huge influence from its inception in 1843. The Leipzig Conservatoire emerged from an environment in which the fascination with music-making as a domestic activity had led to a burgeoning of public, semi-private and fully private music schools operating under varying standards, as well as large numbers of poorly trained barely competent private teachers milking the middle classes. Leipzig was in many ways the ideal city in which to site an institution to tackle this situation, thanks to its legendary Gewandhaus orchestra, and its peerless musical leader, Mendelssohn.58 A parallel can be drawn with the St Petersburg Conservatoire, 56 Cited in C. Pierre, Le Conservatoire nationale de musique et de declamation, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1900, p. 461. 57 Cited in J.-G. Prod’homme, Les symphonies de Beethoven, Paris, Delagrave, 1906, repr. 1977, p. 121. 58 For a detailed background to the establishment of the Leipzig conservatoire see P. Röntsch (ed.), Bericht über die ersten 75 Jahre des Königlichen Konservatoriums zu Leipzig, erstattet zum 2. April 1918, Leipzig, Linnemann, 1918, pp. 5–6.
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opened in 1862 under the aegis of Anton Rubinstein. Under Mendelssohn’s directorship, the Gewandhaus gained a reputation for pedagogy through its carefully structured concerts which laid emphasis on ‘classical’ works from the past.59 Part of the inspiration for the conservatoire lay in the need for proper instrumental training in tandem with a rise in orchestral standards, particularly given the fact that the piano increasingly reigned supreme and interest in other instruments correspondingly declined.60 Thus, the conservatoire existed in a symbiotic relationship with the concert orchestra; the latter would provide teachers and exposure to high-level concert life, and the former would provide new players when members left or retired. The institution was aimed not at amateurs, Liebhaber or dilettanti, but at future professionals. Mendelssohn’s educational vision is revealed in the letter he wrote to the Kreisdirektor Falkenstein in April 1840. Importantly, he believed that group teaching would provide advantages over one-to-one lessons: That through the participation of several students on the same elements of learning and the same studies, a genuine musical sense would be awakened amongst the students, which would keep them fresh, and motivate them to be diligent and competitive, and protect them from insularity.61
While this approach has its advantages, in the conservatoire context it was to pose many problems; after Schumann had met his first pupils, Clara Schumann wrote in her Tagebuch, ‘I have no idea how one can teach six students at once.’ Such teaching, as practised by Liszt in his legendary masterclasses, is arguably better suited to proficient musicians; it is known that Liszt paid no attention to issues like technique or fingering, concentrating solely on interpretation, and never hearing a piece more than once. The most notable aspect of the curriculum is its emphasis on theoretical teaching; in his desire to promote profound knowledge of the repertoire, Mendelssohn opened a question that has been argued constantly in conservatoires since: how much theory do performers need, and how best should it be served up? At Leipzig, students were expected to attend a three-year theory course which looks admirably thorough, embracing harmony, voice-leading and advanced counterpoint, including writing of fugues. It also included 59 See R. Grotjahn, ‘Die Sinfonie im deutschen Kulturgebiet: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungs- und Institutionsgeschichte’, thesis, Hanover (1997). See also Y. Wasserloos, Das Leipziger Konservatorium der Musik im 19.Jahrhundert: Anziehungs- und Ausstrahlungskraft eines musikpädagogischen Modells auf das internationale Musikleben, Studien und Materialen zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 33, Hildesheim, Georg Olms, 2004, pp. 8–15, for a summary of the historical importance of the Gewandhaus. 60 Mendelssohn noted this problem in an oft-quoted letter (8 April 1840) to the Kreisdirektor von Falkenstein in Dresden. See F. Mendelssohn, Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847, ed. P. and C. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Leipzig, Hermann Mendelssohn, 1899, p. 157. Ultimately, a dedicated orchestral class was established in the 1880s. 61 Prospectus, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1843, p. 3.
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formal analysis, instrumentation, score-reading and musical direction, and Italian language for singers. Additionally, there were lectures on aesthetics, acoustics and music old and new, although it is not clear how much of this was mandatory. In a monograph published in 1868, it is noted that all students, regardless of their principal instrument, were required to have lessons in figured bass, piano and singing.62 Mendelssohn’s initial vision was perhaps too idealistic; very soon, problems began to manifest themselves. As with Paris, one of the chief problems was retaining high-profile staff. At Leipzig, the original professorial staff included Robert Schumann, the violinist Ferdinand David, the organist Ferdinand Becker and Mendelssohn himself – an exceptional group by any standard. But within the year, Mendelssohn went to Berlin, returning only in 1845; by 1844 the Schumanns had also left. Joseph Joachim joined the faculty in 1849, but they lost him the same year when he took up a place as concertmaster in Weimar. The few truly distinguished staff members who remained for a long period of time included Moscheles, Ferdinand David and academic staff such as Franz Brendel and later on Arnold Schering (history) and Reger (composition). Then, as now, there existed a delicate balance between attracting high-profile, prestigious staff and keeping ‘rank-and-file’ staff who would actually take care of the majority of the teaching. Issues also arose with the ambitious curriculum. A letter of Mendelssohn to Moscheles of 30 April 1843 (i.e. within the first weeks of the conservatoire’s opening) sheds some light on how Mendelssohn’s attitude to music education shifted once the conservatoire had opened – in this letter at least, it is somewhat at odds with the ideals outlined in the prospectus: All the students want to compose and theorize, whereas I believe that thorough practical work, thorough playing and keeping tempo, thorough knowledge of all competent works, etc., is the main thing that one can and should teach. From these, all other learning takes place naturally, and the rest cannot be taught, but is God’s gift.63
It is worth contrasting this with the theoretical requirements detailed above. The change in emphasis suggests that Mendelssohn realised that the standard of his new cohort was not what he would have hoped for, that their needs were more basic than he had imagined – and that there was a limit to how much could actually be taught. Certainly by summer 1843, Schumann was complaining about the lack of talent in composition amongst the 40–50 students.64 Although 62 E. Kneschke, Das Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1868, p. 21. 63 Mendelssohn, Briefe, pp. 255–6. 64 Quoted in J. Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 269–70.
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Mendelssohn’s vision had been for a specialist school in the truest sense, the reality was that many of the students were amateurs – a state of affairs that persisted in many conservatoires until well into the twentieth century. At Stuttgart, there was even a dedicated department for ‘dilettantes’. David J. Golby’s 2004 study of instrumental teaching in nineteenth-century Britain demonstrates the similarity of the situation in Britain, with institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music initially being dominated largely by the needs of the amateur market.65 One aspect of Leipzig which is now standard in modern conservatoires was its international quality. In its fortieth year, there were 406 students, divided into 208 men and 198 women; out of these, 103 were from Saxony, 122 from elsewhere in Germany, and the remainder from abroad: 12 Austrians, 14 Swiss, 8 Dutch, 19 Swedes/Norwegians, 62 English, 11 Russians, 1 Spaniard, 53 Americans and an Australian.66 In 1874, one Marie-Julie Bettfreund came from as far as Buenos Aires; in 1875 Annie Bain came from the Bahamas. This, however, led to problems with language. The prospectus stipulated that students were expected to arrive with an adequate knowledge of German; however, fairly soon this requirement was relaxed – with predictably bad effect. Perhaps the most famous student who did not understand his lessons at Leipzig was Arthur Sullivan. Mendelssohn’s desired accessibility was never to be realised; there were only six scholarships for native Saxons, which were granted only for a single year, and the annual fees of 80 Thalers were prohibitively high except for students from comfortable backgrounds. There were other problems; Yvonne Wasserloos in her recent study suggests that the curriculum was over-full, with a student potentially spending sixty hours a week in the building.67 Classes could begin as early as 6 a.m., and the final class of the day might end fourteen hours later. Conversely, discipline slackened with time, to the point that by the turn of the century attendance was shocking, with the expected drop in standards. Wasserloos’s study suggests that there is no record of anyone failing an audition, and by the mid-1860s, it was a meaningless formality.68 The general trend was towards greater commercialisation; students were accepted to fill the institution’s coffers. By the turn of the century the prospectus was being printed in both German and English, to attract the enormous British market. Additionally, the 1900 prospectus was embellished with gorgeous illustrations of the new building in Grassisstrasse. The greater emphasis on advertising shown by this revamped prospectus points to another perennial issue in the training of performers; the tension 65 See D. J. Golby, Instrumental Teaching in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, p. 6. 66 K. W. Whistling, Statistik des Königlichen Conservatoriums der Musik zu Leipzig 1843–1883, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1883, preface, p. vii. 67 Wasserloos, Das Leipziger Konservatorium, p. 31. 68 Ibid., pp. 49–50.
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Fig. 5.1. Illustrations of the façade, the concert hall and the stairwell of the building reproduced in the prospectus, 1900.
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Fig. 5.1. (cont.)
between attracting the typically small number of extremely gifted staff and students (and Leipzig certainly had its share), and maintaining sufficient numbers for the institution to remain financially viable. Altogether, as a conservatoire model Leipzig’s advantages and disadvantages remain largely unchanged; student access to first-class teaching and high-level resources is enhanced by an environment of competition, stimulus and future professional contacts. The directorate must manage high-profile staff, while offering a relevant curriculum. Notwithstanding these challenges, the conservatoire increasingly became the preferred venue for instrumental training; after the 1960s this route became the norm for professional musicians.
Other traditions: instrumental teaching in Russia Whoever is moved by music to the depths of his soul, and works on his instrument like one possessed, who loves music and his instrument with passion, will acquire virtuoso technique; he will be able to recreate the artistic image of the composition; he will be a performer. Pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, Director of the Moscow Conservatory, 1934–7
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Very few published sources in English bear witness to the great pedagogical traditions within the conservatoires at Moscow and St Petersburg. However, the plethora of talented Russian performers and composers has ensured a wide circulation of tales relating to individual student performers and composers, often (as in conservatoires generally) concerning friction between talented students – such as Scriabin and Prokofiev – and the establishment. A classic example is Rostropovich’s failure in his first year exams of the Moscow Conservatoire, because he had somehow ‘overlooked the fact that the Conservatoire course involved other disciplines such as harmony, music history and analysis, as well as the obligatory political curriculum’.69 An essential guide to the social and political background to the foundation of the conservatoires in St Petersburg (1862) and Moscow (1866) is contained in a wide-ranging article from 2004 by Lynn Sargeant.70 She charts the course of the Russian music profession that emerged through a conscious attempt by a voluntary association, the Russian Musical Society (1859–1918), to create the institutions and legal framework to support it. This was during a period in the late nineteenth century in which widely varying conceptions of the social and aesthetic purpose of music competed for dominance. Sargeant argues that although the process of musical professionalisation in Russia had much in common with that in Western Europe, the peculiarities of Russian social, political and cultural life strongly shaped the character of the Russian musical profession. Anton Rubinstein’s celebrated article written to promote the establishment of the first Russian conservatoire in St Petersburg argued that the absence of a musical profession in Russia was a consequence of the failure of musicians to persuade the State to ‘give music . . . the same privileges accorded to the other arts’, and to ‘give those involved in music the civic status of artist’. Rubinstein’s attack on Russia’s dilettantes was met by the Balakirev circle with taunts of ‘German pedantry’ and support for the supposed creativity and originality of Russian ‘amateur’ composers and musicians.71 Until the abolition of serfdom in 1861, ‘working musicians were largely serfs, former serfs, or foreigners. Highly skilled Russian performers and composers from aristocratic families also participated in musical life, of course, but by definition only as amateurs. In Russia’s estate-based social hierarchy, there was literally no way to accommodate the professional musician.’72 For years the legal position of graduates remained insecure and a respectable social status (with pension rights and state 69 E. Wilson, Mstislav Rostropovich: Cellist, Teacher, Legend, London, Faber, 2007, p. 31. 70 L. Sargeant, ‘A new class of people: the Conservatoire and musical professionalization in Russia, 1861– 1917’, Music & Letters, 85 (2004), 41–61. 71 Ibid., 41. 72 Ibid., 44.
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service) came only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although women students outnumbered men, their interest in music was routinely disparaged by cultural critics. ‘An ability to “play” the piano was all but mandatory for Russian women who hoped to find a likely husband.’73 Yet many women did in fact pursue professional (and semi-professional) careers. The complex position of Jewish musicians during a period of increased visibility is the final aspect of Sargeant’s magisterial guide through the difficult social landscape of late nineteenth-century Russia. A particularly valuable compendium of Russian ideas and teaching practice in the Soviet era is contained in The Art of Piano Playing by Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964), first published in the UK in 1973 in a translation by K. A. Leibovitch. Neuhaus was born in Elizavetgrad (later Kirovograd) into a family of musicians and studied with Godowsky in Berlin and Vienna. He began teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1922 and ten years later helped create the celebrated Moscow Central Music School for specially gifted children. From 1934 to 1937 he was Director of the Moscow Conservatoire, a post he relinquished in order to devote himself entirely to teaching. His pupils included Lupu, Gilels and Richter. The Art of Piano Playing assumes throughout a high level of talent, motivation and aspiration. ‘The whole secret of talent and of genius is that in the case of a person so gifted, music lives a full life in his brain before he even touches a keyboard or draws a bow across the strings. That is why Mozart as a small child could “at once” play the piano and the violin.’74 Such an approach has been contextualised in recent observations by Jeltova and Grigorenko on Russian attitudes to giftedness: The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 resulted in a regime that tried (or claimed) to minimize individual differences and establish equity in all areas of human enterprise . . . Russian society, however has always been interested in identifying and utilising outstanding abilities for the societal ‘common good’.75
Neuhaus reports that his teacher Godowsky’s comments were aimed exclusively at music, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and broad interpretation of the written score. He would immediately lose all interest in a pupil whose hearing was inaccurate, who memorised wrong notes or showed bad taste. His remarks on 73 ‘Muzykal’noe uchilishche v Moskve’, Russkie vedomosti, 3 February 1866, cited ibid., 52. 74 H. Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (Moscow, 1958), trans. K. A. Leibovitch as The Art of Piano Playing, London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1973, p. 1. 75 I. Jeltova and E. L. Grigorenko, ‘Systematic approaches to giftedness: contributions of Russian psychology’, in R. J. Sternberg and J. E. Davidson (eds.), Conceptions of Giftedness, Cambridge University Press, 2005. The authors note the Russians’ unfavourable view of empirical research into individual differences because the implied testing would challenge the underlying ideological societal postulates.
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the method of playing the piano were usually a few bare words on ‘weighty playing’ or ‘complete freedom’. Neuhaus’s own declared teaching method was to use ‘every means to arouse [a student’s] professional ambition: to be equal to the best; developing his imagination by the use of apt metaphor, poetic similes, by analogy with natural phenomena or events in life, particularly spiritual, emotional life. It means supplementing and interpreting musical language; using every means to develop in him as love of other forms of art, particularly poetry, painting and architecture, and, most important of all – making him feel the ethical dignity of the artist, his obligations, his responsibilities and his rights.’76 Regarding talent as passion plus intellect, Neuhaus asserts that a pianist’s modest yet vast purpose is ‘to play our amazing, our magnificent piano literature in such a way as to make the hearer like it, to make him love life still more, make his feelings more intense, his longings more acute and give greater depth to his understanding’.77 Citing Rubinstein’s emphasis on musical characterisation, he approves his questioning of pupils as to the nature of pieces, whether lyrical, dramatic, sarcastic, solemn, joyful, sorrowful, etc., as being ‘the highest achievement of pedagogical thinking and practice’.78 A passionate advocate of class teaching, Neuhaus considers it a great failing of the conservatoire system that students’ overloaded schedules permit them only rarely to listen to each other in quasi laboratory conditions. An articulate successor in print to Neuhaus is Moscow alumnus Boris Berman, whose Notes from the Pianist’s Bench79 ventures way beyond the conventional to include a chapter entitled ‘Technique of the soul’. He summarises this as ‘recognizing emotions called for in a musical composition, identifying with these emotions, creating emotional continuity, recalling (or reliving) these emotions and moving from one to another in a timely manner to correspond with the changing moods of the composition; and presenting the emotional content in a tone that is appropriate to the style of the composition’, an attitude we have encountered in C. P. E. Bach and Manuel García. His chapter on teaching and learning is based on his perspective as a Moscow student in the 1950s and 1960s and then as a teacher for more than thirty years. Addressing students’ individual needs, Berman again recalls eighteenthcentury thought in having felt on occasion compelled to remark: ‘You are so proficient at the keyboard; how about practicing less and spending more time reading, visiting museums, or listening to music other than the piano repertoire?’ Finding a personal voice, acquiring musical taste and understanding,
76 Neuhaus, The Art, pp. 20–1. 77 Ibid., p. 22. 78 Ibid., p. 173. 79 Boris Berman, Notes from the Pianist’s Bench, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000.
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learning how to practise, engendering respect for the music, projecting authority and confidence are all important goals. This holistic approach to teaching also captivated the pupils of Mstislav Rostropovich. His avowed aim was to educate them to love music and to fire their imagination, within the environment of an open class. His demands were ferocious, his philosophies challenging. As his pupil Ivan Monighetti remarked, ‘It might seem a paradox, but he did not teach “cello-playing”. The cello was in the first instance, for him, a means of transmitting grandiose ideas, hypnotic images, profound spiritual states of being; it was an instrument through which one could influence masses of people.’80 The ability to commit complex music to memory was important to him, as was sight-reading as a test of intuition and spontaneity. For Rostropovich international competitions were an important way of enhancing the cello’s standing. The politics in Moscow that were an inherent part of competition culture are well caught in Elizabeth Wilson’s biography of the great cellist; a defining moment came in 1970 when the authorities tried to insist in advance on Russian winners in each category of the Tchaikovsky Competition in order to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Lenin. Rostropovich had the courage (and clout) to brush this aside.
Alternative paths Apart from the training paths noted so far, we may note a number of individual proponents of innovative educational philosophies which have gained great popularity. For example, a commitment to instrumental skills, musical literacy and knowledge of Western art music is central to the highly structured choral method developed by Kodály. Following Rousseau, Galin, Paris and Chevé in nineteenth-century France developed a system for sight-singing that dispensed with notation in favour of imagery. The Swiss Émile Jaques-Dalcroze developed his Eurythmics to inspire students to feel an enhanced involvement in music through movement. Carl Orff ’s Schulwerk developed Dalcroze’s ideas to create ‘a synthesis of performance through instruments and voice, aural training, movement and improvisation. His approach is based on direct and immediate involvement with music from the first encounter, and it is music for everyone, in classes, with contributions at whatever level an individual can offer. The prime aim is to develop improvisation through the gradual extension of performing skills and the development of musical imagination.’81
80 Wilson, Rostropovich, p. 304.
81 Cited in Swanwick and Spencer, ‘Education’.
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The Suzuki method was conceived by Shin’ichi Suzuki, a violinist who wished to bring some beauty to the lives of Japanese children in the wake of the Second World War. He pioneered the idea that any pre-school child could begin to play a scaled-down violin if the learning steps were small enough; his aim was to raise children with ‘noble hearts’, rather than individual prodigies. Group preparation of performance pieces (rather than studies) in a sympathetic environment is complemented by parentally supervised practice. In its original form, the Suzuki method discourages competitive attitudes, advocating collaboration and mutual encouragement among the players.
Musical performance at the universities The history of the teaching of musical performance within universities is bound up with the Classical dichotomous view of music as musica speculativa (theory, as a part of mathematics) versus musica practica (the performance of music, generally linked with religious ceremonies).82 Through Boethius’s De institutione musica, the key text for musical study for centuries, this view became entrenched. Furthermore Boethius declared: Now, it should be known that he is not called a musician who performs only with his hands, but he is truly a musician who knows naturally how to discuss music and to elucidate its meaning with pure reasons . . . for every art and every discipline considers reason inherently more honourable than skill which is practised by the hand and labour of an artisan. For it is much better to know what someone does than to do what one learns from another.83
Thanks to its inclusion in the seven liberal arts, musica enjoyed a high status within the university curriculum. The trivium and quadrivium formed the basis for the baccalaureate in Arts, which in turn was required for further study in the higher subjects of medicine, law and, most importantly, theology. Nan Cooke Carpenter, author of a number of studies regarding music in European universities, states: ‘everyone who went to the universities for higher learning studied the liberal arts, and everyone who got beyond the trivium studied music along with the other subjects of the quadrivium.’84 Although this notion of music does not involve performance, life in any of the above-mentioned educational institutions would have been unthinkable without practical music-making (cantilena or cantus). The Church and the 82 See N. C. Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958, pp. 3ff. for summary of the role of music within Greek education. 83 Quoted in I. Fenlon (ed.), Early Music History, vol. 18: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Music, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 69. 84 N. C. Carpenter, ‘Music in the Medieval universities’, Journal of Research in Music Education, 3/2 (Autumn, 1955), 136.
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universities were closely bound up with one another; chapel staff taught at the university; the choristers won scholarships to continue their studies; the choir school often functioned under university auspices; in fact, ‘Notre Dame’s choir school actually served as a preparatory school for the university, constantly sending students to the Sorbonne for higher studies, many of these choristers on scholarships’.85 Therefore there would have been plenty of opportunity to study with reputable professional teachers outside the curriculum, provided the student was motivated. Elsewhere in Europe, the situation was similar.86 Musical training in Paris, for example, was highly regarded. In Prague and Vienna, early universities modelled on Paris, music lessons were specified within the curriculum. In England, there is documented evidence of the existence of B.Mus. and D.Mus. degrees from the late fifteenth century onwards.87 In 1464, the first firmly authenticated Bachelor of Music degree was awarded at Cambridge to one Henry Abyngdon, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal to Edward IV.88 External candidates (usually well-established professional musicians) supplicated for these degrees on the basis of many years’ study of music external to the university, later also submitting a composition which was performed upon conferment of the degree. Thus both Thomas Morley and John Dowland gained a B.Mus. from Oxford on 8 July 1588. With time, increasing numbers of candidates supplicated for the degree, which in turn led to the standardisation of the requirements. Thus ‘The Laudian Statutes of 1636 codified the formula whereby candidates where required to have spent seven years in the study or practice of music for the B.Mus. and a further five years for the D.Mus., and to submit a composition (‘Canticum’) of five parts for the B.Mus., and of six or eight parts for the D.Mus., to be performed publicly in the School of Music.’89 The degree conferred the right (and often also the requirement) to teach. In 1626, William Heather endowed a Professorship in Music at Oxford. This provided for a lecturer in the science of music and also a choragus who would lead practical music-making on a weekly basis. Cambridge appointed its first Professor of Music in 1684, one Nicholas Staggins who was Charles II’s bandmaster.90 Until the nineteenth century, these posts were not always regularly filled, or when filled, not always with distinguished musicians. Similarly, it is
85 Ibid., 138. 86 For example, the universities of Bologna and Padua. For a summary of music education at the universities elsewhere in Europe, see ibid., 137–41. 87 S. Wollenberg, ‘Oxford’, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 88 J. Milsom, ‘Henry Abyngdon’, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 89 Wollenberg, ‘Oxford’. 90 For a history of the establishment of this post, see C. F. A. Williams, A Short Historical Account of the Degrees in Music at Oxford and Cambridge, London, Novello, [1893], p. 39.
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hard to gauge how well attended the weekly music practices held by the choragus were. According to Williams, ‘the musical practices soon dropped’.91 In fact, the most important sites for secular music-making (and by association, training) remain the numerous university music societies. It was the activities of the music societies in Oxford which led to the building of the first ‘purposebuilt public concert room in Europe’,92 the Holywell Music Room (1748). Arguably the turning point was in the nineteenth century. After the relative decline in educational standards in the eighteenth century, there now came a period when active, dedicated musicians (composers, conductors and/or organists) were appointed professors. At the same time, the focus of the formal degrees now shifted onto music history and composition, and later analysis. From 1918 it became a requirement for a music student to reside at Oxford. Various other reforms took place, ensuring that candidates would be competent composers and have a wide knowledge of musical history and style.93 Performers who thrived in this environment were chiefly organists, for example Samuel Wesley (B.Mus. and D.Mus. 1839). This emphasis on theory and history is understandable in the light of the creation of the new conservatoires which existed to provide practical training. The Faculty of Music in Oxford was created in 1944. At Cambridge, the Faculty of Music was opened in 1947, offering the Music Tripos. The current BA Honours (Music) at Oxford can incorporate some optional performance training, however the main emphasis is on theoretical elements of music. Performance is listed within the aims and outcomes, following the mention of historical, analytical and critical skills. At the time of writing the Oxford undergraduate syllabus suggests that: A clear division between intellectual and practical skills in the domain of music may be misleading, since many so-called practical skills have a pronounced intellectual dimension, as for instance interpretative and compositional skills. These by definition are forms of non-verbal discourse, but rich in intellectual content.
The Tripos is not dissimilar. At their best, university music departments and societies have played an important role in the revival of much early repertoire (for example the Handel oratorios at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s), and also the promotion of much contemporary music. The societies range from virtually professional pan-university organisations to college-based events. Many successful musicians have cut their teeth in this environment, and 91 Williams, Degrees, p. 36. 92 Wollenberg, ‘Oxford’. For a comprehensive history of the Cambridge music societies, see F. Knight, Cambridge Music: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times, Oleander Press, 1980. 93 For a discussion of these reforms, see Williams, Degrees, pp. 41–2.
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equally importantly, made contacts which are then helpful in their professional careers. The British soprano Susan Gritton, for example, read botany at St Hilda’s, Oxford; during her time at the university, her musical interests were not formally supported, but flourished thanks to the enormous number of concert opportunities for amateur, and then, professional groups.
Inquiries and reports: changes in conservatoire training in Britain from the 1960s to the 1990s At the time the Higher Education Funding Council of England commissioned Sir John Tooley’s Review of Music Conservatoires (1998), the subject had been debated for over three decades. In 1965 a report Making Musicians for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation recommended a reduction in conservatoire numbers and expanded teaching to bring about a necessary increase in quality, advocating a merger of three London institutions. Its proposals would have entailed considerable extra public expenditure at a time when the government was going through one of its recurrent financial crises; furthermore there was at that time no appetite for institutional mergers nor for a reduction in student numbers. Following a perceived deterioration in the training of professional musicians, the second Gulbenkian report Training Musicians (1978) recommended for conservatoires a concentration on training performers and instrumental teachers, extending courses to four years.94 Its recommendations ranged across the training of school-age musicians (especially the early identification of talent), the benefits of specialist music schools and the future of the music colleges. Some of the proposals, notably the provision of career advice within the conservatoire, have since been acted upon, for example at the Royal College of Music; many have not. In 1990 the Gowrie Report returned to the themes of merger and student numbers, recommending the creation of a new London conservatoire, incorporating the Royal College and Royal Academy of Music, with reduced numbers and increased funding per student. With no new building in prospect, its effect was limited to a joint opera school over the next decade. Tooley’s report some eight years later was supportive and sympathetic of the conservatoires’ achievements, noting that with the current focus on professional aims/objectives and their envied status, it is difficult to recall how strongly, only 30 years ago, the conservatoires could 94 In passing, Training Musicians noted the inferior funding arrangements of the London orchestras, noting that these were ‘dwarfed by the subsidy received by, for instance, the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam or the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’. See Training Musicians, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1978, p. 19.
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have been blamed for the shortage of orchestral players, and criticised for lacking clear objectives, for failing to differentiate professional from amateur needs, for producing too many ill-prepared people for the available jobs, and for accepting too many students through an open doors policy who ‘by accident or design entered as potential school teachers’. (p. 14)
He was able to report important changes in the standing of UK conservatoires, nourished by a willingness to embrace change that was illustrated by the replacement of diploma courses with four-year degree programmes (as recommended in 1978) and the development of postgraduate provision. All this had taken place during a period in which there had been ‘much to celebrate’ about British music in terms of its international profile, the pioneering extensions of musical institutions into the community, the place of music in the national curriculum (albeit compulsory only to age fourteen) and the recent wave of new concert halls. Tooley’s remit was principally to advise on patterns of employment of conservatoire graduates, implications for the desirable pattern of future training in the light of changes in the music profession and the relationship with university music departments. He noted changes in the profession relating to a new interest in portfolio careers within a climate of rising instrumental standards and a greater degree of individual versatility. Music’s social role had become more important. He noted the conservatoires’ strategic position as trainers for the music profession, combined with a parallel cultural responsibility to preserve and enhance music as an art form, while functioning as public institutions. The federated approach in the UK conservatoire sector recommended by Tooley has proved more challenging than he might have envisaged. But another of his concerns expressed in the immediate post-Thatcher era has proved enduring, as conservatoires continue to defend themselves against charges of elitism, whilst addressing issues of widening participation: Whilst entry standards to the conservatoires across the board are said to be higher than in living memory, concerns are expressed about the impact of changes in local authority instrumental services, which are a consequence of the introduction of local management of schools. Arrangements for providing instrumental lessons are altering in different ways around the country. In some cases, the local authority services have disappeared and in others they have been replaced by trusts or co-operatives. Concerns are that the opportunity to enjoy instrumental lessons may be reduced in certain geographic areas and the introduction of charges may have an impact on access. (p. 18)
Despite the continuing issues of access, conservatoires are responding rapidly to the demands of the profession, and examine their curricula regularly. As the field of musical study has broadened, the boundaries between the ‘knowing’
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and the ‘doing’ of music have begun to blur. While older institutions tend to retain the traditional theory-rooted model of musical study, many newer institutions are offering training that embraces both practical and theoretical knowledge of music. New universities are seeking to incorporate higher standards of performance, and since 1998 conservatoires are challenging received notions of research through a growing body of performance-based scholarship. While some performance-based scholarship still presents challenges in terms of dissemination and, for the purposes of research assessment exercises within the UK, evaluation, there is no doubt that such work is transforming the face of performance training. One important recent development is the Bologna Declaration of 1999. This agreement was implemented in order to ensure validity of qualifications across Europe by ensuring comparability between educational institutions.95 For musical training, mobility is of great importance; the possibility of moving relatively freely between institutions within a ‘European Higher Education Area’ is an attractive one for musicians, for whom networking and mobility are central to training. As of 2009, no fewer than forty-six countries have acceded to the Bologna process.96
Case study: the Royal College of Music, London Since after the Second World War, the content of conservatoire training became more demanding and such training has become more or less mandatory for aspiring professionals. More recently, conservatoire training increasingly reflects the range of activities in which many musicians engage, including freelance playing in a number of different organisations (solo, chamber and/or orchestral playing), teaching, composition and arranging, studio-based work and animateuring, to name but some possibilities. In order to meet this need, conservatoires’ curricula are diversifying beyond the traditional model of individual teaching of common practice repertoire supplemented by a small amount of traditional theory and harmony. At the Royal College of Music,97 undergraduate options include Alexander Technique, music therapy, a wide
95 For a short discussion of the Bologna Agreement, see R. Smilde, Musicians as Lifelong Learners: Discovery through Biography, Delft, Eburon, 2009 and http://ec.europa.eu/education/higher-education/doc1290_en. htm. 96 Also relevant here is the 1997 study Europe’s Caprices: A Study of Violin Curricula in European Musical Institutions of Higher Learning undertaken by the Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen. This study compares violin curricula across numerous European institutions, looking at factors such as weekly lesson provision, audition and examination requirements, and chamber/orchestral activities. 97 D. Wright (‘The South Kensington music schools and the development of the British conservatoire in the late nineteenth century’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130/2 (2005), 236–82) outlines the background to the establishment of the Royal College of Music.
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range of studio-based options such as CD production, pop-song writing and electro-acoustic composition, outreach and teaching. Performance-based research is flourishing within the conservatoires, and at its best, it contributes to the training of performers by analysing their needs. One example at the Royal College of Music is the Centre for Performance Science which conducts research into key areas of performers’ experience such as practice techniques, performance anxiety, memorisation and widely known but rarely acknowledged professional issues such as alcohol and drug abuse. Other projects seek objectively to explore areas which have long been regarded as the realm of philosophers, for example how listeners evaluate performances of music.98 The core business, however, lies in the preparation of musicians for professional life. Central to this is liaison with professional performing bodies, recalling the model of the Leipzig conservatoire. The RCM maintains such partnerships with a number of professional orchestras including the orchestra of the English National Opera, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. These partnerships take a distinct form: selected students are paired with professional performers, who may provide some lessons but chiefly the students are allowed to attend and participate in rehearsals. These students may also get opportunities to stand in for regular players, thus recreating the ancient apprenticeship model. Places on such schemes are highly competitive; for example, the recent ‘Pathways’ scheme (with the BBC Symphony Orchestra) for second-year postgraduates is open to a single player on each orchestral instrument. Provision for historically informed performance involves professional ensembles in association, individual instrumental group coaching, the awakening of interest in modern instrument players through taster sessions and concert opportunities in both internal and external venues. For contemporary music, a resident ensemble works with student composers to give them training in writing idiomatically for various instruments, and also works with student instrumentalists. The RCM International Opera School offers similar pre-professional training with a broad overlap between study and professional work. Over two years, a student can expect to have at least one major role in the six operas which are put on with professional directors and conductors. These productions are attended by agents and the national press. The remainder of the course consists of intensive acting and language training provided by professionals shared with leading opera houses, singing lessons and coaching.
98 For details of projects and publications, see the website of the Centre for Performance History, www. legacyweb.rcm.ac.uk/cps/Home.
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To ease the transition into running a career as a freelance musician, the RCM’s Woodhouse Centre provides career advice and performance opportunities. The Centre maintains contacts with various concert venues, but the students are given training in handling their own contracts and liaising with the clients. Employment in instrumental teaching is also offered. Outreach activities, which now feature in the portfolio of virtually all musical institutions, are also run from the centre, ranging from workshops with young children to compositional projects with people with Alzheimer’s disease and their carers. The educational activity taking place at the Royal College of Music seeks to respond to the changing needs of musicians. There is no doubt that these responses are necessary; Rineke Smilde’s recent study ‘Musicians as lifelong learners: Discovery through biography’ outlines many of the new skills that are required of musicians, setting the typically diverse range of professional activities a musician may undertake against the ancient and enduring model of master–apprentice learning supplemented by hours of practice, which lies at the heart of great musical training. This fundamental notion is captured in the words of Yonty Solomon, who taught piano at the RCM from 1977 until his death in 2008: As a teacher you have to have real imagination, you have to think over new ideas all the time. You have to have respect for the student and vice versa, that is really very important. . . . Teaching is a giving. You have got to give unstintingly. If they take it completely that is wonderful.99
99 Quoted in Smilde, Musicians, pp. 107–8.
. 6 .
Music and musical performance: histories in disjunction? DAVID WRIGHT
If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light . . . Few things would mortify me more, than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.1
The Earl of Chesterfield’s precept signals the disjuncture between the concepts of music and musical performance as perceived by a British aristocrat in the mid-eighteenth century: listening to music is something a nobleman might do and enjoy without compromise to his station in life, but to participate in its performance is to invite social stigma. And Adam Smith could observe that to work as a professional performer was a ‘sort of public prostitution’, and the ‘exorbitant rewards’ paid to the most admired players and opera singers both reflected the rarity and beauty of their talents, and compensated them for the social ‘discredit of employing them in this manner’. But Smith’s prediction that any lessening in society’s prejudice against performers would lead to a corresponding diminution of their earning potential was to prove very wide of the mark; it stands now as an indication of just how much the routine disparagement of performers and an accompanying ambivalence towards music’s cultural standing was to change.2 For not only was nineteenth-century Britain to prove one of the most lucrative earning grounds for superstar performers, but as a nation it also became serious about encouraging and training its own native performing talent, so as to be the better able to satisfy its appetite for music of all kinds. In 1881, Frederick Crowest, the critic and writer on music, for all that he resented the dominance of the foreign performer (‘nothing to recommend them but their long hair, their foreign accent, and an untidy appearance’) nevertheless recognised that until Britain had a
1 B. Dobrée (ed.), The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932, vol. 4, Letter 1633. 2 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), bk. I, ch. 10, pt. 1, pp. 123–4. The page references are to the ‘Modern Library’ edition, ed. E. Cannan, New York, Random House, 2000.
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satisfactory system of musical education, ‘we must neither envy the foreign element in our places of honour, nor grudge [them] the large sums of money’. Crowest’s description of foreign performers echoes that of the Rev. H. R. Haweis, ‘players and singers from abroad whose chief merits seem to consist in long hair and a very imperfect acquaintance with the English language’, which suggests that the complaint enjoyed a common formulation.3 Lest the disdain of Chesterfield and Adam Smith be thought a peculiarly British affliction, laying the foundations for that epithetical slur, ‘the land without music’,4 the contrast between the funerals of Mozart and Beethoven indicates that a profound attitudinal shift had also taken place in Germanspeaking countries between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A mere thirty-six years separates Mozart’s interment into an unmarked grave, witnessed only by a priest and a sexton, from the extraordinary send-off to which Beethoven was treated. The procession of thousands (estimated at between 10,000 and 30,000) that accompanied Beethoven’s coffin to the church, taking some one-and-a-half hours to cover the 500 yards, has its epic representation in Franz Stober’s painting, Beethoven’s Funeral Procession.5 It was an occasion that could truly be said to have set the seal on composition’s new place in the cultural firmament, now perceived and valued in its own right as possessing creative and intellectual substance. ‘Sacralisation’, as the historian Tim Blanning uses the term, captures this sense of a different attitude (both more knowing and respectful) being accorded to music as an autonomous and self-sufficient aesthetic experience.6 The pictorial genre of what can only be called ‘worshipful listening’ powerfully represents this aesthetic in action, an ideal whose example was influentially propagated in the conventions of audience behaviour that John Ella established for his London chamber music society, the Musical Union.7 But we should remember that there was a hierarchy of veneration in this process: what was being ‘worshipped’ was the score, 3 F. Crowest, Phases of Musical England, London, Remington, 1881, pp. 300–1; H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals, London, Strahan, 1871, p. 73; the Royal College of Music with its modern curriculum was established in 1883, after Crowest had made his comment on British music education. 4 O. A. H. Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik. Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme, Munich, G. Müller, 1914. 5 ‘Four funerals and a wedding: the sacralisation of music in the late eighteenth century’, a paper given in memory of Cyril Ehrlich by Tim Blanning to the Institute of Historical Research ‘Music in Britain’ Seminar in March 2005; T. Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and their Art, London, Allen Lane, 2008. 6 T. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815, London, Allen Lane, 2007, pp. 521–3; T. Blanning, ‘The commercialization and sacralization of European culture in the nineteenth century’, in T. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 120–47; and T. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789, Oxford University Press, 2002, especially pp. 5–14 and 78–99. L. W. Levine discusses the process of cultural sacralisation in Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988. 7 C. Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2007, especially pp. 140–1 and 232–3.
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regardless of how exquisite a degree of adoration the audience seems to be showing to the officiants – the performers themselves – at this musical rite.8 The social and cultural constructions of the new market of eager and culturally aspirant bourgeois consumers firmly established compositions in the high-art tradition as music’s central focus.9 And significantly for the way that music’s history was to be constructed, it was the written text – the notated representation of the musical sound – rather than its performance which came to be understood as the embodiment (something more than just the means of its transmission) of the musical work, particularly in the case of music accorded canonic or exemplary status. It is hardly surprising that the musical score should have assumed such prime importance in an age when print was the means of widespread communication, and at a time when music could be made permanently accessible only in terms of its written text, and not its sounding state. Thus the score was the only way in which music could be made merchantable and turned into a potentially profitable commodity, a form of commercial opportunity that obviously increased with the spread of instrumental ownership and the burgeoning of musical activity in the nineteenth century. Developments such as lithography and stereotyping (the method used by the astutely venturous publisher Novello to produce its volume sales of octavo vocal scores) lowered the cost of music production, something that then enabled printed materials to be purchased in large quantities across a very broad social range. This point is tellingly illustrated by the diminishing unit cost of Handel’s Messiah. In 1837 an edition of Messiah was one guinea, but by 1854 it had dropped to four shillings for an octavo edition, and by the early 1860s this, and other, oratorios were available at one shilling.10 As the market further expanded in response to increasing consumer demand, so commercial retailing became more widespread, ensuring the steady supply and distribution of music, even to small communities. Dave Russell’s example drawn from northern British urban centres is striking: Bradford, with a population of nearly 300,000, had fortysix music dealers; Halifax, with a population of approximately 100,000, had eighteen; Batley, with its population of some 30,000, had four; and even Sowerby Bridge, with a population of only 7,500, had two shops which sold 8 Pictorial representation of idealised attitudes of devotional or worshipful listening, include Albert Graefle’s ‘Ludwig van Beethoven und die Intimen, dem Spiel desselben lauschend’, Moritz von Shwind’s ‘Die Symphonie’ and ‘A Schubert Evening at Spaun’s’, ‘Liszt conducting the premiere of his oratorio St Elisabeth in Budapest, August 1865’ (Illustrated London News). 9 On the Viennese situation see T. DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803, Berkeley, University Press of California, 1995. 10 M. Miller, ‘The early Novello octavo editions’, in O. Neighbour (ed.), Music and Bibliography: Essays in Honour of Alec Hyatt King, London, Clive Bingley, 1980, pp. 160–9; see D. Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914, 2nd edn, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 173.
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music.11 Not until the development of the new science of recording in the twentieth century was musical performance to become widely available in a durable form, its natural evanescence captured and preserved by sound technology. Recording technology means that the condition of music in our own day is fundamentally different from that which Adam Smith so pithily characterised as being necessarily inseparable from the actions of the performers creating it, because it left behind no tangible or vendible commodity, and perished ‘in the very instant of its production’.12 Musical notation endowed compositions with a durable and transmissible format, which meant that in the process of canon formation undertaken by Austro-German scholars (discussed later in the chapter) works and their creators became the primary focus of musicology. This can be seen in the influential tabulation of the field of musicology drawn up by Guido Adler.13 This tabular survey makes but one mention of performance, and that only as a quantifiable measure within the category of ancillary disciplines (‘Biographical studies of musicians, statistics relating to musical associations, institutions and performances’).14 The treatment of composition as a synecdoche for ‘music’ offered musicology a pragmatic means to establish an order on this notoriously complex art form, with the result that its history was constructed into the familiar, classical grand narrative with its constituent periods of musical endeavour. Thus the privileging of the musical work as text, above the musical work as sound, was something of a ‘common sense’ solution to the ephemeral and therefore problematic condition of performance, which continued to defy embodiment as a historical phenomenon until the invention of recording. Until this technology, the closest that performance came to its historical representation, again in printed format, was through a succession of performance treatises. It is indicative of the historical situation that for much of the twentieth century, the performance domain should have been treated in a positivist manner, establishing verifiable performance practices from the ‘how to’ manuals of François Couperin, C. P. E. Bach, Quantz, Leopold Mozart and others, rather than by treating musical performance in terms of social interaction and cultural
11 Russell, Popular Music, p. 179. 12 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk. II, ch. 3, pt. 2, p. 361; see also the Peacock Committee’s A Report on Orchestral Resources in Great Britain (The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970), p. 48, and A. Peacock and R. Weir, The Composer in the Market Place, London, Faber, 1975, pp. 14–18. 13 G. Adler, ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, vol. 1 (1885), 16–17. 14 B. Bujic, Music in European Thought 1851–1912, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 348–55; and K. C. Karnes, Music, Criticism and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth– Century Vienna, Oxford University Press, 2008, especially pp. 4–11 and 38–44. For an influential exegesis of the philosophical issues and the development of the work-concept, see L. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. edn, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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practice. Thus a whole dimension of music history was left frustratingly incomplete. And as the nineteenth century progressed, so the intellectual and cultural environment demanded histories of music that were essentially accounts of great compositions complemented by the attendant fashioning of the lives of their composers. But as far as broader consideration of music went, the context and significance of performers was rarely discussed (except for the personas, social exploits and exploitative economics of megastar virtuosi); indicative is the fact that not until the rise of the ‘authentic’ performance movement in the later twentieth century was sustained analytical consideration given to performance practice issues. What is especially striking about the British musical context discussed in this chapter is the dichotomy between performance and composition brought about by the way that traditional music history has been written. Seen from today’s perspective it does indeed appear odd that there should need to be two sorts of histories dealing with the same musical culture, one about composers and one about performers and their audiences; and furthermore that these histories should be so different in many respects – narratives separated by a common art, as it were. Changing the academic environment, so that works and their creators should not automatically be the primary focus of musical enquiry, required a new historiography and the intellectual caesura of postmodernism.
Historiographies Oscar Schmitz’s 1914 dismissal of Britain as the ‘land without music’ has long been ubiquitous as the authoritative de facto judgement.15 But Schmitz was a journalist, a writer on society and on esoteric subjects, not a musician, and this book is a sort of travelogue of his impressions of British society. Schmitz used the phrase ‘land without music’ as a metaphor for his diagnosis of the central flaw of the British condition, which he expressed somewhat metaphysically as its capacity for appreciating a thing’s external qualities rather than its ‘true inwardness’.16 Schmitz felt this preference for surface rather than substance explained why the British were better at consuming music rather than composing it, their recognition of the feats of soloists leading them to treat musical virtuosi rather as the champions of a particular sport.17 Perhaps because of its German provenance, his verdict, ‘the English are the only cultured race without a music of their own (music hall ditties excepted)’,18 was used as further justification by British critics for their routine disparagement of the national 15 Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik, trans. H. Herzl as The Land without Music, London, Jerrolds, [1926]. The following references are to this translation. 16 Ibid., p. 17. 17 Ibid., p. 83. 18 Ibid., p. 26.
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musical culture, and the epithet stuck. Schmitz’s continuation, ‘I say music of their own, for perhaps more foreign music is performed in England than in any other country’,19 was overlooked, not that this sentiment was intended to convey any sort of approval: to Schmitz, the cosmopolitan nature of British musical consumption was yet more alarming evidence of that lack of discernment in British audiences which further underlined the poverty of their inward life.20 Still, however unsystematic and impressionistic the basis of his judgements, Schmitz was indeed correct in picking up on the breadth of British musical taste; and the curiosity and openness that fuelled this receptivity in turn provided the underlying motivation for the writing (and the subsequent public take-up) of Grove’s Dictionary, as Grove makes clear in his Preface to the first edition. The fact that Schmitz’s phrase gained such currency was not just because it offered journalists such a good tag, but because it also played very much to the priorities of established music history. As will be discussed later in the chapter, commentators such as G. A. Macfarren and H. R. Harweis had already done much to establish the British neurosis that its musical life was significantly inadequate because it lacked sufficient home-grown compositions to match the substantive artistic reputation of Austro-German works. This circumstance made it all too easy to discount the burgeoning of all kinds of performance traditions in Britain, as well as the British enthusiasm for playing, singing and listening to an extraordinarily wide range of music. Only very belatedly has all this activity begun to receive its proper recognition, as recent studies into the social history of British music have generated a very different type of contextual investigation. Perhaps most indicative of this situation was the fact that E. D. Mackerness, the author of one of the first serious social histories of British music, was a Lecturer in English Literature (his book was published in the series ‘Studies in Social History’, edited by the social historian Harold Perkin); that Cyril Ehrlich’s hugely influential study of the music profession in Britain was the work of a social and economic historian; and that Ruth Finnegan’s pioneering investigation into the life of amateur musicians and the range of often hidden musical activities and usually unremarked upon performers within a single English town in the 1980s, was written by a social anthropologist.21 These
19 Ibid. 20 For a recent discussion of Schmitz’s book in the context of the English musical renaissance, see J. Schaarwächter, ‘Chasing a myth and a legend: “The British Musical Renaissance” in a “Land without Music” ’, Musical Times (Autumn, 2008), 53–60. 21 E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964; C. Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985; R. Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, 2nd edn, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
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writers brought a new, and more systematic focus on music’s social and economic context, and on the ways that cultural, educational and market factors have influenced and shaped its performance and reception across society. In turn, they influenced other studies, with the result that our understanding of British musical life has been transformed.22 Such accounts of what British society consumed and the ways in which it did so, show the burgeoning of performance in nineteenth-century Britain, both amateur and professional. This happened as the effects of economic prosperity, increasing amounts of leisure time and higher social expectations kicked in, creating new patterns of musical consumption and enjoyment, not only amongst the bourgeoisie, but also amongst large sections of the growing urban working population. Musicmaking became an intensive activity, vigorously and skilfully taken up right across British society, with a striking proliferation of amateur music-making across a gamut of informal local activities, as well as more formal performances in which the professional and amateur spheres often met.23 The pressures of sustaining all this activity were often considerable, and in some communities it required strong motivation and physical effort from audiences and performers alike. The informal reports of musical events found in private letters and diaries are often more valuable than ‘official’ printed accounts, because they can have that whiff of immediacy and candour that conveys a real sense of the occasion.24 As technological developments in music printing lowered the price of sheet music, so new industrial processes in the manufacture of musical instruments reduced their cost and opened them up to domestic ownership as never
22 Inter alia, see R. Nettel, Music in the Five Towns 1840–1914, Oxford University Press, 1944; Russell, Popular Music; R. Pearsall, Edwardian Popular Music, Rutherford, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975; C. Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; L. Foreman, Music in England 1885–1920 as Recounted in Hazell’s Annual, London, Thames Publishing, 1994; M. Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace, Cambridge University Press, 1995; A. Blake, The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, Manchester University Press, 1997; G. Williams, Valleys of Song: Music and Society in Wales 1840–1914, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1998; C. Bashford and L. Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, Oxford University Press, 2000; P. Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000; T. Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, Oxford University Press, 2000; D. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 2nd edn, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001; J. Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876– 1953, Manchester University Press, 2001; J. Lowerson, Amateur Operatics: A Social and Cultural History, Manchester University Press, 2005; M. Handford, Sounds Unlikely: Music in Birmingham, rev. edn, Studley, Brewin, 2006; R. Cowgill and P. Holman (eds.), Music in the British Provinces, 1690–1914, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007; J. Doctor, N. Kenyon and D. Wright (eds.), The Proms: A New History, London, Thames & Hudson, 2007. From a more sociological perspective, see P. J. Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music, Manchester University Press, 1995. 23 P. Gillett, ‘Ambivalent friendships: music-lovers, amateurs, and professional musicians in the late nineteenth century’, in Bashford and Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture, pp. 321–40. 24 For an examination of the context underlying the accounts of a particular segment of the London audience, see J. L. Hall-Witt, ‘Representing the audience in the Age of Reform: critics and the elite at the Italian Opera in London’, in Bashford and Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture, pp. 122–44.
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before. The soaring market for pianos is usually cited in this context,25 but it was as equally significant to the manufacturing of brass and woodwind instruments, with one result being the rise of the factory brass band, often endowed by the factory or mill owner who saw the benefit of such investment in his workforce as a form of rational recreation and an alternative to drink.26 In commenting on the distribution of professional musicians across the country, Dave Russell makes the important point that ‘Industrial centres were not less inherently ‘musical’ than commercial ones . . . Many smaller towns also had extensive networks of part-time teachers, often manual workers. Simply, the larger centres were blessed with a higher proportion of middle-class and lower middle-class families with the level of disposable income that could sustain a significant professional musical community.’27 Though the piano and the brass band are often represented as symbolising music-making at contrasting extremes of the social spectrum, as we shall see, there was considerably more overlap in terms of repertoire than such representation of social division might otherwise imply. In his iconoclastic history of the English working class, a landmark of ‘history from below’, E. P. Thompson’s graphic phrase, ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ characterised his view that the aspirations of individuals ‘were valid in terms of their own experience’.28 In John Burrow’s words, ‘To the emerging historical sensibility, cultures and the collective identities they helped to constitute, were “made” by their participants, mainly anonymously, in sustaining a particular collective way of life.’29 The approaches and methodologies generated by these fresh historical perspectives – a counterbalance to the ‘affairs of nations’ focus of history’s grand narratives – can similarly be used to help performance history avoid a Procrustean musicological framework. They suggest wider ways of treating the ‘what did they perform’ and ‘why did they perform it’ questions of music programming. And instead of the habitual preoccupation with how far programmes conform to, or deviate from, the more abstract norms of a central musical canon – music history’s own grand narrative – the interpretation can be related to more contingent, local circumstances or wider distribution patterns (such as opera company tours or concert
25 See especially Ehrlich, The Piano. 26 T. Herbert, ‘Nineteenth-century bands: making a movement’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, pp. 10–67. 27 D. Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 210–11. 28 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Penguin, 1963; citation from the 1980 edn, p. 12. 29 J. Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, London, Allen Lane, 2007, p. 504.
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society circuits).30 The focus of investigation might then be on what communities chose to listen to (and how this choice related to their circumstances) when it was left up to them, and how they reacted to the music that visiting performers chose to play to (or at) them – did the musical experiences brought by outside artists change local musical perspectives and so influence future programming choices? A recent model for this type of approach that uses a wide range of evidence, including the results of audience plebiscites, is Leanne Langley’s investigation into Berlioz reception in England and the impact that Berlioz’s music made upon the orchestral culture and aesthetic perceptions of the time.31 Interpreting the data in this way can explain differences in programming tastes between metropolitan and provincial centres, and between different regional and local communities. For example, The Times review of Gounod’s The Redemption in the 1902 Norwich Music Festival gives more space to castigating the music committee for its conservatism in programming it than to its performance: ‘the former popularity of which [The Redemption], though long worn out in the other musical centres of England ensures it an honoured place in the Norwich Festival. [Audiences will need to decrease] before the amateurs of the eastern counties will realize the terrible weakness and insipidity of the work so loudly proclaimed as a chef d’oeuvre exactly 20 years ago.’32 British musical life through the period discussed in this chapter was so lively precisely because people preferred to perform, and have performed to them, a great variety of music, as well as a huge quantity of it, across all the country. Thus the degree of variety itself becomes an important characteristic of the vigour of the British musical environment. But ‘variety’ (in this diversity sense) is no virtue in traditional music history. Instead, its ideal musical environment is one characterised by a convergence of taste, in which the canonical repertoire is uniformly prized in the context of a high art/low art tension. But if performance history is to relate successfully to its own social and cultural milieux, it cannot privilege one type of repertoire above another.
Lumping together or classifying apart: ephemera, repertoire and canon The programming discussed later covers a wide mix of music, some of which is no longer encountered, and composers whose names no longer resonate with
30 For an example of how such distribution patterns affected opera repertoire, see R. Beale, ‘Opera in Manchester, 1848–1899’, Manchester Sounds, 6 (2005–6), 71–97. 31 L. Langley, ‘Agency and change: Berlioz in Britain, 1870–1920’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 132/2 (2007), 306–48. 32 The Times, 25 October 1902.
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us today, or only do so in a specialist context. Eclectic programmes can be difficult to interpret, while the logic behind single- or few-item programmes is usually clearer. One complication is that our current understanding of what constitutes inventive programming is very different from that of a century or so past. Partly this is a consequence of the revolution in programme building initiated by William Glock, who in his Prom seasons (1960–73) often patterned concerts on the basis of sharply contrasting works, an example that was widely followed.33 Our modern-day expectations and judgements have therefore been shaped in a very different cultural context. When we look at a historical programme, what we are usually left with is just a list of pieces and performers – the carcass of the event, metaphorically speaking – from which its original conception and motivating energy has long since departed. But by putting the event back in its context, we may begin to reconstitute it; and it can be a salutary part of this process to remember that each of these archived programmes once had meaning for their performers, promoters and audiences, and that these particular works were grouped together for a reason. The programmes discussed later are drawn from different contexts. Their local circumstances (in matters of taste, social situation, economics, musical resources) will be more readily observable in some rather than others. But what is interesting is the wide enthusiasm shown for tackling the demands of major, canonical, works – some in transcription. The motivations for this will differ in each case. But what seems clear is that the history of musical performance in Britain at this time has much in common with its intellectual history. This takes inspiring form in Jonathan Rose’s historical survey of the often autodidactic reading patterns of the British working classes. Very relevant to the issue of canon and performance history is a question Rose poses, ‘If the dominant class defines high culture, how do we explain the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts, not to mention the pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy?’34 Despite their common currency, and usefulness as more generic labels, ‘canon’ and ‘repertoire’ are not altogether straightforward terms when it comes to applying them at the micro-level of performance history. At issue are the relativities of different performance contexts, and by too readily resorting to the terminology of canon and repertoire, it is easy to misconstrue these. A work might be ‘canonic’ to one community of performers and their 33 I discuss Glock’s approach to programme building in ‘Reinventing the Proms’, in Doctor, Kenyon and Wright (eds.), The Proms: A New History, pp. 168–209, and in ‘Concerts for coteries, or music for all? Glock’s Proms reconsidered’, Musical Times (Autumn 2008), 3–34. 34 J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001, p. 4.
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audience, and not to another; it may be rejected by one as of little interest or musical worth, but be valued elsewhere (perhaps in a different region) for vividly expressing emotions that feel connected to particular circumstance. Though time may show a work’s general take-up was insufficient to give it more than a passing local impact, even so, following E. P. Thompson, the performance experience was still valid for those who valued it. It is because they need to be carefully nuanced, that canon and repertoire are more serviceable deployed empirically within discussion as subsidiary points of reference, rather than being constantly foregrounded. In an attempt to ground these terms more usefully within the performance context, this discussion draws on the classification proposed by Dorothy de Val and Cyril Ehrlich in their helpfully pragmatic treatment of these issues.35 They observed the contrast between the large amount of piano repertoire of all types, and the relatively small proportion of it that continued to be played across the generations. They labelled as ‘ephemera’ music that was swiftly discarded, and drew distinction between the different kinds of repertoire and the exemplary status of the canon. In the present context, Ephemera typifies music such as ballads, music-hall songs, drawing-room music, or domestic or band transcriptions of music in vogue (whether concert hall, opera or operetta). It is often music that captures the social context or spirit of the moment, whether in the form of the commodity music of entertainment, other ‘useful’ music for the everyday, or music that represents the earnest reaction to some national mood, secular or spiritual. Songs in this category offer the social historian valuable insights and a sense of context as a record of otherwise transient feelings and emotions.36 Performers and publishers each relied on ephemera for daily income; the equivalent of a cash crop, it kept performers in everyday employment and provided publishers with the turnover they needed to balance their longer-term investment in the slower but steadier income from their repertoire and canonic music lists. Before the recent challenges of postmodern thinking, ‘canonic’, in music as in literature, was a term reserved for classic works by great composers. Such works were generally agreed to possess an exemplariness that made them touchstones of the art-music tradition. They were esteemed not only for their individual musical qualities, but also for possessing an expressive substance that transcended their own society and historical time, and which gave them a sense of immutability. A permanent physical presence was also witness 35 D. de Val and C. Ehrlich, ‘Repertory and Canon’, in D. Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Piano, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 117–34. 36 For two treatments of some of this repertoire see Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, and Richards, Imperialism and Music.
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to canonic status, and this came through the constant production of new performance editions, appearances in anthologies (particularly relevant to keyboard music), and by the collected or ‘monumental’ composer editions that were intended for library shelves. In their outline of the role that music played in the process of German cultural formation, Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter comment that these musical monuments ‘served as a sonic counterpart to the many statues . . . that patriotic burghers erected in town squares and city parks during the monument frenzy in Germany dating from the 1860s’.37 As well as their commercial potential, practical or performance editions offered important spin-offs for performers and publishers alike. If prepared by a superstar virtuoso, a publisher’s music list gained status through the association. For the virtuoso concerned, it was the only possible means to set down in a permanent form his personal interpretations of the great masters; in other words, these editions were the nineteenth-century print equivalent of making a recording. Therefore, they were liberally marked up with personal approaches in matters of tempos, fingering, phrasing and textual amendments in an attempt to convey the essence of how they played these works. This gave these editions a market appeal to the many who may have heard the virtuoso play but from whom lessons were out of the question. The intention behind such editions has often been misunderstood, and derided in this Urtext age as wilful interference with the composer’s text, so missing their point as being about the preservation and transmission of an interpretation. Busoni’s celebrated performance edition of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Klavier illustrates this point.38 He begins it with a polemical Introduction that justifies the custom of ‘modernising’ Bach (by occasionally retouching the musical text or by transcription), because of Bach’s ‘Outsoaring his time by generations, his thoughts and feelings reached proportions for whose expression the means then at command were inadequate’. Busoni then gives extensive commentary on performing these pieces, indicating his preferences for pedalling, touch, tempo, phrasing and atmosphere.39 Repertoire covers a broader grouping that is more helpfully divided into ‘core’ repertoire (‘what has stayed’) and ‘current’ repertoire (‘what is played’).40 37 C. Applegate and P. Potter, ‘Germans as the “People of Music”: genealogy of an identity’, in C. Applegate and P. Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity, University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 1–35; the quotation is on p. 14. 38 F. Busoni (ed.), The Well-Tempered Clavichord by Johann Sebastian Bach: Revised, Annotated, and Provided with Parallel Examples and Suggestions for the Study of Modern Pianoforte-Technique, New York, Schirmer, [1894]. 39 The commentary for the E flat minor Prelude and Fugue (No. 8 of Book One) is especially personal and fulsome. 40 Excellent résumés of changing repertoires in two taste-creating institutions are: C. Ehrlich, First Philharmonic, Appendix 1 (‘The Evolution of the Repertoire’), pp. 243–7; N. Kenyon, ‘Planning the Proms yesterday, today, tomorrow’, in Doctor, Kenyon and Wright (eds.) The Proms: A New History,
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Though there is often overlap between ‘canonic’ and ‘core repertoire’ works, the two are not synonymous: there are, for example, many perennial favourites in the core repertoire that would not be considered canonic. Decisions about the current repertoire of what is played are often conditioned by the performer’s own experience of what they have encountered (today very much broadened by the expanded repertoire on CD and with opportunities for more inclusive programming), or what they have been taught. Joseph Kerman puts it directly: ‘Repertoires are determined by performers.’41 Thus the ‘what is played’ repertoire will change across generations, when fashions and tastes change, as is evident in some of the programmes cited later. But do performers determine the repertoire they play? Or is the current repertoire (the ‘what is played’) at any given moment, also as much about the mediating force of the consumers’ wallet on performers’ pockets? For Victorian and Edwardian performers, lucrative rewards came from the crossover repertoires in which different musical interests found common ground. One striking example of audience overlap was the operetta, particularly the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which provided a source of solace to some aristocratic patrons who took their culture rather more lightly, as well as to the bourgeoisie they affected to despise; several G&S operas were to become established favourites of operatic societies across the country.42 And by the end of the nineteenth century, music-hall variety programmes brought a wide range of society under one roof, and provided an important income source for orchestral instrumentalists as well as variety artistes.43 Ross McKibbin’s description of musical taste captures this milieu of overlapping repertoires: ‘The great majority of the English were attached to two forms of music – middlebrow and popular – and for many, their attachment to one or the other was not exclusive.’ Though McKibbin was relating this to the context of the post-First World War situation, it was just as applicable at any time in the previous half-century, a point that Dave Russell makes: ‘the repertoire of the period was very often not class-specific. There was a vast
table I: ‘Symphonies at the Proms 1895–2005’, pp. 266–7. For an insight into Hallé’s choice of repertoire, see R. Beale, Charles Hallé: A Musical Life, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, Appendix 4 (‘Most frequently performed works in Hallé’s Manchester concerts 1857–1895’), pp. 252–3. 41 J. Kerman, ‘A few canonic variations’, Critical Inquiry, 10/1 (1983), 112 42 See Lowerson, Amateur Operatics. 43 F. Anstey, (‘London Music Hall’, Harpers Monthly Magazine, 91 (1891)), cited by D. Hoher in, ‘The composition of music hall audiences 1850–1900’, in P. Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1986, pp. 73–92; see also D. [Hoher] Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 1996, and P. Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge University Press, 1998; for some examples of the significance of the halls as employers of orchestral musicians, see P. A. Scholes, The Mirror of Music: A Century of Musical Life, 2 vols., London, Novello and Oxford University Press, 1947, vol. 1, p. 509.
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middle ground that became common property.’44 From the evidence of the repertoires that were being performed, the later nineteenth century was indeed the formative period of the ‘middlebrow’ market. And the importance of what McKibbin calls this ‘established middlebrow canon of very eclectic origins’ was that this canon ‘was what most people understood by classical music’.45 A good example of ‘middlebrow’ taste continuing in a traditional mixed format was Alan Keith’s long-running radio programme, Your Hundred Best Tunes (1959–2007), which he presented up to his death in 2003 at the age of ninety-four. At one time hugely popular, the programme was a modern-day equivalent of a Victorian concert format that was truly middlebrow in its mélange of orchestral, choral and operatic excerpts and ballads, originally chosen by Keith and then by polls of listeners. This cultural middle ground formed the financial basis of such series as the Queen’s Hall Newman–Wood Promenade concerts, which began in 1895.46 The preponderance of enthusiasm for ‘middlebrow’ repertoires ensured that the question of musical taste continued to be in active contention, with the champions of the musically ineffable vigorously contesting the ground with those they considered mere vulgarians; Henry Wood’s comment on Robert Newman’s ambition, ‘He wanted the public to come to love great music’, is illustrative.47 The new London audiences created for concerts through astute programming had important consequences for musicians, with an increase in the number of London’s ‘established’ orchestras (though the players remained freelance). A rebellion by members of the Queen’s Hall orchestra in protest against Wood’s banning of deputies led to the founding of the London Symphony Orchestra as a players’ co-operative; there was also the New Symphony Orchestra (later the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra) which Beecham conducted for a short time before he established his own, eponymous, orchestra in 1909.48
44 R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 386; Russell, Popular music, p. 9. 45 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p. 416. 46 For an account of the interaction of economic, social and musical factors involved in this venture, see L. Langley, ‘Building an orchestra, creating an audience: Robert Newman and the Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts, 1895–1926’, in Doctor, Kenyon and Wright (eds.), The Proms, pp. 32–73. 47 H. Wood, My Life of Music, London, Victor Gollancz, 1938, p. 68. For an interesting and strongly supportive discussion of the benefits of the Proms to musical life, see the review, ‘The Promenade Concerts’, The Times, 14 August 1909. 48 For valuable explanations of the quadrille-like manoeuvres of London’s musical life of the time in addition to Langley, above, see Lucas, Thomas Beecham, Ehrlich, The Music Profession, and McVeigh and Ehrlich, ‘The modernisation of London concert life’. On the founding and early life of the LSO see R. Morrison, Orchestra: The LSO: A Century of Triumph and Turbulence, London, Faber, 2004.
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The British context To illustrate these themes in greater detail the remainder of this chapter explores three performance areas from the latter part of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, that unfashionable period of British music usually written off by most histories as something of a musical desert. Each of these performance cultures – the choral society, the brass band and the domain of municipal music – was vital in its own terms and significant for their respective supporting communities. These cultures reflect the process of music’s democratisation across all strands of society, something that occurred as part of a complex interplay of major economic and social change.49 As E. D. Mackerness commented, ‘The social history of English music in the nineteenth century is largely a history of the manner in which a vastly increased demand for music of all kinds was met.’50 However, the question of who was actually playing, and what they performed was, until fairly recently, only rarely considered. Consequently, the role of successful (i.e. high-selling and frequently performed) but less-than-great works (however well written) in building audiences and creating demand has been under-recognised.51 In the period after 1850, as instrument purchase grew enormously, we see the takeoff of the piano and domestic music markets, as well as the band and choral society markets, all of which are reflected in the number of publications registered for copyright at Stationers Hall. In 1850, this stood at 1,142; in 1880 at 4,432; in 1900 at 7,114 and in 1914 at 11,436 – statistical testimony to the huge market demand for music to be played, sung and enjoyed, totals which are almost certainly significant underestimates of the number of items actually published.52 But instead of the British musical history of this period being characterised in terms of performance and by the successful range of works composed or transcribed for brass and wind bands,53 the choral societies, church choirs and for domestic music-making, musicology’s constant ambition was to (re)construct British music history on the great composer lines. Had an account of British musical activity in its own terms been
49 We gain a vivid sense of the intensity of musical activity in Britain through publications such as Hazell’s Annual; Lewis Foreman reproduces their annual digest in his Music in England 1885–1920. 50 Mackerness, A Social History of English Music, p. 153. 51 I discuss some of the economic implications as related to composers’ earnings in ‘Situating Stainer’, Musical Times, 149 (2008), 95–103. 52 D. W. Krummel, ‘Music Publishing’, in N. Temperley (ed.), The Athlone History of Music in Britain, vol. 5: The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, London, The Athlone Press, 1981, 46–59, Table 1. 53 Russell (Popular Music, p. 205) cites contemporary estimates of between 30,000 and 40,000 wind bands in 1889!
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written, it would have opened up an entirely different perspective on, and understanding of, music’s place in nineteenth-century Britain. From it we should have seen Britain not as a ‘land without music’, but as a land of vigorous musical energy. Moreover, Britain, through its exporting of musicians, instruments, compositions and the graded music exam system, strongly influenced musical practice all across its Empire.54 The general lack of social respectability, let alone standing, accorded to musicians was changed by bourgeois society’s demand for music and for music instruction. By the final years of the nineteenth century there had been a remarkable turn about in the proliferation and quality of London concert life performed to increasingly discerning audiences.55 Perhaps this is most clearly evident in terms of the greater demands of technical skill, blended ensemble and musical sophistication made on performers by the popular modern repertoire of composers such as Berlioz and Wagner. And music’s enhancement of pleasure activities had made it the essential accompaniment to a wide range of sophisticated pastimes and amusements designed to fill the increase of leisure time. Theatres, music halls and variety palaces, not to mention hotels, restaurants and tearooms, all provided daily employment for substantial numbers of musicians as the supply of music had become ubiquitous, and musical life was quick to adapt to the needs of the newly fashionable activity of shopping in London’s West End. And although something like Henry Irving’s 300-guinea commission in 1891 to the young Edward German for incidental music to the play Henry VIII was clearly an exceptional sum, it indicates how integral music was to Irving’s production.56 All the more reason, then, for composers to focus their energies to satisfy evident consumer demand with functional music for immediate use. Each of the well-established markets of choral societies, church and theatre gave the composer a real chance
54 S. Banfield (‘Towards a history of music in the British Empire: three export studies’, in K. DarianSmith, P. Grimshaw and S. Macintyre (eds.), Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, Melbourne University Publishing, 2007, pp. 63–89) illustrates the case in relation to organ building, Stanford’s émigré pupils and music examinations. See also, Richards, Music and Imperialism, and D. Bythell, ‘The Brass Band in the Antipodes: the transplantation of British popular culture’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, pp. 217–44. 55 S. McVeigh and C. Ehrlich, ‘The Modernisation of London concert life around 1900’, in M. Talbot (ed.), The Business of Music, Liverpool University Press, 2002, pp. 96–120. 56 Ibid.; C. Ehrlich, ‘The first hundred years’, in J. MacRae (ed.), Wigmore Hall 1901–2001: A Celebration, London, Wigmore Hall Trust, 2001, pp. 31–65, and E. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, Princeton University Press, 2000. L. and S. Foreman (London: A Musical Gazetteer, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005) bring together a considerable amount of relevant material. Sir Henry Irving’s extensive and committed use of music in his theatre is set out in J. Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World, Hambledon, NY, and London, 2005, especially pp. 241–58; indicative of the enormous popularity of this music for the domestic market are the royalties German received for his piano arrangement of the Three dances: £273 in 1894 (on 21,864 copies sold) and £235 in 1895 (18,192 sold, 1,150 to New York), BL Add. MS 69523, p. 896.
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of making a financial return on his labour, as opposed to the much more speculative prospects offered by the less-developed British market for ‘high art’ concert music. Arthur Sullivan’s success in the Savoy operas illustrates the British composer’s dilemma extremely well. The ideological issues were clearly pinpointed in an obituary in the Cornhill Magazine by J. A. Fuller Maitland, a music establishment figure and influential critic, whose denigrating verdict of Sullivan was that, ‘such natural gifts – gifts greater, perhaps than fell to any English musician since the time of Purcell – were so very seldom employed in any work worthy of them’.57 Before the impact of broadcasting, musical values and practices were much more sharply varied along regional and even local lines, as communities continued to express strongly held preferences in their programmes and music-making. But across the country we see a core of strongly established works that were featured at different levels of performance attainment; often such classics tended to define the capability of the ensemble concerned. Thus Stainer’s The Crucifixion (1887) with its musical narrative and integrated congregational hymns was composed to meet the market needs of an amateur church choir and its sustaining community of worshippers. Its appeal lay in the way that it invested uncomplicated emotionalism and occasional moments of musical drama within an essentially straightforward musical idiom. And Stainer’s music was calculated to offer a rewarding experience and to fulfil the taste expectations of performers and audience alike. In its first decade, 88,623 vocal scores had been sold (generating Stainer some £785 in royalties), as had 362,000 copies of the libretto consisting of text and hymns.58 On a different musical level, the emotional directness of Handel’s Messiah helped to account for its perennial appeal to audiences of many different types, but its difficulties posed problems to groups of less proficient performers. This helps explain the many different local formats in which the Messiah was encountered. These ranged from the musically aspiring but limited local choruses who could manage a chorus and an aria or two, to the fully-fledged orchestral performances envisaged as a crowd-puller (and the financial rescue) of larger and more proficient societies.59 As we have seen, the appeal of good music, and the desire to enjoy it, was the potent force behind adaptation of classical and operatic repertoires for the brass band, in arrangements that brought such music to communities for whom 57 J. A. Fuller Maitland, ‘Sir Arthur Sullivan’, Cornhill Magazine, new series, 10 (1901), 300–9. 58 BL Add. MS 69522, p. 958. 59 We get a vivid sense of the multivalent social currents bound up in performances of Handel’s Messiah at an early stage of its establishment as part of the British canon in R. Cowgill, ‘Disputing choruses in 1760s Halifax: Joah Bates, William Herschel, and the Messiah Club’, in Cowgill and Holman (eds.), Music in the British Provinces, pp. 87–113.
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there was little likelihood of encountering the whole thing in the concert hall or theatre.
The choral society culture The programme of the Philharmonic Society’s concert last night [17 May 1906] was an unusually interesting one; for we not only had the G major pianoforte concerto of Beethoven from Herr Buhlig . . . but we were able to hear for the first time in London the Bradford Festival Choral Society, and to hear them, too, in such splendid works as Bach’s big double motet, ‘Sing ye to the Lord’ and the [Beethoven’s] Choral Symphony. They sang with splendid and untiring energy, as Yorkshire choruses alone know how to do; (even on the famous sustained A in the Choral Symphony the sopranos never wavered for a moment), and they did what so few choruses are trained to do – maintained an even volume of sound, and even timbre for long passages at a time without changing the colour, and this was especially noticeable in the long-sustained pianos and mezzofortes in the double motet; and they never flinched, even in the last ten pages of the Choral Symphony, so that the performance, as far as the choir is concerned, was first rate. In the orchestral numbers of the symphony the band seemed to drag now and then and become rather listless.60
This review is revealing. It tells us that Yorkshire choruses have a national reputation (something which explains the expense and effort of importing the Bradford Chorus to give Londoners a lesson in the choral singing of a symphony that had never previously enjoyed good performances at the hands of the venerable Philharmonic Society); and that their impact was such that the quality of the Philharmonic Society’s orchestra suffered in comparison. To put this into context, no less a critic than Berlioz had described the Philharmonic Society’s 1847 performance as ‘murder’, and the Musical Times review of the Society’s performance on 28 June 1890 confirmed the audience’s expectation: ‘Many present retired before the vocal Finale. We can hardly blame them . . . since the setting of Schiller’s Ode must always be more or less painful hearing.’ Presumably the decision to import the Bradford Chorus was an attempt to restore the Philharmonic’s reputation, at least as far as this work was concerned.61 It is clear that the Bradford Chorus took the singing of such demanding and complicated works as the Beethoven and the Bach very much in their stride; but as the Daily Chronicle
60 The Times, 18 May 1906. 61 Ehrlich, First Philharmonic, p. 76, and Musical Times, 31 (August 1890), 474.
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pointed out, the choral difficulties of the Bach motet (Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (BWV225)) meant that it had previously received very few performances in London, so making its appearance ‘a great treat for the large audience’.62 Another interesting aspect of this outing down to London (there and back in one day) was that it gave rise to immense local pride. The Chorus travelled by special train ‘probably the largest train that ever ran out of Bradford’, the 232 passengers being served breakfast and supper by forty attendants, ‘a special effort of railway catering’.63 The Bradford Chorus (constituted in 1856) was neither the only northern chorus to have been especially invited to London, nor alone in singing that challenging Bach motet: the Huddersfield Choral Society (constituted 1836) records two performances before 1914. The second performance was part of the showcasing of British musical prowess that had been staged for the 1911 International Music Congress held in London, and Huddersfield’s performance of the motet attracted considerable praise. Described as ‘sung with great virility and deep expression’ by the Musical Times, Guido Adler commented, ‘I was astonished at the performance of the Huddersfield Choral Society, but even more so when . . . informed . . . that England possessed several choral societies quite as good’.64 Huddersfield had also once performed Bach’s B minor Mass in London with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, for a fee of £125 and a tea for all!65 But Huddersfield programmed Bach rarely (only the Mass and the motet before 1914), because its home audience found Bach’s music tough going: the 1906 B minor Mass began with a full hall which gradually emptied during the performance.66 No choir could financially sustain that sort of negative reaction, regardless of the musical satisfaction it afforded members. (The Bradford Chorus gave the St Matthew Passion only once, and that as a public rehearsal with piano, and there were single performances of Cantatas 34 and 106.) The Beethoven statistics make for an interesting comparison between the two societies: by 1914 Huddersfield had performed The Mount of Olives (the only Beethoven work in their repertoire) eight times; but between 1856 and 1906, Bradford participated in five Choral Symphony performances, performed the Mass in C four times, and gave single performances of the Choral Fantasia, The Mount of Olives and the Mass in D. There is dissimilarity too in the societies’ patterning of Messiah performances. In the Bradford Chorus’s first fifty years, Messiah was performed forty-one times, 62 Quoted in G. F. Sewell, A History of the Bradford Festival Choral Society: From its Formation in 1856 to its Jubilee in 1906, Bradford, author, 1907, p. 224. 63 Ibid. 64 Anon., ‘The international musical congress’, Musical Times, 52 (July 1911), 442 and 453. 65 R. A. Edwards, And the Glory: A History in Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Huddersfield Choral Society, Leeds, W. S. Maney, n.d., p. 83. 66 Ibid.
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and with the annual performances bringing in some £60 profit on average it was considered a means of financing their season. However, in 1887 this became a loss of over £24, and so it was decided to discontinue them.67 This reversal underlines the contrast with the Messiah concert given to support the 1873/4 Bradford Subscription concert season: that occasion had attracted an audience of 3,551 and made a profit of £138.68 Meanwhile in Huddersfield, Messiah had been performed sixteen times between 1836 and 1866, and thereafter was given at least once annually (and presumably profitably). Adding another perspective, performances of Elijah and Messiah at the Birmingham Festival between 1855 and 1891 are interesting. In 1876, Messiah had an audience of 2,385 producing receipts of £3,061, with Elijah an audience of 2,334 and receipts of £3,271. But Messiah audiences declined during the period, with only 1,411 (£1,946) in 1888; that year Elijah figures were 1,895 (£3,032).69 Messiah reception was perhaps rather more variable than is often assumed, and in some contexts the sheer habit of its continued performance may have devalued it, perhaps causing many to regard it more as a staple of core repertoire than as a canonical work. The Bradford Society’s origins have been traced to their first complete performance of Elijah in 1849, with a chorus of over 200. Their first London visit (with 220 members) was in 1858, when they joined the Handel Festival Chorus (of some 2,000 singers) at the Crystal Palace, gave a command performance at Buckingham Palace and a concert at St James’s Hall (‘In many respects these musical ladies and gentlemen afford a lesson by which our own choral and part singers might profit’).70 For its first fifteen years, programmes consisted largely of part-songs, glees and madrigals alternating with the well-known oratorios of Handel, Mendelssohn and Haydn. Major change came when the choir was engaged as the chorus for the Bradford Subscription Concerts, founded in 1865. This gave them more regular opportunities to sing the big choral works, beginning with St Paul under Hallé in 1866, and the fees they were paid for doing so enabled them to promote major concerts on their own account (though the custom of part-song concerts was maintained, with some thirty given between 1857 and 1906). In its early days the Society operated a two-tier subscription system, with singers of superior ability paying only one
67 Sewell, A History, p. 174. 68 D. Russell, ‘Provincial concerts in England, 1865–1914: a case-study of Bradford’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114/1 (1989), 43–55. 69 Figures given in C. Dale, ‘The Provincial Musical Festival in Nineteenth-century England’, in Cowgill and Holman (eds.), Music in the British Provinces, 325–47, table 16.1. See also A. Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture: A Comparative History of Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 70 The Times, 28 June and 5 July 1858.
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shilling per annum, while ordinary members paid four shillings. But in 1888, with falling audience numbers and the increased costs of more ambitious concerts, the subscription to all members went up to ten and sixpence. Costs cannot have been helped by their practice of marketing concerts on the basis of reserved seats for subscribers and the public, but giving away some 1,200 free tickets, distributed by chorus members, ‘thus providing a first-class free concert for a large number of persons’, though as a service to the community it would have been likely to improve both standing and future recruitment. The Society also made an improvement to church music in the area, both nonconformist and Anglican, increasing the number of choruses church choirs were able to perform.71 The membership grew from 212 in 1860 to 345 in 1902. The Huddersfield Choral Society, rather like the Bradford Chorus, had its beginnings as part of what the historian Peter Clark called the ‘associational world’, governed by rules of behaviour, with meetings staged across the neighbourhood.72 In 1902 its membership stood at 345, newly resuscitated by its doughty conductor, Henry Coward, the autodidact director of several northern choral societies, who took his Sheffield Choral Union on a famous tour of the Dominions in 1911.73 Handel and Mendelssohn dominated the core repertoire at both Bradford and Huddersfield. Huddersfield performed twelve Handel works: Samson (15 performances between 1836 and 1914), Judas Maccabaeus (14) and Israel in Egypt (13) were the most frequent after Messiah. At Bradford, ten Handel works are listed, Judas Maccabaeus (10), Israel in Egypt with Acis and Galatea (4). Huddersfield performed eight Mendelssohn works, led by Elijah (17) followed by St Paul (15) and Hymn of Praise (12). Bradford performed twelve of Mendelssohn’s works, performing them less frequently, though the order of popularity is as for Huddersfield, Elijah (13), St Paul (9) and Hymn of Praise (8). Haydn’s Creation was performed an astonishing twenty-seven times at Huddersfield, but only six at Bradford.
71 Sewell, A History, pp. 93, 174–5, 240–1, 243. 72 P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford University Press, 2000; Musical Times, 43 (April, 1902), 239–41. Several chapters in Cowgill and Holman (eds.), Music in the British Provinces, give a strong context in which to place choral singing activities in the North, notably: S. Drage, ‘The larks of Dean: amateur musicians in northern England’, pp. 195–221; S. E. Taylor, ‘Finding themselves: musical revolutions in nineteenth-century Staffordshire’, pp. 223–35; P. Horton, ‘Outside the cathedral: Samuel Sebastian Wesley, local music-making, and the provincial organist in mid nineteenth-century England’, pp. 255–68; C. Dale, ‘The provincial music festival in nineteenth-century England: a case study of Bridlington’, pp. 325–47. For a wider perspective, see S. Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840–1914, Manchester University Press, 2000, especially ch. 6. An earlier, but still valuable study of musical life in the Staffordshire Potteries, is Nettel, Music in the Five Towns. 73 J. Richards, Imperialism and Music, Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 450–68.
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Perhaps unexpectedly from today’s perspective, Mozart’s Requiem received only one performance (at Bradford) in this period. There was common ground, too, in several of the British works performed: Elgar’s Gerontius (twice each), Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens (twice each), Sterndale Bennett (Woman of Samaria, May Queen) and works by Sullivan, Prout, ColeridgeTaylor (several performances of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast) and the Bradford musician William Jackson. They overlapped in some modern European repertoire. For example, Brahms’s Requiem and Berlioz’s Faust (eight performances at Bradford and six at Huddersfield, attest to Faust’s popularity). Rossini’s Stabat Mater was performed by both societies, but Dvořák’s setting was given only at Bradford, though both programmed his Spectre’s Bride. Wagner’s popularity is evident in selections of Lohengrin and Tannhauser, and Bradford also performed The Flying Dutchman twice. Overall, Bradford’s repertoire is the more enterprising and musically ambitious, something probably explained by its involvement in the Subscription Concert series, with Sir Charles Hallé and F. H. Cowen. For example, Bradford gave four performances each of Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri and Verdi’s Requiem; two each of Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah and Gade’s Psyche; and once each of Franck’s The Beatitudes, Gounod’s The Redemption and Messe Solennelle, Weber’s Der Freischütz and Horatio Parker’s Hora Novissima. What we see is that both these choirs, once clear of their financial comfort zone of Handel and Mendelssohn, were not reluctant to tackle a wide range of challenging European and British works – hardly the sign of a land without performance. We gain a perspective into the wider operational context of late nineteenthcentury choral culture from a choral management handbook by Leonard Venables whose several editions attest to its popularity.74 Venables was educated at the Tonic Sol-fa College, gaining a good reputation as conductor (from 1869) of the South London Choral Association.75 His survey of choral societies and conductors (with seemingly some 128 returns to his questionnaire) is helpful in conveying something of the general situation with regard to programming and finances. On programming he says: ‘At the present time (1886) there is a great race between societies all over the kingdom to be the first in their several districts to perform the works written for the great musical festivals. Nothing will satisfy the ambition of conductor, committee, or members but to attempt Gounod’s latest oratorio, Dvorak’s last cantata, &c.’76 He quotes the views of some leading (but anonymous) conductors: ‘I have
74 L. C. Venables, Choral and Orchestral Societies: A Book of Hints on their Organisation, and Business and Musical Management, 3rd edn, London, J. Curwen & Sons, [1900]. 75 J. D. Brown and S. S. Stratton, British Musical Biography: A Dictionary of Musical Artists, Authors and Composers, born in Britain and its Colonies, Birmingham, S. S. Stratton, 1897, p. 423. 76 Venables, Choral and Orchestral Societies, p. 65.
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performed recently [Gounod’s] The Redemption, [Mackenzie’s] Rose of Sharon, [Gounod’s] Mors et Vita and [F. H. Cowen’s] Sleeping Beauty. I do not think these works are so interesting to chorus singers as works in the older style; but it is quite certain I could not keep my singers if I did only works of Handel, &c. They are very eager to try novelties, and they put up with their unvocal difficulties’;77 and, ‘In Yorkshire they [modern works] are quite as much appreciated by the chorus, but not sung as much on account of difficulty and on account of audience.’78 Venables advised that concerts should not exceed two hours, and he illustrates typical programme-building patterns using three mixed programmes given by Henry Leslie’s eponymous London choir. As a favourite pattern he cites the miscellaneous concert, with sacred music in the first half, followed by secular in the second. Each half mixed vocal solos and duets with choral or part-songs, and the second also included a pot-pourri of South American Airs, arranged for piano duet. The second concert he lists had a mixed first half of sacred choral works by S. S. Wesley, Gounod and Mendelssohn, with a madrigal by R. L. de Pearsall, and songs and part-songs by Henry Leslie and Louis Engel; the second half was a miscellany of operatic arias by Rossini, Bizet and Mozart, part-songs by Mendelssohn, Leslie and A. R. Gaul, a madrigal by Morley and a glee by R. J. S. Stephens. Each half included a piano interlude played by Charles Hallé, of Bach in the first and Chopin in the second. The third programme cited was an all secular concert, a mélange of madrigals, part-songs, glees, an ‘old song’ (‘Sally in our alley’), a humorous part-song and a sentimental Irish melody.79 Venables’s survey included the question, ‘Do your concerts pay well?’, and the answers were: Very well (2); Yes (22); Fairly well (12); Just pays expenses (16); No (76). Answers to ‘What class of concerts pays best?’ were: Miscellaneous – Ballad, Part-songs, &c (64); Oratorio – chiefly Messiah and Elijah (26); Cantata for Part I and Miscellaneous, Part II (17). Unfortunately, there is no indication from where these responses originated, so it is not possible to identify regional patterns in these answers. Also asked was the question, ‘Do you depend on the public, members of society, or subscribers, honorary members, &c., for your audience?’, and replies showed that most could not depend on any one source, but had to work for all three. Venables concludes that the support from the general public seems ‘extremely limited’.80 Yet as we have seen from the free tickets that were issued by the Bradford Chorus, when the public were offered music at no or little cost, there was an enthusiastic uptake, as also with the Chatham and Rochester Choral 77 Ibid., p. 67. 78 Ibid., p. 68. 79 Ibid., ch. 10, ‘Arrangement of miscellaneous programmes’, pp. 75–81. 80 Ibid., ch. 9, ‘Concert profits and losses’, pp. 70–4.
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Society, who ‘have a full rehearsal with band on the evening before each concert. They engage second rate soloists, and charge 1 shilling admission to all parts of the hall. This boon is greatly appreciated by hundreds who cannot pay the prices charged for the final concert and does not injure it [attendance] in the least.’81 Venables includes a chapter to guide a conductor on the works he is most likely to direct, namely Messiah, Judas Maccabeus and Samson, The Creation, Elijah and three smaller sacred works: Mozart’s so-called Twelfth Mass, Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise.82 The constant programming of Messiah and Elijah, with its implication of a sclerotic conservatism, can distort the impression of British musical life. But, as we have seen, performances of these oratorios were often the means of societies paying for more adventurous programmes that the box office was unable to cover. Finances had become an acute issue in London, where the growth in serious amateur participation had generated a significant increase in the numbers of new choral and orchestral societies. The inevitable consequence of this expansion of music-making was oversupply, the paradoxical situation in which the provision of more adventurous concerts soon outstripped the capacity of a similarly minded audience to sustain it. Thus in the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Choral Society’s performances of the main choral works of British composers (Coleridge-Taylor, Cowan, Elgar, Mackenzie, Parry, Stanford and Sullivan), the Bach and Beethoven Masses, as well as other works such as Parker’s Hora Novissima, Benoit’s Lucifer, Henschel’s Stabat Mater, Schubert’s Song of Miriam and Wagner’s Parsifal resulted in an average loss per concert of some £250; the Society could only redress the balance with Messiah and Elijah performances. The programmes of North London’s Alexandra Palace Choral Society, which some considered the capital’s best chorus, are a judicious mix of the popular and the uncommercial: Bach’s B minor Mass, Elgar’s Apostles, Handel’s Israel in Egypt and Acis and Galatea, Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha and Dvořák’s Stabat Mater. The idea of performing Solomon (given once in Bradford and twice in Huddersfield) had to be dropped, reflecting, ‘the tyrannous popularity of some two or three of Handel’s works and the consequent impossibility of arranging for adequate performances of others’.83 Huddersfield and Bradford’s example demonstrates that a dominant provincial society with strong membership support had more leeway for innovative programming than had a
81 Ibid., p. 71. 82 Ibid., ch. 24, ‘The standard oratorios’, pp. 177–206. For an overview of the repertoire that choral societies were performing in the 1886–7 season, see P. Scholes, ‘The Trend of Taste’, in Scholes, The Mirror of Music, vol. 1, pp. 144–5. 83 W. J. Galloway, Musical England, London, Christophers, 1910, p. 119.
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metropolitan one facing a more competitive environment. Dave Russell makes the point that ‘while Manchester might enjoy 15–20 public concerts a month during the winter season in the 1890s when such activity was at its zenith, London offered about 50 a week’.84
Brass-band culture The usual caricature of class taste in Britain has the British cultural elite looking down on the bourgeois consumer, with the bourgeoisie in turn looking down upon the working class, deriding what they saw as their pretensions to culture. For Haweis, ‘Music is not to our lower orders a deep-rooted need, a means of expressing the pent-up and often oppressive emotions of the heart, but merely a noisy appendage to low pastimes.’85 But it is clear from even a brief look at some of the brass-band repertoires being performed that this depiction of a descending musical taste, predicated on social class, has become a gross distortion. Instead, we see considerable crossover between performance spheres. Concert-hall repertoire and operatic extracts were regularly played by brass bands, alongside selections of religious and the lighter secular repertoires. As Herbert has pointed out, frequent sources of transcription material were piano arrangements of orchestral classics and operatic excerpts, especially of Italian repertoire, originally aimed at the middle-class domestic market. He also gives examples of the speed at which such band arrangements were made available: selections from Verdi’s Il trovatore were published by Boosey & Sons within a month of its premiere, while James Smyth’s arrangement of the overture to La forza del destino was being circulated within a few months of the opera’s first performance in St Petersburg in 1862.86 It was therefore through the medium of the brass band that many developed and satisfied the taste for classical music in their own locality. This enthusiasm for the classical repertoire contradicted the then fashionable prejudice that it was beyond the capacity of the lower social orders to value and respond to such music or the arts more generally; what it underlined was that the issue was more about people having opportunities to engage with that culture in the first place. Among many possible examples, the self-governing Besses o’ th’ Barn and the private Cyfarthfa bands are two bands that offer very interesting and
84 D. Russell, Looking North, p. 212. 85 Haweis, Music and Morals, 15th edn (1888), p. 547, quoted in Russell, Popular Music, p. 8. 86 Herbert, ‘Nineteenth-century bands: making a movement’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, pp. 10–67; p. 56.
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contrasting perspectives.87 The name ‘Besses o’ th’ Barn’ derives from an old industrial town between Manchester and Bury in Lancashire. The band’s history has been traced to 1818 and a wind band based at Clegg’s Cotton Mill, known as Clegg’s Reed Band. It converted to an all-brass ensemble in 1853 and in the 1880s it established itself in what is still its bandroom behind the Red King pub on Moss Lane, Whitfield.88 The change from reed to an allbrass ensemble is significant and reflects the greater availability of cheap and robust piston-valve instruments, which were easier to play than keyed instruments.89 Ownership of these instruments was facilitated by the hire-purchase schemes that appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by incentives offered by instrumental manufacturers for players to exchange their current instruments for newer models.90 The Besses typified the way that brass bands were rooted in their community. They drew their players locally, trained them up within the band, and their repertoire included functional social music that reflected community taste, such as hymns, carols and local song repertoires. Such a miscellany was common for bands across the country: an interesting example of an evening’s music for a harvest home celebration performed by the Ockenden Band in West Hoathly was listed complete by the Sussex Agricultural Express in its edition of 11 September 1869.91 Herbert has made the important point that the independently maintained bands offered their membership a very different social structure and skills environment from that which they could expect to experience in the workplace, not least because it was one in which individual executant ability could earn considerable respect.92 The Besses had the good fortune to have Alexander Owen (1851–1920) as their trainer and arranger from 1884. As fierce a disciplinarian as any orchestral conductor (supposedly locking his bands in the bandroom during rehearsals), his last rehearsal with the Besses was a four-hour session spent on his arrangement of Tristan und Isolde just days before his death.93 Lasting some thirty minutes and fully testing a band’s technique and endurance, this transcription was one of several Owen made of Wagner’s music, and it is a masterpiece of the 87 For an extensive discussion on the establishment of bands in relation to social context, repertoires and the significance of developments in instrumental technology, see Herbert, ‘Nineteenth-century bands’. 88 D. H. Van Ess, ‘Band music’, in N. Temperley (ed.), The Romantic Age 1800–1914, p. 138; the band’s history at the official website, www.besses.co.uk. 89 For a detailed discussion of the organology involved, see A. Myers, ‘Instruments and instrumentation of British brass bands’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, pp. 154–86. 90 Herbert, ‘Nineteenth-century bands’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, p. 44. 91 Quoted by V. and S. Gammon, ‘The musical revolution of the mid nineteenth century: from “repeat and twiddle” to “precision and snap” ’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, p. 140. 92 T. Herbert, ‘The practice and context of a private Victorian brass band’, in B. Zon (ed.), NineteenthCentury British Music Studies, vol. 1, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999, pp. 105–18. 93 D. Russell, ‘Alexander Owen’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
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arranger’s art. It capitalises on the band’s ability to sustain a beautifully refined blend of sound and integrated ensemble as well as brilliance and fire. Owen also arranged selections from The Flying Dutchman and the Ride of the Valkyries as well as from Mendelssohn (Elijah and the Overture Ruy Blas), Berlioz (The Damnation of Faust), Beethoven and Sullivan (The Beauties of Sullivan). Especially celebrated was Owen’s Reminiscences of Rossini (1882), which included the William Tell overture, a calling card for the Besses, who won fourteen first prizes from the nineteen band championship contests entered between 1884 and 1886. The Besses’ repertoire thus unselfconsciously bridged the cultures of opera and instrumental music that divided much of nineteenth-century musical thinking.94 Their performances made the Besses an international phenomenon. After winning the 1903 National Championship competition at Crystal Palace, the Besses did a UK tour and were then invited to play for King Edward VII at Windsor. This in turn led to a tour of France in 1905 in celebration of the Entente Cordiale, and in Paris a crowd, reputedly 50,000 strong and including the President, attended their concert in the Tuileries Gardens.95 Emboldened by this, the Band undertook two world tours between 1906 and 1911, and their enthusiastic reception was perhaps at its height in Melbourne where four days of concerts were reported to have attracted total audiences of over 100,000. Curiously the Besses’ 1911 tour occurred in the same year as Sir Henry Coward’s previously mentioned Sheffield Musical Union choir’s tour of the Dominions; the fact that two such northern organisations were both willing and able to undertake such extended trips tells us much about their musical confidence as performers and their attractiveness to audiences. The Cyfarthfa Brass Band was a private band, ‘a surrogate orchestra’ formed as ‘part of the construction of an oasis of culture’ in 1838 by Robert Thompson Crawshay of Cyfarthfa Castle in Merthyr Tydfil to provide music for the family and its social occasions.96 Herbert has categorised the Band’s repertoire into three broad types, light diversions, art-music transcriptions and miscellaneous pieces, including original compositions like Joseph Parry’s Tydfil Overture.97 An 94 C. Dahlhaus, Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, trans. J. B. Robinson as Nineteenth-Century Music, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 8–15. For a helpful outline of brass band repertoire see R. Newsome, Brass Roots: A Hundred Years of Brass Bands and their Music (1836–1936), Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998. Recordings of some of Owen’s Wagner arrangements are available on ‘Wagner’, Grimethorpe Colliery Band/Elgar Howarth (CD, 1995, Doyen, Doy CD 033) and a selection of works by other composers is on Around the world with the Besses, Besses o’ th’ Barn Band/Roy Newsome and Alec Evans (CD, 1979 and 1980, Chandos, Chan 6571/2). 95 The history section of the Band’s website (www.besses.co.uk) includes photographs of this occasion and other events. 96 Herbert, ‘The practice and context of a private Victorian Band’, in B. Zon (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Music Studies, vol. 1, p. 115. 97 Ibid.; a selection of the Band’s repertoire played on nineteenth-century instruments was recorded as The origin of the species: virtuoso brass music, The Wallace Collection/Simon Wright (Nimbus NI 5470, 1996).
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article published in Charles Dickens’s Household Words conveys something of the band’s musical impact on its community: ‘The correspondent of a leading London newspaper, while visiting Merthyr, was exceedingly puzzled by hearing boys in the Cyfarthfa iron works whistling airs rarely heard except in the fashionable ball-room, opera-house or drawing-room.’98 As is clear from the example of the Besses, the best of the bands yielded to no other type of ensemble when it came to performance virtuosity and musical feeling, and the Cyfarthfa band again illustrates that point.99 Herbert points out that ‘the technical demands made of the Cyfarthfa players [in their band books] comfortably outstrip anything found in the brass orchestral writing contemporaneous with it. It is not just that there are occasional passages which test the players; it is that there is apparently an underlying assumption upon the part of the arrangers of this music that the players could play almost anything which was placed before them, provided it was within a given range.’100 The transcriptions from which the Cyfarthfa played make clear the remarkable virtuosity such bands could achieve, and their frequency of rehearsal as an established ensemble meant that they would have produced a greater quality of blend and unanimity of performance than audiences would have been likely to have heard from the ad hoc or pick-up orchestras that characterised much of London’s concert life until the end of the nineteenth century.101 It is clear, too, that brass band arrangers broke the mould of orchestral brass writing; oblivious of the conventions of brass writing that classical composers observed in scoring their works, these brass-band arrangers were intent on getting the best out of their own forces in the most idiomatic ways they could conceive of, so making the brass band an iconoclastic performance medium in its own terms. The distinct cultural identity of the brass-band movement was one of its empowering strengths. And although its repertoire often intersected with bourgeois music traditions, the movement was set apart in terms of its training, the manner and context of performance and its social frameworks. Today, given the ubiquity of broadcasting and recording as primary agents of cultural formation, the means by which taste is shaped and repertoires are established, it is inconceivable that a large section of the British population should maintain its own distinctive, self-determined and largely self-contained cultural sphere. But, in effect, that was how the brass-band world operated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its self-sufficiency and continuing development 98 May 1860, quoted by Herbert in his liner note to The origin of the species. 99 As captured by the Wallace Collection on NI 5470; in the liner note Herbert outlines the formation, repertory and musical significance of the band. 100 T. Herbert and J. Wallace, ‘Aspects of performance practices: the brass band and its influence on other brass-playing styles’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, p. 284. 101 See Ehrlich, First Philharmonic.
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depended crucially upon two pillars of internal communication: specialist publications and the practice of band competitions or contesting. New arrangements and repertoire were widely circulated through the many specialist publications such as the Brass Band Journal published by the instrument maker Boosey, and those by the Liverpool firm, Wright & Round (these were journals of repertoire rather than verbal texts). In the 1880s The Wright & Round Journal cost between 19s. and £1 9s. 6d. a year.102 Also there was a selfhelp literature, such as Right & Round’s Amateur Band Teacher’s Guide and Bandsman’s Adviser with systematic tips (some seemingly garnered from the Brass Band News) on technical issues and matters of ensemble.103 Contesting was significant as a major stimulus to developing performance standards. Most famously held at Crystal Palace, Manchester Belle Vue Gardens and Glasgow, the championship rules and the repertoire lists of successful bands are eloquent testimonies to the seriousness of the musical endeavour that this movement represented.104
Municipal music The fact that so much municipal money went to fund various kinds of performances is strong indication of its social importance. In a 1910 survey of municipal provision, William Galloway argued that it was a means of betterment as well as enjoyment, ‘the continuous activity that is made possible by municipal support is a valuable agent in the spread of musical development’.105 London’s municipal music was organised by the Parks and Open Spaces Committee of the London County Council, which spent some £12,500 on band performances. Its thirteen-week season began mid-May and concerts lasted for three hours. The Committee’s music adviser, Carl Ambruster, offered this guidance to bandmasters: ‘It would be utterly absurd to force down high class programmes where the public do not want them. To a certain extent we are bound to suit the public taste: we don’t want to be told that the whole programme is above their heads. But on the other hand it is our duty to try to raise the public taste.’ The Council’s one hundred plus instrumentalists were divided into an orchestral body and two military bands, and it also hired in some ninety bands on an occasional basis. Galloway details six orchestral programmes, which 102 Herbert, ‘Nineteenth-Century Bands’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, p. 47. 103 Herbert and Wallace, ‘Aspects of performance practices’, in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, pp. 294–5. 104 Contest rules and the results and repertoire of successful bands in the Open and National Championships, 1853–1997 are in Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band, Appendix 3 and 5; a report of the 1860 contest that gives a sense of its striking impact is given in The Times, 11 and 12 July, 1860. 105 Galloway, Musical England, p. 46.
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contained the Fourth Symphonies by Beethoven and Schumann, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth. Overtures included Brahms’s Academic Festival, Mendelssohn’s Athalie, Smetana’s Bartered Bride, Weber’s Euryanthe and Sullivan’s In Memoriam, and selections came from Gounod’s Irene, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Sullivan’s Ivanhoe. Galloway also reproduces six wind-band programmes, and while implying variable standards, he praises these as excellent programmes. They featured popular overtures such as Beethoven’s Coriolanus and Fidelio, Mozart’s Titus, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mackenzie’s Cricket on the Hearth, Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Rossini’s William Tell, Schubert’s Rosamunde, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Weber’s Oberon and selections from operas by Auber, Benedict, Leoncavallo, Meyerbeer, Nicolai, Puccini, Rossini, Johann Strauss, Verdi, Wagner and Wallace. Another contributor to London’s free music was the National Sunday League, which sponsored 511 concerts and 121 band performances in various parks in 1908–9, causing Galloway to remark that ‘it is possible to hear a band on Sunday in almost every park and open space in the metropolitan area’. The League also sponsored orchestral concerts and concert performances of operas in London’s ‘less fashionable’ suburbs, events which performed to ‘crowded audiences’, with a ticket cost of between 3d. and 2s.106 There were several other such Sunday societies with similar aims, including the South Place Sunday Concerts (later the South Place Ethical Concerts) and the Sunday Concert Society.107 But London was not alone in funding music from the rates. In 1903, Leeds City Council established a series of orchestral concerts, ‘the first to be given on definitely educational lines by any municipality in the kingdom’.108 Programmes focused on British and French music, and had low admission, from between 2d. and 18d. for single concerts to 7/6d. and 12/6d. for multi concert tickets with reserved seats. However in 1908/9, attendance fell to some 1,300, and a £200 loss was incurred, which prompted an increase in ticket prices which may well have safeguarded the costs but deterred the poorest. Sheffield supported some 200 free, open-air summertime band concerts in its parks, and also winter concerts with popular programmes funded through a rate of not more than one-eighth of a penny in the pound (£700) and grants from the Tramways Committee (£500), pricing tickets at 1d. (3d. for a reserved seat).109 In 1908 Manchester ratepayers contributed nearly £3,000 for more than 500 band concerts, which brought in audiences estimated at 2,600,000! 106 Ibid., p. 131. 107 F. Hawkins, The Story of Two Thousand Concerts, London, South Place Ethical Society [1969]; ‘The Sunday Concert Society’, The Times, 20 December 1909. 108 Galloway, Musical England, p. 53. 109 Ibid., p. 56.
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Galloway commented on a sample programme that it was ‘characteristically English in its mingling of bad music with good’.110 Liverpool’s support of organ recitals in St George’s Hall was considered a particularly successful means of civic musical provision because of the instrument’s ability to popularise considerable amounts of music through transcriptions and arrangements (economical, too, given that one man, using the mechanical efficiency and sound spectrum of the organ was an effective substitute for an entire municipal orchestra!). The series was established by the famous city organist W. T. Best, who until his retirement in the 1890s gave two, hour-long recitals most Saturdays, programming classical music in the afternoon (at 6d. a ticket) and popular in the evening (at 1d.). Seemingly he did not repeat a work in the year, and the series was continuing to draw a total audience of some 54,000.111 In contrast was the spa town of Harrogate, whose wealth was based on the many affluent and grand visitors who came to take the waters. In the season there were three daily concerts in the grand Kursaal (opened in 1903 and renamed the Royal Hall because of anti-German sentiment), which was designed by Frank Matcham and where the internal ‘circulatory ambulatory’ enabled exercise, perhaps mitigated by the musical entertainment, to be taken in all weathers. There was popular dance music in the morning, a ‘higher level’ of music in the afternoon, and concerts in the evening. In 1909, this provision cost £14,000 offset by income of £11,500 with the Corporation contributing the rest.112 Performers in 1909 included Paderewski, the Beecham Orchestra (giving an early performance of Elgar’s First Symphony),113 the company of La Scala, Milan with Cavalleria rusticana and (Gounod’s) Faust, John McCormack, Clara Butt and Henry Wood.114 Civic music in the seaside resorts of Eastbourne, Bournemouth and Brighton reflects their own very different circumstances. In each, music was a powerful attraction in drawing visitors, and represented a commercial investment. In Eastbourne, the corporation was spending £3,000 on a municipal band which played up to three times every day, according to the season. Bournemouth maintained two reed bands (to play mixed programmes in the pleasure gardens and to support visiting entertainers) and a municipal orchestra, which was run by Dan Godfrey. In 1895, the orchestra had some 50 players and provided 30 ‘classical’ concerts (cheapest ticket 6d.) and 30 ‘symphony’ concerts (cheapest at 1s.) – the difference in ticket price was because the ‘classical’ concerts were 110 Ibid., p. 57. 111 Ibid., p. 64. 112 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 113 Although not necessarily quite as Elgar had composed it; see J. Lucas, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2008, pp. 50–1. 114 A list of the glittering array of artists performing in a variety of musical and theatrical genres, and which demonstrated the process over time of changes in taste and resources has been drawn up by Michael Neesam and Michael Hine, and can be accessed at www.royalhall.org/performance.html.
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unrehearsed. In its first 500 concerts 891 works were performed, 114 (44 premieres) of them by British composers; in the 1908/9 season the 226 works included 38 symphonies (with Beethoven symphonies 1–8), and 41 British works (including Elgar’s First Symphony). The success of Brighton’s municipal orchestra over three months in 1907 (at a cost of £1,300), led to its being established on a year-round basis, working with the Brighton Philharmonic Choir in a 1909 festival with performances of Elijah, The Dream of Gerontius, Coleridge-Taylor’s Bon-Bon Suite, selections from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, Elgar’s First Symphony and In the South, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, Stanford’s Irish Rhapsody, and A. C. Mackenzie’s Britannia Overture.115 Galloway’s survey of the municipal funding of performance shows how closely this civic provision blended existing cultural realities with aspirational ones too.
‘owing to the great spread of concerts, musical publications, private practice and interest in the subject’116 To the authors of the British Musical Biography the democratisation of music was something to be celebrated and a vital (in the true sense) element in this process was the participation in ambitious performances generated by the Competitive Festival movement. Festivals often included concerts by the combined competitors, as in concerts at the 1909 Blackpool Festival which included Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Brahms’s Requiem,117 and the resulting intensity of national music-making was the cause of considerable pride: It is possible that in no other nation is there, at the present time, greater musical activity, creative or executive, than is to be witnessed in our own . . . The greater masters . . . have been treated with brevity in order to afford space for mention of many worthy, if obscure workers in the cause of Art, hitherto passed over by writers of biography. The very large number (probably over 40,000) of persons engaged in the musical profession at the present time will explain the apparent preponderance of notices devoted to living musicians.118
Brown and Stratton’s UK-wide estimate of 40,000 musicians in 1897 indicates that there had been an immense growth in musical employment since 1851.
115 116 117 118
‘Municipal music’, The Times, 16 January 1909. G. Grove (ed.), A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London, Macmillan, 1879, editor’s preface. W. J. Galloway, ‘The competitive movement’, in Galloway, Musical England, pp. 167–206. Brown and Stratton, British Musical Biography, Preface.
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Cyril Ehrlich points out that the proportionate increase of those declaring musical employment in census returns was greater than the growth of the population as a whole.119 In 1841 there were nearly 7,000 musicians in a population of some 26.8m in England and Wales; the 1851 census showed a 2.2 per cent increase in this population to 27.4m, but the number of musicians returned had increased by nearly 70 per cent to over 11,000.120 By 1891, this population had expanded to 37.9m, while the census returns for musical employment had more than trebled to 38,600.121 The scholarship education that was such a feature of the Royal College of Music’s provision (some scholarships also came with maintenance), had been the crucial factor in ‘unearthing a surprising amount of hidden talent in the British Isles’;122 consequently ‘The complexion of the lists of players in our concert orchestras, once international, has become practically national’.123 The quality of the result could catch Germans by surprise, and Stanford instanced Englebert Humperdinck’s reaction to the quality of the playing of Sullivan’s all-British Leeds Festival Orchestra – the reputation of the British music world had led him to expect that many of the players would have been foreigners.124 What really had undermined any sustained defence of nineteenth-century Britain as a land with music, was that, among influential commentators, the British failure to produce compositions able to stand comparison with those of the Austro-German canon was considered to be cause for national embarrassment. ‘The English are not a Musical People’ was the discouraging title of a G. A. Macfarren article in the Cornhill Magazine.125 The popular moralist, the Rev. H. R. Haweis, wrote that ‘The English are not a Musical People’, because he felt that the real enthusiasm was for ballads: ‘Our national music vibrates between “When other lips” and “Champagne Charley” . . . this will be so until music is felt here, as it is felt in Germany, to be a kind of necessity.’126 And the composer Charles Stanford was later to write of George Grove, ‘Curiously enough Grove, with all his winning charm and broad mind, never in his heart believed in the creative work of his own country. He was steeped in Beethoven and Schubert, and in latter days guardedly admitted Brahms and fractions of 119 Ehrlich, The Music Profession, p. 51. 120 The musical occupations listed in the 1851 census were very broadly drawn, such as: ‘Musician (not Teacher)’; ‘Musicmaster, mistress’; ‘Vocalist’; ‘Musical instrument maker, dealer’ (Census 1851. – Report: Table 53 Occupations of the People . . . pp. cxxi–cxxvii). There is a breakdown of the 1851 data in H. B. Thomson, The Choice of a Profession: A Concise Account and Comparative Review of the English Professions, London, Chapman & Hall, 1857, pp. 7–8. 121 Figures taken from Ehrlich, Music Profession, table 1, and N. McCord, British History 1815–1906, Oxford University Press, 1991, tables 3 and 7. 122 C. V. Stanford, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, London, Arnold, 1914, p. 217. 123 Ibid., p. 220. 124 Ibid. 125 G. A. Macfarren, ‘The English are not a musical people’, Cornhill Magazine, 18 (1868), 344–57. 126 Haweis, Music and Morals, pp. 491–3.
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Wagner into his fold. . . . A half century of barren mediocrity had accustomed him to look abroad for anything and everything.’127 Music had been an important agent in shaping concepts of German cultural nationhood across the nineteenth century, something that accounts for the following passage (made available to British readers in an 1870 translation), in which Ferdinand Hiller makes explicit the political perspective contemporary writers were attaching to German music: And Haydn, and Weber, and Schubert, and Mendelssohn! What a propaganda they have made for the fatherland! That they speak a universal language does not prevent their uttering in it the best we speak as Germans – I can wish for the nation nothing better than it should resemble a Beethoven symphony – full of poetry and power; indivisible yet many-sided; rich in thought and symmetrical in form; exalted and mighty!128
The achievements of Germanic composers enabled the endeavours of nineteenth-century Austro-German music scholars to be focused on the work of canon formation. This they did through their compilation of monumental or complete editions and the writing of biographical accounts. The results were such pioneering ventures as Chrysander’s Handel edition (1858– 94) and biography (1858–67), the Bach-Gesellschaft (1851–99) and Philipp Spitta’s Bach biography (1873–80), the Mozart edition (1877–1905), Köchel’s Mozart catalogue (1862) and Otto Jahn’s Mozart biography (1856, revised in 1867 and 1889–91), as well as editions of Beethoven (1862–5), Schubert (1884–97) and Schütz (1885–1927). These, then, were the exemplary models of national attainment that some British writers sought desperately to emulate in relation to British composers. Edward Rimbault had produced an adapted translation of Forkel’s Bach biography for the English market in 1869,129 and George Grove had written a preface to the translation by Pauline Townsend of Jahn’s The Life of Mozart.130 These are but two examples of an extensive literature of German composers available in English, whether in translation, or as studies written by British authors, such as Hubert Parry’s,
127 Stanford, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, pp. 223–4. 128 F. Hiller, ‘Quasi Fantasia’, in E. Graeme (ed.), Beethoven: A Memoir, London, Griffin, 1870, quoted in M. Hughes and R. Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd edn, Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 25. Such politicisation of music was part of a wider cultural project in which composers themselves were often the least involved, as is explained in Applegate and Potter, ‘Germans as the “People of Music”: genealogy of an identity’, in Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity, pp. 1–35. 129 E. Rimbault, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life and Writings. Adapted from the German of Hilgenfeldt and Forkel with Additions from Original Sources, London, Metzler, 1869. 130 O. Jahn, The Life of Mozart . . . Translated from the German by P. D. Townsend, London, Novello, Ewer & Co, 1882.
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Johann Sebastian Bach.131 From that anxiety was constructed the ideology of the English Musical Renaissance, an attempt to demonstrate that British composers had suddenly turned all around by beginning to write ‘great’ works rather than merely ‘useful’ or functional ones, and thus were able to take their place on the international stage along with the great composers of other nations. The performance situation in Britain was also very different from Germany’s. Metropolitan concert life was essentially ad hoc, running on the basis of pick-up bands (there was no ‘permanent’ concert orchestra in central London until the 1890s),132 and despite the claims of the Royal Academy,133 there was to be no systematic or course-based conservatoire provision until the Royal College of Music’s founding in 1883.134 Clearly, then, the weight of British musical strengths lay differently from those of the ubiquitous Germanic model, hence Mackerness’s injunction to look at the different ways in which the astonishing British demand for music of all kinds was actually being met. If we interpret the astonishingly wide range of music that was being performed in concerts of different types and conditions as being evidence of musical curiosity in a very positive sense, then we come closer to understanding that the take-up and genuine appreciation of good music was an essential characteristic of nineteenth-century British musical culture. It links into the quiddity of that significant manifestation of Victorian scholarship, George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Grove was an astonishing taxonomy of musical knowledge, albeit one in which, as its eponymous editor expressed it, as ‘an English Dictionary it has been thought right to treat English music and musicians with especial care’.135 Considerable prominence was given to the medieval round ‘Sumer is icumen in’ as demonstrating that British composers were in advance of the ‘learned, crabbed style’ of their Flemish and Italian contemporaries. Nevertheless, as Leanne Langley has pointed out in her comprehensive analysis of its structure and organisation, the Dictionary was remarkably unpartisan in its treatment of subjects; rather, the evidence of the whole was testimony to ‘the nation’s unique capacity to understand, incorporate and 131 C. H. H. Parry, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Story of the Development of a Great Personality, New York and London, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. 132 The implications of this situation are treated by M. Musgrave, ‘Changing values in nineteenth-century performance: the work of Michael Costa and August Manns’, in Bashford and Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture, pp. 169–91. 133 The RAM’s provision and practices were given short shrift in the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, First Report of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into and Report on the State of Musical Education at Home and Abroad, London, 1866, pp. 1–2. 134 D. Wright, ‘The South Kensington music schools and the development of the British conservatoire in the late nineteenth century’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130/2 (2005), 236–82; for details of the RCM’s ‘General Regulations’ of 1883 and 1889 see Appendix 1, pp. 279–80. Only from its 1900/1 Prospectus does the RAM begin to spell out the constituent elements of study in any detail. 135 Grove (ed.), A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879–89), vol. 1, Preface.
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champion good music, whatever its origin, style or date’.136 Perhaps, then, it is in this capacity for performing and responding to good music that we may most clearly discern the nature of the nineteenth-century British musical character, something that Grove was at such pains to emphasise in his Preface.
Technology and the dominance of the performer Technology has wrought profound change to our musical circumstances. The modern, digitally conditioned, musical experience is diametrically opposed to that of our score-based, nineteenth-century counterparts. It is predominantly as sound – through the medium of captured performance – rather than as notated representation that music is sold for our use now. Recorded music has proliferated in an extraordinary way to encompass the whole spectrum of tastes and idioms, something now also reflected by the increasing numbers of performers who routinely cross between different types of artistic contexts. Detailed comparisons of recordings of a particular work have become the commonplace of music journalism. But our ability to compare performances by hearing them side by side would have astounded our predecessors. Many had only one opportunity to hear a work in its full orchestral guise, and accordingly, serious listeners prepared carefully for the experience. They would have done this by studying the concert programme notes (often with notated examples) sometimes available in advance, or by playing the works through in a piano or piano duet reduction.137 We feel the genuine emotion of George Grove’s words written to Richter in 1897 after a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, that he would ‘have given anything to be able to hear it once again’,138 a facility today taken for granted in its multiplicity of recordings. The performer’s new dominance in the musical order of things is also a consequence of our more ambivalent attitude to contemporary classical composition. In the nineteenth century new works benefited the box office; today, the situation is reversed, sometimes excepting well-trailed, high-profile commissions. This ambivalence became especially striking in the 1960s, when many 136 L. Langley, ‘Roots of a tradition: the first Dictionary of Music and Musicians’, in M. Musgrave (ed.), George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 168–215. 137 See, for instance, the reminiscences of the painter Henry Halliday as well as other examples cited by P. Gillett, ‘Ambivalent friendships: music-lovers, amateurs, and professional musicians in the late nineteenth century’, in Bashford and Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture, pp. 321–40; on the educational and cultural significance of programme notes and their transmission, see C. Bashford, ‘Not just “G.”: towards a history of the programme note’, in Musgrave (ed.), George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, pp. 115–42, and ‘Educating England: networks of programme provision in the nineteenth century’, in Cowgill and Holman (eds.), Music in the British Provinces, pp. 349–76. 138 Bashford, ‘Not just “G.”’, p. 131.
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chose to take refuge from the antagonistic idioms of the avant-garde within the less rebarbative adventures of the historical performance world. Thus encouraged, historically informed performance (which grew out of the iconoclastic ‘authenticity’ movement) has gone on to change, often in radical respects, attitudes towards performing much of the canonic repertoire, as well as affecting the way it sounds. Today’s even not-so-old listener is likely to have experienced music from the classical mainstream clothed in several very different sound worlds. And this is now true not just of earlier music, but of Romantic repertoire such as symphonies by Berlioz, Schumann, Brahms and Bruckner. The incentive for record companies to support costly, historically informed rerecordings of the canon lies in their sales potential to consumers as replacement or additional versions. To maximise this opportunity, the marketing process gives primary emphasis to the performers in conceiving and arriving at these revisionist interpretations. Marketing music in this way has given a sharper edge to branding the performer and the performance, and so ‘Norrington’s’ Beethoven, say, is clearly proclaimed on the basis of a discernibly individual performance style. Journalists and broadcasters then seize on this, further elaborating the distinctions as they hear them between the respective performance practices of such as Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Philippe Herreweghe. This focus has foregrounded the performer in the consumer’s listening experience and purchasing decisions. Often it has made a particular performance brand the deciding factor when selecting one representation of a work over other perfectly satisfactory rivals in an already overcrowded catalogue – and listeners with a completionist approach buy multiple performance versions of the same work. In the run-up to the final concert of the 2008 Proms season, the New York Times carried the story that Sir Roger Norrington, conductor of the ‘Last Night’ was going to insist that Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 should be played ‘without vibrato’ – a decision that sent ‘rockets of outrage into the blogosphere and newspaper columns’. The brouhaha this decision whipped up was further evidence of the potential of a musical performance to generate a considerable amount of public interest. And that interest was aroused regardless of whether or not the musical public knew the case pro et contra vibrato, or saw the threat to vibrato as an attempt ‘to denigrate and undermine British and English cultural icons’.139 It attests to the fact that careful building of the profiles of performers and their performance identity has given successful recording artists unprecedented influence in shaping our musical culture. And because of the ways musicians are commodified in today’s 139 http://nytimes.com/2008/08/13/arts/music/13vibr.html, accessed 13 August 2008.
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visually centred media – with youth, brilliance and visual appeal enjoying a market premium – never before have so many younger generation musicians achieved such prominence. This development has encouraged different sorts of repertoire decisions; it has also emphasised underlying cultural tensions between the iconography now used to market young performers and the iconic basis of the traditional canon. But it has also become possible for a well-known performer to use their accumulated market presence to turn the tables on a commercial record label. When John Eliot Gardiner decided in 2005 to launch his own label, Soli Deo Gloria to market his complete Bach Cantata cycle, his action severed the traditional, artist-dependant relationship that recording companies so assiduously cultivate. Gardiner’s cycle was conceived to link both the new Millennium celebrations and the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death in 2000. It originated in a carefully launched year of live performances of the cantatas on their appointed feast days. However, at the end of the year, Deutsche Grammophon, Gardiner’s record label, withdrew its undertaking to record the project. Yet despite cantata cycles from others such as Masaaki Suzuki and Ton Koopman, Gardiner still managed to secure the financial backing to set his SDG project firmly underway on an independent, not-for-profit basis, and to expand it to cover further performance projects. Technology has not only moved the spotlight firmly onto the performer, it has also displaced the social tradition of live musical experience. This it has done by shifting consumption from the collective arena of the public sphere, and removing it to the individually selected and self-constructed meanings of the private domain.140 The digital age has seen these developments carried to new levels of quality and convenience, and at a time when postmodern relativism has replaced old-style canonic certainties. There is now an absence of conventions about patterns of musical consumption, leaving the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ decisions entirely up to the individual. These recast cultural circumstances are at odds with the cohesive values that are required to sustain ideas of canonicity. In this, as in other respects, the digital age marks another dividing point in music’s social history.
140 See M. Katz, ‘Listening in cyberspace’, in M. Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2004, pp. 158–87.
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PART II
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PRE-RENAISSANCE
PERFORMANCE
. 7 .
The Ancient World ELEONORA ROCCONI
The notion of ‘performance’ was central to the practice and ideology of ancient Greek and Roman societies: a politician’s speech or a lawyer’s closing, a choral exhibition or a sport competition were all interactive events whose fundamental components were the spectacle and its audience, both of which had an active role in the way they functioned.1 This was particularly true for musical activities, whose civic and educational value was outstanding, especially in Classical Greece. Indeed, the ancient Greek culture of mousikē embraced the entire field of poetic performance to which the Muses gave their name, including song, poetry and bodily movement, all integrated within an event, which served to define culture, ethnicity and gender, and was a core element of religious and social rituals.2 The settings for such artistic performances ranged from entertainment in the private home to larger urban or pan-Hellenic festivals (i.e. ‘involving all Greeks’, not just a single polis), where competitive events took place in public. In these contexts the entire community, whether limited to a specific social elite or extended to the whole Hellenic society, was involved and found a common identity. These performances were thus not only a valuable means of reinforcing local individualities, but also a dynamic opportunity for exchange and interaction among different parts of the Greek world. It was through these occasions that regional identities consolidated their ‘Hellenic’ sense of affiliation.
The culture of mousikē in Archaic and Classical Greece In the Archaic (eighth to sixth century BC) and Classical ages (fifth to fourth century BC), composers – called melopoioi, that is, ‘makers of melos’, a composition defined by words, tune and rhythm3 – and performers were often the same 1 S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 1–29. 2 P. Murray and P. J. Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 1–8. 3 Plato, Republic, 398d.
[209]
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people; originally Alcaeus’ poetry, for instance, was probably sung by its own author within the same aristocratic symposia to which it constantly refers – see the pictorial representation of Alcaeus and Sappho holding a barbitos (a deep-voiced lyre) in an Attic red-figured vase.4 Biographical tradition claims that Sophocles sang to himself in his tragedy Thamyris, which dramatised the singing competition between this mythical bard and the Muses, and he was consequently portrayed playing the kithara, the professional stringed instrument, in contemporary iconography. This practice seems to date from the Mycenaean age (seventeenth to twelth century BC), when minstrels such as those described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey sang their songs to the four-stringed phorminx (a round-based lyre), improvising the melody at the same time as the text, which was unique to every performance. Such performances were able to arouse deep emotions in both the player and the audience, as Plato’s portrayal of a rhapsode in Classical time still clearly shows: ‘For I [i.e. Ion, the rhapsode protagonist of Plato’s dialogue named after him] must frankly confess that at the tale of pity, my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs . . . I look down upon spectators from the stage, and behold the various emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking.’5 The lists or ‘canons’ (kanones), according to which composers were distinguished with reference to the particular ‘genre’ in which they excelled (melic poetry, tragedy, comedy etc.) may be dated back to the Hellenistic period (third to first century BC). Scholars working in the ancient libraries that flourished at that time (the most famous of which was in Alexandria) organised the poetic material of their past, producing the first ‘critical editions’ of such material. Alexandrian scholars referred to the ancient melopoioi as composers of ‘lyric’ poetry (lyrikē poiēsis), that is, poetry sung to the lyre, the traditional Greek stringed instrument, or, more generally, to any musical instrument. This term, which appears for the first time in the grammarian Dionysius Trax (second century BC), gradually became commonplace, probably in order to stress the musicality of such poetry just at the time when it was actually vanishing. The lyre was becoming unnecessary for its composition and performance (at least in the most learned contexts). Ancient lyric poetry may well have been performed by solo singers or by male, female or mixed choruses, in private as well as in public contexts: hence the traditional distinction (recurrent in modern ‘manualistic’ approaches to ancient Greek poetry) between choral and monodic lyric.6 Of course most lyric composers were versatile enough to practise both categories, even if they became more famous for a particular genre. 4 Munich Inv. 2416, c. 470 BC. 5 Plato, Ion, 535 c–d. 6 For a discussion on this ‘artificial’ classification, see M. Davies, ‘Monody, choral lyric, and the tyranny of the hand-book’, Classical Quarterly, 38 (1988), 52–64.
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Monodic poetry (i.e. sung by a single performer) was performed in contexts limited to a select audience, the most important of which was the symposium (literally ‘drinking together’), a civic ritual attested since the Archaic age as a privilege of the aristocratic male elite (hetaireia, literally ‘association, brotherhood’).7 It took place after the evening meal, when respectable wives left and adult male citizens remained together privately in the men’s quarters of the house, under the leadership of a symposiarch who established all the drinking rules and entertainment for the occasion. Each guest set an ivy or myrtle crown on his head and used myrrh scent, as in a sort of initiation rite. The party started when the gathering struck up the paean, a religious choral song originally devoted to Apollo, and offered libations to the gods, transforming the ritual of sharing the table in a religious collective rite with Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. The guests then sang convivial songs called skolia (literally ‘winding, obscure’), a term reflecting the fact that each symposiast participated in turn on receipt of the myrrinē (a myrtle-branch which was passed around, snaking its way among them). On these occasions there were poetry competitions between participants, sometimes alternating song by song, sometimes ‘capping’ the verses previously struck up by another guest; elegies were sung to the accompaniment of the aulos (a reed-blown pipe, almost always played in pairs), lyric songs to the lyre. The symposium was the institutional context for the enjoyment and preservation of a consistent part of the Archaic and Classical melic poetry, purposely composed to be sung there (or, if composed for a different occasion, reperformed and adapted to the context, as in the case of excerpts from theatrical songs).8 From the mid-sixth century BC onwards, iconographical evidence shows that an important part of the entertainment in these parties was played by the musical exhibitions of aulētrides (literally, ‘female aulosplayers’), psaltriai (literally, ‘harp-girls’) and orchēstrides (literally, ‘female dancers’), women of low social position, basically accomplished courtesans called hetairai (literally, ‘female companions’, perhaps ironically as they served as ‘companions’ to men).9 They were hired by the host of the symposium for their artistic performances as well as for their erotic entertainment: hence the equation of aulētrides with prostitutes, which became a stereotype of literature, especially in comedy and anecdotal writings.
7 The symposium on which we have the most information is the Athenian type. For a general overview on different types of symposia see D. Musti, Il simposio nel suo sviluppo storico, Rome, Laterza, 2001. 8 For the inclusion of the theatrical repertoire in the fifth-century symposia see, for example, Aristophanes, Knights, v. 529. 9 L. Kurke, ‘Inventing the hetaira: sex, politics, and discursive conflict in archaic Greece’, Classical Antiquity, 16 (1997), 106–50.
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According to Plato (Laws, 654b, mid-fourth century BC), the choral dancing and singing in honour of the gods – that is, the choreia – provide the most important and effective means for educating and bringing order to society. In fact, choral songs, which belong to the earliest and most widespread practices of the entire Greek world, were performed on many different occasions. Some of these were particular celebrations, such as marriages, funerals or sporting victories; others were regular events such as the numerous religious festivities which took place during the year’s calendar (e.g. the Panathenaea and the City Dionysia in Athens, the former in honour of the city’s patron divinity, Athena Polias, the latter devoted to Dionysus; or the Gymnopaediae and the Carnea in Sparta, both dedicated to Apollo). These festivals, which occurred in every part of the Greek world in order to celebrate local cults, naturally differed in the detail of their ritual, since it was believed appropriate that different gods were honoured in their own, distinctive way: hence there were specific choral forms for each god (or goddess).10 A distinction among musical ‘types and forms’ (eidē kai schēmata), according to the functions and the contexts in which they were originally performed, may already be found in Plato, Laws, 700a–b; here the author recalls how the musical genres of his past were properly distinguished, as it was not permitted to use one type of melody for the purposes of another (probably in order to differentiate types of worship).11 They might consist of prayers to the gods (hymnoi), funeral lamentations (thrēnoi), paeans and dithyrambs, that is, choral songs originally devoted to Apollo and to Dionysus. By the late sixth century BC, however, we hear of dithyrambs only as institutionalised festival events, resembling a refined art form more than a ritual composition, sung by a chorus of up to fifty men or boys dancing in circular formation (enkyklios choros) with the accompaniment of the aulos. As may be inferred from extant sources, cultic hymns such as the paeans were characterised by regularity of rhythm, syllabic (i.e. not melismatic) style and moderate usage of modulation, which was kept to a minimum. Typical features of funeral lamentations, on the other hand, were antiphony (between one or more solo voices and a chorus, where a soloist usually had the function of chorus-leader) and ritual refrains. Further types of choral compositions were the partheneia, or ‘maiden-songs’, well attested especially in Sparta, Ephesus and Delos (where the Delians maintained, throughout the whole year, a professional chorus of Delian women, Deliades, to perform at a multitude of religious events); processional (prosodia) 10 C. Calame, ‘Feste, riti e forme poetiche’, in S. Settis (ed.), I Greci. Storia, arte, cultura e società, vol. 2. I, Turin, Einaudi, 1996, pp. 471–96. 11 B. Kowalzig, ‘Changing choral worlds: song-dance and society in Athens and beyond’, in Murray and Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses, pp. 44–6.
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and marriage-songs (hymenaioi and epithalamia), these latter based on the exchange between two mixed choral groups; and laudatory (enkōmia) and victory odes (epinikia) commissioned by rulers or nobles for both public and private festivities, through which the donor’s high standing was affirmed within the community. On some particular occasions these poems were also performed by solo singers.12 It was common practice also to send and receive foreign choroi between different poleis: in this way each city could assert its own identity as well as strengthen its relationships with others.13 Choral activity usually involved a group of people, ranging from three to sixty. They perceived themselves (and acted) as a ‘collective’ group (as, for instance, the choirs of parthenoi or gynaikes, i.e. ‘unmarried’ or ‘married women’). The chorēgos, or chorus-leader, gave ‘the signal (exarchein) of dancing and singing’ (Suda s.v. chorēgos).14 In this formally constructed genre of poetry, one stanza, the strophe, was immediately followed by another, the antistrophe, which had exactly the same rhythm and metre and was sung to the same melody. This stable framework of repetitions, marked out by strophe, antistrophe and sometimes a third element called the epode, was most probably intended to aid the dance, and it could also be applied to soloistic songs (which, on some occasions, were perhaps accompanied by a silent choir of dancers, who surrounded the solo performer).15 Since all Greek choruses were arranged according to the different phases of human life (children; girls/boys; adult women/adult men – both in segregated and mixed groups), it seems that one of the functions of these ritual gatherings was that of accompanying the transition from one age to the other, as well as that of defining the social role, age-group, gender and political status of their participants. During the main religious festivals of the Greek world, however, music’s purpose was not only directly to celebrate the gods but also to reinforce social and civic identity. Musical exhibitions of virtuosi, who captivated their audiences through their individual talent, had already been in existence since the late sixth century BC, though within a religious and ‘ritual’ context.16 In this period, during the most important pan-Hellenic games (such as the ones held 12 For evidence of soloistic paeans, see Strabo, Geography, 9.3.10; for monodic performance of at least one of the epinikia of Simonides, see Aristophanes, Clouds, vv. 1355–6. 13 I. C. Rutherford, ‘χορὸς εἰς τῆσδε πόλεως (Xen. Mem. 3.3.12): song-dance and state-pilgrimage at Athens’, in Murray and Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses, pp. 67–90. 14 C. Calame, Les chœurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque, Rome, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1977. 15 See Odyssey, 8.261ff., where the famous blind Phaeacian bard Demodocus improvises a soloistic song in the presence of Odysseus, surrounded by a silent dancing chorus. For this hypothesis applied to the performance of some fragments of the poet Stesichorus (sixth century BC), see M. L. West, ‘Stesichorus’, Classical Quarterly, 21 (1971), 302–14, and more recently A. D. Barker, Euterpe. Ricerche sulla musica greca e romana, ed. F. Perusino and E. Rocconi, Pisa, ETS, 2002, p. 46. 16 For the Greeks, religious worship took many forms. The gods were honoured also by human achievement: hence the great importance of competitions of any kind within religious festivities.
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in Olympia, Nemea, Delphi and Isthmia), and in the context of athletics, one could also find musical contests (mousikoi agōnes) in singing to the aulos (aulōidia) and to the kithara (kitharōidia), as well as in solo aulos or kithara playing. According to the competitive nature of Greek performance culture, prizes were offered to the best singer and instrumentalist, who thus gained fame and popularity from their victories: hence these occasions attracted performers from many parts of Greece. The musical items performed by these professional musicians were called nomoi, traditional solo pieces (sung or purely instrumental, grouped into the four major classes quoted above),17 which were generally thought of as conforming to their own fixed patterns: in Greek, nomos means also ‘custom’ or ‘law’. They were originally given different names according to their origin or their main features: we know, for instance, about a Boeotian as well as an Aeolian nomos (presumably originating in those specific geographical regions); a Terpandreios and a Kēpiōn (named after the poets Terpander and Cepion, a pupil of Terpander); a Trochaios and an Orthios (which derived their names from certain peculiar Greek rhythms); and so on.18 Some of these nomoi became notorious; for example, the so-called Pythikos nomos was a purely instrumental description of Apollo’s fight with the serpent named Python (who occupied the site of Delphi before him), introduced and developed as the main musical form in which the aulētai challenged during the Pythian games, held in one of the most important Apollinean sanctuaries (i.e. Delphi). In the final section of this nomos (called syringes, literally ‘whistles’), the players imitated the death of the serpent as it expired with its final ‘whistlings’, by exploiting the high harmonics achieved via the ‘speaker’ hole of the aulos. The musical forms which became the most fashionable between the fifth and fourth centuries BC, however, were the kitharodic nomoi, accompanied by the singers on their kitharas. These solo songs, together with the monodies of actors on stage in dramas, resulted in the ideal developing ground for the avant-garde musical style typical of that period (the so-called ‘New Music’), originating in the spectacular contemporary choral dithyrambs cultivated by prominent composers such as Kinesias and Melanippides.19 The most distinctive musical innovations of such a style were the abandonment of antistrophic composition, which allowed phenomena such as the spreading of a syllable over several notes, and the movement of melody through a wider range of sounds, that is, modulations. This was made possible first by organological 17 i.e. kitharodic, aulodic, kitharistic and auletic. 18 A. D. Barker, Greek Musical Writings: I. The Musician and his Art, Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 249–55. 19 E. Csapo, ‘The politics of the New Music’, in Murray and Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses, pp. 207–48.
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innovations in the construction of the aulos, which became equipped with a mechanism (i.e. metal collars) through which the pipe-players were able to close and open the numerous finger-holes during performance, and later by increasing the stringing of the kithara in order to emulate the ‘panharmonic’ possibilities of the aulos. Greek theatrical drama was part of a religious festival devoted to Dionysus, organised by the city of Athens with the purpose of stressing its civic ideology and its cultural self-assertion among the other Greek poleis. The main elements of the programme were competitive performances of dithyrambs and plays, which always involved music. Plutarch, between the first and second century AD, describes the experience of watching tragedy as ‘a wonderful aural (akroama) and visual experience’ (Plutarch, On the Renown of the Athenians, 5).20 Indeed, choral odes of ancient tragedies and comedies were sung and danced to the accompaniment of the aulos in the orchēstra,21 a circular or trapezoidal platform of packed earth surrounded by a semicircular seating scheme properly called theatron22 (which became a permanent building only in the late fourth century BC). This spatial arrangement influenced the performer–audience relationship, since the playing area and the auditorium were one, with no structure or illumination separating the players from the public; consequently, the audience was an active partner in the theatrical performance, free to comment and to intervene, as well as to be commented upon (especially in comedy, where the characters often addressed the public, collectively or individually).23 Within the varieties of drama, three main types of choral dances emerged, each with its own character: the emmeleia for tragedy (which displayed a grave and solemn quality), the kordax for comedy (which had a lascivious character), and the sikinnis for satyr play (whose chorus was made up of satyrs, Greek mythological deities, half human and half beast, who danced in a violent way). According to the ancient sources, Greek theatrical dancing was highly mimetic, even though we know that it followed the framework of repetitions (strophe, antistrophe and epode) typical of any ancient choral genre. Choral songs (called stasima) were interspersed with actors’ episodes which, though usually spoken, displayed a strong rhythmical beat based on the iambic metre: ᴗ ―. Parts of their roles, however, could also be delivered as a kind of 20 The consciousness of this phenomenon in later centuries was such that ancient theatre, especially ancient tragedy, inspired the Western world’s first operas, which began as attempts to restore Greek drama to the stage. 21 From orcheomai, literally ‘space in which the chorus dance’. On the aulos in theatrical contexts see P. Wilson, ‘The musicians among the actors’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 39–68. 22 From theaomai, lit. ‘place for seeing’. The meaning of the word theatron, which corresponds to the Latin cavea, was later on extended to denote the entire building. 23 P. D. Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre, London, Kindle Edition, 1989.
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recitative called parakatalogē (that is, katalogē (i.e. recitation) ‘beside’ or ‘along with’ (para) musical accompaniment), the irregularity of which was thought to produce a ‘tragic’ effect (see Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems, 19.6), or were more often sung.24 Tragic actors (or their parodic counterparts in comedy), for instance, performed solo cries at moments of high tension or sang in concert with the chorus the so-called amoebean songs (from ameibō, ‘to exchange’). The formal lament, in which the voices of the actors and chorus were interwoven in extended threnody typical of tragedies, was called kommos (from koptō, ‘to beat’ – i.e. the head and breast in lamentation). The famous Aristotelian katharsis, described by the philosopher as the purging of the emotions of pity and fear that are aroused in the viewer of a tragedy,25 was probably enhanced by the musical performance of the most emotional scenes. According to a widespread practice in ancient musical performances, it was common for the playwright in the early theatre (who also composed the music for his plays) to hold the office of actor as well as that of choreographer and trainer of the chorus;26 after having attempted to act in some of his tragedies (see above), Sophocles was the first to separate the functions of actor and poet due to his weak voice (mikrophōnia). Ancient literary sources often remarked that the vocal talents of an actor, who wore a mask during performance, should undoubtedly exhibit euphōnia (‘good voice production and delivery’), megalophōnia (‘loudness of voice’, necessary in an open-air theatre) and lamprotēs (‘clearness, distinctness’). These qualities were certainly enhanced by daily exercises; we know, for instance, that a comic actor named Hermon, contemporary with Aristophanes, usually did a prolonged vocal workout before performing.27 But they were reinforced also by some simple acoustical devices typical of Greek theatre design, such as the almost complete lack of reverberation, due to the absence of a roof, and the profusion of reflected sounds, such as those characteristic of the orchēstra.28 In the second half of the fifth century BC, dramatic music became more complex. This was due to the use of more elaborate rhythms and melodies, probably as a result of the influence of mimetic and ‘expressionist’ music, typical of dithyrambic and kitharodic composers, on innovative playwrights such as Euripides. Such a revolutionary style led to the emergence of professional actors, since it was ‘easier 24 On actors in the Classical world see especially Easterling and Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors, and A. Duncan, Performance and Identity in the Classical world, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 25 Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b. 26 Aeschylus, for instance, regularly took on the leading roles in his own productions. 27 Pollux, Onomasticon, 4.88. 28 This increased the distance limit of satisfactory listening from 42 metres – the distance limit for speech transmission, in quiet conditions – to 60 metres (M. Barron, Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design, London, E. & F. N. Spon, 1993, p. 228). Theoretical pieces of evidence (as the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, 11.25, or the Natural History of the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, 11.270) show the consciousness of the phenomenon of the orchēstra reflection.
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for one person to execute many modulations than for many’ (Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems, 19.15). The first evidence of this growing phenomenon was the institution of a prize in 449 BC for the best actor in the City Dionysia, the most important Athenian festival devoted to dramatic performances. These professionals gradually became real virtuoso performers, who went on tour as distinguished protagonists; for instance, the professional actor Theodoros, the most famous tragic actor of the fourth century, specialised in female roles of Sophoclean and Euripidean dramas (which had become repertoire plays in the late Classical period). It was the actors themselves who contributed to the vast and rapid spread of the theatre outside Attica, transforming it into an international genre, though there is evidence attesting to the spread of interest in drama since the fifth century BC:29 we know, for instance, that Aeschylus and Euripides took some of their productions to Sicily and Macedonia. As a consequence, the function of the chorus (previously integral to the performance structure) also changed considerably. In the early fourth century Aristophanes (in comedy) and Agathon (in tragedy) no longer composed special choral songs for each play, and began the practice of inserting musical compositions (called embolima, i.e. ‘interludes’) between the episodes, which could be transferred from play to play. This sort of chorus can be traced to the time of ‘New Comedy’, a label given to plays of the early Hellenistic period, for which Menander is the dramatist best known to us. In these plays the chorus, more often a band of revellers or drunks, has nothing to do with the plot of the drama and enters the scene only between the episodes or acts, singing and dancing, to allow the audience (and the actors) to take a breather.30 Other contexts of musical performance which are only occasionally cited in ancient sources (but widely spread over the entire Greek world) are those related to so-called ‘folk music’. This included songs and instrumental music which accompanied everyday activities with their rhythmical and repetitive character. We know that the aulos, for instance, was used on the warships known as ‘triremes’ to keep the rowers’ strokes in time; for a parody of this practice on the comic stage see the rowing scene in Aristophanes’ Frogs, where Dionysus rows Charon’s boat across the Styx to the accompaniment of a chorus of frogs, attempting inexpertly to keep time with their song.31 The aulos could also accompany warriors in battle
29 On this topic see especially O. Taplin, Comic Angels and Other Approaches to Greek Drama through Vasepainting, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, and O. Taplin, Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century B.C., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. 30 P. D. Arnott and J. M. Walton, Menander and the Making of Comedy, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1996. 31 The frogs acquire the role of keleustēs (i.e. ‘boatswain’), while elements of the text point out the accompaniment of the aulos to this scene. See E. Rocconi, ‘Il canto delle rane in Aristofane Rane 209–267’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 85 (2007), 137–42.
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or various athletic events such as the long jump, discus or javelin throwing, boxing and wrestling.32 Furthermore, ancient sources speak about several work songs: a reapers’ song called Lityersēs (after the mythical Phrygian hero), melodies sung by hired labourers who went to work in the field, or by bath attendants as well as by women winnowing (see Athenaeus, Banquet of the Learned, 619a). This oral tradition of popular music, including extemporised love songs, singing matches and mourning laments, whose traces can sometimes be found in comedy,33 is rarely corroborated, not least because of the anonymity of its composers. However, it found a literary transposition in the Hellenistic period, when the gap between the popular and the elite cultures became more consistent, thanks to some learned poets who, in some cases, even elevated such a folk tradition to a ‘literary genre’.
Musical performances in late Greek antiquity In the post-Classical history of musical performance, the theatre became the most popular kind of entertainment; even the smallest city had its own theatre, which came to be considered an essential public building, even away from the major centres of mainland Greece. New productions retained their competitive character, being performed within the frame of the Dionysia, celebrated everywhere in the expanded Greek world after Alexander’s conquests. It also became part of other religious festivals, such as the Mouseia held at the city of Thespiai or the Soteria at Delphi. Additionally of great importance was the phenomenon of the revival of the old classics: contests of old tragedies and comedies are known to have formed a regular part in the programmes of the Athenian Dionysia (starting from 386 BC) as well as of many other festivals.34 This expansion rendered necessary the development of various and distinct theatrical professions, which were no longer amateur activities, simply conceived as a way of contributing to the city life. This growing phenomenon of the virtuoso and the increasing ascendancy of soloists led to the constitution and spread of guilds (synodoi or koina) of theatrical performers called ‘Artists of Dionysus’ (Dionysiakoi technitai), active across and beyond Greece from the third century 35 BC. These touring companies operated specifically as autonomous political 32 M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 28–30. 33 See, for example, the lyric agon between an old woman and a girl to grasp the attention of the beloved man, or the lover’s complaint sung at his mistress’s door (called paraklausithyron) in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazousai (vv. 893–923 and 952–75). 34 G. M. Sifakis, Studies in the History of Hellenistic Drama, London, Athlone Press, 1967. 35 A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, rev. J. Gould and D. M. Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1968; I. E. Stefanis, ιονυσιακοì Τεχνı˜ται. υμβολὲς στὴν ρωσοπογραφία τοῦ εάτρου καì τῆϛ Mουσικῆϛ τῶν Ἀρχαίων Ἑλλήνων, Heraklion, University Publications of Crete, 1988; B. Le Guen, Les Associations de technites dionysiaques à l’époque hellénistique, Paris, de Boccard, 2001.
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entities (each with its own administrative system, its own decrees and magistrates elected in public assemblies) and became incredibly powerful in late Greek antiquity, even sending their own ambassadors to every part of the Greek world. Such organisations, knowledge of which is based overwhelmingly on epigraphic evidence, spawned specialised performers as well as production teams to individuals, cities or the various organising bodies and festivals widespread in every corner of the Greek world. In fact they offered not only musicians, poets and actors, but also costume makers (imatiomisthai) and trainers (didaskaloi) for any theatrical exhibition of the period. On some occasions they could even act as co-organiser, one example being the Mouseia at Thespiai, or the Dionysia at Thebes.36 The ‘stars’ of these guilds were the tragōidoi and kōmōidoi, travelling professional singers who could enjoy huge earnings and fame, honoured by statues and civic rights in the cities where they performed. Often their performances resembled concerts or recitals rather than theatrical productions, since (as far as we know) they seem to have included excerpts from famous dramas of the past instead of the performance of the complete ancient texts.37 In these performances (called epideixeis or akroaseis) not only the order of the original excerpts was rearranged but, in some cases, their delivery was also changed: passages originally conceived for spoken delivery, for instance, even messenger speeches, complains Lucian in On the dance, 27, were set to music in the new performance and sung to the instrumental accompaniment of the aulos or the kithara. On the other hand, sections that were originally choral could be transformed in astrophic exhibitions (that is, avoiding the structure of repetitions typical of choral music) and hence transferred to soloists. Our knowledge of these musical practices relies mostly on relatively recent papyrological discoveries (spanning from the third century BC to the third century AD), which show a variegated panorama of theatrical exhibitions in the Hellenistic and Roman times. Such evidence closely reflects a ‘performative’ rather than a ‘literary’ tradition: traces of the performative use of these documents are the presence of musical notation (probably not included in the texts of the great Alexandrian editors),38 stage directions (including references
36 S. Aneziri (‘The organisation of music contests in the Hellenistic period and artists’ participation: an attempt at classification’, in P. Wilson (ed.), The Greek Theatre and Festivals, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 71) argues that the competitions at the Mouseia and the Dionysia were conducted jointly by both the cities and the artists of the Isthmian and Nemean Koinon. 37 B. Gentili, Lo spettacolo nel mondo classico (teatro ellenistico e teatro romano arcaico), Rome, Laterza, 1977. 38 For a different hypothesis see T. Fleming, ‘The survival of Greek dramatic music from the fifth century to the Roman period’, in B. Gentili and F. Perusino (eds.), La colometria antica dei testi poetici greci, Pisa, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1999, pp. 17–29; and T. Fleming and E. C. Kopff, ‘Colometry of Greek lyric verses in tragic texts’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica, 3/10 (1992), 758–70 (fully discussed in L. Prauscello, Singing Alexandria: Music between Practice and Textual Transmission, Mnemosyne Supplements, 274, Leiden, Brill, 2006).
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to sounds or noises) and actors’ sigla (for tragedy and comedy, the letters A, B and having numeric value and indicating the actors according to the hierarchy within the company: protagonist, deuteragonist and tritagonist).39 Among these documents, the tragic musical anthologies appear as particularly popular: sometimes the dramatic texts are selected according to the content, as in P.Oslo inv. 1413 (tragic passages on Pyrrhus and Neoptolemus) and in P.Oxy. 44. 3161 (lamentations of mythical mothers); at other times they are selected according to author, the most popular of whom was Euripides. A passage in Aristotle’s Poetics (1450a), in which the author complains that stringing together a set of speeches (rheseis) expressive of a character will not produce the essential tragic effect so well as a play which has a plot, seems to confirm that in the fourth century BC tragic anthologies were widely promulgated. Indeed, in one of the most ancient surviving musical papyri we have (Leiden papyrus inv. 510), dated around the third century BC, we find an anthological selection of two lyrical excerpts from an Euripidean drama of the late fifth century, the Iphigenia in Aulis.40 The two excerpts are rearranged in their order: the first is part of an amoebean song between Iphigenia and the chorus, coming from the last part of the tragedy (vv. 1500–9),41 and the second is an originally choral section coming from its second stasimon (vv. 784–94). In both cases the original performance is readapted to the conditions of the new musical production: a lyric duet between soloists (or between actor and secondary chorus) for the first excerpt, and a solo performance for the second fragment (even if the hypothesis of a solo performance also for the first passage cannot be completely ruled out).42 One can only speculate on the authenticity of the Euripidean music, since it is more than possible that the original text was set to new music by contemporary musicians. According to these documents, another theatrical genre which was also quite popular at that time is the mime, a term used by modern scholars to cover a very wide range of performances. In its more common meaning, the mime is a narrative entertainment – probably originating in Magna Graecia – which was performed by actors who, without masks, usually portrayed lower-class characters from daily and ordinary life. They would speak in dialogue but also sing 39 As well as an extensive use of the writing material, i.e. the papyrus, on both sides, see T. Gammacurta, Papyrologica scaenica, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2006. 40 E. Pöhlmann and M. L. West (eds.), Documents of Ancient Greek Music: The Extant Melodies and Fragments, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 18–21. 41 As Prauscello (Singing Alexandria, p. 179) opportunely points out of the long astrophic section in Iphigenia in Aulis (vv. 1475–1531), the papyrus has selected just those parts which represent not only the most pathetic point of the whole section, but also the only one in which there is a lyric exchange between the chorus and the protagonist. 42 See Prauscello, Singing Alexandria, p. 178.
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and dance, and papyri suggest that their text was considered more open to rewriting and additions than any other theatrical genre. Musical accompaniment is not usually recorded on these papyri, but is roughly indicated by special signs which simply indicate percussion beats (like krous- for krousis, i.e. ‘beat’) or the presence of a wind instrument on stage (symbolised by a simple horizontal stroke; – ); for some examples see P.Oxy. III. 413, which refers the best-known mime-text of antiquity, the so-called ‘Charition-mime’ (a story reminiscent of the Euripidean Iphigeneia in Tauris).43 Some poets (such as Sophron in the fifth or Herondas in the third century BC) gave this genre a literary form; but the mime seems to have been particularly widespread as a ‘popular’ performance, both in the Graeco-Roman Aegypt and in Rome, where it gradually took over the Atellan farce (an Italic form of improvised drama) as a tailpiece or finale (exodium) after tragic performances (see next section). One of the most important cultural phenomena of late Greek antiquity, however, was the development and the rise of pantomime, which would become the most popular and disseminated theatrical performance of the Roman Imperial period (according to the sources, it was ‘officially’ invented in 22 BC, when Pylades of Cilicia and Bathyllus of Alexandria introduced it in Rome, see next section). This musical performance offered the public something similar to modern ballet interpretation of serious drama: a single actor/dancer (called orchēstēs), wearing a graceful silk costume and a closedmouth mask, mimed a story playing ‘all’ (pantos) the parts himself, supported by a chorus of singers and a small orchestra. The musical accompaniment included wind instruments (basically aulos and panpipes, a set of reed tubes bound together with wax) as well as percussion, such as kymbala (small brass cymbals), sistra (Egyptian musical instruments consisting of a handle and a U-shaped metal frame) and the kroupezion (from krouō, ‘to strike’), a sandal with an iron sole, used to mark time for the dance. The pantomime’s origin can be traced back to the mimetic dance of tragic actors, since the pantomimic and tragic mythical themes were basically the same (although historical dramas also played their part in such repertoire): an epigraphy describes the pantomime dancer as an ‘actor of tragic rhythmical movement’.44 For a parody of tragic dancing in comedy see the finale of Aristophanes’ Wasps (vv. 1474–515), where the main character, Philocleon, challenges the younger tragedians to a competition in which, he says, he will 43 M. Andreassi, Mimi greci in Egitto: «Charition» e «Moicheutria», Bari, Palomar, 2001; Gammacurta, Papyrologica, pp. 7–32. 44 Delphi III 1. 551, on which see M. Robert, ‘Pantomimen im Griechischen Orient’, Hermes, 65 (1930), 106–22.
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dance the old dances of Thespis, the traditional founder of Athenian tragedy. It has been argued that here the dance figures were probably mimed, so that the characters on stage simply struck certain postures, showing these stylised movements more or less in isolation from each other.45 But the pantomimic performances certainly had precedents in other contexts: in Xenophon’s Symposium (a dialogue written around 360 BC as if it were a record of actual after-dinner conversation), we find a description of the exhibition of an aulos player, a girl acrobat and a boy playing the kithara and dancing at the same time, all provided by a Syracusan impresario contracted by the host: among their performances, a suggestive tableau of the mythical love of Dionysus and Ariadne, accompanied by music, is included (9.2–7). Furthermore, scholars have identified as a kind of pantomime the competitive performance of Aristagoras dancing the role of a Gallus in an Alexandrian epigram of the mid-third century BC.46 Besides these increased typologies of theatrical performances set up by the Hellenistic entertainment industry (which put music in the hands of experts and virtuosi), the ‘high’ literary production of that time was greatly influenced by the gradual introduction of ‘book culture’. In fact, most poetry of the Alexandrian period was not written for musical performance, but for recitation – at the court of a patron or at public poetry festivals – or for private reading. The conventional use of ancient lyric verses (i.e. verses originally sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument) in repeated stichic patterns (i.e. verses of the same pattern, such as Homer’s hexameters or the trimeters of tragedy, repeated in every line of the text) provides evidence of a very sophisticated poetry, a prerogative of the learned and refined culture developed within the circle of erudite poets of the Alexandria Museum, very well acquainted with the models of the past (see above). In such a culture, these poets had a much more circumscribed role, as their business was only writing words, not music.47 Traces of contemporary performative occasions, however, can be found in this poetry, which often placed living performance tradition within a literary
45 L. E. Rossi, ‘Mimica e danza sulla scena comica greca (a proposito del finale delle Vespe e di altri passi aristofanei)’, Rivista di cultura classica e medievale, 20 (1978), 1149–70; W. T. MacCary, ‘Philokleon ithyphallos: Dance, costume and character in the Wasps’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 109 (1979), 137–47. 46 O. Weinreich, Epigrammstudien, I: Epigramm und Pantomimus nebst einem Kapitel über einige nichtepigrammatische Texte und Denkmäler zur Geschichte des Pantomimus, Heidelberg, Winter, 1948; E. J. Jory, ‘The masks on the propylon of the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias’, in Easterling and Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors, pp. 238–53. 47 R. Hunter, Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 1–13.
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frame. A good example of such a practice may be found in the Idylls of the poet Theocritus (third century BC), the creator of pastoral poetry, describing a great variety of musical situations, including private and public contexts, and portraying many traditional musical genres, still easily recognisable despite being divorced from their original musical performance.48 First of all we find the bucolic agon (boukoliasmos), a literary genre based on the extemporised performance of two opponents, who alternately improvised couplets or ‘stanzas’. Each theme, introduced by one of them, was closely capped or varied by the other; the music, a significant element of the original competitions (probably based on the repetition of stereotyped melodic motifs used as an aid to improvisation during the performance), is missing. The best Theocritean example of boukoliasmos is the contest between the goatherd Comatas and the shepherd Lacon in Idyll 5 (‘The Goatherd and the Shepherd’). This idyll is written in recitative verses (that is, dactylic hexameters), but the musical symbolism, as well as the numerous references to the instrument typical of the pastoral world (i.e. the syrinx or panpipes), constantly reminds the reader of the original performance of such a genre, reinforcing the illusion of realism (a dominant aesthetic concept in the early Hellenistic age) pursued by Theocritus. Other genres recurrent in such poetry were, for instance, the love songs, such as the celebrated one performed by the Cyclops Polyphemus for the nymph Galatea in Idyll 11 (‘The Cyclops’), or by the labourer Boukaios of Idyll 10 (‘The Reapers’). Such a genre could also take the form of a serenade or paraklausithyron (literally, ‘lover’s complaint sung at his mistress’s door’), as in Idyll 3 (‘The Serenade’). We also find examples of work songs, such as the reaper’s song named Lityersēs (see above) displayed in Idyll 10.41ff.; mourning laments, such as the dirge of Thyrsis on the death of Daphnis, the mythical Sicilian shepherd who, according to some sources, invented pastoral poetry (see Idyll 1, titled ‘Thyrsis’), or the lamentation for Adonis (ialemos) performed by a female singer during the Alexandrian Adonia Festival in Idyll 15 (‘Women at the Adonia’); and, finally, what we would more generally label ‘folk music’, such as two evidently famous little songs quoted in Idyll 4 (‘The Herdsmen’) and 14 (‘The Love of Cynisca’), one in honour of the city of Croton, the other one belonging to the Thessalian tradition. These erudite compositions display quite a complex combination of ‘illusive realism and allusive erudition’ (to employ a recent scholarly definition),49 assuming the form of typical ‘high’
48 R. Pretagostini, ‘Tracce di poesia orale nei carmi di Teocrito’, Aevum Antiquum, 5 (1992), 67–78. 49 W. G. Arnott, ‘The preoccupations of Theocritus: structure, illusive realism, allusive learning’, in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit and G. C. Walker (eds.), Theocritus, Hellenistica Groningana, Proceedings of the Groningen Workshops on Hellenistic Poetry, Groningen, Egbert Forsten, 1996, pp. 57–70.
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literary products of the new Hellenistic world, on which, nevertheless, musical performance certainly left some traces.
The Roman age In ancient Rome, the interaction among different arts assumed more spectacular features than in Greece. Roman musical performances, especially those of the Imperial period (27 BC–AD 476), were remarkable shows in which the combination of dance, words and music aimed to ‘amuse’ audiences (often with a conspicuous propagandistic agenda) in spite of the transmission of ethical and religious values. The Greek practice, typical of the late Classical and Hellenistic period, of turning musical performances into a show was developed in Roman spectacles, commemorating the victory of a general (e.g. the pompa triumphalis, a religious and civic parade, accompanied by trumpeters, for the entry of the vir triumphalis into the city) or a funeral (e.g. the pompa funebris, in honour of a person of high rank, usually accompanied by several musical instruments), not to mention the various theatrical representations frequent at that time. Roman musical performances were naturally influenced by neighbouring civilisations, most notably by the Greeks (especially after the conquest of one of their major colonies in Italy, i.e. Tarentum, in the third century BC) and the Etruscans, whose influence on the development of the privileged context for such performances, the ludi (see below), is clearly stated by ancient sources.50 Nevertheless, the scarcity of information about the musical and theatrical activity in Etruria and in Greek-speaking cities of southern Italy makes it impossible to measure exactly their impact on Roman spectacles.51 The ludi (literally, ‘games’) were religious festivities in honour of a god, a deceased personage or a commemorative historical event (for instance, triumphs in war) – to which in the Imperial age were added celebrations in honour of the emperors – organised not only in Rome, but in all the Roman world. In these contexts public entertainment of different types could take place, such as chariot races, gladiatorial combats, the hunting of exotic wild animals (venationes) and naval battles (naumachiae). Despite their religious character, these occasions soon became the best means by which the political government (especially the Imperial power) could consolidate its control on the masses and manipulate public opinion: hence their essentially secular
50 Tertullian On the Spectacles 5; Isidore of Seville Etymologiae 18; Livy Ab urbe condita, 7.2.4–7. 51 D. Briquel, ‘Ludi/Lydi: jeux romains et origines étrusques’, Ktema, 11 (1986), 161–7.
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character and their development as a large-scale entertainment industry, in which music always played a great part (though it was never performed as an independent art).52 The most ancient festivities in Rome were the ludi Romani held annually since 366 BC in honour of Jupiter, said to have been already established by Tarquinius Priscus as far back as the fifth century on the occasion of his conquest of the Latin city of Apiolae (Livy, Ab urbe condita, 1.35.9). The games consisted of an opening solemn procession, the pompa circensis (where dancers and musicians paraded), and a horse and chariot race in the circus (ludi circenses). Such a site was a large open-air venue in the shape of a rectangle, with a strip (called spina, decorated by sculptures and columns) running most of the length down to the middle of the space, creating a roughly rectangular-oval circuit for the races. In 264 BC gladiatorial games were added (ludi gladiatorii, from gladius, i.e. ‘sword’), initially taking place in the forum, and later in amphitheatres, round or oval in shape, whose large central performance arena was surrounded by tiered seating.53 During the fights, musicians (often displayed on contemporary mosaics, like those from the seaside villa at Dar Buc Ammera, near Zliten, in Libya) played accompaniments, altering their tempo to match that of the combat. Typical instruments for such performances were long straight trumpets (tubae), large curved horns (cornua) and the water organ (hydraulis), invented in the third century BC in Alexandria but widely employed in theatres, amphitheatres and circuses only by the mid-first century AD.54 The musicians were sometimes dressed as animals, with names such as ‘tibia-playing bear’ (ursus tibicen) and ‘horn-blowing chicken’ (pullus cornicen), as some Pompeian mosaics attest. Musical and theatrical performances (ludi scaenici) were probably included among the Roman games as early as 364 BC, when historical sources (Livy, Ab urbe condita, 7.2.4–7) attest that some imported Etrurian performers (ludiones) danced without song (sine carmine ullo), that is, to nothing but the sound of a reed-pipe called tibia, the most significant of the Roman instruments, similar to the Greek aulos. The promotion of such an event is described by Livy as an attempt to cure a pestilence that had not responded to ordinary remedies (that is, an attempt to restore the pax deorum, as a religious act). Later on, according to the same source, these dances were imitated by Roman youth,
52 For a general overview of this topic see N. Savarese (ed.), Teatri romani: gli spettacoli nell’antica Roma, Bologna, Il mulino, 1996. 53 The amphitheatres, like the theatres, were originally made of wood: the first permanent building in Rome dates from around 30 BC. 54 Vitruvius, On Architecture, 10.8; Athenaeus, Banquet of the Learned, 174a–185a.
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who added an improvised dialogue similar to the Fescennine verses (an interchange of extemporaneous raillery, originally sung in villages at harvesthome), giving place to a more developed, yet still plotless, dramatic and musical performance called satura (literally, ‘mixture’, ‘medley’), the nature of which little is known. It was only in 240 BC, however, that the first ‘drama’ based on Greek models (i.e. a fabula with a plot and artistically constructed incidents) was staged by Livius Andronicus, a Greek playwright, on the occasion of an official visit in Rome by Hieron II, tyrant of Syracuse. From such a date, more serious and artistic forms of drama (i.e. tragedies and comedies) were staged during the ludi scaenici, replacing traditional ‘local’ performances such as the Atellan farce; this latter, an improvised short play of Oscan origin (from Atella, an Oscan town in Campania), relied on stock situations and stock characters in masks, such as Maccus (the foolish character), Pappus (the stingy old man) or Bucco (the fat and boastful character), imported into Rome since the early fourth century BC. Atellan farces were performed at the public games after tragedies, as a tailpiece or finale (exodium, literally, ‘after-piece’). Roman tragedies and comedies of the Republican age relied extensively on Greek typologies, although Roman dramas seem to have explored and expanded the musical potential of their Greek models. Accordingly, four different types of drama were developed. The fabula palliata (from pallium, the Greek cloak) and the fabula togata (from toga, the Roman dress) were respectively comedies in Greek or in Roman dress. The so-called cothurnata (from cothurnus, i.e. ‘buskin’, a boot which Athenian tragic actors wore on stage) and the praetexta (which refers to the white toga of Roman senators) were the tragedies specifically in Greek and in Roman costume, the former based on the same mythological characters of their Greek prototypes, the latter dealing with upper-class citizens, famous historical figures, or mythological characters from the distinctively Roman culture. At that time all the plays were performed on temporary wooden stages, since permanent theatres were not erected in Rome until 55 BC. Furthermore, other attractions competed with drama for audience attention at public games: we know, for instance, that the first two productions of the comedy, Terence’s Mother in Law (Hecyra), were failures because the public left, first to see a rope dancer and later to watch gladiators. The typology of drama most familiar to us is the palliata, since the only surviving Roman comedies, written by Plautus and Terence (third to second centuries BC), belong to this genre. These plays were basically Latin translations or adaptations of Greek ‘New Comedy’, where actors wore Greek chitons and pallium and acted in Greek locations, although some contemporary elements
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were occasionally inserted. Quite often the dramatists mixed elements of two or more sources employing the so-called method of contaminatio (literally, ‘contamination’). The most important innovation in these new dramas, however, was the remarkable increase in musical performance: the frequent transformation of originally spoken sections in cantica (i.e. ‘songs’), performed by soloists taking the place of the chorus, completely disappeared in the context of Roman comedy. In the palliata the cantica were numerous (see the expression numera innumera, literally ‘countless metres’, to indicate the metrical variety of Plautinian verses)55 and spaced out by spoken sections called diverbia, all acted by male actors (usually slaves or freemen)56 continuously, without any interludes between scenes – the convention to divide these plays into acts was established in the Renaissance editions of Plautus. These musical sections, which could be solo arias or duets, were accompanied by different varieties of tibia and composed by a musician (not the playwright himself) who was part of the professional theatrical companies, called greges or catervae, which provided all the means for the theatrical set.57 The leader of the troupe (dominus gregis) was asked to produce the plays by the magistrates responsible for organising such public games (the curule aediles), bought the script directly from the author and arranged for music, props and costumes. According to valuable evidence from the production records of Terence’s comedies, for instance, we know that one Flaccus Claudi (i.e. slave or ex-slave of Claudius, one of Terence’s patrons) was the composer, as well as the player, of the music of his dramas. Even if we are little informed about Republican Roman tragedy, the titles and the extant fragments of early Latin cothurnatae suggest a strong interest in musical virtuosity in tragic contexts. Some of the titles of Livius Andronichus (Andromeda), Ennius (Andromacha, Hecuba, Iphigenia) and Accius (Alcestis, Hecuba and Bacchae), to quote some of the most important dramatists between the third and first centuries BC, imply a Roman attraction to Euripidean plays with remarkable solo singing. Again, the practice of adapting Greek tragedy for the Roman stage passed on the conversion of spoken passages to lyrical performance: see the example of Ennius’ Medea, where the main character sings some of
55 C. Questa, Numeri innumeri. Ricerche sui cantica e la tradizione manoscritta di Plauto, Rome, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985. 56 In Rome the actors who performed in dramas were rigorously excluded from membership in the res publica. 57 E. J. Jory, ‘Association of actors in Rome’, Hermes, 98 (1970), 224–53; P. G. Brown, ‘Actors and actormanagers at Rome in the time of Plautus and Terence’, in Easterling and Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors, pp. 225–37.
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the scene with her children (fr. 282 Vahlen), spoken as iambic trimeters in the Euripidean original drama. The likelihood of a musical performance in Imperial Latin tragedy, however, is more controversial. Despite the preservation of Seneca’s plays, which strongly influenced tragic drama in the Renaissance, modern scholars believe that his tragedies were written for recitation only or, if staged, were performed in private productions.58 Strong evidence in favour of such a hypothesis is the modification of the Roman theatre design: the space of the orchēstra, originally devoted to choral dancing, was reduced, becoming semicircular, and normally occupied by the senators; from this has been inferred the disappearance of the tragic chorus (still present, however, in Senecan tragedies). In the Imperial period, there was a great increase in musical performance opportunities, occasioned by the theatrical explosion under the Roman Empire (as attests the construction, from the late first century BC, of numerous permanent theatres in all areas of the Empire). Traditional tragedies and comedies, however, were flanked or supplanted by more popular forms of theatrical entertainment: a mythical narrative could be danced to choral music as a pantomime (tragoedia saltata), sung by a tragic singer (tragoedia cantata), or chanted to the professional stringed instrument imported from Greece, that is, the cithara (citharoedia).59 The Emperor Nero (called citharoedus by Tacitus)60 is said to have experimented with all these possibilities, acting and singing tragic roles in private and public theatres, in both Greece and Rome. Even if, as we have already seen earlier, a form of mimetic dance existed in the Greek world from at least the middle of the third century BC, the pantomime or tragoedia saltata was officially introduced in Rome in 22 BC, thanks to Pylades of Cilicia, who is accredited with having inserted chorus and orchestra in dance performance, and Bathyllus of Alexandria. Evidence suggests that it gained an overwhelming popularity in Augustan Rome among all classes of society until the sixth century AD. Pantomimes took place on the public stage as well as privately, and they were appreciated especially for the virtuosic ability of their main performer, the saltator or planipes, that is, ‘who wore no shoes’ in order to have greater freedom of movement. Sometimes a second dancer was added along with a herald whose function was to
58 For the hypothesis that actual performance had taken place in Seneca’s lifetime, see G. W. M. Harrison, Seneca in Performance, London, Duckworth, 2000. 59 H. A. Kelly, ‘Tragedy and the performance of tragedy in late Roman antiquity’, Traditio, 35 (1979), 21–44; E. Hall ‘The singing actors of antiquity’, in Easterling and Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors, pp. 3–38. 60 Annales, 14.15 and 16.4.
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broadcast the actions beforehand. The authors of the librettos, however, remained anonymous.61 In 173 BC, mimes (whose actors included both men and women)62 were admitted to the official programme of the Floralia, as a tailpiece following tragic performances at the annual festival celebrated in honour of the goddess Flora. They soon became the main theatrical entertainment of such festivity. This is evidence of the beginning of a process of formalisation of such a genre, whose performance had usually been occasional and largely improvisational, with a plot outline devised by the archimimus (the master or first player), who assigned dialogue sequences to the other players. Only titles survive from such literary mime: some were named after professions (for instance: The Augur, The Patchwork Tailor, The Fisherman) and others after festivities or social occasions (Saturnalia, The Wedding): hence the assumption that their topics could cover the whole spectrum of domestic situations; the adultery theme was one of the most common.63 The mimers spoke in dialogue, sang, danced and capered, conveying action through musical performance as well as physical gesture. The exhibitions of naked mimae and saltatrices (nudatio mimarum) were particularly appreciated by the Roman audience. The prominence of music in theatrical representations, however, did not overshadow its usage in other contexts, since music accompanied all the spectacular entertainment of the Roman public games, offering the players broader possibilities of employment. Besides these institutionalised occasions, moreover, there were several other performing artists (not only singers and musicians, but also acrobats and tightrope walkers) called circulatores (from circulor, ‘to form groups/circles round oneself’, because of the arrangement of their public), who made their displays in less formal circumstances as modern street artists. In one of his elegies, the Latin poet Propertius (late first century BC) describes one such typical performance: ‘an Egyptian piped, and Phyllis rattled her castanets with artless grace as we pelted her with roses, and a dwarf, the famous Magnus, was there to dance for us, bobbing his stubby arms to the hollow pipe’ (Elegies, 4.8.39–42). Since the second century AD, with the diffusion of Christian religion in the Roman Empire, the Christian Church consistently condemned all the spectacular performances of the Roman world. In Tertullian’s On the games (second century AD), it is explicitly stated that Christians should not take part as
61 M. E. Molloy, Libanius and the Dancers, Hildesheim and Zurich, Olms-Weidmann, 1996, especially pp. 40–79. 62 For female performers in antiquity (especially mimae) see R. Webb, ‘Female entertainers in late antiquity’, in Easterling and Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors, pp. 282–303. 63 R. E. Fantham, ‘Mime. The missing link in Roman literary history’, Classical World, 82 (1988–9), 153–63.
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spectators at such entertainment. In later centuries, in the eastern Byzantine world, the ban on images brought about by Iconoclasm would have implied even a double ban on musical theatre, transforming the ancient art of drama into amoral fiction and sacrilege.64 But even in the fourth century AD, though disapproving theatrical and musical performances because of their lack of moral ends, Saint Augustine admitted the emotional mass-reactions created by them in the audience (Confessions, 3. 2), stressing the fundamental and lasting importance of such performances in ancient Greek and Roman societies.
64 W. Puchner, ‘Acting in the Byzantine theatre: evidence and problems’, in Easterling and Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors, pp. 304–24.
. 8 .
Performance before c. 1430: an overview JOHN HAINES
The first problem confronting anyone interested in medieval music performance is the sheer size of the Middle Ages. By far the longest period of Western European music history, it spans the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. It is difficult to generalise about a millennium of music-making. Major differences exist, for example, between a lament from Carolingian Gaul and a lute composition from fifteenth-century Italy.1 These two pieces differ dramatically in almost every respect, including their temporal, geographical, linguistic and social contexts. Another problem is the remoteness of the Middle Ages. From the Baroque period, for example, we have a wealth of performance treatises, printed music, musical instruments, and in some cases, letters and musical sketches from the hands of composers themselves. Very little to none of this sort of documentation survives for the medieval millennium. This is due not only to the fact that the majority of music was transmitted orally rather than through writing, but also because most of the music written down in the Middle Ages – on perishable surfaces such as wax tablets or parchment pieces – has not survived.2 To make matters worse, medieval music writers, trained as they were in the speculative tradition of Boethius, generally refrain from detailed performance descriptions or prescriptions. Nevertheless, some knowledge survives on medieval music performance, and research continues to improve current understanding of the many kinds of music made in the Middle Ages, on which the present chapter proposes a thumbnail sketch. The picture frequently evoked of medieval music performance is that of ‘centuries of monkish dullness’, as Henry Fielding once put it.3 Most histories of medieval music give priority to sacred Latin monophonic song, followed by polyphony and vernacular song, respectively.4 The resulting medieval musical 1 On lute composition see T. McGee, ‘Instruments and the Faenza Codex’, Early Music, 14 (1986), 480–90. 2 R. Rosenfeld, ‘Technologies for musical drafts, twelfth century and later’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 11 (2002), 45–63. 3 H. Fielding, Tom Jones, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 67. 4 See, for example, J. Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1989, and D. Wilson, Music of the Middle Ages: Style and Structure, New York, Schirmer, 1990.
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Latin chant
Polyphony
Vernacular song
Instrumental music
Fig. 8.1. Conventional view of medieval music repertoires panorama is one where Latin chant dominates, with vernacular song and polyphony a distant second, and instrumental music a barely audible afterthought (Fig. 8.1). Now, instrumental music plays such a small part in modern histories largely on account of the paucity of surviving notated pieces.5 At the other extreme, Latin chant owes its fame to the political dominance of the Church in the Middle Ages; Latin manuscripts for liturgical use abounded and many have survived. The dominance of Latin chant extends to much of the earliest extant polyphony, based on chant fragments and explicitly composed for the Divine Service. Music histories typically fixate on notated polyphony partly because it prefigures masterworks by such well-known composers as Palestrina and Brahms, a representative case being Guillaume de Machaut’s ballade 34 discussed in Chapter 11.6 The most serious consequence of these prejudices is that many histories omit discussing substantial musical repertoires transmitted exclusively by oral means.
5 Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe, pp. 432–57; Wilson, Music of the Middle Ages, pp. 379–382 (entitled ‘An instrumental postscript’). 6 See, for example, J. Haines, ‘Friedrich Ludwig’s “Musicology of the Future”: a commentary and translation’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 12 (2003), 160.
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If a division of medieval music into ‘the big three’ (chant, polyphony and vernacular song) does not do it justice, the problem is more one of perspective than anything else. Focusing on these written-out and often sophisticated works leaves out music of a more plain nature. In particular, a great deal of medieval song lies somewhere between singing a canticum and reading a prosa, as Boethius put it.7 Much of this music occurs in the unspectacular, quotidian contexts described below and to a certain extent in the next chapter by Jeremy Summerly. In order to survey the totality of music-making in the Middle Ages, it is imperative to include this modest variety often performed by members of the lower, illiterate class. Thus, from the sophisticated Parisian organum quadruplum down to the humble Anglo-Saxon lullaby, all musical performances have their role in medieval society.8 An alternative history of medieval music performance might well take its cue from Johannes de Grocheio who around 1300 categorised three main types of music according to their place and function in society: lay, learned and ecclesiastic.9 The related strategy proposed in this chapter, and one having the distinct advantage of including music omitted by both Grocheio and most modern music historians, is to divide musical performances into the two main functions they served in medieval life: work and edification (Fig. 8.2). As seen in Fig. 8.2, music for work makes up the majority of musical sound made in a medieval day. Under this category falls music for nurturing such as lullabies, official music such as ceremonial instrumental pieces and other miscellaneous functional songs such as those performed in battle. The second category of edification includes entertainment in the modern sense. Under this category falls music for worship (including rituals frowned upon by the Church), music for small gatherings such as banquets and music for large public festivities sometimes linked to the liturgy but usually distinct from it, such as the ring dances (choreae or caroles). The latter two categories receive a little less space in Fig. 8.2, since such events occur less frequently than worship events. Taken together, these six sub-categories account for most medieval music-making. Having considered all of medieval music performance rather than the music restricted to such exclusive environments as courts and monasteries, it is clear that we must rethink the three conventional repertoires of chant, polyphony and vernacular song (Fig. 8.3; cf. Fig. 8.2). Indeed, the great majority of medieval music is either monophonic or heterophonic, and most songs are in the vernacular rather than Latin. As Fig. 8.3 shows, learned polyphonic 7 Boethius, cited in J. Haines, ‘Lambertus’s Epiglotus’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 16 (2006), 142. 8 For an original discussion of music’s function in medieval society see A. Hughes, Style and Symbol: Medieval Music, 800–1453, Ottawa, Institute of Medieval Music, 1989, pp. 133–74. 9 C. Page, Discarding Images, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 73–4.
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Nurturing (W)
Official (W)
Miscellaneous (W)
Festivities (E)
Worship (E)
Gatherings (E)
Fig. 8.2. Revised view of medieval music repertoires (W = music for work, E = music for edification)
Latin chant
Polyphony
Vernacular song
Instrumental music
Fig. 8.3. Standard medieval repertoires revised
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repertoires, such as those associated with the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris or the papal courts in Avignon, belong to a limited practice in global terms. We can also see that chant in the learned language of Latin is overshadowed by a host of more humble vernacular songs never committed to parchment. Even in the realm of worship, Latin chants are but one of a larger body of ritualistic songs, many in medieval vernacular languages rather than Latin. The marginalised categories of instrumental music and vernacular song (Fig. 8.1) make up the majority of music performed in any given medieval day (Fig. 8.3). The evidence for instrumental playing in the Middle Ages is impressive and attests to an elaborate musical tapestry, as Stefano Mengozzi details in Chapter 10. All of this music, not just the learned written-out pieces favoured by modern historiography, belongs to medieval musical performance.
Music for work The concept of work (Latin labor) was central to medieval thought and life. Though labor included all kinds of work, it originally meant agricultural work, whose rhythms shaped medieval time. Most work songs were sung by commoners and in vernacular languages rather than Latin. It is fitting that the laboratores or workers were also known as rustici, for rusticitas referred to the vernacular tongue.10 The evidence for medieval work music that we shall now survey contradicts the frequently floated image of a Middle Ages dominated by learned Latin song, the unfortunate fruit of ecclesiastic prejudices in both manuscript transmission and modern historiography mentioned above. In my first category of work songs, the activity of nurturing covers the wide span of human life, from birth to death.11 One of the earliest nurturing musical events is the neglected medieval lullaby. Thanks to its ubiquity and long-lasting musical influence, the lullaby, it must be said, is a major medieval musical genre, albeit one seldom mentioned. At the end of the fourth century, so a little before our period, John Chrysostom provides an exceptional witness. Illustrating how humans delight in song, John gives as his first example nursing infants put to sleep by singing nurses who cause their eyelids to close by ‘carrying them in their arms, walking to and fro and singing certain childish
10 J. Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en occident, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, trans. A. Goldhammer as Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 49 and 55–6; C. du Fresne du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis, Paris, Libraire des sciences et des arts, 1938, vol. 7, 244, ‘Rustice’. 11 A helpful survey of work songs, although with no attention to medieval evidence, is K. Bücher’s Arbeit und Rhythmus, 3rd edn, Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1902.
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songs to them’.12 At the core of this remark lies the mother’s rocking rhythm whence originates the lullaby. As Karl Bücher has pointed out, bodily motion governs much work song.13 We find a rare medieval passage on lullaby music in Albert the Great’s thirteenth-century edition of Aristotle’s work on animals (De animalibus). Albert advises that while women breastfeed a child, ‘the infant should be moved to the sound of music since infants in cradles are accustomed to be rocked to the lullabies of women’. ‘The motion of the cradles’, Albert goes on to say, ‘should be smooth and the singing gentle, because music causes the infant to receive nourishment with joy and smoothness of spirit.’14 Failing any medieval notated specimens, we can turn to contemporary lullabies for an idea of what this music sounded like. Lullabies are generally intensely intimate songs performed by women for infants and children, with effects like portamento and descending lines; the words are in the mother tongue and frequently include nonsense syllables.15 In his Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius likens the sweetness of rhetoric to ‘the vernacular music of our hearth, sometimes in light and at other times in heavier modes’.16 Boethius’ sixth-century ‘hearth songs’, lullabies or otherwise, were in the vernacular, as he states – likely Vulgar Latin, the precursor to Romance languages. Moving to nurturing music in the mainstream of human life, we must consider the healing rituals that played so great a role in the Middle Ages. It is here that we encounter the individual known as the enchanter (incantator) whom we shall meet again in connection with religious rituals. The enchanter, as Isidore of Seville succinctly put it, practised ‘the art of words’; these words were sung.17 Incantations for healing were by their very definition songs 12 Cited and translated in J. McKinnon, ‘The Early Christian period and the Latin Middle Ages’, in O. Strunk and L. Treitler (eds.), Source Readings in Music History, New York, Norton, 1998, p. 124; see also P. Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 15. The Greek original is given and discussed in A. Naegele, ‘Über Arbeitslieder bei Johannes Chrysostomos – Patristisch-literarisches zu K. Büchers “Arbeit und Rhythmus” ’, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse, 57 (1905), 104–5. 13 Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus, pp. 295–377. On the lullaby, see Naegele’s appendix in his ‘Über Arbeitslieder’, 131–42. 14 H. Stadler, Albertus Magnus de Animalibus libri XXVI, Münster i. W, Aschendorff, 1916, vol. 1, p. 352: ‘Praecipunt moveri infantes cum cantu musico, sicut solent infantes in cunis moveri cum naeniis cantibus mulierum. Motus tamen cunarum debet esse lentus et cantus suavis quia musica facit cum gaudio et lenitate spiritus recipere nutrimentum’, trans. in K. Kitchell and I. Resnick, Albertus Magnus On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins Press, 1999, vol. 1, p. 427. 15 J. Porter, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 15, pp. 291–2, art. ‘Lullaby’. 16 Boethius, Tractates, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand and S. J. Tester as The Theological Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 176: ‘Adsit igitur Rhetoricae suadela dulcedinis quae tum tantum recto calle procedit cum nostra instituta non deserit cumque hac musica laris nostri vernacula nunc leviores nunc graviores modos succinat.’ Tester’s translation on p. 177 differs from mine. 17 W. M. Lindsay (ed.), Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, Oxford University Press, 1988, vol. 1, 325, line 12: ‘Incantatores dicti sunt, qui artem verbis peragunt.’
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(charms, carmina), and relied on vocal effects for their efficacy.18 Churchmen frequently condemned them, which only attests to their ubiquity in medieval culture. ‘To chant over herbs for evil deeds’, wrote Martin of Braga in the sixth century, ‘and to invoke the names of demons by incantation – what is this but devil worship?’19 The specimens that survive, unfortunately without music notation, usually name the illness and invoke members of the Trinity and Christian saints.20 Incantations sounded a lot like plainchant. In his History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours relates that the citizens of Saragossa were ‘singing psalms’ that sounded to the besiegers as if ‘they were practising some kind of enchantment’.21 In fact, many incantations were pieces of plainchant; churchmen allude to such chants as the Kyrie and Lord’s Prayer being used as incantations.22 And it is possible that some incantations were polyphonic, as Thomas of Chobham in the thirteenth century mentions medical incantations for ‘several voices’.23 With the end of the human life cycle we come to the second sub-category of work music, music for official occasions or ceremonies, the best attested of these being funerals. Funeral rites were elaborate affairs, with mourning either by a soloist or choir as a central activity. We are fortunate that a few laments with musical notation have survived for several important characters, including Visigothic King Chindasvinthus (d. 652) and Charlemagne (d. 814); these are some of the oldest neumed songs in Latin.24 Ex. 8.1 gives the opening of the lament for Charlemagne taken from a tenth-century Aquitanian manuscript.25 As F.J.E. Raby has put it, the text of this lament draws both on the popular dirge genre and on the learned Latin rhetoric of Carolingian learning, a fitting
18 E. Bozoky, Charmes et prières apotropäiques, Turnhout, Brepols, 2003, pp. 34–5; D. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages, University Park, Pennsylvania University Press, 2006, p. 9. 19 C. Barlow (ed.), Martini episcopi Bracarensis, Opera omnia, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1950, p. 198, lines 12–14: ‘Incantare herbas ad maleficia et invocare nomina daemonum incantando, quid est aliud nisi cultura diabolica?’ See J. McNeill and H. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents, New York, Columbia University Press, 1938, pp. 43, 198, 229 et passim. 20 Bozoky, Charmes et prières, pp. 36–44. 21 Gregory of Tours, Histoire des Francs, trans. O. M. Dalton as The History of the Franks, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927, vol. 2, pp. 106–7; Patrologiae cursus completus . . . series latina, vol. 71, Paris, 1879, col. 263B: ‘aliquid agere maleficii’. 22 For example, McNeill and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance, pp. 43 and 294. 23 F. Broomfield (ed.), Thomae de Chobham summa confessorum, Louvain, Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968, pp. 478–9: ‘Et sicut diverse herbe simul coniuncte aliquam habent virtutem in medicina que nulam per se haberent, ita plura elementa vel plures voces habent in rebus temporalibus aliquem effectum si simul coniuncte proferantur quem non haberent singulariter prolate.’ 24 G. Reaney, ‘The Middle Ages’, in D. Stevens (ed.), A History of Song, New York, Norton, 1961, pp. 15–16; H. Anglès, ‘Hispanic culture from the 6th to the 14th century’, Musical Quarterly, 26 (1940), 510–11. 25 E. De Coussemaker, Histoire de l’harmonie au Moyen Âge, Hildesheim, Georg Olms, 1966, pp. 87–97 and plates 1–2 for a facsimile of the notation and text used in Ex. 8.1.
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Ex. 8.1. Opening of the lament for Charlemagne A solis ortu usque ad occidua littore maris planctus pulsat pectora. Ultra marina agmina tristitia tetigit ingens cum errore nimio. Heu, me dolens plango! (From the rising of the sun to its setting, a wail shakes the foundations of the sea-shore. Beyond the seas a vast army wandered with sadness and with much uncertainty. Alas, grieving I wail!)
blend for the Frankish warrior-emperor Charlemagne.26 Although the musical notes in Ex. 8.1 do not show exact pitch, they nevertheless reveal a simple syllabic melody emphasising the text with a paired-phrase structure; the form is AA0 BB0 C. Such a prestigious lament as this was in all likelihood rendered by a soloist rather than a chorus. In many cases, these singers were women. Surviving evidence attests to a persistent medieval tradition of professional ‘women lamenters hired to bewail a dead man’, as one twelfth-century writer puts it.27 Beyond the lament, other official occasions would have called for musical instruments, some of which are described in Chapter 10. We find an example of a vocal performance in Suger’s life of King Louis VI the Fat, during the triumphal entry into Rome of Emperor Henry V in February 1111. A formidable train led Henry that included singing clerics and ‘the horrible clamor of Germans singing’, Suger writes with unashamed racial prejudice.28 In my third and final category of music linked to labor comes a miscellany of songs associated with daily tasks. Late twelfth-century scholar John of Salisbury attests to the work song’s ubiquity in the Middle Ages when he mentions in passing ‘the labourer who averts or diminishes the tedium of his labours by old songs and sweet voices’.29 Yet, to my knowledge, not a single 26 F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957, vol. 1, p. 211. 27 J. Ziolkowski, ‘Women’s lament and the neuming of the Classics’, in J. Haines and R. Rosenfeld (eds.), Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, p. 145, n. 55. 28 Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. and trans. H. Waquet, Paris, Champion, 1929, p. 62: ‘Precinentium clericorum odis et Alemannorum cantancium terribili clamore cellos penetrante, celeberrima et sollempni devotione deducitur.’ 29 John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, trans. C. Nedermann, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 145.
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miscellaneous work song has come down to us in writing. Performed mainly by the lower class, medieval work songs were for the most part in various vernaculars rather than Latin. Many daily tasks would have presented opportunities for singing to relieve the monotony of work, from threshing wheat to sewing clothes. In the same passage mentioned earlier, John Chrysostom also mentions women singing songs as they weave, either one at a time or all singing together.30 His important observation speaks to the integrality of song and work, as noted by Bücher. Later genres codified in parchment anthologies such as the chanson de toile originate in this menial music for manual labour. The Old French song ‘Bele Yolanz’ given in Ex. 8.2 presents a typical literary distance from popular work songs. It opens with a description of a young woman sitting and sewing a clothing item for her beloved. The one sung about then begins to sing: ‘God, how sweet is love’s name! Never did I think I would feel its pain!’ Ex. 8.2. Opening of ‘Bele Yolanz en ses chambres seoit’ (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, f. fr. 20050, fol. 64v)
30 McKinnon, ‘Early Christian Period’, p. 124; Dronke, Medieval Lyric, p. 15; Naegele, ‘Über Arbeitslieder’, 115. The word ςυμφώνως should be understood as referring to unison singing rather than the singing in parts misconstrued by Peter Dronke (Medieval Lyric, p. 15: ‘they all harmonise a melody together’). On the early Christian ideal of unison singing and the symphonia concept, see J. Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, trans. B. Ramsey, Washington, DC, National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983, pp. 66–72. Ted Gioia, in his recent book Work Songs, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 81, cites this passage from Dronke’s book, stating in a note that ‘the quote from Chrysostom [is] drawn from his Patrologia Graeca’ [sic], evidently citing Dronke, Medieval Lyric, p. 277.
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It is difficult to decide whether this refrain or the entire song – if either – is meant to echo an actual medieval sewing song since, as Michel Zink points out, such chansons de toile are already archaic by the time we find them in thirteenthcentury compilations.31 A manlier work song is that used in hunt or battle. The polyphonic caccia of the late fourteenth century presumably originates in a lost tradition of singing while hunting.32 Although no notated specimens of war songs survive, a few medieval writers refer to music associated with battle, both liturgical and not. Liudprand of Cremona in the tenth century contrasts the battle cries of the Hungarians and Saxons. Like Suger above and in typical medieval fashion, Liudprand wears his racism on his sleeve when he writes that, in the course of the battle, ‘there was heard the holy and plaintive cry “Kyrie eleison” from the Christian’s side, and from their side the devilish and dirty “Húi, húi”’.33 It is interesting to note in passing the use of liturgical chant here in a decidedly nonliturgical context, as we have seen elsewhere. In contrast to such choral war chants, we also find evidence for solo performances. A famous anecdote comes from Wace’s Roman de Rou (1160) that tells of the minstrel Taillefer who rode before the army on a horse, ‘singing of Charlemagne, Roland, Olivier and his men who died at Roncevalles’.34 The material, if not the actual melody, of such a song is clearly related to the epic genre described below.
Music for edification In the Middle Ages ædificatio meant ‘edification’ in the broadest sense. For the churchman, ædificatio embodied a total vision of pastoral care in which he tended to both the bodies and the souls of his flock.35 Within this edificatory context the arts could provide templates for right living. Performers sang or recited the lives of the saints, for example, for the edification of those listening.36 Labor and ædificatio often went together. As Johannes de Grocheio
31 M. Zink, Les chansons de toile, Paris, Champion, 1977, pp. 2–3. 32 On which Ted Gioia makes the following curious and unsubstantiated remark: ‘The jaunty rhythms of Italian hunting songs from the Trecento, known as caccie, may have found their way into liturgical music, as seen for instance in the lilting mass settings from the Old Hall manuscript, a major source of early English polyphonic compositions’ (Work Songs, p. 32). 33 Liudprand of Cremona, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona, trans. P. Squatriti, Washington, DC, Catholic University of America Press, 2007, p. 89. 34 J. Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 58. 35 C. Burger, Ædificatio, fructus, utilitas: Johannes Gerson als Professor der Theologie und Kanzler der Universität Paris, Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr (P. Siebeck), 1986, pp. 40–55. 36 R. Schulmeister, Ædificatio und Imitatio: Studien zur internationalen Poetik der Legende und Kunstlegende, Hamburg, Lüdke, 1971, pp. 18–42 and 68–78, especially p. 34.
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somewhat practically put it, workers should listen to saints’ lives and epic songs in their leisure time in order to better bear their work.37 Generally speaking, music for edification has a greater preponderance of songs in Latin than in the vernacular. By far the largest extant medieval musical repertoire is Latin liturgical chant. It is so enormous that Johannes de Grocheio, when describing musical performance in Paris around 1300, spends over one-fourth of his treatise listing the different chants performed in the liturgy. Beginning with the invitatory and responsories of matins, Grocheio moves through the divine hours, then proceeds to the chants for mass, from the introit to the communion.38 Performance contexts for these chants varied widely from public masses in large urban cathedrals to the divine hours in small monastic communities.39 It is important to remember at this point that, in the Middle Ages as now, the Church has been mostly responsible for keeping record of its music. This bias should make us wary since it has resulted among other things in the modern tendency to view the medieval liturgy as an all-Latin event, relatively uniform across Europe. But the complete historical record suggests a different picture. The practice of musical troping appears to have been widespread, even though Grocheio, for example, only briefly mentions troped pieces (farsae).40 The first recorded tropes in the vernacular are the Old French songs performed in alternation with the epistle reading at Mass during the Feast of Saint Stephen (26 December). Evidence for this activity begins only in the twelfth century; yet liturgical singing in the vernacular likely occurred much earlier.41 And just as Latin and vernacular at times mixed during worship services, a religious spirit could infuse vernacular song, as seen in the significant corpus of Old French Marian songs committed to parchment in the thirteenth century.42 One aspect of liturgical performance often overlooked is the presence of rituals routinely condemned by church officials, which speaks to their popularity. Such rituals mixed easily with the Christian code, for the Middle Ages did not know the sharp distinction between secular and religious originating in modern times; indeed, the expression ‘liturgy’ is not a medieval one, and rarely
37 C. Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio on secular music: a corrected text and a new translation’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 22. 38 E. Rohloff, Der Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheo nach den Quellen neu herausgegeben mit Übersetzung ins Deutsche und Revisionsbericht, Leipzig, Reinecke, 1943, pp. 58–67. 39 A good survey is J. Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 16–42. 40 Rohloff, Musiktraktat, p. 67. 41 The best introduction is J. Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 249ff. 42 D. O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, University of Toronto Press, 2005.
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occurs before the nineteenth century.43 Early on, Christianity assimilated many ancient rituals as part and parcel of the Christian liturgy, beginning with Christmas and Easter, the ancient feasts of the sun’s birthday (dies natalis solis invicti) and the spring rites venerating gods like Bacchus, respectively. The tenacity of pre-Christian religious rituals throughout the Middle Ages regularly grated church officials because of the unabated enthusiasm with which people practised them. Many of these rituals, involving both singing and instrumental music, took place during the commemoration days of the different saints, so all throughout the year. The practices that particularly irked church officials, and consequently those for which evidence survives in the form of condemnations, involved either dancing or women singing – or, worse yet, both.44 Especially well attested are all-night celebrations on the graves of the more recently departed. These laetitiae or ‘joyfuls’ included instrumental music and songs performed at the banquet following the wake.45 Beyond this there existed outright demonic activities or occult practices involving incantations alluded to earlier in connection with medicine. Churchmen routinely condemn incantations’ use of liturgical chants such as the Psalms or the Lord’s prayer.46 It thus appears that these demonic incantations, like the medical ones discussed earlier, sounded somewhat like liturgical chant. So pervasive was the practice of incantations throughout the Middle Ages that it became the subject of a scholastic debate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, culminating in the important testimony of Nicole Oresme discussed in Chapter 11.47 Several churchmen connect incantations with New Year celebrations, a high point in the medieval tradition of singing and dancing at feasts discussed in the previous paragraph.48 A late-medieval attestation of the ancient Kalends feast is the infamous Feast of Fools. It was widely celebrated in France, but also elsewhere, contrary to what is sometimes assumed: around 1236 Lincoln bishop Robert Grosseteste complains bitterly about the abuses of the feast in
43 B. Haggh, ‘Foundations or institutions? On bringing the Middle Ages into the history of Medieval music’, Acta musicologica, 68 (1996), 94. 44 MacNeill and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance, pp. 41, 229, 273 et passim; R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 46–8 and 102–9. 45 MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, p. 105; Quasten, Music and Worship, pp. 149–77; MacNeill and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance, p. 319 (where Regino of Prüm attests to the songs’ joyful character) and p. 333. 46 For example, Broomfield (ed.), Thomae de Chobham, p. 477. 47 See B. Delaurenti, La puissance des mots: ‘Virtus verborum’: Débats doctrinaux sur le pouvoir des incantations au Moyen Âge, Paris, Cerf, 2007. 48 For example, Broomfield (ed.), Thomae de Chobham, p. 471, and MacNeill and Gamer, Handbooks, p. 277, n. 10, and p. 334.
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Ex. 8.3. Prose of the Ass from the Feast of Fools
his cathedral.49 Music and rites for the Feast of Fools survive for the cathedrals of Beauvais and Sens in the early thirteenth century. The ceremony opened with a donkey processing into the church to the strains of the so-called Prose of the Ass (Ex. 8.3). The text is set to a straightforward, syllabic tune befitting a processional song. As I have explained elsewhere, the Latin text resonates with pagan themes, from the opening’s Oriental reference to the closing injunction for the ass (here a distinctly non-Christian symbol), ‘burdened . . . with ancient things’ (i.e. pagan rites), to sing loudly in the church.50 Fittingly, the final injunction quits the Latin tongue and switches to the vernacular, the language of the people in a ritual that is unquestionably theirs. All of the music surveyed so far, whether para-, semi- or just plain liturgical, falls under the category of medieval performances ultimately for edification. Medieval edification embraced the modern notion of entertainment. A frequently cited context in medieval literature for musical entertainment is the banquet. Arguably the most famous passage comes from the Occitan romance Flamenca.51 The author describes a cacophony of instruments such as the harp and the vielle, and names pieces such as the lais of Tintagel and Chevrefeuille, whose record survives only in this account. Banquet performers were probably of a high calibre. Cassiodorus in the sixth century transmits a letter from Emperor Theodoric to Boethius asking for advice on behalf of Frankish King Clovis. Clovis wanted a skilled string player for his banquets, one who could ‘perform a feat like that of Orpheus, when his sweet sound tames the savage hearts of the barbarians’.52 Mealtime music likely included 49 H. R. Luard (ed.), Roberti Grosseteste episcope quondam Lincolniensis epistolae, Rolls Series 25, Wiesbaden, 1965, pp. 118–19. In his useful introduction to the Feast of Fools, E. K. Chambers (The Mediæval Stage, Oxford University Press, 1903, vol. 1, pp. 279–81 and 289–291) does not mention the feast’s dissemination outside France. 50 J. Haines, Satire in the Songs of Renart le nouvel, Geneva, Droz, 2010, ch. 6. 51 C. Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300, London, Dent, 1987, pp. 154–5 and 172. 52 Cited in The Variae of Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, trans. S. J. B. Barnish, Liverpool University Press, 1992, pp. 38 and 42–3.
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Ex. 8.4. Banquet song from Renart le nouvel* * This is refrain 29 in the edition portion of my Satire in the Songs (manuscript V’s reading).
lighter pieces such as the banquet songs parodied at different points in Renart le nouvel. Near the end of this romance occurs a spectacular entertainment scene featuring some forty notated refrains sung by different animals.53 One such is the short ditty performed by the lioness Orgueilleuse, a parody of the prevailing trouvère courtly song (Ex. 8.4). One of the most ancient and important genres of edifying music is the solo epic tradition. Already in antiquity, Roman historian Tacitus attests to epic performances, the ancient songs of the German tribes that preserve their history, as he puts it. By the sixth century, several witnesses mention these same barbarian epics performed by a solo singer accompanying himself on a stringed instrument, a lyre or cythara.54 When in the ninth century Charlemagne copied down the Frankish epics he so enjoyed hearing at mealtimes, he was recording a performance tradition that was at least seven centuries old; unfortunately, none of these notated specimens have survived.55 The earliest epic songs in Romance languages date from the eleventh century.56 Yet not a single medieval epic, either Germanic or Romance, has come down to us with music notation. Near the end of the medieval period, Johannes de Grocheio equivocates the performance of epic song with that of saints’ lives in the passage cited earlier in this chapter. Failing musical evidence for epic song, scholars have looked to the surviving saints’ lives with music notation, the earliest being the tenth-century Clermont-Ferrand Passion.57 The performance traditions of both genres were apparently similar. Epic songs were probably performed in small, private settings such as at mealtime in the case of Charlemagne.58 Perhaps this was the music for which Emperor Theodoric a few centuries earlier intended the string player cited above, since in that same letter to Boethius he emphasises the importance of the human voice along with that of the lyre.59 53 Haines, Satire in the Songs of Renart le nouvel, ch. 2. 54 G. Kurth, Histoire poétique des Mérovingiens, Paris, Pickard, 1893, pp. 31–4; on the Anglo-Saxon tradition, see Stevens, Words and Music, pp. 204–12. 55 Kurth, Histoire poétique, p. 55. 56 On the surviving evidence see Stevens, Words and Music, pp. 222–6. 57 Ibid., pp. 235–49. 58 H. W. Garrod (ed.), Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne: The Latin Text, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1925, p. 26, para. 24, 2, lines 1–3: ‘Inter cenandum aut aliquod acroama aut lectorem audiebat. Legebantur ei historiae et antiquorum res gestae.’ 59 Barnish, The Variae of Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, pp. 40–1.
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As Christopher Page has emphasised, private courtly settings were also the theatre for another edification genre, this one well attested by both literary and notated evidence: the love song. One of Page’s poignant examples is the account of a southern French minstrel who spends an evening at the court of the Count Dalfi d’Alvernhe in Montferrand. Following a lavish after-dinner performance featuring many entertainers, the count dismisses everyone but a minstrel and himself for an intimate performance.60 Outside such refined circles we find other contexts for the performance of medieval love songs. All throughout the Middle Ages, churchmen allude to them as diabolical love songs (carmina diabolica or carmina amatoria). The fiery sixth-century preacher Cesarius of Arles repeatedly attacks popular love songs, at one point letting slip that they are in the vernacular (rusticanae cantica amatoria) – this over four centuries before the first troubadours.61 One churchman in the eighth century goes so far as to thank God for his sexual inexperience that prevents him from being tempted by the sensuality and ‘discordant hissing of these songs’!62 Love songs were regularly performed during the festivities mentioned above, as abundant ecclesiastical condemnations make clear. One such from the early thirteenth century denounces the dancing and obscene movements that accompany ‘love songs or ditties’ (amatoria carmina vel cantilenae).63 The lively festivities we have already encountered several times also included other kinds of musical performances, notably the ring dances or chorus songs (choreae) led by women and young girls.64 The popularity and long life of these dances and their attendant music can be gauged by the frequency with which churchmen condemn them. At times the practice even threatened to contaminate the clergy. For example, Ivo of Chartres in the twelfth century cites Saint Augustine’s warning that clergy should neither marry nor ‘mix in company where indecent love songs are performed and where the obscene gestures of bodies in ring dances take place’.65 As Margit Sahlin has made clear, the late medieval carole is but the continuation of the ancient and early medieval ring 60 C. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–1300, London, Dent, 1989, pp. 46–53. 61 Cesarius of Arles, Sermons au peuple, trans. M.-J. Delage, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1971, vol. 1, pp. 136–7 and 324. 62 R. Weber (ed.), Ambrosii Autperti Opera, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medaevalis XXVIIB, Turnholt, Typographi Brepols, 1979, vol. 3, pp. 954–5 (‘diversis carminum sibilis’). 63 L. Gougaud, ‘La danse dans les églises’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 15 (1914), 12. 64 M. Sahlin, Étude sur la carole médiévale: l’origine du mot et ses rapports avec l’Église, Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksells, 1940, pp. 137–92, Gougaud, ‘La danse dans les églises’, and Stevens, Words and Music, pp. 161–2. 65 J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, Paris, 1889, vol. 161, col. 490: ‘neque his coetibus admisceantur ubi amatoria cantantur, et turpia carmina, aut obsceni motus corporum choreis et saltationibus efferuntur’; the passage is taken from Ivo of Chartres’s Decretum. As Sahlin notes (Étude sur la carole, 36), the terms chorea and carole can mean either a dance or a song.
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dance performance practice.66 With a surge of ecclesiastical condemnations of the ring dance in the thirteenth century, we find once again the youthful pleasures of dancing and choral singing that constituted such a vital part of performance life throughout the Middle Ages, one that luckily produced great anxiety in the minds of middle-aged churchmen.67 Finally in the arena of edification, we should briefly inspect music for the stage. Here too, condemnations by churchmen preserve important information on a mostly lost performance practice. The early Christian poet Prudentius offers up in the early fifth century an especially colourful description of theatre music. He rails against ‘the lascivious bodies of effeminate actors who whirl about in summersaults’, going on to complain about the ‘vain melodies of a young female lyre player’.68 Aside from an occasional historical crumb such as this, the record for most medieval stage music unfortunately remains blank until around 1200. The extant late medieval notated examples of secular plays (such as Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion) and liturgical dramas (such as the Play of Daniel) emerge as the visible witness and endpoint of a thriving tradition of dramatic performance all throughout the Middle Ages.
Conclusion As I have suggested throughout this chapter, the evidence for musical performance in the Middle Ages is often partial at best, and non-existent in some cases. Yet there can be no doubt that music pervaded a great many areas of medieval life. To sum up this chapter, in the realm of labor, humans were surrounded with music, literally from the cradle to the grave. Beginning with the ubiquitous lullaby, and on through the multitude of pieces that attended healing ceremonies, war and most menial labour, music accompanied medieval men and women all the way to their death. And, they hoped, beyond. Most people in pre-modern societies entertained a profound conviction about inaudible music that I have refrained from discussing in this chapter. This was not only the infamous music of the spheres beloved by learned music writers, of course, but also the music they and others expected to find in the afterlife. As Grocheio puts it near the end of his treatise, the Church with all its music is but the ‘earthly and militant sign of the heavenly and triumphant one where angels and archangels sing without ceasing “Holy, holy” ’, recalling the frequently glossed 66 See Sahlin, Étude sur la carole médiévale, p. 137, n. 4, and Y. Rokseth, ‘Danses cléricales du XIIIe siècle’, Mélanges 1945, vol. 3, Études historiques, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg 106, Paris, 1947, 93, n. 1, and the sources cited there. 67 Page, Voices and Instruments, pp. 77–84; Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, pp. 14 and 110–33. 68 Prudentius, Cathemerinon liber (Livre d’heures), ed. Maurice Lavarenne, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1943, vol. 1, 53: ‘turpia semivirorum membra theatrali . . . vertigine ferri . . . lyricae modulamina vana puellae’
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biblical vision from the twenty-first chapter of the Apocalypse of Saint John.69 But here we may be testing the limits of a modern history of musical performance. To sum up, in the realm of ædificatio, medieval men and women worked towards the goal of right living with a variety of musical helps. As I have stressed, edifying performances included not only the Latin chant repertoire officially sanctioned by the Church, but other genres: Latin and vernacular tropes of all kinds, performances surrounding feast days and the laetitiae ceremonials, as well as incantations. Other entertainment included music performances at banquets and ring dances, the epic song tradition, love songs in both private and public situations, and performances for the stage. Thus the total panorama of medieval music extended well beyond courts, cloisters and cathedrals, making its way into every humble home and working field. Music belonged not just to the privileged learned few who knew how to write it down but to the quotidian experience of every medieval woman and man. The exact sounds of all the medieval music covered here probably did not always conform to the Western art tradition, nor can most of these sounds be uncovered or reproduced with historical certainty.70 But, at the very least, all of these many music performances merit our acknowledgement and, ultimately, our keen historical interest.
69 Rohloff, Musiktraktat, p. 66: ‘Ecclesia enim haec terrestris et militans signum est et imago illius caelestis et triumphantis, in qua sunt angeli et archangeli sine fine dicentes Sanctus, sanctus et caetera.’ 70 Haines, ‘Lambertus’s Epiglotus’, 160–1; see, however, T. McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, Oxford University Press, 1998.
. 9 .
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Introduction Do not force the high notes. Sing sweetly, elegantly, and with fluidity – neither harshly nor nasally. Be rhythmically flexible where appropriate. Tune chords from the lowest voice upwards. Avoid singing wrong notes, respect natural word stress, and make the text clearly audible. Ensure that the members of an ensemble can see each other, and encourage them to follow the hand gestures of their musical director. The interpretation of medieval Latin treatises is fraught with difficulty, but above is a distillation of some of the clearer instructions contained within surviving sources relating to the vocal performance of the music of the European Middle Ages. The term ‘Middle’ Ages is a loaded one: in popular parlance it can imply a low ebb in European civilisation between the sophistication of Classical Antiquity and the enlightenment of the modern era. Indeed the first two-thirds of the Middle Ages used to be labelled the Dark Ages – nowadays more positively designated Late Antiquity. It was only with the emergence of the Gothic style and the creation of universities that Europe was deemed (in nineteenth-century terms) to have rehoisted itself out of the cultural primeval soup: ‘in the time when the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and had passed away, and our own days of light had not yet come, there lay a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness’.1 Yet these erstwhile Dark Ages witnessed – alongside many other great achievements – the composition and codification of a great body of monophonic sacred music (plainchant) and the cultivation of the earliest polyphony (organum).
Plainchant Plainchant is the backbone of medieval music. Like cantillation (its Jewish precursor), plainchant is a singularly vocal medium, which exists to lend
1 H. Pyle, Otto of the Silver Hand, London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1888, p. 1.
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gravitas and audibility to the texts that it decorates. A useful by-product is that it is easier and more fulfilling for a group of people to sing a melody together than it is to speak the same text in well-organised unison – indeed group singing is the most efficient way to project a text in a large space without the use of amplification. Mastery of the contours of plainchant and an understanding of how words are enunciated in this single-line form are a sine qua non for the understanding of all medieval music, whether monophonic or polyphonic, sacred or secular. A first-hand appreciation of the (subtle) word-painting and (even more subtle) mood-painting associated with plainchant is something that no performer of medieval music should be without – there is no substitute for feeling the curvature of plainchant ‘on the voice’. Until the mid-twelfth century, Cistercian monks lived a relatively silent existence (singing aside). But when rehearsing plainchant, an exception was made if a member of the order needed to ask a question relating to the length of a note or to the accentuation that should be accorded to a syllable of the text.2 Apart from the fact that modern singers could learn much from this minimalist rehearsal protocol, this is useful to know. The organisation of a fluid melody and attention to appropriate word stress were evidently the most important features of correct performance practice – these were the two areas in which a novice needed most guidance. The young learnt to read by committing the words of the Book of Psalms (in Latin) to memory: syllable by syllable, word by word, phrase by phrase, verse by verse; all 150 psalms in numerical order. Only later would the meaning of the words be fully understood.3 If we are to sing this material convincingly today, it stands to reason that the words should be spoken aloud before attempting a musical rendition, not least because reading aloud was more common in the Middle Ages than it is now.4 By the later Middle Ages a senior Benedictine monk would have committed the psalms and their three thousand associated antiphons to memory (along with hundreds of other chants from the Mass and Office).5 These dedicated performers sang this
2 J. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 175. 3 A. M. Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005, p. 48. 4 There is disagreement as to the purpose and incidence of silent reading in medieval Europe. In E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen (eds.), The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 2: Latin Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 12, Kenney states that a book, whether of poetry or prose, acted ‘something like a [musical] score for public or private performance’ and that silent reading was unusual, whereas A. K. Gavrilov in ‘Techniques of reading in Classical Antiquity’, Classical Quarterly, 47 (1997), 56–73, believes that silent reading, which promoted ‘concentration, speed, and absorption of material’ (p. 69), mirrors current usage. For a discussion of the ‘two ways of reading’ (lectio and meditatio) see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 212–17. 5 D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 329.
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repertoire for upwards of six hours per day and are estimated to have stored around eighty hours of texted music in their heads.6 It is little wonder that renditions of plainchant by singers who do not live in enclosed orders frequently sound stilted and synthetic.
Theory On the way to learning how to sing plainchant with propriety, the young would have been taught music theory. The musical gamut gradually expanded until it comprised a conjunct series of twenty notes rising, in modern parlance, from Bass low G to Alto top e00 .7 This series of notes (notae) was drawn on a grid (a ladder or scala). The grid gave rise to the earliest form of graph (the stave) and this visual representation of music proved an invaluable tool in learning pieces from scratch, in transmitting music from one place to another, and in memorising ever more complicated musical structures. By the eleventh century the gamut encompassed a sequence of overlapping six-note scales termed hexachords – for the previous two centuries the musical molecule had been the four-note tetrachord. Each hexachord comprised the intervals Tone–Tone–Semitone–Tone–Tone. The three possibilities were CDEFGA, FGABbCD, and GABnCDE, which were known as the natural, soft and hard hexachords respectively. By shifting (mutating) from one hexachord to another during a wide-ranging melody, only this fixed six-note intervallic sequence needed to be applied. The musical director could thereby programme singers to mutate from one hexachord to the next according to the rules of melody and counterpoint. This is analogous to changing positions on a string instrument in that c0 might be played on the violin with the third, second or first finger depending on the note’s melodic context. Or to put it another way, c0 can be played on each of the cello’s four strings. In medieval terminology, c0 could be construed as the lowest note of a natural hexachord, the second-highest note of a soft hexachord, or as a medial note within a hard hexachord. This was the system of ‘real’ music (musica vera or musica recta) and today’s performer who attempts to tamper with ‘accidentals’ in the rendition of medieval music without an understanding of this elegant six-note system is thinking, unhelpfully, outside the box.8 But that is not to say that the box should remain closed – a system of musica ficta (false music) was developed in order to expand the number of usable notes within
6 K. Levy, Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 176. 7 J. Herlinger, ‘Medieval canonics’, in T. Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 175. 8 For a detailed discussion of many aspects of early music theory and their impact on performance see M. Bent, Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta, New York and London, Routledge, 2002.
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the gamut.9 The application of hexachords associated with musica ficta can substantially alter the character of a piece of music, and there is nothing pure about a performance that does not engage with this colourful expansion of the medieval musical palette.
Context Medieval religious ritual centred on silent prayer and meditation, and it seems unlikely that a brash, deliberately projected vocal delivery would have been the default. That said, the liturgical day, week and year revolved around lightness and darkness, high and low, ferial and festal; singing that did not reflect the perennially changing liturgical colours would have been as inappropriate as an immutably well-mannered vocal style. Apparently the thirteenth-century Canons at Lyon in France had a competitive habit of raising the roof during Mass on feast days when they were described as attempting to ‘shake the stars’ in order to ‘rouse the holy angels on high’.10 The performance practice of vernacular song is similarly shrouded in metaphor, but it is scarcely to be believed that when the Norman minstrel Taillefer opened the Battle of Hastings in 1066 with a song, he did so with vocal reticence. The battle led to the domination of AngloSaxon culture by those who spoke a language whose word for ‘yes’ was ‘oïl’, and Taillefer (whose nickname, Incisor-ferri, meant ‘the hewer of iron’) had taunted the English by juggling his sword in front of them while singing – an irritating opening gambit if ever there was one – and subsequently taking first blood.11 Any English vocal response on Henlac Hill, whether spoken or sung, would be puzzling to our ears since not only was the language of Harold’s army significantly different from today’s English, but it would have sounded doubly perplexing because it pre-dated the Great Vowel Shift of the late-medieval period.12 The story of Taillefer’s musical bravery may not recount actual events but we, like our ancestors, want it to be true. By the time that John Milton wrote his History of Britain in 1670, the legend had ballooned to such an extent that the entire Norman army is reported to have sung the Song of Roland as a prelude to this historic conflict. If Taillefer and/or his fellow warriors can be presumed 9 Ibid., pp. 105–14, for a succinct description of the process. 10 J. Dyer, ‘A thirteenth-century choirmaster: the Scientia Artis Musicae of Elias Salomon’, Musical Quarterly, 66 (1980), 102. 11 F. Barlow (ed.), The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. xxiii–xxiv. 12 The term ‘Great Vowel Shift’ (GVS) was coined by Otto Jespersen in 1909 and his theory has subsequently been refined; see W. Labov, Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 1: Internal Factors, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 145–54. In the South of England the word ‘mate’ would (approximately) have been pronounced ‘mart’ before the GVS; similarly ‘meet’ had been pronounced ‘mate’, ‘might’ pronounced ‘meet’, ‘moot’ pronounced ‘moat’, and ‘mouse’ pronounced ‘moose’.
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to have sung with life-affirming commitment and forthright vocal delivery to match, Blondel’s trouvère tones must have been more hushed and conspiratorial when, in 1192, he apocryphally located Richard Coeur de Lion, who was languishing in a German prison within Dürnstein Castle.13 The point of both legends is that music was a medium through which patriotism and loyalty were well expressed. Music was in the blood: it accompanied hostility and peacemaking, celebration and mourning, living and dying, and it emanated from the throat of the common man as he went about his daily grind every bit as much as it sprang from the lips of Christ’s servant in holy orders, the secular entertainer, or the warrior. The Church seemingly despised minstrelsy;14 but was this just because of the non-religious subject matter of the songs, or was it bound up with an unseemly performance style as well? And if it was, should we attempt to recreate something ‘unseemly’ when performing particular medieval secular monophonic songs today? The church authorities were offended by the degrading corporeal movements made by certain performers of secular song, and we could surmise that these rampant physical gestures were accompanied by comparable degradation of vocal quality. But perhaps not all of these secular entertainers were low life; indeed Thomas of Chobham, an early thirteenth-century Sub-Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, believed that when certain minstrels provided relaxation therapy through their music, or when their songs were instructive, then these musicians could be tolerated (possunt sustineri). The distinction seems to have been between joculator and histrio. The histrio was a reveller, a tavern musician who sang suggestive songs and whose act was sometimes enhanced by the histrionics of lewd dancers. But the joculator sang songs of historical record and celebrated the lives of good people, thereby providing solace (solatia) to those who would listen and reflect.15 Inherent in this contrast of moral tone is one of musical tone quality as well – a raucous vulgar tone suits raucous vulgar music. But what is raucous? Would, for instance, the vocal production of today’s dramatic soprano appear to be a cultivated form of musical expression to the medieval musical ear? The answer seems obvious – no, it would not.
Monophony Even though it is impossible to be sure of the exact effect that single-line music had on the medieval ear, melody evidently provoked a range of responses 13 D. Boyle, Blondel’s Song: The Capture, Imprisonment and Ransom of Richard the Lionheart, London, Penguin, 2006, pp. 166–79. 14 C. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300, London, Dent, 1989, p. 8. 15 F. Broomfield (ed.), Thomae de Chobham Summa confessorum, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia, Louvain, Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968, p. 292.
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depending on the mode of the moment. That, in itself, was nothing new. Plato had described how Ancient Greek modes affected character.16 Aristotle had written about the enthusiastic, relaxed, feeble and sad qualities of specific modes.17 And in the early twelfth century, Johannes Cotto18 described the characteristics of the eight medieval church modes. Cotto defined Mode I as ceremonious, Mode II as profound, III austere and IV to VIII ingratiating, well bred, tearful, spectacular and staid respectively. What is interesting is that Cotto records the difference of opinion between two listeners when Cotto himself sang a passage of sacred chant – one listener praised it while another disliked it.19 It is comforting to read that matters of taste were an issue where plainchant was concerned. This surely empowers the latter-day performer of medieval monophony to grapple with performance choices head on. If it is not certain that contemporaneous listeners would have shared the same response to a given piece of medieval music, then modern performers have little to lose by trying to give as persuasive and informed performance as possible, even though, by definition, that will be a performance conceived on our own terms. Medieval liturgical drama presents a particularly interesting focus when considering performance solutions for medieval music. Reports of the death of European drama upon the closure of the Ancient Roman theatres are an exaggeration – medieval minstrelsy (in its various forms) maintained and developed many aspects of performance art before the reinvention of the play. The emergence of liturgical drama was a significant step along that path. The greatest of the medieval liturgical dramas is The Play of Daniel, which was assembled around the year 1170 at Beauvais Cathedral.20 The colourful – and disturbing yet rejuvenating – story is set in the fourth decade of the Babylonian Exile. The Play of Daniel therefore takes place in what is modern-day Iraq and, pertinently for today’s players and audiences, deals with religious intolerance, ritual murder and political injustice. What makes this play so realistic and dramatically arresting are its stage directions. Not only do they specify the movements and gestures of the characters, but they also direct their emotions. So, when King Balthasar is instructed to act as if astounded (stupefactus) and King Darius is required to sing tearfully (lacrimabiliter), the use of such modern conventions in this Belvacian masterpiece assumes 16 The Republic, 398e–399c. 17 Politics, 1340b1–5. 18 The author of the treatise De musica (c. 1100) is variously referred to as John of Afflighem (Johannes Affligemensis), John Cotton, or simply John. Johannes Cotto is preferred in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 13, pp. 137–8. 19 C. Palisca (ed.), Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1978, p. 133. 20 R. K. Emmerson, ‘Divine judgement and local ideology in the Beauvais Ludus Danielis’, in D. H. Ogden (ed.), The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, Kalamazoo, MI, Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1996, p. 45.
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considerable significance when considering the development of theatre in the broadest sense. The lack of explicit tempo and dynamic markings in medieval musical manuscripts should not blind us to the fact that the single-line music of the Middle Ages requires performers to exhibit a wide range of expression, as dictated by the subject matter, its context, the meaning of the words and the character of the melodic line. And, although marks of expression are nonexistent in the sources of the period, when it comes to seeking a performance directive for each piece (or section of a piece), the absence of proof is not proof of absence. In short, senza espressione is not an option.
Polyphony The history and genesis of the earliest European vocal polyphony are lost in the mists of time. Heterophony, as inherited from antiquity, could conceivably have led to some form of polyphonic expansion. And monophony (with or without a drone) performed in reverberant acoustics inevitably leads to a polyphonic combination of sounds from which a fascination for harmonic titillation might have developed. On a different level, it is possible to accept the conscious theorisation of the existence of polyphony as a logical imperative: trivially, two adult males who sing a melody in unison create a frequency ratio of 1:1 between their pitches; less trivially, a prepubescent boy and an adult male who sing ‘in unison’ do so in the octave ratio of 2:1; it is then admissible to theorize that the simple ratios 3:2 (the Perfect fifth) and 4:3 (the Perfect fourth) form a musically coherent extension of unison and octave ‘polyphony’. Interestingly, the added (organal) voice in the genre of simple (parallel) organum was originally sung at a consonant interval below the pre-existent melody; it was only later that the pre-existent tune was heard beneath the fabricated one. The implications for the performance of the earliest polyphony are unclear. In the time of Guido d’Arezzo, did the higher (principal) voice, the vox principalis, assume a dynamic and timbral hegemony over the derivative lower (organal) voice, the vox organalis? And by the same token, did the reverse hold true in the early twelfth-century monasteries of Aquitaine, by which time the principal voice had by convention become the lower of the two? In other words, should the ‘tune’ be sung more loudly and in a more forthright manner than the ‘added part’? Or should the sound quality of the two voices be perfectly matched and the concept of melody and accompaniment be abandoned? And anyway, are such considerations of any real significance in, say, the deeply resonant and highly reverberant acoustics of a large stone building? In short, are we superimposing anachronistic performance imperatives onto a musical form whose function was straightforwardly to sprinkle angel-dust over
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and under plainchant on special occasions? The answer to the last question is most certainly yes. As polyphony became more complicated and esoteric, it does, however, seem reasonable to probe the specific manner of its performance. The twelfthcentury emergence of a voice that was required to hold (tenere) long notes beneath an elaborate two-, three-, or four-voice texture raises questions. If the held Tenor lines of the organa pura of the Notre-Dame School are to be sustained without a break in the sound, then performance by at least two people might be presupposed. But perhaps a momentary break in tone (whether in a large acoustical space or not) was deemed acceptable in Paris during the late 1100s, and maybe the concept of ‘staggering the breathing’ is a peculiarly post-medieval one. The most intimate (yet still artistically fulfilling) ensemble performances frequently take little account of the aural effect upon those who are not themselves performing. Indeed, our concept of a medieval audience should perhaps be a more inward-facing one than our idea of what constitutes an audience today. But one outspoken commentator does give an especially vivid account of the effect of twelfth-century music on the listener. John of Salisbury studied in Paris with Peter Abélard, became Secretary to Thomas Becket, and finished his days as Bishop of Chartres. John was convinced of the power of music to ‘captivate with its beauty . . . when heard in its more delicately uttered strains’.21 But John was critical of twelfth-century musical innovations such as expanded vocal ranges, dense harmonies, voice exchange, protracted melodic arches and ornamental scalic figures. Yet this Englishman was clearly enraptured by the French music of his age; its sensuousness literally drove him to distraction: The very service of the Church is defiled, in that before the face of the Lord, in the very sanctuary of sanctuaries, they, showing off as it were, strive with the effeminate dalliance of wanton tones and musical phrasing to astound, enervate, and dwarf simple souls. When one hears the excessively caressing melodies of voices beginning, chiming in, carrying the air, dying away, rising again, and dominating, he may well believe that it is the song of the sirens and not the sound of men’s voices; he may marvel at the flexibility of tone which neither the nightingale, the parrot, or any bird with greater range than these can rival.22
Whether John was intending to be complimentary or not, that is surely the kind of write-up that a modern vocal consort would die for. 21 J. B. Pike (ed.), Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1938; repr., New York, Octagon Books, 1972, p. 31. 22 Ibid., p. 32.
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Reception The way that John of Salisbury describes vocal tone colour in French performance implies a timbre that we would think of now as being dominated by a light high Tenor sound, or even falsetto. In recent decades the English Choral Tradition has frequently provided a model for what seems a desirable fit for medieval polyphony. When Christopher Page’s group Gothic Voices was still in its relative infancy, Page advocated the use of ‘a singer with a strong, straight tone who is able to go directly to the centre of the note . . . without any thickening from vibrato’.23 Notwithstanding a certain circularity of argument (Page liked the way that his singers approached medieval polyphony, therefore medieval voices might have resembled the voices that he was using), the 1980s concerts and recordings by Gothic Voices were astounding and groundbreaking. Most notably, the performances were predominantly given by unaccompanied voices. No longer were Notre-Dame Tenor lines supported by instruments, and no longer were the Tenor (and Contratenor) parts of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries deemed instrumental merely because they were untexted. A capella renditions of medieval music are no longer unusual, but this is underpinned by the (un)comfortable feeling that the performance of this repertoire merely mirrors contemporary taste in the performance of any repertoire.24 Irrespective of the fact that nobody reading this has ever (fortunately) experienced a visit to Léonin’s dentist or to Pérotin’s bathroom, today’s performers of medieval music increasingly feel that they should acquire an understanding of the culture that surrounded the music that they sing. Most pertinently, today’s vocalists need to be assured of the fact that the medieval music that they choose to perform is of good quality; performing music just because it is very old is hardly reason enough. Aesthetic judgements can seem random when the musical language is distant. So the fact that Pérotin was dubbed Pérotin the Great (Perotinus Magnus) is comforting: we like the music of Pérotin and so did the man now known as Anonymous IV.25 True, the Englishman who described Pérotin in such reverential tones was writing some years after the event, but he lived in the same century as Pérotin, and he knew the Notre-Dame repertoire intimately and clearly revered it. But there is always the lingering doubt that a harmony or sonority that sounds 23 C. Page, ‘The performance of Ars Antiqua motets’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 162. 24 D. Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 25 Anonymous IV is so called because his De mensuris et discantu appeared as the fourth anonymous treatise in E. De Coussemaker (ed.), Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series, vol. 1, Paris, Durand, 1864, pp. 327– 64. Page prefers the toponymic label ‘English Anonymous’.
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particularly beautiful and arresting today may not have been enjoyed for those same reasons in the thirteenth century. Anonymous IV also remarked that in the West of England (Westcuntre), major and minor thirds were regarded as the most consonant intervals (optimae concordantiae).26 In thirteenth-century Paris, intervallic taste was different from that in England: the Gallic ear favoured perfect consonances over imperfect consonances. This difference in regional taste within medieval northern Europe brings into play yet another factor that might affect the way in which medieval music could plausibly be interpreted today.
Notation For a modern performance of medieval music to be convincing, there must be an authoritative notated version from which to work. By the time that mensural notation was invented in the mid-thirteenth century (shortly after the invention of the mechanical clock), modern transcriptions of polyphony are, broadly speaking, likely to agree in matters of rhythm. But there is much debate as to the way in which earlier notations should be deciphered. If there is no agreement about whether a passage should be transcribed as measured or unmeasured, then subtle debates about tempo and articulation become submerged under the choppy waters of frustrated ignorance. In Ex. 9.1 the rhythm of the two-voice organum Viderunt omnes from the Magnus Liber is transcribed in compound time; many modern performers still erect this rhythmic scaffolding around the organum purum sections of the Notre-Dame repertoire.27 In Ex. 9.2 the transcription does not assign a regular metre to the music and, moreover, it removes the opening dramatic major
Ex. 9.1. The opening of Léonin’s Viderunt omnes transcribed in measured rhythm (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1, fol. 99)
26 Ibid., p. 358. 27 Mark Everist amusingly labels this jaunty trochaic rhythm cantus dictus Sagittarii, a reference to the 124 bpm tempo of ‘Barwick Green’, the signature tune of the long-running BBC radio serial The Archers; see E. Roesner (ed.), Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, 7 vols., Monaco, Éditions de L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1993–2009, vol. 2, M. Everist (ed.), Les organa à deux voix pour l’office du manuscrit de Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Plut. 29.2, 2003, p. lxxviii, n. 113.
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Ex. 9.2. The opening of Léonin’s Viderunt omnes transcribed as free rhythm (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1, fol. 99)
seventh which has, for many years, been a trademark of this Christmastide work. Anonymous IV himself was critical of the notation of the Magnus Liber, which he regarded as unspecific in the matter of rhythm; however, he had the benefit of hindsight since, by the time that he wrote his musical treatise, a notational system had been developed that was much clearer in this regard.28 Today’s performers – however interested they may be in the complexities of pre-Franconian notation – are left wondering how to proceed. The performance choices are manifold and the effects on the listener markedly different, depending on which solution is inferred. Yet surely it is better to have sung and run the risk of criticism than never to have sung at all. Choice can stultify or enliven. The scholarly debate continues to rage, but if the result is to dampen the performer’s ardour and to censor performance then the musicologists’ arguments are merely full of sound and fury, signifying very little. Whether the two-voice Viderunt omnes was written by Léonin or not (and surely the identity of the composer makes no difference to the greatness of the work), and whether the piece is delivered in gently undulating consonant waves or in brashly dissonant regular metre, this music is no Victorian child: it would be wrong for it to be seen but not heard.
Tuning The aural effect of medieval consonance and dissonance is a thorny issue. Where tuning is concerned, today’s singer is inevitably heavily influenced by equal temperament (twelfth-comma mean-tone temperament) because of the ubiquity of the piano (or some other equally tempered keyboard instrument) as the common reference tool within Western musical education. Ensemble singers have always been interested – to a greater or lesser degree – in tuning systems. And since it is not possible to sing in harmony without consideration (consciously or not) of temperament, some temperamental solution(s) must be
28 J. Yudkin (ed.), The Music Treatise of Anonymous IV: A New Translation, Musicological Studies and Documents, 41, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1985, pp. 43–5.
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adopted. The visceral joy that performers can experience when, for instance, placing major or minor thirds in their just ratios of 5:4 and 6:5 respectively is tempered by the reality of the medieval system based, as it was, on the system of Pythagorean tuning. In the tuning system whose invention is ascribed to Pythagoras of Samos, restated by Boethius in the sixth century,29 and advocated by composers and theorists of the later Middle Ages, the major third (81:64) is wider even than its equally tempered namesake and the minor third (32:27) even narrower.30 Intervallic character within the Pythagorean system is deemed consonant in the case of perfect fourths and fifths, unstable in the case of thirds, tense in the case of major seconds, major sixths, and minor sevenths, and dissonant in the case of the remaining intervals (minor seconds, augmented fourths, diminished fifths, minor sixths, and major sevenths). For every performance of Notre-Dame polyphony that makes a comparison between the vaults, arches and buttresses of the Gothic architectural style and the musical architecture of organum purum and discant, there will be another that makes its case that much more convincingly by taking care to tune perfect fourths and perfect fifths accurately, and by tuning major thirds almost 8 cents wider than in equal temperament (over 21 cents wider than their justly tuned relations).31
Modern performance The late-medieval period saw the replacement of score notation by choirbook format and the shortening of written note values. It is fascinating to speculate as to the nature of the (presumably symbiotic) relationship between the changed appearance of the music and shifting performance ideals. Singing from one’s own self-contained line as opposed to singing from a line within a score – especially where the vertical alignment is less than perfect – promotes a new sensation in the mind of the performer. The individuality of one’s own voice-part is magnified when the character and range of a whole section of a piece can be analysed at a glance. Aural sensitivities to the nature and function of other voice-parts are simultaneously heightened. Compare this to the medium of the string quartet whose members would rarely choose to perform from a full score, even in a piece whose sections are short enough to make page turns easily negotiable. Whether the appearance of shorter note values had any effect on tempo is unclear, but interaction with the musical manuscripts of the
29 In De institutione musica; see C. M. Bower (ed.), Fundamentals of Music: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989. 30 J. Herlinger, ‘Medieval canonics’, p. 177, Table 6.3. 31 R. Rasch, ‘Tuning and temperament’, in Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, p. 196.
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period is more than simply desirable. A convincing performance is one executed with authority and confidence: authority is easily assumed when primary sources have been used for the preparation and/or execution of the performance; and confidence runs the risk of being misplaced if original materials have not been consulted. The musical and theoretical sources of the period are the mirrors of the medieval soul; they are the tools with which a performer’s interpretation may be sculpted. Ultimately, musical instinct will underpin the rendition of any piece from any period of music; but it is relatively easy to defend the linchpins and idiosyncrasies of one’s own performance if ‘higher’ authority can be cited. Adopt a suitable tempo, articulate appropriately, balance voices sensitively, adapt vocal timbres to suit the piece and your acoustics, apply dynamics effectively, tune chords carefully, pay attention to matters of ensemble, match the text convincingly to the melodic line, and give thought to the pronunciation of the words. Those are my own tenets for the performance of medieval music; indeed they are startlingly similar to the tenets that I might hold when I approach the performance of vocal music from any period. A literal performance of medieval music is impossible and, arguably, undesirable: any portrayal of medieval music must depend on functional equivalence. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, when an active movement to rediscover medieval music emerged, performers have adopted a wide spectrum of practices based on a mixture of pragmatism and detailed research. For that reason the performance of medieval music is unlikely to remain the same from one generation to the next. However, performance strategies are likely to remain similar, even if the tactics differ substantially. In the words of Horace,32 which were quoted in the thirteenth-century treatise Summa musicae: ‘the one who combines the useful with the delightful wins the applause’.33
32 ‘omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci’ is line 343 of the Epistula ad Pisones (‘Ars Poetica’); see N. Rudd (ed.), Horace Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 70. 33 C. Page (ed.), The Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 54.
. 10 .
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Introduction From the outset it is important to restate the inevitable disclaimer: our knowledge of medieval instruments and medieval instrumental performance practice is severely limited by the nature of the historical evidence at our disposal. Virtually no stringed instrument survives from before 1500, and even if several specimens had survived they could only represent a fraction of the vast array of instrument types that were produced in medieval Europe. Secondly, the problem of correctly matching the medieval representations and descriptions of musical instruments in visual and literary sources with their contemporaneous designations can be quite thorny in itself – witness the case of the gittern/ citole/mandora/cittern discussed below – since those representations are very often frustratingly ambiguous on key details of manufacturing and performance practice (one case for all: the problem of bridge shapes in bowed instruments before c.1470). Given this scenario, the study of the history of medieval instruments relies more on arguments based on inference, common sense and musical judgement, than on the evidence of the primary sources. If the goal of accurately reconstructing the musical instruments used centuries ago faces insurmountable difficulties, the related task of pinpointing the specific contexts, circumstances and conventions of instrumental performance poses even thornier problems. The issue is not just that the world of medieval instrumental music belonged to a cultural domain – orality – that by definition left very few written traces. What complicates the historian’s task is also the localised nature of the documentary evidence, which in no way can do justice to the myriad of performing traditions and conventions that for centuries developed and interacted on the European scene and in counterpoint with non-European musical cultures (most prominently, Islam). The upshot of this state of affairs is that much of the pre-1500 repertoire that has come down to us – with the possible exception of some forms of sacred music – may well have been performed in a variety of equally, or more or less acceptable ways. Such a conclusion is not an endorsement of an ‘anything-goes’
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attitude; to the contrary, the task of distinguishing between actual performance practice(s) and many possible performing fictions remains paramount. Much of medieval instrumental practice is lost forever, yet much is being and will be discovered through an ever more carefully contextualised evaluation of the documentary sources, and through the exercise of musical judgement. Perhaps more than in any other musicological field, on this terrain the scholar and the performer have a common purpose. As the debates on authenticity in early music and on the ‘a cappella heresy’ have abundantly confirmed, any scholarly argument about medieval performance practice is bound to rely also, for better or for worse, on modern ears.1
The sources: iconography, literary works, and musical treatises The vast body of visual artefacts from the Middle Ages is a rich source of information on the design and features of musical instruments and their use in actual musical practice.2 Unfortunately most of these images – and certainly those pre-dating the end of the thirteenth century – were meant to be more plausible than realistic representations of musical scenes and are of little organological value, and even when they appear to be realistic, they remain tantalisingly vague on key details of construction and performance practice. This is the case, for instance, with the numerous illuminations featuring musical instruments found in the extant manuscripts of the Cantigas de Sancta Maria, a collection of more than 400 songs in praise of the Virgin Mary that were compiled under King Alfonso X of Spain between 1270 and 1290.3 These instruments may have been common not only in Spain, but throughout the Mediterranean basin as well. Some of them, however, may never have existed; nor is it certain whether the instruments portrayed were actually used to perform the cantigas copied into the same source, or fulfil a merely decorative function. Musical iconography from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tends to be more valuable to music scholars because it appears to strive for a higher degree of accuracy and realism. The illuminations of the Squarcialupi codex, for instance, contain portraits of Florentine musicians in the act of playing instruments that
1 For two recent assessments of those scholarly debates, see J. Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002; and D. Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 2 Medieval books of hours and psalters are especially rich sources of musical images, as shown by the numerous reproductions in the studies by Remnant and Winternitz cited below. 3 Some of the illuminations may date to the fourteenth century; for a reproduction of some of them, see J. Ribera, Music in Ancient Arabia and Spain: being La música de las Cantigas, trans. and abridged E. Hague and M. Leffingwell, Oxford University Press, 1929.
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have been used to design modern copies of those same instruments, such as the organetto. Numerous trecento illustrations of musical instruments from paintings, illuminations, and literary sources, were published by H. M. Brown.4 While there are no medieval musical treatises dedicated specifically to the instruments, a great number of literary sources make more or less extended references to them. One of the most frequently debated sources is the De musica by Johannes de Grocheio (written c. 1300), which offers valuable information on instrumental music in contemporary Paris as part of his much discussed survey of the musical forms and genres of secular music.5 His claim that a good fiddle player is able to perform in all styles and musical forms (bonus artifex in viella omnem cantum et cantilenam et omnem formam musicalem generaliter introducit) has attracted much scholarly attention. Lawrence Gushee, echoed by Christopher Page, has suggested that Grocheio’s omnem formam only included the monophonic genres such as trouvère songs and chansons de geste, and dances (estampies and ductia).6 At any rate, the performing versatility that so impressed Grocheio may be an index not only of the great variety of musical genres and forms in the Paris of his time, but also of the growing interest in instrumental music (particularly string playing) by the educated class and the clergy beginning in the midthirteenth century. Part of this trend was also an increasingly more positive attitude about secular entertainment by academics and clergymen. The closing section of the massive Tractatus de musica by the Dominican monk Jerome of Moravia, also written in Paris in the early 1270s, offers rare information on the tuning of the fiddle and the rebec, a sure sign of the presence of those and other string instruments in monastic environments. About a century later, Konrad of Megenberg witnessed the rise of the professional wind bands in his Yconomica, written c. 1350.7 In his Tractatus de canticis (c. 1424–6), French Theologian Jean Gerson discusses at some length the instruments cited in Psalm 150.8 Many other sources, from Isidor of Seville’s Etymologiae to Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, either 4 See H. M. Brown, ‘Catalogus. A corpus of trecento pictures with musical subject matter, part I’, Imago musicae I–III (1985–7) and V (1988); Mary Remnant’s English Bowed Instruments from Anglo-Saxon to Tudor Times, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, features more than 150 illustrations of bowed instruments, mostly from the British Isles. 5 On this topic see in particular C. Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Song in France 1100–1300, London, Dent, 1987, pp. 50–3 and 67–9; C. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300, London, Dent, 1989; Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 69–75; C. Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio on secular music: a corrected text and a new translation’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 17–41. 6 Page, Voices and Instruments, p. 68. 7 Page has discussed Jerome and Konrad respectively in Voices and Instruments, pp. 57–76 and 126–33, and in his ‘German musicians and their instruments: a 14th-century account by Konrad of Megenberg’, Early Music, 10 (1982), 192–200. 8 C. Page, ‘Early 15th-century instruments in Jean de Gerson’s “Tractatus de Cantici”’, Early Music, 6 (1978), 339–49.
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mention or discuss the instruments in some detail. Especially intriguing are those texts mentioning the materials for making strings.9
Contexts of performance The court The most accomplished performers of medieval instrumental music were the minstrels, variously referred to in contemporaneous sources as joculator, histrio, jongleur, menestrere, or menestrel.10 These musical ‘craftsmen’ were part of a broad family of professional or semi-professional entertainers – dancers, storytellers, mimes, acrobats, etc. – who routinely performed, solo or in ensembles, for courtly and (at a later time) city audiences. The romanticised figure of the itinerant bard, though historically true, was only one aspect of medieval minstrels; it appears to have become increasingly less common in the late Middle Ages, along with a steady rise in the professionalisation, specialisation and social status of instrumental performers. Throughout the central Middle Ages (ninth–thirteenth centuries) the minstrels were primarily associated with a court. They played fiddles, harps, gitterns, lutes, wind instruments such as shawms and recorders, and percussion; they would frequently accompany themselves while singing a variety of vocal genres, from love songs to chansons de geste. The vast repertoire of troubadoric songs circulated in southern France, Spain and northern Italy by means of jongleurs, who only rarely were also the poets/composers (troubadours). Women were rarely, if ever, remunerated as minstrels, although they may have frequently contributed to musical life at court from different capacities. The actual services expected from courtly minstrels could vary greatly, depending on the interests and needs of their patrons. Payment records show that some courts dispensed with them altogether, while others hired them in sizeable number (this information per se says little about musical performances at any given court, which may often have been provided by other members of the staff). Not infrequently, a minstrel might act as an agent for his or her patron, and even engage in delicate political missions. In spite of their generally low social status, the minstrels were de facto courtly 9 Page, Voices and Instruments, pp. 210–42. 10 For an overview of the history of minstrelsy in the Middle Ages, see L. Gushee and R. Rastall, Oxford Music Online, ‘Minstrel’ (accessed 12 November 2009); and R. Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 1380– 1500, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 300–17 and 357–67. For a more detailed presentation of French courtly minstrels, see the opening three chapters of Page, The Owl and the Nightingale. On minstrels at the Burgundian court, see C. Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1364–1419: A Documentary History, Ottawa, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979, pp. 23–54; on the civic minstrels of the late Middle Ages, see in particular the contributions by Keith Polk and Timothy McGee cited below.
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figures who were expected to provide good company to their aristocratic hosts. Thus, by necessity they had to be well versed in the courtly arts of conversation and decorum, lest they lose the favour of their feudal patrons (hence their frequent condemnation by the clergy as flatterers).
The city Beginning in the fourteenth century the term minstrel came to indicate the figure of the professional instrumentalist employed by a court or a city. That period saw a steep rise in the number of wind bands across Europe, both privately and publicly supported: Keith Polk has calculated that at least 150 aristocratic households (including numerous bishops) and civic governments from German-speaking areas began to sponsor such bands in the period c. 1350–1450.11 The members of city bands enjoyed the benefits and the status of city officials or clerks. As Polk has pointed out, the aura of power and magnificence that such ensembles conferred on their public and private patrons, in the ruthless and highly volatile political climate of the times, was no doubt a key factor behind this development.12 Predictably, sound reflected hierarchy: the trumpets were typically reserved for the highest aristocratic stations, whereas shawm ensembles were considered appropriate for the lower ranks. The musical duties of city bands ranged from the most basic ‘announcement’ calls of the waits (in German: Türmer, who might be also employed on the battlefield) to the more elaborate public performances of professional wind musicians (called Stadtpfeifer or piffari). The rise of civic music ensembles led to the creation of schools that taught future minstrels not only the rudiments of performance (counterpoint, ornamentation, improvisation etc.), but also basic maths, reading and writing. These establishments were modelled on the artisan schools that towards the end of the Middle Ages began to offer basic education (in the vernacular) for the burgeoning middle class, in parallel to the traditional Latin curriculum taught at cathedral schools. The fourteenth century also saw the emergence of the ‘minstrel schools’, large gatherings of professional musicians from all over Europe typically held in German, French and Burgundian cities during Lent (traditionally a time of low musical activity).13
11 For example: Hamburg had a wind ensemble by 1350, Leipzig by 1440; the Holy Roman Emperor began its sponsorship in 1352 and the King of Poland in 1422; the number of players in these ensembles varied. See K. Polk, ‘The trombone, the slide trumpet and the ensemble tradition of the early Renaissance’, Early Music, 17 (1989), 390–1. 12 Ibid., 400. 13 On minstrel schools, see M. Gomez, ‘Minstrel schools in the Late Middle Ages’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 213–16.
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Some aspects of the rich late-medieval musical landscape have continued until the modern era in various forms. String instruments were normally kept in barbershops, and there was playing and singing in streets and squares, particularly during peak times such as annual fairs or religious feasts. In southern Germany and Austria music was made in the very popular bathhouses. The tradition of young men serenading outside the apartments of young women (hoffieren) was also well established in those areas. The performances typically relied on bowed and string instruments.14 The tabor and pipe combination shown in Fig. 10.1 (the instrument on the right is a gittern), was a very common way of providing dance music in urban outdoor settings. The tabor pipe was a duct flute with three or four holes and a generally narrow bore to allow overblowing; the tabor (in its many different shapes and sizes) was the most common percussion instrument in the Middle Ages.15
Fig. 10.1. Country scene with players of tabor and pipe, and gittern (Lyon Municipal Library)
14 On this topic see D. A. Smith, A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance, n.p., Lute Society of America, 2002, p. 33. 15 On medieval percussion instruments, see J. Blades, Percussion Instruments and their History, London, Faber, 1984, pp. 188–224, and J. Montagu, Timpani and Percussion, New Haven and London, Yale
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Instruments for religious occasions The water organ of Classical Antiquity (hydraulis) was still being used in Europe until the eleventh century and was no doubt common in churches and monasteries until that time. The later generation of pneumatic instruments was easier to carry and to operate, although the old hydraulis could guarantee a more continuous flow of air through the pipes.16 The new types of positive and portative organs also required a second person to operate one or two pairs of bellows to maintain air pressure. It is possible to overestimate the availability of the organ in European churches and monasteries of the late Middle Ages; no doubt many religious institutions could not afford them, and relied instead on the occasional use of wind and string instruments, particularly during processions and liturgical dramas.17 Although there is a fair amount of evidence pointing to the presence of the instruments in religious contexts, important questions remain open on their precise role and function in different contexts and in different geographic areas. Quite plausibly, chant sequences and other plainsong melodies such as the Te deum would have been performed with instrumental accompaniment on extra-liturgical occasions;18 yet the same melodies might generally have been played without the instruments (or at most with the organ) when performed during the Mass or the Office, with the possible exception of princely weddings or religious functions attended by foreign dignitaries, which would have featured trumpets and shawms. There is evidence that extra-liturgical occasions, such as sacred plays, might have featured the instruments even when performed inside a church.19
Domestic music-making Amateur music-making is for obvious reasons the least documented aspect of medieval performance practice; yet it was no doubt widespread among all social classes. Scattered bits of information about this practice may be often gleaned only indirectly from a variety of sources such as chronicles and personal inventories, which often include musical instruments. String instruments were again those preferred by the educated elites both south and north of the University Press, 2002, pp. 15–31. On the early history of the flute and the recorder, see A. Rowland-Jones, ‘Iconography in the history of the recorder up to 1430’, pt. 1, Early Music, 33 (2005), 557–74; pt. 2: Early Music, 34 (2006), 3–27. 16 M. Campbell et al., Musical Instruments: History, Technology, and Performance of Instruments of Western Music, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 394. On the medieval organ, see P. Williams, The Organ in Western Culture, 750–1250, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 17 Remnant, English Bowed Instruments, p. 106. 18 Ibid. 19 A. Tomasello, Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon, 1309–1403, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 34–6.
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Alps (noblemen, wealthy burghers and members of the clergy). The Florentine chronicler Filippo Villani, for instance, informs us that Francis Petrarch played the ‘lyre’ (by which he actually meant a lute, as it is clear from other documents), apparently accompanying himself and perhaps singing his own poetry.20 Better documented are the moments of music-making in the privacy of courtly chambers (as opposed to the halls, reserved for dancing and ceremonial music).21 Musically educated rulers such as Charles the Bold (d. 1477) not only entertained themselves in their leisure moments, but might also ask a court musician to perform for them. The highly respected and much sought-after position of chamber valet at the French and Burgundian courts was designed specifically to fulfil that function, though painters, sculptors and other artists were also hired as chamber valets. Skilled performers (usually harpers) such as Gautier l’Anglais to Baude Fresnel and Jean Tapissier served as chamber valets under Burgundian Duke Philip the Bold.22
Instrumental practices and repertoires Plucked instruments The impressive European history of the lute began with the Arab conquest of the Iberian peninsula and Sicily respectively in the eighth and ninth centuries.23 The establishment of the Moorish court in Cordoba attracted Arab musicians from the Middle East and northern Africa, including the legendary Ziryab (‘Blackbird’, c. 790–852), who is credited with having added a fifth string to the Middle Eastern lute that eventually made its way to southern Europe. In Cordoba Ziryab opened a music school for both singers and instrumentalists that was quite possibly the first (documented) one of its kind. The long presence of the Moors in Spain created an ideal condition for sustained musical exchanges between Arab and Christian traditions of poetry and music. Yet it was primarily through Sicily that the lute made its way to the rest of Europe, and only in the mid-thirteenth century. The extraordinary paintings of the Cappella Palatina of Palermo (c. 1140), completed under the Norman King Roger II, show a predominant number of lutes and gitterns, most of which were played by Muslim musicians, and many fewer wind, percussion and bowed instruments. But it was not until the late thirteenth
20 Smith, A History of the Lute, p. 27. 21 On public and private forms of music-making at court, see Strohm, The Rise of European Music, pp. 313–19. 22 Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy, pp. 123–37. 23 This short summary of the early history of the lute in Western Europe is indebted to Smith, A History of the Lute, pp. 16–33.
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century that the lute began to make inroads on the Continent thanks to the many Tuscan poets who sojourned in Sicily at that time in order to absorb the poetic tradition of the island – a pattern of transmission confirmed by the very high number of lutes depicted in fourteenth-century Tuscan paintings. There is no extant trecento music written specifically for the lute, nor do we possess any secure evidence that the instrument was used to play in polyphony; its usual function was no doubt to accompany narrative and lyrical poems. A small group of justiniane from Ottaviano Petrucci’s Frottole libro sesto (1505) may be by Venetian poet, statesman and musician Leonardo Giustinian (1383– 1446). They are frottola-like pieces, with a florid vocal line accompanied by two lower (and less active) parts, most likely intended for the lute. Italian humanist culture contributed to the popularity of the instrument, considered as a reincarnation of the old Greek lyre. Fourteenth-century French musicians appear to have favoured the harp and the gittern/citole, but the lute is mentioned in the statutes of the musicians’ guild in Paris as early as 1321. Payment records, corroborated by later remarks by Johannes Tinctoris and Sebastian Virdung, demonstrate that the lute was an extremely popular instrument in early fifteenth-century Germany.24 Two main types of plucked instruments circulated: the lute properly speaking, with a pear-body shape, no frets, and four strings (double or single), and the quintern (the German equivalent of gittern, probably of Andalusian origin), a smaller, pear-shaped instrument with a round back, a sickle-shaped pegbox and as many as five strings (single or double), but more commonly three or four.25 Both instruments used gut strings, although Tinctoris attributes to German musicians the invention of brass strings to double the gut strings an octave lower. The use of frets on the fingerboard, allowing better control of intonation, began to emerge around 1400, whereas the addition of a fifth string dates to c. 1430, in response to the growing practice of playing the lute polyphonically. With the addition of a sixth string around 1475, the lute had acquired a range that was suitable for the performance of an entire motet or chanson.26 The quintern and the lute may have been played as a duo until around 1430, after which the quintern gradually vanished from the scene. Accomplished string players, such as the legendary Pietrobono del Chitarrino of Ferrara, no doubt excelled on both instruments, but the gittern had a stronger association with amateur playing, particularly in the less respectable corners of society. This
24 See K. Polk, ‘Voices and instruments: soloists and ensembles in the 15th century’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 180. 25 K. Polk, German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons and Performance Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 22–4. 26 Smith, A History of the Lute, pp. 52–3.
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instrument, for instance, is mentioned in connection with music in taverns, with rowdy street music at night, and is a relatively frequent occurrence in crime records.27 There is also evidence of lute–organ duos in early fifteenthcentury Germany (most likely portable organs were involved); not coincidentally Conrad Paumann, the most prominent German organist of the fifteenth century, was also an accomplished lute player, indeed one of the first ones to play the instrument polyphonically, that is, plucking the strings with his fingers, rather than with the plectrum.28 Paumann is also credited with having introduced the German system of lute tablature. Such extraordinary cases of versatility in performance, however, gave way to specialisation later in the century.29 The widespread presence of the lute around the Mediterranean basin was paralleled by the harp in northern European courts throughout the Middle Ages. Anglo-Norman and Old French courtly literature often features remarkably detailed descriptions, and sometimes images of musical scenes, most commonly a courtly figure or hero performing a lengthy poetic song (lai) on that instrument: for instance, a thirteenth-century copy of the Tristan en prose has a picture of a harpist playing for King Mark of Cornwall.30 The instrument appears to have fallen gradually out of fashion at the inception of the Renaissance, but it remained a favourite at both the Burgundian and the Avignonese papal courts in the fifteenth century. Needless to say, it is not known how the instrument was used in performance. Even the famous ars subtilior rondeau ‘La harpe de mélodie’ by Jaquemin de Senleches, a virtuoso harper at the Avignonese papal court, may have been conceived for an a cappella performance, in spite of mentioning the harp in the text, and of being notated in the shape of a harp in one of its sources.31
Bowed instruments Iconographic and literary sources attest unequivocally that the fiddle, in its many types and forms, enjoyed great popularity for much of the Middle Ages, both inside and outside courtly circles. The thirteenth-century romance Gille de Chyn by Gaultier de Tournai reports that two players sang a love song accompanying themselves on the fiddle. Another thirteenth-century chanson de geste of the Lorraine cycle, Hervis de Metz, likewise mentions a joungleur singing to the accompaniment of his own fiddle.32 References to sons d’amours in these 27 L. Wright, ‘The medieval gittern and citole: a case of mistaken identity’, Galpin Society Journal, 30 (1977), 15 (the article is reprinted in T. McGee (ed.), Instruments and their Music in the Middle Ages, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 253–89). 28 Polk, ‘Voices and instruments’, 179. 29 Ibid., 186. 30 Page, Voices and Instruments, p. 99. 31 On the medieval harp and its role in the performance of polyphony, see H. M. Brown, ‘The trecento harp’, in S. Boorman (ed.), Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 35–73. 32 Page, Voices and Instruments, p. 31.
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poems from northern France (i.e. ‘France’) point to the transmission of troubadoric songs outside Occitaine, that is to say, in areas where the poetic language was not easily understood. The practice of accompanying these melodies with a bowed instrument (and frequently with a harp also) may have been a way to draw the attention of the listener towards musical sound and away from the barely intelligible texts. However, not all vocal music would have had an instrumental accompaniment irrespective of style and genre: Page has suggested that songs in the non-strophic High Style of the troubadours may have been routinely performed without instrumental accompaniment, while songs in the Low Style and especially dances would have involved the use of the instruments (with or without the voice).33 The visual sources consistently maintain a distinction between waisted fiddles played a gamba with underhand bow, and non-waisted (i.e. oval or rectangular) fiddles played a braccio with overhand bow.34 The popularity of the manner of performance a gamba (i.e. with the instrument resting on or between the legs) declined rapidly in the early years of the fourteenth century for reasons that remain unclear. For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the fiddle was played exclusively a braccio across Western Europe with the exception of remote territories of the provinces of Aragon and Valencia, where the Moorish tradition of playing the rabāb in the a gamba position continued unabated (to judge from a number of paintings with musical scenes from that area). The rabāb was the same instrument variously described by a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French authors as rubeba, rubebe or rebebe, later to become ‘rebec’ (a very similar instrument is still played today in Morocco). It had three or four strings (more rarely only one or two, or as many as five or six) tuned in fifths and mounted on an elongated body of various sizes with a curved back and generally two or three decorative roses on the upper end of the belly, made of wood (the lower end was characteristically made of parchment). According to Woodfield, the rabāb served as the model for the creation of the larger Valencian viol in the 1470s, which in turn appears to have been the immediate ancestor of the Renaissance viol.35 From mid-fifteenth-century Aragon also came the vihuela de mano, a sort of ‘plucked fiddle’ that became especially popular in Spain in the next century.36 Very common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was also the organistrum (also called symphonie and vielle a roué in France and later hurdy-gurdy in England),
33 Ibid., pp. 12–28. 34 The short presentation of bowed instruments that follows is based for the most part on Remnant, English Bowed Instruments, and I. Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, Cambridge University Press, 1984. 35 Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, pp. 15–37, 61–79. 36 Ibid., pp. 38–60.
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a sort of ‘fake’ bowed instrument in which the strings vibrate against a spinning wheel, rather than against a bow. The organistrum was a favourite of troubadours and trouvères and was later associated with blind musicians.37 In spite of the great number of extant images of bowed instruments the crucial issue of the shape of the bridge supporting the strings over the soundboard remains – and is likely bound to remain – frustratingly elusive. Our assessment of the role of the fiddle in medieval musical performance hinges on the answer to that question. If medieval fiddles were routinely built with flat bridges until around 1470, as scholars such as Peter Holman and Ian Woodfield have maintained, then only the outer strings could have been bowed individually until around that time; the inner strings could produce sound only as parts of open-fifths chords (drones).38 On the other hand, if arched bridges were in use then the strings could have been positioned at variable distances from the soundboard, thus bowed individually to perform complex melodic parts such as those of mensural polyphony. Scholars such as Brown and Remnant, among others, have pointed to iconographical evidence to demonstrate that arched bridges were indeed used long before 1470; Brown has argued, for instance, that the fiddle shown in Fig. 10.2 supports this hypothesis.39 At any rate, even accepting the early dating of arched bridges it would seem that many and perhaps most fiddles would have featured flat bridges, with relatively limited potential. On the other hand, the anonymous textless motet In seculum viellatoris (‘In seculum of the fiddle player’, see the opening bars in Ex. 10.1), from the late thirteenth century, may have been conceived for at least one fiddle, a performance that would require the bowing of individual strings.40 The issue of tuning directly relates to the ongoing studies of bridge shapes. In his Tractatus de musica, Jerome indicates three different tunings for the fiddle: d G g d0 d0 , d G g d0 g0 , and G G d c0 c0 ; Howard Mayer Brown has observed that the first two would have been appropriate for playing drones, and the last one for playing melodic lines.41 Jerome also writes that the two strings of the rebec were tuned to low G (gamma) and D, but it seems implausible that an instrument with short strings such as the rebec would have been tuned to such low pitches; Brown has observed that Jerome’s pitch indications are to be viewed as
37 S. and S. Palmer, The Hurdy-Gurdy, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1980, pp. 44–67. 38 Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, p. 71, and the summary of this debate in D. Fallows, ‘Secular polyphony in the 15th century’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 206–7. 39 See Remnant, English Bowed Instruments, pp. 24–7, and Brown, ‘The trecento fiddle and its bridges’, Early Music, 17 (1989), 308–29. 40 For a short discussion of this piece, see Remnant, English Bowed Instruments, p. 104. 41 Brown, ‘Instruments’, in Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice, pp. 24–5.
Instrumental performance before c. 1430
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Fig. 10.2. Giovanni del Biondo, Musical angels (Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery), showing two players of organetto and fiddle. relative, not absolute.42 One sentence from the Tractatus suggests that skilled fiddle players would have been able to improvise a contrapuntal line against a pre-existing melody, following the technique of ‘fifthing’ in use among singers.43 While instrumentalists routinely played vocal music from memory and in the best cases improvised over notated melodies according to the techniques of discantus used by singers, there is also evidence of poetic texts added to pieces 42 Brown, ‘The trecento fiddle’, pp. 323–5.
43 See also Page, Voices and Instruments, pp. 70–6.
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Ex. 10.1. In seculum viellatoris (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS. Lit. 115, fol. 63v, n. 105), opening
that had originally been conceived for the instruments (such as dances). Christopher Page has observed that the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras created his canso Kalenda maya by adding a new text to a pre-existing estampida that would have been normally performed by two fiddles.44
Wind instruments German scholar Konrad of Megenberg documents important transitions in fourteenth-century musical life in his treatise Yconomica, written c. 1350 as a manual of how to run an aristocratic household. Konrad makes a distinction between the servi delectabiles, that is, servants who routinely entertain their master, and the professional minstrels (the ioculatores) who were increasingly populating the urban scene.45 Equally interesting to music historians is his assessment that the ‘old fiddle’ is considered old-fashioned at that time, and that wind instruments and percussions (presumably played in small consorts) are the latest fashion.46 Until Konrad’s generation, and since antiquity, the trumpet had been available only in the shape of a straight pipe about 150 cm long and ending with a flare. This instrument, variously known as buisine or (in Germany) posaune, had very limited musical capabilities, since it could generate only the first four sounds of the natural harmonic series (i.e. unison, octave, twelfth and 44 Ibid., p. 47. 45 Page, ‘German musicians’, pp. 195–6. 46 Ibid., pp. 196. Polk, German Instrumental Music, pp. 21 and 228, n. 26.
Instrumental performance before c. 1430
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fifteenth). Thus, the buisine was used for the most part to produce military signals or celebratory fanfares. Nevertheless, during the fourteenth century it was increasingly adopted as the lowest member of the shawm ensemble for providing drones in the performance of dance music.47 The decisive factor leading to a full integration of the trumpet within the shawm band (alta capella) was the metallurgic innovations of the last quarter of the fourteenth century.48 At that time instrument makers developed new procedures allowing them to bend a metal pipe while preserving its cylindrical shape. This revolutionary technique led to new ‘S-shaped’ instruments around 1375 and to the now familiar twice-folded shape around 1400.49 Scholars have been much occupied with the question whether or not the new ‘S-shaped’ and folded instruments featured a slide mechanism as early as in the first half of the fifteenth century. The current general consensus is that a single-slide Renaissance trumpet (either ‘S-shaped’ or double-folded) became a stable member of the shawm ensemble in the first decades of the century. The player would move the entire trumpet up and down the slide, in which he blew air through the mouthpiece. The trompette des ménestrels regularly cited in Burgundian payment records from 1422 onwards was most likely such a slide instrument. In southern Germany, however, the preferred designation was posaune, thus the same term that used to indicate the straight natural trumpet. Later in the fifteenth century the posaune, known in Italy as trombone, was extended into the lower range and fitted with a double slide.50 On the other hand, it is currently assumed that the trompette de guerre, or war trumpet, did not need and thus did not normally feature the slide mechanism.51 It has been plausibly argued that a slide trumpet tuned in D or G played the contra-tenor part in alta capella ensembles;52 the shawm (in D) would have improvised over the tenor part played by the bombard or tenor shawm (tuned in G), which indeed early fifteenth-century Burgundian documents refer to as the teneur de ménestrels.53 Presumably such professional ensembles performed a wide-ranging repertoire that included motets and chansons in addition to dance music. According to Ross Duffin, instances of this repertoire are provided by 47 P. Downey, ‘The Renaissance slide trumpet: fact or fiction?’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 26. 48 For an overview of the organisational structure, the instrument types, and the musical activities of the fifteenth-century alta capella, see L. Welker, ‘Alta capella: zur Ensemblepraxis der Blasinstrumente im 15. Jahrhundert’, Basler Jahrhbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 7 (1983), 119–65; K. Polk, German Instrumental Music, pp. 45–86. Welker’s article, along with those by Wulf Arlt and Kenneth Zuckermann in the same volume (see the bibliography), deals extensively with the issue of instrumental improvisation in the Middle Ages. 49 Downey, ‘The Renaissance slide trumpet’, 26. 50 K. Polk, ‘The trombone’, 402–3. See also T. Herbert, The Trombone, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 45–60. 51 R. Duffin, ‘The trompette des ménestrels in the 15th-century alta capella’, Early Music, 17 (1989), 397. 52 Ibid., 399–400. 53 Ibid., 401.
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the small number of untexted pieces preserved in Trent 87, including a basse dance melody that is related to a motet attributed to Dufay.54 The melodic ranges of the parts involved, transposed up a fifth, match very conveniently the ranges of the alta capella, as shown in Ex. 10.2. The shawm (called schalmey in German and cennamella or cialamella in Italian) became increasingly widespread in the fourteenth century across Europe, although it was certainly well known long before (it figures prominently among the musical vignettes that accompany the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a sign of its Middle-Eastern origin).55 It was a double-reed instrument in the shape of a conical pipe of c. 27–30 inches (69–76 cm) in length, ending with a flare (quite prominent in Fig. 10.3 below). Modern versions of the instrument, which may differ from their medieval counterparts in important respects, can still be encountered in rural areas throughout the European region. The keyless treble shawm, spanning about two octaves from its lowest note d00 , including most chromatic pitches) was by far the most commonly used: it could easily play rapid melismatic passages with a crisp and imposing sound that appears to have allowed variations in dynamics. It was thus particularly suited for outdoor performances. In the second half of the fourteenth century Ex. 10.2. T’Andernaken al op den Rijn (Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS. 87, fols. 198v–199r)
b 6 œ œœ & 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ ˙
5
6 œ. V 4
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˙.
j œœ
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œ
b j b œ . œ œ œ œ œj œ œ œ ˙ . J ˙
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˙
w.
˙
Ó. œ œœ œ J J
#3# 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 j j œj œ œjœ j œ œj œ ˙ . & œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ œj j œ j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ # # œ œ Œ œ œ j œ . œ V œ œ œ J œ œJ œ œ œ œ ˙ Œ œ ˙ ˙. ˙. ˙ ˙. œ œ ˙ ˙. ?b w.
54 Ibid., 399–400. 55 For the following information on the shawm I am indebted to Polk, German Instrumental Music, pp. 50– 4, and to T. McGee, The Ceremonial Musicians of Late-Medieval Florence, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 58–62.
Instrumental performance before c. 1430
277
Fig. 10.3 School of Giotto, Glorification of St Francis, detail showing a wind ensemble (two shawms and bagpipe), organistrum and psaltery (Church of St Francesco al Prato, Pistoia). the treble shawm was the highest member of professional trio ensembles that also included the tenor shawm (the bombard in g, featuring one key on its seventh hole) and the bagpipe, generally replaced by the slide trumpet around 1410 and by the trombone towards the end of the fifteenth century. Shawm players customarily doubled on the bagpipe and even on trumpets and soft instruments. Iconographical sources and paying records from civic archives indicate that shawm ensembles customarily provided dance music.56 In fourteenth-century Florence a player of cennamella was hired with the specific duty of sounding the alarm (sveglia) on particular occasions; an ensemble of three piffari (originally two shawms and one bagpipe, then three shawms) was founded in the 1380s as part of a general reorganisation of the city government and imitation of northern courts (particularly France and Burgundy); among other duties, the new ensemble was expected to entertain government officials during daily meals at the civic Mensa.57 The performers came increasingly from other parts of Italy and from northern Europe (particularly Germany); thus the repertoire they performed must have been international
56 Emanuel Winternitz has sketched a social history of the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy in his Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979, pp. 66–85. 57 McGee, The Ceremonial Musicians, pp. 124–45.
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in character. All professional instrument players prior to c. 1500 played from memory and were skilled in the art of improvising over a tenor part.58 The saltarelli and istampitte preserved in London, British Library, Add. 29987, copied near Milan around 1400, are indicative of the dance music played by Italian wind bands of the time. The presence of northern musicians and northern repertoires in Italy increased dramatically in the early fifteenth century, with the return of the papacy in Rome and with the establishment of piffari ensembles throughout the peninsula.
Epilogue: early music and modern ears In the last three decades our knowledge of medieval instruments, their performing techniques, and the specific circumstances in which they were used has increased significantly, thanks to a carefully contextualised evaluation of the available iconographical and documentary sources. As a result of this sustained scholarly effort, the rather indiscriminate use of instruments in performances of medieval music dating to the 1960s and 1970s has given way to a more discriminating approach: current scholars strive to resolve the issue of instrumental participation in the performance of a given polyphonic piece by considering a variety of factors that include the profile of a melodic part, its suitability to carry text, the particular content and origin of the sources, etc. Yet, our attitudes towards the performance of medieval music are bound to change with the deepening of our knowledge of instruments, musical styles and performance practices, and with the impact of new interpretations of the repertoire proposed by performing ensembles.
58 Ibid., pp. 146–53.
. 11 .
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’ JOHN HAINES
This chapter explores the issues laid out in Chapter 8 by inspecting a wellstudied piece, Guillaume de Machaut’s ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’.1 The circumstances surrounding the creation of this ballade illustrate its remoteness from the bulk of music-making of the mid-fourteenth century. Still, something can and will be said about the performance of Machaut’s ballade, inasmuch as it contrasts with the majority of music performed in the Middle Ages. It seems apposite to start outside ballade 34 by looking at the countless pieces of menial music performed around the time and near the place Machaut put together his learned musical composition. As outlined in Chapter 8, we begin with music made at work, from humble work songs to official ceremonial pieces, and then move to music whose primary purpose is to edify, from liturgical chants to songs performed at banquets. The point of my selecting this well-known ballade is to show how a piece such as this misrepresents the average medieval music performance. By holding Machaut’s famous ballade under the light of the revised view of music history proposed in Chapter 8, we begin to see it as a paradox, an extraordinary written work far removed from the mainstream performance world of the mid-fourteenth century. But first, a quick sketch of our case piece. Machaut conceived his ballade as a literary work, placing it in the grand and original enterprise that was his quasiautobiographical Voir Dit, a story incorporating letters and musical exchanges between a lover (Machaut) and his much younger beloved Toute-Belle (Péronne).2 As related in the Voir Dit, ballade 34 originated in an epistolary exercise of one-upmanship. When Machaut’s colleague Thomas Paien sent to him his poem ‘Quant Theseus’, Machaut responded by composing a new poem using the same poetic scheme as well as the same refrain: ‘Je vois assez, puisque 1 I am grateful to Lawrence Earp for lending me his research notes on the Reina Codex for my edition of ballade 34 below, and to Mark Laver for producing the digital score. Throughout this chapter, I have opted for the conventional modern spelling of ‘ballade’ rather than the medieval French balade found in some recent scholarship. 2 For a summary, see Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Poem), ed. D. LeechWilkinson and R. Palmer, New York, Garland, 1998, pp. xxvi–xxvii.
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je vois ma dame’ (‘I see enough, since I see my lady’). According to Machaut’s own account in the Voir Dit, it was in October of 1363 that he decided to fuse these two poems into a single ballade. The following month, after putting together the four-part ballade and revising it several times, the sexagenarian Machaut sent it to his nineteen-year-old lover Péronne. As he relates in the Voir Dit, Machaut had made it for her. He could not resist congratulating himself on his outstanding ballade, declaring to Péronne, ‘I have made the tunes in four parts, and have heard them several times, and they please me very much.’3 More than a sentimental musical love-gift, then, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’ is a literary coup, as well as the only four-part ballade with two texts in Machaut’s repertoire. It is important to place this ambitious composition squarely in its original literary context, the equally ambitious Voir Dit into which Machaut placed it. Certain recent critics have gone so far as to see the central circumstance of the Voir Dit, Machaut’s relationship with Péronne, as ‘an imagined pretext for the author’s playful exploration of the shifting relations among poet, public, and patron’.4 At the very least, Machaut has embellished their relationship in his account; at worst, it is a complete fiction. Ballade 34, too, is a cross between a heartfelt expression and a parchment chimera, both a sentimental confessional and a sophisticated musical-poetic exercise, self-consciously clever and disarmingly tender all at once. As I shall argue in the conclusion of this chapter, this complexity, along with the work’s surprisingly modern-sounding tonality, has made ballade 34 a hit in modern music histories. If to seasoned readers ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’ seems a rather hackneyed case study for medieval music performance, it was not always so, and it is instructive briefly to contemplate why. For a long time, scholars were unsure as to where Machaut even belonged in the history of music. Early historians such as Jean Lebeuf and Charles Coussemaker in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, ranked him with the trouvères, well below the favoured Adam de la Halle, and had comparatively little to say about the fourteenth-century canon from Reims.5 This all changed with Friedrich Ludwig’s major work on late medieval polyphony in the early part of the twentieth century, including his lifetime project, the complete edition of Machaut’s musical opera. Ludwig placed Machaut at the centre of medieval music history. As early as 1905, he stated that the composer ‘represents the 3 The account is given with quotations from the Voir Dit in D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame: aspects of genre and style in the late works of Machaut’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 54–9. 4 Machaut, Livre dou Voir Dit, ed. Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, p. xxi. 5 J. Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères, Cambridge University, Press, 2004, pp. 93 and 177–8.
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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pinnacle of mid-fourteenth-century musical art, firmly establishing musical forms for all French polyphonic genres . . . in which he is emulated by a significant number of French composers during the second half of the century’.6 Henceforth, Machaut should no longer be ‘classed with the knightly trouvères’, as H. E. Woolridge put it a little later, for ‘his real place is not among these distinguished amateurs’.7 Machaut soon became the fourteenth century’s most ‘outstanding French musician’ and its ‘greatest French poet and composer’.8 Thanks to Ludwig, Machaut shifted from the shadows to centre stage, occupying entire chapters in the history of music, with his followers parenthetically tagging along. ‘Machaut and his Progeny’, declares the recent Oxford History of Western Music in a chapter heading, just as Ludwig envisioned it.9 From Ludwig on, too, Machaut’s secular works – including his forty-two ballades – rose to ‘the rank of classic master works’, in Ludwig’s words, and none more so than his ballades for four voices.10 Of the eight, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’ presented an irresistible temptation to historians, since, in addition to having an unusual form, it came with the intriguing tale of a poetic competition and an outrageous love story between the aged composer and a woman some four decades his junior, as I related above. Ludwig edited for the first time the double ballade by the man he called ‘the greatest musical genius of the French fourteenth-century’ in Guido Adler’s popular music history, first published in 1924 with the last edition published in 1977.11 From there ballade 34 was adopted in Claude Palisca’s companion anthology to Donald Grout’s best-selling History of Western Music. There it remained in circulation as the representative of Machaut’s secular music for a decade and a half (in the first and second editions, 1980 and 1988), only to be dethroned in 1996 by yet another four-voice secular piece by Machaut, his rondeau ‘Rose, liz’.12 It will be worthwhile to consider, at the end of this chapter, just why a quirky ballade by the erstwhile obscure trouvère rose in the twentieth century to become one
6 Haines, ‘Friedrich Ludwig’s “Musicology of the Future”: a commentary and translation’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 12 (2003), 163. 7 H. E. Woolridge, The Polyphonic Period, part 1, Method of Musical Art, 330–1400, The Oxford History of Music, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1929, vol. 1, p. 242. 8 G. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, New York, Norton,1940, p. 347; R. Hoppin, Medieval Music, New York, Norton,1978, p. 396. An interesting compromise is Paul Henry Lang’s rather curt treatment of Machaut, the ‘new trouvère’, in Music in Western Civilization, New York, Norton, 1941, p. 153. 9 R. Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, Oxford University Press, 2005, vol. 1, p. 289. 10 F Ludwig, ‘Die geistliche nichtliturgische, weltliche einstimmige und die mehrstimmige Musik des Mittelalters bis zum Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in G. Adler (ed.), Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 2nd edn, Berlin, H. Keller, 1930, p. 272. 11 Ludwig, ‘Die geistliche nichtliturgische . . . Musik’, pp. 267 and 270–2. 12 C. Palisca, Norton Anthology of Western Music, New York, Norton, 1980, vol. 1, pp. 78–81, 2nd edn, 1988, vol. 1, pp. 83–6, and 3rd edn, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 82–4. The ballade is also mentioned in Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, p. 347.
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of the most significant masterworks by a medieval musical genius – leading one musicologist to simply call it ‘miraculous’.13
Machaut’s musical world Let us return to Johannes de Grocheio already mentioned several times in Chapter 8. Writing around a half-century before Machaut composed his ballade 34, Grocheio’s discussion of music performed in Paris around 1300 first categorises different types of secular music – epic songs, courtly songs and dance music, all still thriving in the nearby city of Reims some sixty years later. The fourteenth century witnessed the tail end of an active reception and codification of all these repertoires. Epic songs, for example, were still copied and their melodies still ringing in the air, if the reference to a song using the ‘melody of the Gui de Nanteuil’ epic (so Gui de Nantull) is any indication.14 The same applies to other types of vernacular song, in particular the anthologies or chansonniers of the trouvères. Machaut himself enjoyed trouvère music and cited the songs of Thibaut de Champagne and others in his motets.15 And still in the mid-fourteenth century churchmen were railing against the dance music to which Grocheio’s treatise was a witness, including the ductia and stantipes.16 As one injunction from around 1350 put it, city officials and other ministers should not allow, either in churches or in cemeteries, ‘ring dances (choreas), silly songs (cantilenas) . . . or any other such kind of wantonness or shamefulness’.17 Although removed from the learned, literary world of Machaut’s double ballade, all of the epic, courtly and dance music just mentioned was performed in and around Reims where the great composer forged his famous ballade. Grocheio comes closer to the learned universe of Machaut’s Voir Dit in his second category of musica composita.18 He includes the motet and the hocket, both genres to which Machaut bent his compositional skill. In his third and most sizeable category of church music, Grocheio lists all of the chants of Mass and Office. Anne Robertson has recently reminded us that most of Machaut’s sacred polyphony occurred in the context of predominantly monophonic chant. As canon at Reims for forty years, one of Machaut’s major 13 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit’, p. 57. 14 R. Bossuat, Manuel bibliographique de la littérature française du Moyen Âge, Paris, Librairie d’argences, 1951, pp. 49 and 54; F. Gennrich, Der musikalische Vortrag der altfranzösischen chansons de geste, Halle, Niemeyer, 1923, p. 10. 15 Haines, Eight Centuries, pp. 18–21 and 25; J. Boogaart, ‘Encompassing past and present: quotations and their function in Machaut’s motets’, Early Music History, 20 (2001), 1–86. 16 C. Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 73. 17 E. Martène, Thesaurus novus anecdotorum, Paris, 1717, repr. New York, 1968, vol. 4, p. 253. 18 Page, Discarding Images, p. 74.
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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activities included taking part in singing the daily offices and various masses for the complex liturgical web of feasts and events, the most notable being the important coronation rites in that city’s cathedral.19 Nearly all this repertoire was monophonic Latin chant. We must be careful of overly relying on Grocheio for medieval music performance. He never intended to write an objective description of performances in the modern sense, but rather a new philosophy of music grounded in the recently rediscovered works of natural philosophy by Aristotle.20 Grocheio wanted to demonstrate that music could be divided according to its parts and members much in the same way that Aristotle and his thirteenth-century commentators had classified all animals. Consequently, Grocheio adjusted the musical reality of his day, leaving out music that did not fit his Aristotelian agenda.21 For example, he did not include in his musica composita (also regularis or canonica) the multi-voiced rondeau made famous by Adam de la Halle, perhaps since it was either too secular or trite for this canonical category.22 Of the several music genres Grocheio overlooks, a major one is the incantation. Now, it so happens that we have an extraordinary witness on the performance of incantations from right around the time Machaut is composing his double ballade in Reims. In a series of writings spanning the 1350s and 1360s, Paris-trained scholar Nicole Oresme discusses the music of incantations. Just as Grocheio a few decades earlier rejects the music of the spheres, Nicole Oresme denounces incantations as having no supernatural potency, expressing a rational scepticism on the ascendant in the fourteenth century.23 In so doing, he focuses on the effectiveness of their musical performance. And here is where Nicole Oresme provides us with unprecedented – and as usual for the Middle Ages, late – information on the medieval performance of incantations. He describes the audience for incantations as often being ‘miserable, imprudent and lacking discernment’; they are easily deceived because they are frequently young or at least adolescent.24 He describes the performers of incantations as ‘certain old women’ prone to nefarious magic. Singers may 19 A. W. Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 37–51. 20 J. Haines and P. DeWitt, ‘Johannes de Grocheio and Aristotelian natural philosophy’, Early Music History, 27 (2008), 47–98. 21 Ibid., 92. 22 Page, Discarding Images, p. 74: ‘musica composita vel regularis vel canonica quam appellant musicam mensuratam’. 23 B. Delaurenti, La puissance des mots: Virtus verborum: débats doctrinaux sur le pouvoir des incantations au Moyen Âge, Paris, Cerf, 2007, pp. 405–78. Following Aristotle, Grocheio asks ‘Quis enim audivit complexionem sonare?’ See E. Rohloff, Der Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheo nach den Quellen neu herausgegeben mit Übersetzung ins Deutsche und Revisionsbericht, Leipzig, Reinecke, 1943, p. 46. 24 Delaurenti, La puissance des mots, pp. 412–13.
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also belong to the male sex, as Oresme mentions the conjurator and nigromanticus.25 Oresme then proceeds to give a vivid description of the singer in the following remarkable passage:26 His face or countenance – in fact, his whole appearance – will afterwards remain for a long time notably changed in corporal leanness, in color, and aspect, so that one would scarcely believe that he is the same person as before. And he will appear for a long time as if half-dead, and he will have a certain blackness about the eyes in the manner of a menstruating woman. And not only will he be changed in body but also he will be completely disturbed mentally, so that he will look like an idiot or madman.
Oresme credits the potency of incantations to the particulars of their music performance. He compares the energetic performance of incantation singers to that of a priest preaching. Their voice has a wild aspect, mixing animal cries with other sounds of nature. The singer ‘forms various sounds internally (ad intra) and an unfitting and almost trumpet-like cry resounds’.27 In sum, singers of incantations ‘do not always use a meaningful sound but murmur some sounds that are difform with some strange unaccustomed difformity . . . dissimilar to the ordinary human voice’.28 Nicole’s precious description of the singing incantator rivals any other medieval witness on the ‘sound of medieval song’, to paraphrase the title of Timothy McGee’s important book.29 Thus Nicole Oresme, writing in Rouen during the 1360s, describes incantation performances that cannot have been much different from those in neighbouring Reims where Machaut lived and worked. Also overlooked by Grocheio are a number of musical genres discussed in Chapter 8, from work songs such as the lullaby to the edifying music of stage productions. Madeleine Pelner Cosman has discussed some relevant musical performances.30 As she points out, a host of performed music related to the average person’s medical needs in Machaut’s day. Medieval medical writers prescribed that meals be regulated with a view to a person’s health. Eating and related activities such as hunting were surrounded by music. Cosman gives the example of the erotic shivaree performed for good fortune at weddings.31 And, of course, musical performances occurred in connection with the diagnosis and
25 Ibid., pp. 413 and 419; the original Latin with an English translation is given in M. Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968, pp. 350–1. 26 Clagett, Nicole Oresme, p. 350; Delaurenti, La puissance des mots, pp. 419–20. 27 Clagett, Nicole Oresme, pp. 368–9; Delaurenti, La puissance des mots, p. 467. 28 Clagett, Nicole Oresme, p. 369; Delaurenti, La puissance des mots, p. 469. 29 T. McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, Oxford University Press, 1998. 30 M. P. Cosman, ‘Machaut’s medical musical world’, in M. P. Cosman and B. Chandler (eds.), Machaut’s World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, New York Academy of Sciences, 1978, pp. 1–36. 31 Ibid., p. 3.
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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treatment of diseases, including psychological ones.32 It is difficult to overstate at present the importance of astrology and astronomy (synonymous during this period) to the medieval planning of daily events. As Cosman points out, astrological movements and predictions typically did not conflict with the Christian view; they belonged to ‘God’s great scheme’.33 In this sense, as she puts it in her conclusion, the esoteric doctrine of the music of the spheres had a very practical application as the divine, astrological music with which all human music needed to synchronise. My paraphrase of Cosman’s title in the subheading for this section, ‘Machaut’s Musical World’, holds an irony. For all of the musics just mentioned did not so much belong to Machaut’s musical world as his music belonged to their world. Machaut’s ballade 34 and his other compositions that have come down to us in writing constitute a very small part of the entire musical panorama of his time, as I have implied in the above. As I shall now argue, such musical works as his ballade 34 are ‘compositions’ in the modern sense, the products of a rarefied literary culture to which the exceptionally welleducated nobleman Guillaume de Machaut belonged.
A literary composition Machaut was a privileged man in the fourteenth century.34 Educated at cathedral schools in his home town of Reims, France’s prestigious coronation city in the Middle Ages, he obtained early on an important and well-paying secretarial post in the employ of King John of Bohemia. After completing his baccalaureate at the University of Paris, a rare achievement at the time, he received a series of canonicates, giving him the necessary means and leisure to pursue his literary and musical aspirations. Throughout his career, Machaut remained well connected to nobility such as John the Duke of Berry to whom he dedicated his Fonteinne amoureuse. For a measure of Machaut’s wealth and self-esteem we need only look at his celebrated Messe de Nostre Dame, a Marian Mass he composed and paid to have sung regularly at Reims in memory of himself and his brother.35 By training and vocation, Machaut was a writer, an exceptional thing in the Middle Ages. He belonged to the even more exclusive club of late-medieval
32 See C. Page, ‘Music and medicine in the thirteenth century’, in P. Horden (ed.), Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, pp. 109–19. 33 Cosman, ‘Machaut’s medical musical world’, p. 6. 34 On the following paragraph, see especially L. Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research, New York, Garland, 1995, pp. 3–51; and Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, Livre dou Voir Dit, pp. xi–xviii. 35 Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 2–4 and 257–75.
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authors who oversaw the compilation of their works.36 This he did over several decades, from around 1350 to his death in 1377, with ‘a small army of messengers and copyists’ assisting him.37 Into his edition of his complete works Machaut placed his Voir Dit (over 9,000 lines of verse, not counting the intercalated letters and musical pieces) after his literary works such as the Remede de Fortune and before the gatherings devoted to independent musical works. Nowhere is the author’s literary ego more manifest than in his Voir Dit, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini has emphasised. With its complex admixture of genres (letters, songs), Machaut’s ‘true story’ powerfully asserts his literary mastery and his unique identity as both a subtle master of writing and a courtly lover following archetypes such as Tristan.38 Writing at the height of his craft in the 1360s, Machaut ably seduces and manipulates his reader, specifying at times who may read the text, whether an audience can hear it and, if so, how it is to be performed. In one case, he tells Toute-Belle to learn a song ‘exactly as it has been composed without adding or taking anything away’, though conceding it can be performed on a variety of instruments – organ, bagpipe or other.39 We first encounter ballade 34 well into the second half of the Voir Dit, in a letter from Péronne to Machaut dated 5 October 1363. She informs him of a poem (balade) that he accidentally sent her, Thomas Paien’s poem ‘Quant Theseus’, which she promises to send back to him.40 Apparently, sometime prior, perhaps in September, Machaut’s acquaintance Thomas Paien – whose exact identity, incidentally, is not known (Ludwig believed him to be a professor of law at the Sorbonne) – had sent the poem in a letter to Machaut. Leaving the letter unopened, Machaut misfiled it and accidentally sent it to Péronne.41 Less than two weeks later, on 17 October, Machaut sends to her Paien’s poem along with his ‘response’, the poem ‘Ne quier voir’, which, he states, he had composed as soon as he had opened her letter – ‘on the spot’, in Robert Palmer’s translation. He promises to write music for it.42 This he does, in the thin space of a little over two weeks. On 3 November, he sends her the
36 J. Haines, ‘Manuscript sources and calligraphy’, in S. Trezise (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to French Music, Cambridge University Press, ch. 14 (forthcoming). 37 S. J. Williams, ‘An author’s role in fourteenth-century book production: Guillaume de Machaut’s “Livre ou je met toutes choses”’, Romania, 90 (1969), 446. 38 J. Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soutil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle, Geneva, Slatkine, 1985, pp. 32–49, 93–103 and 211–21; see also W. Calin, A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1974, pp. 167–202. 39 D. McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience, University of Toronto Press, 2006, p. 68. 40 Machaut, Livre dou Voir Dit, p. 417 : ‘I found . . . a ballad someone had sent you. So I am sending this back because I believe you have never looked at it, for it is still sealed.’ 41 Machaut, Livre dou Voir Dit, pp. xxx n. 2, 737 and 740. See also Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit: a reconstruction and a guide for musicians, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2 (1993), 124–7. 42 Machaut, Livre dou Voir Dit, pp. 441 and 740.
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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Paien poem and his response, set to music in four parts; he begs her to learn these, for ‘they please me quite well’.43 A few days later, on 5 November, Péronne comments on the two poems, adding that his is better than Paien’s, although she says nothing about the music.44 What is extraordinary about the foregoing is how much it tells us about the composition of a piece of medieval music. Considering that most music performed in the Middle Ages has disappeared, and that most of what has survived is anonymous and imprecisely dated, Machaut’s ballade 34 stands out as a truly outstanding case. Still, some mystery surrounds the question of exactly how Machaut composed his ballade 34. One of eight four-part ballades composed by Machaut, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier’ is the only one conceived and transmitted exclusively as a four-voice piece.45 As Kevin Moll has put it, three-part writing was the norm until the fifteenth century.46 Machaut’s ballade 34 also departs from the majority of his other ballades in that its tonal centre is C and not B flat.47 The standard method of composing polyphony was to begin by adding a voice to an existing one, often the tenor, and then adding further voices to this two-part kernel. It is possible that in this case Machaut started with the first cantus (cantus I in Ex. 11.1), as Theodore Karp has suggested.48 The tenor was not a foundational voice, but added as contrapuntal filigree, as with most of Machaut’s other polyphonic songs.49 One thing is clear, though: more so than with his other ballades, Machaut made a special effort to integrate all four voices into a single sonorous unit. Arguing from ballade 34’s affinities with the Messe de Nostre Dame, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has concluded that Machaut worked on all four parts simultaneously, which would make sense of the composer’s statement that ‘I have made the tunes in four parts, and have heard them several times, and they please me very much’.50 How did Machaut actually hear his ballade performed? Unfortunately, he does not address this issue in the Voir Dit, merely relating that he had heard the piece several times. More than this Machaut does not say, and we are missing here a world of performance details, including subjective audience responses such as that of John of Salisbury discussed by Jeremy Summerly in Chapter 9. 43 Ibid., p. 457. Following this letter, Machaut relates the entire incident in the body of the dit where he also inserts the ballade itself (Machaut, Livre dou Voir Dit, pp. 451–5, lines 6464–541). 44 Machaut, Livre dou Voir Dit, p. 461. 45 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame’, 43–73; E. E. Leach, ‘Machaut’s Balades with Four Voices’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 10 (2001), 48 and 57–65 46 K. Moll, ‘Texture and counterpoint in the four-voice Mass settings of Machaut and his contemporaries’, in E. E. Leach (ed.), Machaut’s Music: New Interpretations, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2003, p. 54. 47 P. Lefferts, ‘Machaut’s B-flat Balade Honte, paour (B25)’, in Leach (ed.), Machaut’s Music, pp. 163–4. 48 T. Karp, ‘Compositional process in Machaut’s ballades’, in C. Comberiati and M. Steel (eds.), Music from the Middle Ages through the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Gwynn McPeek, New York, Gordon & Breach, 1988, pp. 75–6. 49 Leach, ‘Machaut’s Balades’, 60; see her analysis, 58–65. 50 Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Le Voir Dit’, 58.
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Ex. 11.1. Machaut’s ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’, edited from the Reina Codex (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, nouv. acqu. fr. 6771, fol. 54v–55r)
Whether Machaut himself participated in this performance or just listened to it for better objectivity is unclear. He does not specify, but performances such as these may well have used instruments. This was clearly the case for ballade 33, since Machaut relates that it was performed on a variety of instruments, as cited earlier, leaving the exact instrumentation open (‘organ, bagpipe or other’).
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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Ex. 11.1. (cont.)
Regardless of how much he performed ballade 34 or heard it performed, Machaut intended its final version as a written artefact: one of the many notated pieces populating his complete works anthology, a musical text among many others.
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Ex. 11.1. (cont.)
Ballade 34 is found in seven manuscripts, mostly dating from the 1370s.51 The two latest manuscripts, the Chantilly and Reina codices, present
51 These are manuscripts A, B, Vg, G, E, Ch and PR; for descriptions and dates of these books, see Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 84–93 and 123–5.
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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significantly different readings from the common recension. Chantilly was produced in the 1390s and Reina a few decades later. The Reina version of ballade 34, though similar to that of the Chantilly Codex, is unique; it is presented in Ex. 11.1. I have chosen to edit the quirky and previously unedited Reina reading because it illustrates that, already in the fifteenth century, Machaut’s music was being re-shaped differently from his original conception. The section of the Reina Codex containing ballade 34 was compiled in northern Italy around 1410 by a scribe knowledgeable in French notation; it has mostly French works from the fourteenth century.52 The small Machaut corpus in this book, seven works in all, thus belongs to a fifteenth-century Italian reception of fourteenth-century French music.53 Clearly, these fifteenth-century readers included the rarefied double ballade for its outstanding qualities. But they, or at least the scribe who copied it, felt free to modify it. The changes are mostly small modifications of rhythm and pitch, but they occur throughout the piece.54 In bar 4, for example, the contratenor has a minim rest followed by three minims and two semibreves, as opposed to minim, semibreve, minim and two semibreves in the common recension that was edited by Ludwig and Schrade. An example of a more dramatic change is found later in the same voice, where the Reina reading has the contratenor a fifth higher than the common recension in bars 63–8. This is not necessarily a scribal error, since the contratenor still blends nicely with the other voices at this point. All in all, the Reina Codex presents a reading of ballade 34 that is distinct from the earliest one transmitted in other manuscripts. A half-century after Machaut composed it, ballade 34 was already
52 K. von Fischer, Handschriften mit mehrstimmiger Musik des 14., 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Répertoire International des Sources Musicales B IV 3 (Munich, 1972), pp. 485 and 512. 53 Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 124–5; N. Wilkins, A Fourteenth-Century Repertory (52 Ballades, Virelais, Rondeaux) from the Codex Reina, Paris, Bibl. Nat., Nouv. Acq. Fr., 6771, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 36, Rome, 1966, pp. II–III. 54 The version of the piece found in most manuscripts was first edited by Ludwig in the first edition of Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, cited earlier, and also in the first volume of Ludwig’s edition of Machaut’s works, Musikalische Werke, vol. 1, Balladen, Rondeaux und Virelais, Leipzig, 1926, pp. 40–2. The same recension was edited by L. Schrade, The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 3, Paris, 1956, pp. 124–7, an edition reproduced in the Norton Anthology discussed above. This version of the piece differs from that of the Reina Codex in Ex. 11.1. The following notes indicate where the recensio major differs from the Reina version, using Schrade’s nomenclature in his typescript commentary to vols. 2 and 3 of Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, Monaco, 1956, pp. 117–18, and correcting his occasional slip: Cantus I: b. 8, pam, 3 Mi; b. 23, pam, 3 Mi; b. 26, Sb, pasb; b. 45, Sb, 2 Mi; b. 70, Sb, 2 Mi; b. 72, Sb, pasb. Cantus II: b. 11, 3 Mi (e’, d’, c); b. 44, 4 Mi (g’, g’, f’, e’); b. 46–7, 3 Sb (last one dotted), Mi. Contratenor: b. 2, 4th and 5th note, Mi, Sb; b. 2, 7th note is d; b. 4, Mi, Sb, Mi, 2 Sb; b. 8, 2 Sb; b. 12, Mi, Sb, Mi; b. 21–2, 2 Sb, Br; b. 27, 2 Sb; b. 35, Mi, Sb, Mi; b. 52, Sb, 2 Mi (a, g, f); bb. 63–68, a fifth lower; bb. 65–8, dotted Sb, 2 Sb, Mi, 2 Sb, Br; b. 72, e. Tenor: b. 5 (after rest), dotted Sb, Sb, Mi; b. 35–6, Sb, Br, Sb. In addition to which, R has three errors: Co, b. 1, a missing rest after the first note; Can II, b. 3, an extra minim rest; Can II, b. 46, an extra semibreve rest in between the two notes.
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morphing into a substantially different piece from the one Machaut originally created. All of which brings us to the modern reception of ballade 34.55 In theory, the historically innovative character of the ballade is what made it so compelling to modern readers and audiences, and what ultimately granted it the status I described at the beginning of this chapter. Yet it seems to me that another factor has operated in this process, one more likely to win over to medieval music the average music history undergraduate like me some twenty years ago, when I first encountered ballade 34 as I followed the Palisca score while listening to the Studio of Frühen Musik’s compelling 1973 recording.56 That other factor is the ballade’s affinity with modern tonality, attesting to the way in which early music is made to ‘mirror contemporary taste’, as Summerly has put it in Chapter 9. Indeed, the piece can be heard as a song in the harmonic Classical or early Romantic style, in no less than the key of C major. This is largely thanks to the two lower voices that provide something of a bass line. In the following brief analysis, I will spare the reader the disingenuous use of quotation marks around modern harmonic terminology simply because that is how I and, I suspect, a few others first heard ballade 34. The piece exudes C major, with swathes of it basking in the tonic chord: at the beginning (the second cantus slipping in the third of the chord on the second beat) and end, of course, but also at the first full cadence at bar 5, at bars 15–24, from the A section’s closed cadence (bar 31) and for ten or so bars following that, at the half cadence at bar 49, most conspicuously at bar 58 ending the phrase ‘Je voy asses’, and finally leading up to the final cadence at bars 70–1. We hear the dominant chord emphasised right from the start (bars 2–4), and later as it alternates with the subdominant in the lead-up to most cadences (bars 6–9, 43–6, 55–6 and 61–6). The final cadence enriches the dominant’s position with a brief but crucial tonicisation, the FÖ producing a sweet dominant of the dominant at bars 65–6. Only the cadences on the mediant at the A section’s open cadence (bars 28–9) and on the supertonic at bar 54 depart from this pattern, but the listener barely flinches at such key changes that are entirely in keeping with Classical or early Romantic sounds – a medieval frisson, perhaps, but hardly a shiver. One can easily find other such moments in Machaut’s corpus, of course, beginning with his rondeau ‘Rose, liz’ mentioned earlier. These moments, I would argue, were precisely why early music historians gravitated to Machaut 55 I should point out that between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth century, there was apparently little interest in Machaut or his music. As Lawrence Earp observes (Guillaume de Machaut, p. 62), ‘by the sixteenth century, Machaut’s name was all but forgotten’. 56 The recording is cited in Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, p. 417.
Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34
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at a time when little to no medieval music was being performed. Its sound repulsed nineteenth-century scholarly ears. Initially Machaut barely ranked above Adam de la Halle – ‘the “Hunchback of Arras” ’ whose ‘fresh melodies are stuck in a crippled, misshaped harmony’, in the cruel words of August Ambros from 1864.57 Eventually, though, the resemblances of Machaut’s music to pieces composed in the common period harmonic language conquered these prejudices, helping the medieval composer ascend to the highest place in the canon of medieval art music. Music historians around 1900 shaped a narrative of progress leading to the establishment of common period tonality, ‘the third as the foundation of harmony’, as Hugo Riemann put it.58 As Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has pointed out in his valuable book on medieval music reception, their bias was shaped by their predilection for Romantic German art songs; the more medieval pieces sounded like these, the better.59 Early on Ludwig identified a trend in late-medieval polyphony away from contrasting individual voices and towards ‘melodic and accompanying voices’.60 Subsequent histories translated this idea into an historical movement towards a ‘cantilena style’, singularly embodied in Machaut’s ballades. As Gilbert Reaney wrote in 1960, the ballades and rondeaux presented a ‘solo cantus and accompanying tenor and contratenor’.61 When Ludwig first edited ballade 34, it was on three staves: the top two with the two cantus voices, and the lower staff with the tenor and contratenor together with the word ‘instrumental’ put in parentheses.62 The comparison was clear. Ballade 34 could be compared to a Lied, with the top two voices as a duet and the lower two as an accompaniment. Like all of us, Ludwig fashioned medieval music in the manner that most appealed to him, in his case as a duet with instrumental accompaniment, a German Romantic song. Ludwig would write in his commentary that Machaut’s alliegance (Huldigung) to his beloved Péronne came from deep in the composer’s heart (von Herzen), pouring out onto his musical creation as ‘the expression of a deep, inward emotion’ (der Ausdruck tiefen inneren Gefühls).63 What better illustration of late-Romantic sentimentality?
Conclusion Ludwig’s basic bias is important less for that on which he focused than for what he basically ignored: the whole gamut of popular medieval music which I have
57 Cited in Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, p. 160. 58 Ibid., p. 30. 59 Ibid., pp. 31–2. 60 Haines, ‘Ludwig’s “Musicology of the Future” ’, 163. 61 G. Reaney, ‘Ars Nova in France’, in A. Hughes and G. Abraham (eds.), Ars Nova and the Renaissance, 1300–1540, Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. 24–5. 62 Ludwig, ‘Die geistliche nichtliturgische . . . Musik’, p. 270. 63 Ibid.
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treated in this chapter and in Chapter 8. Incidentally, this topic interests me because of my personal predilection for popular song. All these personal biases notwithstanding, I hope that this chapter, like the remainder of this volume, will serve the cause of advancing the state of knowledge on the historical musical past. To sum up my argument in a single sentence, it is imperative to view Machaut’s learned polyphony in the broader context of the plethora of musical pieces performed in his time, mostly simple songs and tunes woven into the daily fabric of mundane activities for either work or edification. Ultimately, a complete historical panorama of medieval music should not so much exclude a venerated art piece such as Machaut’s double ballade as it should include all of the music performed in the Middle Ages. If I have singled out Friedrich Ludwig in this chapter as playing a seminal role in the success of ballade 34, it would be unfair to blame him for diligently making history as he understood it in the early twentieth century, and for creating what was urgently needed in his time. Indeed, the German master provided for the then marginalised domain of medieval music history an attractive and compelling masterwork narrative that would ultimately bestow upon this branch of learning a prestigious place in the university that it still holds today, albeit admittedly precariously. Were he still living and writing today, Ludwig would probably concur that the continuing advancement of modern understanding on medieval music performance matters, now as it did a hundred years ago. If the story of medieval music performance is to move beyond a mere mosaic of masterworks by mighty men, then it must embrace the many types of music – mediocre or simple, if such be the case – played and sung by countless and usually faceless performers.
.
PART III
.
PERFORMANCE IN THE
RENAISSANCE
( C . 1430–1600)
. 12 .
Performance in the Renaissance: an overview JON BANKS
Much more information about musical performance in the period 1430–1600 comes down to us than for any preceding era. We would obviously expect more to survive as we draw nearer to the present, but this alone is not an adequate explanation for the apparent quantum leap in the detail and diversity of the material that survives from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The crucial difference lies in important changes in the nature of what comes down to us and also in the way it was distributed and used. As well as the familiar resources of archives and accounts – which themselves become more abundant and informative than before – we find a far more copious and varied iconography, a greater diversity of literary sources that contain realistic accounts of musical performance, and treatises and books on musical instruction that were aimed at cultivated amateurs as well as the scholarly elite. Most significantly of all, these are preserved not just in the traditional manuscript form, but additionally in the new medium of print, which ensured that all of these sources were both more numerous and more widely distributed than ever before. If one single social change can be said to have shaped the development of musical performance in the Renaissance and to distinguish it from what went before, it is the increasing involvement of the amateur musician. The city states of Italy fostered the rise of a humanistically educated middle class with artistic aspirations and enough leisure time to pursue them. This in turn encouraged a new context of recreational performance, which, partly through the influence of books like Baldassare Castiglione’s II cortegiano, became an essential accomplishment in genteel society throughout Europe. More music was being performed by more people than had ever been the case previously, and with a different emphasis. The need for a professional to impress and entertain gives way to an aesthetic of elegance in which an amateur could succeed without necessarily being seen to try too hard. As Castiglione says of his ideal courtier, ‘I wish him to dissimulate the care and effort that are necessary for any competent performance; and he should let it seem as if he
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himself cares nothing of his accomplishment, which because of its excellence, he makes others think very highly of.’1 One consequence of this is that much of the music of the sixteenth century seems smoother and technically simpler to perform than that of the fifteenth. It is hardly fair to accuse its composers and performers of ‘dumbing down’, though; on the contrary, the rise of recreational music reflects a new and highly original focus on music as an expressive art. For all its apparent beauties to modern ears, music before the Renaissance had been invariably discussed and understood in terms of its numerical and speculative qualities. In the old scholastic tradition, music was part of the quadrivium, where together with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy it formed one of the four pillars of the ‘scientific’ investigation of the world. Its gradual realignment with poetry and rhetoric during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of the most significant watersheds in European music history. It marks the birth of a modern conception of music that makes its medieval antithesis seem bizarre and alien to us today; and understanding the coexistence and interaction of these two approaches to music during the Renaissance is one of the keys to understanding the performance characteristics of the period. It is no surprise, then, that our sources tell us of a greater diversity of different musics than we knew of before. Diversity was of course not a Renaissance invention, but the wide involvement of amateurs, poets and others outside the elite of the clerical classes means that for the first time we have significantly different modes of performing coexisting as part of the mainstream. The choral polyphony of the chapels and cathedrals went on alongside improvised verse recitation, solo lute and keyboard music, professional wind bands and private consort music, each with their own unique styles and historical trajectories. These differing genres were not necessarily competitors or exclusive markers of social identities. Indeed, many of them enjoyed relatively equal status and we often find performers and composers crossing the boundaries from one to another. Jacob Obrecht was connected with the wind band in Bruges and wrote music for them; Josquin des Prez wrote pieces in the Italian improvised frottola style; and aristocratic patrons such as Ascanio Sforza seem to have supported Josquin’s music and the art of improvised recitation at the same time. The overview of musical performance here is pursued under a number of different headings, but the convenience of these divisions should not make them seem more absolute than they really are. The way in which the various
1 B. Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, Venice, Aldine, 1528, trans. and ed. G. Bull as The Book of the Courtier, London, Penguin, 1967, p. 120.
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genres outlined below relate to each other and yield insights into each other is profoundly symptomatic of the universalist Renaissance way of thinking about music, a way that characterises so much of the thought of the time and which largely disappeared with the advent of the modern world after 1600. A true ‘Renaissance man’ was not just familiar with the full range of the artistic and scientific disciplines of his time, but understood them all as interconnected revelations of the same fundamental truth.
The performance of sacred music The performance practices associated with church music maintain a curiously obstinate continuity throughout the Renaissance. For the Masses and motets that constitute so much of the surviving written repertoire, all the evidence points to unaccompanied a cappella singing as being the norm (though there are some famous exceptions), and the performing forces maintained by chapels and cathedrals throughout Europe for divine service were all choirs and were all male, with either falsettists or boys on the top line. The approximate dimensions of these polyphonic settings remained reasonably stable over the period and their interaction with plainsong and the rest of the liturgy remained the same. The status of the cyclic Mass as the primary vehicle for demonstrating compositional virtuosity and seriousness of purpose was the same for Palestrina in the 1590s as it was for Dufay over a century and a half earlier. The invention of music printing in Josquin’s time may have made the source distribution of Palestrina’s Masses different from those of Dufay, but the genre played a similarly crucial role in the careers of both composers. That this stability was not necessarily inevitable within a naturally conservative ecclesiastical context is obvious from the way that the Mass cycle was such a novelty at its inception with Dufay, and then became very old-fashioned very quickly with the advent of the seventeenth century. It is even more remarkable when the profundity of the changes in the world outside are considered. Man’s view of the world was challenged, not just once by the discovery of the New World in 1492 but again by the rapid displacement of the earth from the centre of creation after the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. The nature of the Church itself was challenged by Luther, while the dramatic rediscovery and translation of Classical texts throughout the period led to complete reappraisals of all the aspects of knowledge that had been filtered through the previous centuries. We do find reflections of all these things in the composition of Masses and motets, and also of course in other musical manifestations, but the context and manner of the way in which they were performed remained stubbornly consistent.
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The main change in sacred performance practice seems to have concerned the increasing size of ensembles. Payrolls and other documents suggest that soloists or a relatively small group of singers were the norm in the early fifteenth century and this is confirmed by the few iconographical sources that show ecclesiastical musicians at work. On the other hand, the choir assembled by Galeazzo Maria Sforza in Milan in the early 1470s included twenty-six singers, who, in the era before print, benefited from manuscript repertoire books copied so that they were big enough to be read by everyone at a distance. It does not necessarily follow that a small book implies a small choir, though; repertoires were smaller than today’s and it is quite possible that memory may have played a greater role in the performance of notated music then than it does now.
The performance of secular song from notation The historical trajectory of the notated secular song traditions of the Renaissance is very different from that of the Mass and motet, even though nearly all composers throughout the period were active in both genres. The transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century is marked by a decisive change in the performance of secular polyphony, such that the old style, based on the medieval chanson tradition, all but disappears in the decade after 1500. Taking its place in the sixteenth century are a number of very different forms, all of which contrast strongly with the chanson and include the frottola, the madrigal, the lute song and the consort song. Not only does the almost total domination of the French language give way to Italian, English or whichever other language was native to the intended audience and performers, but the music differs profoundly, and the transition from one to the other is a direct reflection of wider changes in society and musical practice. The courtly French chanson was already a venerable old form at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The poetic conventions of ‘courtly love’, the rigorous verse forms of the rondeau and ballade and even the basic formal characteristics of their musical settings were all well established before even Dufay was born. There is of course still considerable uncertainty about exactly how this music actually sounded. In particular, the issue of whether all the polyphonic lines were taken by singers or whether some of them might instead have been taken by instrumentalists remains controversial. However, there is a greater consensus about the context in which these songs were performed. There can be little doubt that the fifteenth-century chanson was very much a courtly entertainment, delivered by a small group of elite professionals at the command of a refined chamber audience. It is a highly literate tradition, both in
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the sense that the notation yields complex polyphony with little room for spontaneous manoeuvre and also in the sense that it is a self-conscious repertoire; the songs abound in allusions to each other. To give just one example, Loyset Compère’s ‘Au travail suis’ explicitly quotes the words and music of six older chansons and there are many other less obvious examples that make the genre as a whole something of an intertextualist’s paradise. Virtually all of the major composers of the time produced chansons; it is a high art on a par with the sacred music of the time and of course many of its principal practitioners, from Dufay and Ockeghem through to Compère and Agricola, were simultaneously singers in the service of the chapel. There are a few composers who seem to have composed only chansons, such as Hayne van Ghizeghem (whose ‘De tous biens plaine’ became one of the most famous songs of its time), but they are exceptional, and do not really challenge the notion that the performing style was that of the professional singers who were employed in church. Chanson manuscripts survive in sufficient quantities to imply that they were an extremely important performance genre and therefore a regular feature of court life, though many questions about when and why they were sung remain unanswered. Written descriptions tend to be of special events, and we lack evidence for the everyday and commonplace activities of court musicians. There are enough reports of music being played during meals for us to assume that it was a common practice, but the descriptions tend to specify instrumental music rather than songs. Even so, when Philip the Fair’s chronicler tells us in 1501 that ‘At dinner Monsigneur summoned his singers and players of instruments, to give them a more pleasant entertainment’ it seems most probable that a polyphonic chanson was what the singers sang and that this kind of summons was an occupational hazard for them; as professionals, they were still servants and at the beck and call of their employers.2 Chanson performance also seems to have played a significant part at other courtly entertainments. For example, the Court of Love, founded at the Burgundian court on St Valentine’s day 1401 ‘to protect and honour the feminine sex through poetry and song’ may have been a typical performance opportunity for chanson singers.3 The instigators may have been the aristocrats and courtiers themselves, but it appears that they made use of professionals to compose and sing ‘all kinds of chansons, ballades, rondeaux, virelais and other love poems’.
2 A. de Lalaing, Voyage de Philippe le Beau en Espagne, en 1501, in Collection des voyages des souverains des PaysBas, ed. L. Gachard, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, i, Brussels, 1876–88, repr. 1969, vol. 7, p. 282. 3 See C. Wright, Music at the Court of Burgundy 1364–1419: A Documentary History, Henryville, PA, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979.
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Most formal of all were the theatrical spectacles, such as the famous Banquet de Veau given by Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1454. In a gleeful account of the extravagances of the proceedings there, the Mémoires of Olivier de la Marche mention a number of chanson performances, naming several pieces of which one, ‘Je ne vis onques la pareille’, matches the title of a song variously attributed to Dufay or Binchois.4 At the banquet, this song was performed, according to La Marche, by a boy and a singing stag; quite what we can learn about how it sounded from this is a matter of interpretation, but for all its theatricality this is surely a polyphonic chanson in its natural surroundings, as are several other outlandish performances in the description. The first ever printed books of music – from Petrucci’s Odhecaton A of 1501 to the Canti C of 1504 – are also the last significant sources of chanson-related material. There is a particular irony here; the new technology that made possible the mass dissemination of music in the sixteenth century announced itself with a repertoire that already belonged to the past. The emergence of first the frottola and then the madrigal as the most characteristic secular song genres of the sixteenth century reflects an entirely different performance context. The new style of music is designed to be performed by its patrons, not summoned by liveried servants. Castiglione’s assertion that ‘I am not satisfied with our courtier unless he is also a musician and unless as well as understanding and being able to read music he can play several instruments’ indicates a new set of priorities for secular music-making.5 The frottola also appears to be the first notated genre in musical history where the female voice is not only admitted alongside the male without reservation, but encouraged and idealised too. Records of women’s involvement in amateur performance do not come down to us from the early sixteenth century, but one of the first records of a woman being employed to sing polyphony is in connection with the frottola; Giovanna Moreschi, who was married to the frottola composer Marchetto Cara, sang professionally in Ferrara in the early 1500s. Her employer was Isabella d’Este, who was certainly a more than competent musician in her own right and quite probably sang too; it seems that both genders may have been involved in frottola and subsequently madrigal performance from the very start. The other products of the new domestication of music-making are the various genres of accompanied polyphonic song. Lute songs appear among the earliest Petrucci prints and continued to be composed throughout the sixteenth century, with consort songs (where the solo voice is accompanied 4 Mémoires d’Olivier de La Marche, trans. G. G. and D. M. Stuart as The Memoires of Messire Olivier de la Marche, London, British Library, 1930. 5 Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, p. 94.
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by instruments, usually a viol consort) following shortly after. Musically, these are of course separate genres, each with their own distinctive charms; but in terms of the history of musical performance, they all share the same informal and recreational context as the madrigal, in marked contrast to the chanson repertoire of the previous century. Intriguingly, this is a performance context that we recognise easily in the many amateur madrigal societies and early music groups of today. Part of the appeal of such groups is not just the music itself, but also the ideal of informal performance among friends participating on equal terms of importance and musical interest. This is an ideal that may be said to transcend historical context, but it is the music of the sixteenth century that seems to come closer to attaining it than any other. This is not to say that professionals simply ceased to be involved in performing secular song after the demise of the chanson. From its beginnings, the frottola was incorporated into dramatic performances, one of the earliest references being the ‘musicha mantuana’ composed by Bartolomeo Tromboncino in 1502 for a Plautus production. As these spectacles became more extravagant, musicians found themselves cast in increasingly bizarre roles, such as the soloist at the Medici wedding in Florence of 1539, who sang a four-voiced madrigal on his own in a cave, ‘playing all the parts’ on a ‘violone disguised as a tortoiseshell’. This is by no means a unique instance, and the intermedi seem to have exploited the widest possible instrumental palette, perhaps as much for the sake of novelty and exotic appearance on stage as sound colour. The intricacies of this kind of staging and also its sheer logistical ebullience – one of the polychoral madrigals in the famous ‘La Pellegrina’ intermedi of 1589 required sixty singers and at least twenty-four instrumentalists – must have placed considerable demands on the performers. The very public nature of these performances were a professional affair far removed from the intimacy of the recreational madrigal. What survives of the written music for the intermedi seems to make no concessions to the rigours of staging in terms of musical complexity and indeed highly ornamented songs like Antonio Archilei’s ‘Dalle più alte sfere’, from the 1589 intermedi, are real virtuoso showpieces. Archilei wrote this piece for his wife, Vittoria, whose starring roles in these performances are among the earliest instances of a woman achieving a professional prima donna status. Madrigal performances outside the theatre became increasingly virtuosic too as the sixteenth century drew to a close, with composers like Marenzio writing what are essentially dramatic concert pieces rather than domestic pastimes. After the 1580s, the Dukes of Ferrara and Mantua maintained groups of singers – which included women as well as men – expressly to perform
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polyphonic madrigals in their private chambers; apparently the Ferrara ensemble regularly entertained their employer for up to four hours a day.
Unwritten traditions Even in our own highly literate age, much music-making still proceeds quite happily without any reference to notation and leaves no written trace. In the Renaissance, when literacy was that much rarer, memory, improvisation and oral tradition must have played a still greater part. The informal, non-courtly contexts – fairs, village weddings, taverns – were the province of musicians whose lives and times are obscure to us now; many were itinerant outsiders who made the best part of their livings touring the circuit of festivals in Europe, as they had done in the Middle Ages. The picture becomes a little clearer in the sixteenth century, with the establishment of new genres of painting like the familiar village and tavern scenes of Peter Breughel the Elder. These may not constitute precise documentary evidence, but they are at least credible in their depictions of bagpipes and other ‘folk’ instruments; the apparent depiction of dance steps in some instances even invites us to hazard a guess at the specific tunes the pipers might have played. A parallel literary interest in ‘ordinary’ life yields new insights, such as the way that Feste, who plays the role of fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, includes playing the pipe and tabor among his many professional skills. Certain other Renaissance ‘unwritten traditions’ are courtly in origin and seem to have enjoyed equal status with written music. Perhaps the most significant of these is the Italian tradition of singers improvising verse recitations to their own instrumental accompaniment. This was a serious endeavour that strove after no less than the rediscovery of the miraculous powers attributed to music in Classical Antiquity. Orpheus had reputedly moved the stones to tears and the inadequacy of ‘modern’ music compared to this was keenly felt in an age that was rediscovering past glories in all the other arts. It is remarkable that the emphasis on rediscovery makes this one of the first manifestations of an early music movement in European history; and there seems to have been an appropriately experimental quality to much of what went on, with practitioners like Marsilio Ficino laying considerable stress on healing and divination. For many others, it was simply a literary pursuit where amateurs could succeed without submitting to the indignities of the professional discipline of notation; and the best of them enjoyed a very high status as star performers in Italian humanist circles. Details of these performers are hard to come by. Being amateurs, they do not on the whole appear on payrolls or other documents, at least as musicians; and
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being improvisers, they of course left no notated compositions. Nevertheless, we know that figures such as Serafino dell’Aquila (1466–1500) enjoyed reputations that equalled or excelled those of composers like Josquin. Theirs was the kind of music that we know to have been practised by Leonardo da Vinci, which explains why music is one of the few fields of artistic endeavour in which he left no written record. We are told that Leonardo’s preference for the lira da braccio (a bowed instrument that claimed descent from the classical lyre) was that of a man ‘who by nature had a high-flowing spirit, full of gracefulness, and who sang divinely, as an improviser, over its accompaniment’ and he reputedly had a special instrument made in the shape of a skull.6 This recalls the tortoiseshell violone of the Florentine intermedi and indeed the ‘unwritten tradition’ made an important contribution to theatrical productions, from Poliziano’s Orfeo of the late fifteenth century to the Florentine La pellegrina of 1589, where solo songs acted as a complementary foil to the contrapuntal complexities of the madrigals. We know little more about the actual music of these improvisers than they themselves did about the Orphic incantations they strove to revive. Petrucci’s fourth book of frottole (1505) includes various pieces with titles like ‘Modo di cantar sonetti’ or ‘Aer de versi latini’, which are intended as schematic vehicles for the performer’s own choice of texts. Though historically fascinating, the rather plain fragments of polyphony on the page can hardly be said to capture much of the charisma that must have charged a performance by Leonardo. There is also evidence that Serafino at least was not wholly above the artifices of notated music. He clearly knew Josquin, whom he once addressed as ‘Jusquino, suo compagno musico’, and one of his sonnets addressed to the Virgin has an acrostic such that the first syllable of each line yields the notes of the opening of the ‘Salve regina’ melody. In addition, the first syllable of each stanza can be read as spelling ‘la sol fa re mi’, a melody used as the basis of one of Josquin’s own Masses.7 The point here is that Netherlandish artifice and improvised spontaneity do not seem to have been mutually exclusive categories, at least by the end of the fifteenth century in Italy. Thus it is that some of Petrucci’s earliest publications include ten books of frottole, which seem to have been an attempt to render the improvised style in a medium accessible to readers of notation for a four-voiced ensemble; there must have been a substantial public for this type of music who
6 See E. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1982. 7 See E. E. Lowinsky, ‘Ascanio Sforza’s Life: a key to Josquin’s biography and an aid to the chronology of his works’, in E. E. Lowinsky (ed.), Josquin des Prez, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 58–9.
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were ensemble readers, not solo improvisers. As with the French chanson, this represents a shift in performance context from fifteenth-century performers who were, if not actually professional, at least gifted and charismatic, to a more general recreational and domestic approach to music-making. The frottola is an important antecedent of the sixteenth-century madrigal in terms of performance context as well as musical style. The Italian improvised tradition was not restricted to singers and poets. One of the most celebrated musicians of his day was Pietrobono dal Chitarino (1417–97), who in the course of an international career was raised to the rank of nobility and depicted on portrait medals. The chitarino that he played was a plucked instrument like a small lute, probably related to the old medieval gittern. His performance on it is the subject of one of the most remarkable pieces of writing about music from the period, a Latin poem by Lippo Brandolini, which gives us exactly the kind of information that so many earlier accounts of improvised music leave so tantalisingly vague. We are asked to pay attention, for example, ‘as his left hand runs along the entire cithara, as his hand swiftly travels along the tuneful strings. You will marvel at how all his fingers fly simultaneously, how one hand is in so many places at once. Now it dashes to the very top of the instrument, now it runs to the very bottom.’ We also learn that ‘He packs together the notes and the crowded rhythms, and he draws them out, and he varies them and he fills them yet again with many notes. He runs along and travels the whole length of the strings, and immediately repeats the same thing in three or four different ways. He goes back and forth along the lyre, but always with a different arrangement, and thus using different rhythms he goes back and forth along the lyre.’8 Though this certainly leaves plenty of room for interpretation, the essence of Pietrobono’s style is unmistakable. The first passage tells us how he impresses with fast scalar motion over the entire compass of the instrument, while the second further implies the use of some kind of motivic development or melodic sequence (‘repeats the same thing in three or four different ways’). Though Pietrobono never wrote down a note (as far as we know), many pieces in the earliest lute tablatures, which would have been compiled towards the end of his life, contain music that follows this prescription exactly. Connecting this notation with Pietrobono’s improvisations is not so far-fetched, since they are specifically for the type of instrument that he played. Moreover, the pieces that conform most closely to Brandolini’s description are the lute duets in
8 Original text and translation in F. A. Gallo, Music in the Castle, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 122–3.
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Petrucci’s Intabolatura de lauto libro primo (1507). We know that Pietrobono habitually performed with a single accompanist, usually referred to as a tenorista, someone who holds the tenor line; and tenor lines of popular chansons are exactly what we find accompanying the running passages in Petrucci’s lute duets. Rather as the frottola publications of the early sixteenth century strive to tame the virtuosity and charisma of the humanist improvisers for more general use, so the lute publications seem to be inviting players to bask in the reflected glory of one of the greatest musicians of the age. Another performing tradition where unwritten music played an important part was that of the alta cappella, the loud wind band of shawms and sackbut. In their association with ceremonial and dance music, such bands presented the public face of a court to the world, unlike the more intimate practices of such as Pietrobono. Even so, the basis of the improvised aspects of their repertoire probably consisted of the same kind of virtuosic decorations of slower-moving tenor lines. Indeed, the few examples of what appear to be notated dance music, for example the ‘Danza alta’ in the early sixteenth-century Spanish Palace Manuscripts, are not fundamentally unlike the tenor settings in the early lute books. The fact that ‘Danza alta’ is copied into what is otherwise a book of songs raises some interesting questions about why it came to be written down and how it was performed. It seems improbable that it was copied for the benefit of wind players, who knew how to improvise this music anyway, and it is equally possible that it was for literate musicians who were not experienced in alta-style improvisatory techniques (perhaps lutenists), to try and capture some of the glamour of what must have been a persuasive dance idiom. The fact that the ‘tune’ in this case is the basse danse ‘La Spagna’, which enjoyed a parallel career as a popular cantus firmus in composed polyphonic music, would seem to support this latter interpretation. Whether the purpose of the notation was literal transcription or emulation, though, the music of ‘Danza alta’ may still be considered to offer a credible representation of how a band might have realised a basse danse tenor. Ceremonial music was not the exclusive preserve of the polyphonic alta cappella, in spite of their prestige and musical brilliancy. Courts and cities typically maintained separate establishments of trumpets, drums and fifes for military and ceremonial purposes, whose activities were not confined to the strictly musical, in the modern sense of the word; loud instruments were routinely used for signalling in battle and also at sea. To the Renaissance belong the first voyages across the Atlantic (and indeed around the world) and there is evidence that ships routinely carried at least one trumpeter. They often carried other musicians too; when Sir Francis Drake set off around the world in 1577, he took four professionals with him, who probably played viols
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amongst other things.9 The presence of such musicians on board ships seems to have been relatively common and owed as much to a captain’s need to assert proof of his status, in case of capture by an enemy, as to any predilection for entertainment. Fascinatingly, groups of such musicians seem to have additionally justified the space they took up on the tiny ships of their time by their diplomatic value. Signalling a friendly intent on a foreign shore in the absence of a common language was a necessary and delicate matter, and there is much to suggest that musical performance played a critical role in many initial contacts. The many records of return performances by the local musicians – from Africa to Indonesia – and the enthusiastic reactions of the sixteenthcentury mariners to them make absorbing reading.
Instrumental consort music The idea of the consort – a coordinated set of instruments of varying sizes corresponding to the different pitch ranges of voices – is one of the most characteristic of Renaissance musical innovations. Until the end of the fifteenth century, the emphasis was on improvisation and solo performance, as it had been throughout the Middle Ages; the only notated secular music that comes down to us is the French chanson, which, as we have seen, belonged to a particular group of chapel singers. On the other hand, if it is possible to talk of a golden age of instrumental consort music, then that age is the sixteenth century, where high-quality music for viol, recorder and various mixed consorts appears in remarkable quantities. As with the demise of the chanson and the rise of the madrigal, the change is not one of musical evolution and eclipse, but a reflection of social patterns of music-making that increasingly favour the recreational over the ceremonial. Ironically, the first inklings we have of a polyphonic repertoire specifically for instrumental consort are intimately connected with the old French chanson. The last decades of the fifteenth century saw the compilation of a considerable number of Italian sources that preserve a repertoire that is mostly made up of chanson music without any words. Leaving individual parts untexted is usual enough in the older French sources; of the three polyphonic parts that make up most chansons, only one usually carries the full text and it is generally accepted now that this is a scribal convention that in no way precludes all three lines from being sung. However, having no text in any part at all is a different matter, especially in a country like Italy, where French was a foreign language. Moreover, textless chanson sources in Italy are not 9 See I. Woodfield, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon Press, 1995.
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isolated curiosities but a prolific and impressively consistent phenomenon, such that the omission of the words would seem to be by design rather than accident. It has been suggested that singers might provide texts from memory, since many of them were northerners for whom the French language would have been as familiar as the Italian. The role of memorisation in the performance of Renaissance music should not be underestimated, but in this case it raises more questions than it resolves. The number of missing texts that a singer would have to supply is vast, and since in most cases each was associated with a specific piece of music, it seems unlikely that they would have been memorised independently. At the same time, other texts that singers must surely have known by heart, such as the Ordinary of the Mass, are repeatedly provided in full in other sources. There is much to suggest, then, that the music of these ‘chansonniers’ was meant to be performed without words.10 This conclusion is supported by the way that some pieces are not only never found with text in any source, but also look as if they were composed without any reference to the line structures of forme fixe poetry, which are such recognisable determinants of the phrase structure in the majority of genuine chanson settings. Others take this one step further and seem to be showcases for some highly original devices of purely musical logic, which defy adaptation to any verbal text whatsoever. Many of these pieces appear again and again in the sources, once more giving the impression that they were carefully chosen to be part of a distinct repertoire. This music seems to represent a curiously transitional stage that connects the old professional French chanson tradition with the recreational consort music of the sixteenth century, while being quite distinct from either. It seems most likely that it was intended for performance on a consort of lutes, which took many different forms and sizes before the relative standardisation of the sixteenth century. Not only does the lute consort represent the only really practical solution to the exigencies of some extraordinary part-ranges, but the lute is also an instrument that is repeatedly mentioned as being played by the kind of people who would have had the literacy skills to perform chansons, in other words chapel singers. The list of renowned chanson composers who are recorded in connection with lute playing includes Robert Morton, Hayne van Ghizeghem, Johannes Martini and possibly Alexander Agricola. Some of the textless ‘chansons’ of the latter in particular bear a remarkable resemblance to some of the music in the earliest lute tablatures and requires a range and agility that is simply beyond any other fifteenth-century instrument. Indeed it is in 10 See J. Banks, The Instrumental Consort Repertory of the Late Fifteenth Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006.
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some of Agricola’s pieces that the prescription offered by Brandolini for Pietrobono’s lute style seems most closely realised. The phenomenon of the lute consort represents more than a whimsical switch from singing to playing on the part of the chapel musicians, though the example of Pietrobono and others like him may have offered them some motivation to do so. The lute was also one of the most favoured instruments of the Italian humanists and there is evidence that lute playing is the common ground where the two traditions began to merge together, and where the professional aspect starts to give way to the recreational. The case of the ‘chansonnier’ Florence 229, a manuscript compiled c. 1492, yields some possible insights into this process. Its repertoire of 268 pieces is mostly textless, but much is recognisable as chansons copied without their words. Its first owner was not a prince or a courtier, but a wealthy Florentine citizen called Alessandro Braccesi.11 Not only did he move in impeccable humanist circles, but some of his own verse came to be sung to the cithara (presumably the lute) by none other than the great Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino. This was a man steeped in the improvising tradition, who had no chapel of singers to perform for him; so why did he own such a vast anthology of notated chansons? One answer is that he played from it himself in a very particular context, possibly alongside like-minded amateurs, or even with some support from the kinds of professional singer/lute players who abounded in Florence at the time. A clue to this context is supplied by the Classical Latin quotation from the opening of one of Horace’s satires that adorns the elaborate frontispiece of the manuscript. In the Loeb translation, it reads: ‘All singers have this vice: if asked to sing among friends, they are never so inclined, but if not asked they never stop.’ ‘Singing’ is the usual English translation of the Latin ‘cantare’ and its derivatives, but it is important to note that the word could equally denote ‘playing an instrument’ at this time, as is made clear by Petrucci’s use of the term specifically and unambiguously for lute playing in his books of tablature. Equally interesting, from the viewpoint of performance history, is the implied equal relationship between players and audience. The chanson singers at Philip the Good’s Banquet de Veau in 1454 were not exactly ‘among friends’; they were professionals performing in front of their masters. The erudite humour of the motto here, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of banter we might expect between amateur performers in front of a select peer group.
11 See H. M. Brown, A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Monuments of Renaissance Music, vii, 2 vols., University of Chicago Press, 1983.
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This supposition is supported by the elegance of Florence 229, with its beautiful calligraphy and sumptuous illuminations. Such details would be wasted on professional performers, but would have an obvious appeal to collectors of books and scholars in general. An explicit connection between literary and musical pursuits is made by Angelo Decembrio, the first Italian professor of Greek, who recommended that a ‘cithara’, by which he probably meant a lute, should be kept in a library, as indeed one apparently was in the Este castle at Ferrara.12 Performance in the context of a private book collection makes sense of the beauties of Florence 229; there it would be visible as well as audible, and its multimedia appeal would have been very much part of the point. This kind of performance thus marries the context and practices of the Italian unwritten tradition with notated polyphony, a feat made possible by the peculiar nature of the fifteenth-century chanson. Divested of their words, French chansons presented a ready-made repertoire of approachable pieces for Italian lutenists. They are not too long, and they are relatively straightforward in their notation, while the problems posed to singers by their considerable vagaries of range are circumvented by the nature of the instrument. We know from many accounts that lutes played single lines in ensembles together at this time; and this repertoire would be an ideal introduction to polyphony for amateur players, whatever their technical abilities. The very first printed book of music, Petrucci’s Odhecaton A of 1501, was devoted to exactly the same kind of music, which demonstrates how important this performance genre must have seemed at the time. Despite its potential for mass production, the Odhecaton was hardly the Ford Model T of its time and was produced in limited quantities as a luxury item. Consequently, its impact on music generally was not as great as its huge retrospective significance might lead us to believe. It is significant that after the triumphant role of the chanson repertoire in heralding the age of printing, it more or less disappears after the Canti C of 1504. The refined library context was evolving into a less exclusive culture of domestic music-making, and it is in this later context that the subsequent forms of sixteenth-century instrumental consort music flourished. The development of new consort instruments like the viol ushered in a whole new repertoire and performing ideal that rendered the old part-hierarchies of the chanson redundant, along with the semi-formal pretensions of the library context. As the first printed book of music, the Odhecaton has been studied from numerous angles, both as a musical repertoire and as a major monument in the 12 Gallo, Music in the Castle, p. 74.
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history of printing, publishing and editing. However, it remains enigmatic from the point of view of performance history. Some pertinent questions, such as how many copies were produced, who they were aimed at and who bought them are still only answerable in the broadest circumstantial terms. The question of how they were used is also fraught with uncertainties that do not lend themselves to easy resolutions. Petrucci’s format is not too small, with each page being a little over three-quarters of the size of an A4 sheet, but they still raise issues of practicality. Sharing a single copy would not be a problem for singers, for example, but a consort of viols on the other hand would have to sit at a considerable distance from it if they were to afford themselves the elbow room necessary for bowing. It is possible that these issues were circumvented by the ad hoc copying of individual parts onto scraps of paper that have not come down to us, or that parts were routinely memorised, such that the printed original only served as a master reference copy. These are matters that are critical to our understanding of the Odhecaton – and indeed much other music of the same era – but for which very little concrete evidence survives. The music of the later sixteenth century is very different from that of the Odhecaton. The old repertoire persists in a few isolated manuscripts and lute tablatures, but by the 1540s new music is being written using the equal imitative techniques so characteristic of Renaissance consort music, and information about how to perform it is often included in the written sources. Instructions like ‘per cantar e sonar’ or ‘apt for the voices or viols’ are often upheld as examples of a laissez-faire attitude to instrumentation, an idea that seems in line with the fascination with instrumental variety evinced by writings from Virdung’s Musica getutscht of 1511 to Praetorius’s Syntagma musicum of 1618. However, the fact that these instructions appear at all is indicative of a new context; this music is not just for a dedicated core of professionals but also for a much wider market of amateurs who need to be convinced that what they are buying will suit their own peculiar circumstances. At this time we also find music written for very specific ensembles, like the English ‘mixed consort’ of flute or recorder, violin, viol, lute, bandora and cittern. This was not a revolution, but a gradual change of context that starts with the impenetrable conventions of the Odhecaton and leads to the cosiness of publications like Dowland’s books of songs and airs, where the parts are printed at right angles to each other, to facilitate the reading of a single page by singers or players sitting facing each other across the four sides of a table. Besides amateur music-making, professional instrumental ensembles continued to thrive in the sixteenth century and indeed the records of the time bring their personalities and conditions into sharper focus than ever before.
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The role of players on ships has already been noted; and on dry land courts and civic institutions provided musicians with increasingly respectable secular careers. In England, for example, the lutenist Philip van Wilder became a member of the King’s Musick in the early 1520s and, despite being a foreigner, rose to be a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and was granted permission to own land in 1539. Equally remarkable are the many stories of families like the Bassanos, a successful dynasty of musicians and instrument makers in England of Venetian Jewish origin. Dance music was adapting to the new conditions too. The music for the fifteenth-century basse danse was a professional affair, as was discussed above, but with the advent of the sixteenth century came new dance styles, such as the pavan and galliard, and a new sort of music to go with them. The publications of Pierre Attaignant, starting with his book of pavans and galliards of 1529, reflect the new approach. All the parts are written out in full and are relatively easy to play, with an emphasis on homorhythm and regular phrasing, which is the exact opposite of the florid improvised and open-ended basse danse. Sixteenth-century dance music is no longer exclusively the province of professionals, which was one of the factors that led to a transformation of the old alta cappella. An impressive versatility had always been in the nature of the fifteenthcentury alta cappella. As well as improvising over basse danse tenors they were clearly familiar with notated music too. The wind ensemble in Ferrara owned a book of ‘canto figurato . . . a la pifarescha’ in the 1480s and though it now appears to be lost, it seems clear that they played chansons and other polyphony too, in situations ranging from the courtly to the civic.13 The new dance music may have become accessible to amateur ensembles, but the professional function of the alta cappella to impress and provide a soundtrack to formal occasions remained important and the status and currency of professional wind players remained high, in contrast to the fate of chanson singers. Sixteenth-century ensembles like the ones that performed Gabrieli’s polychoral pieces in Venice were a huge expansion of the earlier trio of shawms and sackbut, and also made use of new instruments like the cornett, but they inherited their function and status directly from the alta cappella.
New instrumental traditions Around the year 1500, a number of medieval instruments – such as the hurdygurdy, rebec, portative organ, citole, gittern, psaltery – seem either to go out of 13 For a review of the possible identification of this book with the manuscript Casanatense 2856, see J. Rifkin, ‘Munich, Milan, and a Marian motet: dating Josquin’s Ave Maria . . . virgo serena’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 314–22.
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fashion or become relegated to the shadowy margins of folk performance. On the other hand, writers like Virdung and Praetorius testify to a fascination with new instruments. Some of these, like the crumhorn, had a relatively short lifespan and may have owed much of their currency to the theatrical excesses of the intermedi, whereas others established precedents and designs that persist to the present day. An example of the latter is the chekker, a chamber keyboard instrument that first appears in the middle of the fifteenth century. The keyboard itself was not new at this point, but the idea of an intimate personal instrument, as opposed to the more public organ, marks an important transition. The technology and outward aspect of keyboard instruments changed through the Renaissance, from the chekker through to the clavichord and harpsichord, but its essential function remained constant. Subsequent eras have seen further developments, including the establishment of a virtuoso concert tradition for keyboard instruments, but the role of the keyboard in the realm of personal recreation has developed in an unbroken tradition from the chekker to the piano and electronic keyboards of the twenty-first century. A similar kind of continuity can be observed with the lute. This was not a new instrument in the Renaissance, but the very end of the fifteenth century saw a standardisation of the instrument, the invention of a new style of polyphonic playing (as opposed to its original retention of the Eastern plectrum style of the ud from which it derived) and the invention of tablature notation. After Petrucci’s Intabolatura de lauto libro primo of 1507, lute books proliferated, with much fairly elementary music being issued as well as virtuoso fantasias. With lute music, we are freed from many of the awkward performative uncertainties that dog our understanding of, for example, the Odhecaton. The tablature notation specifies not only the instrument but the tuning of its strings and fingering, and the books are so eminently legible and practical that modern performers regularly sight-read from them today. The lute shares the same kind of personal context as the keyboard and, like it, is played in the same circumstances now as it was then. Although there are of course many important differences, the essential nature of the lute as a portable personal instrument is still preserved in the modern guitar. Other instruments really do seem to have been new at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In many cases these are consort instruments which, unlike their medieval ancestors, were made not in a single size for use by a solo player, but in various sizes – treble, tenor, bass – so that a full consort of like instruments could be achieved. Some, like crumhorns and cornamuses, seem to have been passing novelties, while others, like the cornett, became important contributors to the soundscape of the day. The sackbut is another innovation of
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the fifteenth century, when for the first time the metalworking technology needed to make a working double slide mechanism became a practical reality; the instrument has since evolved into the present day trombone with perhaps fewer changes than any other. Perhaps the most significant new instrument was the viol. Its importance lies not only in its ubiquity throughout the sixteenth century and the quantity of high-quality music written for it, but also in its inception from the beginning as a consort instrument. It is possible to trace the shape and stringing of the viol in a number of medieval antecedents, but its radical novelty lies in its perfect embodiment of the Renaissance ‘consort principle’ and no instrument more fully expresses the new ideals of consort music.
The sixteenth-century avant-garde Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90) is today considered to be something of a grand old man of Renaissance music theory, the solid and reliable foundation on which the contrapuntal splendour of the polyphonic style of the high Renaissance was built. However, as well as the discussions of intervals and counterpoint in his Istitutione harmoniche (1558), there is also, together with passages about temperament and ancient Greek scales, a description and illustration of a harpsichord with nineteen notes to the octave instead of the usual twelve. This is faintly disturbing from a modern perspective; exploring the possibilities of microtonal intervals is not what we associate with, for example, Palestrina or Tallis, or indeed anything before the avant-garde of the later twentieth century. Zarlino’s microtonal harpsichord can not be dismissed as a theoretical speculation either. The instrument he describes was actually built by a certain Domenico Pesarese, in 1548. Although it is now lost, Charles Burney reports seeing it in 1773, with special tuning instructions ‘in his [Zarlino’s] own handwriting’ written on the back of the foreboard.14 It was a real instrument, and it was not the only one of its kind. Jean Titelouze apparently played on one in Rouen too, while Vito de’ Trasuntini’s ‘Clavemusicum omnitonum’, a harpsichord with thirty-one pitches to the octave, belonged to Camillo Gonzaga and still survives in the Museo Civico, Bologna. Nicola Vicentino’s ‘arcicembalo’ and ‘arciorgano’, designed for the same thirty-one-note system, were built in the middle of the sixteenth century, and there is even some surviving music that uses specially adapted notation to render the microtones, by Vicentino (a single motet, ‘Musica prisca caput’) and Ascanio Majone. 14 C. Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, London, Becket, 1773, pp. 262–3.
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Moreover, microtonality was not just a concern of the written tradition; when Marsilio Ficino searched after the ancient Orphic powers of music in his invocations to the lira, he was using a ‘scientific’ system of correspondences between musical intervals and the material and spiritual worlds that presumably included the microtonal intervals of ancient Greek scales. The significance of this for our understanding of the history of sixteenthcentury musical performance is not its curiosity, but rather its ordinariness. In Renaissance terms, microtonal experimentation was neither a countercultural antithesis to the mainstream, nor a theoretical abstraction far removed from the practicalities of day-to-day music-making. Zarlino was one of the most respected writers on music of his day and Vicentino, though famously eccentric, was a pupil of Willaert and made a career out of playing and promoting his arcicembalo and arciorgano; and his one recorded dispute about tuning took place with a papal singer, not a theorist. For Zarlino, Vicentino and others like them, an interest in microtonal tuning was in fact an expression of that most characteristic Renaissance concern of all, the rediscovery and reassessment of ancient Classical texts, that was such a profound influence on the other arts. Their keyboards are in one sense no more than a rather more pronounced manifestation of the same concerns that led to the adoption of the first keyboard temperament systems that stem from the same era. The vast majority of the composers of sixteenth-century polyphony may not have written microtonal music but we can be reasonably sure that they were not only aware that such things were possible, but also recognised a place for them within the scope of their own conception of musical practice. It is in this contextual sense that some of the familiar performance practices alluded to above – the madrigal groups and viol consorts, for example – differ profoundly from their modern equivalents. Modern listening habits lead us to hear sixteenth-century polyphony as a classic repertoire, whose value lies in ideas of beauty and expression that, though valid, have been formed in part by the ideas of the intervening centuries. In its time, this was music of adventure and Classical rediscovery, which felt all of a piece with the dynamism of the age of Columbus and Copernicus. This difference between then and now goes some way towards explaining some of the curious judgements of the Renaissance on its own music, such as Tinctoris’s assertion in 1477 that ‘there is no composition written over forty years ago which is thought by the learned to be worthy of performance’ or the praise lavished on Adrian Willaert by his contemporaries, which seems so disproportionate to the appeal of his music in modern times.15
15 See Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti, trans. and ed. A. Seay as The Art of Counterpoint, Musicological Studies and Documents, v, Middleton, WI, American Institute of Musicology, 1961, p. 14.
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The characteristic Renaissance outlook on music, which understood microtonality as part of the mainstream and still appreciated the relevance of the idea of music as science, did not directly affect the sound of the music or impinge on the circumstances of its performance. Even so, it is crucial to our understanding of the vitality of an era that is sometimes perceived as ‘an angelically faceless golden age of polyphony’.16
16 J. Haar, ‘A sixteenth-century attempt at music criticism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 36 (1983), 209.
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Vocal performance in the Renaissance TIMOTHY J. McGEE
Developments in compositional styles and forms in the Renaissance brought about significant changes in vocal performance practices in both sacred and secular music, notably in vocal production, the combination of voices and instruments and the number of voices per part.
Vocal sounds There is some evidence that vocal practices in the centuries preceding the Renaissance included a much richer and more varied set of sounds than are normally attributed to the period, many of which were actually indicated in the forms of the early notation.1 The Medieval treatise Summa musice (c. 1200) describes the way in which a number of the neumes were performed: the has an indistinct pitch on the second note; the voice is to two-note clivis ; and a slide off the pitch when singing a plica and other liquescent notes quick vibrato is to be performed while ascending the interval of a third in the .2 The theorist Walter Odington (c. 1300) discusses execution of a quilisma the gargling sound of a note called gutturalis, and a sliding pitch called a sinuosa.3 Jerome of Moravia, writing in Paris c. 1280, includes both trills and vibratos involving the intervals of a half-step and full step, that are performed at slow, fast and accelerating speeds.4 In the early decades of the fourteenth century, the Italian theorist Marchettus of Padua discusses division of the 1 On the association of early notational forms with performance practice indications see T. J. McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song: Vocal Style and Ornamentation According to the Theorists, Oxford Monographs on Music Series, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998. On singing in the Middle Ages see J. Dyer, ‘The voice in the Middle Ages’, in J. Potter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 165–77, 254–8; and J. Potter, ‘Reconstructing lost voices’, in T. Knighton and D. Fallows (eds.), Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, London and New York, Schirmer, 1992, repr. Oxford, 1998, pp. 311–16. 2 C. Page (ed.), The Summa Musice: A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers, Cambridge University Press, 1991, lines 523–54. Summarised and discussed in McGee, Sound of Medieval Song, pp. 44–5. 3 W. Odington, Summa de speculatione musice, ed. F. F. Hammond, CSM 14, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1970, p. 94, trans. J. A. Huff, MSD 31, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1973. Summarised and discussed in McGee, Sound of Medieval Song, p. 52. 4 S. M. Cserba (ed.), Hieronymus de Moravia, O.P.: Tractatus de musica, Freiburger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, 2, Regensburg, F. Pustet, 1935, p. 184. Summarised and discussed in McGee, Sound of Medieval Song, pp. 61–7.
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whole tone into five parts which allowed for very wide and very narrow semitones.5 These intervals were still being described by Bonaventura da Brescia as late as 1497.6 It is not clear how long any of these sounds remained a part of vocal practices nor, since they all are discussed with reference to the performance of chant, whether they were adopted as a part of polyphonic vocal practices. There is evidence, however, that at least some of the sounds may have continued on; the notation for the quilisma and plica survived the conversion to square notation, and several of the medieval sounds are quite similar to those described by Giulio Caccini in his publications of 1601 and 1614, discussed below.
Singing instructions Although information about singing practices is found only as incidental remarks in the writings of the earlier centuries, beginning in the Renaissance a number of treatises discuss techniques and styles in some detail. The earliest organised singing instructions are those of Conrad von Zabern, written in Germany in 1474.7 What interested Conrad in his presentation of six rules was the quality of choral performance of chant, and he sets the following objectives for singers: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Unison entrances and balanced voices; Accurate observance of rhythmic values; The chant should be pitched to fit comfortably within every singer’s range; The pitch and tempo should be adjusted to the occasion: the more solemn the feast, the slower the tempo; the more joyous the feast, the higher the pitch. 5. The integrity of the chant is to be preserved by not subdividing any of the notes or adding harmonies or ornaments. 6. Strive for a more cultivated (as opposed to rustic) vocal delivery. This includes the avoidance of added consonant sounds for the purpose of articulation; exclusion of nasal sounds; use of pure and accurate vowel sounds; accurately maintaining the pitch of long notes; absence of vibrato; 5 The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua, ed. J. Herlinger, University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 2, 8, 9–10. Discussion in McGee, Sound of Medieval Song, pp. 81–2. 6 Bonaventura da Brescia, Regula musice plane, facsimile edn Monuments of Music and Music Literature in Facsimile, 77, New York, 1975, trans. A. Seay, Rules of Plain Music, Colorado College Music Press Translations, 11, Colorado Springs, Colorado College Music Press, 1979. Discussion in McGee, Sound of Medieval Song, p. 83. 7 Conrad von Zabern, De modo bene cantandi choralem cantum, Mainz, 1474, ed. K.-W. Gümpel, Die Musiktraktate Conrads von Zabern, Wiesbaden, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1956. See J. Dyer, ‘Singing with proper refinement from De modo bene cantandi (1474) by Conrad von Zabern’, Early Music, 6 (1978), 207–27; and C. MacClintock (ed.), Readings in the History of Music in Performance, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 12–16.
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do not force the voice; do not bellow on the high notes or sing too faintly; do not make elaborate facial or body gestures. Many of these same points are stressed forty years later by another German theorist, Andreas Ornitoparcus.8 As helpful as these statements are in confirming that the values of the fifteenth century are similar to those held by choir directors today, it must be noted that Conrad and Andreas were speaking only about unison chant performance. They say nothing about solo singing, the secular repertoire, nor the performance of polyphony.9 For that kind of information we must consult several sixteenth-century writers from Germany, and Italy who address the subject.10 The solo singing instructions they convey agree with and amplify the advice from Conrad, which confirms the stability of those values over the entire period of the Renaissance as universal basic singing instruction. These later, more detailed instructions admonish the solo singer to be careful to keep the mouth open only as much as if in casual conversation; place the voice in the front of the mouth, avoiding nasal sounds and those from the back of the throat; support but do not force the voice; pay attention to steady vocal production in terms of pitch, volume, and intensity; use clear articulation in rapid passages; articulate and enunciate the text clearly; use a flexible delivery in order to express the sentiment of the text; support the text with facial and body gestures but be careful to avoid excess; and in ensemble performance, to strive for balance among the voices. The instructions provided by Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) are the most helpful and among the most detailed. Cardano was not a professional singer or teacher; he was a professor of medicine at the University of Pavia (near Milan), who is best known for treatises on astronomy, astrology, medicine and philosophy. But in 1574 he wrote a treatise on singing which indicates a very detailed knowledge of vocal performance. His statements, in addition to reinforcing the earlier treatises, also provide information about how one learned to sing a new composition, which was to sing the solfege syllables. But he emphasises that once singers have learned the notes, they should go directly to the words since 8 Andreas Ornitoparcus, Musice Active Micrologus, Cologne, 1513, trans. J. Dowland as Andreas Ornithoparcus his Micrologus or Introduction, London, 1609. See A Compendium of Musical Practice: Musice active micrologus, New York, Dover, 1973. 9 Ornitoparcus makes the following observations concerning the different national singing characteristics: ‘The English carol; the French sing; the Spaniards weep; Italians who dwell on the coasts caper with their voices and the others bark; but the Germans howl like wolves.’ In Andreas Ornithoparcus his Micrologus (1609), bk. 4, ch. 8. 10 H. Finck, Practica musica, Wittenberg, 1556, facsimile edn, Hildesheim, Olds, 1971, and Bologna, Forni, 1969; G. Maffei, Delle lettere . . . Libri due, Naples, 1562, in N. Bridgman, ‘Giovanni Camillo Maffei et sa lettre sur le chant’, Revue de musicologie, 38 (1956), 3–34; G. Cardano, De musica, Milan, 1574, in C. A. Miller (trans. and ed.), Hieronymus Cardanus, Writings on Music, Musicological Studies and Documents 32, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1973; L. Zacconi, Prattica di musica, 2 vols., Venice, 1592, facsimile edn, Bologna, Forni, 1967.
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it is the text that will provide the inspiration for good expression. From context it would seem that many singers did not do this, and performed using only solfege syllables – a practice Cardano considers to be ridiculous. His specific goals, which are directed towards ensemble soloists, are: to learn how to produce notes accurately and quickly; keep a steady beat; read ahead in order to prepare for difficult technical passages; prepare the part before rehearsal; hold the pitch steady; produce a clear tone and avoid harshness; keep a steady vocal quality; train your ear to hear the other parts in order to sing well in tune with them; avoid food and drink that damages the voice, such as sour wine, most spices, and nuts. On a more advanced plane, he advises that once the part has been learned, the singer can ‘relinquish the beat’, meaning that small rhythmic liberties can be taken for the purpose of expression, and he gives advice for learning to extemporise in two, three and four parts.11 All of that advice accords with modern technique and values for both choral and solo singing, with the exception of vibrato: instead of a constant vibrato as found in modern vocal practice, the Renaissance writers exclude it from choral chant performance entirely, and instruct soloists to cultivate it as a soloist’s ornament, which is to be applied only in order to enhance particular notes (see below). The only other variance from Conrad’s rules has to do with expression: whereas Conrad advises suppressing individual expression in favour of a uniform choir sound, the instructions for solo singing advise its cultivation, again agreeing with current practice.
Church vs. chamber We know that in the late Renaissance there were two distinct vocal practices: loud for church and modulated for chamber. Sixteenth-century writers Nicola Vicentino, Gioseffo Zarlino and Lodovico Zacconi tell us that church singers had to rest their voices after singing loudly in order to be able to sing with a greater range of dynamics suitable for chamber performance.12 And although this information comes from rather late in the Renaissance, it is reasonable to think that the practice of singing loudly when performing polyphony in church probably dates back to the medieval origins of polyphonic performance, simply because of the problem of being heard in such a large space. There would have 11 Cardano, De musica, ch. 44. Cardano also tells us that the social standing of singers in Renaissance society was quite low. He agrees with the general perception that they were thought of as gluttons, hedonists, lacking in morals, and were disreputable purveyors of every kind of vice! 12 Zacconi, Prattica di musica, vol. 1, ch. 40; N. Vicentino, L’antica musica, 1576, trans. and annotated M. R. Maniates, ed. C. V. Palisca, Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996, vol. 4, ch. 29; G. Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche, Venice 1558, facsimile edn, New York, Broude, 1965 and Bologna, Forni, 1999, vol. 3, ch. 45. See discussion in D. Fallows, ‘The performing ensembles in Josquin’s sacred music’, in Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 35 (1985), 32–66.
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been no difficulty for a unison chant choir to fill the space, given the number of voices singing, but polyphony sung by soloists or small ensembles would have required the singers to sing very loudly in order to be heard. At the time there would have been little other conflict between church performance practice and those required for chamber; with the exception of volume, the remainder of the singing advice stated above would have applied to both locations. Further, during the Middle Ages in most cases the performing personnel would not have been the same for the two locations. Whereas the sacred material would have been performed by clerics, the secular repertoire – most of which would have been monophonic – was sung either by professional minstrels or the lay citizens themselves, which is perhaps why the observation about the difference between church and chamber practices is not found in early documents. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the increasing popularity of polyphonic secular music, the increasing technical difficulty of that repertoire, the growth of secular motets, the use of sacred motets in chamber settings and the trend towards professional singers for both church and chamber would have been responsible for the problem. More and more the same musicians were performing both repertoires, which is why in the sixteenth century the theorists remark that performers had to let their voices relax before changing from one venue to the other.
Ornamentation In addition to vibrato, all solo musicians – instrumentalists as well as solo singers – were expected to add a multitude of other ornaments to enhance their performances. Information about ornamentation comes from a number of treatises and instruction manuals written in the sixteenth century, but also from a few written-out ornamentations from early in the fifteenth century.13 It is especially helpful that numerous didactic sources make it clear that the practice of embellishment was the same for both instrumentalists and singers, which allows us to use both repertoires in order to gain an insight into the practice. In modern terminology, ornaments can be separated into two categories: passaggi (divisions) and graces, although there was no such distinction at 13 S. di Ganassi, Opera intitulata Fontegara, Venice, 1535, trans. D. Swainson, ed. H. Peter, Berlin, Lienau, 1956; D. Ortiz, Tratado de glosas sobre clausulas . . . Rome, 1553, ed. Max Schneider, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2003; A. Coclico, Compendium musices, Nuremberg, 1552, facsimile edn, M. Bukofzer, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1954, trans. A. Seay as Musical Compendium, Translations, 5, Colorado Springs, Colorado College Music Press, 1973; G. Dalla Casa, Il vero modo di diminuir, 2 vols., Venice, 1584, facsimile edn, Bologna, Forni, 1970; G. Bassano, Ricercare, passaggi et cadentie, Venice, 1585; Bassano, Motetti, madrigali et canzoni francese, Venice, 1591; R. Rogniono, Passaggi per potersi essercitare nel diminuire, Venice, 1592; G. Luca Conforto, Breve et facile maniera d’essercitarsi, Rome, 1593, facsimile edn, Bologna, Forni, 2002; G. B. Bovicelli, Regole, passaggi di musica, madrigali e motetti passeggiati, Venice, 1594, facsimile edn, N. Bridgman, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1957.
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the time. Passaggi are the notes placed between those written on the page, a term that could refer to a single additional note or a rather extensive run; and graces are the ornaments added to the written notes themselves, the types of ornaments that in the Baroque era would be called trill, mordent, turn, etc. Examples in the instruction manuals concentrate exclusively on the passaggi, while discussing the graces but not illustrating them. Although in later centuries the placement and specific form of graces was often indicated by stenographic signs, that kind of assistance was not provided in the Renaissance; they were chosen and added spontaneously, as were the passaggi. The kinds and placement of ornaments changed during the period, reflecting the changes in compositional style. Prior to c. 1470, ornaments were usually restricted to the highest voice.14 With the development of imitative writing where all voices shared the melodic material, ornamentation was added to all parts. An example of a four-part composition with ornamentation is provided by Girolomo Dalla Casa, which shows rapid passaggi in all voice parts, especially at cadence points.15 No graces are indicated in this or any other example, but the literature makes it clear that they, too, would have been added by each of the singers. Graces could be added by any and all parts without any concern of clashing, but this was not the case with passaggi. There would always have been a danger that cacophony would result from more than one performer adding passaggi simultaneously. From written instruction as well as surviving examples such as those in Dalla Casa, it is clear that there was a general understanding that the higher voices took precedence over the lower, meaning that in a situation where, for example, the tenor and soprano were entering a cadence together, the tenor would not ornament unless the soprano did not. Ornamentation was not restricted to secular music. That it was also applied to the sacred repertoire we have Zacconi’s statement from 1592 that motets are much easier to ornament than madrigals (see below), as well as some writtenout examples of ornamentations for Palestrina motets.16 The overwhelming number of treatises and manuals about ornamentation come from Italy, which is testimony that embellishments – especially elaborate passaggi – were more popular in that region than in the remainder of Europe. But there is ample evidence that ornamentation was a common practice
14 Extensive examples can be found in both the Faenza and Buxheimer manuscripts: Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale., MS 117, facsimile edn, Musicological Studies and Documents, 10, n.p., American Institute of Musicology, 1961, transcribed and ed. in D. Plamenac, Keyboard Music of the Late Middle Ages. CMM 52, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1972; Buxheimer Orgelbuch, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Cim 352b, facsimile edn, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1955, transcribed B. Wallner, in Das Erbe deutscher Musik, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1935–, vols. 37–9. 15 Dalla Casa, Il vero modo, vol. 2. 16 In R. Erig, with V. Gutmann, Italian Diminutions, Zurich, Amadeus, 1979.
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everywhere, with local tastes and traditions resulting in regional style differences. Two French vocal treatises from the mid-seventeenth century, for example, spend most of their time discussing the subtle application of graces, but they also indicate that passaggi were commonly applied by French singers as well.17 The major French interest, however, was in graces, with a cautious avoidance of the more dramatic style developed in Italy (see below). Merin Mersenne’s comparison of the Italian and French practices in his Harmonie universelle of 1636, highlights the differences between the two most influential regional performance styles of the period: The Italians in their recitatives they observe many things of which ours are deprived, because they represent as much as they can of the passions and affections of the soul and spirit, as, for example, anger, furor, disdain, rage, frailties of the heart, and many other passions, with a violence so strange that one would almost say that they are touched by the same emotions they are representing in the song; whereas our French are content to tickle the ear, and have a perpetual sweetness in their songs, which deprives them of energy.18
Late Renaissance monodic style In the late sixteenth century, all vocal performance practices were seriously influenced by the developing monodic style, a new dramatic style of singing that developed in Italy. This style was closely involved with new ornamentation practices as well as new executions of the more traditional ornaments. The development of a highly expressive monodic style is usually credited to Giulio Caccini, although he never claimed to have originated it.19 There is no doubt that he had a great deal to do with it and that he was its most widely known and celebrated practitioner, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that there were influences from Rome and Naples in the performance practices of several other fine singers that contributed to its development.20 The details of the new 17 J. Millet, La belle méthode ou l’art de bien chanter, 1666, facsimile edn with introduction by A. Cohen, New York, Da Capo, 1973; B. de Bacilly, Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter, Paris 1668, facsimile edn, Geneva, Minkoff, 1971, trans. A. B. Caswell as A Commentary upon the Art of Proper Singing, Henryville, PA, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968. Millet’s treatise also includes an appendix of practical examples that include copious passaggi. 18 M. Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique, Paris, Cramoisy, 1636, intro. François Lesure, 3 vols., Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963, vol. 2, pp. 354–60, trans. in MacClintock, Readings, p. 173. 19 For a summary and discussion of what Caccini claims about his singing style, see J. W. Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto, 2 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, vol. 1, p. 58. 20 See J. W. Hill, ‘Oratory music in Florence, I: Recitar Cantando, 1583–1655’, Acta Musicologica, 51 (1979), 108–136; Hill, Roman Monody; T. Carter, ‘A Florentine wedding of 1608’, Acta musicologica, 55 (1983), 89–107; and T. Carter, ‘Giulio Caccini’s “Amirilli, mia bella”: some questions (and a few answers)’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 113 (1988), 13–31.
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expressive style are described by Vincenzo Giustiniani, who notes that as early as the 1570s the style of monodic singing in Rome was quite different from that applied to the multi-voiced compositions such as those by Palestrina and others.21 He then goes on to note that composers such as Giaches de Wert and Luzzasco Luzzaschi had adopted some of the dramatic monodic practices in the polyphonic music they wrote for the concerti delle donne, the ensembles of virtuoso female singers, at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara.22 Giustiniani describes the style as it was adapted to ensemble performance by the donne: They increased their voices, loud or soft, heavy or light, according to the demands of the piece they were singing; now slow, breaking off with sometimes gentle sighs, now singing long passages legato or detached, now groups, now leaps, now with long trills, now with short, and again with sweet running passages sung softly, to which sometimes one heard an echo answer unexpectedly. They accompanied the music and the sentiment with appropriate facial expressions, glances and gestures, with no awkward movements of the mouth or hands or body which might not express the feeling of the song. They made the words clear in such a way that one could hear even the last syllable of every word, which was never interrupted or suppressed by passages and other embellishments. They used many other particular devices which will be known to persons more experienced than I.23
By the end of the century these performance practices were adopted rather widely in Italy and applied to all secular polyphonic repertoire, especially the madrigal. They were also used in the performance of sacred music, although the application was much more conservative. It is undoubtedly these differences – especially the irregular tempo – that caused Zacconi’s remark about motets being easier to ornament than madrigals, meaning that compositions that are performed at a steady speed with modulated expression present an easier line for the addition of stock ornaments.24 As Mersenne and Giustiniani state in the above quotations, the new solo style was quite dramatic, with the delivery linked to the sentiment of the text as a whole as well as to certain significant words. A crucial part of the practice involved the execution of bursts of dramatic ornaments which are described by Caccini in his two collections of songs.25 They include, in addition to the usual 21 V. Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la musica, c. 1628, trans. C. MacClintock, Musicological Studies and Documents 9, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1962, p. 69. Giustiniani names the singers who were responsible for the new style: Giovanni Andrea, Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, and Alexandro Merlo. 22 On the ‘concerti delle donne’ see A. Newcomb, The Madrigal at Ferrara, 1579–1597, 2 vols., Princeton University Press, 1980. 23 Giustiniani, Discorso, p. 69. 24 Zacconi, Prattica di musica, fol. 64v. 25 G. Caccini, Le nuove musiche, Florence 1601 [1602], ed. H. W. Hitchcock, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 9, Madison, A-R Editions, 1970; and G. Caccini, Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle, Florence, 1614, ed. H. W. Hitchcock, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 28, Madison, WI, A-R Editions, 1978.
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passaggi and graces: entering a third lower than the written pitch and then sliding up to it (intonatione della voce); sudden bursts of sound (esclamazioni); a dramatic use of crescendo and diminuendo on a single pitch (messa da voce); the accelerating articulated subdivision of a single pitch at a cadence (trillo);26 and the somewhat enigmatic ornament called sprezzatura that involved the rapid addition of a vocal ornament that he describes as follows in his Nuove musiche (1614): Sprezzatura is that charm given to a song by the rapid succession of several quavers or semiquavers on various tones, which, when done at the right time relieve the song of a certain restricted narrowness and dryness and make it pleasant, free, and airy, just as in common speech, eloquence and fluency make pleasant and sweet the matters being expressed. And with respect to this eloquence, I would liken to the rhetorical figures and shadings, the passaggi, trilli, and other similar ornaments, which can be introduced sparingly in every affect.27
Caccini’s linking of the sprezzatura ornament to rhetoric is very helpful in clarifying just how this as well as many of the other ornaments were executed. Caccini’s audience would have been well aware of rhetorical practices and would have understood the comparison. Oratory was a standard part of the study of rhetoric, which was an important part of education during the Renaissance.28 Numerous sixteenth-century treatises on rhetorical delivery emphasise the employment of many of these same dramatic devices: change of speed, vocal colour and volume, and the use of sudden exclamations, as important tools for the expression of text.29 Caccini obviously saw a close parallel between the two arts, and we can obtain a vivid picture of his vocal performance by imagining a dramatic orator who employs these kinds of variations to keep the listeners’ attention. Giulio Caccini was instrumental in spreading this new performance style to various locations within Italy and elsewhere in Europe. He was the star of the Medici court in Florence from the time of his arrival in 1565 until the early decades of the seventeenth century. By the year 1600 his second wife Margherita, daughters Francesca (known professionally as ‘La Cecchina’) and 26 This is not to be confused with a trill, which was called gruppo. The trillo is often referred to in modern performance as the ‘goat trill’, although Caccini and other writers make it clear that the performer was to avoid making this ornament sound like a goat. 27 See photo reproduction in Caccini, Nuove musiche, ed. Hitchcock, preface. 28 On the importance of the understanding of rhetoric for performance of the English lute song see R. Toft, Tune thy Musicke to thy Hart: The Art of Eloquent Singing in England 1597–1622, University of Toronto Press, 1993. 29 On rhetoric see J. J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1974; and B. M. Wilson, ‘Ut oratoria musica in the writings of Renaissance theorists’, in T. J. Mathiesen and B. V. Rivera, Festa Musicologica: Essays in Honor of George J. Buelow, New York, Pendragon Press, 1995, pp. 341–68.
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Settimia and son Pompeo performed in his style and taught it at home and abroad. Singers from other cities in Italy were sent to study with Giulio; the heads of state from all over Europe were exposed to Caccini-style performances whenever they visited Florence; and Giulio was invited to a number of cities where he performed and taught the local singers. In 1605 he was invited to the court of Henry IV of France in Paris, where he, his wife and two daughters performed for an international audience over a period of six months.30
Ensembles Throughout the period, solo singing was perhaps the most traditional of all forms of musical presentation. In the early Renaissance there were several different ways in which this was done. A single unaccompanied solo voice would have been the most basic as well as the oldest of these traditions, and there is no doubt that it continued. A variation on this was the addition of improvised instrumental accompaniment, a tradition that was pan-European during the Middle Ages, but which died out in most areas during the fourteenth century, replaced by the emerging polyphonic tradition that involved composed rather than improvised settings of a text. In Italy, however, the improvised form of performance continued to be very popular until the early seventeenth century as a special form of presenting native Italian poetry. The instrument most often associated with the tradition was the lira da braccio, a favourite of the Italian humanists, an instrument that was thought of as the Classical lyre of Orpheus. The lira da braccio had seven strings – similar to the ancient kithara, two of which were plucked by the thumb of the left hand, and the other five were bowed. Fifteenth-century humanists such as Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano presented poetry in this fashion, as did Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The title role in Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo31 (c. 1480) was sung to the lira da braccio by the poet Baccio Ugolini. This style of singing was closely allied with oratorical delivery and no doubt was one of the basic models for the dramatic monodic style of the sixteenth century as described above. The medieval model for performance of polyphonic song was almost exclusively by solo voices, a practice that evolved in several directions during the 30 The invitation came from the Queen of France, the former Maria de’ Medici, who was well acquainted with the Caccinis and their singing. See S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols, London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 4, pp. 769–75, art. ‘Caccini, Giulio’. On style see T. J. McGee, ‘How one learned to ornament in late sixteenth-century Italy’, Performance Practice Review, 13 (2008), 1–16. 31 The date of the performance of Poliziano’s work is not secure. See the discussion in N. Pirrotta and E. Povoledo, Li Due Orfei da Poliziano a Monteverdi, Turin, Edizioni RAI, 1969, p. 8, trans. K. Eales as Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 6, in which a date in the 1480s is proposed. A date a decade earlier is suggested in A. T. Benvenuti, L’Orfeo del Poliziano, con il testo critico dell’originale e delle successive forme teatrali, Padua, Antenore, 1986, pp. 89–103.
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Renaissance. During most of the fifteenth century the polyphonic repertoire was normally performed by ensembles of only voices or only instruments, but by the year 1500 that practice had changed to admit a combination of the two. One practice, perhaps the earliest, was to accompany a solo voice with either a keyboard or lute-type instrument capable of playing all of the other lines. By the mid-sixteenth century we have clear evidence that the style of mixed performance had expanded to include any combination of voices along with a variety of single-line instruments. In 1535 the combination of instruments and voices was sufficiently common to be depicted in a woodcut in a performance instruction manual where two singers with three recorder players appear to be performing what probably is a five-part composition.32 The type of instruments combined with voices in this manner included all of the ‘soft’, or chamber instruments: bowed and plucked strings, and the flute/recorder types. Loud (outdoor) instruments, such as trumpets and shawms, were never used with solo voices.33
Secular polyphonic repertoire and its performance Over the period of the Renaissance the repertoire of polyphonic secular music evolved in terms of types, numbers of voice parts, formal design and relationship between text and vocal line. In 1430 the majority of the repertoire consisted of three-voice French chansons in the standard, multi-verse medieval poetic formats of rondeau, virelais and ballade, with repeats and refrains (popular in all areas), two- and three-voice Italian songs also in poetic forms (ballata, madrigale, caccia), and in England, two- and three-voice carols. In all cases the usual performance practice was solo voices. After 1450 the musical types typical of particular geographical areas were no longer as isolated. Musical sources in all areas often contained repertoire from a variety of places. This borrowing of repertoire led inevitably to a sharing of compositional techniques and a blurring of the characteristics of the national styles that had been so clearly demarked earlier. By the end of the century four voices had become more and more the norm in all areas, and the newer format of through-composition was often applied even when the text was in an older form. This was usually accomplished by setting only a single verse. The technique of imitation in all voice parts was applied more and more, replacing the older format of quasi-independent lines. The implications of these new developments in composition for performance practice was that the imitative style placed more emphasis on blend rather 32 Ganassi, Opera Intitulata Fontegara. 33 On the classification of loud and soft instruments see E. Bowles, ‘Haut et Bas: the grouping of musical instruments in the Middle Ages’, Musica Disciplina, 8 (1954), 115–40.
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than contrast, and the absence of repeats allowed for a closer union between the melodic lines and the text, encouraging a kind of vocal expression that was more closely associated with the text. The musical form that best illustrates these new practices is the sixteenth-century madrigal where, beginning in midcentury, a conscious effort was made to develop musical gestures that illustrated specific words or phrases of the text: ascending and descending passages for the images of climbing a mountain or descending into the depths; dissonant harmonies to portray bitter emotions; and various musical clichés that painted particular words such as ‘high’, ‘low’, or ‘alone’. Although usually thought of and discussed as ‘madrigalisms’, many of these gestures were adopted in all geographical areas and can be found in many different musical forms, including sacred music.
Performance practice At the present time there seems to be more or less general agreement that the performance practices were different for sacred and secular music, and that the sacred practices encompassed a variety of treatments according to geographical traditions and the type of music being sung. It is generally agreed that secular polyphony was usually performed with one on a part – either all voices or a combination of instruments and voices.34 A variant of this practice would be performance with a single voice and the reduction of all other lines performed on keyboard or lute. Apparently this was done even for compositional types that would seem to be inherently vocal, such as madrigals or imitative chansons. There was also the growing repertoire of monodic songs – music intended for solo vocal performance with accompaniment by keyboard, lute or harp, as discussed above. The possible exceptions to this solo practice norm would be music for large theatrical presentations, where there would be more than one singer to a part. Beginning in the early sixteenth century large theatrical productions, which included performances of chansons, madrigals and so on, would often have several singers to a part and sometimes instrumental doubling as well.35
Sacred polyphonic repertoire The sacred polyphonic repertoire throughout the Renaissance period consisted of motets and settings of the Mass Proper and Ordinary as well as 34 C. Reynolds, ‘Sacred polyphony’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, p. 189. 35 See H. M. Brown, Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: The Music for the Florentine Intermedii, Musicological Studies and Documents 30, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1973.
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items for the daily Office. The most interesting of the developments was in the setting of the Mass Ordinary in the second half of the fifteenth century. Composers began musically to unite all five (sometimes six) parts of the Ordinary,36 using a number of devices such as cantus firmus, identical entrance passages, common motifs, and so on, all of which resulted in the creation of a large, integrated, multi-movement composition. Motets, that in the Middle Ages often had two or more separate texts, evolved to single texts. The compositional style changes in all of sacred polyphony parallel those described above for the secular repertoire: three-voice texture with a dominant treble changing by mid-fifteenth century to more equal voicing with the inclusion of some imitation; changing to four voices with pervasive imitation by the end of the century. Throughout the sixteenth century the sacred forms remained more or less constant, but new compositional practices involved writing for five or more voices as well as for two or more choirs, and eventually the introduction of instruments along with the voices.
Performance practice It must be remembered that throughout the Renaissance period, the most frequently performed sacred music continued to be monophonic chant, sung in unison by a choir. To this, on special occasions, was added the rich repertoire of polyphonic music described above, whose performance traditions are less clearly understood. One of the more contentious performance practice topics in the scholarly literature over the past few decades concerns the number of singers that would normally sing a sacred polyphonic composition. The issue revolves around the factual knowledge of how many singers were actually employed as members of the choirs at the various churches and court chapels. The older, and most obvious conclusion was to assume that all singers sang all of the music, similar to modern choral practices. Therefore, when it was established, for example, that in 1469 the Burgundian court chapel had six high voices, two contratenors, three tenors and three contrabasses,37 the assumption was that a fourpart Mass or motet was performed with all 14 singers, distributed 6–2–3–3 (SATB). In Rome the papal choir in 1544 consisted of 29 singers: 7 sopranos, 14 contraltos–tenors, and 8 basses, which led to the conclusion that in a performance of a four-part work the voices would be distributed 7–7–7–8.38 We know 36 Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and sometimes the Ite missa est. 37 D. Fallows, ‘Specific information on the ensembles for composed polyphony, 1400–74’, in S. Boorman (ed.), Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 110–11. 38 R. Sherr, ‘Performance practice in the Papal Chapel during the sixteenth century’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 458, repr. in R. Sherr, Music and Musicians in Renaissance Rome and Other Courts, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999.
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that during the last half of the fifteenth century the Florence baptistry had five singers who performed three-voice polyphony (although we do no know how the voices were distributed), and in 1512 that number had increased to 12–14 voices with the voice distribution 2 basses, 3 tenors, 2 contratenors and 1 adult and 4 to 6 boys for the top part. Similarly, Treviso Cathedral in 1527 had 2 basses, 2 tenors, 3 contras and 2 adults plus 4 boys for the top part,39 and in 1568 the Kapelle in Munich consisted of 12 basses, 10 tenors, 9 altos and 20 boys.40 More recent research, however, has revealed that knowledge of how many singers were in the choirs did not necessarily indicate how many sang at one time. It appears that at least in some locations the members of the choir took turns singing, which resulted in just a few voices or perhaps only one on a part. Richard Sherr, for example, has demonstrated that the practice in the Papal Chapel during the sixteenth century (where the membership varied between 20 and 35 singers) included everything from four singers per part to soloists, but he concludes that ‘only rarely if ever did all of the singers perform together, and that the use of soloists was always an acceptable possibility’.41 Similar practices have been found to be true of England during the period 1470–1558, where the cathedral and chapel practices were fairly consistent. The usual practice was that there were two or three male voices employed for each of the lower parts in a three-, four- or five-part composition and three to six boys for the top line, although how many of them would have sung at any one time is not securely known. The Gyfford part-books from c. 1553 state that its four-part music is to be sung by ‘three men and a child’, that is, one to a part. And the Regulation of 1526 for Chichester Cathedral states: ‘[T]hat there be there in perpetuity four lay clerks having mutually blending voices and learned in music, of whom one at least is always [to be possessed] of a natural and audible bass voice: while the voices of the other three be sweet and melodious, so that by the joint application of their voice they may naturally and freely encompass 15 or 16 notes.’42 The size of the choir, therefore, tells us only how many people were available, but not how many performed at one time. At least in some cases the ‘choir’ was actually an assembly of soloists who took turns. And we must
39 D. Fallows, ‘The performing ensembles in Josquin’s sacred music’, Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 35 (1985), 42–3. 40 C. Wearing, ‘Orlandus Lassus (1532–1594) and the Munich Kapelle’, Early Music, 10 (1982), 150. 41 Sherr, ‘Performance Practice’, 460–1. Seventeenth-century polyphonic practice in the Papal Chapel was by soloists; see J. Lionnet, ‘Performance practice in the Papal Chapel during the 17th century’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 3–15. 42 R. Bowers, ‘The vocal scoring, choral balance and performing pitch of Latin church polyphony in England, c. 1500–58’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 112 (1987), 47–54.
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remember that all church services also included a large quantity of chant for which the entire choir would have sung in unison. To be sure, on some very special occasions music was presented by a large number of performers, as for example in Cambrai, during a visit by Emperor Charles V in 1540, when thirtyfour singers took part in a performance of the motet ‘Preter rerum’.43 But these would seem to have been exceptions, as would have been a performance that included loud instruments and organs with voices, as discussed below. The usual custom, however, was something entirely different and far more modest than has been previously thought. What we can conclude from this information is that some locations employed as few as one, two or three singers for each vocal range, while others, such as the Sistine Chapel and the Munich Kapelle, had much larger forces. But none of this tells us how many singers actually participated at one time. There is clear evidence that one on a part was an acceptable number (e.g. the Gyfford Part Books; Sistine Chapel). How frequently that was the practice is still not known, but the fact that as late as the eighteenth century, Bach’s B minor Mass was performed with one on a part,44 suggests that solo singing of sacred polyphonic music must have had a very long and geographically broad tradition.
Sacred music and instruments Although there was an organ present in most churches and chapels from the Middle Ages, there is very little evidence that the instrument ever performed with voices until very late in the sixteenth century. Organs sometimes played introductions (intonations) to set the pitch for the singers, and they were used to play alternatim verses, that is, every other verse of a psalm, alternating with either unaccompanied unison chant or unaccompanied polyphonic voices. But when the organ played, the singers usually were silent. On some extremely festive occasions loud ‘outdoor’ instruments were mixed with voices. In France in 1520, for example, shawms and sackbuts performed during a High Mass at the church of the Jacobins.45 This practice continued to grow in popularity during the century although it was not immediately acceptable to everyone. It was seen by some as an unwelcome encroachment of theatrical practices, as can be gleaned from Erasmus’s statement in 1518: ‘we have introduced a kind of artificial and theatrical music into churches . . . 43 C. Wright, ‘Performance practices at the Cathedral of Cambrai 1475–1550’, Musical Quarterly, 64 (1978), 296. 44 J. Rifkin, ‘letters’, in Musical Times, 123 (1982), 747–54; 124 (1983), 161–2. 45 Fallows, ‘Performing ensembles’, 34–5.
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Everything resounds with trumpets, cornetts, shawms and sackbuts, and the human voices which must compete with them.’46 But by mid-century the practice was well established in a number of places; in Munich for example, wind instruments combined with voices regularly at Mass on Sundays, feast days and Vespers.47
Multiple choirs From the last half of the sixteenth century there is a growing repertoire for multiple choirs. This repertoire was popular in a number of locations such as London, Rome, Venice and Munich, where there was talent as well as sufficient funds to support larger numbers of singers.48 The usual practice was for the composer to write for contrasting ranges of voices, as for example, Choir I SAAT, Choir II ATTB, that is, mostly high voices in one ensemble, and mostly low in another. Even with only one voice to a part the contrast between the two ensembles would be heard. At other times additional contrast was obtained by assigning soloists to one choir and two or more voices to the other. Some of the most spectacular compositions in this format were written in Venice by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. Some of that repertoire calls for two, three or four choirs, and sometimes includes a set of instruments such as sackbuts, cornets and organ, either combined with voices or as a separate choir.49 For quite a while it was assumed that the divided choirs were physically separated and placed in the choir loft of St Mark’s. More recent scholarship has demonstrated that the musicians most often performed all together in a single group, placed on a pergolo, a hexagonal structure in the nave. This was especially true of the repertoire for two choirs without accompaniment, in which the distribution of voices would contrast one choir of soloists with the other, the ripieno choir, having two or three voices to a part.50 It is also true that in some of the most festive music very late in the century, the soloist choir was placed on the pergolo, while the ripieno choir was in the loft with instruments.51
46 Ibid. 47 Wearing, ‘Orlando Lassus’, 149, citing Massimo Troiano. 48 The earliest known compositions were those published in 1550 by Gardano, containing works for divided choir by Adriano Willaert and Jacquet of Mantua (Jacques Colebault). See L. Moretti, ‘Architectural spaces for music: Jacopo Sansovino and Adrian Willaert at St. Mark’s’, Early Music History, 23 (2004), 153. 49 A. Cavicchi (in ‘Appunti sulla prassi esecutiva della musica sacra nella seconda metà del XVI secolo con riferimento alla musica del Palestrina’, in F. Luisi (ed.), Atti del Convegno di Studi Palestriniani, 28 settembre–2 ottobre 1975, Palestrina, Fondazione G.P. da Palestrina,1977, p. 299) notes a Mass written in 1591 by Luzzaschi, Virchi, Fiorini and Alberti, that required three choirs, two organs, cornets and trombones. 50 See discussion in D. Bryant, ‘The cori Spezzati of St. Mark’s: myth and reality’, Early Music History, 1 (1981), 170–5; Moretti, ‘Architectural spaces’, and A. Atlas, Renaissance Music, New York, Norton, 1998, pp. 411–13. 51 D. Bryant, ‘The cori Spezzati of St. Mark’s: myth and reality’, Early Music History, 1 (1981), 170–5.
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Conclusion A number of practices that were the foundation of Baroque performance, such as multiple choirs and concerted combinations of voices and instruments, were developed during the Renaissance. Of special note is the fact that it was the late sixteenth-century developments in terms of dramatic expression of the text, as well as the performance techniques developed along with the monodic style that led directly to opera and remained as the basis of the solo operatic performance tradition for the next several centuries.
. 14 .
Instrumental performance in the Renaissance KEITH POLK
Between 1430 and 1600 performance practice for instrumental musicians turned on its head. The watershed development for players (and of course for music in general) was the arrival of a compositional approach which was based on the notion of through imitation as the basic texture. This took place just before 1500, and after this the ground rules for performers changed fundamentally. The purpose here will be to trace the course of how these changes played out. With the key date of 1500 providing the frame of reference, this study will divide into two parts. The first considers the development of the instruments, ensembles and performance techniques of the fifteenth century. This span in essence may be viewed as a culmination of medieval traditions. The second takes up what followed in the sixteenth century, a period in which tradition and innovation time and again came into sharp conflict.
Instrumental practices c. 1430–1500 Instrumentalists in the fifteenth century performed almost entirely without written music. Because they worked without music, their practices have remained veiled – but other sources, iconographical, theoretical and archival, tell us a great deal. We know that in the fifteenth century the tradition of the distinction of two categories of instruments (haut and bas, or loud and soft) held sway.1 The soft instruments were those with gentler timbres, the most important being the fiddle, the lute, the harp and the portative organ. The loud instruments in this era included trumpets, shawms of various sizes, bagpipes and drums. The two groups will be considered separately, but it should be noted that while we have much more explicit information for practices in the soft category, loud and soft probably had much in common in relation to performance practices.
1 The landmark study remains E. A. Bowles, ‘Haut and Bas: the grouping of musical instruments in the Middle Ages’, Musica Disciplina, 8 (1954), 115–40.
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The soft category – the instruments2 Each of the instruments in this category followed its own unique evolutionary path. The fiddle, a bowed stringed instrument rather like the modern violin (though somewhat larger) had been an overwhelming favourite among players in the late fourteenth century. While its primacy was giving way in the fifteenth century, it remained a common instrument in ensembles until well after 1500. The rebec, a smaller bowed instrument, also remained in use as a discant instrument in ensembles. The lute was the star ascendant from about 1430 onward, and players favoured pairs of lutes for chamber ensemble performances.3 By this time the instrument was considered as consisting of at least two sizes, the smaller for the discant, the larger capable of tenor or contratenor ranges. The smaller instrument was often the quintern, an instrument of slightly different construction, usually played with a plectrum until at least 1450, and essentially a monophonic instrument. The lute itself could be played with or without a plectrum, and was capable of performing more than one part in the musical textures. Several keyboard instruments were available. The portative organ (a small instrument, played with one hand while pumped with the other) retained some stature to about 1450 and declined thereafter, though it still remained in use. The larger organs were usually restricted to either solo performance or to performance with singers in sacred settings. A variety of keyboard stringed instruments were arriving on the scene in the fifteenth century, but their impact was relatively modest until after 1500. The harp enjoyed considerable renown among instruments in the soft category, but tended to remain somewhat to the side. Players of harp, at any rate, tended to be specialists, while in general players of soft instruments tended to be doublers. The harp nonetheless figured prominently in fifteenth-century ensemble performance practice.
2 The focus here is on performance practice, and discussion of individual instruments is of necessity concise. As a result some instruments (the psaltery for example) are not discussed. For fuller information on late-medieval instruments (including those omitted in this chapter) see the appropriate articles in R. W. Duffin (ed.), A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2000. The articles by Herbert Myers on wind instruments and that by Crawford Young on plucked instruments are of particular authority. For a general survey see H. M. Brown and K. Polk, ‘Instrumental music, c.1300–c.1520’, in B. J. Blackburn and R. Strohm (eds.), Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages, The New Oxford History of Music, vol. 3, pt. 1, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 97–161. 3 The term ‘chamber’ musicians began to be used for players in the soft category at about this time, as for example in a payment in Deventer in 1437 to two ‘Camer speellude’ of the Bishop of Utrecht. See K. Polk, ‘Minstrels and music in the Low Countries in the fifteenth century’, in B. Haggh et al. (eds.), Archival Research and Musicology, Brussels, Belgian Royal Archives, 1994, pp. 392–410.
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The recorder had made its appearance well before 1430, but became an increasing presence in the later fifteenth century. It was somewhat exceptional in two ways. First, recorders from very early were often played as a consort, without mixing with other instruments. Second, they were one exception among the soft instruments in that they were consistently picked up as a potential doubling instrument by players of loud instruments.4 Soft instruments as a group had characteristics which set them apart from those in the loud category. Most of these instruments could be played alone as solo instruments as well as in ensembles (instruments in the loud category were generally restricted to ensemble performances). Also, soft instruments could appear in a very wide variety of combinations. The loud instruments tended to be much more restricted in this regard (more on this presently). Changes did occur over time. In the early fifteenth century a combination of fiddle, portative organ and some kind of lute was a favourite, but by about 1450 the lute duo was the pre-eminent soft ensemble. Still, all of the instruments listed above continued in use throughout the century.
The soft category – the players A handful of the virtuoso players were so remarkable that they attracted detailed commentary from contemporary observers. A fine pair of chamber musicians, Jehan de Cordeval and Jehan Fernandez, arrived at the court of Burgundy in 1433. The two, both evidently blind, were from the Iberian peninsula, and had arrived in the retinue of the new duchess, Isabella of Portugal. As they arrived, each bore the title ‘player of the lute’ (‘joueur de luth’), in 1435 this was slightly emended to the plural ‘player of the lutes’. In 1436 the entries read as payments to ‘players of fiddle’; and thereafter the titles shifted back and forth, and in some years the scribe gave up on any specific designation and they were termed simply ‘joueurs de bas instruments’. The importance of the shifting terminology for performance practice is first that it verifies what has been suggested above concerning chamber players – they were expected to have the ability to double on a variety of instruments. In addition, the use of the ‘player of the lutes’ in 1435 would indicate that it was understood that ‘lutes’ were plural, that is, made in more than one size.5
4 While not completely accurate I shall use the term ‘consort’ if unmodified to refer to an ensemble consisting entirely of instruments of one general type, i.e. of recorders, or of viols. For example, see K. Polk, ‘The recorder in fifteenth-century consorts’, in D. Lasocki (ed.), Musicque de Joye, Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Renaissance Flute and Recorder Consort, Utrecht 2003, Utrecht, STIMU, 2005, pp. 17–29. 5 For documentation of Cordoval and Fernandez at the Burgundian Court see J. Marix, Histoire de la musique et des musiciens de la cour de Bourgogne sous le règne de Philippe le Bon, Strasbourg, Heitz, 1939, repr. Geneva, Minkoff, 1972, pp. 266–73.
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The most celebrated reference to this pair comes in the lines from the Champion des dames of Martin le Franc, dating probably from the 1440s: Tu as les avugles ouy Jouer a la court de Bourgongue . . . J’ay veu Binchois avoir vergongne . . . Et Dufay despité et frongne Qu’il n’a melodye sy belle
On hearing the blind chamber duo, Binchois and Dufay were discomfited as they could not match such lovely melody.6 The reference is hardly specific, but as it is certain that two players were involved, we can assume the ‘melody’ was accompanied melody, that is, counterpoint in some fashion. Another striking reference to this pair is from a description of the famous banquet given by the Duke of Burgundy in 1454 at a gathering of the knights of the Golden Fleece. The two played on fiddles, while a young woman from the court of the duchess sang with them (unfortunately the piece performed was not named).7 Conrad Paumann (c. 1410–1473), also blind, was probably the most renowned German musician of his day. His first professional post was as organist in the St Sebaldus church in his native Nuremberg in 1446. In 1447 he was appointed to the civic chamber ensemble of lute and organ, also in Nuremberg. In 1450 he moved to serve the Duke of Bavaria in Munich, and remained in that service until the end of his life. He made one notable trip to Italy in 1470, where he was described as ‘miracoloso’. History remembers him primarily as an organist, but he was also a master lutenist, appearing both as a soloists and in lute ensembles in a variety of official visits to such German towns as Augsburg as a musical representative of the Duke of Bavaria. His abilities were noteworthy on a pair of accounts. First, Tinctoris singled out Paumann’s supreme ability to play more than one line on the lute – this in contrast to other contemporaries who specialised in monophonic performance. Second, he was also a fine composer. We only have one piece extant, but it reveals complete mastery.8 Analogous to Paumann in Germany, Pietrobono, lutenist at the court of Ferrara was ‘beyond all doubt one of the most important figures in all of fifteenth-century music, certainly in Italy’.9 Pietrobono, usually named as Pietrobono del Chitarino in the Ferrarese accounts, first appeared in the
6 Ibid., p. 107. 7 Ibid., p. 40. 8 K. Polk, German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons and Performance Practice, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 24–5. 9 L. Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara 1400–1505, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 98. For what follows see Lockwood’s chapter on Pietrobono (pp. 95–108) and the listings of court musicians in his Appendix V (pp. 314–28).
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records in 1441 and with some interruptions he remained in the service of the d’Este court until his death in 1497. His specialty was playing elegant melody as a single line on the small quintern, usually accompanied by his ‘tenorist’, probably a player on a large lute. He was certainly a master of the larger instrument as well, for he was also renowned for his performances as a singer, for which he provided his own accompaniment. His career provides several insights into contemporary attitudes towards performance. Pietrobono was considered the most creative Italian musician of his time – yet not one note of his music has survived. His entire artistic output consisted of what resulted from spontaneous performances. In addition, his impact on his audiences reminds us of the contemporary value placed on the single musical line. In our time we tend to place almost our entire emphasis on polyphonic art-works. This focus does not square with fifteenth-century values. And value is an appropriate term, for one marker of the status achieved by Pietrobono was that his compensation, both in terms of salary and supplementary gifts, vastly exceeded that of any of the singers or composers associated with the Ferrara court. We are also fortunate to have several letters relating to Pietrobono’s teaching of fellow performers. From these it is clear that the young player evidently learned music by rote and at a distinctly leisurely pace – it could take a week of daily lessons to learn two or three pieces, even for a talented player. These performers were the cream of contemporary talent, but there were numerous others of outstanding ability. Hans Kratzer was active in the civic organ/lute duo in Nuremberg, Leonardo del Chitarino preceeded Pietrobono in Ferrara, and a lute duo with the court of the Margrave of Brandenburg achieved considerable fame in the 1440s – though the accounts did not reveal their names. Paumann and Pietrobono achieved extraordinary stature, but at any one time there were scores of other very fine chamber musicians putting their skills into practice.
The soft category – musical sources and instrumental performance practices The musical sources which convey repertoire of chamber musicians consists of a group of larger manuscripts which have generally been considered keyboard collections, as well as a handful of fragmentary sources. The two most important larger sources are the Faenza Codex, and the Buxheim Organ Book.10 10 For descriptions and biography concerning the Faenza Codex (Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 117) and the Buxheim Organ Book (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cim. 325b (formerly Mus. Ms. 3725) ) see D. Fallows, A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs 1415–1480, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 9 and 17. Of particular importance in relation to the Faenza source is P. Memelsdorff, ‘Motti a motti: reflections on a motet intabulation of the early Quattrocento’, Recercare, 10 (1998), 39–68. For a survey of manuscripts with ties to instrumental music, see Brown and Polk, ‘Instrumental music’, pp. 112–31.
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The Faenza Codex was probably compiled between about 1420 and 1430. The repertoire is quite varied, including sacred pieces, French and Italian songs, and dances. Scholars have engaged in heated debate concerning the intended performance medium. One group has argued that it is a keyboard source (the sacred items must have been intended for organ), while others have argued that it was intended for single-line instruments especially the lute, though one line might also have been played by fiddle or portative organ. One reasonable compromise would appear to be that the source probably represented the repertoire of chamber musicians in the mould of Conrad Paumann. Such musicians would choose the instrument appropriate for the performance context. The liturgical sacred items would be played on a large organ, in church, while the dances would be played on perhaps two lutes in a room appropriate for secular activity (note that the dances would be completely out of place for performance by a large organ, which would have been in a fixed location with the walls of a church). The contents of the manuscript are immensely revealing concerning performance practices of the time. Some items included, for example, were composed several decades earlier – suggesting that much of the instrumental repertoire once learned by aural transmission tended to be distinctly retrospective. Also the techniques used to transfer the pieces to chamber performance are instructive. The pieces are all for two parts (with a very few exceptional instances of an isolated third note being added). With a three-part original one part would be stripped away, in most cases the contratenor. In a few instances, if the original tenor rested for a considerable span, the contratenor would be taken over. Apparently the Faenza performer[s] always wished to have a basic twopart sonority. Embellishments were freely applied, most elaborately to the discant. In sum, one perspective on the Faenza Codex is that it provides virtually a catalogue of the ways chamber performers would adapt and compile their repertoire. The Buxheim Organ Book is unquestionably for organ as it contains numerous indications of parts for pedals. It dates from about 1465 and is evidently from the circle of Conrad Paumann in that it contains examples of Fundamenta which are credited to him (these were rather short sets of examples, setting out a step-by-step pattern for a young keyboard player to learn both how to produce improvised counterpoint and how to add embellishments to a preexisting framework). The Buxheim collection is very large and includes sacred items, German songs, as well as imported secular items, including a number of settings of dance tenors. Most of the song settings are highly embellished, and Buxheim thus provides a primer on both methods of transcription from vocal models and on decoration technique of the second half of the fifteenth
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century. It also includes, however, pieces which are not decorated, one dramatic example being Wiplich figur, attributed to Paumann himself. This piece is especially important as it suggests that while embellishment was an essential skill for keyboard players, they might also perform pieces as they stood, without any decoration whatsoever. One final manuscript that can be mentioned is Bodleian 213, which dates from the 1430s.11 This is another very large volume, and has been discussed in the literature primarily as a source of early fifteenth-century vocal music. It is the major source as for the earlier chansons of Dufay and Binchois and their contemporaries. The scribal practices here are particularly fascinating in relation to the provision of texts. Some pieces are texted in all parts, a few are texted in two parts, and a great many are given text for the discant only, with the other parts left without any text at all. A powerful argument was raised in the 1970s that the ideal medium for performance of the chansons of this era was that of unaccompanied voices – a view which has been widely, perhaps too widely, accepted. One dissenting voice was that of Graeme Boone, who noted concerning Dufay’s Mon chier amy (to take this as one example), that the ‘cantus and tenor [of this song], unlike the contratenor, are finely adapted to the declamation of their texts in every respect’ and he goes on to say, ‘the prosodic strictures of [Dufay’s] style, as seen in the manuscript texting, unambiguously privilege certain voices as the bearers of text, and this fact must not be ignored if the principles of text setting are to be understood’.12 That is, not only the way the texts are written out, but the musical structure itself would appear to reveal that some parts of the texture are by design to be declaimed, that is, sung, others are not – implicit is that these other parts are not vocal, and are thus suggestive of instrumental performance. Without a doubt, one performance choice would have been that of all-vocal performance. Still, the manner of texting in the Bodleian source, Boone’s observation of the lack of fit of text with music and the specific instance of a performance within the Burgundian circle (at the 1454 banquet mentioned above) would seem to make a strong case that for some of the chansons by Binchois and Dufay one of the performance options expected by the composers themselves would have been one which combined a voice or voices with instruments.
Loud music – the instruments, the players and the sources The loud instruments were those that produced penetrating sounds; trumpets and shawms were the most prominent, others that were important included 11 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. misc.213, see Fallows, A Catalogue, p. 31. 12 G. M. Boone, Patterns in Play, a Model for Text Setting in the Early French Songs of Guillaume Dufay, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1999, pp. 196–7.
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the bagpipe and various kinds of drums. Within the loud category four groupings were particularly noteworthy: the corps of trumpet players (often including kettle drums), the shawm bands (which usually included a brass instrument equipped with a slide, i.e. a sackbut in some form), the bagpipes (sometimes singly sometimes in pairs), and a combination of fife and drum (a grouping associated with military units, and one which became increasingly common after about 1470).13 Through most of Europe the trumpet groups were almost exclusively associated with the highest nobility. Italian cities were a prominent exception in that the cities that maintained any degree of independence provided support for trumpets. Venice had her ‘six silver trumpets’ and similar support existed in Bologna, Florence and Siena. The ensembles, particularly those associated with the nobility, did expand dramatically in the course of the fifteenth century. Around 1400 often two trumpets were considered sufficient; but by 1500 the larger courts had at least a dozen. The sound of the trumpet was considered an aural image of power, and a dozen or so trumpets marching shoulder to shoulder down a narrow medieval street were capable of an awe-inspiring din, which was of course the point. No sources survive of music for trumpets in the fifteenth century. A few composed pieces include vocal parts which are written in imitation of trumpet fanfares, which suggest that in general trumpets then were restricted to a range up to about the eighth harmonic – that is, trumpets were essentially capable of a triad. One single comment, in reference to trumpets performing at a noble wedding in Amberg in 1474, mentions that the trumpets played ‘higher than one could imagine possible’. This hints that exploration of higher partials was underway – but how this expanded register would have been put into practice is unknown.14 The most important ensemble from a musical point of view was the shawm band. This group increased from about three players in 1430 (usually consisting of a discant shawm, a tenor shawm, often called a bombard, and a sackbut in some form for the contratenor, though an all-shawm ensemble with a shawm and two bombards was also possible) to four or five by the end of the century. A great deal of superficial information is available concerning the players in that pay records have survived in great quantity from most regions in Europe. We have in fact thousands of such documents available. Unfortunately they rarely give any information beyond names, and in some instances the particular
13 For information on the loud instruments discussed below see the appropriate articles in Duffin, A Performer’s Guide; see also R. W. Duffin, ‘Shawm and curtal’, in J. Kite-Powell (ed.), A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music, New York, Schirmer, 1994, rev. edn, 2007, pp. 85–92. 14 See Polk, German Instrumental Music, p. 49, for a survey of what is known of trumpet performance practice of this period.
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instrument which was played. A very few entries specify from early in the fifteenth century that a player played a particular part; ‘soprano’, ‘tenor’ or ‘contratenor’ – these are invaluable in that they establish that the shawms were at root polyphonic ensembles. Tinctoris testified to the polyphonic nature of the ensemble assigning the soprano to the shawm, the tenor to the bombard, and the contratenor to the sackbut; he further noted that the shawms were capable of all the chromatic notes needed in performance (they were ‘perfect’ to use his terminology).15 Concerning sources for performance practices of loud instruments, we have substantially less documentation available than even the sparse sources available for music in the soft category. One prized exception is the ‘Zorzi Trombetta’ manuscript. This was a hodge-podge collection put together by a musician serving as a trumpet player on one of the Venetian galleys on the Flanders–England route in the mid-1440s. The ‘trumpeter’ (actually Giovanni da Madon, later a prominent member in the official ensemble in Venice) among other items wrote out a tenor for a Dunstable chanson, and then sketched out a series of counterpoints to go with that tenor.16 These are rather raw in effect (parallel fifths figure prominently), but serve to establish that this young player was able to write counterpoint, and could, therefore, obviously read mensural notation. They, and the other contents of the manuscript, also establish that for this musician familiarity with the international chanson repertoire was probably a given. Moreover, while we have almost no other indications of this kind, this one source suggests that musical literacy was probably quite common, at least among the upper echelons of professional shawm band players. One manuscript of potential far-reaching consequence is the Casanatense manuscript, for which a date of about 1481 has been suggested, and, more important, also suggested has been that the collection represents the repertoire of the wind ensemble at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua. This dating has been challenged recently, and the issue is not yet resolved.17 What is clear from this
15 A. Baines, ‘Fifteenth-century instruments in Tinctoris’s De Inventione et usu musicae’, Galpin Society Journal, 3 (1950), 20–1. 16 The manuscript is described and discussed by D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Il libro de appunti di un suonatore di tromba del quindecesimo secolo’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 16 (1981), 16–39. (An English-language version of this paper is available as Pamphlet 2524 in the manuscript room of the British Library, London.) On Zorzi see Polk, German Instrumental Music, pp. 158–9 and p. 248, n. 94; see also R. Baroncini, ‘Zorzi Trombetta and the band of Piffari and trombones of the Serenissima: new documentary evidence’, Historic Brass Society Journal, 14 (2002), 59–82. Examples of Zorzi’s counterpoints, with commentary, are available in L. Welker, ‘ “Alta Capella” zur Ensemblepraxis der Blasinstrumente im 15. Jahrhundert’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 7 (1983), 150–61. 17 The argument for dating the Casanatense manuscript (Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 2856 (formerly O.V.208) ) is in Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, pp. 269–77. The proposal that it should be dated at least a decade later is in J. Rifkin, ‘Munich, Milan, and a Marian motet: dating Josquin’s Ave Maria . . . virgo serena’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 239–350.
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manuscript and others comprising similar repertoires, however, is that a kind of piece evolved between about 1480 and 1490, the so-called ‘instrumental tricinia’ which appears to have been designed for instruments from the outset. Moreover, this kind of piece was developed foremost by Johannes Martini in Ferrara and Heinrich Isaac in Florence. Both of these centres boasted some of the most brilliant wind players of the time. This repertoire offers evidence that wind players then had full command of the most advanced musical techniques of the time, and their concepts overlapped almost completely with those of contemporary vocal musicians – and composers.
Performance practices at the close of the fifteenth century All professional instrumentalists had to have command of a basic set of skills. Memory capacity was crucial, for all players, chamber players or those in wind bands, had to commit a core repertoire to memory. With the grasp of this basic repertoire they could put it into performances in a variety of ways. First, they could simply play a piece as composed (in the terms of the time this would have been playing a ‘res facta’). Or they could take the original framework and apply embellishments, often these would be highly elaborate – and, at best, elegant. Another alternative would have been to take one part of an original, and construct new counterpoints around it (in the terms of the time this would have been counterpoint ‘supra librum’). Another option was to strip away an original third part (usually the contratenor) and one player would invent a new one. For skilled players of the time combinations of the above were undoubtedly the order of the day, a bit of playing as composed, a bit of invented counterpoint, and a healthy dose of decoration all being possible. An essential conclusion is that the task of instrumentalists of this era was to invent from their imaginations a musical piece on the spot – their function was at root a creative one. Achieving a close understanding of how late fifteenth-century performers went about their performances has been one of the great challenges to performers and scholars of our time. The path to accomplishing this, while offering formidable difficulties, is smoothed in that much of late fifteenth-century theoretical writing was aimed at precisely this issue. Johannes Tinctoris is especially specific. For him, the rules he laid out in his Liber de Arte Contrapuncti (representing the concept of counterpoint in general practice about 1475) apply both to written as well as to improvised counterpoint. A few allowances were to be made for improvisation (he recognised that occasional dissonant clashes might occur) but in all essentials of style there was no distinction between what was to be composed and what was to be created on the spot. Tinctoris was sympathetic to
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instrumental music. He described both Paumann and Pietrobono in glowing terms, and stated that his own favoured recreation was playing the ‘viola’ (it is not entirely clear whether this might have been a bowed instrument or some kind of lute). He did not, however, specifically say that his rules applied to instrumental as well as vocal performance. Other theorists did, however. The Spanish theorist Durán was quite direct; for him the rules of counterpoint applied ‘to playing as much as singing. For playing is the equivalent of singing.’18 In fact, one of the happy developments on the musical scene in the past few decades has been the success of some modern performers and performer/scholars in recreating improvisations following fifteenth-century stylistic parameters. Those associated with the Schola Cantorum in Basle (under the musical guidance of Crawford Young and Randall Cook), at Case Western University (under leadership of Ross Duffin), and the University of Southern California (lead by Adam Gilbert) have achieved particularly impressive results.19 The task of interweaving spontaneous counterpoint was eased somewhat with performers focused in particular registers. Michael Schubinger was a specialist in the discant range. His brother Augustine was initially a trombonist, and therefore concentrated on the contratenor. And of course at the court of Ferrara Pietrobono, the specialist at embellishing a soprano line, was consistently accompanied by his ‘tenorist’. Specialisation must have facilitated the ability of the performers quickly to fit in with new ensembles. Contemporary documents reveal that mobility in and out of ensembles was the rule of the day, and quick assimilation was imperative. One of the issues that must have been of constant concern was the matter of the pitch level. Here, too, there must have been some consistency in that players from Germany, France and Flanders are noted as arriving in bands in Italy, with no comment as to any difficulty accommodating to a new environment. The issue was not a minor one. In one quite exceptional document from 1480 in Milan a player who had been hired from Cesena was fired because ‘he could not play in tune with the other band members’.20 Instrumental performance practice of the late fifteenth century demanded a high order of artistic ability at all levels.
18 For more on Tinctoris and Durán see Polk, German Instrumental Music, pp. 166–8. 19 Parallel to these developments, several scholars have presented suggestions as to how modern performers might go about recreating performance practices of that time; these include: T. J. McGee, Medieval and Renaissance Music, a Performer’s Guide, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1990, pp. 186–200; A. Gilbert, ‘The improvising alta capella c.1500: paradigms and procedures’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 29 (2005), 109–23; Polk, German Instrumental Music, pp. 169–213. 20 They could not ‘intonare con loro’; G. Barblan, ‘Vita musicale alla corte sforzesca’, in G. Treccani (ed.), Storia di Milano, vol. 9, Milan, Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri per la Storia di Milano, 1961, p. 780. For further on matters of tuning see R. W. Duffin, ‘Tuning and temperament’, in Kite-Powell (ed.), A Performer’s Guide, pp. 279–68. As Duffin points out, the difficulties of tuning are particularly difficult when fixed pitch instruments such as the lute are used in ensembles.
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1500–1600 – the transition, new practices Unwritten practices reached a high point late in the fifteenth century, but by 1500 overlapping demands pressed instrumentalists inexorably in new directions. Two interrelated developments forced the issue. The first was the rise of through imitation as the favoured texture in musical composition. The second was the increase in the texture from one of three parts (based on a core duo of discant/tenor) to one of four and more parts (which ultimately evolved into a texture in which the discant/bass pair became the defining voices). Three-part improvisation based on a tenor demanded skill, but was reasonably straightforward for experienced and well-trained professionals. Improvisation in four parts and more in imitation, however, posed immense complications generally beyond the capabilities of even skilled professionals. The combination of forces resulted in fundamental shifts in instrumental practices. One was that performers became increasingly dependent on notated music. From about 1500 onward much of the basic repertoire of instrumentalists was drawn from music for which the basic structure was dictated by a written exemplar, either manuscript or print. A further shift occurred as the art of embellishment assumed an even more prominent place in the arsenal of performers than had been the case in the fifteenth century. Changing fundamentals meant substantial adjustments, but improvisation nonetheless continued to be a basic skill required of instrumentalists, particularly under demanding performance contexts. Dancing continued to be an overwhelming favourite as a social pastime, and such diversions could last for many hours. In providing suitable music instrumentalists had to find a way to fill all of that time. Various kinds of improvisations were imperative (numerous illustrations of dance have survived, and the musicians furnishing the music are never shown performing from written texts). One approach was to continue in the traditional way with a reduced three-part texture (a well-known melody could be placed in the tenor, and new counterpoints invented around it). By about 1530, however, the voice to be borrowed was the soprano, that is, when a popular chanson was taken over as a dance piece, it would be the top part that would provide the framework for the new structure. Another new and appealing technique began to appear by shortly after 1500. Also taking off from the fundamental shift away from a tenor-based framework, the new manner involved laying out a pattern in the bass, which quickly resulted in a kind of predictable harmonic succession, around which a soloist or several experienced performers were able to negotiate, creating an acceptable web of
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new counterpoints. Well-known examples of such basses are the passamezzo patterns.21 The most artistically significant of the new improvisations was that embodied in what musicians of the time often termed ‘fantasia’. At its most fundamental level a fantasia was the spontaneous product of a musician at a particular time and in a particular place. It was a performance art which vanished as it passed. Fortunately a number of these were of such fine quality that they were ultimately written down – and indeed, quantities of them were in fact made available in contemporary prints. This was music of such fascinating complexity that it was exclusively music for soloists, particularly lute (in Spain, the vihuela) or keyboard. Models of such products of invention are those produced for lute by Francesco da Milano. These combine great variety; some sections are imitative, some are distinctly idiomatic, some pieces are based on one main idea, others quote from (for example) popular chansons. Keyboard ricercars, such as those of Cavazzoni, were offshoots of the same concept of music which could be produced in performance. One of the ironies of this phenomenon is that as the fantasia evolved into a highly sophisticated form for soloists, evidence of a related form for instrumental ensembles all but disappeared. This was due in good part to the conditions inherent in performance practice. A free-wheeling mixture of imitative and idiomatic textures with infinitely flexible construction was impossible with any improvisatory ensemble practice for even the most skilled performers when six or eight musicians were working together.
The instruments The notion of a dividing line drawn in 1500 proves particularly useful in terms of consideration of individual instruments. We can see a distinctly new attitude in the demand for an expanded variety of instrumental colours just after the new century opened as new instruments and instrumental combinations arrived on the scene. Still, tradition remained robust, as the prominent instruments of the previous decades continued to provide the backbone of instrumental combinations.22
21 Suggestions concerning how these new textures could be accomplished in performances to accompany dancing are given in K. Polk, ‘Instrumentalists and performance practices in dance music, c.1500’ and in T. J. McGee (ed.), Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Kalamazoo, MI, Medieval Institute Publications, 2003, pp. 98–114. 22 During the course of the sixteenth century, not only did new instruments appear, but almost all of the instruments discussed here increased in the number of different sizes available. The dilemma then is that on the one hand an understanding of the resulting complexities is fundamental to an approach to performance practice, on the other, an adequate discussion of those complexities is impossible in a concise overview. Fortunately, a very good survey of these issues is available in the essays in Kite-Powell (ed.), A Performer’s
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The lute, the premier chamber instrument earlier, retained its hold in the sixteenth century. There was a renewed emphasis on solo playing, which led to new repertoires, particularly the fantasia, as described above. One highly significant new development was that of ever larger sizes of lutes, and these larger instruments reflected the desire for increased reinforcement of bass lines in musical textures. An additional aspect was the increased participation of amateurs in lute playing. The technique of the lute is demanding, but a large number of amateurs took up the instrument, some of whom became highly skilled. The marketing for the relatively large number of lute publications was of course aimed at this audience, for they were the ones with the means to purchase the volumes. Among the keyboard instruments the organ remained central. It continued as largely an instrument for professionals; indeed a successful career for an organist now demanded a level of virtuosity such that we no longer hear of doublers in the manner of Conrad Paumann. In any case organists of the sixteenth century, while perhaps capable of playing other instruments, are rarely mentioned as doing so. Stringed keyboard types made significant advances after 1500, and these instruments had the added virtue of being accessible to amateurs as well as professionals. One key development for keyboard performers was the increasing use of the keyboard to provide an underpinning in ensemble performance, with an emphasis in supporting the bass line. This led ultimately to the concept of figured bass, and this notion was already discernible in performances by about 1580. Professionals were constrained to develop improvisational techniques, but there was also a vast increase in written sources. One intriguing sidelight is that for keyboard players there was apparently something of a four-tiered approach to dealing with notation. Music could be written for keyboard in tablature, the simplest way, or it could be written in a form like the modern keyboard score. Reading from full score was demanded of good players, and the most accomplished may even have been expected to be able to read from a set of part-books.23 The most dramatic new entries on the scene were the new bowed stringed instruments. The viol appeared slightly before 1500, and was from its inception made in complete consorts. The instrument had a dual appeal, being played by both amateurs and professionals. While the viols often performed in consorts, one other use was that of having one or two large viols reinforcing the bass in Guide to Renaissance Music. For a general treatment of instrumental music in the sixteenth century see V. Coelho and K. Polk, ‘Instrumental music’, in J. Haar (ed.), European Music 1520–1640, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2006, pp. 527–55. 23 The various ways keyboard players approached notation formats is discussed in R. F. Judd, ‘The use of notational formats at the keyboard: a study of printed sources of keyboard music in Spain and Italy c.1500–1700’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1989).
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mixed combinations of instruments. Ultimately the most important stringed instrument was the violin, which began to appear shortly after 1500. This instrument, too, was from the beginning made and performed in consorts of like instruments.24 The violin was for professionals only, and made rapid inroads in providing music for dancing. By the end of the century violins formed the premier ensemble for such use. Note that this would have meant the conditions described above; very long performances, working without written scores. The instruments were perhaps new, but the demands followed along traditional lines. Among the wind instruments, the shawms and sackbuts continued to form the core of the wind ensemble. More sizes of the shawm developed; especially critical was the development of a successful bass size. In terms of actual practice a true bass shawm proved an impossibility. The instrument was simply too long to be managed in many performance situations. The solution was to double the tube on itself, a form which of course led in time to the modern bassoon. This instrument was in fact successful from the outset, and quickly became a standard element in the wind ensemble. With the sackbuts, too, there were attempts to find additional sizes. The bass sackbut was developed, but in fact found limited use, as in performance it was quite cumbersome. Similarly a small trombone for the discant was known, but found no general use as this role was taken over by the most brilliant newcomer among the winds, the cornett. The cornett became established by about 1500, and thereafter often provided the discant to the shawm ensemble. Its gentle tone quality made it an ideal instrument to combine with voices, and one of the most dramatic changes in performance practice was that almost immediately cornetts were often called upon to combine with voices in church services. The desire for this more suave tone quality frequently resulted in a new configuration among the winds of an ensemble exclusively of cornetts and sackbuts. Another novel colour for the sixteenth century, usually played by members of wind bands, was the crumhorn, also an instrument usually performed in consorts. Doubling continued to be expected of professional wind players. Recorders were one such double, and while recorders were probably one of the performance options in the fifteenth century, the taste for the instrument seems to have increased significantly after 1500. It is after that date, at any rate, that we hear of more frequent purchases of recorders and of much larger inventories of the instruments being available. The recorder was apparently most often
24 P. Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers. The Violin at the English Court 1540–1690, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 4.
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performed in consorts.25 One remarkable consort was that engaged for the court of Henry VIIII, consisting entirely of one family, the Bassanos. The Bassano success from the 1530s onwards serves to mark a zenith in the history of the recorder, for from this point for the next several decades, players could specialise in the instrument, and join the ranks of the outstanding virtuosi of the time.26 The transverse flute, largely absent in the fifteenth century, had begun to reappear about 1470 in the pairing of flute and drum used to accompany military units, especially those associated with the dreaded Swiss infantry – hence the name ‘the Swiss pair’ frequently attached to the combination. The flute, however, quickly expanded beyond any military associations and by about 1550 was completely assimilated into contemporary practices. The nature of the instrument precluded the development of a true complete family (a real bass was not a viable option), but it none the less was often played both in pure consorts and seems to have been judged especially effective in use with consorts of mixed timbres. In fact its popularity was little short of astonishing, for the inventory of instruments of Henry VIII included seventy flutes, and a Stuttgart court inventory of 1589 included 220.27 The career trajectories of trumpeters altered in the sixteenth century. In one direction the exploration of the high register which had begun in the fifteenth century continued, and by 1600 a full command of clarino technique was required of the skilled player. The natural trumpet did not yet find a place in the usual ensemble practice, but in terms of technique the groundwork had been laid for the later integration of the instrument into the orchestra of the Baroque period. One atypical development for some trumpeters of the time was one that probably had economic reality as its basis. All courts of the higher nobility nursed the ambition to support both a wind ensemble and a trumpet band. Many, such as the English royal court, managed to do so, and did indeed patronise two distinct ensembles. Now while the clarino technique would call for a specialist, most of the trumpet duties called for a relatively low grade of technical command – or, to put it another way, the ability to play the trumpet was well within the capabilities of the well-trained professional wind player. It must have been obvious that it was perfectly possible for one set of capable 25 The issues involved with the recorder consorts are particularly complex; see H. W. Myers, ‘The idea of “Consort” in the sixteenth century’, in D. Lasocki (ed.), Musicque de Joye, Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Renaissance Flute and Recorder Consorts Utrecht 2003, Utrecht, STIMU 2005, pp. 31–60, at 36–40. 26 The family was the topic of a monograph: D. Lasocki, The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531–1665, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1995. 27 See Myers, ‘The idea of “Consort” ’, 40–6.
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professionals to provide both functions, that is, to play as a shawm band when that was called for, or as trumpeters when appropriate. For fifteenth-century courtly practice, however, this was evidently simply not on. The court of Burgundy had trumpets for ceremony, and a wind band to provide the fifteenth-century version of instrumental art music. Therefore all courts felt the need to match the Burgundian model. Moreover, the trumpeter, dressed in impressive livery, with a banner draped from his instrument, represented the stature and grandeur of his lord. Thus in most centres, for most performers, the tradition of separation between trumpeters and other wind players remained inflexible. Yet in some courts in the sixteenth century, especially those in central and northern Germany, some contamination of tradition appears to have taken place as the functions of the wind ensemble were absorbed by members of the trumpet bands. Georg Heyde, whom we first hear of as a member of the trumpet ensemble of Duke Albrecht of Prussia, moved on to head the trumpeters of the court of Denmark in 1542. While there he prepared for his ensemble a massive manuscript collection of polyphonic music with a completely sophisticated contrapuntal repertoire. Among the marginal indications are some that state that a particular piece was appropriate for sackbuts, or that others were good on crumhorns. Obviously the manuscript was to be performed by a wind band, not by trumpets – though the performers were listed within the category of trumpet ensemble.28 Concerning ensemble practice, two contrasting approaches characterise the sixteenth century. One was the vogue for consorts of like instruments. As described above, performers played viols, recorders and crumhorns most often in groups unmixed with other instrumental timbres. The violin, too, in the sixteenth century was almost exclusively played in the same fashion. At the same time mixed consorts combining viols, lutes, recorders and keyboard instruments were frequently heard. Towards the end of the century newer performance practices in relation to how to combine instruments began to appear. Perhaps the most important of these was the emphasis placed on dividing instruments into melodic voices on the one hand and ‘foundation’ voices on the other – important as it led directly to the development of the basso continuo practices of the Baroque era.29 Finally, it should be noted that the tradition of dividing instruments into categories of haut and bas, which could still be discerned at the beginning of the century, had utterly
28 The manuscript is Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, MS 1872–4o; for a discussion of the background of Georg Heyde in relation to this collection see H. Glahn (ed.), Music from the Time of Christian III, parts 2 and 3, Dania Sonans V, Copenhagen, Egtved, 1986, pp. 10–11. 29 H. M. Brown, Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: The Music of the Florentine Intermedii, Musicological Studies and Documents, vol. 30, Rome, American Institute of Musicology, 1973, pp. 78–9.
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disintegrated as a guiding principle for performers by 1600. Yet though a wider range of sonorities was available as the older framework was displaced, musicians were not haphazard in which instruments they selected for a performance. Their choices simply conformed to a different set of priorities. One paradox rests in the relative degree of creativity on the part of instrumentalists in the late fifteenth century compared to those around 1600. Pietrobono and Paumann were considered by their contemporaries to be the most important musicians of their age in their respective regions. When the choir of Philip the Fair was heard just after 1500 what struck a listener was not the excellence of such singers as Pierre de La Rue and Alexander Agricola, but the brilliant improvised performance of the cornettist Augustine Schubinger. This era was a kind of golden age when instrumentalists could be considered inventive musicians of extraordinary stature – and almost none was included in the category of composer. Their art was, judging from contemporary reaction, of extraordinary originality, but existed only in the moment. In essence nothing remains of their contributions. In the course of the sixteenth century the creative stature of instrumentalists reversed. By 1600 the performance demands on ensemble players constrained them to perform from written music. They were no longer ‘creative’ in the same sense. Some balance must be noted, however, for by the late sixteenth century many composers, with Monteverdi, Schütz, Hassler and Sweelinck as examples, were trained and began their careers as instrumental performers.
. 15 .
Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music in performance, 1549–1599 OWEN REES
In 1549 the young Francisco Guerrero returned to his native Seville as a contralto singer of the cathedral. He remained there until his death in 1599, serving as assistant chapelmaster and (from 1574) chapelmaster. Seville Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in the world, dominated the musical life of a city and region enjoying a golden age both economically and culturally, given its central role in trade with the New World. Indeed, the cathedral’s liturgical and musical practices influenced those of many New World churches. This chapter considers musical performance within two liturgical contexts at the cathedral: the Marian Salve service and Vespers of a high-ranking feast. It examines how various types of polyphony and instrumental music were deployed in these contexts, taking elements of Guerrero’s output as specific examples. This selection allows the reader to draw some comparisons with the repertoire discussed in Chapter 19 of this book, namely Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers music published in 1610. More generally, the influence of Seville Cathedral and the broad dissemination of Guerrero’s music nationally and internationally lends wider relevance to some of the performance issues raised here, as does the degree of common musical practice among Iberian churches. The provision for vocal and instrumental music at Seville Cathedral was of a lavishness designed to reflect the magnificence of the cathedral, in competition with Toledo, the primatial church of Spain. In 1587, Alonso Morgado commented that ‘the music and the choir, both of voices and of instrumentalists, shawms, trombones, bassoon, recorders, cornetts, and all instruments, can compete with the finest in Christendom’.1 This musical establishment encompassed several (and in some cases overlapping) groups of personnel.2 First was the body of clerics (or coro) who sang chant and were regulated by the 1 A. Morgado, Historia de Sevilla, Seville, Andrea Pescioni & Juan de Leon, 1587, quoted in M. S. Álvarez Martínez, Diccionário de la música española y hispanoamericana, 7, Madrid, Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 2000, p. 973, art. ‘Sevilla’. 2 A stimulating summary and discussion of the types of personnel involved in the music of a Spanish earlymodern cathedral, and of the division (and overlapping) of responsibility between the various groups of musicians, may be found in M. A. Marín, Music on the Margin: Urban Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Jaca (Spain), DeMusica, 7, Kassel, Reichenberger, 2002, pp. 59–74. On Seville’s musical establishment during
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succentor. These included choir chaplains (capellanes de coro) and the so-called veinteneros; some of them also performed polyphony as part of the capilla de música, which consisted of adult singers of four vocal types: tiple, contralto, tenor and contrabajo. Boy singers known as niños cantores, cantorcicos or seises3 sang designated sections of chant in the liturgy, as well as villancicos at Christmas and Corpus Christi. The cathedral employed a titular organist, and engaged other organists to play in its principal chapels.4 Finally there was the band of salaried instrumentalists or ministriles. These were first taken onto the cathedral’s payroll during the 1520s (previously, players were contracted ad hoc), and although there was a return to the contract system in the mid-1540s, the salaried group was re-established in the 1550s, shortly after Guerrero’s return to Seville. The capitular acts record the chapter’s motives: so splendid and large a church demanded instrumental music because of its sonorousness, ensuring that the liturgy on feast days was celebrated with proper solemnity, and enhancing the people’s devotion.5
The Salve service in the Antigua Chapel The cathedral chapter’s investment in its musical establishment during Guerrero’s early years as joint maestro included the commissioning of new books of polyphony to replace the antique repertoire in existing manuscripts. It was probably in 1555 that manuscript MS 1 of the Biblioteca del Coro of the cathedral was copied for the capilla de la Virgen de la Antigua, the location for Marian devotion including the Saturday Salve service.6 The manuscript was still in use for every Salve service in the Antigua Chapel in the early eighteenth century,7 exemplifying the striking continuities of performed repertoire in Iberian cathedrals from the sixteenth to the eighteenth (and sometimes even nineteenth or early twentieth) centuries. The book opens with seven settings of Guerrero’s time, see H. González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero (1528–1599), vida y obra: la música en la catedral de Sevilla a finales del siglo XVI, Seville, Cabildo Metropolitano de la Catedral de Sevilla, 2000, pp. 111–38 and 215–27. 3 In contrast, the Cathedral’s mozos de coro studied only plainchant. The seises took part, for example, in the Easter play, the vernacular sung chanzonetas and entremeses of Christmas, and the Corpus Christi procession and other Corpus Christi services, of which their dances were (and are) a renowned feature. 4 On the organs and organists of the cathedral, see González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, pp. 251–71. 5 The text of this capitular act is transcribed in R. M. Stevenson, La música en la Catedral de Sevilla 1478– 1606: Documentos para su estudio, Madrid, Sociedad Española de musicologia, 1985, pp. 39–40, doc. 274. 6 The manuscript is assigned the siglum SevBC 1 in the Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music 1400–1550, compiled by the University of Illinois Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies, III, Neuhausen-Stuttgart, American Institute of Musicology, 1984, pp. 138–9. 7 This is stated in an inventory of 1721–4. See J. Ruiz Jiménez, La librería de canto de órgano: creación y pervivencia del repertorio del Renacimiento en la actividad musical de la Catedral de Sevilla, Seville, Junta de Andalucía, 2007, p. 40 and p. 345. See also J. M. Suárez Martos, ‘El Archivo Musical de la Catedral de Sevilla en 1724: génesis y pervivencia de libros manuales y de facistol’, Musicalia (Revista del Conservatorio Superior de Música ‘Rafael Orozco’, Cordoba), 2004, 81–2.
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the Salve regina, by Josquin, Gombert, Morales, Ceballos, and the two maestros, Pedro Fernández and Guerrero (with two settings); then comes a collection of Marian motets and finally three settings of the response to the blessing ‘Benedicamus Domino’.8 The Salve service was performed with chant, polyphony and instrumental music: the endowment of the service with polyphony in the late fifteenth century specified the participation of the maestro de capilla, organist, six choirboys, an alto, a tenor and a bass,9 and by the 1530s the ministriles also took part on the first Saturday of each month.10 The form of service (at least before the adoption in Seville of the reformed Roman rite – the ‘nuevo rezado’ as it was known in Spain – on 7 January 1575) may have been as follows, and is reflected in the ordering of contents of MS 1 (polyphonic items in bold):11 Salve regina Versicle, response, and prayer Marian motet (motete de la Salve) Versicle, response, and prayer Antiphons to St Sebastian12 and St Roch ‘Benedicamus Domino’: ‘Deo dicamus gratias’ How was the Salve regina performed? Evidence suggests that it was sometimes treated alternatim and sometimes sung throughout in polyphony. Certainly, alternatim performance is stipulated in the document of endowment: separate verses of the text are to be sung to polyphony and to chant and to be
8 For an inventory of the manuscript, albeit marred by inaccuracies, see H. González Barrionuevo, J. E. Ayarra Jarne and M. Vázquez Vázquez, Catálogo de libros de polifonía de la Catedral de Sevilla, Granada, Junta de Andalucía, 1994, pp. 2–10. It has not been possible to consult a copy of J. M. Suárez Martos, El rito de la Salve en la Catedral de Sevilla durante el siglo XVI. Estudio del repertorio musical contenido en los manuscritos 5–5– 20 de la Biblioteca Colombina y el libro de polifonía no 1 de la Catedral de Sevilla. Estudio musicológico, Seville, the author, 2003, or of the complete edition of the contents of the manuscript by the same author, El libro de polifonía no 1 de la Catedral de Sevilla (E: Se; Ms 1). Edición completa de música para el Rito de la Salve. Obras de Josquín des Prez, Pedro Escobar, Pedro Fernández, Jachet de Mantua, Nicolás Gombert, Cristóbal de Morales, Francisco Guerrero y Rodrigo de Ceballos, Seville, the author, 2003. 9 González Barrionuevo, Ayarra Jarne, and Vázquez Vázquez, Catálogo de libros de polifonía de la Catedral de Sevilla, p. 14. 10 See González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, p. 149, quoting from Luis Peraza’s Historia de Sevilla of 1535. For an account mentioning the participation of the ministriles at this service in the 1580s, see T. M. Borgerding, ‘The motet and Spanish religiosity, ca. 1550–1610’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan (1997), pp. 90–1. 11 Robert Snow presented a hypothetical form of the service (which I use as the basis for the following account), based on the contents of MS 1 and an earlier manuscript (Seville Cathedral, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS 5–5–20), in A New-World Collection of Polyphony for Holy Week and the Salve Service: Guatemala City, Cathedral Archive, Music MS 4, Monuments of Renaissance Music, 9, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 73. Borgerding (‘The motet’, pp. 93–4) adds information from the text of Pedro de Toledo’s endowment (1499) of the polyphonic Salve at Seville. 12 Although there is no direct evidence that polyphony was employed at this point in the Salve service, there survive two settings by Guerrero of this text, Beatus es et bene tibi erit.
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played on the organ. Four of the seven settings in MS 1 are designed for alternatim performance, the setting by Pedro Fernández, senior maestro de capilla at the cathedral, providing an example:13 [Text in bold is set in polyphony] 1. Salve Regina, mater misericordiæ: 2. Vita, dulcedo, spes nostra, salve. 3. Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evæ. 4. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle. 5. Eia ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte. 6. Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, 7. nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. 8. O clemens, 9. O pia, 10. O dulcis Virgo semper Maria. Rodrigo de Ceballos’s treatment of the text is similar, except that the whole concluding section of text from ‘O clemens’ to the end is in polyphony. As we shall see, Guerrero did the same in his Salve regina first published in 1570. In contrast, however, the other three Salve settings included in MS 1 treat the entire antiphon text in polyphony, and indeed these pieces are given pride of place in the book: the famous five-voice setting by Josquin, the five-voice setting by Morales, and one of the two settings by Guerrero in the manuscript. It is true that Guerrero, like Josquin and Morales (and perhaps following their example, as he did in other instances),14 constructs his setting in three partes, so that one might conceive of performances of these three works in which (for example) the prima pars and tertia pars were sung in polyphony, and the secunda pars played on the organ or other instruments or replaced by chant, but this seems fanciful, and would have been unconventional in relation to the typical division of the Salve text into verses for alternatim performance in Spain: compare that division (set out above) with the tripartite division used by Josquin, Morales and Guerrero here:15
13 The structure of Fernández’s setting, as an exemplification of the Spanish approach of the early sixteenth century, is given in G. G. Wagstaff, ‘Mary’s own: Josquin’s five-part “Salve regina” and Marian devotions in Spain’, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 52 (2002), 11. 14 On Guerrero’s emulation of his teacher Morales, and of Josquin, during the early part of his career, see two studies by the present author: ‘Guerrero’s L’homme armé masses and their models’, Early Music History, 12 (1993), 19–54; ‘ “Recalling Cristóbal de Morales to mind”: emulation in Francisco Guerrero’s Sacræ cantiones of 1555’, in D. Crawford (ed.), Encomium musicæ: Essays in Honor of Robert J. Snow, Festschrift Series no. 17, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press, 2002, pp. 365–94. 15 On this treatment of the text in Josquin’s setting and Morales’s five-voice setting, see Wagstaff, ‘Mary’s own’, pp. 14–15. More generally on the widespread employment of such tripartite division of the Salve regina text in polyphonic settings, including works by Agricola, Arcadelt, Ockegham, Richafort and Verdelot, see S. Ingram, ‘The polyphonic Salve Regina, 1425–1550’, Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina (1973), pp. 97–9.
Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music, 1549–1599
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Prima pars Salve regina, mater misericordiæ: Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evæ. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle.
Secunda pars Eia ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte.
Tertia pars Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo semper Maria.
Thus it can be seen that the secunda pars of these settings corresponds with ‘verse 5’ in the conventional alternatim scheme, which would usually be chanted or played instrumentally. Guerrero’s through-composed Salve was subsequently adapted to make it suitable for alternatim performance, a version preserved in the manuscript Guatemala City, Catedral, Archivo Capitular, MS 4.16 The resultant scheme differs significantly from that used in more conventional alternatim works, such as those by Fernández and Ceballos described above, in that it is the odd-numbered verses which are sung in polyphony: [Text in bold is set in polyphony] 1. Salve Regina, mater misericordiæ: 2. Vita, dulcedo, spes nostra, salve. 3. Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evæ. 4. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle. 5. Eia ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte. 6. Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, 7. nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. 8. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo semper Maria. The adaptation had the bizarre consequence (clearly audible to anyone familiar with the Salve regina chant) that ‘nobis post hoc’, now sung to the music which Guerrero wrote for ‘O clemens’, refers to the wrong phrase of the chant. The other Guerrero setting preserved in MS 1 is an alternatim work, as is the third treatment of the text surviving by this composer, which he published in his motet collections of 1570, 1589 and 1597, and in his Liber vesperarum of 1584. Of these two alternatim settings by Guerrero, that in MS 1 (in which, as usual, the even-numbered verses are polyphonic) is scored for three tiple parts and an 16 See Snow, A New-World Collection, pp. 24 and 74–5, and the edition (presenting the two versions in parallel) at pp. 339–50.
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altus. Perhaps the piece was sung by the choirboys with their master Guerrero (who was a contralto).17 In his setting first published in 1570, Guerrero adopts an alternatim scheme identical to that found in Ceballos’s setting, described above. As a result, while Fernández’s setting requires that five verses be chanted or played, Guerrero’s and Ceballos’s require just four such verses. In considering how such a performance worked at Seville Cathedral, we may turn first to Guerrero’s set of instructions to the cathedral’s ministriles which the chapter issued in July 1586, and which were still in force in 1611.18 Guerrero specifies that ‘in the Salves, of the three verses which [the ministriles] play, one should be with shawms, another with cornetts, and the other with flautas [recorders, or possibly flutes], because it is irritating to have always a single type of instrument’.19 With regard to the first and second verses, Guerrero is here stipulating the upperinstrument type, and the cathedral’s trombonists would, we can presume, have taken the lower parts. At first glance, it is not obvious how these instructions were to be applied in an alternatim scheme, since Guerrero specifies three verses to be played by the ministriles while his treatment of the text in polyphony (as noted) leaves four such verses without polyphony.20 The solution is probably that the opening verse (‘Salve regina, mater misericordiæ’) was chanted. This would accord with stipulations in several Iberian church ceremonials of the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries – including a ceremonial of 1593 from Seville (although not the cathedral) – that the organ should not begin items performed alternatim such as hymns and canticles, but that the singers should start, so that the congregation might be aware (through hearing the text) that that item had commenced.21 Indeed, the 1635 Ceremonial Monástico of the Spanish Benedictine congregation specifies that the first verse of Marian antiphons be sung, after which singers and organ alternate.22 If Guerrero’s stipulations for
17 For speculation about the performance context of this piece see Ruiz, La librería, p. 111 and n. 250. Regarding the problematic question of the participation of boy choristers in polyphony at Seville and elsewhere in Spain, see González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, pp. 134–8. 18 See J. Ruiz, ‘Diccionário de la música española y hispanoamericana 6, Madrid, Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 2000, p. 595 art. ‘Ministril’. 19 The original passage is reproduced in Stevenson, La música, p. 72, doc. 616. On the interpretation of flautas, see K. Kreitner, ‘Minstrels in Spanish churches, 1400–1600’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 539 and 541. 20 The problem is discussed by Kreitner in ‘Minstrels’, 541. 21 See B. Nelson, ‘The integration of Spanish and Portuguese organ music within the liturgy from the latter half of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1986), vol.1, pp. 193–4, referring to and quoting the Ceremonial y processionario de los frayles de la orden de la Sanctíssima Trinidad, Seville, 1593. See also B. Nelson, ‘Alternatim practice in 17th-century Spain: the integration of organ versets and plainchant in psalms and canticles’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 240. 22 Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol.1, pp. 203–5. This Ceremonial specifies an alternatim scheme for the Salve in which the even-numbered verses are played by the organ, beginning with ‘Vita, dulcedo’, and including ‘O pia’ as a separate verse, so that the organ played four times. Nelson also describes surviving sets of Salve organ versets.
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instrumentation, quoted above, are then applied to the relevant verses of the Salve regina in order, there results the following scheme for performance of Guerrero’s Salve published in 1570 and Ceballos’s setting copied into MS 1: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Salve Regina, mater misericordiæ: CHANT Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve: POLYPHONY Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evæ: SHAWMS and TROMBONES Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle: POLYPHONY Eia ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte: CORNETTS and TROMBONES Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui: POLYPHONY nobis post hoc exsilium ostende: RECORDERS (OR FLUTES) O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria: POLYPHONY
It is possible that – perhaps on particularly festal occasions – the concluding ‘O clemens’ verse received more elaborate treatment. The Seville Cathedral manuscript Libro de polifonía 17 contains five parts of a thirteen-part setting by Guerrero of ‘O clemens, o pia’.23 If Juan Ruiz is correct in believing that this manuscript was for the use of the ministriles (an issue discussed below), then perhaps voices and instruments sometimes performed together to conclude performances of the Salve. It is difficult to establish what the ministriles played as their independent Salve verses in such alternatim performances in the Antigua Chapel. Kenneth Kreitner proposed that they might have improvised on the odd-numbered verses as an organist might have done,24 but such ensemble improvisation would have been a challenge of a different order from that of an organist improvising a verse on the Salve chant, and Kreitner has come to believe that ministriles usually played from written music.25 We might then, given the performance practice for the Salve at Seville described above, expect to find Salve settings – indeed, sets of versets for the Salve, of the type we have for organists – in the various surviving manuscripts compiled for ministriles (five principal sources of this type are currently known), alongside the abundant sets of fabordones and psalm and hymn verses preserved there (together with textless copies of motets, chansons, madrigals and Spanish songs).26 But such provision for the Salve is strikingly absent from these surviving books. Textless copies of Guerrero’s Marian motets certainly feature there, but not Salve regina settings, with the exception of Guerrero’s printed alternatim 23 The setting is without attribution in MS 17, but is presumably the same work as that attributed to Guerrero in the inventory of 1721–4, as transcribed in Ruiz, La librería, p. 328. 24 Kreitner, ‘Minstrels’, 541. 25 K. Kreitner, ‘The repertory of the Spanish cathedral bands’, Early Music, 37 (2009), 268. 26 On these manuscripts and the repertoires they contain, see Kreitner, ‘The repertory’.
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setting, copied along with the other thirty-five four-voice motets from his 1597 print into the opening section of Segovia, Archivo Capitular de la Catedral, MS 6. Perhaps the absence of Salve settings or verses in the surviving ministril manuscripts is not representative of such manuscripts as a whole, of which many have certainly been lost. Numerous books were compiled or obtained for the use of Seville Cathedral’s ministriles during the period under consideration: Juan Ruiz has constructed a list of such books which includes payments to players for music books or copying in 1549, 1560, 1566, 1571, 1572, 1580 and 1592–4, for example.27 Some of these books were collections of vocal polyphony (in manuscript or printed). For example, the inventory of the cathedral’s music books of 1721–4 mentions two copies of Duarte Lobo’s Liber missarum,28 one of which was used by the ministriles ‘in order to play the verses which alternate with those of the singers of polyphony’ in the Salve services held in the Antigua Chapel.29 Although the note in the inventory does not state categorically that the verses concerned were those used in an alternatim performance of Salve regina, that seems the most likely explanation. However, Lobo’s Liber missarum contains no Salve regina setting, although there are two Marian works in the collection: the Missa de beata virgine and the Missa Sancta Maria. Did Seville’s ministriles employ short sections (perhaps parts of the Kyrie) from one or both of these Masses as verses in an alternatim performance of the Salve? The Missa Sancta Maria would, as it happens, have made a good match in modal terms: it is written in ‘high clefs’ (or chiavette, a later term adopted in some modern discussions), with G final, and a flat in the signature, as are two of Guerrero’s Salve regina settings, so that if transposed down a fourth (the conventional treatment of works notated thus) Lobo’s music would match not only these settings, but also other Salve settings notated (like the Salve chant itself) with d final, such as Guerrero’s version for high voices.30 The same applies to the Kyrie and Credo (from which the ‘et incarnatus’ – a separate section – might have been used) of Lobo’s Missa de beata virgine, music which was perhaps all the more appropriate since it clearly paraphrases the relevant chant used at Marian Masses.
A painting of a motete de la Salve The next polyphonic item in the Salve service was the Marian motet. Guerrero’s Tota pulchra es, used for this purpose and copied into the relevant section of MS 27 Ruiz, La librería, Table 6 on p. 102. 28 Duarte Lobe, Liber Missarum, Antwerp, Plantin, 1621. 29 Ruiz, La libreria, pp. 103–4 and 332. 30 Recent discussions of conventional clef-combinations (including ‘high clefs’ or chiavette) and transposition in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries include A. Parrott, ‘Monteverdi: onwards and downwards’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 303–17, and A. Johnstone, ‘ “High” clefs in composition and performance’, Early Music, 34 (2006), 29–53.
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1, was chosen for a contemporary painting of angel musicians in the ‘Gamba’ Chapel, next to the entrance to the Antigua Chapel.31 The motet is shown on two panels high on the chapel’s wall, above and to either side of the main painting (an Immaculate Conception by Luis de Vargas, completed in 1561). The right-hand panel shows an organist playing from a choirbook, open at the beginning of the motet, while on the left-hand panel a group of four angels sing the piece from another choirbook: they are just about to turn the page to the second opening of the piece. This panel includes a banner on which can be seen parts of the immaculist motto (also the motet’s text) ‘Tota pulchra es amica mea, et macula non est in te’: Vargas perhaps included this banner because the motet text is not easily visible from the ground, given not least that the choirbook from which the angels sing is upside-down to the viewer from below. Although the music performed by the angel musicians is partly transcribable, and although this painting of it has been mentioned several times in the modern literature, it has hitherto been either misidentified or left unidentified in that literature.32 The painter Luis de Vargas was also an experienced musician and a skilled lutenist,33 and we can presume that he painted the musical notation himself. It would be naive to take Vargas’s portrayal of the performance of Tota pulchra es as providing direct evidence regarding performance practice at the cathedral, with regard to the use of the organ to accompany motets as early as the 1550s, although such a practice was to become common. Nevertheless, the employment of the organ in this role in Seville and elsewhere in Spain at this period deserves further investigation.34
Musicians in the coro The celebration of festal Vespers and Mass, in the central coro of the cathedral, was – together with processions – the other principal focus of musical 31 When he published this music in his 1555 motet collection, Guerrero presented Tota pulchra es as the second part of the motet Quasi cedrus. 32 J. E. Ayarra Jarne (‘La música en el culto catedralicio hispalense’, in D. A. Iñiguez (ed.), La Catedral de Sevilla, Seville, Guadalquivir, 1984, p. 707, illus. 658) claimed that the piece was a composition by the painter Vargas, and stated that the opening theme was traditionally used for the composition test in competitions for the post of maestro de capilla at Seville. J. M. Llorens Cisteró (Francisco Guerrero (1528– 1599): Opera omnia, vol. 3: Motetes I–XXII, Monumentos de la Música Española, 36, Barcelona, Instituto Español de Musicología, 1978, p. 126) identified the piece as Guerrero’s six-voice Tota pulchra es Maria published in 1570. In more recent studies, both T. Borgerding (‘The motet’, p. 95) and J. Ruiz (La librería, pp. 140–1) discuss the painting and also deal at length with Guerrero’s music, but neither identifies the piece. 33 F. Pacheco, Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memorables varones (manuscript). The biography of Luis de Vargas is the last in the collection. A facsimile is available at http://bib.us.es/ guiaspormaterias/ayuda_invest/derecho/libroDeDescripcion.htm. 34 For a discussion of the issue of organ accompaniment in polyphony, see González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, p. 274.
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Fig. 15.1. Medallion on the choir stand in the coro of Seville Cathedral, showing a group of singers performance at Seville Cathedral.35 Standing in the middle of the coro is a magnificent wooden and bronze choir stand, made in the early 1560s, and the bronze medallions incorporated into the scheme include several representations of musical performance at the cathedral.36 In one (see Fig. 15.1), a group of singers – six or seven men and three boys are visible – perform from a choirbook placed on the reading desk of the very choir stand to which the 35 As with the English ‘choir’, the term coro can denote both this part of a cathedral and the group of singing clerics involved in performing Mass and Office therein. 36 Aspects of these medallions were discussed by R. Cheetham in ‘Ministriles en el coro: concerted Masses in sixteenth-century Cordoba’, paper delivered at the 24th Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, University of York, 16 July 1998.
Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music, 1549–1599
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medallion is affixed. The cathedral’s choirbooks included some of exceptionally large size, allowing use by a considerable number of performers (since they were legible from some distance). An example is Libro de polifonía 15, copied in 1595 under Guerrero’s jurisdiction, which measures no less than 83 cm × 58 cm.37 We should here recall that members of the capilla de música were on occasion afforced at the choir stand by capellanes de coro and veinteneros, although in one case such afforcement caused problems: on 13 December 1564 the chapter ordered Luis Martínez, a capellan, not to approach the choir stand used by the singers of polyphony, since ‘he throws the others out of tune’.38 The number of adult singers constituting the capilla de música was given as thirteen in 1564–5, while in 1586 the majordomo protested to the chapter concerning the appointment of a fifth tiple singer, since he considered four tiples sufficient.39 A second medallion on the choir stand (see Fig. 15.2) shows the ministriles – one playing cornett, two playing shawms of different sizes (probably treble and alto) and two playing trombones – reading from a book placed on a movable stand. When the band of ministriles was first formed in the 1520s, it was to consist of three shawm players (treble, tenor and contra) and two trombonists. Thereafter the constitution of the band varied: in 1553 there were six players, and in 1575–81 eight, while in 1586 the ensemble had two treble shawms (doubling on cornett), alto shawm, and two trombones, together with a tenor shawm player who doubled on bassoon.40 As already noted with regard to Guerrero’s instructions for performance of the Salve, the shawm players also played recorders (or flutes), and in the same set of instructions Guerrero specifies that in celebrating a feast in the coro there should always be one verse played by recorders.41 A new chest of such instruments was purchased in 1566, and more in 1571.42 On some festal occasions trumpets and drums also were employed: for example, they played from the cathedral tower for the feast of St Peter, a ceremony in which the bells, trumpets, drums, and
37 Ruiz, La librería, p. 54. 38 R. M. Stevenson, ‘Francisco Guerrero (1528–1599): Seville’s sixteenth-century cynosure’, InterAmerican Music Review, 13/1 (1992), 36, and – for a transcription of the relevant entry in the actas capitulares – Stevenson, La música, pp. 51–2, doc. 389. 39 González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, p. 121. 40 Stevenson, La música, p. 60 doc. 477, and p. 72 doc. 616; Gonzalez Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, p. 222 and n. 28. 41 The passage is reproduced and translated in, for example, Kreitner, ‘Minstrels’, 540–1. Guerrero’s instructions of 1586 also address the issue of ornamentation. He specifies that such ornaments are the province of those playing the topmost parts, and – when there are two players of treble shawm or cornett – he requires them to take it in turns to add ornamentation, because when they ornament together ‘insufferable dissonance’ results. 42 Stevenson, ‘Francisco Guerrero’, 37–8 and 41, and Stevenson, La música, p. 52 (doc. 390), p. 55 (doc. 419), and p. 61 (doc. 481).
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Fig. 15.2. Medallion on the choir stand in the coro of Seville Cathedral, showing the ministriles
shawms/trombones sounded in turn.43 Although wind instruments were the norm in great Spanish churches, the music which greeted Philip II to the cathedral in 1570 included seven viols on one side and wind instruments on the other.44 On the medallion shown in Fig. 15.2 the ministriles stand on wooden floorboards (whereas the singers in Fig. 15.1 stand on the stoneflagged floor of the coro), perhaps indicating the gallery from which the
43 González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, p. 229; Stevenson, La música, p. 39, doc. 266. 44 R. M. Stevenson, Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1961, p. 157.
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ministriles would typically have performed during services in the coro.45 An inventory from 1614 of instruments and music books used by the ministriles notes that two of the books were in ‘the music loft’ and ‘the little loft’.46
Vespers in the coro The celebration of a great feast (of the first or second class) at the cathedral began with First Vespers on the afternoon before the feast day, and on the day itself the greatest musical elaboration was lavished on Mass (and the procession preceding it, in which singers and instrumentalists participated) and Second Vespers that afternoon. The level of feast was marked not only by increased use of polyphony and instrumental music,47 but also by the manner of chant performance: as well as the use of more elaborate versions of the psalm tones, for example, as a general principle in Spanish churches chant was performed more slowly at the more important liturgical occasions; the succentor was responsible for directing that the chant be performed in the proper manner, including the correct speed.48 A manuscript choirbook (Seville, Libro de polifonía 2) of Guerrero’s Vespers psalms and hymns was copied for the cathedral between 1573 and 1576, and in 1584 Guerrero published his Liber vesperarum,49 including psalms, hymns, settings of the Magnificat, and marian antiphons, and dedicated to the cathedral chapter. The Liber vesperarum and Juan Navarro’s Psalmi, hymni ac Magnificat (1590) were the two most popular printed collections of Vespers polyphony in the Iberian world: no fewer than sixteen copies of the Liber vesperarum were sent to America in 1601 alone,50 while Guerrero’s psalms continued to be used at Seville Cathedral in the nineteenth century.51 Almost all of the music concerned was designed for alternatim performance, and the polyphony makes ubiquitous reference to the relevant chants. 45 See J. Ruiz Jiménez, ‘Ministriles y extravagantes en la celebración religiosa’, in J. Griffiths and J. SuárezPajares (eds.), Políticas y prácticas musicales en el mundo de Felipe II, Musica Hispana, Textos, Estudios 8, Madrid, Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 2004, pp. 208–9. See also the same author’s ‘Ministril’, p. 594, where he observes that the ministriles in Spanish churches were usually placed either in their own gallery or in the organ loft, and that such positioning above the coro brought acoustic advantages. 46 See Ruiz, La libería, p. 360, for a transcription of the relevant inventory. 47 González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, Appendix 7 offers a summary of the surviving regulations concerning the use of polyphony and instrumental music at various Spanish cathedrals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including, for example, detailed information from Toledo Cathedral on the manner of liturgical performance for various feasts and seasons. 48 See Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol.1, pp. 210–11, and ‘Alternatim practice’, 241. Luis de Villafranca, instructor of plainchant at Seville Cathedral until 1579, briefly discusses the different rhythmic approaches to chant appropriate to (for example) the Mass Ordinary chants, the Communion proper, and triple-metre hymns; see chapter 4 of his Breve instrucción de canto llano, Seville, 1565. 49 Guerrero, Liber vesperarum, Rome, Alessandro Gardano, 1584. 50 See Ruiz, La librería, p. 116 and n. 266. 51 Ibid., p. 242.
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First and Second Vespers of feasts of high rank at Seville might have begun with a piece played by the ministriles, as was the case at the cathedrals of Léon and Palencia.52 More generally, Kenneth Kreitner has argued that a principal function of the ministriles at León Cathedral and elsewhere at Vespers and other services was to provide preludes and postludes to liturgical items.53 Intriguingly, in 1583 the Chapter of Seville Cathedral instructed that a marchee be played at the choir stand when polyphony was about to be sung.54 For the recitation of the five Vespers psalms a large number of performance methods could be deployed within alternatim schemes: (a) chant (b) the harmonically formulaic four-voice elaboration of chant known as fabordón55 (c) composed polyphony (of various degrees of elaboration of which the simplest were close to fabordón) (d) verses played on the organ (e) verses played by the ministriles A document of 1630 describing ceremonial practice at Seville Cathedral states that for feasts of the first rank the first and last psalms at Vespers were performed by the singers of the capilla and the ministriles in alternatim fashion.56 The third psalm might be sung by alternating chant verses with verses performed by a solo singer or instrumentalist together with the organ: in such verses the organist could have utilised the conventional harmonic and cadential patterns of fabordón for the accompaniment.57 As for the second and fourth psalms, a compendium of the duties of the ministriles and the singers of the capilla published in the early eighteenth century specifies the use of fabordón for these.58 Whatever the performance method for the body of each psalm, the 52 D. Kirk, ‘Instrumental music in Lerma, c. 1608’, Early Music, 23 (1995), 404–5. 53 See K. Kreitner, ‘The cathedral band of León in 1548, and when it played’, Early Music, 31 (2003), especially 44–5 and 48. 54 See Stevenson, La música, p. 69, doc. 579, and Stevenson, ‘Francisco Guerrero’, p. 46. The reference to the choir stand here seems odd, given the normal placing of the ministriles in a gallery during services. 55 For an introduction to the Iberian fabordón practice and repertoire (vocal and instrumental), see Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol.1, pp. 280–311. Large numbers of fabordones, often grouped into sets providing for each of the psalm tones, are preserved in both vocal and instrumental sources from Spain and Portugal of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Monteverdi’s Dixit Dominus from the 1610 collection famously incorporates florid elaborations of falsobordone. 56 This and other similar documents defining the cathedral’s ceremonial, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are discussed in Ruiz, La librería, pp. 230–312, in the context of an invaluable discussion of liturgical practice and musical repertoire. Regarding the performance of the first and last Vespers psalms according to the 1630 document, see p. 240. The instructions to León Cathedral’s ministriles of 1548 studied by Kreitner likewise call for them to alternate with the organist and singers during the first and last psalms at Vespers of major feasts. See Kreitner, ‘The cathedral band’, 44. 57 See Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol.1, p. 288. 58 Ruiz, La librería, p. 241. This entire set of instructions is transcribed as Appendix 2 (pp. 363–89).
Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music, 1549–1599
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1630 instructions specify that the doxology was to be sung in polyphony:59 Guerrero oversaw the copying of a collection of settings of the lesser doxology in 1563.60 Guerrero’s Liber vesperarum begins with seven psalm settings, the first five being those for Sunday Vespers, and the last Lauda Hierusalem, the final Vespers psalm for Marian feasts (and Corpus Christi). Here and in all but one of the other psalms, Guerrero provides polyphony for the evennumbered verses, while verse 1 is given in semi-mensural chant, indicating the rhythmic approach applicable to any chanted verses of Office psalmody.61 Lauda Hierusalem is the most elaborate setting in the collection, and provides a brilliant climax to the psalmody at Vespers of Marian feasts.62 Guerrero notates the piece in ‘high clefs’ (chiavette), indicating (as noted above) a downwards transposition which is here also required by the psalm tone: this setting uses the third tone (the formula is written out, as mentioned, for the first verse, and is incorporated into the polyphony), of which the reciting note is c0 . Given this high reciting note, psalms (and canticles) in this tone were therefore chanted at a lower pitch more comfortable for the singers:63 Juan Bermudo recommended f for the reciting note, i.e. transposition downwards by a fifth, which is also the standard transposition for chiavette works without a flat in the signature, and some sixteenthcentury fabordones indicate the same transposition, while Spanish organ versets of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that transposition by a fourth rather than a fifth had by then become the most common in third-tone psalmody.64 This correspondence between the choice of clefcombination for the polyphony and the tone of each psalm setting is generally observable in Guerrero’s psalms in the Liber vesperarum. Thus he uses chiavette for Confitebor tibi Domine (seventh tone), Beatus vir (third tone), and Laudate Dominum (eighth tone). The seventh and eighth psalm tones, like the third, have high reciting notes (d0 and c0 , respectively), and were thus likewise
59 Other Iberian ceremonials of the period stipulate that the lesser doxology was to be sung, and not played on the organ. See Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol.1, p. 195. 60 Ruiz, La librería, pp. 117, 242, 318 and 320–1. 61 Such rhythmised chant performance is illustrated also in the Breve instrucción of Luis de Villafranca. 62 The doxology has a C3 mensuration signature (with three minims within each semibreve tactus), a mensuration which is unique in this collection, and which Bruno Turner observes is ‘the lively measure of villancicos’, in ‘performing matters: Spanish liturgical hymns: a matter of time’, Early Music, 23 (1995), 481. 63 Nelson, ‘Alternatim practice’, 244: ‘The impracticability (for the voices) of performing psalm tones at the “written pitch” associated with each one is self-evident; owing to their diversity of pitch – the reciting notes spread between f and d 0 – it was necessary to transpose them to a comparable range.’ 64 Further on psalm-tone transposition in Spain and Portugal, theoretical descriptions of the practice from the writings of Juan Bermudo and later, and evidence for such practices within the organ repertoire, see Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol. 1, pp. 232–78, and especially pp. 256 and 261–3, and Nelson, ‘Alternatim practice’, 244–55, where transposition of the third psalm tone is also specifically discussed.
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transposed down.65 Conversely, Dixit Dominus and Laudate pueri use the first psalm tone, with reciting note on a, and here Guerrero uses ‘normal clefs’ (chiavi naturali), not therefore requiring an equivalent downwards transposition, and indeed the later Iberian organ verset repertoire shows this tone to have been left untransposed. In addition to the repertoire of organ versets for psalms (or canticles), the ministril manuscripts located thus far include abundant music for psalms, of various levels of elaboration. For example, one such manuscript perhaps copied in the orbit of the Spanish capilla real during the 1590s and used at the collegiate church of San Pedro in Lerma (Lerma, Archivo de San Pedro, Ms. Mus. 1) begins with a group of seven textless psalm settings in five and six parts, including sixpart treatments by Guerrero of Dixit Dominus and Lauda Hierusalem, that is, the first Vespers psalm and the last such psalm for Marian feasts and Corpus Christi, pieces which also occur in Granada, Archivo Manuel de Falla, MS 975.66 Another manuscript from San Pedro in Lerma (Utrecht, University Library, MS 3.L.16) includes a group of five ‘fabordones for the shawms’, and Granada MS 975 (just mentioned) has nearly 150 verses, mainly sets for a particular psalm or separate doxology versets. In this collection settings of Dixit Dominus are the most common, matching the evidence for the ministriles’ participation in this first psalm of Vespers. Most of these psalm settings are of the even-numbered verses (they include, for example, settings published in Guerrero’s Liber vesperarum), raising the question of whether Seville’s ministriles sometimes simply repeated as (for example) verse 3 of Dixit Dominus Guerrero’s music for verse 2 just sung by the capilla de música, or whether the instrumentalists chose a different setting (in the same tone) to that sung polyphonically. The other principal items at Vespers sung with polyphony on high-ranking feasts were the hymn and the Magnificat, and both of these also received alternatim performance. In Spain there was a long-established tradition of singing the chant melodies of hymns in mensural fashion (some duple and some triple, among the latter being the famous Spanish version of Pange lingua).67 In Guerrero’s hymn settings originally composed before his return 65 These psalms by Guerrero have a somewhat unusual feature for chiavette works, in that their bassus parts descend as low as A, producing (if transposed by a fifth) a low D; comparison might be drawn with the discussion of similarly low bassus parts resulting from transposition of pieces employing chiavette in Monteverdi’s Vespers. To the discussions of transposition in Monteverdi’s setting of Lauda Hierusalem published in 1610 might be added the fact that Monteverdi, too, refers to the third psalm tone in his setting, with its implications of transposition. 66 Kirk, ‘Instrumental music’, 397; Kirk, ‘Churching the shawms in renaissance Spain: Lerma, Archivo de San Pedro Ms. Mus. 1’, D.Phil. thesis, McGill University (1993), vol. 1, pp. 133–7, and (for transcriptions) vol. 2, pp. 33–49. 67 See Turner, ‘Spanish liturgical hymns’. Turner has produced editions of several of Guerrero’s hymns, including the Spanish form of Pange lingua, with reconstructions of the relevant chant verses, published by Mapa Mundi.
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to Seville in 1549 and preserved at Toledo Cathedral, polyphony is usually provided just for the second verse and the last (the doxological verse),68 but in the later versions published in his Liber vesperarum Guerrero followed typical practice, with alternate verses set (and almost always the even-numbered verses).69 The Seville Cathedral Ceremonial of 1630 states that, at feasts of first and second class, the Vespers hymn was to be performed alternatim with polyphonic and organ verses alternating, but that the first and last verses were to be chanted.70 Guerrero’s first published collection of Magnificat settings71 includes – as was common at the time – sixteen settings: two in each chant tone, of which the first sets the odd-numbered verses and the second the even-numbered verses. The Seville 1630 Ceremonial stipulates that on first- and second-class feasts the Magnificat should be performed ‘con música y órgano, a coros’, presumably meaning polyphony alternating with organ verses.72 An alternatim performance of the Magnificat requires six organ versets, and we find sets of six in both printed and manuscript collections of organ music, the former including those of the Spaniard Antonio de Cabezón (1578) and the Portuguese Manuel Rodrigues Coelho (1620).73 Guerrero’s use of clef-combinations in relation to the pitching of the chant tone is less consistent in his cycle of Magnificat settings than in the psalms in the Liber vesperarum discussed above. Nevertheless he again employs chiavette for the works in tones 7 and 8, where the high reciting notes of the tone demanded transposition. The clef-combinations of the third-, fifth- and sixthtone Magnificat settings are, however, somewhat anomalous, with C1 clef for the topmost voice (as used in chiavi naturali) but F3 for the lowest voice (as used in chiavette). The third-tone works are closest to chiavette in their clefcombination, in that the three lower voices are notated in clefs corresponding 68 See the editions and commentary in M. Noone, Códice 25 de la Catedral de Toledo: Polifonia de Morales, Guerrero, Ambiela, Boluda, Josquin, Lobo, Tejeda, Urrede y anónimos, Madrid: Editorial Apuerto, 2003, and the same author’s ‘Cristóbal de Morales in Toledo, 1545–6: ToleBC 25 and “new” works by Morales, Guerrero, Lobo, Tejeda and Ambiela’, Early Music, 30 (2002), 341–63. Recent discoveries of Guerrero’s hymnody in manuscript at Seville are discussed by Ruiz in La librería, pp. 119–22, and table 22 on pp. 400–2. Ruiz emphasises the continued use at Seville of the traditional hymn tunes, even after hymn texts were adjusted to meet the demands of the reformed Roman rite. 69 See R. Snow, ‘Liturgical reform and musical revisions: reworkings of their Vespers hymns by Guerrero, Navarro and Durán de la Cueva’, in M. F. Cidrais Rodrigues, M. Morais and R. V. Nery (eds.), Livro de Homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner, Lisbon, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1992, pp. 463–99, and particularly table 1 (pp. 468–471) and p. 472. 70 See Ruiz, La librería, p. 246, n. 592, where the original document is quoted. 71 Guerrero, Canticum beatæ Mariæ, Louvain, Phalèse, 1563. 72 Quoted in Ruiz, La libería, p. 243, n. 584. As Ruiz notes, a Ceremonial of 1687 specified such alternation of polyphony and organ for the Magnificat on feasts of the second class. 73 Cabezón’s son saw to the publication of his work, as Obras de música para tecla, arpa y vihuela, Madrid, 1578; Coelho’s published works appeared as Flores de musica, Lisbon, 1620. On organ versets for the Magnificat and other liturgical items, see Nelson, ‘The integration’, pp. 197–9.
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to chiavette (C2, C3, F3), and we can presume that these pieces (the reciting note of which is shown as c0 ) were transposed downwards, as in the case of the third-tone Lauda Hierusalem discussed above. The sixth-tone settings represent even more of a hybrid in terms of their clefs: the lowest two voices have C3 and F3 respectively as one would expect in chiavette, but the upper two are notated in C1 and C3, standard in chiavi naturali. The reciting-note is a (the normal ‘pitch’ when this chant tone is notated), and the bassus looks rather uncomfortably low in F3 clef in the setting of the even-numbered voices, with a lowest note of G, requiring a leger line. This particular setting also includes an additional bassus part in the six-voice treatment of the doxology, and this second bassus is notated with F4 clef rather than F3. In conclusion, the chiavette elements in the notation of this last work seem out of place, and perhaps both sixth-tone settings were left untransposed, a conclusion supported by the evidence of later Spanish writers and the organ verset repertoire.74 However, the even-verses fifth-tone setting uses this same unusual clefcombination (C1, C3, C3, F3), while the odd-verses setting has C1, C3, C4 and F3, with only the bassus therefore suggesting chiavette; here the high reciting note (c0 ) would suggest downwards transposition, but Guerrero’s clef-combinations render the correct interpretation elusive.75 Guerrero’s first- and second-tone Magnificat settings are notated in chiavette, with a flat in the signature, such that the standard downwards transposition by a fourth would bring their reciting notes to their normal notated level of a and f respectively. According to the early eighteenth-century Compendio de las obligaciones que deben cumplir los ministriles y capilla de música, the Seville ministriles played a piece after the Magnificat, in the same psalm tone as had been used to sing the canticle. This instrumental music was an ‘antiphon substitute’: the document specifies that it occurred while the succentor recited the repetition of the Magnificat antiphon. The same document specifies that the antiphon before the Magnificat was to be sung in chant with ‘counterpoint’, that is, formulaic (‘improvised’) polyphony.76 It is perhaps in this light that we should interpret the presence of six six-part settings of the ‘Sicut erat’ (the second part of the
74 Nelson, ‘Alternatim practice’, 245. 75 Transposition of the fifth tone down by a fourth was the normal practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain, but almost all sixteenth-century fabordones and organ versets leave this tone untransposed. Nelson, ‘The integration’, p. 269; Nelson, ‘Alternatim practice’, 245. 76 A transcription of the relevant passages is in Ruiz, La librería, pp. 364–5. Compare this information with Kreitner’s view (‘The cathedral band’, 44–5) that the relevant stipulations for Magnificat performance in the León Cathedral directions to ministriles might best be interpreted as meaning that the instrumentalists played a prelude and postlude to the Magnificat. Kreitner (‘The repertory’, p. 271) notes the absence of Magnificat settings in the ministril manuscripts.
Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music, 1549–1599
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doxology) extracted from Magnificat settings by Guerrero in a (lost) book for the Seville ministriles described in the inventory of 1721/4.77 These could well have been used as the ‘antiphon substitute’ music, choosing one belonging to the Magnificat just sung in polyphony or matching the tone of that setting. The Compendio stipulates that the ministriles should likewise play an ‘antiphon substitute’ during the spoken recitation of the antiphon after the final psalm at first and second Vespers.78 The employment of ‘antiphon substitutes’ has been much discussed with regard to Italian sacred music in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and Monteverdi’s Vespers music of 1610 has provided a particular focus for such discussions.79 In Spain and Portugal it is clear that such ‘antiphon substitutes’ were also frequently provided by the organist.80 Spoken recitation – in either a low voice or loudly enough to be clearly audible – of the original liturgical text while instruments played was a widespread practice in Spanish cathedrals during the instrumental verses of alternatim items such as canticles and psalms.81
Instrumental doubling and substitution in vocal music As we have seen, the ministriles of Seville Cathedral during Guerrero’s career typically performed separately from the singers, providing verses of alternatim items, ‘antiphon substitutes’ and preludes and postludes to services and to liturgical items within them (as well as music in processions). But how widespread was the use of instruments to double or replace voices in polyphony? Such doubling and substitution are nowadays sometimes seen as typical or characteristic of Iberian practice and feature quite frequently in modern performances and recordings. It seems that the presence of a bajón player in the coro – to give the note for the beginning of chants, and to double the bass line in polyphony – became widespread even in the great musical institutions in the 77 For the text of the relevant inventory, see Ruiz, La librería, p. 347. There are, indeed, precisely six Guerrero Magnificat settings which have a six-voice treatment of the end of the doxology, between them covering all but the first and seventh tones. 78 Ibid., pp. 363 and 365. 79 Some of the relevant literature is surveyed in J. Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 23–5. Kirk (‘Instrumental music’, 405) compares Italian and Iberian practice in inserting instrumental items within the liturgy; see also his ‘Churching the shawms’, p. 205. Juan Ruiz (‘Ministriles y extravagantes’, p. 215, table 1) summarises the liturgical participation of the ministriles at the cathedrals of León (1550), Valencia (1560) and Siguënza (1594). Unlike Kreitner, he interprets the León documentation as indicating that the ministriles played during the first and last verses of hymns and the Magnificat, rather than providing a prelude and postlude (i.e. antiphon substitute) to those items; cf. Kreitner, ‘The cathedral band’, 45, mentioned above. Another survey of the roles of ministriles in the liturgy constitutes chapter 5 of Kirk, ‘Churching the shawms’. 80 See Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol. 1, pp. 183–6. 81 See Ruiz, ‘Ministriles’, p. 214, n. 46, and Nelson, ‘The integration’, vol. 1, pp. 207–9.
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late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Juan Ruiz argues that such use of the bajón developed (particularly in smaller establishments) because of a lack of singers, and notes that references to such use of instruments multiply from the 1580s onwards.82 At Seville a bajón player engaged in 1586 was obliged both to play alongside the singers at their choir desk on every day when polyphony was performed, and also with the ministriles, as directed by the President and the maestro de capilla (Guerrero).83 Ruiz also notes the use of cornett players – and, less frequently, trombonists – in the coro, performing alongside the singers of polyphony, and he presumes that their role was to double or replace voices.84 With regard to the simultaneous use of voices and instruments, the 1630 Seville Ceremonial describes specially grand performances of Tantum ergo (verse 5 of Pange lingua) at the high altar for the octave of the feast of Corpus Christi (a feast celebrated with particular splendour in Seville), in which the organs, ministriles and singers all joined, accompanied by the ringing of bells.85 Choirs were stationed at the organs on either side of the coro and – some distance further eastwards – in the capilla mayor, accompanied by the great organs and other keyboard instruments. Guerrero provided music for this Tantum ergo verse of the hymn, departing thus from his normal scheme of setting even-numbered verses, but during suceeding centuries it was verse 2 of his hymn which was retexted as Tantum ergo and used in these cori spezzati performances.86 Ruiz further raises the possibility that one ‘choir’ of polychoral works by Guerrero may have been played by the ministriles rather than sung, and he believes that the choirbook Seville MS 17 (mentioned above with regard to the thirteen-voice Salve verse by Guerrero) could reflect this practice. The book contains parts for one choir only of polychoral motets by Guerrero, and Ruiz identifies this manuscript as one of a pair – ‘one for the ministriles and one for the capilla’ – listed in a 1644 inventory of the Cathedral’s music books, believing that the surviving book is the one used by the ministriles.87 Whether or not this is correct, in the case of more than one of the Guerrero motets in MS 17 it is difficult to imagine that one ‘choir’ was performed by instrumentalists alone. An example is Duo seraphim, scored for three four-voice choirs in a manner which is inspired by its text: the text is Trinitarian, and at one point in the piece the three Persons of the Trinity – ‘Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus’ – are 82 Ruiz, ‘Ministriles’, pp. 211–12. See also González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, pp. 240–2. 83 González Barrionuevo, Francisco Guerrero, p. 241; Ruiz, ‘Ministriles’, p. 212, n. 42. 84 The playing of the marchee before polyphonic items which the Seville Cathedral chapter ordered in 1583 was to take place ‘at the choir desk’. 85 Ruiz, La librería, p. 249. 86 One nineteenth-century copy even adds parts for violins and oboes: Ibid., pp. 251–4. 87 Ruiz, La libería, pp. 60–1 and 104–7. Further on MS 17, see Suárez Martos, ‘El Archivo Musical’, 89.
Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music, 1549–1599
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Ex. 15.1. Guerrero, Duo Seraphim, opening
presented in turn by the three choirs. To omit one of these three verbal elements (in this case the first, ‘Pater’, since MS 17 gives the parts for choir 1) by playing the relevant phrase on instruments would be a nonsense. Instrumental performance of the choir 1 parts in MS 17 would also destroy the point of the opening, where the two seraphim (the cantus parts of choirs 1 and 2) ‘cry one to another’ (‘Duo seraphim clamabant alter ad alterum’) in antiphony at the unison (see Ex. 15.1).88 The existence of MS 17 raises the issue of whether such polychoral works were performed with spatially separated choirs (of singers and/or instrumentalists) at Seville, as we know the Tantum ergo was in the seventeenth century. The classic test for whether a particular polychoral work of this period was designed for cori spezzati performance is whether – in full scored sections of the piece – the music of each separate choir is harmonically satisfactory without the support of the other choirs, so that listeners close to that choir did not hear an ‘ungrammatical’ result. In essence, this depends on whether the bassus part of each choir in such sections avoids the fifth of the chord, for example as its last note at cadences. The first choir of Guerrero’s Duo seraphim passes this test (as does the second choir except at two brief moments which might have been considered unexceptionable), but the third choir does not. It is therefore unlikely that the piece was sung with a wide separation between the three choirs (for example, with some performers placed in the galleries overlooking the coro and others within the coro). One can, however, imagine a disposition 88 Ego flos campi, for two four-voice choirs, would also not succeed if performed with instruments taking the second-choir parts (the ones present in MS 17): for example, that choir’s opening text-phrase – ‘sicut lilium inter spinas’ (‘like a lily among thorns’) – is not sung by choir 1, and is necessary to the sense, the ‘sicut’ here pointing to the ‘sic’ which begins the first choir’s next phrase (‘sic amica mea’: ‘thus is my beloved’).
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with the first and second choirs on either side of the coro and the third choir (which has higher scoring) at the choir desk in the middle, or with the choirs standing around three sides of the great choir stand, which (as can be seen from Fig. 15.1) is constructed with a reading desk on each of its four sides. The opening duet between the two seraphim who ‘cried one to another’ would thus sound antiphonally across the coro.89 Our understanding of Seville Cathedral as a musical institution – its personnel, repertoires and performing conventions – has been considerably enriched in recent years by the work of Juan Ruiz and others, as part of the developing picture of how music was perfzormed in the great churches of the Iberian world in the early-modern period, and of continuities and changes in such practices. Much might now be gained through further integrated study of the areas of the surviving repertoire, which have often been studied separately – chant, composed polyphony, vocal and instrumental fabordones, organ versets and other organ music, and the contents of the ministril manuscripts. As we have seen, the enrichment of liturgical performance through music in a church such as Seville Cathedral had as one of its most striking and ubiquitous features the alternation of performing groups and of musical types, the effective combination and succession of which would have been among the major responsibilities of the succentor and maestro de capilla. The relationship between employment of chiavette and conventions of psalm-tone transposition (as previously studied with regard to chant and organ music) which has briefly been explored here provides one example of the fruits of such an integrated approach. 89 Guerrero’s Ego flos campi likewise could not be performed with wide separation between the choirs: here, much more than in Duo Seraphim, the first choir’s part is harmonically unsatisfactory in fully scored sections without the support of the other choir’s bassus part.
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PART IV
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PERFORMANCE IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
. 16 .
Performance in the seventeenth century: an overview TIM CARTER
Music of the Baroque era has occupied a special place in the drive towards ‘authentic’, ‘period’ or (so current parlance prefers) ‘historically informed’ performance. HIP is, of course, hip, and has been for a long while;1 it is also a source of some anxiety, and not just from a more conservative cast of performers anxious to preserve their own hard-earned traditions. While HIP might in principle extend across all repertoires, its central tenets are usually deemed less relevant to music somehow closer to our own time. Therefore, if perhaps the greatest composer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), was the ‘creator of modern music’, so Leo Schrade famously styled him in 1950, then his operas, sacred music and madrigals might not need the benefit – or the crutch – of HIP to convey their messages. Likewise, if Bach and Handel mark the start of the so-called ‘common practice’ period deemed essential to the music-theoretical training of any musician, then their music presumably speaks to all times independent of how authentic its performance. Nor is this ‘presentist’ (universalist, transcendentalist) stance annulled by the ‘historicist’ arguments often adduced in favour of HIP: that period performance brings the music somehow back to what the composer intended (which succumbs to the intentional fallacy), or to how it might have been heard in its time (but we are not authentic listeners). Further, advocates of HIP can easily be accused of opportunism (for commercial gain), escapism (from the dreaded musical avant-garde) or even just the exotic Ye-Olde-Tea-Shoppe fakery of the heritage industry. But although postmodernism has thrown a spanner in the works – so my previous remarks suggest – the battle for HIP has been fought and rightly won in many musical environments. Moreover, few can deny that its best exponents have the virtue 1 I borrow the term from J. Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002. As a matter of bibliographical procedure, I shall cite sources only when they offer important further reading, and/or when information is not readily derivable from standard sources such as the entries on individuals, institutions and cities in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, and its online derivatives. The references here, then, should not be regarded as comprehensive for the seventeenth century, although they are an essential beginning for anyone seeking to gain further information on it.
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of making old music sound fresh, vital and even new. While this might seem a convenient paradox, it is a laudable enough aim for any repertoire. The ‘special place’ allocated to Baroque music in this broader argument derives in part from the fact that unlike much music of the Middle Ages and (save in certain institutions) Renaissance, it had significant currency long before the emergence of HIP. Mendelssohn may have revived Bach’s St Matthew Passion only in 1829, but Handel’s Messiah had a long performance tradition across Europe since its premiere in Dublin in 1742, and whether or not in Mozart’s arrangement. Vincent d’Indy may have mounted a concert performance of Monteverdi’s first opera Orfeo (or at least, a fair part of it) only in 1904, but Monteverdi’s madrigals and those of his contemporaries were relatively well known in other performing environments, while real or fake arie antiche from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a staple of nineteenth-century vocal pedagogy. Audiences in Paris from the 1850s on could choose between hearing Baroque music on a piano or on a harpsichord, and their newspapers and journals covered the grounds for preferring one to the other. Also in Paris, two of Molière’s comédie-ballets were often staged with their original music by Lully (Le bourgeois gentilhomme first in 1852) and Charpentier (Le malade imaginaire in 1860).2 The great collected editions of composers’ opera omnia, and national(ist) collections of older music (the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, Les maîtres musiciens de la Renaissance française, L’arte musicale in Italia) reflected the century’s penchant for collecting on the one hand, and for history as a way of monumentalising both past and present. By the end of the nineteenth century, a fair amount of early music was being studied and performed.3 The issue was what to do with it. The presence of these performance traditions permitted resistance to them on the grounds of their ‘inauthentic’ (if they were) accretions in a manner somewhat similar to the arguments over restoring the art-works of the great masters – whether or not to remove the layers of varnish and grime, to touch up or otherwise repair, to rectify the damage of over-painting. Part of the answer depends, we have seen, on where one stands on the line between historicism and presentism. However, part depends on caring about who performed what when, where and how. Thus HIP becomes inextricably entwined with the history of performance tout court. But how the two might interact is a more complex question than one might expect. 2 For piano versus harpsichord, see A. Fauser, ‘Creating Madame Landowska’, Women and Music, 10 (2006), 1–23; for Lully and Charpentier, see K. Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2005. 3 Compare H. Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988; J. Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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A ‘long’ or ‘short’ seventeenth century? While Monteverdi was for Schrade the ‘creator of modern music’, others (such as Gary Tomlinson) have placed him instead at the ‘end of the Renaissance’. The argument hinges on the usefulness or not of style periods (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic . . .) in our music histories, and on the place of the seventeenth century within any such scheme. It is fairly easy to argue that something happened in Italy around 1600 – with Jacopo Peri’s opera Euridice (1600) and Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602) – even if we might disagree on just how ‘Baroque’ (or ‘Renaissance’) the result may be. But given that standard music-history surveys of ‘Baroque’ music cover the period of roughly 1580 to 1750, that is, from late Palestrina to Bach and Handel, it is hard to know how best to treat the seventeenth century as a discrete unit. Going back to 1580 is sensible enough: some of Caccini’s songs dated from 1585, so the composer said, and others noted a change in the musical air around this time. But if we cannot also extend a ‘long’ seventeenth century to include Bach (1685–1750) and Handel (1685–1759), then do Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637– 1707), Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), or François Couperin ‘le grand’ (1668–1733) have any place in it on stylistic or other grounds? If, on the other hand, we took our seventeenth century to span the later works of Monteverdi to the deaths of Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) or Henry Purcell (1659–95), then it would be very short indeed. This is not just idle nitpicking: it exposes some fundamental questions about historical (dis)continuities, and about the seventeenth century itself. It is very hard to chart a straight course through much of this period on the traditional lines of style and influence: we can get from Monteverdi to Cavalli but then are stuck unless we like Stradella; Cavalli takes us sideways to Lully, and Lully to Purcell (with a nod back to Henry and William Lawes); but Schütz is out on a German limb (though he studied with Giovanni Gabrieli and Monteverdi), and Johann Jacob Froberger is quite literally all over the place; Spain is barely on the chart; and then we somehow have to get back to Corelli for instrumental music, and Alessandro Scarlatti for opera. Clearly I exaggerate, but not as much as one might think. Some of these discontinuities are consequent upon the deep political, religious and social fractures in what has aptly been called the ‘iron century’ (the Thirty Years War, the War of Mantuan Succession, the English Civil War, the FrancoDutch War, three Anglo-Dutch wars, the War of the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire, the Nine Years War . . .). Others, however, reflect the sheer scale of repertoires as yet unstudied or performed: hundreds of Italian operas are
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the most obvious case in point, but Catholic sacred music after Monteverdi comes a close second. However, it is clear that regardless of the difficulties of defining a ‘seventeenth century’, or of surveying its music, one can identify genres, styles and idioms that are characteristic of the period: the rise of the basso continuo, the emergence of new vocal styles of recitative and aria, the continued development of independent instrumental music with its own communicative and expressive power, and the separation of ‘modern’ styles for voices and/or instruments on the one hand, and ‘ancient’ or ‘learned’ ones on the other. All these features posed unique challenges for performers then, as they do today.
Some institutional contexts With one major exception, musical environments hardly changed between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Formal musical establishments focused on the court, the church, or the town, with greater or lesser degrees of mobility between them depending on location. A musician could also choose – or be forced to adopt – a more peripatetic freelance career. Domestic music-making continued to play a significant role, although we shall see that many lamented its apparent decline in the face of the increasing professionalisation of the music business. The ‘major exception’ was the rise of public opera in Venice in 1637 and its rapid spread through Europe: this changed significantly the career paths and rewards especially for virtuoso singers.
The court In 1601, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua appointed Claudio Monteverdi his maestro della musica to head the court musical establishment (the duke also maintained a separate cappella for liturgical services at the Basilica of S. Barbara, headed by Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi).4 Monteverdi reorganised and expanded the court’s musical forces to provide a cohort of nine male singers (three castratos, two altos, two tenors, two basses) – who could also be joined by the virtuoso tenor Francesco Rasi – plus a group of (ten?) string players, a (five-part?) wind ensemble, one or more players of the Spanish guitar, two or three keyboard players (plus an instrument tuner) and a separate group of three female singers, one of whom was also a harpist. There were around thirty-five musicians in all, not counting the separate court trumpeters used for other ceremonial purposes. This was sufficient to meet the duke’s everyday needs for theatrical entertainments, banquets and dancing, performances in the chamber, liturgical and 4 R. Bowers, ‘Monteverdi at Mantua, 1590–1612’, in J. Whenham and R. Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 53–75.
Performance in the seventeenth century: an overview
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devotional music in his private chapel and music outdoors. And if we listen carefully to Mantuan music of this period, we will hear the faintest echoes of the performers for which it was written. For example, Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of madrigals (1605) ends with ‘Questi vaghi concenti’, for nine voices and fivepart string ensemble plus continuo: the unusual vocal scoring (SSSAATTBB) only makes sense given the number and distribution of the male singers at court. Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (1607) was clearly designed for the court musical establishment, with Francesco Rasi in the title-role, the other solo and chorus parts to be taken by nine male singers (the female ones did not yet sing on stage save in exceptional circumstances), and the requisite number of instrumentalists.5 One assumes that something similar applies to the pieces eventually put together to make up Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers. Similar structures are apparent across the royal and princely courts of Europe – always allowing for adjustments to suit local circumstances, religious affiliation and patronal interests – chiefly because of the responsibilities of the ruler to demonstrate magnificence on the one hand, and piety on the other.6 Lesser courts and noble households could reduce the scale, although it was rare for princes or prelates not to have at least some musicians attached to them on a permanent or ad hoc basis. To move to the opposite extreme, during the heyday of music at Versailles towards the end of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV had access to three large groups of musicians.7 The Musique de la Chambre had a surintendant, a maître and a compositeur, plus about eight solo singers, a harpsichordist, two lutenists, one theorbist, four flautists, three viol players and four violinists, providing secular music at court performances, plus a separate ensemble known as the 24 violons du Roi that played for royal ballets, coronations and marriages, and for the king’s dinner on special feasts (a different group, the Petits violons or the Violons du Cabinet, accompanied the king on his travels, and also played in court entertainments). The Musique de la Grande Écurie (about forty instrumentalists) was intended chiefly for outdoor court ceremonial, with trumpets, fifes and drums, plus players of the violin, oboe, cornett and sackbut; this also included the 12 grands hautbois du Roi (ten oboes and two bassoons) which played for the king’s lever on New Year’s Day, May Day and the feast of St Louis, and also joined with the 24 violons or Petits violons for court entertainment. The Musique de la Chapelle Royale had a (non-musician) maître, four sous-maîtres (one 5 T. Carter, ‘Singing Orfeo: on the performers of Monteverdi’s first opera’, Recercare, 11 (1999), 75–118; summarised in T. Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 97–9. 6 For other examples, see P. Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690, Oxford University Press, 1993; L. Robledo, ‘Questions of performance practice in Philip III’s chapel’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 199–218. 7 J. R. Anthony, French Baroque Music, rev. edn, London, Batsford, 1978, pp. 10–16.
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for each quarter of the year), some ninety singers – eleven sopranos (falsettists, castratos and boys), eighteen hautes-contre, twenty-three tenors, twenty-four baritones and fourteen basses – and a group of instrumentalists (in 1708, six violins and violas, four bass violins, two flutes, two oboes, a bassoon, a crumhorn and two serpents): they performed for the king’s Mass and other devotions, also including a large repertoire of grands motets. Not all a given court’s musicians were necessarily available as musicians at any given time – such positions were usually sinecures for life – and indeed some were not necessarily musicians at all (given that in some courts, positions could be awarded or purchased in name only). Similarly, titles did not always reflect function: for example, Louis Couperin was employed in Louis XIV’s Musique de la Chambre as a player of the treble viol – which he was – but surely he performed more on the harpsichord and organ. Such multi-tasking was a norm, if not a requirement. A court appointment did not necessarily prevent performers from engaging in other professional activities – so long as obligations to the court could be met – and indeed could sometimes pose relatively few demands at least in terms of day-to-day service throughout the year. Courts could also be centres for musical cosmopolitanism, allowing for the exchange of repertoires and performance styles crossing national and even religious borders. Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway (reg. 1588– 1648), had Dutch and Danish singers and composers (some of whom, such as Mogens Pedersϕn and Hans Nielsen, were sent to Italy for further study), English lutenists (including Dowland from 1598 to 1606) and string players (William Brade and Thomas Simpson, among others), and other instrumentalists and keyboard players from Germany (Johann Schop as violinist; Melchior Schildt and Johann Lorentz [ii] for the organ) and Poland (the organist Michael Crakowitz). The king also maintained connections with the leading northern European composer of the period, Heinrich Schütz. Clearly these kinds of exchanges could be fruitful, although national prejudices could also intervene, as in the well-known complaints from Dresden musicians (including Schütz and Christoph Bernhard) about Italian performers starting to dominate musical life at the court of the Elector of Saxony.8
Churches and affiliated institutions In 1613, Monteverdi was appointed to the prestigious position of maestro di cappella at the Basilica of St Mark in Venice. The musical establishment there on his arrival numbered about thirty singers, six instrumentalists and two
8 S. Rose, ‘Music in the market-place’, in T. Carter and J. Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Music, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 55–87, at pp. 64–5.
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organists, plus another sixteen instrumentalists who were brought in for twenty-six services per year (including Christmas, Easter, Ascension and the feast of St Mark). On Monteverdi’s death, the Roman musician Giacomo Razzi, currently in Venice, tried to interest Giacomo Carissimi in the position. Razzi said that there were forty singers and twelve instrumentalists (‘among violins, violoni, trombones, and cornetts’) as well as others brought in on special occasions. He also outlined their duties: ‘ordinarily they sing from the large book, and in the cantus firmi the counterpoint is improvised. On the solemn feasts, since the Most Serene [Doge] comes, with all the Senate, great music is made for four, five and six choirs, with different groups [concerti] of voices and instruments.’ Razzi also noted – as did Monteverdi himself in his own correspondence – that there were many other lucrative performing opportunities in Venice; they included festal celebrations in other churches and in the city’s scuole grandi and piccole (in effect, confraternities), and music in private households. Indeed, one has the impression that St Mark’s was not itself the most exciting musical institution in Venice save where grand civic ceremonial came into play.9 The Cappella Sistina in Rome – the Pope’s private chapel, which did not use instruments – had around thirty-two singers, but not all sang given that after twenty-five years of service, attendance was no longer required. Save on Sundays, only half the choir was on call to perform the daily services (on alternate days). San Petronio in Bologna had thirty-six singers and about ten instrumentalists. Even a relatively provincial centre such as Bergamo (in the Veneto) sought to maintain a significant musical establishment: in August 1614, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore employed a maestro di cappella (Giovanni Cavaccio), two organists, five sopranos, three altos, three tenors, two basses and seven instrumentalists. A number of Roman churches had cappelle of four sopranos, two altos, two tenors and two basses, plus an organist and a maestro di cappella; again, these forces would usually be divided to spread the load on alternate days or weeks, and additional vocalists and instrumentalists could be brought in for special occasions. Lutheran congregations tended by definition to have lesser musical needs, although music could still be elaborate on special occasions. In Hamburg, music in the five parish churches was provided by four organists and by eight to ten singers under the direction of the Stadtkantor, plus teachers from the Johanneum Latin school who also sang; if instruments were needed (cornett, sackbut, viol or 9 P. Fabbri, Monteverdi, trans. T. Carter, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 128 (1613), 136–7 (Razzi). See also J. H. Moore, ‘Venezia favorita da Maria: music for the Madonna Nicopeia and Santa Maria della Salute’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37 (1984), 299–355; J. E. Glixon, Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260–1807, Oxford University Press, 2003.
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violin), the eight town musicians were available. For English cathedrals, the Civil War necessarily forced severe disruptions in their musical establishments, but after the Restoration, a typical choir comprised some sixteen men (basses, tenors and countertenors) and eight boys – with more of the latter in some Oxbridge chapels – plus an organist and his deputy. In the New World, the musicians of the cathedral of La Plata (now Sucre, Bolivia) around the midseventeenth century included a chapelmaster and a succentor, an organist, six choirboys, six plainchant singers, ‘many’ singers of polyphony, and seven ministriles (mostly wind players, often Indians); by the last decades of the century, the chapel stabilised at around twenty-five musicians, with two directors, one organist, ten adult singers, two continuo players (harp and violone), six choirboys and four ministriles.10 Unlike the court, a musical position in the church required a regular, often daily, commitment; therefore most institutions had mechanisms in place to enforce discipline in the cappella. As we have seen at St Mark’s, Venice, a distinction would normally be made between ‘ordinary’ and ‘solemn’ or otherwise special services that would in turn influence the number of performers required, and also the types of music done. The staple of the Catholic liturgy remained plainchant, which did not necessarily require a professional cappella (it could be sung by clerics); rather, the choir was needed for music in several parts, which might range from simple four-part falsobordone (a homophonic harmonisation of a chant melody) or not-so-simple improvised counterpoint (Razzi refers to what was also called contrappunto alla mente),11 through stile antico polyphony in the style of Palestrina (often for the Ordinary of the Mass), to more elaborate concertato idioms involving voices and instruments (often for Vespers). The Lutheran service retained features of the Catholic one but also centred on (communally sung) chorales. Not all music within any liturgy was necessarily ‘liturgical’ strictly speaking. Thus motets or anthems could cover ritual or devotional acts (the Offertory, Elevation, Communion, etc.), while organ music filled other ‘empty’ spaces in the service. Something similar applies to the cantata that in Lutheran churches later in the century became associated with the sermon (and with the chorale of the day) and expanded upon its themes. 10 J. Lionnet, ‘Performance practice in the Papal Chapel during the 17th century’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 3–15; J. Roche, ‘Music at S. Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, 1614–1643’, Music & Letters, 47 (1966), 296–312; (Bologna, Hamburg) N. O’Regan, ‘The Church Triumphant: music in the liturgy’, in Carter and Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, pp. 283–323, at p. 291; I. Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 41–56; B. Illari, ‘Polychoral culture: cathedral music in La Plata (Bolivia), 1680–1730’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago (2001), pp. 67–8, 83. For another example, see R. Stevenson, ‘Mexico City cathedral music: 1600–1750’, The Americas, 21 (1964), 111–35. 11 E. T. Ferrand, ‘Improvised vocal counterpoint in the late Renaissance and early Baroque’, Annales musicologiques, 4 (1956), 129–74.
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Save in the most ascetic religious environments, it was widely accepted that music was useful to praise God on the one hand, and to secure the attendance of the faithful on the other. Even in Calvinist Amsterdam, where organ playing was forbidden during services until 1680, an organist such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) would offer a public recital for an hour in the morning and in the evening. It is also clear that for most people in the seventeenth century (and before and after), the church was where they most often encountered music of any complexity. The tensions between music’s power to attract and distract was the subject of periodic complaint and even legislation. Musical performances at convents – as in S. Radegonda in Milan, in numerous institutions in Paris or even in Cuzco in Peru – were a matter of some controversy, with nuns tending either to be praised for their piety and good musical works, or to be condemned for lewd display.12 Confraternities and similar social and charitable institutions were on safer ground, where devotional exercises could be accompanied by musical activities, including oratorios. For some, the jury was still out on whether music was a good or bad thing. But the Jesuits were clear on the matter, to judge by their widespread use of music as an instrument of conversion in the New World and Far East.13
Town musicians Most urban centres of any size across Europe had musicians employed by civic authorities for ceremonial purposes or other musical needs.14 They would usually receive a salary plus the benefit of other privileges and donations, and tended to operate within some kind of guild system. Although the phenomenon has been associated particularly with northern Europe – such as the town waits in England and the Stadtpfeifer in Germany – it was also evident south of the Alps (as with the Cremonese wind ensemble that Monteverdi sought to recruit for the court of Prince Francesco Gonzaga in Monferrato in 1609). Such town musicians would usually distinguish themselves from lesser performers (the much derided, and unlicensed, ‘beer fiddlers’ and balladeers). In addition to their civic employment, they would also hire themselves out to particular individuals, and often served as music teachers. 12 R. L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan, Oxford University Press, 1996; G. Baker, ‘Music in the convents and monasteries of colonial Cuzco’, Latin American Music Review, 24 (2003), 1–41. Compare C. A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995; C. Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700, Oxford University Press, 2002. 13 See the essays in J. W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, University of Toronto Press, 1999. 14 See, for example, H. Müller, Ulrich Johann Voigt, 1669–1732: Stadtmusikus zu Celle und Lüneburg, Celle, Stadt Celle, 1985; T. A. Collins, ‘Of the differences between trumpeters and city tower musicians: the relationship of Stadtpfeifer and Kammeradschaft trumpeters’, Galpin Society Journal, 53 (2000), 51–9.
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Despite the title, the would-be Stadtpfeifer (or Stadt- or Ratsmusikant) needed to be proficient on a number of wind and string instruments and able to engage in a wide range of repertoires. Indeed, town musicians could be virtuosi of some distinction (we shall see the case of Johann Schop, below), and also composers of music appropriate to their domain, including ceremonial fanfares, dances, wedding songs and chorales.
The opera industry Opera brought something new into the equation. Although the genre first arose in the north Italian courts – Peri’s Euridice was performed as part of the Florentine festivities for the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and King Henry IV of France in October 1600 – it had a patchy history there. Chiefly this was because it required its noble audiences to sit and watch, and also because the new recitative style was often regarded as tedious: courtiers tended to prefer more active forms of self-display by way of dancing or tournaments. But things changed profoundly with the opening of the first ‘public’ opera houses in Venice and then elsewhere from 1637 on. Indeed, one can start to speak of a veritable opera factory, with theatre owners, impresarios, librettists, composers, singers, dancers, instrumentalists and stage and costume designers all profiting from what was clearly a growth industry.15 The patterns were not entirely new given the earlier experience in theatrical enterprise gained by the professional troupes of commedia dell’arte players that resided in and toured European courts and cities. Thus some performers grouped themselves into opera companies that contracted their services to a theatre owner or impresario for a season, or made independent arrangements to tour specific regions. The system was so efficient that several north Italian courts in effect contracted out the provision of their entertainments to such groups, or otherwise maintained connections with Venetian impresarios to procure repertoire on the one hand, and star singers on the other.16 In France, matters remained more centralised around the court and its surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi, Jean-Baptiste Lully. Opera in Austria and Germany tended to be dominated by Italians: the only consolidated moves towards a native opera were made in Hamburg, where from 1678 the Theater am Gänsemarkt presented performances in German. London was, as usual, a special case, with its mixture of French practices 15 E. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991; B. L. Glixon and J. E. Glixon, Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and his World in Seventeenth-Century Venice, Oxford University Press, 2006. 16 S. Mamone, ‘Most Serene Brothers-Princes-Impresarios: theater in Florence under the management and protection of Mattias, Giovan Carlo, and Leopoldo de’ Medici’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 9 (2003), www.sscm-jscm.org/v9/no1/mamone.html.
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(the court had been exiled in France during the Civil War), Italian musicians, and English theatrical traditions that favoured songs within plays rather than opera.
Performing lives: five case studies Conventional wisdom then, as now, deemed the music profession to be a dangerous career choice. Yet for those with ability and luck, many musical institutions provided a significant degree of job security. Music was also often an aid to upward social mobility (Giulio Caccini was the son of a carpenter, and Jean-Baptiste Lully of a miller); and for the best in the field, there were fortunes to be made. It was not unusual for children to follow their fathers in the profession (e.g. Francesca Caccini, Dieterich Buxtehude, Henry Purcell), and even to form large musical dynasties (the Bach family and the Couperins, among many others), while charitable institutions catering for orphans or the impoverished often regarded music as a way for their male charges to gain a future, and for their female ones to develop another skill for marriage. Of course, we know more about those who succeeded as musicians than those who failed or gave up trying. But it would seem that the decision to be a musician in the seventeenth century was not necessarily a bad one. For many male children, the starting point was admission to the choir of a major local church that would also provide instruction in music as well as the three Rs. Formal choir schools appear to have been more common north of the Alps (thus Henry Du Mont studied at the choir school of the Onze-LieveVrouwekerk in Maastricht, and John Blow at the Magnus Song School in Newark), although by the middle of the seventeenth century, institutions in Naples (conservatori) and Venice (ospedali) were adopting an increasingly important role in training male (and some female) singers and instrumentalists for the church or theatre, teaching orphans on a charitable basis but also accepting paying pupils. Young musicians identified as having some potential for princely service were frequently placed under the eye of a more senior figure at court, and might even lodge in his house. This was somewhat akin to the apprenticeship system that operated more rigidly within the townmusicians guilds in Germany. Other children born into musical families were trained at home, at least in the first instance, and benefited from family connections in ascending the professional ladder. The preference would be to develop multiple musical skills, at least until a primary one was readily identified by virtue of talent and/or by force of circumstance (for the latter, the obvious case in point is the accidental or deliberate castration of boys before puberty). Opportunities for female musicians were necessarily more
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limited save where musical training could be achieved within the household, or where a girl was orphaned or indigent (in cities where institutions were available to provide for them), or where financial issues or simple vocation prompted entry to a convent. Other churches had no need of them, and entry to court service was reserved to a select few, who would usually be married off to male musicians so they could maintain a career. Opera changed the picture considerably in terms of its burgeoning demand for female singers, who gained unprecedented (for women) economic power as a result. However, given music’s role as a feminine accomplishment, schools for girls had some significant role in music-making, including the ospedali in Venice (the Pietà is the most famous), Saint-Cyr just west of Versailles and even Josias Priest’s establishment in Chelsea. How musicians made their way in the world thereafter depended on the customary combination of talent and being in the right place at the right time. There are as many stories of performers’ lives as there are performers, the overwhelming majority of whom have been long been forgotten. Sometimes, however, their performances deserve to be heard.
Francesco Rasi Rasi was born in Arezzo on 14 May 1574, son of a Tuscan civil servant and administrator.17 He studied at the University of Pisa, and by the early 1590s, if not before, was in training for a court position in Florence under the aegis of Emilio de’ Cavalieri, the newly appointed director of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici’s court music (Cavalieri received an allowance for him). Rasi also no doubt studied with the most prominent singer and teacher in Florence, Giulio Caccini, whereby he became a prominent exponent of the new Florentine styles of solo song. Cavalieri took Rasi to Rome in autumn 1593, where his performances as a tenor and player of the archlute were received enthusiastically; Rasi received offers of employment by Virginio Orsini (Duke of Bracciano), Cardinal Montalto and Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. He then appears to have travelled to Germany and Poland. However, by 17 November 1598 he had accepted a position at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. This move was undoubtedly associated with Rasi’s contribution to the three spectacular performances of Battista Guarini’s controversial tragicomedy, Il
17 W. Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici, with a Reconstruction of the Artistic Establishment, ‘ “Historiae Musicae Cultores” Biblioteca’, 61, Florence, Olschki, 1993, pp. 556–603; S. Parisi, ‘Ducal patronage of music in Mantua, 1587–1627: an archival study’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1989), pp. 477–87.
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pastor fido, staged in Mantua in June, September and November 1598. In the intermedi associated with the June performance, Rasi sang ‘wondrously’ to the chitarrone, ‘to whom responded two echoes with marvelous excellence’.18 Although the effect was Florentine in origin (Jacopo Peri had done something similar in the intermedi accompanying La pellegrina for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I and Christine of Lorraine in 1589), Rasi seems to have made it his own, not least, of course, in the title-role of Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (1607), where Orfeo’s central aria, ‘Possente spirto e formidabil nume’, makes great play of instrumental echoes. Rasi claimed, and probably received, special treatment from the Mantuan court (a position higher than just a court musician; rooms in the palace) – as he also did for his father who moved with him to Mantua, and for others of his family – and he was without doubt the most prominent singer there, taking leading roles in Mantuan theatrical entertainments, including Apollo in Marco da Gagliano’s Dafne and Teseo in Monteverdi’s Arianna (both in 1608). Later in 1608, he toured France and the Low Countries. In 1610, Rasi was involved in a plot to murder his stepmother in Arezzo, for which he was condemned to death in Tuscany (the penalty was annulled in 1620); the Gonzagas enabled him to flee to Turin, and found ways to keep him out of the limelight, including a trip to the Imperial Court at Prague in September–December 1612. Similar motives may explain Rasi’s extended connections with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Marcus Sitticus, for whom Rasi revived Monteverdi’s Orfeo and provided other vocal music. After he returned to Mantua, he was granted an annual pension of 200 scudi, but he died unexpectedly on 30 November 1621. A month before his death, Rasi complained to Alessandro Striggio, court councillor in Mantua (and Monteverdi’s frequent correspondent), that he was being asked to perform music too high for his voice, and that the court singers were treating him without civility; he also reminded Striggio that he merited some esteem for introducing the ‘new manner’ (nuova maniera) of singing to Mantua.19 Indeed, he had long sought to rise above the status of a common-or-garden court singer. He published two collections of solo songs (1608, 1610) and one of ‘dialoghi rappresentativi’ (1620) – other secular and sacred music by him survives in manuscript – and, somewhat unusually for a musician, two of poetry (1614, 1619). He was a member of the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica of Verona (1612) and was nominated a Cavaliere di San Marco by Antonio Priuli, the doge of Venice (1618). He
18 Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, p. 92.
19 Parisi, ‘Ducal patronage of music in Mantua’, p. 487.
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regarded himself as a noble virtuoso, and for the most part, the Gonzagas treated him as just that.
Johann Schop Schop first appears in the records in 1614 at the court of Duke Friedrich Ulrich of Wolfenbüttel: the duke’s Kapellmeister, Michael Praetorius, noted that Schop was a ‘very good’ violinist and also able to ‘hold his own’ on the lute, cornett and trombone.20 He moved to Copenhagen to enter the large musical establishment of King Christian IV of Denmark, and then to Hamburg as principal violinist and Ratsmusikdirektor of the town musicians, where he stayed for the rest of his career despite attempts to lure him back to Copenhagen. Hamburg was a significant musical centre: other distinguished musicians working there included the organist Jacob Praetorius (ii; no relation to Michael) at the Petrikirche, Heinrich Schiedemann, organist at the church of St Katharinen from 1629 and a favourite pupil of Sweelinck’s, and Thomas Selle as Ratskantor from 1641. One assumes that Schop also participated in the Collegium Musicum, inaugurated in 1660 by the organist Matthias Weckmann (a pupil of Jacob Praetorius and from 1655, organist at the Jacobikirche), which offered weekly public concerts by some fifty musicians performing what was considered to be the best music from Italy and Germany. Schop is one of a number of virtuoso violinists who held positions among town musicians in northern Germany, including David Cramer in Hamburg, Thomas Baltzar (c. 1630–63; one of Schop’s pupils) and Nathanael Schnittelbach (1633–67) in Lübeck, and Nicolaus Bruhns (1665–97) in Husum. He knew Heinrich Schütz, whom he accompanied with the composer Heinrich Abert on a trip to Copenhagen for the festivities celebrating the wedding of Crown Prince Christian in 1634; while there, Schop engaged in, and won, a contest of virtuosity with the French violinist Jacques Foucart. His surviving compositions reflect his duties as a town musician, including wedding songs for leading Hamburg citizens, two printed collections of instrumental dance music and canzonas (1633 and 1635), and one of sacred settings (1643–4). He also composed other solo songs and chorale melodies, including ‘Werde munter, mein Gemüte’ (1642), now best known to English-speaking audiences by way of Bach’s arrangement as ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. His sons Johann (ii) and Albert also became musicians. 20 For further details, see J. Kremer, Das norddeutsche Kantorat im 18. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen am Beispiel Hamburgs, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1995; D. D. Boyden, The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 and its Relation to the Violin and Violin Music, Oxford University Press, 1965, repr. 1990, pp. 136, 167–8. For similar, if later, examples, see T. Drescher, Spielmännische Tradition und höfische Virtuosität: Studien zu Voraussetzungen, Repertoire und Gestaltung von Violinsonaten des deutschsprachigen Südens im späten 17. Jahrhundert, Tutzing, Schneider, 2004.
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Silvia Gailarti Manni Gailarti was born around 1629, the daughter of a Roman gentleman, Silvestro, and the singer Leonora (Dionora, Leonida) Luppi (born around 1610).21 By 1633, Luppi was remarried to Lorenzo Presciani (who had some connection with Prince Taddeo Barberini), but they separated (it seems), and she appears to have moved to Venice by the time her daughter was ten or so, perhaps to take advantage of the opportunities for opera there. They received the protection of the Venetian noblemen Nicolò Gabriel and Matteo Dandolo (the latter a noted intellectual and music-lover), and frequently provided musical entertainment in their own household (it is possible that Luppi was a courtesan). In August 1642, Luppi pursued legal action against the Neapolitan musician Giovanni Carlo del Cavalieri for having seduced her thirteen-year-old daughter and then trying to kidnap her and poison the mother: Cavalieri had been taken into the household earlier that year to teach Gailarti singing and playing, and had lured her with promises of a position at the court of the Duke of Celenza (near Naples) with an annual salary of 200 scudi and accoutrements appropriate to a gentlewoman. We do not know the outcome of the case, or what happened to Cavalieri. Luppi and Gailarti both appear to have sung in one or more operas by Monteverdi in the 1640/1 season (which included the composer’s Le nozze d’Enea in Lavinia and a revival of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria) under the names Leonida and Silvia Donati; Luppi claimed in 1642 that she was still owed money by Monteverdi and Benedetto Ferrari on the one hand, and by Francesco Cavalli on the other. Gailarti’s vocal talents, and their impact on men’s hearts, were being praised in poetry in 1642, and by late 1643 she was the dedicatee of the scenario for Benedetto Ferrari’s opera II prencipe giardiniero, where it emerges that she was now Ferrari’s singing pupil. She may have sung in that opera; she certainly took the role of Calisto in Cavalli’s Titone (in the 1644/5 season); and the Venetian intellectual Giovanni Francesco Loredano described her as ‘a siren who kills all those who have the good fortune to hear her voice or look upon her face’. In 1645, Luppi was murdered in a neighborhood incident, and Gailarti married a Roman, Pietro Manni (perhaps the later opera impresario of that name, who may also have been a singer), bringing with her a sizeable dowry and household possessions, including lavish dresses (some perhaps opera costumes) valued at 772 ducats, and a spinet worth 30. Her total worth at age sixteen was 2,400 ducats, that is, six times Monteverdi’s annual
21 B. L. Glixon, ‘Scenes from the life of Silvia Gailarti Manni, a seventeenth-century “virtuosa” ’, Early Music History, 15 (1996), 97–146.
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salary at St Mark’s. Gailarti may then have moved back to Rome, for nothing is known of her career for almost thirteen years. She returned to Venice to take the seconda donna role in Pietro Andrea Ziani’s L’incostanza trionfante in the 1657/8 season, for which she received 375 ducats plus, it seems, lodging and travel expenses (although it was not all paid on time). She sang in the 1658/9 season (Cavalli’s Antioco) and in 1660/1 (Daniele da Castrovillari’s ill-fated Pasife). It is not known whether Gailarti continued to perform in Venice, but she certainly did so elsewhere as a prima donna in Turin in 1662 (Pietro Andrea Ziani’s Le fortune di Rodope e Damira) and in Piacenza that same year (Isidore Tortona’s Andromeda), and in Parma in 1665 (Antonio Cesti’s Dori). Attempts to bring her to Mantua in 1669 for Antonio dal Gaudio’s Eudosia fell through, in part because she had fallen out with the other proposed singers, and in part because Gailarti disliked the music for not giving her enough arias, even though the Mantuan impresario, Count Romoaldo Vialardi, promised one at the end of the third act that ‘should draw tears from the eye’. By this time she was living in Milan and may have had ambitions to form her own opera company, perhaps because, aged forty, she saw drawing nigh the likely end of her active singing career. Vialardi finally gave up on her: ‘I will avail myself of another who is better and who will look beautiful on stage.’ Even though she performed in Mantua the next year (Giovanni Battista Tomasi’s II gran Costanzo), Vialardi noted that ‘Signora Silvia has behaved disgracefully, and that is enough said’. The only subsequent reference to her is in 1677 as the signatory of the dedication to a libretto possibly by her husband, Floridea, regina di Cipro, performed in Reggio Emilia. We do not know when she died.
Nicolas Lebègue Lebègue was born probably in 1631 in Laon (in Picardie).22 Although his family was of relatively humble origins, it was probably the fact that his uncle (also Nicolas) was a ‘maître jouer d’instrument’ in Paris that enabled Lebègue to enter the musical profession, although we know nothing about his education. By 1661 he was known as a ‘famous’ organist of Paris, but the first document we have concerning his employment comes from 1664, when on 18 December he was hired as the organist of the church of St Merri (in the Marais). He was required to play for three services (two Masses and Vespers) each Sunday; for Masses on Mondays and Saturdays (except during Advent and Lent) and on Thursdays; for Masses on Feasts of the Apostles; and four to six times per day 22 N. Dufourcq, Nicolas Lebègue (1631–1702), organiste de la chapelle royale, organiste de Saint-Merry de Paris: étude biographique, suivie de nouveaux documents inédits relatifs à l’orgue français au XVIIe siècle, Paris, A. & J. Picard, 1954.
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for high feasts (in all, about four hundred times per year). His annual salary was 460 livres, raised to 600 in 1669 as Lebègue took on additional duties at St Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. In 1675, he received a ten-year royal patent for printing organ music: he published three collections, the first in 1676 and the others after 1682 but before 1686, as well as two books of harpsichord music (1677 and perhaps 1686), and a collection of solo motets (1687) for the Benedictine nuns at Val de Grâce. Other organ music survives in manuscripts, including one originating from as far afield as Montréal in ‘La nouvelle France’ (i.e. Quebec in Canada). In 1678, Lebègue was appointed one of four organists to the king (another was Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers), playing in the last quarter of each year for a lucrative annual salary of 600 livres. He retained his position at St Merri, presumably sending a deputy when his court duties intervened. He also performed before the king and queen at other Parisian churches, such as at the Invalides on 1 May 1682, where ‘Sieur Le Bègue, organist to the king, who came expressly for the occasion, played the organ with that beautiful manner which always charms those who hear him’. He died on 6 July 1702. Lebègue had a series of distinguished pupils, including François Dagincourt, Nicolas Geoffroy and Nicolas de Grigny; he also seems to have prepared in manuscript a ‘Méthode pour toucher l’orgue’ (1676; now lost). His organ publications reveal the range of music typically required within and outside the liturgy, including offertories, elevations, noëls, and versets for Mass and for the Magnificat at Vespers, as well as more generic symphonies, récits and trios. Some is very ambitious indeed, while other of this music is designed for the more modest talents that must have been more the norm in churches in Paris and elsewhere.
Pietro Reggio Reggio was born in Genoa in 1632.23 The first notice of him as a performer is in a list of Italian musicians at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden from November 1652 to 1 March 1653: Vincenzo Albrici was the maestro di cappella heading an ensemble comprising one male soprano, five castratos, two male altos, two tenors, two basses (one being Reggio) and a player each of the viol, theorbo and harpsichord (in effect, a continuo group; the last was Albrici’s brother, Bartolomeo). The English ambassador to Sweden, Bulstrode Whitelocke, had the pleasure of hearing them perform at his residence on 16 April 1654, when the queen was elsewhere: ‘Her absence and the leisure which they had thereby, gave opportunity to some of her musicians, Italians, and Germans, to passe a 23 G. Rose, ‘Pietro Reggio: a wandering musician’, Music & Letters, 46 (1965), 207–16.
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complement on Whitelocke, to come to his house, and, with great ceremony, to intertaine him with their vocall and instrumentall musick, which was excellent good; and they played many lessons of english composition, which the gentlemen, who were musicall of Whitelocke’s family, brought forth unto them.’ After the queen abdicated on 5 June 1654 (and moved to Rome), Reggio may have followed Vincenzo and Bartolomeo Albrici to Germany; he appears to have sung with the French royal chapel in 1657; and his later epitaph also notes his fame in Spain. By the summer of 1664, however, Reggio had settled in London, joining the large number of foreign musicians (including the Albrici brothers) seeking their fortune after the Restoration. Samuel Pepys’s diary notes for 22 July 1664: ‘Straight home by water, and there find, as I expected, Mr. Hill and Mr. Andrews, and one slovenly and ugly fellow, Seignor Pedro, who sings Italian songs to the theorbo most neatly, and they spent the whole evening in singing the best piece of musique counted of all hands in the world, made by Seignor Charissimi, the famous master in Rome.’ Reggio attached himself to a number of London households, taught singing (e.g. to John Evelyn’s daughter, Mary), copied music manuscripts containing Italian and other repertoires (such as London, British Library, Harley 1501, with music by Carissimi, Cavalli, Cesti, Luigi Rossi, Barbara Strozzi, Pietro Andrea Ziani and others), and occasionally composed songs for the theatre. He published The Art of Singing, or a Treatise wherein is Shewn How to Sing Well Any Song Whatsoever, and also How to Apply the Best Graces, with a Collection of Cadences Plain, and then Graced (Oxford, 1677) and also The Books of Songs with a Thorough Basse to Them for Instrument, a large folio engraved edition issued in London in late 1680 (it was reprinted in 1692). He died on 23 July 1685, and was buried in St Giles-in-the-Fields the next day: the burial record identifies him as ‘Peter King’ of Drury Lane, suggesting, perhaps, some ongoing theatrical connection.
Some conclusions Clearly, these five case studies are highly selective, but they are revealing in terms of what opportunities were available to performers, and what good or bad choices may have been made. They also raise a number of other important issues. One is the apparently increasing professionalisation of musical performance during the seventeenth century and its impact on newly developing communities of listeners. Around 1650, the Florentine Severo Bonini lamented the decline of amateur music-making: ‘Do you not see that today one is only concerned with composing little arias for one and two voices concerted with harpsichords or similar instruments? Madrigals to be sung at the table without instruments have been sent to oblivion, as is church music, all
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of which are too composed, and so little by little one will carry on losing this art.’24 Roger North displayed a similar nostalgia for the good old days when a polyphonic madrigal or fantasia represented the ‘respùblica among the courtiers’ – ‘Now it is come to pass that few but professors can handle [music], and the value is derived upon high flights and numbers of capitall performers’ – while Johann Kuhnau’s satirical novel, Der musicalische Quack-Salber (The Musical Quack, 1700), lampooned a bad German musician hiding his lack of talent behind the guise of being an Italian virtuoso.25 It is no coincidence that with the exception of Silvia Gailarti, all my performers were also composers to a greater or lesser degree; nor is it any coincidence that Gailarti is the exception, given her gender, although for women composers I could have chosen instead Caterina Assandra, Francesca Caccini, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Barbara Strozzi or several others. That performers should be composers (and vice versa) is not surprising: although some seventeenth-century institutions were developing notions of a standard repeating repertoire, there was still a premium on new music specific to a given time and place. For that matter, writing music down was the only way that performers could create some kind of legacy of their art. Not all may have been able to do so: when the virtuoso soprano Adriana Basile was recruited from Naples to Mantua in 1609–10, it was noted that she knew more than three hundred Italian and Spanish songs by heart, although there is no indication of how she learnt them, or indeed of whether she could read music at all.26 Also, one should not downplay the role of improvisation, that is, spontaneous musical work that might or might not somehow turn later into a ‘musical work’, or for that matter, the notion that seventeenth-century musical works are often notated so incompletely that they are almost literally composed in performance. But there are enough seventeenth-century manuscripts that were clearly intended to serve as a repository of an individual performer’s repertoire, whether for use or for commemoration. Music printing raises further questions. It had mixed fortunes in different parts of Europe during the seventeenth century, declining precipitously in Italy (for economic reasons and perhaps also stylistic ones) but maintaining a foothold in parts of Germany and in the Netherlands, France and England (after the Restoration), where there seems to have been enough of a demand from music-lovers to sustain the market. By definition, music printing 24 For this and other such complaints, see T. Carter, Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy, London, Batsford, 1992, pp. 241–2. 25 J. Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, Being a Selection of his Essays Written during the Years c. 1695–1728, London, Novello, 1959, p. 222. For the North and Kuhnau examples, see Rose, ‘Music in the marketplace’, pp. 65–6. 26 Parisi, ‘Ducal patronage of music in Mantua’, pp. 181–2, n. 49.
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presumed some kind of dissemination for reputation or profit (or both), yet music for a specific time and place, and/or for specific performers, was not always suitable for a broader range of consumers. When Schütz ‘published’ his Historia der freuden- und gnadenreichen Geburth Gottes und Marien Sohnes, Jesu Christi (the ‘Christmas Story’) in 1664, he printed the recitatives, but the more complex intermedia remained available only in manuscript because they ‘would not attain their proper effect except in princely chapels’. Virtuoso performercomposers faced even more difficulties given that while printing enhanced their image and helped attract patrons, it could also undercut their value (why pay someone to perform or teach when one can get the same experience from a print?). The increasing complexity of musical styles and scorings which demanded greater notational and other specificities prompted a preference for more expensive engraving over letterpress printing for certain repertoires. It also explains the tendency for prints of more ‘difficult’ music to contain detailed prefaces or other directives (tables of ornaments, etc.) explaining what is really required of the performer(s). The large numbers of ‘how to’ treatises published in the period – catering for different levels of achievement – are part of the same trend; they further suggest that what we assume was widely accepted common knowledge in the period (how to play a figured bass, how to ornament a melodic line) was not necessarily all that common. But when in 1676 an admirer asked Lully how to get copies of favourite melodies from his operas, Lully’s answer was straightforward: he should find someone who sang them well.27 A would-be performer of seventeenth-century music is faced with various types of evidence: the musical notation, the treatises that explain (in greater or lesser detail) how to interpret it, contemporary descriptions of musical performances, and archival and other records about specific performers and their institutional environments. Each of these is a separate minefield, and bringing them together presents still more obstacles. Musical sources that are evidently in some sense incomplete pose an obvious set of problems (Italian opera scores come to mind). But even seemingly straightforward cases leave us with difficulties. We can fairly well sort out what Thomas Coryat meant in his well-known description of music probably by Giovanni Gabrieli at a festal celebration in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice in August 1608, when he speaks of ensembles comprising sixteen to twenty male voices and instruments (for the latter, ‘Sometimes sixteene played together upon their instruments, ten Sagbuts, foure Cornets, and two Violdegambaes of an extraordinary greatnesse; sometimes
27 Cited in Rose, ‘Music in the market-place’, p. 70. Compare T. Carter, ‘Printing the “New Music” ’, in K. van Orden (ed.), Music and the Cultures of Print, New York and London, Garland, 2000, pp. 3–37.
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tenne, six Sagbuts and foure cornets; sometimes two, a Cornet and a treble viol’), three singers also playing the treble viol, two singers accompanying themselves on the theorbo, and so on.28 But how are we to interpret Coryat’s reference to ‘seven faire paire’ of organs ‘standing al in a rowe together’ and accompanying this musical extravaganza? Have we ever heard a later seventeenth-century cantata by Bernardo Pasquini done with a choir of 100 plus 150 string players, or an oratorio by Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier (S. Beatrice d’Este) with an orchestra of thirty-nine violins, ten violas, twenty-seven lower string instruments, two trumpets, one lute, and presumably one or more keyboard players (Corelli was involved in both performances in Rome in 1687 and 1689 respectively)? Or what happens when we move to the other extreme still more common in contemporary accounts of musical performance, which will often note at some length the occasion, the place, and the audience, but will offer nothing about the music other than its having been, say, ‘beautiful’ (or not). All this is something the following chapters must address.
28 D. Arnold, ‘Music at the Scuola di San Rocco’, Music & Letters, 40 (1959), 229–41, at 236–7.
. 17 .
Vocal performance in the seventeenth century RICHARD WISTREICH
The seventeenth century could well be characterised as one in which singers and singing in general, and the figure of the individual solo singer in particular, were the driving forces in a range of major developments both in specific genres and in the broader institutional manifestations of music. The most obvious of these, perhaps, is the acceleration of what began as a fairly marginal form of music theatre – opera – from its near standing start in the elite space of the Florentine court in 1600 to its flourishing establishment in the public theatre culture of most of Western Europe by the early 1700s. Music historians rightly point to innovations in a whole variety of other genres of vocal music, including in the church: the sacred concerto, oratorio and grand motet; in chamber music: secular song in many different national styles, concerted madrigal and cantata; and the various different kinds of theatre music besides Italian opera, such as French ballet de cour and tragédie en musique, Spanish comedia and zarzuela. English masque and ‘semiopera’, and so on.1 All of these largely depended for their realisation on the highly developed skills of virtuoso singers. Furthermore, the emergence of professional women singers from their barely visible sequestration in the north Italian courts onto the centre stage of public acclaim and accessibility, and an almost parallel trajectory for castrato singers, are two of the more obvious phenomena which, in different ways, both drove and resulted from these developments. This brief chapter is not the place to attempt even the most cursory survey of vocal music genres in the period, nor even to collate and analyse the huge number of references to elements of ‘performance practice’: readers are referred throughout to the extensive relevant literature that deals with these matters. Rather, I will focus closely upon generic aspects of the seventeenth-century voice itself, particularly in terms of contemporary ideals of ‘art’ singing technique and voice categorisation, which differ quite markedly from those of our own time, even
1 For comprehensive accounts of seventeenth-century music and its associated institutions, see T. Carter and J. Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, 2005, and L. Bianconi, Il Seicento, Turin, Edizioni di Torino, 1982, trans. D. Bryant as Music in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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within the extraordinarily fertile culture of modern ‘historically informed performance’. Developments in vocal music, particularly in dramatic genres, naturally made increased demands on singers. One of the most significant was the creation of an entirely new kind of vocal performance, namely recitative – ‘speaking in song’ – pioneered in Florence and Rome around the turn of the century and soon ubiquitous as the principal medium for conveying the narrative in opera, oratorio and other genres. Indeed, many singers now had to be actors (and some actors to be singers), able to sustain convincing portrayals of fictional characters in works often lasting several hours that in turn required feats of stamina, memory and stagecraft beyond anything that had been demanded of them in the past. But it was also a time of extraordinary opportunity in which it was increasingly possible to become a ‘star’ and to reach an ever broader public, whether singing solo in a church in Rome, in an opera house in Venice, Dresden, Vienna, Hamburg or Naples, a public theatre in London, Paris or Madrid – even a convent in Milan, or benefiting from the apparently insatiable appetites of royalty and the aristocracies of Europe to expend huge amounts on elaborate, semi-private entertainments that featured singing. Most new kinds of vocal music encouraged singers either to convey intense expressions of strong feelings, engage in dramatically convincing and affecting role-play, or to display feats of occasionally staggering vocal virtuosity, and often to combine all of these. Thus we might well expect the seventeenth century to have witnessed a revolution in vocal technique, a sweeping away of the established paradigms of Renaissance singing and their replacement with something quite new. But in fact, so far as it is possible to tell (and it is important to stress that we can never be sure, at a remove of three or four centuries, what any kind of singing really sounded like) there was remarkable continuity with what had gone before. Integers of fine art singing established in Italy at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century, including ideal standards of voice production, articulation and the basic elements of expressive embellishment in the interpretation of text remained remarkably stable throughout the century. Indeed, the same technical elements that were later collated and carefully elaborated in, for example, the preface to Giulio Caccini’s iconic Le nuove musiche (‘New Songs’) of 1602 (see Chapter 13), are still clearly recognisable as the critical premises of another equally famous treatise, Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni, which is primarily a book about the training of opera singers, and published more than 120 years after Caccini’s, in 1723 (see Chapter 21). These enduring technicalities of singing style became internationally recognised touchstones of advanced vocal excellence and were developed through a
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set of quite precisely understood ‘building blocks’. For Caccini, they included intonazione, messa di voce, passaggi, trillo and gruppo, to which by Tosi’s time had been added appoggiatura, portamento di voce, scivolo e strascino (‘gliding and dragging’): in other words, elements primarily of embellishment.2 Indeed, in a sense, they constituted the practical aspect of the consolidation of a near hegemony of Italian singing style which, although contested and to a certain extent resisted (especially in France), nevertheless became well entrenched throughout Europe by the end of the century and was to endure right up to the mid-nineteenth century and even beyond. For this reason, the first section of the following discussion focuses particularly closely on Italian practices of vocal technique and their pedagogy, and especially on the earlier part of the century, for which we have the largest number and variety of source materials. In the second section I turn my attention to the singers themselves in terms of voice types and their deployment in practice, focusing principally upon the soprano voice in its various manifestations, because of its particular rise to prominence during this time. I conclude with a brief look at the expressive functions of vocal technique in singers’ performances on the stage.
Fundamentals of vocal technique and pedagogy In a letter to an as yet unidentified prince, written around 1600, the veteran court musician Luigi Zenobi set out details of the ideal household musical establishment, listing the qualities and skills to be looked for in the each of its members – music director, singers and instrumentalists. Singers, in general, are ‘those who sing the high, middle, or low parts; if they sing them well, with assurance, grace and good taste one calls them excellent . . . if as a result of practice, practitioners, if by nature, natural singers’. He continues by describing ‘what it takes for one to sing with grace, good taste, noble embellishments and with art, or in other words, to sing one’s part really well’.3 In reality, success in the singing profession required both ‘nature’ and ‘practice’, whatever the level of aspiration – star soloist and rank-and-file choir member alike. Singers aspiring to be rated ‘excellent’ needed to be naturally endowed with a clear and carrying voice with flexibility in the larynx, and prepared to spend years in developing vocal agility and the means to sing expressively, through a 2 G. Caccini, Le nuove musiche, Florence, Marescotti, 1602, preface; extract in M. Murata (ed. and trans.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4: The Baroque Era, New York and London, Norton, 1998, pp. 100–9; P. F. Tosi, Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni, Bologna, Lelio dalle Volpe, 1723, facsimile edn, New York, Broude, 1968, p. 111, trans. J. Galliard as Observations on the Florid Song, London, J. Wilcox, 1743, facsimile edn, London, Reeves, 1967, p. 174. 3 B. Blackburn and E. Lowinsky, ‘Luigi Zenobi and his letter on the perfect musician’, Studi musicali, 20 (1994), 61–95, repr. in B. Blackburn, Composition, Printing and Performance: Studies in Renaissance Music, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000.
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combination of dynamic, rhythmic and graceful alterations and additions to the vocal line; thus training ideally began in childhood. This seems to have been the pattern for most singers, whether they were taught in church choirs, convents or by members of their own family, or were sent by wealthy patrons to study (and often to live) with teachers while they prepared for court or other service; and by and large, professional singing was learned entirely orally within the master–apprentice system.4 Caccini’s publication of Le nuove musiche marked a significant new departure in pedagogy: an attempt to put his legendary teaching methods into written form, in order to ‘deliver a discourse to my readers upon the noble manner of singing, in my judgment, the best one, so that others could practise it’. The procedure goes in two stages. First, there is a lengthy preface elucidating some generic elements of good singing, including clear and intelligent enunciation of the text, and the description and demonstration, through short examples, of certain basic types of embellishment. Second is the collection of ‘new songs’ itself, most of which are in the form of ‘worked examples’ showing in notation (so far as it is possible to do) the application of the embellishment techniques to practical situations; as Caccini remarks, ‘in the profession of singer . . . not only are the details useful, but everything taken together makes it better’.5 The principles of Le nuove musiche inspired similar collections, such as Ottavio Durante’s ‘Devotional arias, which incorporate the manner of singing with gratia, imitation of the words, and the way to write passaggi [short runs] and other affetti’ (1608), which covered much the same ground as Caccini (although in less detail). Durante also included a brief reference to what we might term ‘interpretation’: Singers must strive to grasp the sense of what it is they have to sing, especially when singing alone, so they can understand it in themselves and make it their own, in order to bring their listeners to the same understanding. They must take care to sing in tune, to sing adagio (that is, with great freedom of rhythm), to give forth the voice with gratia and to pronounce the words distinctly in order to be understood.6
A further indication of what were considered to be the basics of vocal technique is seen in Ignatio Donati’s preface to his second volume of ‘Motets for solo voice’ (1636). Donati was the music director of Milan Cathedral, and he defined 4 S. Rose, ‘Music in the market-place: musical training’, in Carter and Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, pp. 73–7; S. Durante, ‘Il cantante’, in L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli (eds.), Il sistema produttivo e le sue competenze, Turin, Edizioni di Torino, 1987, trans. L. G. Cochrane as Opera Production and its Resources, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 345–417, especially pp. 364ff. 5 Murata (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4, p. 102. 6 R. Wistreich, ‘Reconstructing pre-Romantic singing technique’, in J. Potter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 190–1.
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his market precisely as ‘teenage boys and girls, or nuns’ and those ‘who do not have natural disposition’, presumably the kinds of pupils he taught in the course of his job. The motets include written-out passaggi and his preface gives suggestions about how they should be taught: by getting the young people to learn the notes slowly in full voice on solmisation syllables until they are memorised, and then to speed up until they can sing each passaggio in one breath, practising on the vowels A, E and O, but taking care not to shake the head or move the lips.7 Some of the most detailed information we have about the more practical and finer details of singing technique comes from German training manuals for choirboys published during the century. Much of the more advanced content is based on the Italian models their authors wished their students to emulate, and which they needed in order to perform elaborate figural music.8 The bottom line for Michael Praetorius (1619), for example, is that a singer must have ‘a beautiful voice given by Nature, but also . . . a round neck and throat for diminution’.9 Daniel Friderici (1649), following Praetorius, continues: ‘The boy should, from the very beginning, be encouraged to form his voice quite naturally, and if possible, gently shaking, wavering or trembling in the throat or neck.’10 This probably does not mean ‘vibrato’ in the modern sense, but rather ensures that the voice really is free and not forced. Young boys are to be encouraged to develop their voices healthily by singing German songs (presumably chorales) in church and also outside (at burials), taking care always to avoid shouting ‘like peasant boys in the meadows’, which, judging by the regularity with which it comes up, was something of a default of normal church singing in many parts of Europe: Thomas Morley’s remark (1597) that ‘Most of our churchmen, so they can cry louder in their choir than their fellows, care for no more, whereas by the contrary they ought to study how to vowel and sing clean’, was reprinted in a footnote to the English translation of Tosi, published in 1743.11 ‘However’, says Wolfgang Kaspar Printz in 1678, ‘although a singer may be endowed freely from Nature with a clear and pleasant voice, it is nevertheless 7 In E. Rosand, ‘ “Senza necessità del canto dell’autore”: printed singing lessons in seventeenth century Italy’, in A Pompilio, D. Restani, L. Bianconi and F. A. Gallo (eds.), Atti del XIV Congresso della Società Internazionale di Musicologìa: transmissione e recezione delle forme di cultura musicale, 3 vols., Bologna, EDT, 1990, vol. 2, p. 219. 8 J. Butt, Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 9 M. Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, vol. 3, Wolfenbüttel, 1619; extract trans. in C. MacClintock, Readings in the History of Music in Performance, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 164. 10 D. Friderici, Die Musica figuralis, Rostock, 1624/1649; ed. E. Langelütje, Berlin, Gaertner, 1901, p. 17. 11 T. Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), ed. A. Harman, London, Dent, 1952, p. 293; Tosi, Observations, p. 142.
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well known that it can be considerably improved’.12 Printz sets the boy to working on his breath control by singing long notes, slowly getting louder and then softer, an exercise otherwise known by its Italian name, messa di voce – literally, ‘placing the voice’ and still fundamental to bel canto method today. Printz explains that the boy should practise holding back his breath as much as possible while singing runs, attacking each note precisely but gently so as to avoid giving the breath away too fast. He adds that this will help him not only to sing longer and longer phrases as his lungs grow, but also to make ‘Passagiren, Triletti and Trilli gracefully and easily’.13 This leads to the next and crucial step, which is to learn the correct way to articulate passaggi (diminutions, or short runs), and – most importantly in Caccini’s ‘reformed’ style of ornamentation – the various short, expressive accenti which enable a singer to convey a personalised range of subtle, textually inspired nuances in solo song. French vocal music also has its equivalents to passaggi and accenti, described by the theorist Marin Mersenne in Harmonie universelle (1636) as ‘passages, fredons, tremblemens, & battemens de gorge’.14 Articulating all these kinds of embellishments correctly is perhaps the main thing which distinguishes seventeenth-century technique from modern art singing, because the key point, and the one for which the German boys have been preparing, is that it happens entirely in the throat, through very rapid and accurate repercussions of the vocal folds. The technique requires that perfect balance of relaxation and breath control that Printz’s choirboy has been developing, in which the larynx is free and not depressed or otherwise constricted at the point at which each note is attacked – something, however, that places distinct limitations on both volume and vocal ‘colour’. The attainment of this facility, often called simply ‘disposition’ (literally ‘skill’) is neatly summed up in the most comprehensive French singing treatise of the century, Bénigne de Bacilly’s Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter: ‘Disposition is a certain facility in the performance of everything having to do with singing. It has its location in the throat.’ But like many other writers, Bacilly is at a loss to explain in words how to do it, implying that you either have it, or you don’t: ‘The throat must be so well-disposed by nature that the singer is able to sing a piece pleasantly and according to the rules in a very short time and with almost no training.’15 12 W. C. Printz, Musica modulatoria vocalis, Schweidnitz, 1678, p. 15. 13 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 14 M. Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, Paris, Cramoisy, 1636; facsimile edn, Paris, CNRS, 1963, p. 351. Comprehensive descriptions of seventeenth-century French vocal ornaments are in F. Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, Princeton University Press, 1978; see also S. A. Sanford, ‘A comparison of French and Italian singing in the seventeenth century’, Journal of Seventeenth Century Music, 1 (1995), http://sscm-jscm.press.illinois.edu/vlno2.html (accessed 7 September 2011). 15 B. de Bacilly, Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter et particulièrement pour ce qui regarde le chant français, Paris, 1668; facsimile edn, Geneva, Slatkine, 1971, p. 48; Eng. trans. and ed. A. B. Caswell as A Commentary upon the Art of Proper Singing, Brooklyn, NY, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968, p. 24.
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Trillo The principal form in which throat articulation is manifested in Caccini’s toolbox of expressive embellishments is the trillo, a short burst of repeated throat articulations on a single pitch often applied to a pre-cadential note, and perhaps the most recognisable of seventeenth-century vocal ornaments. Closely related to the trillo is the short gruppo: similarly fast repeated articulations, but on two adjacent and alternating tones.16 The trillo became a standard test of vocal accomplishment for singers: Monteverdi specifically mentioned it as a key qualifying factor in both of his surviving audition reports on prospective professionals.17 In order to show what the trillo is, Caccini offered a notated model of gradually diminishing note values on a single pitch, the singer ‘restriking each note with the throat on the vowel a’, adding that this was the method he had used to teach it to his own wife and daughters.18 Praetorius, however, said it can only be learned by imitating someone who can already do it ‘as a bird learns by observation of another’, while John Playford related that some people have taught themselves throat articulation by ‘singing a plain Song, of 6 Notes up and 6 down, [and] in the midst of every Note beat or shaked with their finger upon their Throat, which by often practice came to do the same Notes exactly without’. Playford further relates the account of an amateur singer who claimed to have learned the trillo by imitating hawkers ‘who lure their birds as he-he-he-he-he; which he used slow at first, and by often practice on several Notes, higher and lower in sound, he became perfect therein’.19
Passaggi and accenti Once the trillo has been mastered, it opens the door to the correct way to produce passaggi and also the whole battery of other small ornamental accenti (in French, ports de voix and tremblemens) which the singer uses to embellish the line in all kinds of solo song, all of which entail very precise throat articulations and finely tuned dynamic variations of the voice. This is most clearly demonstrated in what is perhaps the most comprehensive, but succinct elaboration of Italian accenti which we have, with practical instructions on how to master them: the page of annotated vocal exercises headed ‘The true principles of 16 Later in the century, the trillo and gruppo gave way to the more familiar two note tremolo (trill) whose vocal production is nevertheless based on the same principles of throat articulation. 17 Discussed respectively in R. Wistreich, ‘Monteverdi in performance’, in J. Whenham and R. Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 261–79, and R. Wistreich, ‘ “La voce è grata assai, ma . . .”: Monteverdi on singing’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 7–19. 18 Murata (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4, p. 105. 19 J. Playford, The Skill of Musick, London, 1674, note to the section: ‘Directions for Singing after the Italian Manner’ (a translation of Caccini’s preface), pp. 52–3.
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polished and good singing’ which opens Francesco Rognoni’s monumental diminution manual for singers, and violin and cornetto players, his ‘Forest of various passaggi’ (1620).20 Rognoni begins with an exercise he labels portar della voce, a way to move stepwise seamlessly from note to note, gradually increasing the intensity of the lower note, then relaxing the voice momentarily to introduce a little tremolo before moving up to the next one; it is then practised in reverse, coming down the scale. This teaches the singer how to move into throat-production without breaking the flow of air, and it also introduces the principle of portamento, a controlled sliding between notes that obscures the beat, giving an illusion of spontaneity and unmeasured freedom to the pulse. This is also very like the equivalent French embellishment, the port de voix, which singers were instructed to use on most stepwise ascending intervals, thereby achieving a similar ‘slurring’ effect by anticipating the upper note a little before the beat and then holding it a little after the beat, before releasing the voice with a tiny, almost imperceptible throat articulation (coup de gosier).21 Rognoni’s exercises continue with an increasingly complex syllabus of accenti and he concludes by cautioning against making throat ornaments without sufficient breath support, which otherwise will result, he warns, in a sound like those who sing ‘in the Moorish style, [who,] beating the passaggio in a certain way displeasing to all, singing a a a, so that it seems they are laughing’. This comment (which, incidentally, mirrors Printz’s linkage of breath control to disposition) provides an important insight into the ‘limits’ of throatarticulated singing, at which I hinted earlier: there is always a danger of what we might now call ‘going off the voice’ and losing not only pitch, but also projection. The solution is in Rognoni’s following remark: ‘From this, learn that embellishments should come from the chest and not from the throat.’ I take this to mean that the singer has to master the art of using the breath (‘from the chest’) to maintain a fundamental underlying portamento all the time that embellishments are being articulated. It echoes and reinforces a remark made a generation before by Lodovico Zacconi in his Prattica di musica (1592): ‘Two things are necessary for anyone who wishes to practise this profession – chest and throat; chest in order that a great variety and number of tones can be carried through to the proper end; throat in order to control them with facility.’22 Roger North, writing over a century later in 1695, makes 20 F. Rognoni, Selva di varii passaggi, Milan, 1620; facsimile edn, G. Barblan, Bologna, Forni, n.d.; see also S. Carter, ‘Francesco Rognoni’s Selva de varii passaggi (1620): fresh details concerning early-Baroque vocal ornamentation’, Performance Practice Review, 2 (1989), 5–33. The page of notation is reproduced in Wistreich, ‘Reconstructing Pre-Romantic singing technique’, p. 189. 21 Bacilly, A Commentary on the Art of Proper Singing, p. 66. 22 L. Zacconi, Prattica di musica, Venice, 1592; facsimile edn, Bologna, Forni, 1983, p. 58; see also Wistreich, ‘ “La voce e grata assai” ’, 15.
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a similar point: ‘For if there be any pause between note and note, it is amiss; but with the same breath as one note ends, so the next begins’ and he cautions that the trill ‘is dangerous for a scollar to meddle with, till he hath the mastery of the sound, else it will make him apt to loose the principall tone; and that spoiles all’.23 The balance is a very fine one, but especially critical for singers who performed in large places like churches or theatres, rather than in small chambers or salons, and yet still employed passaggi or accenti in their singing. This goes some way to explaining how it can be possible that, as far as the evidence shows, throat-articulation was part of the vocal apparatus of all ‘frontline’ professional solo singers, regardless of where they were performing. Thus, while singers in the late sixteenth century are reminded by Luigi Zenobi that they ‘must sing in one style in church, another in the chamber, and in a third one out of doors’, a century later, the distinctions seem to have been reduced to a simple question of dynamics: and a singer (says Tosi) should merely ‘regulate his Voice according to the place where he sings; for it would be the greatest Absurdity, not to make a difference between a small Cabinet and a vast Theatre’.24
Embellishment in practice One of the mantras of the proponents of the ‘new’ style of expressive singing in the years around the beginning of the seventeenth century was their criticism and rejection of a prevailing and decadent ‘bad practice’: the over-elaborate and indiscriminate addition of passaggi and other extravagant embellishments simply in order to demonstrate the singer’s ‘mechanical’ virtuosity, with little or no attention to the text. In his Preface to the score of Euridice (1600), which famously expounded his part in the invention of recitative, the singer and composer Jacopo Peri hinted that virtuoso singers were to a certain extent prisoners of fashion, who would rather have made much more discriminating use of improvised embellishment had their audiences allowed it, taking as his example one of the most famous virtuosas of the time: I demonstrated this new manner of singing [i.e. recitative] . . . to that celebrated lady . . . Signora Vittoria Archilei, who has always made my music worthy of her song, adorning it not only with those gruppi and with those long passaggi both simple and double which, by the liveliness of her wit, are encountered at every moment – more to obey the practice of our times than because she judges that
23 J. Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, London, Novello, 1959, pp. 18–19. 24 Tosi, Observations, p. 150.
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in them consist the beauty and force of our singing – but also those sorts of delights and graces which cannot be written, and if written, cannot be learned from the notation.25
At the end of the 1620s, the connoisseur Vincenzo Giustiniani, reflecting on the great improvements in the art of solo singing in Rome since his own youth, noted that contemporary singers had ‘mended their ways’ and entered a new age of continence in the matter of vocal excess: Having abandoned the past style, which was quite rough, and also the excessive passage work with which it was ornamented, they now cultivate, for the most part, a recitative style embellished by grazia and by ornaments appropriate to the conceit, along with an occasional passaggio drawn out with judgment and articulation . . . they make their words well understood, applying to each syllable a note now soft, now loud, now slow, and now fast, demonstrating with their face and in their gestures the conceit that is sung, but with moderation and not excessively.26
This judgement seems to be well supported by that of his contemporary, the nobleman polymath and musical amateur Pietro della Valle. In the latter’s essay in praise of the state of modern music, written in 1640, he recalls the fine singers of his youth (at the turn of the century), but notes that, in comparison with the even greater singers of the present age, they: hardly had other skills: of singing soft and loud, of increasing the voice little by little, of diminishing it with grace, of expressing the affections, of following the words and their meanings with judgment; of making the voice joyful or melancholy, of making it plaintive or ardent when necessary.27
We need to allow for the particular idealising rhetorical strategies of this (and, it must be said, much other seventeenth-century) writing about singing: both writers are tapping into recognisable tropes borrowed from practical rhetoric (oratory), with their catalogues of vocal effects and emphasis on the importance of contrast and moderation in successfully moving and persuading the listener. There is probably a similar degree of idealisation of France’s perhaps most famous chamber singer, composer and sought-after singing teacher of the mid-seventeenth century, Michel Lambert, in a memoir written in 1715, some twenty years after his death. Here he is celebrated for having ‘perfected the manner of singing well, through the finesse and delicacy of his ports de voix, passages, diminutions, tremblemens, ‘holding back’ and ‘moving forward’, and all the ornaments of singing that are able most agreeably to 25 Murata (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4, p. 153. 26 V. Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la musica de’ suoi tempi (1628), trans. in J. W. Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1997, vol. 1, p. 110. 27 Murata (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4, p. 40.
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charm the ear’.28 These kinds of lists became pretty formulaic in encomia of particular star singers; nevertheless, their continued use is surely an important clue to what it was about seventeenth-century singing that impressed itself most strongly on its listeners. Thus Giulio Caccini’s daughter Settimia, in the role of Aurora in Mercurio e Marte (music by Monteverdi) at Parma in 1628, was said to have sung ‘with superhuman grace and angelic voice’ so that ‘there was no one, however feeble of judgement who did not grow tender at the trills, sigh at the sighs, become ecstatic at the ornaments’;29 while in 1657, a smitten fan of the Venetian nun, Mariette Redoi, asked if anyone could sing with more charm, could pronounce the words with greater clarity, if any one could put more chest into the gorgie [throat-articulated ornaments], more facility into the passaggi, more sweetness in the trilli, more speed into the runs, more assurance into the ascending scales, more precision into the falling?30
Embellishments: spontaneous or written? The underlying premise of these various descriptions is that embellishment was ‘added’ spontaneously to the vocal line at the point of performance by the discerning singer, who made choices from a learned palette of suitable expressive alterations to pitch, rhythm and dynamics in response to the demands of the text. Given this, it is nevertheless interesting to see how much ornamentation is found already ‘written-into’ the notation of vocal music of all kinds, suggesting that improvising may not after all have been a self-evident art for the majority of singers. Annotations are found in the form of sometimes quite extended written-out ornaments and even entire ‘doubles’ (embellished second verses of songs) in manuscripts associated with the teaching of singing, including, for example, the various books preserving mid-century English chamber song,31 as well as the annotated versions of monodies in publications specifically directed at students, such as those by Durante and Donati, mentioned above. These sometimes even included ‘alternative’ plain and ornamented versions of the same pieces, such as Bartolomeo Barberini’s Second Book of Motets (1614), in which the rubrics explain that the first version is for 28 P. Bourdelet, Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu’à present, Paris, 1715, pp. 225–6, quoted in C. Massip, L’art de bien chanter: Michel Lambert (1610–1696), Paris, Société Française de Musicologie, 1999, p. 99. 29 T. Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 93. 30 C. Anselmo, Saggio di lettere, Venice, 1627: see Wistreich, ‘ “La voce e grata assai”’, 16. 31 For example, in ‘Lady Anne Blount’s Song Book’, reproduced in facsimile, together with twenty-five other English manuscript song books, in E. B Jorgens (ed.), English Song, 1600–1625, 11 vols., New York and London, Garland, 1986; see also E. Huws Jones, The Performance of English Song 1610–1670, New York and London, Garland, 1989.
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those who do not have ‘dispositione di passeggiare’, the second for those who may have disposition, but do not know how to ornament stylishly.32 Fully notated embellishments of all kinds, from simple cadential figures and short ‘fills’ of passaggi to painstakingly typeset renditions of trilli and ports de voix, or signs above the stave indicating where ornaments are to be made are, in fact, to be found in a very wide range of published and manuscript vocal music, both secular and sacred, from all over Europe and throughout the century. In some cases, it can be argued that these indications are for the benefit of amateurs who cannot be expected to know what is expected and do not have access to teachers able to show them. In other cases, the complex typesetting of ornamentation might function not so much as a blueprint for further renditions, but, rather, as a representation of the performances of a particular singer, serving the reader as the next best thing to hearing the virtuoso in the flesh.33 However, the inadequacy of notation alone to convey the reality of a singer’s performance is implicitly acknowledged, for example, in the printer’s preface to Jacopo Peri’s songs, Le varie musiche (1609), where he concedes that ‘it would be necessary to hear the composer play and sing them himself to fully appreciate their perfection’.34 Nevertheless, neither the needs of amateurs nor the use of print to memorialise other singers’ improvisations really sufficiently explains the ubiquity of written-out embellishment in sources of every kind of vocal music from madrigals to cantatas, sacred concertos to opera – notwithstanding Peri’s own caveat, noted above, about ‘graces which cannot be written, and if written, cannot be learned from the notation’. For example, almost all of Claudio Monteverdi’s published and manuscript vocal music includes at least some ‘composed-in’ ornamental figures. All of this music was almost certainly written for professional singers whose techniques the composer knew intimately because he worked together with them day in and day out. Examples include the fully notated trilli, gruppi and diminutions in various parts of the Vespers of 1610 (see Chapter 19) and the motets and psalm settings written for the singers of S. Marco and other Venetian churches, published in his huge collection of church music, Selva morale e spirituale (1640–1); similarly, painstakingly written-out passaggi and cadential figures are found throughout the madrigal books published from 1605 onwards. In his theatre music the most celebrated case is probably that of the aria ‘Possente spirto’ in the opera Orfeo (performed 1607, published 1609). Here the score offers two versions of 32 Rosand, ‘ “Senza necessità del canto dell’autore”’, p. 218. 33 See T. Carter, ‘Printing the “New Music”’, in K. Van Orden (ed.), Music and the Cultures of Print, New York and London, Garland, 2000, pp. 3–37. 34 Rose, ‘Music in the market-place’, p. 69.
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Orpheus’ famous demonstration of his god-like vocal powers, one ‘plain’ and unornamented, the other copiously embellished, and often explained as a way of illustrating the extraordinary singing of the virtuoso Francesco Rasi, who created the role (see Chapter 16) – although this is nowhere explained in the text, otherwise rich in performance rubrics.35 Less equivocal examples from what little survives of Monteverdi’s other music for the stage include extensive passages of semiquaver diminution written into the music for the characters Seneca and Mercurio in the manuscripts of L’incoronazione di Poppea and many affetti in the music for Plutone in the 1638 print of Ballo delle ingrate. Notwithstanding this, Monteverdi clearly expected singers to add ornamentation of their own as well: in the introductory note to the score of Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624, published 1638), he specifically instructs the tenor narrator to refrain from adding embellishments except in one particular passage.36 Other composers (who very often directed the performances of their own music) may have had differing expectations of the degree to which singers might embellish their compositions. Jean-Baptiste Lully supposedly blew his top when he heard a young actress adding ornamentation to one of his recitatives while rehearsing it under the instruction of Michel Lambert: ‘that’s not what it says on your score! My recitative is only made to be spoken: I want it done exactly as written.’37 Henry Purcell, on the other hand, apparently regarded it as normal to leave such things to the performers, as implied in an eighteenth-century story about the child theatre singer Jemmy Bowen, who, ‘when practising a Song set by Mr Purcell, some of the Music [i.e. the band] told him to grace and run a Division in such a Place “O let him alone”, said Mr Purcell, “he wil grace it more naturally than you, or I, can teach him” ’.38
Singers and their voices Returning once more to Luigi Zenobi’s seminal letter (c. 1600), we find a detailed breakdown of the specific qualities to look for in (male) singers of each of the four voice types: bass, tenor, alto and soprano. He starts with the 35 S. Leopold, Monteverdi: Music in Transition, trans. A. Smith, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 84–5; T. Carter, ‘Resemblance and representation: towards a new aesthetic in the music of Monteverdi’, in I. Fenlon and T. Carter (eds.), Con che soavità: Studies in Italian Opera, Song and Dance, 1580–1740, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 118–34. 36 Translated in C. Monteverdi, Madrigals Book VIII: Madrigali Guerrieri ed Amorosi, ed. S. Applebaum, New York, Dover, 1991, p. xvii. 37 J. L. Le Cerf de la Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne, et de la musique françoise, pt. 2, 2nd edn, Brussels, F. Froppens, 1705, p. 204 ; see also D. Tunley, ‘Glimpses of performance practice in Lully’s operas’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 361–4. 38 A. Aston, A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber (?1747), quoted in O. Baldwin and T. Wilson, ‘Purcell’s stage singers’, in M. Burden (ed.), Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 124.
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bass, who should have a range of twenty-two notes (three octaves!) which he can sing in a full and even tone. Tenors and altos, meanwhile, should be sparing in their embellishments when singing in ensemble (just small passaggi and ‘a few gentle trilli and tremolos’) but may do more when performing solo. However, the most space by far is devoted to sopranos – ‘truly the ornament of all the other parts’ – who have ‘the obligation and complete freedom to improvise diminutions, to indulge in playfulness, and, in a word, to ornament a musical body’.39 The increasing pre-eminence of the soprano voice during the course of the century is well documented: in most Italian operas, for example, basses and tenors normally only played minor roles, as we will see, while the leads were allocated to women and castratos. Only in France, where castrato singing was never really accepted before the eighteenth century, were male leads assigned to hautes-contre (high tenors) or basses-taille (baritones). In 1636, Marin Mersenne, who perhaps more than any other contemporary writer investigated the phenomenon of singing from a philosophical as well as a practical point of view, reflected on the fact that ‘sopranos (both vocal and instrumental) . . . come much nearer to heaven and to life than basses . . . and many maintain that high sounds are more pleasant than low sounds, and that they derive more pleasure hearing a soprano than a bass’.40 Bacilly favoured the higher voice ranges on the grounds that ‘a greater number of the emotions or passions will appear to good advantage’.41 It is of particular relevance to note, however, that the word ‘soprano’ could refer to a variety of different kinds of singers, all well represented in seventeenth-century vocal music: girls; boys with unbroken voices; women; male falsettists; and, of course, castrati.
Children Child singers were ubiquitous in professional performances throughout Europe. Boys were (as ever) to be found everywhere in church choirs both Catholic and Protestant, and as the German treatises make abundantly clear, were required to develop sophisticated skills to be able to perform the increasingly complex ‘Italianate’ figural music. The English choirboy tradition suffered a damaging blow with the banning of choral music in church during the mid-century Commonwealth period and a whole generation of trained boy singers was effectively lost; but the tradition was quickly revived after the Restoration, mainly thanks to the efforts of the bass singer, actor and 39 Blackburn and Lowinsky, ‘Luigi Zenobi’, p. 100. 40 Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, vol.1, pp. 24, 26. 41 Bacilly, A Commentary on the Art of Proper Singing, p. 23; see pp. 18–28 for Bacilly’s detailed and interesting views on vocal range and singing techniques.
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choir trainer Captain Henry Cook, ‘esteemed the best singer after the Italian manner of any in England’. Cook recruited talented boys, including the future leading composers Pelham Humfrey and John Blow, from all over England and brought them to the Chapel Royal in London, where he probably taught them the Italianate singing techniques that would characterise late seventeenthcentury English vocal music.42 The tradition of children singing in the theatre was already well established in the various choirboy companies successfully in operation in London at the beginning of the century,43 and on the preCommonwealth London stage, boys who played the female roles in adult companies also often sang (for example, Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Ariel, among many others). The taste for such displays was clearly enduring and child actor-singers remained in vogue after the Restoration. In Purcell’s time, ‘child stars’ including Jemmy Bowen and Laetitia Cross (who was only twelve when she sang in Purcell’s music for Bonduca in 1695), performed often suggestive love songs and duets between, or sometimes within, the acts of plays.44 Children and adolescents were also active on the professional stages in Italy and France. The staging of plays was a feature of Jesuit pedagogy, but the fullscale pastoral ‘opera’ Eumelio, written for the students of the Seminario Romano by its music director, Agostino Agazzari, in 1606 was a new and ambitious departure. Calling for adolescent soloists singing not only soprano, but also alto, tenor and bass roles, it was a remarkably early example of the new through-sung drama, adapted for a specifically educational purpose.45 The embargo on women appearing on the Roman stage (see below) was generally solved by substituting young castrati, but not always: in the early Barberini operas San Bonifatio (1638) and La Genoinda (1641), the female roles were in fact sung by boys ‘under eleven or twelve years of age’.46 Girls in religious establishments might (if rarely) get similar opportunities, when they came from families wealthy enough to have provided them with the necessary education prior to their entry into the cloister. In 1686, three ten-year-olds, twin sisters Maria Maddalena and Teresa Maria Chigi, and Geltrude Petrucci, took the roles of ‘Divine Love’, ‘Innocence’ and ‘Delight’, respectively, in a lengthy and demanding operina performed at a convent in Siena, as part of their
42 John Evelyn’s Diary, 28 October 1654, in P. Dennison and B. Wood, ‘Henry Cook’, Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 7 September 2011), www.grovemusic.com. 43 L. P. Austern, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Late Renaissance, Philadelphia, PA, Gordon & Breach, 1992. 44 Baldwin and Wilson, ‘Purcell’s stage singers’, p. 124. 45 Bacilly, incidentally, reported that boys’ voices generally broke between the ages of fifteen and twenty: Bacilly, A Commentary on the Art of Proper Singing, p. 37. 46 Durante, ‘Il cantante’, p. 353.
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clothing ceremony.47 Children were also to be found singing on the stage in otherwise ‘adult’ productions, such as Jacopo Giusti, the ‘fanciuletto luchese’, who played the role of the Messenger, Dafne, in the first ‘publicly performed’ opera, Peri’s Euridice (1600). Meanwhile, in France, boys (pages) made up an important component of both the Chambre and the Chapelle of the French royal household, where they received a wide-ranging musical education. Pages from both establishments took part in several of Lully’s theatre works, including the Ballet des Muses (1661) and the tragédie lyrique, Isis (1677).48
Adult male sopranos The English travel writer Thomas Coryat famously reported on the concert he attended at the Scuola di S. Rocco in Venice in 1608 (see Chapter 18). The highlight of the evening so ecstatically described by Coryat was a singer ‘who had such a peerlesse and (as I may in a manner say) such a supernaturall voice for sweetnesse, that I thinke there was never a better singer in all the world’. Coryat was even more impressed when he realised the man was a middle-aged falsettist, rather than ‘an Eunuch, which if he had beene it had taken away some part of my admiration, because they do most commonly sing passing wel; but he was not, therefore it was much the more admirable’, suggesting that even for this English traveller, hearing a castrato was no novelty, even in 1608.49 In fact, even in Rome, with probably the greatest concentration of castrato singers anywhere in Italy, virtuoso professional falsetto sopranos appear nevertheless to have had at least equal status in the early years of the century, and were to be heard singing solo in public churches. For example, members of the Confraternity della Morte from Perugia coming as pilgrims for the Jubilee Year celebrations in 1600, were entertained with instrumental and vocal music at the Oratory of the Arciconfraternità all’Ave Maria, where they heard ‘the most rare falsettists’, including ‘the most pleasing Signor Lodovico, who with gorgie and passaggi showed how much he is valued in this profession’.50 But while soprano falsettists continued to be employed in choirs to bolster the boys (as in the French chapel royal, where they were referred to as dessus mués, fausses or faucets) until well into the eighteenth century, it seems that they were largely eclipsed in the solo field by castrati and women.51
47 C. Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 131. 48 L. Sawkins, ‘For and against the order of nature: who sang the soprano?’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 315–24, 317. 49 T. Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities, hastily gobled up in five moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy etc. . ., London, 1611; facsimile edn, London, Scolar Press, 1978, p. 252. 50 C. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 119. 51 Sawkins, ‘For and against the order of nature’, 316.
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Apart from the known careers of the most famous castrato singers, it is still quite hard to ascertain just how numerous and widespread they were, because detailed casting information for operas in the seventeenth century is actually very sparse.52 In the sixteenth century, excellent castrato singers were a much-prized rarity, but by the beginning of the seventeenth they had already become relatively familiar and by the end of the century they were a critical fixture of public Italian opera. Castrati sometimes played the roles of women, for example in the Papal States (excluding Bologna), where the appearance of women on public stages was forbidden up until 1798. Interestingly, as far as can be ascertained, castrati also sang all the female roles in the landmark early opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, first performed to an all-male audience in Mantua in 1607. Here the women’s parts were taken by two castrati from the Mantuan household musical establishment together with the Florentine Giovanni Gualberto Magli, who was ‘borrowed’ from the Medici for the occasion. However, female roles in operas and intermedi in Italy and elsewhere were otherwise by and large sung by women throughout the century. Indeed, in Mantua in the year following Orfeo, the female parts in all the music theatre works presented for the wedding celebrations of Francesco Gonzaga and Margaret of Savoy were taken by professional women singers.53 Most famously, the actress and singer Virginia Ramponi Andreini played the title role in Arianna, with its famous lament, and took the audience by storm, establishing (if only in historical retrospect) the rather sudden emergence of the idea of the operatic prima donna.54 Thereafter, Monteverdi created all his female roles for specific women, including the sisters Adriana and Margherita Basile and, as noted above, Settimia Caccini. Later, in Venice, he wrote the tragic role of Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea for Anna Renzi, in a cast list which also included not only several other women sopranos (including in the title role), but also castrati in the lead male roles of Nerone and Ottone, at least one boy (Ottavia’s page, Valletto), a young girl (Damigella), and even high tenors in travesty in the comic roles of Arnalta and Nutrice; the female sopranos may well have doubled up in the smaller roles of Fortuna, Virtù and perhaps the boy also sang Amore. ‘Normal’ tenors and basses, meanwhile,
52 R. Freitas, ‘The eroticism of emasculation: confronting the Baroque body of the castrato’, Journal of Musicology, 20 (2003), 196–249, 234; see also J. Rosselli, ‘The castrati as a professional group and a social phenomenon, 1550–1850’, Acta musicologica, 60 (1988), 143–79. 53 Monteverdi’s Arianna and Mascherata delle ingrate and Marco da Gagliano’s La Dafne, as well as the jointly composed intermedi for Giovanni Battista Guarini’s play, L’idropica. 54 Andreini stood in at very short notice for the teenage star of the Gonzaga court, Caterina Martinelli, who had died suddenly from smallpox, soon after creating the role of Venus in La Dafne; see T. Carter, ‘Lamenting Ariadne?’, Early Music, 27 (1999), 395–405.
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were assigned far fewer parts, primarily subsidiary: the hoary philosopher Seneca (who dies in the middle of Act 2) is a bass, as is the small role of Mercurio; two tenors and a bass take the small parts of the soldiers, Littore, Lucano and Liberto and other tiny roles, while very possibly the same singers form a trio of Seneca’s followers in two scenes and probably appear again as the chorus of consuls and tribunes at the end.55 Such diversity (and balance) of casting was perhaps particularly marked in mid-century Venetian opera, but the underlying sense of the careful consideration of vocal types (and ranges) in differentiating the characters in earlier seventeenth-century music theatre is notable. The ascendancy of male sopranos to their position of such dominance, especially of the operatic stage, might also therefore be seen as surprising, considering that the earliest operatic experiments had so strongly featured great tenor singers of the age, including Jacopo Peri and Francesco Rasi (see Chapter 16). Although tenors played the leading parts in some of the first Venetian operas, including, for example, the two male leads in Monteverdi’s first custom-written Venetian opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1641), they were soon supplanted by sopranos, and in the operas of Francesco Cavalli and Luigi Rossi, nearly all principal roles of heroes and lovers were taken by castratos; thereafter this became the norm. What to modern notions of voice and gender may seem contradictory apparently presented no such problem for contemporaries. Castrati tended to retain the boyish looks of ‘ideal’ male lovers and their voices were considered entirely in keeping with that image.56 In his celebrated comparison of French and Italian opera at the close of the seventeenth century, the Abbé François Raguenet singled out this aspect of Italian practice for admiration: Add to this, that these soft, these charming Voices [i.e. of castratos] acquire new Charms, by being in the Mouth of a Lover; what can be more affecting that be Expressions of their Sufferings in such tender passionate Notes; in this the Italian Lovers have a very great Advantage over ours, whose hoarse Masculine Voices ill agree with the fine soft things they are to say to their Mistresses.57
But this can also be balanced against the opinion of Pierre Perrin, writing a generation earlier in 1659, who described castratos as ‘the horror of ladies, the laughing-stock of men, one moment expected to play Cupid, the next a lady, 55 For Monteverdi’s Venetian operas, see E. Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2007, and Carter, Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre. 56 Freitas, ‘The eroticism of emasculation’. 57 F. Raguenet, Parallèle des Italiens et des François, en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras, Paris, 1702, trans. as A Comparison Between the French and Italian Musick and Opera’s [sic], London, William Lewis, 1709, p. 38; a portion of this text is reproduced in Murata (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4, pp. 162–70.
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and to express amorous passions, which offends against our sense of the plausible, good taste, and every dramatic convention’.58
Other male voices In France, the lower male voice ranges were more likely to be heard in leading roles. Lully assigned the principal role in eight of his fourteen operas to an haute-contre, a voice which is predominantly produced in the chest, but nevertheless pitched much higher than normal male speaking range. The taste for the high tenor range was also cultivated in England where Henry Purcell wrote such songs as ‘’Tis Nature’s voice’ (Ode on St Cecilia’s Day, 1692) for the counter-tenor John Pate, who later sang in Italy.59 ‘Tenor’ in the seventeenth century covered the standard (modal) range of the adult male voice (equivalent to modern baritone, and extending more or less from about our A to f 0 or g0 ); thus it did not normally require the singer to stray into falsetto range. As we have seen, after the earliest decades of the century, the tenor was very rarely cast in leading roles in stage works. The combination of high and ‘normal’ tenors in a trio with a bass is, however, a common combination in a wide variety of sacred and secular repertoire in all parts of Europe, especially from the mid-century onwards. François Raguenet, this time commenting on the lack of bass singers in the Italian opera of his generation (the later decades of the century) compared to their greater importance in French opera, mused on the special properties of the lowest vocal range: For every Man, that has an Ear, will witness with me, that nothing can be more Charming than a good Base; the simplest Sound of these Bases, which sometimes seems to sink to a profound Abyss, has something wonderfully Charming in it. The Air receives a stronger Concussion from these deep voices, than it doth from those that are higher, and is consequently fill’d with a more agreeable and extensive Harmony.60
Extraordinary bass voices, especially those of prodigious range (recall Zenobi’s criterion of a twenty-two-note range) were probably always as rare as they are today, but were clearly highly prized throughout Europe. Solo songs, motets and some operatic roles exploiting a large range and also requiring disposition no less impressive than that required of sopranos are to be found in song and 58 Sawkins, ‘For and against the order of nature’, 320. Such opinions prevailed, despite (or perhaps because of) the success of Italian castrato singers, including Atto Melani, in Cardinal Mazarin’s ill-fated ventures into Italian opera, culminating in Cavalli’s Serse in 1660: see J. R. Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, New York, Norton, 1978, pp. 52–3. 59 For Purcell’s tenors and counter-tenors, see A. Parrott, ‘Performing Purcell’, in M. Burden (ed.), The Purcell Companion, Portland, OR, Amadeus Press, 1995, pp. 385–444. 60 Raguenet, A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick, p. 5.
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cantata collections from throughout the century. In England, Henry Purcell wrote a series of magnificent anthems exploiting the two-and-a-half octave range of the Rev. John Gostling, a favourite of King Charles II. But basses were almost never cast in primo uomo roles in Italian opera, and usually only in ‘exotic’ parts. François Raguenet’s anonymous English translator noted that there were indeed low basses to be heard in Italy, but: these Bases are peculiar to the Churches, being very improper for the Theatre where instead of becoming the Part of an Hero, they wou’d set the Audience a Laughing. Whenever they are used, ’tis in the Mouth of a Magician, a Gyant, or a Devil, such as Pluto, Charon, Belzebub, &c.61
Casting a bass as an older man with gravitas, such as the role of Seneca in L’incoronazione di Poppea or Arsete in Domencio Mazzocchi’s La catena d’Adone, was exceptional before the later eighteenth century.62
Singers on stage Even after well over a century in which probably hundreds of singers had made successful careers in music theatre, the elderly and highly experienced Piero Francesco Tosi continued to muse on a perennial conundrum: ‘I do not know if a perfect Singer can at the same time be a perfect Actor; for the Mind being at once divided by two different Operations, he will probably incline more to one than the other.’ The conclusion which he reaches, that ‘It being, however, much more difficult to sing well than to act well, the Merit of the first is beyond the second’, may well have reflected the realities of the respective qualities of acting and singing on the early eighteenth century music theatre stage, especially as he adds: ‘what a Felicity [it] would be, to possess both in a perfect Degree’.63 Information about how singers learned to act, and indeed about what kind of acting skills may have been expected of them is very sparse and we have generally to rely for what little there is on the normally hyperbolic descriptions of stars by their fans. However, an anonymous manuscript treatise on Italian music-theatre production from c. 1630 known as Il Corago, provides fairly down-to-earth advice, although it does pre-date the beginning of ‘public’ opera (in 1637) by some years, and thus refers more to private court spectacle, where expectations may have been different. But on precisely Tosi’s point, the
61 Ibid., p. 36. 62 E. Rosand, ‘Seneca and the interpretation of L’incoronazione di Poppea’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 34–71. 63 Tosi, Observations, p. 152.
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Corago suggests that ‘to be a good singing actor one should above all be a good speaking actor’ adding that although connoisseurs may appreciate a wonderful singer who acts badly, by and large, if there has to be a choice, the public would rather have the opposite – a sentiment, as we shall see, that had apparently been reversed by the end of the century. The Corago suggests directors put weak actors at the back of the stage or even partially hide them in a machine (for example on a cloud) where they do not have to ‘strike histrionic poses’.64 His advice to singers is basic in the extreme: make slower gestures than you would otherwise, because recitative goes more slowly than normal speech; try to avoid walking around while singing; and, in a strong hint that music theatre acting generally was highly stylised (as we know was the case in the ‘straight’ theatre at this time),65 he somewhat cryptically comments that ‘When the chorus performs roles, they will use both gestures and motions that are more natural and usual than when they imitate those who sing [solo]’. Finally, the Corago wonders aloud why it is that, if singers can learn to sing ‘trilli, passaggi and other similar gallantries’, they cannot also learn to act with the necessary ‘changes of voice and feeling’.66 One of the remaining mysteries is how music theatre singers learned acting at all. Most of the men who sang in the first decades of opera’s success were trained primarily as church or chamber singers and seem to have combined stage appearances with continuing ecclesiastical careers. Meanwhile, with the exception perhaps of singer-actresses like Virginia Ramponi Andreini, who came out of the spoken theatre tradition (specifically the commedia dell’arte), the first female opera singers to achieve success, first in Padua and then in Venice, were Romans, and would therefore have had no opportunities to develop as actors in the city of their birth.67 André Maugars, a French viola da gamba player who was in Rome in the late 1630s, writes that ‘nearly all’ Roman singers ‘are almost all natural actors by nature . . . not only because of their singing, but as well for their expression of the words, the postures and the gestures of the characters, they represent naturally and very well’.68 This emphasis on ‘representation’ may help to 64 P. Fabbri and A. Pompilio (eds.), Il Corago, Florence, Olschki, 1983; partially translated in Murata (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, vol. 4, pp. 121–6; see also, R. Savage and M. Sansone, ‘Il Corago and the staging of early opera: four chapters from an anonymous treatise circa 1630’, Early Music, 17 (1989), 494–511. 65 J. R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1993. 66 Fabbri and Pompilio (eds.), Il Corago, p. 96. 67 T. Carter, ‘Italian opera after 1637’, in Carter and Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Music, p. 250. 68 A. Maugars, Response faite à un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique d’Italie, escrite à Rome le premier octobre 1639, ed. E. Thonain, Paris, Claudin, 1865; repr. London, H. Baron, 1965; partial trans. in MacClintock, Readings in the History of Music in Performance, pp. 117–26.
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contextualise Giulio Strozzi’s detailed praise of the stage performances of the (Roman) singer, Anna Renzi. Nowadays credited with being the first opera diva, she starred in some of the earliest public operas in Venice: ‘Our Signora Anna is endowed with such lifelike expression that her responses and speeches seem not memorized but born at the very moment. In sum, she transforms herself completely into the person she represents.’69 Although movements, gestures and facial expressions are clearly contributing factors to the overall success of the performance, her ability convincingly to ‘embody’ another role and to ‘take command of the stage, mean what she says, and say it so clearly that ears could desire no more’, is primarily rooted in her vocal delivery. In language we will now find recognisable, Strozzi continues: she has ‘a fluent tongue, smooth pronunciation, not affected, not rapid, a full, sonorous voice, not harsh, not hoarse, nor one that offends you with excessive subtlety; which arises from the temperament of the chest and throat . . . She has excellent passaggi and a robust and fast double trill.’70 It is noteworthy that the role for which she is now best known (Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea) consists apparently almost entirely of recitative, and yet the persistent measure of vocal skill – that of throat-articulated embellishment – remains the touchstone by which Strozzi communicates to his readers her qualities as a singer; an interesting clue for historians of vocal performance practice. Praise for Anna Renzi’s near contemporary, the Roman castrato Loreto Vittori, which also focuses on his ability ‘not only to play the role but to make himself take on, as he sings, any shade of the soul’s emotions’ rests, apparently, not so much on virtuosity in embellishment as on vocal skills normally associated with spoken oratory: That true artist, when he has to portray the voice and the words of a man agitated by anger, makes use of a piercing, excited, often precipitous sort of voice; if he is to show compassion and sadness, a flexible, broken, weak sort of voice; if he is to express fear, a submissive, hesitating, humbled quality.71
It is interesting in light of this description, that Maugars, although placing Vittori and another star of church and stage, the castrato Marc’Antonio Pasqualini, in the first rank of singers, nevertheless thought them less impressive in ‘arias’ than their contemporary, the celebrated chamber singer Leonora Baroni, whom he praised in conventional (even if particularly extravagant) 69 G. Strozzi, Le glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana, Venice, 1644, trans. in E. Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1991, p. 232. See also C Sartori, ‘La prima diva della liricia italiana: Anna Renzi’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 2 (1968), 430–52. 70 Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, p. 232. 71 J. N. Erythraeus, Pinacotheca imaginum, Amsterdam, 1645, quoted in Durante, ‘Il cantante’, p. 357; see also B. M. Antolini, ‘La carriera di cantante e compositore di Loreto Vittori’, Studi musicali, 7 (1978), 141–88.
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terms: ‘there is no one who is not ravished by this beautiful and difficult method of singing’.72 Maugars was, however, completely won over by recitative when he experienced it in the context of sacred oratorio: ‘Each singer represented a character in the story and expressed perfectly the energy of the words . . . I could not praise this recitative music enough – which one would need to hear in person to be able to judge its merit properly.’73 The line between this kind of ‘representation’ in church and in secular music theatre was a fine one. Indeed, the German composer and theorist Christoph Bernhard, writing around the middle of the century, warned church singers to be careful not to be tempted to express the Affekt of the text through gestures and facial grimaces: such affects are ‘better heard than seen’, and should be reserved for when the singer has to play a part in a singenden Comoedie; even then, this should only be attempted by those who are both ‘experienced singers and good actors’.74 Later in the century, singers had realised that the way to their audience’s hearts was to be found through set-piece arias during which they came to the front of the stage and demonstrated their virtuosity, rather than with complex and finely drawn character portrayals, such as those offered by the roles in Monteverdi’s operas. By the turn of the eighteenth century, vocal display had virtually eclipsed all other considerations and the audience went to the theatre primarily to experience their favourite singers playing off against one another, in many ways just what their predecessors had been doing at the beginning of the century: dazzling and pleasuring their listeners through displays of vocal pyrotechnics. As Roger North rather bluntly put it: I challenge anyone that hath attended them, to say, if their favourite party were not reigning upon the stage, they were not uneasy, or rather impatient till the other was done. I know for my owne part I went for the musick, and tho I could not blame the play, I hated it, because it stood in the way of my diversion.75
72 Maugars, trans. MacClintock, Response fait à un curieux, p. 122 (translation slightly modified). 73 Ibid., p. 119. 74 C. Bernhard, Von der Singe Kunst, oder Maniera, ed. J. Müller-Blattau, Die Kompositionslehre Heinrich Schützens in der Fassung seines Schülers Christoph Bernhard, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1999, p. 36. 75 R. North, Cursory Notes of Musicke (c.1698–c.1703): A Physical, Psychological and Critical Theory, ed. M. Chan and J. C. Kassler, Kensington, Australia, 1986, p. 231.
. 18 .
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century DAVID PONSFORD
The seventeenth century was an age of transitions. Besides developments in the construction of musical instruments and new sacred and secular compositional genres, there was a transformation of musical notation and its metrical organisation, and a new consciousness of music both as a rhetorical/poetical discipline and as an important subject within the new scientific disciplines. There was also an increasing awareness of distinct national styles, drawn into sharp focus by the documented travels between countries by important composer-performers, and a transformation of social attitudes towards music. Performance in the seventeenth century took place in three areas, broadly defined as church, court and ‘chamber’. At the beginning of the century, instrumental idioms were hardly distinct. The question of whether keyboard pieces by J. P. Sweelinck (1562–1621) were intended for performance on organ or harpsichord was relatively unimportant. Madrigals were ‘apt for viols and voices’, Johann Woltz’s keyboard anthology (1617) contained pieces that were originally issued in part-books for ensembles, and as late as 1660 the Fugues et caprices . . . pour l’orgue by François Roberday (1624–95) were printed in open score so that parts could easily be extracted for viols. By the end of the century, though, instrumental idioms had become far more distinct. The largest repertoires belonged to those instruments capable of polyphonic music, keyboards and the lute family, but there were astonishing developments in ensemble music. This was partly due to the development of instruments as well as to the changing genres. National styles of instrument building can most obviously be seen in the organ and harpsichord families. The mid-sixteenth-century organs in the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, played by Sweelinck for his daily recitals, were modest in size compared with the huge four-manual and pedal organs from organ builders such as Arp Schnitger at the end of the seventeenth century (e.g. Nikolaikirche, Hamburg, 1687), in which every division became a complete organ in itself, with a 320 Pedal division, and disposed according to quasi-architectural principles: the Werkprinzip. From mid-century onwards, French organs were constructed on
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quite different principles, attaining broad consistency in tone colours and design, which encouraged standardised registrations that dictated the titles of individual pieces and their associated musical styles: plein jeu, fugue, duo, trio, récit, fond d’orgue and grand jeu. Italian organs were of a different tradition again, based on one keyboard with a multiplicity of stops sounding the higher partials of the harmonic series, from which the player could choose particular colours for individual versets in the Mass.1 These national characteristics were also reflected in harpsichords. The relatively light construction and relatively unbarred soundboards of Italian harpsichords contrasted markedly with the more heavily constructed Flemish harpsichords of varying shapes and sizes with more complex soundboard barring. Flemish two-manual instruments were built as early as the 1590s for the purposes of transposition down a fourth (or up a fifth), compatible with the pitch differences between different members of families of viols, recorders and voices. Only later were the keyboards aligned for expressive purposes. From the 1680s, Flemish harpsichords (particularly by the Ruckers family) were rebuilt by French makers and subjected to ravalement, which consisted of extending the keyboard compass from four to five octaves, increasing both the length and the depth of the case, and furnishing with the disposition of 2 × 80 and 1 × 40 .2 During the same period, one of the most important and influential musical developments in France was the experimental change to woodwind instruments made in the village of La Couture-Boussey on the outskirts of Paris. Here the characteristic Baroque forms of recorder, flute, oboe and bassoon were established by a group of craftsmen including Jean Hotteterre (c. 1605–c. 1690) and his family, all of whom had positions at the royal court. These new designs were imitated by makers in England and Germany and led to a characteristic lowering of pitch standards. The century also witnessed a change in priorities regarding string instruments. At the beginning, the viol family was considered appropriate for cultured gentlemen. At the end of the century the violin family (including violas and cellos if not quite yet the double bass) was gradually superseding the viols, notwithstanding notable exceptions. Experiments in violin tuning were made by such player-composers as J. H. Schmeltzer (c. 1623–80) and H. I. F. von Biber (1644–1704), of which Biber’s Mystery (Rosary) Sonatas (c. 1676) are the most fully worked-out system of scordature as applied to the sixteen pieces. Some of the most notable composers and performers were employed as organists, whose compositional output included not only organ and harpsichord 1 P. Williams, The European Organ: 1450–1850, London, Batsford, 1966. 2 F. Hubbard, Three Centuries of harpsichord Making, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 112–13.
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genres, but often vocal and chamber music as well. In Roman Catholic churches, liturgical sections of the Office were performed alternatim, in which the liturgical texts of the Mass, canticles and hymns were divided alternately between sung plainchant and solo organ pieces. In prominent Parisian churches, organists could be required to play up to 400 services per year, and on important feast days would play about 100 (fairly short) versets.3 Obviously, improvisation was the norm, and the important publications by Frescobaldi (1583–1643), Nivers (1632–1714), Lebègue (1630–1702), Raison (c. 1640–1719), François Couperin (1668–1733) and Nicolas de Grigny (1672–1703) represent highly significant examples, but count for but a tiny fraction of the improvised repertoire. That improvisation (i.e. instant ‘composition’) was the required norm in both Catholic and Lutheran contexts is illustrated by accounts of procedures for appointing new organists. From Johann Kortkamp’s account of an audition in 1655 at St Jacobi, Hamburg, Matthias Weckmann (1621–74) improvised fantasias, fugues and chorale variations.4 For St Mark’s, Venice, the aspiring organist had to improvise strict four-part polyphony on a given theme, improvise polyphony upon a cantus firmus that had to migrate successively to all four parts, and respond alternatim to the choir and modulate to a different mode.5 It is clear from the alternatim Magnificats by Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654), Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1596–1663) and Weckmann, that in the Reformed Church the alternatim practice continued to some extent, but the practice of preluding on chorales in services as well as the playing of large scale toccatas, fantasias, preludes and fugues in extra-liturgical contexts was of greater musical importance. Demonstrations, competitions and recitals gave the organ a more secular rather than a strictly liturgical role. A church such as the Marienkirk in Lübeck had civic and commercial functions as well as liturgical. On a daily basis, professional scribes were in residence to draw up commercial contracts, and stockbrokers gathered in the church before the stockmarket opened. This led to the foundation by Franz Tunder (1614–67) of a series of organ recitals, which became the Abendmusiken in the time of Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707). Owned by the town council, rather than the church, the continually expanding north German organ was the subject of civic pride and often competition between neighbouring towns. In the Calvinist church, organ music was not permitted in the liturgy, but Sweelinck’s daily recitals in Amsterdam must have contributed to his pre-eminence as a teacher, whose influence can be traced down to J. S. Bach.
3 B. Gustafson, ‘France’, in A. Silbiger (ed.), Keyboard Music before 1700, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 97. 4 K. J. Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, rev. edn, University of Rochester Press, 2007. 5 C. Stembridge, Frescobaldi; Organ and Keyboard Works, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2009, vol. 1, pt. I, Introduction, p. vii.
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Besides organists, important churches also maintained instrumental ensembles, such as that at St Mark’s, Venice, for which Giovanni Gabrieli (1557–1612) included fourteen canzonas and two sonatas in his Symphoniae sacrae (1597). Furthermore, in the first half of the seventeenth century, instructions for playing instrumental toccatas, ricercars, capriccios and canzonas in church services are found in various Italian publications. Under the influence of the secondo prattica, these contrapuntal genres were gradually supplemented by the new solo sonata, which encouraged greater instrumental virtuosity, moving the affections of the listeners as much as Caccini had expressed in the preface to his vocal collection, Le nuove musiche (1602). In the Protestant north, instrumental ensembles were also maintained. At St Mary’s, Lübeck, there were fourteen instrumentalists regularly employed in Buxtehude’s time: four brass players to play chorales from the church tower, and ten regularly employed to play from the organ and choir loft, including seven municipal musicians.6 It was at the royal courts that instrumentalists could hope to find regular employment. In the second half of the century, Louis XIV’s musique de la chambre contained lutenists, guitar players, viol players, harpsichordists and the Vingtquatre violons du roi. His musique de l’écurie consisted of trumpets, violins, oboes, saqueboutes and cornets, musettes, fifes, percussion, serpents, cromhornes and trompettes marines. Fee payments indicate that for special events (ballets, divertissements, special services) there was flexibility between these institutions.7 In England, Queen Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I all maintained retinues of professional musicians, and under royal patronage the greatest names of the age – William Byrd (1540–1623), Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656), Thomas Morley (1557–1603), Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625), John Coprario (c. 1575–1626) and Alfonso Ferrabosco (1578–1628) – were able to bring the art of consort music (both homogeneous ensembles and ‘broken’ consorts of bowed, wind, plucked and keyboard instruments) from its beginnings modelled on vocal polyphony to a mature idiomatic refinement. James I employed five lutenists and twelve string players, which may have been supplemented by five extra violinists to make a total of seventeen.8 William Lawes (1602–45) was brought up under the tutelage of Coprario, music master to the Earl of Hertford, and where he may well have played in a consort with the future Charles I. Royal patronage of music also brought an international aspect to performance and composition. Charles II’s exile at the court of Louis XIV was an important factor in changing the character of English Restoration instrumental music. The king’s band of twenty-four
6 Snyder, Buxtehude, pp. 93–5. 7 M. Benoit, Musiques de Cour, Paris, A. & J. Picard, 1971. 8 P. Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 179.
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violins, modelled on Louis XIV’s Vingt-quatre violons du roi, played at Charles’s coronation in 1661, and the ‘new’ French dances and French performance practices offered a change of style from the pavans, galliards, fantasias and polyphony of earlier times. James II’s wife, Mary of Modena, employed Italian musicians in England under the direction of Innocenzo Fede, and in 1689 many of them travelled to the château of St Germain-en-Laye where the court was re-established during James II’s exile. This no doubt led to further international exchanges of musical styles, both in composition and performance. There are also countless records of English domestic music-making by writers such as Pepys, Evelyn, Thomas Mace, Roger North and Hawkins, as well as reports of monarchs throughout Europe enjoying music as escapism and recreation. Charles I’s move to Oxford in 1642 precipitated consort music played by both royal and university musicians, and after the royal defeat in 1646 public music meetings became part of Oxford’s social scene. Similar meetings also evolved in London, leading to commercial concerts with professional performers and a fee-paying audience being set up in 1672 by John Banister, establishing a precedent for similar ventures in other towns. At a time when performers were most often composers as well, we become more aware of significant transmissions of styles through the journeys of particular musicians. The Catholic/Protestant issue was responsible for English composers such as Peter Philips (1560/1–1628) and John Bull (1562–1625) emigrating to Europe, facilitating aspects of the English virginal style being adopted by composers such as Sweelinck. In the 1660s Pelham Humphrey’s travels to Italy and France, as well as the French Robert Cambert’s and the German Thomas Baltzar’s immigration to England, had considerable influence over English musical styles. Johann Jacob Froberger (c. 1616–67), court organist to Emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna and a pupil of Frescobaldi, was especially influential. His travels to Dresden, London, Paris, Brussels, Utrecht and Regensburg had significance for the dissemination of stylus phantasticus styles in both composition (toccatas, ricercars, capriccios) and performance.9 Froberger was himself influenced by French composers such as Louis Couperin (c. 1626–61), especially the latter’s harpsichord suites and tombeaux. However, the difference between notated score and actual performance practice can only be imagined if we are to believe Princess Sybilla of Württemberg, who, in refusing a request from Constantijn Huygens for Froberger’s manuscripts, claimed that Froberger’s pieces were impossible to perform properly without the composer’s own guidance.
9 See R. Rasch, ‘Johann Jacob Froberger’s travels 1649–1653’, in C. Hogwood (ed.), The Keyboard in Baroque Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 19–35.
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In the latter half of the century we also see special concerts dedicated to ‘foreign’ music. Performances of Italian music in Paris were organised by Abbé Matthieu at St André-des-Arts, when the sonatas da chiesa and da camera by Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) were first heard, after which Italian sonatas (and Italianate sonatas by French composers) became very popular. Matthieu’s concerts also provided one route whereby Italian instrumental styles were incorporated into native French genres, such as F. Couperin’s Pièces d’orgue. Parisian orchestral styles (French overtures and dances) were transmitted to German musicians via Georg Muffat (1653–1704) in the introductions to his Florilegium Primum (1695), Florilegium Secundum (1698) and Ausserlesene Instrumental-Music (1701). Although Muffat spent six years in Paris (1663–9), this was only between the ages of ten and sixteen, and it is not proven that he studied with Lully himself. Therefore a certain caution is advised when considering Muffat as an authority on Lullian performance practice. With a subject so particular in repertoires, instruments, chronology and geography, a full account of performance practices is beyond the confines of this chapter. I therefore propose to discuss certain topics applicable to all instruments: tempo and proportion, rhythmic interpretation, accidentals, ornamentation, pitch and temperament. Any particular examples should, of course, be regarded as being representative of a wide variety of instrumental repertoires, although, as other authors have also warned, one must be cautious in accepting the universal application of performance-practice issues that, at times, may have been quite particular in terms of region, repertoire, or even institutional preference.
Tempo In the seventeenth century, tempo could be decided by three considerations: time signatures, genre considerations and tempo markings such as Adagio, Légèrement etc. As the century witnessed such fundamental changes in notation, metrical organisation and musical style, performers today need to engage with these important issues when considering particular pieces. Although it has been argued that the tempo proportion system was breaking down by the early 1600s,10 for collections such as Monteverdi’s Mass and Vespers (1610) proportional time signatures and mensural rhythmic notation based on the tactus was 10 For discussion of issues concerning proportion and tempos, see R. Bowers, ‘Some reflections upon notation and proportion in Monteverdi’s Mass and Vespers of 1610’, Music & Letters, 73 (1992), 347–98; J. Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance, Oxford University Press, 1999; P. Brainard, ‘Proportional notation in the music of Schütz and his contemporaries’, Current Musicology, 1 (1992), 21–46; R. Deford, ‘Tempo relationships between duple and triple time in the sixteenth century’, Early Music History, 14 (1995), 1–52.
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still in operation.11 The system was complex, and various conventions were used to obviate the challenges of a notational system yet to develop numerical time signatures and metrical bar-lines. Among these conventions were the rule similis ante similem perfecta est (‘a note followed by its like is perfect’), ‘blackening’ and the punctus divisionis (a dot of division to clarify the mensural grouping of notes). : Rests were governed by different conventions. In virginal music, the c3 of the galliards in Parthenia (1612/13) signified a proportional relationship with the ¢ of the preceding pavans, three minims of the galliard taking as much time as two minims of the pavan. Frescobaldi’s Il primo libro dei capricci (1624) contains a wide variety of different note values and proportional time signatures (including 4/6 to cancel 6/4) with use of ‘black’ notation as well as triplets, but it may be significant that in his prefaces Frescobaldi only described tempo relationships in vague or relative terms, and with none of the precision for which the proportional system was developed (assuming that mensural proportions actually translated into performance practice).12 Awareness of such topics is essential for defining tempo relationships within multi-sectional pieces. The sine qua non is, of course, accurate scholarly editions with original note values and time signatures that are free from the well-intentioned but often erroneous modern interpretations of early seventeenth-century collections. By 1700, numerical time signatures and metrically consistent bar-lines had largely superseded the tactus-based system, which was hardly appropriate for the new aesthetic priorities. Among the reasons for change during the century must have been the seconda prattica, with its aims to reproduce ancient Greek vocal declamation, the instrumental stylus phantasticus based on improvisation, the emergence of the basso continuo and keyboard-directed ensembles, and the increasing use of Italian tempo words. However, the two systems overlapped to a considerable extent. The preface to Frescobaldi’s Toccate (1615) clearly illustrates the new flexible approach to tempo. These ‘modern’ pieces were based on organised rhetorical improvisation. As Frescobaldi stated, they were not governed by a regular beat, but like the modern madrigal, could be sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes even held up ‘in the air’, all according to the affetti of the particular passage.13 Character (rather than tempo) markings such as ‘Adasio’ [‘at ease’] were used to highlight expressive dissonances, for example in the opening toccata of Fiori musicali (1635). This style became known as the stylus phantasticus, understood
11 See J. P. Wainwright, ‘Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610)’, Chapter 19 in this volume. 12 C. Stembridge, ‘Interpreting Frescobaldi. The notation in the printed sources of Frescobaldi’s keyboard music and its implications for the performer (I and II)’, The Organ Yearbook, 34 (2005), 33–60, and 35 (2006), 95–133. 13 See Stembridge, ‘Interpreting Frescobaldi’, for translations of Frescobaldi’s prefaces.
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Ex. 18.1. Froberger, Toccata 3, bars 5–7
by Mattheson in 1726 as music that is ‘now swift, now hesitating, now in one voice, now in many voices, now for a while behind the beat, without measure of sound, but not without the intent to please, to overtake and to astonish’.14 It was as much a feature of Italian violin/cornett sonatas, sonatas by Schmelzer and Biber, as well as keyboard toccatas and preludes by Froberger, Weckmann and Buxtehude. One notational feature, often misunderstood today, concerns the dot in this representative passage from Froberger’s Toccata No. 3 (1649) (see Ex. 18.1). The dots in bars 5, 6 and 7 (RH) prolong the value of the semiquaver whilst not necessarily shortening succeeding notes. Rather than implying ‘modern’ dotted rhythms, the dots in this instance function more like the Renaissance dot of division (punctus divisionis), with the trill in bar 6 (needing time) adding weight to this hypothesis. Notation had constraints and prints could not necessarily reflect performance practice. Time-values had to add up to the appropriate metrical unit, especially in publications, whereas rhetorical improvisation implied by the style demands freedom in performance. An alternative solution to metrical notation was the French prélude non mesuré, notated in its purest form by Louis Couperin. Here the ‘white’ notation has no metrical significance whatsoever, and the performer has to assess the tempo, create the rhythm, and understand the harmonic and metrical significance of each note. Such metrical freedom has enormous advantages. Unmeasured notation is informative over arpeggiatiation of chords, repetitions in ornaments, degrees of over-legato through tenues (not ties or slurs), and the avoidance of rhythmic straightjacketing dictated by the binary or ternary ratios of modern notation.15 Conversely, metrical notation can more easily
14 Snyder, Buxtehude, p. 253. 15 For advice on performance of préludes non mesurés, see D. Moroney, ‘The performance of unmeasured harpsichord preludes’, Early Music, 4 (1976), 143–51; see also Moroney’s introduction to Louis Couperin,
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Ex. 18.2. Froberger, Toccata 1, bars 1–3
Ex. 18.3. Louis Couperin, opening of Prélude a l’imitation de Mr. Froberger
show harmonic rhythm, basic pulse, quicker and slower note values and overall structure. For toccatas and tombeaux, both have their advantages and disadvantages in equal proportion. A comparison between the beginnings of Froberger’s Toccata No. 1 (1649) (see Ex. 18.2) and Louis Couperin’s Prélude a l’imitation de Mr. Froberger (Ex. 18.3) demonstrates the different notational features of what is identical music. The prélude non mesuré represents an example of notational experiments made in the seventeenth century. Another was ‘void notation’ (or beamed minims) used by Charpentier among others, the significance and meaning of which is still far from being understood.16 Some resonance with the proportional system may still have been intended in north German vocal and instrumental works. This is particularly relevant when melodically related fugue subjects are used within the same piece, successively in duple then triple or compound metres in the tradition of the variation canzona. For example, Buxtehude’s organ Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 149) is based on a recurring theme first as an ostinato, the notes of which are then rearranged to supply different subjects with different time signatures (see Ex. 18.4). Pièces de clavecin, ed. D. Moroney, Monaco, L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1985, pp. 11–16; C. Tilney, The Art of the Unmeasured Prelude for Harpsichord: France 1660–1720, London, Schott, 1991; R. W. Troeger, ‘The French unmeasured harpsichord prelude: notation and performance’, Early Keyboard Journal, 10 (1992), 89–119. 16 G. Sadler, ‘Charpentier’s void notation: the Italian background and its implications’, in S. Thompson (ed.), New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2010, pp. 31–61.
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Ex. 18.4. Buxtehude, Praeludium in G minor (ostinato theme, fugue subjects and time signatures)
It is a matter of debate when proportional tempo relationships died out, the final Fugue a5 from J. S. Bach’s Clavierübung III (1739) being an even later example.
Genre More reliable than notation and time signature as an indicator of tempo was the genre of the music, though note values themselves, derived from the mensural system, still had influence. In keeping with their stile antico status, ricercars were traditionally notated with the main beat as a minim, whereas canzonas were notated with crotchet pulses. Contemporary performers would have grown up with inherent ideas of music actually to dance to, from which the instrumental pavans, galliards, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, gigues, minuets, bourrées, loures, passepieds and so on, developed. However, not only did dances change but different national styles came into play. Italian correnti and gighe had completely different tempos from French courantes and gigues, and Mattheson was able, retrospectively, to distinguish between Italian and French gavottes.17 Plausibly, each locality had their own individual slant on tempos and rhythmic mouvement (e.g. Louis Couperin’s Menuet de Poitou). Furthermore, each dance had its own history and became transformed in both style and performance during its popular life.18 An interesting question is to what extent the actual dance as practised had a bearing on the tempos of particular titled dance pieces. A strict 3:2 tempo relationship between galliards and pavans sometimes produces a tempo at which the galliard is too slow to 17 J. Mattheson, Der volkommene Capellmeister, Hamburg, Herold, 1739, p. 225; facsimile edn, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1969; trans. E. C. Harriss as Johann Mattheson’s ‘Der volkommene Capellmeister’, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1981. 18 See articles on each dance and other genres in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001. More extended studies on particular dances and music go into greater depth, for example, I. Payne, The Almain in Britain c. 1549–c.1675, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003.
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century
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dance. In any case, many pavans and galliards were memorial pieces to important persons, for instance, Tomkins’s pavan and galliard for Earl Strafford. Most likely, some time after a particular dance had become popular the best composers based their pieces on an a priori concept of that dance, adopting the metre certainly but imbuing the music with such complexity and artifice that relations with the actual dance became more and more distant, ultimately becoming pure ‘art music’. Tempos also changed with time and country. For example in 1676, Thomas Mace described sarabandes as ‘of the shortest tripletime, but . . . more toyish, and light, than corantoes’, a description that suits Matthew Locke’s sarabandes.19 In France, d’Anglebert’s sarabandes (1689) were much slower, and between these extremes the question of tempo in the sarabands by Henry Purcell (1659–95) is a matter of debate, chronology and national influence being pertinent issues.
Rhythmic interpretation: notes inégales and overdotting An important performance practice in French Baroque music is the rhythmic convention of notes inégales, whereby, under certain conditions, particular note values that are subdivisions of the beat are performed unequally, even if these same note values are notated equally. More than forty writers between 1665 and 1775, mostly French, described the practice with considerable consistency, and as theory has always followed practice it is necessary to consult writers far into the eighteenth century for as full a picture as possible of this enigmatic topic.20 The earliest was Loys Bourgeois, who in 1550 outlined the essentials in relation to vocal practices.21 Sources other than French, such as Tomás de Santa Maria (1565), Bovicelli (1594), Ceroni (1613), Frescobaldi (1615) and Puliaschi (1618) described Italianate rhythmic conventions, but thereafter there are no Italian sources dealing with the matter until the beginning of the nineteenth century.22 Bourgeois established six general principles: notes eligible for inégalité depended on time signature; the reason for inégalité was to achieve more grace in performance; inégalité was applicable in conjunct motion; long-short (LS) inégalité was characteristic; consonances were often stressed by longer duration, whilst dissonances (i.e. unaccented passing notes) were consequently 19 T. Mace, Musick’s Monument, London, 1676, p. 129. 20 A summary of notes inégales and overdotting can be found in S. E. Hefling, Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music, New York, Schirmer Books, 1993. 21 L. Bourgeois, Le droit chemin de musique, Geneva, 1550; facsimile edn, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1954. 22 T. de Santa Maria, Libro llamado art de tañer fantasia, Valladolid, 1565. G. B. Bovicelli, Regole, passaggi di musica, Venice, 1594. P. Ceroni, El melopeo y maestro, Naples, 1613. G. Frescobaldi, ‘Avvertimenti’, Toccate e partite, Rome, Borboni, 1615. D. Puliaschi, Musiche varie a una voce, Rome, 1618.
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shorter. Over a century later in 1665, Nivers maintained similar principles, although in his second organ book (1667) he went further by notating LS inégalité in seven pieces (all solo melodic lines with accompaniment) with dotted quaver/quaver rhythms (ratio 3:2).23 Details of relations between note values and time signatures were published in 1965, and reproduced with minor corrections in 1993.24 From this, three general principles have been proposed: 1. Inégalité applied to note values of one quarter of the metrical pulse in simple time: (a) in 2 and ¢ time (two beats) when quavers were eligible; (b) in 2/4, ¢ (four beats) and 3/4, when semiquavers were eligible. 2. Inégalité applied to note values of one half of the metrical pulse in simple time: (a) in 3/2 time, when crotchets were eligible; (b) in 3 and 3/4, when quavers were eligible. 3. Inégalité applied to semiquavers in time signatures of 3/8, 4/8, 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8. Bourgeois’s mention of ‘meilleure grace’ as the reason for inégalité is consistent with later advice by Georg Muffat (1695) and Saint-Lambert (1702),25 although Gigault and Nivers stressed liveliness rather than elegance. Saint-Lambert specified that the degree of inégalité depended on taste. Bourgeois and Nivers advocated mild inégalité, supported by Bacilly in 1668,26 but in 1696 Étienne Loulié described three manners of performance:27 1. Equal notes (‘détachez les notes’), used in disjunct motion. 2. Mild long-short inégalité (‘lourer’), used in conjunct motion. 3. Very long-short inégalité (‘piquer’ or ‘pointer’). Loulié’s association of inégalité with conjunct motion, and égalité with disjunct, is supported by Montéclair, F. Couperin, Hotteterre, Démotz and Vague, among others. A combination of conjunct and disjunct motion can frequently be seen in harpsichord pieces where a conjunct melodic line (inégal) in the RH 23 G.-G. Nivers, Livre d’orgue, Paris, 1665; facsimile edn, Courlay, Fuzeau, 1987. G.-G. Nivers, 2. Livre d’orgue, Paris, 1667; facsimile edn, Courlay, Fuzeau, 1992. 24 F. Neumann, ‘The French inégales, Quantz and Bach’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18 (1965), 322–3; Hefling, Rhythmic Alteration, pp. 8–9. 25 G. Muffat, Florilegium primum, Augsburg, 1695, trans. and ed. D. K. Wilson as Georg Muffat on Performance Practice, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001. M. de Saint-Lambert, Les principes du clavecin, Paris, 1702, trans. and ed. R. Harris-Warrick as Principles of the Harpsichord by Monsieur de SaintLambert, Cambridge University Press, 1984. 26 B. de Bacilly, Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter, Paris, 1668; trans. and ed. A. B. Caswell as A Commentary upon the Art of Proper Singing, Brooklyn, NY, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968. 27 E. Loulié, Éléments ou principes de musique, Paris, 1696, pp. 34–35; facsimile edn, Geneva, Minkoff, 1977; 2nd edn, Amsterdam, Roger, 1698; trans. and ed. A. Cohen as Elements or Principles of Music, Brooklyn, NY, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1965.
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century
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is accompanied by a disjunct broken, arpeggiated texture (style brisé) in the LH (played égal). This probably accounts for received information that inégalité applied to melodies rather than accompaniments, and although this may be true in certain contexts, no known French author stated this distinction explicitly. Regarding repeated notes, J. J. Quantz stated that they should be executed equally,28 justified by the precise rhythms (both dotted and undotted) of repeated notes printed in the organ books of Nivers, Lebègue, Raison and de Grigny. The same exemption from inégalité applies, according to Lacassagne in 1766,29 to syncopations. In linking inégalité to consonance and dissonance, Bourgeois reflected standard Renaissance practice: consonance = long, dissonance = short, although Santa Maria (1565) suggested the opposite for greater eloquence, that is, hurrying over the first consonant note (on the beat) and dwelling on the second dissonant note (off the beat). It is reasonable to assume that the Short-Long (SL) ‘Lombard’ rhythm, with unprepared dissonances on the beat, became part of the new musical language in early seventeenth-century Italy, seen in such madrigals as Monteverdi’s Troppo ben può questo tiranno Amore (1605), and in Laetatus sum from Monteverdi’s Vespers. In France, Loulié mentioned a fourth manner of inégalité: that of playing the first note shorter than the second, producing a Lombard rhythm in a descending, mostly conjunct context.30 F. Couperin’s ‘Coulés’ from the ornament table in his first book of Pièces de clavecin (1713) described a similar manner and context.31 Neumann stated that notes inégales made sense only to notes that are written equal but rendered unequal. However, countless examples of notated inégalité exist, for which there are two reasons: (a) to make explicit the indication of inégalité; (b) to prescribe sharper dotting than ‘normal’ inégalité. As late as 1782 Marcou reported on the lack of agreement between these two principles that were still in operation,32 and a century earlier notation itself was still the subject of experiment. Furthermore, both Muffat and Montéclair discuss subtle inégalité, illustrating their arguments by writing dotted rhythms in their musical examples.33 In 1713, the first 28 J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, p. 106; facsimile edn, Leipzig, VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1983; trans. and ed. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber & Faber, 1976. 29 L’Abbé J. Lacassagne, Traité général des éléments du chant, Paris, 1766, p. 51, facsimile edn, New York, Broude, 1967. 30 Loulié, Éléments, p. 62; 1698 edn, pp. 71–2; Cohen edn, p. 62. 31 Reprinted in F. Couperin, Pièces de clavecin: premier livre, ed. K. Gilbert, Paris, Heugel, 1972. 32 P. Marcou, Élémens théorique et pratique de musique, London and Paris, 1782, p. 35. 33 Muffat, Florilegium secundum, ed. Wilson, p. 44. M. P. de Montéclair, Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre la musique, Paris, 1709, p. 15.
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three Allemandes in F. Couperin’s first book of Pièces de clavecin (1713) may well have been a lesson in inégalité: the first is dotted throughout; the second is undotted but with the heading Sans lenteur; et les doubles croches un tant-soitpeu pointées (‘ever-so-slightly dotted’); and the third contains no dotted rhythms or performance instructions at all – the lesson on inégalité is assumed to have been understood. National considerations also played a part. F. Couperin stated that ‘the Italians . . . write their music in the true values in which they have conceived it . . . [whereas] we dot several consecutive quavers in conjunct motion, and yet we write them equal’,34 and J.-J. Rousseau stated ‘In Italian music all the quavers are always equal, unless they are marked pointée’,35 like Couperin’s Courante à l’italienne, marked pointé-coulé. In 1736, Montéclair’s Gavotte à l’italienne and Courante à l’italienne were both marked croches égales, supporting the distinction between French and Italian performance styles.36 In 1709 Montéclair stated that ‘it is very difficult to give general principles concerning égalité or inégalité of notes, because it is the style of the pieces one is singing that decides it’,37 and in 1748 Mondonville stated that ‘it is necessary to distinguish all the phrases that are in the French taste, from those which require Italian taste’.38 In the late seventeenth century, the influence of Italian music, especially that of Corelli, was extremely significant in Paris. Couperin’s own mission to unite the French and the Italian styles is well known, but with Corelli’s music circulating in Paris from the 1680s, there are marked instances of Italian genres in Couperin’s early trio sonatas and organ masses (1690).39 Examples of French composers writing in Italian styles are numerous, and whereas instructions about inégalité were probably general principles abstracted from French music (aimed at amateurs and children, as stated by Loulié), they were hardly prescriptive for composers such as Couperin, and as Montéclair stated, style analysis was probably the most important factor. Inégalité could vary in manner from extremely dotted rhythms, to mild inequality, to sharp Lombard rhythms, depending on style. Sensitive conjunct melodies can be treated to subtle and varied inequality, whilst for French overtures sharply dotted rhythms may well be appropriate.
34 F. Couperin, L’art de toucher le clavecin, Paris, 1717, pp. 39–40; facsimile edn, New York, Broude, 1969. 35 J.-J. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, Paris and Amsterdam, 1768, pp. 380–1. 36 M. P. de Montéclair, Principes de musique, Paris, Boivin, 1736, pp. 50 and 53; facsimile edn, Geneva, Minkoff, 1972. 37 Montéclair, Nouvelle méthode, p. 15. 38 J.-J. C. de Mondonville, Pièces de clavecin avec voix ou violon, Paris, 1748, Preface. 39 It is debatable whether Couperin actually succeeded in fusing Italian with French styles. More often than not it was a juxtaposition rather than a fusion, which makes the task of style and genre analysis more clear-cut and relevant to performance.
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century
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French influence in England French influence in high culture and language pervaded most parts of Europe during the reign of Louis XIV, and music was no exception. A comparison of parallel sources of pieces in A Choice Collection of Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinet Composed by the late Mr. Henry Purcell (1696) reveals considerable French influence, including inégalité.40 The organisation of these suites resembles that of Froberger with the addition of an Italian or a French prelude. Preludes to Suites Nos. 4, 6 and 8 may be English equivalents of the French prélude non mesuré, their continuous semiquaver movement alternating style brisé harmonies with melodic figurae in a seemingly irregular harmonic rhythm. With the simple adjustment of replacing Purcell’s ‘black’ semiquavers with the French genre’s ‘white’ semibreves, both the stylistic origins of Purcell’s preludes and the improvisational nature implied in performance becomes clear. The two versions of the Almand from Suite No. 3 in G (Oxford, Christ Church MS 1177 and the printed edition), contain widely differing rhythmic variants: MS 1177 is notated in mostly even semiquavers with occasional dotted semiquavers in disjunct motion. The printed version contains much more dotted notation, mostly LS but also SL, both manières in conjunct as well as disjunct contexts. These variants are ‘of a kind more likely to stem from the composer himself than from a copyist’,41 but whatever the reasons these versions suggest not only that notes inégales were a feature of English performance style, but also that the style needed explicit notation for an English amateur public unfamiliar with French practice. The emphasis on genre and style has implications for the French overture and the question of overdotting. During the mid-twentieth century, this question became a cause célèbre.42 In the primary sources, the quantity of information on notes inégales contrasts sharply with that on overdotting, of which the first source is Quantz’s Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752). This led Neumann in 1965 to conclude that ‘for the period from Lully to Rameau, the so-called French style is essentially a legend, and its first formulation by Dolmetsch is an invention which has been wrongly taken as a discovery’.43 However, if inégalité was a function of genres such as French overtures, allemandes, courants and so on, there would have been no need for separate writings on overdotting. All that would change is the manner of
40 H. Purcell, Eight Suites, ed. H. Ferguson, London, Stainer & Bell, 1964. 41 Ibid., p. 24. 42 Contradictory views have been expressed in F. Neumann, ‘The dotted note and the so-called French style’, trans. R. Harris and E. Shay, Early Music, 5 (1977), 310–24; and T. Dart, The Interpretation of Music, London, Hutchinson University Library, 4th edn, 1967, pp. 80–2. 43 Neumann, ‘The dotted note’, 323.
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performance. For lyrical récits and sensitive allemandes subtle inégalité may well be appropriate, whereas majestic French overtures could well have been conceived with strongly dotted rhythms in mind. Four considerations need to be borne in mind: (a) The degree of dotting in notation ultimately depends on tempo, although the principal and the practice remain the same.44 The faster the tempo the less dotted the notation becomes. (b) During the late seventeenth century, musical notation was still in a state of development. Hence the double dots notated by Chambonnières, Louis Couperin and André Raison may not have been used by Lully, but nevertheless may well have been intended in performance. (c) Rather than assuming one fixed manner of performing French overtures, performance styles might have varied with chronology and country. (d) Whilst the scribe and the engraver are concerned with relations between the long note and the succeeding short note in dotted rhythms, the performer’s concern is more directed towards the relation between the short note and the succeeding long note on the strong beat (often across the bar-line). Tempo, and in particular the precise rhythmic placing of the rest on the weak beat, therefore becomes the most important aspect in the performer’s consciousness. The degree of overdotting in French overtures must always have been ultimately dependent on tempo and character, which must have varied according to circumstance, so that precise prescriptive rules would have been impossible. Furthermore, it may have been a result of intense and too narrowly focused twentieth-century musicology that has led to notes inégales and overdotting being regarded as separate topics. A genre-specific approach to inégalité could well have been the conceptual principle for rhythmic interpretation in the seventeenth century.
Accidentals Another revolutionary change during the century was that the modal and hexachord systems were gradually supplanted by the diatonic key system. This had important implications for accidentals. In north German organ tablature, the letters c, d, e, f, g, a, b, h, indicating the notes, were modified with small loops to indicate sharps (not flats) to raise particular notes by a semitone. Lute tablatures were fret-specific, so that modifications were unnecessary. The 44 See J. O’Donnell, ‘The French style and the overtures of Bach’, Early Music, 7 (1979), 190–6 and 336–45.
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century
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situation with staff notation was more complicated. The modern use of symbols for sharps, flats and naturals did not come into general use until the eighteenth century. In the century before, flats were used to cancel sharpened notes, and sharps were used to cancel flattened notes. This can be seen in the ‘key’ signatures in Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, notated for violin in scordatura. In Sonata No. 3 the signature has F sharp and G sharp at the top of the treble clef (G2) stave, and F flat and G flat an octave below, indicating F naturals and G naturals in the lower octave throughout the piece. Because of the late establishment of consistent metrical bar-lines, the modern use of accidentals, whereby each accidental is effective for the entire bar, was not generally applicable until the eighteenth century. For most of the seventeenth century, accidentals applied only to the notes themselves and their immediate repetitions. This system was open to considerable ambiguity, and performers today have to make judgements based on musical style (often having to decide between ‘modal’ and ‘tonal’ solutions to alternative but equally plausible options), as well as deconstructing the well-intentioned decisions of modern editors. Another area of confusion regarding accidentals, only seldom acknowledged, is the case of accidentals that apply retrospectively. This most often occurs in decorated resolutions of suspensions at cadences when only the final third of the chord has a sharp attached. Robert Donington has drawn attention to Italian and English examples including pieces by Palestrina, Peri, Viadana, Dowland, Monteverdi and Carissimi,45 and Saint-Lambert tells us that when the auxiliary notes in tremblements are altered to conform with the key or mode of the piece, the required accidentals should be borrowed from the preceding or even the succeeding altered notes (i.e. retrospectively), even across bar-lines.46 It is also possible that some of the final cadences in Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’orgue (1699), where sharps are only printed next to the major third in final chords, are subject to this notational convention of accidentals applying retrospectively to previous notes in the cadence. Other examples of retroactive accidentals in different musical contexts can also be found.47
Ornamentation For many, ornamentation is the first study undertaken in performance practice, initially rewarding because answers to basic questions can seemingly be answered in positivist terms by reference to published tables. However, as 45 R. Donington, A Performer’s Guide to Baroque Music, London, Faber & Faber, 1975, pp. 125–32. 46 Saint-Lambert, Principes, p. 43; Harris-Warrick edition, p. 79. 47 For a fuller account, see Donington, A Performer’s Guide to Baroque Music, pp. 125–32.
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ornament tables are abstractions and simplifications by both theorists and composers, it can be misleading to interpret them too literally without reference to the way ornaments are often written out in music. Ornaments are decorations of musical lines, and the way one performer improvises an ornament to sound spontaneous will be (and should be) a unique and personal event, and to an extent independent of the necessarily rigid metrical way in which realisations of ornaments are printed in the original tables. (How could any composer or theorist notate precisely a trill that accelerates then decelerates, if all note values have to add up metrically?) The topic can be divided into two: small-scale ornamental figures and large-scale ‘paraphrase’ embellishments, and is best approached on a national basis.
Small-scale ornaments Italy The highly decorated compositions of Italian seventeenth-century music gave rise to a plethora of ornament tables and instructions, relevant to a wide range of instrumentalists and singers (see Table 18.1). Table 18.1 Italian publications containing ornament tables
Date
Author
Title
1584 1585 1592
Girolamo dalla Casa Orazio Scaletta Riccardo Rognoni
1592 1593 1594 1600
Lodovico Zacconi Girolamo Diruta Giovanni Battista Bovicelli Emilio de’ Cavalieri
1601 1602 1608 1615
Adriano Banchieri Giulio Caccini Ottavio Durante Girolamo Frescobaldi
1619 1622 1627 1634
Michael Praetorius Lodovico Zacconi Girolamo Frescobaldi Michelangelo Rossi
Il vero modo di diminuir, libri I et II Scala di musica Passagi per potersi essercitare nel diminuire Prattica di musica Il transilvano Regole, passagi di musica, madrigali e motetti passeggiati Rappresentatione de Anima, et di Corpo (preface) Cartella, overo Regole utilissime Le nuove musiche Arie devote Toccate d’intavolature di cembalo et organo . . . libro primo Syntagma musicum Prattica di musica seconda parte Il secondo libro di toccate Toccata e correnti per organi, o cimbalo
Place of publication Venice Venice Venice Venice Venice Venice Rome Venice Florence Rome Rome Wolfenbüttel Venice Rome Rome
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century
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It is important to note that in all cases of particular ornaments, contrary performance instructions can be found or argued.48 Thus from Diruta, Cavalieri, Praetorius and Frescobaldi, trills (both the tremolo and groppo types) begin on the main note and on the beat, although there are examples in Cavazzoni, dalla Casa, Diruta and Frescobaldi where they begin on the upper auxiliary, and some by Diruta (quoting Merulo) precede the beat. Printing considerations are also important. The movable type used in open scores and part-books was not sufficiently flexible for elaborate ornaments, so Frescobaldi’s ricercari and capricci do not normally contain ornamental figures or symbols. This does not imply an unornamented performance; all evidence points to the contrary, as movements from Fiori musicali contained in the Turin organ tablature (c. 1637–40) demonstrate.49 Written-out ornaments are found in engraved scores (intavolature) such as Frescobaldi’s Toccate, although the notated trills contain fewer repetitions than intended. Certain notated figures are shorthand for more elaborate ornaments, given the grammatical errors that would occur if certain figures were to be played literally.50 Comparisons between printed sources and contemporaneous manuscripts (e.g. Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali, 1635, with the Turin organ tablature) can provide examples of musical contexts where added ornamentation can be fully justified.
England Although late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English music was highly embellished, instructions on how to play ornaments are conspicuously absent. Early in the century, the only sources are for lute: Thomas Robinson’s The Schoole of Musick (1603) and the lute book belonging to Margaret Board (c. 1620–30).51 For the rich repertoire of English virginal music there are no sources before Edward Bevin’s Graces in Play of uncertain date (c. 1630–80) and questionable relevance.52 Later sources include those listed in Table 18.2. Due to the absence of English ornament tables in the early seventeenth century, the debate over the precise meaning of the virginalists’ single and double-stroke ornament signs has not revealed any unified and precise
48 A brief summary of early seventeenth-century Italian ornamentation can be found in C. Johnson, prefatory essays to Girolamo Frescobaldi, Fiori Musicali, Colfax, NC, Wayne Leupold, 2008, pp. 36–42. 49 Biblioteca nazionale universitaria, Torino, Giordano 1, 3, 6, and Foà 8. 50 Stembridge, ‘Interpreting Frescobaldi’, 48–9. 51 See D. Poulton, ‘Graces of play in renaissance lute music’, Early Music, 3 (1975), 107–14. 52 Discussed and reproduced in P. le Huray, ‘English keyboard fingering in the 16th and early 17th centuries’, in I. Bent (ed.), Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music, London, Stainer & Bell, 1981, pp. 227–57.
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Table 18.2 English ornament instruction manuals of the second half of the seventeenth century Date
Author
Title
1654 1659 1659, rev. 1665 1663 1673 1676 1695 1697 1699
John Playford Anon. Christopher Simpson John Playford Matthew Locke Thomas Mace Anon. Henry Purcell Henry Purcell
A Breefe Introduction to the Skill of Musick Miss Mary Burwell’s Instruction Book for the Lute (MS) The Division-violist Musick’s Hand-maide Melothesia Musick’s Monument The Compleat Flute-Master ‘Rules for Graces’, The Harpsichord Master A Choice Collection of Lessons for the Harpsicord or Spinnet, 3rd edn
solutions.53 Furthermore, the musical sources are inconsistent: concerning a particular note one source may have a double stroke, another may have a single stroke, and another may have nothing at all. Even in the rare cases where one source has a written-out ornament and another has a double stroke, it would appear that the written-out version is an alternative and not a realisation.54 However, these ornaments must have meant something, and the following interpretations cannot be wrong: the single stroke may mean a slide (from the third below), an appoggiatura (from above or below), a mordent (reiteration with the lower auxiliary), a trill (reiteration with the upper auxiliary), an arpeggio, a ‘filler’ note between the interval of a third, or a correction sign. The double stroke may indicate a division, a trill, a mordent or a turn. In addition, both single and multiple strokes were sometimes used to draw visual attention to important notes and to clarify part-writing. Musical context will often suggest possibilities as well as dictate impossibilities, and the relation between ornaments and contemporary keyboard fingering is useful. Length of notes determines how many reiterations of the trill or mordent are possible, and the rule of thumb (from E. N. Ammerbach’s Orgel oder Instrument Tablatur, 1571) that mordents suit 53 Contributions to this subject include: H. Ferguson, Keyboard Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1975; D. Hunter, ‘The application of grace signs in the sources of English keyboard music, c. 1530–c. 1650’, Ph.D. thesis, National University of Ireland (1989); D. Hunter, ‘The Dublin Virginal Manuscript: new perspectives on virginalist ornamentation’, Early Music, 30 (2002), 68–80; D. Hunter, ‘My Ladye Nevells Booke and the art of gracing’, in A. Brown and R. Turbet (eds.), Byrd Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 174–92. 54 For an example, see le Huray, ‘English keyboard fingering’, p. 251.
Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century
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ascending passages and trills suit descending passages is useful, but should not be taken too dogmatically. There is no certainty either whether trills and mordents begin on the upper or lower auxiliaries, or whether they should begin on the main note. The long written-out cadential trills, abounding in Byrd, almost always begin on the upper note. Therefore, do the ornament symbols indicate a trill (long or short) beginning on the main note, or imply a shorter trill beginning on the main or the upper note? Whatever, it would seem that Frescobaldi’s suggestion concerning a certain rhythmic freedom in the performance of ornaments is musically justifiable. Probably as a result of the increase in music printing, the wider dissemination of music and musical practices, together with the influx of new musical styles from France, Italy and Germany, ornament tables increased in complexity after the Restoration. That is not to assume necessarily that ornaments themselves became more elaborate, but that there was an increased precision in their notation and in instructions for their performance. In post-Restoration England the earliest ornament tables were for fretted and bowed instruments, such as the ‘Table of Graces proper to the Violl or Violin’ in John Playford’s Breefe Introduction and Christopher Simpson’s Division-violist. In keyboard music the virginalists’ single and double stroke ornaments can be found well into the eighteenth century, but the more precise French ornament tables had an increasing influence. French musicians working in England, such as Robert Cambert, as well as the interchange of musicians between London and the exiled court of James II at St Germain-en-Laye, no doubt played their part. Matthew Locke’s ornaments in Melothesia (1673) were unexplained in detail, but the ‘Rules for Graces’, attributed to Henry Purcell in The Harpsichord Master, contain all Locke’s symbols and are generally French in conception, although the accuracy of the printed version of Purcell’s ornament table has been questioned.55
France In the early seventeenth century, symbols for standard decorations existed in Vallet’s Secretum musarum (1615–16) but were hardly codified systematically, and the absence of conventions was noted by Bacilly in 1668 in relation to vocal music, but for instrumental music ornament tables began to be printed with increasing precision. Nivers’s first Livre d’orgue (1665) and Chambonnières’s Pièces de clavecin (1670) contained the first French ornament tables in prefaces
55 See Ferguson, Keyboard Interpretation, pp. 149–52.
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to printed collections, and which heralded the inclusion of systematic tables in most French instrumental publications thereafter. The most fully developed ornament table appeared in Jean-Henry D’Anglebert’s Pièces de clavecin (1689),56 which evidently had important significance for German music through being copied out by J. S. Bach between 1709 and 1714.
Germany Early German seventeenth-century sources for ornaments were almost exclusively centred on vocal and Italian practices, in particular those of Caccini and Monteverdi, but prefaces to instrumental compositions such as Georg Muffat’s Apparatus musico-organisticus (1690), Florilegium secundum (1698), and J. C. F. Fischer’s Les pièces de clavessin (1696) reveal the influence of French practices and symbols. The English virginalist’s double stroke was also used by Sweelinck, and was subsequently transmitted to the north German organ school. As an example, the double strokes in the fugue subject from Buxtehude’s Praeludium in D (BuxWV 139) may well relate, ultimately, to the virginalists’ tradition. By this time (and perhaps before), a trill beginning on the dissonant note would create an accent, and therefore be metrically strong (a ‘good’ note); that on a consonant note would be metrically weak (a ‘bad’ note). In this fugue, the main note is nearly always dissonant, implying a trill beginning on the main note. In other contexts, trills beginning on the dissonant upper note create the required accent. The introduction to the collection of instrumental sonatas Hortus musicus (1688) by the Hamburg organist Johann Reincken posits two signs: x signifying a tremolo using the lower auxiliary, and the double stroke signifying a tremolo using the upper note, although whether these tremolos begin on the main note or the auxiliary is not specified. However, these ornaments are found in writtenout form in the free sections of Buxtehude’s praeludia with both upper-note and main-note trills, demonstrating a wide range of possibilities that are not precisely specified in the tables.57
Large-scale or ‘paraphrase’ ornamentation Some idea of the freedom and creative opportunities inherent in performing seventeenth-century music can be gained from studying the large-scale embellished versions that were written down, suggesting that such paraphrases were
56 J.-H. D’Anglebert, Pièces de clavecin, ed. K. Gilbert, Paris, Heugel, 1975, p. x. 57 G. Webber, Aspects of Performance Practice in Buxtehude’s Organ Works, www.rco.org.uk (accessed 15 June 2008).
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an essential part of performers’ improvisations. These paraphrases occur in dances (prompting decorated repeats), variations on established melodies and ground basses, and occasions when a performer was embellishing another composer’s music. Examples are the elaborately embellished repeated sections of English virginalists’ pavans and galliards, Louis Couperin’s versions of dances by Lebègue, Hardel and Chambonnières, as well as the whole art of improvising divisions set out in Christopher Simpson’s The Division-violist. Such examples must come from the universal concept of improvisation, the notated evidence being the mere fragments of a long historic tradition. Something of the developing prominence of the virtuoso solo performer in the late seventeenth century can be glimpsed from the paraphrases of Corelli’s violin sonatas Op. 5, which, despite being published on 1 January 1700, may well have been written earlier in the 1680s. Their classic status throughout Europe in the eighteenth century is well known, and one of their functions lay in providing a basis for improvisation, particularly the slow movements that were paraphrased by later violinists such as Geminiani, Tartini, Dubourg and several anonymous players.58 Among the many lessons to be gained are not only the actual embellishments made in slow movements, but the implication that they intended their embellishments to be as individual and different as possible.
Pitch The present-day conventions of A440 for ‘modern’ instruments and A415 for ‘Baroque’ instruments is a twentieth-century construct, useful because the two pitches are an equal-tempered semitone apart, thus enabling harpsichords to play at both pitches by the lateral shifting of the keyboard under the jacks (thereby avoiding considerable retuning). Reliable evidence of pitch comes from woodwind instruments and organs, although wood shrinkage in woodwind and changes of wind pressure and gradual damage from tuning organ pipes (leading to progressive shortening and therefore sharpening of pitch) means that margins need to be allowed. Before the late sixteenth century, pitch in church was hardly an issue – voices sang at a pitch appropriate to their ranges – but when instruments began to be played with voices a pitch standard was obviously needed. However, the evidence proves that there were no fixed standard pitches. Different cities/towns had their own pitch standards, and within those localities pitch standards differed according
58 N. Zaslaw, ‘Ornaments for Corelli’s violin sonatas, Op. 5’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 95–115.
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to what instruments were played as well as the musical and social contexts in which they were used.59 In 1640, the Florentine music theorist G. B. Doni equated vocal pitch with latitude: northern people sang at a lower pitch than southern, but the contrary was true for organs where he found that pitches in Naples, Rome, Florence, Lombardy and Venice ascended by semitones. Italian organs prior to 1670 do indeed break down to distinct pitch levels that differ by approximately a semitone: A387 (Rome); A415 (Tuscany); A435 (northern areas) and A464 (the Veneto).60 For instruments and voices, mezzo punto, tutto punto and tuono corista all specified different pitch levels of roughly a semitone apart. The situation was further complicated by the use of high clefs (chiavette) in such pieces as Lauda Jerusalem and the Magnificat a7 in Monteverdi’s Verspers, which implied a downward transposition, normally of a fourth, to bring these pieces into line with normal vocal and instrumental ranges.61 In England, Nathaniel Tomkins’s description of the Worcester Cathedral organ in 1665 informs us that, for church music at least, two different standards were in operation: ‘Organ-pitch’, in which the key C was called C, and ‘Quirepitch’, in which the key C was thought of as F. Thus two pitch standards were obtained by transposition.62 In Germany, Praetorius’s Syntagma musicum gives much information about pitch throughout Europe, referring to Chor Thon (choir-pitch) – which changed in meaning – and Cammer Thon, which he regarded as the pitch at which nearly all their instruments were tuned. The Compenius organ, built for Braunschweig and now at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark, and for which Praetorius acted as adviser, is at A470. Several recorders from 1625–30, probably originating from Leipzig and now in the Musikinstrumentenmuseum in Berlin, have been measured at A465. German organs throughout the seventeenth century remained at high pitch, most likely for reasons of expense (shorter pipes = less raw material). Schnitger organs could range from A467 to A501, so that the special Gedackt stop at about A407 (a minor third lower than the rest of the organ) at St Jacobi, Hamburg (1693) was specifically for use with other instruments, and was called ‘Cammerton’ by Mattheson and Adlung.63 In France, three broad pitch standards were in operation. Organs were built in Ton de chapelle (a whole tone lower than A440), whereas wind instruments at court were tuned to Ton d’écurie (a semitone higher than A440). Ton 59 See B. Haynes, A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ‘A’, Lanham MD, Scarecrow Press, 2002, from which much information in this section is based. 60 Ibid., p. 70. 61 See Wainwright, ‘Case study’, Chapter 19. 62 See A. Johnstone, ‘ “As it was in the beginning”: organ and choir pitch in early Anglican church music’, Early Music, 31 (2003), 507–25. 63 Haynes, A History, p. 141.
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d’opéra, for Lully’s operas, was again a tone lower than modern pitch. Bruce Haynes finds good reasons why the pitch levels of strings in the Grande Bande and the Petite Bande differed by a minor third in 1662.64 During the last three decades of the century, Nivers’s term Ton de la chambre du Roy (a pitch standard of about 1½ semitones below A440) referred to Louis XIV’s court music at Versailles where instruments were commonly used with the organ, unlike other churches. At this time, the pitch of the king’s organs such as those at Saint-Cyr, Les Invalides and Fontainebleau (also at St Gervais where F. Couperin was organist) were raised by a semitone, presumably to match the pitch of contemporary woodwind instruments. After Louis XIV’s death in 1715, organ pitches were gradually lowered a semitone back to Ton de chapelle. From the late seventeenth century, the increasing political and cultural influence of France, the invention of new French woodwind instruments at lower pitches, together with the spread of French instrument makers throughout Europe, had considerable implications for pitch. The new instruments, which reached as far as London, Amsterdam, Turin, Madrid, various German courts, Venice and Vienna, were at the standard French pitches, Ton d’opéra, Ton de la chambre du Roy and Ton d’écurie, so that when these instruments were combined with organs, organists needed to transpose. In England, French musicians working at court, together with the enthusiasm of Charles II for French music, ensured that the new French hautbois, bassoons and flutes, at their Ton d’opéra pitch, were to dominate music in London, particularly for performances of Lully’s music to entertain Charles II. ‘Consort Pitch’, originally used by the older viol consorts, continued to be used for secular music and matched the Ton de la chambre du Roy, suggested by extant English recorders whose average pitch has been measured at A402– 411. The pitch of the one surviving English organ from this time (c. 1693) at Adlington Hall, Cheshire, is at A406, and therefore consistent with being in a private house and its probable use with other instruments. Musical notation can also provide clues. Purcell’s Odes from the 1690s, after the introduction of oboes, appear to have been written a tone higher than his secular music from the 1680s, suggesting the adoption of a lower-sounding pitch consistent with the new French oboes. In Germany at this time, as many woodwinds at A392–430 survive as those at Cammer Thon pitches (A450–489), no doubt reflecting the increasing popularity for the new French woodwind alongside traditional German instruments.
64 Ibid., pp. 100–2.
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Temperament Temperament is, arguably, more important, because of the effect that different sizes of intervals have on the sounds that the instruments create. It is crucial, of course, to keyboard instruments and repertoires that have organs and harpsichords as a constituent part.65 Although Equal Temperament had been known since the sixteenth century, at least in theory, authorities from 1571 to 1697, such as Zarlino, Praetorius, Mersenne and Werckmeister, make it clear that quarter-comma mean-tone was the temperament used for most of the century.66 ‘Mean-tone’ implies two equal tones adding up to a pure major third (i.e. within the interval C–E, D is tuned exactly halfway), narrow fifths, and, most importantly, major thirds tuned as pure acoustic intervals. The consequences are that notes cannot have enharmonic equivalents: G sharp cannot serve as A flat, C sharp is a different note from D flat, etc., and the presence of an unusable ‘wolf’ fifth. Available keys were restricted to E flat major through to E major and their relative minors, with four unavailable major keys: B major, F sharp major, C sharp major, A flat major, and their relative minors. However, these keys suited most seventeenth-century music; fifth- and sixth-comma mean-tone temperaments widened the major thirds slightly, resulting is less impure fifths and a less angry ‘wolf’. With the plethora of scientific experimentation at this time, means were found to alleviate problems of key restriction and enharmonics. Solutions included the provision of split sharps on organ and harpsichord keyboards, with separate strings and pipes for ‘enharmonic’ notes (G sharp and A flat, and so on). This led to harpsichords constructed with many more notes to the octave. The Italian cembalo cromatico had nineteen keys to the octave, and an extreme example was the harpsichord with thirty-one keys per octave made by Vito Trasuntino in Venice in 1606.67 Whether John Bull’s chromatic hexachord fantasia was intended for such instruments, or whether it was written with Equal Temperament in mind can only be guessed. In any case, it is unplayable in quarter-comma mean-tone. However, the many composers who used the descending chromatic fourth as a basis for composition must have been aware of the expressive character of quarter-comma mean-tone, 65 Further details of keyboard temperaments can be found in C. A. Padgham, The Well-Tempered Organ, Oxford, Positif Press, 1986; A. C. N. Mackenzie of Ord, The Temperament of Keyboard Music: Its Character; its Musicality; and its History, Bristol, the author, 2007; R. W. Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, New York, Norton, 2006. 66 G. Zarlino, Dimostrationi harmoniche, Venice, 1571. M. Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, vol. 2: De organographia, Wolfenbüttel, 1618; M. Mersenne, Harmonicorum libri, Paris, 1635–6, and Harmonie universelle, Paris, 1636–7; A. Werckmeister, Hypomnemata musica, Quedlinburg, 1697. 67 For a description of such instruments and theories of temperament, see P. Barbieri, Enharmonic Instruments and Music 1470–1900, Latina, Levante, 2008.
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whereas this ubiquitous figura and its harmonisation in modern Equal Temperament sounds anodyne in comparison. In the late seventeenth century, such pieces as Buxtehude’s Praeludium in F sharp minor (BuxWV 146), with its dominant of C sharp major and its modulation to G sharp minor (unplayable in mean-tone) could have been written for Werckmeister’s new circulating temperaments, although this Praeludium survives only in copies from the mid to late eighteenth century and therefore could have been transposed later. In any case, keyboard temperaments encompassing all tonalities were clearly needed by the time that Part One of J. S. Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier was assembled before 1722.
. 19 .
Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610) JONATHAN P. WAINWRIGHT
Monteverdi’s Vespers is probably the most popular ‘piece’ of early seventeenth-century sacred music nowadays – certainly in terms of performances and recordings. The inverted commas around ‘piece’ are deliberate for, although many perform this sequence of Vespers music as a single work within a church or concert hall, there is little doubt that Monteverdi saw his 1610 publication as an all-purpose collection designed to be dipped into rather than performed from beginning to end. As well as the Vespers music (including two Magnificats) the volume contains a Mass; moreover, the music is written for a wide range of scorings which suggests that it was probably composed at different times and was not originally intended as a ‘work’ in the modern sense. That is not to say, however, that the modern tradition of performing Monteverdi’s Vespers as a single work is not viable or desirable. The music (with or without additions) makes an ideal concert in terms of length and sheer variety – not to mention quality – of music. That performers and academics alike are fascinated by this ‘work’ is therefore not surprising and, as Monteverdi’s 1610 collection raises virtually every important issue in relation to the performance practice of early seventeenth-century sacred music, it is an ideal subject on which to base this chapter.1 In order to examine the range of performance possibilities for the 1610 Vespers, it is necessary to refer to the original musical notation, to music treatises, and to a large range of recent scholarship. It would be foolish to expect this material to deal with all the questions, but it does at least offer the beginnings of some answers for performers approaching the music today. Reference is made to a number of representative recordings of the 1610 Vespers in order to demonstrate modern-day practices and trends.
1 The popularity of the ‘1610 Vespers’ in terms of performances and recordings is matched by a vast bibliography. The most important books are J. Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers (1610), Cambridge University Press, 1997; J. Kurtzman, The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance, Oxford University Press, 1999; and J. Whenham and R. Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 2007; these books offer a comprehensive coverage of many of the issues touched on in this short chapter and the reader is directed to them as a matter of priority.
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Monteverdi’s Vespers: then and now An examination of the performance of the 1610 music in Monteverdi’s time is no easy task for then, as now, there was no single way of performing the music and, at best, we have to consider a range of performance possibilities within the parameters of early seventeenth-century performance practice. The title of the publication (see Table 19.1) hints at a range of possible performance contexts for the sacred music in the 1610 collection: the Mass, ‘for church choirs’, is obviously liturgical music intended for performance in churches, but the Vespers music (which may or may not include the ‘not a few sacred songs’) is ‘suited for chapels or the chambers of princes’. This is a clue that some of the 1610 music may be more than just liturgical in purpose and perhaps embraces a dual function as devotional music. Related to the question of context is that of the scale and size of performing forces. As we shall see, this is a complicated issue for even if the music is considered predominantly liturgical in function (a question to be examined in more detail below) there is still no standard associated scale of performance, as a Mass or Vespers service could be either ferial (for an ordinary non-festal weekday) or solemn (for special liturgical occasions with elaborate ritual and ceremony) which would in turn influence the forces required. With this in mind it is worth examining the evidence we have for the origins and possible function of the sacred music in Monteverdi’s 1610 publication. It is perhaps fair to say that the prevailing image associated with the 1610 Vespers is that of splendour: a large array of voices and instruments spread around the galleries of a vast church such as the Basilica of St Mark’s, Venice. The 1989 recording and DVD by the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, His Majesties Sagbutts & Cornetts, and the London Oratory Junior Choir directed by John Eliot Gardiner epitomises this: the recording took place in St Mark’s and involved seventy-three performers in total. It is possible that Monteverdi did perform music from the 1610 collection in Venice after he took up the post of maestro di cappella at St Mark’s in 1613, but the origins of the music are not Venetian but rather Mantuan, and the number of performers originally involved may have been more modest. Monteverdi was employed at the Gonzaga court in Mantua from 1590 to 1612 and, from 1601, was maestro of the court musical establishment (the separate cappella for liturgical services at the Basilica of S. Barbara was directed by Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi from 1588 to 1609). Until recently it was thought that Monteverdi’s duties at Mantua were exclusively those of secular musician but Roger Bowers’s reappraisal of the documentary evidence has shown that as well as providing secular music for the ducal salon, Monteverdi participated in the provision of liturgical
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Table 19.1. Title and contents of the 1610 publication SANCTISSIMÆ / VIRGINI / MISSA SENIS VOCIBVS, [/ AD ECCLESIARVM CHOROS] / AC VESPERÆ PLVRIBVS / DECANTANDÆ, / CUM NONNVLLIS SACRIS CONCENTIBVS, / ad Sacella siue Principum Cubicula accommodata. / OPERA / A CLAVDIO MONTEVERDE / nuper effecta / AC BEATISS. PAVLO V. PONT. MAX. CONSECRETA. / [coat of arms of Paul V] / Venetijs, Apud Ricciardum Amadinum. / M D C X. (For the Most Holy Virgin, a Mass for six voices [for church choirs] and Vespers to be sung by several voices, with not a few sacred songs, suited for chapels or the chambers of princes. Works by Claudio Monteverdi composed recently and dedicated to His Holiness Pope Paul V. Venice, at the shop of Ricciardo Amadino. 1610.)a
Messa da capella a sei voci, fatta sopra il motetto In illo tempore del Gomberti (A Mass in vocal polyphony for six voices composed on the motet ‘In illo tempore’ by Gombert) Kyrie – [Gloria] – [Credo] – Sanctus – Agnus Dei [i] – Agnus Dei [ii] Septem Vocibusb
Vespro della B[eata] Vergine da concerto, composto sopra canti fermi (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin for voices and instruments, composed on cantus firmi) Domine ad adiuvandum [Response to versicle ‘Deus in adiutorium’] Sex vocib. & sex Instrumentis, si placet (For six voices and six optional instruments) Dixit Dominus [Psalm 109] Sex vocib. & sex Instrumentis Li Ritornelli si ponno sonare & anco tralasciar secondo il volere (For six voices and six instruments. The ritornellos may be played or omitted, as desired) Nigra sum Motetto ad una voce (Motet for one voice) Laudate pueri [Psalm 112] à 8 voci sole nel Organo (For eight voices alone with the organ) Pulchra es A due voci (For two voices) Lætatus sum [Psalm 121] A sei voci (For six voices) Duo Seraphim Tribus vocibus (For three voices) Nisi Dominus [Psalm 126] A dieci voci (For ten voices) Audi cœlum Prima ad una voce sola, poi nella fine à 6 voci (First for one voice alone, then at the end for six voices) Lauda Ierusalem [Psalm 147] A Sette voci (For seven voices) Sonata sopra San[c]ta Maria à 8 (For eight [instruments plus the voice Parte che canta sopra la sonata]) Ave maris stella Hymnus à 8 (Hymn for eight [voices]) Magnificat Septem vocibus, & sex Instrumentis (For seven voices and six instruments) Anima mea Soprano solo canta (Soprano sings alone) Et exultavit A 3. Voc. (For three voices) Quia respexit ad una voce sola & sei instrumenti li quali suoneranno con più forza che si può (For one voice alone and six instruments, which will play as loudly as possible) Quia fecit a 3 voci, & doi instrumenti (For three voices and two instruments)
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Table 19.1. (cont.) Et misericordia a 6. voci sole in Dialogo (For six voices alone in dialogue) Fecit potentiam ad una voce & tre instromenti (For one voice and three instruments) Deposuit potentes [no rubric in part-books; for one voice and paired instruments, cornetts then violins, in echo] Esurientes a due voci & quattro instromenti (For two voices and four instruments) Suscepit Israel à tre voci (For three voices) Sicut locutus ad una voce sola & sei instromenti in dialogo (For one voice alone and six instruments in dialogue) Gloria patri à tre voci due de le quali cantano in Echo (For three voices, two of which sing in echo) Sicut erat tutti li instrumenti & voci, & va cantato & sonato forte (All of the instruments and voices, it is sung and played loudly) Magnificat A 6 voci (For six voices) Anima mea a 2 voci (For two voices) Et exultavit a 3. voci (For three voices) Quia respexit a una voce sola (For one voice alone) Quia fecit à 6. in Dialogo (For six voices. In dialogue) Et misericordia à 3. voci, & si suona adaggio perche li Soprani cantano di Croma (For three voices, and it is played slowly because the sopranos sing in quavers) Fecit potentiam à 3. voci (For three voices) Deposuit potentes à 3. voci, & cantano doi Soprani in Echo (For three voices, and two sopranos sing in echo) Esurientes a due voci (For two voices) Suscepit Israel à due voci (For two voices) Sicut locutus est à 5. voci in Dialogo (For five voices in dialogue) Gloria patri à 6. voci (For six voices) Sicut erat A 6. voci (For six voices) a
The title words in square brackets appear in the Bassus generalis part-book only. The rubrics (mainly concerning scoring) are taken from whichever part-book contains the most comprehensive information; for full details see J. Roche (ed.), Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, London, Eulenburg, 1994, Textual Notes, pp. xxi–xxxiii; or J. Kurtzman (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine. Vespers 1610. Critical Appendix, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 47–65. b
and devotional music for Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga’s private chapel.2 This is important for it immediately offers a context for the composition and
2 R. Bowers, ‘Monteverdi at Mantua, 1590–1612’, in Whenham and Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, pp. 53–75; and R. Bowers, ‘Claudio Monteverdi and sacred music in the household of the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua, 1590–1612’, Music & Letters, 90 (2009), 331–71.
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performance of the 1610 sacred music – without this musicologists had been forced to explain the collection primarily as the ‘portfolio’ product of a disillusioned court musician looking towards Rome (the collection is dedicated to the pope) or to Venice (where it was published) for future employment. What then was the original purpose of the 1610 Vespers sequence? Before examining this thorny subject it is necessary to issue a word of warning: even if something of the original purpose can be discerned, this does not necessarily relate to the use that the collection was subsequently put. The fact that the Vespers portion of the publication is presented in the order of a liturgical sequence and provides the basic musical ingredients for First or Second Vespers on the eight major feasts of the Virgin in the Tridentine Rite (response, five psalms, a hymn and choice of Magnificats) has led scholars to seek a particular occasion for which all the Vespers music may have been composed (although it has always been accepted that individual numbers could have been extracted for use in other circumstances).3 This is not the place to examine the various suggestions but, as this musicological preoccupation has led to the fascinating modern trend of presenting the Vespers in (quasi-)liturgical reconstructions, it is necessary to mention briefly some of the relevant issues. The main liturgical ‘difficulty’, in both musicological and practical performance terms, concerns the ‘sacred songs’ – the extra-liturgical motets – which appear in the publication after each of the psalm settings and which are arranged in order of ascending number of voices (see Table 19.1, above). As the psalms and Magnificat in a Vespers service are prefaced and followed by an antiphon appropriate to a particular feast day, the usual explanation for the 1610 motets is that they are ‘antiphon substitutes’ sung after the psalms in the place of the antiphon repeat.4 As always, things are not quite so simple, for it has been noted that ‘Duo seraphim’, having a Trinitarian text, is out of place in a Marian Vespers and is unlikely to have replaced a Marian antiphon; furthermore it has been shown that the ‘Sonata sopra “Sancta Maria ora pro nobis” ’ acted as a substitute for the repeated antiphon after the Magnificat and is therefore not in its ‘correct’ place in the publication.5 Consequently, modern performers presenting the Vespers music within a liturgical reconstruction sometimes place the Sonata after the Magnificat and move ‘Duo seraphim’ elsewhere (for example by replacing the final liturgical response ‘Deo gracias’ where 3 See Kurtzman, Monteverdi Vespers, ch. 1; and Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers, pp. 30–5 for full details. 4 See S. Bonta, ‘Liturgical problems in Monteverdi’s Marian Vespers’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 20 (1967), 87–106. 5 See D. Blazey, ‘A liturgical role for Monteverdi’s Sonata sopra Sancta Maria’, Early Music, 17 (1989), 175– 82; and A. Parrott, ‘Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 revisited’, in R. Monterosso (ed.), Performing Practice in Monteverdi’s Music: The Historic-Philological Background, Cremona, Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 1995, pp. 163–74 (particularly pp. 170–4).
Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610)
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substitutions were not obliged to make reference to the feast or season); it is then necessary either to repeat the plainsong antiphons after ‘Laetatus sum’ and ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ or find two other pieces (Marian motets or instrumental sonatas) to act as antiphon substitutes. That said, John Whenham has questioned the antiphon-substitute theory altogether and suggested that the motets are no more than an optional embellishment to the liturgy and, if used at all, should follow the complete antiphon–psalm (or Magnificat)–antiphon sequence (as in Philip Pickett’s 1991 semi-liturgical performance).6 Finally we should remind ourselves of the other purpose for the motets hinted at in the title of the 1610 publication: private devotional music for aristocratic chambers. It is all too easy to forget that much sacred music also had a function outside the liturgy and its customary performance spaces. To sum up, although the 1610 publication has at its core the immutable order of a Vespers service, it also has interspersed amongst it an arithmetic sequence of extras – the motets – probably ordered to appeal to the eye rather than as a faithful reflection of a performance order. As such the 1610 publication probably does not represent the exact contents of a Vespers presented at any one specific occasion, but is a compendium of sacred music composed (and probably revised) over a period of time and designed to be drawn from by choirmasters to suit the occasion and whatever forces they had at their disposal. Furthermore, a ‘composed’ setting was probably not used for all the psalms at most Vespers services (particularly not at ferial services) and the 1610 publication provided a choice of styles and scorings for directors to choose perhaps one or two of the psalms, leaving the others to be performed to plainsong (and perhaps adorned with falsobordone harmonisations). So where does all this leave the modern performer? As usual it offers a range of possibilities and choices. The director will need to decide whether to perform ‘the Vespers’ in a straightforward concert presentation or to use the music in a (semi-)liturgical reconstruction. If it is to be a concert presentation then there is usually only one decision to be made concerning the movements: which of the two Magnificats to perform (the performance of both would be unusual for it would be, to a degree, repetitive as the two are musically related: the seven-voice and six-instruments setting probably being a reworking of the six-voice one). The choice of Magnificat will depend on the availability of obbligato instruments and the general approach being taken to the ‘work’ (see below concerning performance forces) but either of the Magnificats can make an ideal and exciting climax to a concert (in practice most modern
6 Whenham, Monteverdi: Vespers, pp. 17–22; New London Consort, directed by Philip Pickett (L’Oiseau-Lyre 425 823–2, issued 1991).
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performances include the seven-voice and six-instrument version). In a concert performance no other decisions are necessary as regards the order and inclusion of movements, for the published sequence works well for a modern audience in terms of concert length, vocal and instrumental variety, and sheer range of musical styles – even if it is not what the composer would have expected. A liturgical reconstruction requires a number of preliminary decisions to be made concerning the addition of chant, the reordering of the motets and, possibly, the addition of other motets or sonatas to complete the liturgical sequence (see above). The added plainsong will depend on the specific Marian feast chosen for the reconstruction and a contemporary breviary (or modern edition) will need to be consulted in order to find the plainsong antiphons for the psalms and, since the antiphons are unlikely to agree in mode with the cantus firmus of the psalms, performers should be prepared to transpose the antiphons to make a smooth musical link (assuming that such a link is desirable).7 Two recordings, in particular, seem to me to demonstrate the value of contextualising the Vespers music within reconstructed services: Andrew Parrott’s landmark recording of 1984 recreated the Second Vespers for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (15 August) and, in a more recent release, Paul McCreesh recreated a First Vespers of the Annunciation when it occurs after Easter.8 These recordings cannot, of course, recreate the visual action of the liturgy, and reconstructions may be little more than ‘exotic fakery’ (to use Tim Carter’s expression), but they do impress on a listener, perhaps more than does a standard concert performance, a more plausible setting for Monteverdi’s music.
Modern editions Monteverdi’s 1610 Mass and Vespers was originally published, not in score, but in a set of eight part-books: Cantus (soprano 1), Sextus (soprano 2), Altus (alto), Tenor (tenor 1), Quintus (tenor 2), Bassus (bass), Septimus (various) and Bassus generalis (organ). The instrumental parts and the extra vocal parts are printed in various part-books on facing pages (see Table 19.2) so, with much sharing and exchanging of copies, it would be just about possible to perform from the 7 See C. Bartlett (ed.), Monteverdi: Vespers (1610): Guide to Liturgical Context with Plainsong Antiphons etc., Wyton, King’s Music, 1989 – described as ‘work in progress’ – for a useful introduction to the issues; the pamphlet contains sets of chants for the main Marian feasts from Antiphonarium iuxta Breviarum Romanum, Antwerp, 1571–3 and Directorium Chori, Rome, 1604. 8 Taverner Consort, Choir and Players directed by Andrew Parrott (EMI Reflexe CDS 7 47078 8, issued 1984), and the Gabrieli Consort and Players directed by Paul McCreesh (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv CD 00289 477 6147, issued 2006).
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Table 19.2. Instruments
Movement
Specified instruments (clef)
Domine ad adiuvandum
Cornetto [I], & Violino da brazzo [I] (G2) Cornetto [II], & Violino da brazzo [II] (G2) Viuola da brazzo (C1) Viuola da brazzo, & Trombone [I] (C3) Trombone [II], & Viuola da brazzo (C4) Trombone [III], Contrabasso da gamba, & Viuola da brazzo (F4) Viuolino da brazzo [I] (G2) Viuolino da brazzo [II] (G2) Cornetto [I] (G2) Cornetto [II] (G2) Trombone [I] (C4) Trombone [II], ouero Viola da brazzo (C4) Viuola da brazzo (F4) Trombone doppio [III] (F4) Violino [I] (G2) Viuolino [II] (G2) Cornetto [I] (G2) Cornetto [II] (G2) Cornetto [III] (G2) Viuola da brazzo (F3) Violino [I] (G2) Violino [II] (G2) Cornetto [I] (G2) ! Fifara [I] (G2) ! Trombone [I] ( F3) ! Flauto [I] ! Cornetto [I] Cornetto [II] (G2) ! Pifara [II] (G2) ! Flauto [II] ! [Cornetto] [II] Cornetto [III] (G2) ! Trombone [II] (C3) ! Cornetto [III] (G2) Viuola da brazzo (F3) Violino [I] (G2) Violino [II] (G2) Viuolino [I] (G2) Violino [II] (G2) Viuola da brazzo (F3)
Sonata sopra Sancta Maria
Magnificat à 7
Quia respexit
Quia fecit Fecit potentiam
Partbook Cantus Sextus Altus Tenor Quintus Bassus Sextus Altus Tenor Quintus Bassus Septimus Septimus Bassus Quintus Bassus Altus Tenor Sextus Septimus Quintus Bassus Altus Tenor Sextus Septimus Bassus Quintus Bassus Quintus Septimus
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Table 19.2. (cont.) Movement
Specified instruments (clef)
Partbook
Deposuit potentes Et exultavit
Cornetto [I] (G1!G2) Cornetto [II] (G2) Violino [I] (G2) Violino [II] (G2) Cornetto [I] (G2) Cornetto [II] (G2) Cornetto [III] (G2) Viuola da brazzo (F3) Violino [I] (G2) Violino [II] (G2) Viuola da brazzo (F3) Cornetto [I] (G2) Cornetto [II] (G2) Trombone (F3) Cornetto [I] (G2) Violino [I] (G2) Cornetto [II] (G2) Violino [II] (G2) Cornetto [III] (C2) Viuola da brazzo (F3)
Sextus Altus Quintus Bassus Sextus Altus Tenor Septimus Quintus Bassus Septimus Sextus Altus Tenor Sextus Quintus Altus Bassus Tenor Septimus
Esurientes
Sicut locutus est
Sicut erat
Unspecified instrumental parts Dixit Dominus 2 parts in C1 clef (Cantus & Sextus) 1 part in C3 clef (Altus) 2 parts in C4 clef (Tenor & Quintus) 1 part in F4 clef (Bassus) Ave maris stella 2 parts in C1 clef (Cantus & Sextus) 1 part in C3 clef (Altus) 1 part in C4 clef (Tenor) 1 part in F4 clef (Bassus) Summary of instruments required for complete performance of the Vespers:* 2 violins (violini da brazzo) 3 cornetts (one perhaps doubling with a large cornett required in ‘Sicut erat’ only) 3 violas (tenor viuola da brazzo) 1 bass violin (bass viuola da brazzo) 1 violone (contrabasso da gamba) 3 trombones in tenor range
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Table 19.2. (cont.) Movement
Specified instruments (clef)
Partbook
1 bass trombone (trombone doppio) 2 tenor recorders (flauti) 2 tenor transverse flutes (fifare) *
This assumes one instrument per part and a downward transposition for the sevenvoice Magnificat.
original part-books (although it is more than likely that performers copied out additional parts to save inconvenient swapping of part-books). However, the publication, typically of the period, contains a fair number of misprints and inconsistencies (particularly between the Bassus generalis and the vocal partbooks) and therefore performers today use modern editions in score and their associated parts. Because of the popularity of the Vespers there are a large number of editions available; the following comments concern editions that are most readily available to modern performers. The new ‘collected works’ volume (Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 2005) is the only modern edition that contains the whole of the 1610 publication; it also includes a complete facsimile of the print, but it is not a practical performing edition.9 The editions by Hans Redlich and Walter Goehr are, in light of current expectations, no longer acceptable,10 and the same can be said for Denis Stevens’s edition (1961, rev. 1994) which, although it is inexpensive and therefore widely used, takes too many liberties with Monteverdi’s music (for example, ‘Nigra sum’ is recast as a dialogue duet and two parts are added editorially to the Sonata).11 Gottfried Wolters’s 1966 edition is more scholarly and, so long as performers can cope with the Mensurstriche (bar-lines between rather than through the staves), it is an acceptable edition (although, as we shall see, there are issues relating to transpositions of certain numbers).12 Jerome Roche’s 1994 Urtext edition contains both Magnificats, is the only modern score to contain the complete Bassus generalis part, and has appended the 9 Claudio Monteverdi: Opera omnia, vol. 9, Instituta et monumenta: Monumenta v, Cremona, Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 2005. This supersedes G. F. Malipiero (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Tutte le opere, 14/1–2, Vienna, Universal Edition, 1932. 10 H. Redlich (ed.), Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, Vienna, Universal Edition, 1949, rev. 1952 and 1955; W. Goehr (ed.), Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), Vienna, Universal Edition, 1957. 11 D. Stevens (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers 1610, London, Novello, 1961, rev. 1994; the 1961 edition omits all the ‘sacred songs’ as, at the time, he considered them to be irrelevant to a Vespers service. 12 G. Wolters (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vesperae Beatae Mariae Virginis 1610, Wolfenbüttel, Möseler Verlag, 1966.
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plainsong antiphons for two Marian feasts. Although it is designated a ‘study score’, the format is large enough to be used by singers, and instrumental parts are available from the publisher.13 The only feature that could militate against its use as a performing edition is that ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ and the two Magnificats are untransposed (see below). Two editions are ideal for modern performers in that they are both scholarly and practical. The first of these, edited by Clifford Bartlett, contains the usual Vespers sequence, the six-voice Magnificat is omitted, and ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ and the seven-voice Magnificat are transposed down a fourth (these are also available, if requested, at the original pitch and in other transpositions, as is the six-voice Magnificat). Bartlett has also produced a performance edition for voices and continuo alone (an approach to be considered below) and a useful liturgical supplement.14 Jeffrey Kurtzman’s Oxford University Press edition was published the same year as his seminal book on the Vespers (1999) and includes both Magnificats which, as with the psalm ‘Lauda Jerusalem’, are given at both original and transposed pitch; an appendix gives the plainsong antiphons for the feasts of the Blessed Virgin, and a supplementary Critical Appendix includes the critical notes and an edition of the Bassus generalis.15 Performing parts are available for both Bartlett’s and Kurtzman’s scores and performers are therefore in the fortunate position of having the choice of two excellent editions which provide all the material for a concert performance and much of the plainsong needed for a liturgical reconstruction. That said, performers will always need to be critical of their performing text and be prepared to question the editorial decisions. For example, the musica ficta in ‘Suscepit Israel’ of the seven-voice Magnificat is open to different interpretations (Kurtzman and Bartlett come up with different solutions).
Transposition (chiavette clefs) In the 1610 publication Monteverdi notated the Mass, the psalm ‘Lauda Jerusalem’, and the two Magnificats in a clef combination known today as chiavette or ‘high clefs’ (SATB = G2 C2 C3 F3, rather than the normal clef configuration: C1 C3 C4 F4) which, to musicians of the early seventeenth century, indicated a downward transposition (regardless of the absolute pitch standard). A transposition down a fourth brings the vocal parts of these 13 J. Roche (ed.), Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, London, Eulenburg, 1994. 14 C. Bartlett (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers 1610, Wyton, King’s Music, 1986, rev. 1990; Monteverdi Vespers (1610): Edition for Performance by Voices and Continuo Only, Wyton, King’s Music, 1990; and Guide to Liturgical Context, 1989. 15 J. Kurtzman (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine. Vespers 1610, Oxford University Press, 1999; and Critical Appendix, 1999.
Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610)
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numbers in line with the tessitura of the rest of the movements and the instrumental parts are restored to their normal ranges (the cornetts, in particular, are not expected to play stratospherically high). Although downward transposition has now won wide acceptance, it did, when first introduced in performance by Andrew Parrott at a BBC Promenade Concert in 1977, cause some consternation. It was argued that the downward transposition made some numbers (‘Et misericordia’ in the seven-voice Magnificat in particular) too low for the basses and that a ‘low’ Magnificat destroyed the presumed climactic conclusion to the Vespers. Andrew Parrott’s comprehensive examination of the evidence offered by the musical sources demonstrated, beyond reasonable doubt, that the downward transposition is historically correct.16 The equating of ‘high’ with ‘climactic’ is anachronistic and the Magnificat is, in any case, not the absolute conclusion to a Vespers service, even if it usually concludes a modern concert version. The chiavette theory is nowadays accepted by all but the most stubborn diehards and a downward transposition for the Mass, ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ and the Magnificats is now the established performance practice. (A recent suggestion that the transposition should be down a tone should be disregarded, as the use of a temperament such as quartercomma mean-tone would have an adverse effect on the resulting ‘key’.)17
Pitch The one remaining doubt relating to the downward transposition issue is the fact that the transposed Mass and Magnificats require basses with a bottom D. This in itself may not be a problem, for singers with a low range must have existed in Monteverdi’s day – as they do today – and the issue may go away altogether when one considers the likely absolute pitch used by Monteverdi at Mantua. Although there was probably not a single pitch standard in northern Italy in the early years of the seventeenth century, it does seem likely that the pitch in Mantua was about a semitone sharp of the modern a0 = 440 Hz. Organs are perhaps the most useful instruments for determining likely pitch standards for, once built and tuned, the pitch was relatively fixed (although seasonal temperature could give some variation). Bruce Haynes cites evidence that the
16 The high-clef theory, long acknowledged, was first proposed in relation to the Vespers by Jeffrey Kurtzman in his Essays on the Monteverdi Mass and Vespers of 1610, Houston, TX, William Marsh Rice University, 1978, pp. 37–40, and was later developed by Andrew Parrott in ‘Transposition in Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. An “aberration” defended’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 490–516. 17 See R. Bowers, ‘An “aberration” reviewed: the reconciliation of inconsistent clef-systems in Monteverdi’s Mass and Vespers of 1610’, Early Music, 31 (2003), 527–38; and, for responses, see A. Parrott, ‘Monteverdi: onwards and downwards’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 303–17, and A. Johnstone, ‘ “High” clefs in composition and performance’, Early Music, 34 (2006), 29–53.
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organ at S. Barbara in Mantua was a semitone above modern pitch, and the sharp pitch finds support in studies of woodwind instruments of the period.18
Performance forces The 1610 part-books allow the possibility for all the main items of a Vespers service to be performed with organ alone: the rubric for ‘Dixit Dominus’ in the Bassus generalis part-book reads: Li Ritornelli si ponno sonare & anco tralasciar secondo il volere (The ritornellos may be played or omitted, as desired). In such a performance Monteverdi’s opening response, ‘Domine ad adiuvandum’, is replaced with plainsong, the ritornellos are omitted in ‘Dixit Dominus’, the Sonata is omitted altogether (it being, like the motets, probably an optional extra in any case), and the Magnificat for six voices and organ is performed. A number of recent performances have shown how satisfying and successful this approach can be and confirm the potentially functional nature of the collection.19 However, if performers wish to present the ‘full version’ for voices and instruments there are still decisions to be taken concerning the number of voices to be used and whether instrumental doubling should be applied. Until recently the standard way of presenting the Vespers was as a grand choral work which utilised soloists and chorus in the ensemble numbers, and directors had to decide what to assign to the chorus. ‘Nisi Dominus’ and ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ are clearly in the tradition of double-choir pieces and work well as multiplevoice choruses, but the choice of solo and tutti sections in the other numbers is rather more difficult. Indeed, if one looks to the part-books for help here, the indications actually hint that the norm was one to a part (‘Laudate pueri’: à 8 voci sole nel Organo (For eight voices alone with the organ); ‘Et misericordia’ in the seven-part Magnificat: a 6. voci sole in Dialogo (For six voices alone in dialogue)), assuming that ‘voices alone’ means solo voices rather than voice parts each potentially taken by more than one voice (the latter, on the other hand, is clearly allowed by the ‘six voices’ of the 1610 Mass suitable for church choirs).20 These rubrics apart, there are no other indications of solo or tutti divisions in the Vespers. A further clue about performing forces is offered if we consider the original context for the Vespers music: the Mantuan court chapel. Duke Vincenzo’s musical forces included a cohort of ten virtuoso adult male
18 B. Haynes, A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ‘A’ , Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Press, 2002, p. 73 and passim. 19 For example, Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, Yorkshire Bach Choir directed by Peter Seymour (Cloister Records CLOCD0304, issued 2004). 20 ‘Sole’ could, of course, also mean voices without instruments; see ‘Instruments and voices’ below.
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singers and various groups of instrumentalists (about thirty-five musicians in total) and it was undoubtedly these musicians who ‘premiered’ most if not all of the music in the 1610 publication (although probably not all at once, nor in the sequence or form that we have in the collection) in one of the liturgical/ devotional spaces in the court complex (these being primarily the church of Santa Croce and the ducal chapel in the Corte Vecchia).21 These spaces were small, which would have had implications for the numbers of performers then and supports a small-scale ‘one to a part’ approach to the 1610 music now.22 Should performers wish to take a large-scale view of the music then it is possible to imagine large festive occasions and perhaps point to Monteverdi’s links with the big Mantuan churches for justification (although a large performance venue does not necessarily equate with the need for large performing forces). Monteverdi did not have an official association with the Palatine Basilica of S. Barbara in Mantua, but it is possible that on special occasions some of the 1610 music was performed there; indeed, Paola Besutti has pointed out that the hymn ‘Ave maris stella’ was composed on the reformed plainsong in use at S. Barbara, which may suggest more of a connection between Monteverdi and S. Barbara than can currently be supported by documentary evidence.23 Monteverdi’s sacred music may also have been heard in the cathedral of S. Pietro and in the other large Mantuan church, S. Andrea, for the duke’s cappella is known to have performed in both venues. We know, for example, that Vespers music by Monteverdi was performed on Ascension Day 1611 at S. Andrea,24 a festal service that included the annual celebration of Gonzaga rule in Mantua. The opening Vespers response, ‘Domine ad adiuvandum’, contains an adaptation of the instrumental Toccata that had originally opened Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo in 1607 – a fanfare that can be regarded as a Gonzaga family ‘theme tune’ – and it is easy to imagine it opening a grand occasion.25 The information concerning Monteverdi’s original Mantuan
21 Bowers, ‘Monteverdi at Mantua, 1590–1612’, 53–6; P. Besutti, ‘Spaces for music in late Renaissance Mantua’, in Whenham and Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, pp. 76–94 (pp. 90–4 in particular); and Bowers, ‘Claudio Monteverdi and sacred music’, 333–46. 22 Recordings that use one voice to a part include those by Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino directed by Stephen Stubbs (Atma Classique ACD2 2304–5, issued 2003) and the Gabrieli Consort and Players directed by Paul McCreesh (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv CD 00289 477 6147, issued 2006). 23 P. Besutti, ‘Ave Maris Stella: la tradizione mantovane nuovamente posta in musica da Monteverdi’, in P. Besutti, T. M. Gialdroni and R. Baroncini (eds.), Claudio Monteverdi: Studi e Prospettive; Atti del Convegno, Mantova, 21–24 Ottobre 1993, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1993, pp. 57–77. 24 This is revealed in a recently discovered letter in Mantova, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Gonzaga, busta 2721, fasc. III, doc. 8, fols. 55r–56v; reported by Kurtzman in Whenham and Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, p. 289, n. 15. 25 J. Kurtzman, ‘The Mantuan Sacred Music’, in Whenham and Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, pp. 141–54.
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performing venues is therefore complex and actually offers the modern performer a range of possibilities in terms of the scale for a performance of the Vespers. The other related issue is that of doubling the voices with instruments. Modern performers taking a large-scale approach to the Vespers routinely add instruments that are not specified in the original part-books in order to give extra instrumental colour. But is this a historically justified approach? The evidence, it has to be admitted, is ambiguous. Those favouring the use of doubling instruments point to the practice of voices and instruments performing together in Renaissance polyphony and claim support for the seventeenthcentury practice from Michael Praetorius in the third volume of his Syntagma musicum.26 It could also be noted that the opening 1610 Response calls for four instruments (three viuola da brazzo and a contrabasso da gamba) that are not specified for use again, and that the seven-voice Magnificat requires three cornetts but only two are required elsewhere, so why not utilise these instruments in other numbers? It is also possible to argue that the direction in ‘Laudate pueri’, à 8 voci sole nel Organo (For eight voices alone with the organ), rather than indicating that voices alone was the norm, was actually a necessary rubric in order to ensure that the voice parts were not routinely doubled. If, however, we view the 1610 publication not as a single artistic unity but rather an all-purpose collection of sacred music composed and used at different times then the anomalies concerning the number of instruments can be discounted. Furthermore Praetorius’s suggestions for instrumentation may relate more to German than to Italian practice and should probably be treated with caution. There may in fact be only one place where Monteverdi intended the voices to be doubled by instruments: in the ‘Sicut erat’ of the seven-voice Magnificat, and he said so in the rubric (tutti li instrumenti & voci, & va cantato & sonato forte (All of the instruments and voices, it is sung and played loudly) ) and provided the necessary instrumental music in the part-books. It seems to me that although one can find other sections of the Vespers where a chorus or the doubling of the vocal parts is acceptable they are never necessary, and if we are looking for a ‘normal’ – rather than the ‘occasional’ – scale of performance, then the small-scale approach is the most historically accurate. A number of recent recordings have demonstrated how successful this approach can be: the use of solo voices without instrumental doubling allows for more flexible and expressive singing and the instrumental ritornellos and obbligatos seem all
26 M. Praetorius, Syntagmatis musici . . . tomus tertius, Wolfenbüttel, Elias Holwein, 2/1619, pp. 105–68, trans. J. T. Kite-Powell as Syntagma Musicum III, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 115–71.
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the more colourful and effective if the basic ensemble is otherwise that of solo voices with continuo.27
Instruments and voices Only three numbers in the Vespers (‘Domine ad adiuvandum’, ‘Sonata sopra Sancta Maria’ and the seven-voice Magnificat) actually specify instruments; the ritornellos in ‘Dixit Dominus’ and ‘Ave maris stella’ are for unspecified instruments (detailed in Table 19.2) and the director is required to assign the parts. The five- or six-part ritornellos may be performed either in consorts of similar instruments (strings alone or cornetts and trombones) or in mixed consorts (a combination of strings and winds), and the modern practice tends to be to give variety by changing the instrumentation for each ritornello. It seemed that although Monteverdi was prepared to freely mix strings, cornetts and trombones in his music he always maintained two like instruments playing the top two parts, whether these instruments play alone or are doubled by another pair (as in ‘Domine ad adiuvandum’). This policy should be maintained when ‘orchestrating’ the ritornellos (i.e. the top part should not be assigned to the violin and the second to a cornett or vice versa). At the moment it is not possible to more precise about the instrumentation of the ritornellos. Peter Holman has noted a general tendency in music of this period for strings to play in four- or five-part ensembles and winds to play in six-part ensembles, which could therefore indicate that the ‘Dixit Dominus’ ritornellos are for cornetts and trombones and those of ‘Ave maris stella’ for strings.28 Ultimately the decision concerning the ritornellos may depend on the director’s particular view of the music: if the aesthetic is that of ‘Renaissance’ homogeneity then an unvaried consort of like instruments could be used for the ritornellos, but if the ‘work’ is viewed in terms of ‘Baroque’ diversity then varied and mixed consorts could be considered. (The last sentence is loaded with concepts of ‘period’ terminology that ideally need further exposition, but in this context the terms ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’ will be allowed to stand.)29 A number of other comments are required concerning Monteverdi’s specified obbligato instruments. Monteverdi calls for the full range of instruments 27 For example, New London Consort directed by Philip Pickett (L’Oiseau-Lyre 425 823–2, issued 1991); and Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino directed by Stephen Stubbs (Atma Classique ACD2 2304–5, issued 2003). 28 Peter Holman’s review-article (concerning J. Kurtzman, Monteverdi Vespers of 1610), Musical Times, 141 (2000), 52–7 (at 57); see also Kurtzman’s reply in Musical Times, 142 (2001), 52–60 (at 54). 29 For an examination of the terms ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’ see, inter alia, J. P. Wainwright, ‘From “Renaissance” to “Baroque”?’, in J. P. Wainwright and P. Holman (eds.), From Renaissance to Baroque: Changes in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeenth Century, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2005, pp. 1–21.
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of the viola da braccio (violin) family: the violin (called viuolino da brazzo or violino), violas of various sizes and a bass violin.30 The bass violin was sometimes called the violone and later evolved into the violoncello.31 In one number, ‘Domine ad adiuvandum’, Monteverdi calls for a single instrument from the viola da gamba family of string instruments: the contrabasso da gamba. As this part is doubling the bass violin part it makes sense – in this case – to use an instrument that sounds at the lower octave. It is possible that, following Praetorius,32 the trombone doppio called for in the Sonata should also be an instrument sounding at the lower octave but, as it would open up a large gap between the trombone doppio and the other two trombones, this may not have been Monteverdi’s intention – modern practice is to use a trombone that sounds at pitch. The Magnificat for ‘seven voices and six instruments’ makes use of a wide variety of obbligato instruments. The ‘Quia respexit’ setting requires the first cornett seemingly to change mid-piece to fifara, then trombone and flauto before taking up the cornett again; the second cornett is required to change to pifara (= fifara), then flauto and back to the cornett; and the third cornett changes to trombone and back to cornett. In practice there is often barely time for the first cornett player to change instruments, so the extra instruments were probably played by other members of the band. Flauti are recorders in the tenor range and the fifare are tenor transverse flutes. The label pifara (shawm) in the Tenor part-book is most likely a misprint for fifara (flute) as it is very unlikely that two different instruments were intended and, given the text ‘Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae’ (For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden), it is unlikely that shawms should be used rather than Renaissance flutes. What, then, of the singers required to perform Monteverdi’s Vespers? We know that the Mantuan court chapel included ten virtuoso adult male singers and court documents and Monteverdi’s letters provide us with the names of some of the performers who may have performed the 1610 music.33 For example, Jeffrey Kurtzman has suggested that the Trinitarian motet ‘Duo seraphim’ was composed for the three court tenors (Francesco Rasi, 30 See P. Holman, ‘ “Col Nobilissimo Esercitio della Vivuola”: Monteverdi’s string writing’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 577–90. 31 See S. Bonta, ‘From violone to violoncello: a question of strings?’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 3 (1977), 64–99, and S. Bonta, ‘Terminology for the bass violin in seventeenth-century Italy’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 4 (1978), 5–42 (both reprinted in S. Bonta, Studies in Italian Sacred and Instrumental Music in the 17th Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003). 32 M. Praetorius, Syntagmatis musici . . . tomus secundus, Wolfenbüttel, Elias Holwein, 2/1619, pp. 20, 32 and 46; trans. D. Z. Crookes as Syntagma musicum, vol.2: De organographia, pts. I and II, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 35, 43 and 54. 33 See Bowers, ‘Claudio Monteverdi and sacred music’, 332–3 and 355–7.
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Francesco Campagnolo and Pandolfo del Grande), and may have been performed in 1605 in the Jesuit church of Holy Trinity at the installation of the Rubens altarpiece that contains the Gonzaga family adoring the Holy Trinity.34 Richard Wistreich discusses vocal technique and style in the seventeenth century in Chapter 17 so here I shall merely point out that the Mantuan singers who performed the 1610 music were virtuosi who probably sang in a far lighter and more flexible way than operatically trained singers of today.35 Monteverdi’s singers would also have been capable of articulating notes rapidly in the throat and therefore of performing the most elaborate composed and improvised ornaments and passaggi (scales and figures). The Vespers contain extensive composed passaggi and graces but this should not be taken as evidence that performers did not add further improvised ornamentation of their own.36 The chapel vocal ensemble at Mantua was all male: the soprano parts were most likely performed by castrati, and the range of the ‘alto’ parts suggests they were taken not by falsettists but by high ‘tenors’. Women were not allowed to sing in churches, but it is not inconceivable that the female court singers sang motets such as ‘Pulchra es’ when they were performed in ‘the chambers of princes’.
Basso continuo The only continuo instrument specified in the 1610 publication is the organ. That is not to say that other continuo instruments, in particular plucked instruments, should not be used, indeed it seems that the combination of organ and chitarrone was a favoured pairing in early seventeenth-century Italy. The use of the harpsichord in church music is less frequently documented, but its use was not out of the question on special occasions or feasts. The use of a bowed string instrument to double the bass line is actually very unusual in early to mid-seventeenth-century music.37 The Bassus generalis parts of the two Magnificats gives unusually detailed information concerning organ registration; the indications for the Magnificat a 7 are summarized in Table 19.3.
34 Kurtzman, ‘The Mantuan sacred music’, 143. Roger Bowers (‘Monteverdi at Mantua, 1590–1612’, 63) suggests another occasion, that of the thanksgiving for the beatification of Luigi Gonzaga in the same church on 29 December 1605. 35 See R. Wistreich, ‘ “La voce è grata assai, ma . . .”: Monteverdi on singing’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 7–19. 36 For an examination of ornamentation and passaggi see Kurtzman, Monteverdi Vespers, pp. 467–87. 37 See G. Dixon, ‘Continuo scoring in the early Baroque: the role of bowed-bass instruments’, Chelys, 15 (1986), 38–53.
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Table 19.3. Organ registrations indicated in the Magnificat a 7 1–3 voices 1 voice and instruments 4–6 voices and/or instruments 6–7 voices and/or instruments 7 voices and instruments
Principale solo [8ft] Principale solo [8ft] Principale [8ft] and Ottava [4ft] Principale [8ft], Ottava [4ft] and Quintadecima [2ft] Full organ
The stops indicated are primarily principale stops (i.e. the fundamental open metal pipes) and only in ‘Fecit potentiam’ is an additional ‘colour’ stop required: ‘Principale & registro delle zifare ò, voci humane’. This probably refers to a treble register stop made up of two ranks of pipes, the fiffaro being a rank of short-pipe reeds and the voce humana being a second rank of principale pipes tuned slightly sharp to produce a slow vibrato. The registration principles outlined in Table 19.3 are also essentially followed in the Magnificat a 6, but ‘Quia respexit’ begins with organ alone registered ‘Principale, ottava, & quintadecima’ and is reduced to ‘Principale solo’ when the voice enters; at the words ‘humilitatem ancillae suae’ (the lowliness of his handmaiden) the registration is given as ‘Principale & tremulare’ (i.e. a mechanical tremolo or possibly the fiffaro/voce humana stop?) until the words ‘omnes generationes’ (all generations) where ‘Principale ottava & quintadecima’ are required when ‘la voce canta forte’ (the voice sings loudly). The only other exceptions are ‘Esurientes’ for two voices which is registered ‘Principale & ottava’; and ‘Fecit potentiam’ that requires ‘Principale & Fifara’. These registration indications are important for they suggest that the intended instrument was relatively large and certainly not the small chamber organ usually used in modern performances. Furthermore they give some indication about organ continuo practice: it seems that Monteverdi intended the player to routinely add or subtract registers (40 or 20 stops) in order to respond to the texture of the music (which in turn relates to the meaning of the words). This is in tune with the information given in L’arte organica by the organist and organ builder Costanzo Antegnati which was published in Brescia in 1608.38 What then of the basso continuo realization? The Bassus generalis part-book, typically of the period, actually contains a range of different accompaniments: a sparsely figured bass line alone that follows the lowest sounding part, short scores which provide a bass line and a reduced version of the upper parts, or full 38 See A. Morelli, ‘Monteverdi and organ practice’, in R. Monterosso (ed.), Performing Practice in Monteverdi’s Music: The Historic-Philological Background, Cremona, Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 1995, pp. 125–41.
Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610)
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scores.39 The bass-only parts require realisation along the lines suggested by Lodovico da Viadana in the preface to his Cento concerti ecclesiastici . . . con il basso continuo per sonar nell’organo (Venice, 1602) and in Agostino Agazzari’s Del sonare sopra ’l basso con tutti li stromenti, e dell’uso loro nel conserto (Siena, 1607),40 but how modern players should treat the short and full scores is a more difficult issue. Generally today continuo organists do not double the voice parts and rather treat the short and full scores merely as a guide to the harmony and texture of the composition when improvising their own accompaniment. However, early seventeenth-century sources are ambiguous concerning the desirability of doubling voices and, as Imogen Horsley demonstrates, such doubling continued to be used in the accompaniment of north Italian church music into the second decade of the seventeenth century.41 It might, therefore, be that the three-part short scores of ‘Laudate pueri’ and ‘Laetatus sum’ in the Bassus generalis part-book are actually an indication that the voices should be doubled far more than is the usual modern practice (although the same degree of doubling in the elaborate few-voice motets and some sections of the Magnificats – which are also notated in short or full score in the Bassus generalis – is perhaps unlikely). The organist would therefore have been expected to be competent in reading both the ‘old style’ intavolatura as well as the more reactive basso continuo notation.42 The variety of accompaniments offered in the 1610 volume are perhaps a further indication that the individual numbers were composed at different times.
Tempo relationships The interpretation of time signatures and the relationship between dupleand triple-time sections in the 1610 Vespers has proved to be controversial, and scholars and performers have not yet reached a degree of consensus on the issue. The subject was first raised by Roger Bowers, who argued that Monteverdi’s use of proportional mensuration signatures conveys a mathematical relationship between duple- and triple-time passages.43 Bowers noted that the notation generally requires a sesquialtera relationship between duple 39 I. Horsley, ‘Full and short scores in the accompaniment of Italian church music in the early Baroque’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 30 (1977), 466–99. 40 For translations, see O. Strunk (ed.), Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, ed. L. Treitler, New York, Norton, 1998, pp. 617–28. See, too, F. T. Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass as Practised in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1931, pp. 1–33 and 67–74. 41 Horsley, ‘Full and short scores’, 472–82. 42 See also G. Nuti, The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 57–60 in particular. 43 Paper entitled ‘Some reflection upon notation and proportion in Monteverdi’s Mass and Vespers of 1610’, presented at the 1990 Royal Musical Association Conference in Cambridge; published under the
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and triple time (two time units in duple time equal three in triple time). This works well in numbers such as ‘Nisi Dominus’ where there is a minim pulse, but many scholars and performers have problems with the relationship when the duple-time music includes passages in semiquavers which thereby slows the minim pulse down and, if the proportional relationship is maintained, results in a ‘slow’ triple section (in, for example, ‘Pulchra es’). Critics of the ‘slow’ triple time justify changing the implied proportional relationships by arguing that, by 1610, the mensural system of notation was beginning to break down. The issue is far too complex to cover satisfactorily in a few words but it should be noted that the theorists often give vague or contradictory information on the matter and much of the debate depends on what unit of time is taken as the basic tactus; it is also true that one of the many criticisms that the Bolognese theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi made of Monteverdi during the so-called Artusi–Monteverdi controversy was that the composer misused mensuration signs (in the 1607 Scherzi musicali) and therefore misunderstood their significance. It would be foolish to pronounce anything definitive on the issue at this stage, but I do make a plea to performers to at least consider the proportional relationships and try the ‘slow’ triple-time approach. Triple-time passages do not all have to be quick and dance-like and, furthermore, if the duple sections are taken at a quicker basic tempo (which is possible, particularly in one to a part performances and where singers are not weighed down by heavy instrumental doubling) then the proportionally related triple sections might not seem so slow; further, proportional relations need not be strictly so. It is possible that, due to recent traditions, fast triple times have become ingrained in modern performers’ minds (as was the high pitch of ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ and the Magnificats) and will only be changed by persuasive performances which advocate the proportional duple–triple relationship. Indeed, recent recordings directed by Konrad Junghänel and Paul McCreesh, although not following the proportional relationships to the letter, do perform many of the triple-time sections with a slower metrical relationship to the duple beat than is usual.44 Only time will tell whether ‘slow’ triple sections ever become the accepted performance practice. The issues relating to a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers are complex – both practically and philosophically. There is not a ‘correct’ way of doing the same title in Music & Letters, 73 (1992), 347–98. See, too, the correspondence between Jeffrey Kurtzman and Roger Bowers in Music & Letters, 74 (1993), 487–95 and Music & Letters, 75 (1994), 145–54, and Kurtzman, Monteverdi Vespers, pp. 433–66. 44 Cantus Cölln and Concerto Palatino directed by Konrad Junghänel (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472–77332–2, issued 1995); Gabrieli Consort and Players directed by Paul McCreesh (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv CD 00289 477 6147, issued 2006).
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‘work’, but rather there are a range of possibilities open to the modern performer. Far from revealing a weakness in the modern performance traditions, this situation – which requires creativity and imagination when reaching decisions over the various options – shows the strength of historically aware music-making. We can be sure that Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 will continue to fascinate scholars and performers alike, and each generation will want to explore this wonderful music anew.
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PART V
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‘LONG CENTURY’
PERFORMANCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH
. 20 .
Performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’: an overview SIMON MCVEIGH
An increasingly public milieu, as music moved from royal and aristocratic patronage at court to public concerts supported by newly enriched middle classes and promoted by newly independent musical entrepreneurs: thus runs the typical line of discussion in connection with eighteenth-century performance. Undoubtedly this is a useful snapshot for what is (in the broader sweep of musical history) a transitional phase towards a more widely dispersed musical culture and a more commercially oriented model of performance. Yet such a snapshot is not without its own historical difficulties, not least in the comparatively limited extent of truly public performance across Europe, and in the weight of association with a bourgeois culture that is itself often elusive or misleadingly overstated. First, it is worth emphasising the sheer centrality of musical performance in every kind of social interaction, whether court or civic ceremonial, liturgical celebration, sociable club or mere domestic amusement. Music figured very largely in the social round of the elites of every European society, defining status and spending power as well as musical sophistication and refined taste. For the leisured classes, whether listeners or performers, it was symbolic of an abundance of time for indulgence of entertainment or intellectual pursuit. And as musical performance coalesced into standard patterns – opera seasons, winter subscription concerts and Lenten oratorios – they were appropriated and absorbed into the lives of an ever-widening sphere of music-lovers. This expansion may have brought about certain changes of tone, yet performance remained a shared experience, celebrating social differentiation while at the same time enabling cohesion and harmony by bringing different layers of society together in a neutral space not requiring the learning and social sensitivities inherent in conversation.
Sites and functions There was live music everywhere – horns accompanying the stagecoaches of the nobility, the hunt or the post; military signals and parade-ground bands;
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tower music in Germany, street entertainers and waits; water music, wind bands at the pleasure gardens, the ship’s fiddler. In France the Grande Écurie provided music for open-air ceremonies and fêtes, while background music accompanied banquets and dinners of all kinds, as well as dancing: from the courtly minuet and waltz to the rustic Polish dances that so enthused Telemann. When these images turn up in art music, in theatre and concert room, they serve not only as clearly recognisable social indicators but also as representations of a rich soundscape: witness the appropriation of the musette and hurdy-gurdy (linked to poor itinerant Savoyards) as Arcadian playthings for the conventionalised bergeries and fêtes champêtres of the Versailles aristocracy.1 This is not to suggest that the more formal sites of performance were undifferentiated from day-to-day functional music, but instead to emphasise a continuum in which a range of functions and social meanings were encoded. Often these blurred or overlapped – was a musical salon truly performance if treated purely as an opportunity for conversation? Yet even at the ‘high art’ end of the spectrum, music was almost always written with particular events in mind, often designed for individual performers and a known patronage. It was largely outside eighteenth-century conception to create music for its own sake. At the same time, performance per se was increasingly projected as an object of public contemplation, and therefore as separate from the music itself.
Ceremony and the court Throughout the eighteenth century music maintained a symbolic political role as an instrument of absolutist power, a temporal representation of monarchical glory. For court ceremonial on grand occasions, music lent stature and magnificence not only in the effulgent sonority and extravagantly teeming musical forces but also in the lavishness of pure spectacle. The splendour of musical time matched the artistic splendour of the architectural spaces in which it took place: the performance itself became an object of admiration. Such events took different forms. At their simplest they might consist of an amplification of normal liturgical practice. Thus the coronation of George II in 1727 took the form of an Anglican service at which Handel’s Coronation Anthems formed the musical centrepiece: grandiose choral settings unambiguously relating earthly choirs in the vastness of Westminster Abbey to heavenly cherubim and seraphim. Similarly, Haydn’s main obligation to the Esterházy court after 1795 was to compose a Mass for the name day of the prince’s consort, elaborate symphonic structures performed at the Eisenstadt church 1 R. D. Leppert, Arcadia at Versailles, Amsterdam, Swets & Zeitlinger, 1978, pp. 35–9.
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each summer. Elsewhere birthdays and name days were customarily celebrated in opera. Italian opera seria was used unambiguously as an instrument of state, reflecting the ideals of absolutist rule and a powerfully beneficent government. At Naples royal occasions were celebrated with opera at the Teatro San Carlo, open to the public, while similar practice prevailed in Maria Theresa’s Vienna, where Italian opera formed the centrepiece of celebrations of Habsburg victories, marriages and anniversaries. An alternative was the aristocratic extravagance of the serenata, a cross between large cantata and miniature opera. Here allegorical figures vie with each other in commenting on the events being celebrated, with the real characters themselves occasionally depicted in Arcadian disguise. Taking place after nightfall, serenatas were elaborately staged in special venues (‘halls, banqueting rooms, loggias, pavilions, courtyards, gardens, public squares – even boats moored offshore’),2 often open to the sky and thus observable by a wider populace. Such opulent occasions were not only overt displays of power and authority: the very grandeur of the musical experience, of the act of performance itself, appropriated celestial images for the monarch or republic. ‘Political symbols and rituals were not metaphors of power; they were the means and ends of power itself’:3 a power exerted towards distinguished guests, clearly differentiated according to rank; towards local townspeople, encouraged to revere their monarchs in all their splendour; and towards a wider international reputation in a culture itself immersed in competitive display. Beyond these occasions was the more day-to-day role that music played in court ritual. In Milan, for example, the court Cappella was responsible not only for liturgical music and instrumental concerts, but also formed the basis of the Italian opera company at the Teatro Regio Ducale: a model that extended to the richest courts of Europe, each anxious to emulate the latest Italian fashions. At Dresden it was the proclivities of the crown prince that supplanted French influence with Italian, following the Grand Tour of 1716–17 that had such lasting effect on north German musical taste. Opera seria was central, of course, but at private court concerts Italian instrumental music was also promulgated, including Vivaldi concertos adapted for the large Dresden orchestra by his student Johann Georg Pisendel. Much the same transformation took place at Berlin in the 1740s, when Frederick the Great instituted Italian opera in deliberate emulation of 2 M. Talbot, ‘Vivaldi’s serenatas: long cantatas or short operas?’, pp. 75–6, reproduced in Venetian Music in the Age of Vivaldi, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999. 3 L. A. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, p. 54.
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Dresden. The king ruled over musical taste with an obsessive control of detail, an artistic despotism recalling the administrative and military regimen for which Prussia was famed. But here concerts took on a quite different function: in an intimate court setting the king himself played a fixed repertoire of flute concertos and solos by his favourite court musician Quantz (and some of his own), in systematic succession. Many courts started to curtail their musical establishments after the years of opulence, often as a result of the Seven Years War, but court music continued to play a vital role in the development of operatic and instrumental idioms throughout the second half of the century. Most influential was Mannheim, where it was the orchestra itself that achieved the most celebrity.4 Court life here was highly ritualised, with a set series of choreographed events throughout the calendar. Music accompanied every kind of activity, from church services and Carnival balls to hunts, river excursions, parades and banquets. During autumn and winter a performance took place virtually every evening: spoken theatre with a ballet or pantomime; opera twice weekly, followed by souper and chamber music; concerts by the Mannheim orchestra twice weekly in the Rittersaal. Although the concerts were relatively informal, with music only one of many attractions, the orchestra provided the aural counterpart to the splendidly frescoed hall: a permanent well-rehearsed establishment symbolic of modernity and cultural leadership.
The political arena: four snapshots from France Although quite different in musical style, French serious opera fulfilled essentially the same function of cultural dominance as Italian opera seria. The Académie Royale de Musique had, under Lully’s monopolistic control, explicitly glorified the established social order – Louis XIV in particular – not least in prologues replete with political references. The noble character and dramatic power of the tragédie en musique, depending on a close match of French poetry and music, began to fade in the early eighteenth century, but the Opéra nevertheless continued as a royal spectacle: a display of aristocratic prestige and influence dominated by court etiquette. It was the total identification of the Académie with the political and social hierarchy that fuelled the Querelle des bouffons, an intellectual dispute that split Paris society between 1752 and 1754. On the face of it this was a musical altercation, exacerbated by the success of Pergolesi’s light comic opera La serva padrona at the Opéra and by the advocacy of Rousseau. Yet to progressive parlementaires of the Enlightenment
4 E. K. Wolf, Manuscripts from Mannheim, ca. 1730–1778, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 27–34.
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the new Italian opera acted as a surrogate for intellectual freedom, and its support nothing less than an attack on the absolutist power of the monarchy. Once these subversive seeds eventually came to fruition in the 1789 Revolution, music again took on a highly politicised role, with operas on nationalistic topics playing a central role in celebrating the reasserted French identity. Old-style opera librettos were disapproved, and popular revolutionary songs and military music commensurately encouraged: revolutionary consciousness was enhanced by massive festivals on the Champs de Mars, occasions of national grandeur and political resonance, featuring large (even multiple) orchestras. A symbolic unity was expressed in an idealistic participation of a united populace, as when music teachers fanned out across Paris to teach Gossec’s Hymne à l’Être Suprème for a festival celebrating the Supreme Being.5 Yet once Napoleon seized power in 1799 he began to reintroduce old patterns of absolutist patronage, corralling the Opéra into an instrument of state propaganda under his personal control and even parading 600 Roman soldiers in Le triomphe de Trajan (1807) in a transparent allegory of Imperial might.
Church In church, too, the notion of performance as an end in itself, or at least as a direct expression of religious commitment, became ever stronger. Elements of the Calvinist tradition may have abhorred instrumental and operatic word setting, yet elaborate sacred music flourished elsewhere, with an increasingly conspicuous role for performance in both Catholic and north German Protestant churches. The sacred music Vivaldi wrote for Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà clearly demonstrates the division of motet and mass sections into separate choral and solo numbers, with the latter adopting operatic genres if not the fullblown operatic style later seized upon by his Neapolitan contemporaries. Italian oratorio followed a similar path, as biblical characters took on operatic personae and librettos political resonance, as in the patriotic references to Venice’s war against the Turks in Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans. In Bavaria and Austria, too, the exuberant frescos of Baroque churches were matched by richly accompanied sacred music: ‘there is scarce a church or convent in Vienna, which has not every morning its mass in music, that is a great portion of the church service of the day, set in parts’, with orchestral accompaniment.6 Even the north German cantata tradition adapted to the notion of performance 5 J. H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 126–7. 6 C. Burney, An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands, ed. P. A. Scholes, Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 78.
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per se. Bach’s cantatas, especially those with subjective Pietist arias in the first person, introduce an operatic mode of communication. Often this takes the form of a dialogue with a single obbligato instrument, even duets between Christ and the Daughter of Sion redolent of the operatic love duet. Bach’s most elaborate organ music was of course intended for the Lutheran service, with the chorale prelude literally designed to prefigure congregational singing of the hymn. Perhaps more surprisingly, the Catholic liturgy furnished the prime opportunity to hear some of the most famous soloists of the day. Thus Tartini was employed by the Padua basilica to play concertos at the most important church festivals, while Charles de Brosses visited the Turin chapel particularly in order to hear Somis play, discovering to his disappointment that he had missed his scheduled appearance.7 The hundreds of concertos Vivaldi wrote for the orphan girls of the Pietà were heard at services in the neighbouring church on Sundays, feast days and during Lent: a celebration of the Ospedale’s mission and a major source of income. The girls’ white gowns and angelic appearance in choir lofts behind an iron grille only enhanced the orchestra’s international renown.
Cities In cities lacking the centralising and monopolising function of a dominant court – or where an alternative site of musical performance was needed – musical patronage was often assumed by wealthy individuals. In Rome, Cardinal Ottoboni and Prince Ruspoli vied in the lustre of their artistic and intellectual patronage, setting up separate small musical establishments for regular academies or conversazioni; while for larger church festivals their musicians united in elaborate musical ceremonies, the opulent visual effect as well as imposing sonority again explicitly displaying both wealth and social importance. For one outdoor performance of a Scarlatti oratorio in 1705 the large stage with painted backdrops included a platform for the singers and seven tiers for the instrumentalists, the whole brilliantly illuminated with carriages forming boxes for the cardinals, princes and noble ladies.8 Elsewhere the initiative relied on the local business community, as in Lübeck, where merchant oligarchs financed the Abendmusiken at the Marienkirche. Under Buxtehude’s leadership the series solidified into programmes of organ and vocal music (sometimes oratorios) on five Sundays before Christmas. Admission was free to the general public, although in an 7 S. McVeigh and J. Hirshberg, The Italian Solo Concerto, 1700–1760: Rhetorical Strategies and Style History, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2004, pp. 34, 276. 8 J. Spitzer and N. Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 122.
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interesting reversal in 1752 Johann Kunzen began to charge for exclusive entry to the dress rehearsals at the stock exchange. Another kind of musical organisation of great importance for the future of concert life in north Germany was the collegium musicum. At first loosely defined gatherings of the educated middle classes, their character gradually moved towards a more public concert setting, featuring professional performances focused on instrumental music. University towns such as Leipzig proved a particularly fertile environment, with groups of students meeting in coffee-houses to advertise their availability for church engagements and for other well-paid festive events. In 1729 Bach took over the directorship of the Telemannische Collegium Musicum, contributing suites and concerto arrangements as well as composing secular cantatas for ‘extraordinary concerts’ when the Elector visited from Dresden. In Britain, too, amateur clubs for gentleman performers began to admit audiences and call on professional stiffening; but here the nature of the organisation differed. The middle-class Castle Society, originating at a City tavern, was set up in the manner of a gentlemen’s literary society, with regulations ensuring decorous behaviour – a formalising of sociability in clear contrast to the mores of the aristocratic salon – and weekly meetings alternating between closed rehearsals and performance nights.9 Such societies tended to preserve older styles, possibly out of affection for the more sober virtues of the concerto grosso over foreign aristocratic culture, but also because they presented fewer technical challenges. This model persisted as an elite cultural focus beyond the metropolis. The Edinburgh Musical Society, for example, mixed amateurs and professionals, one of the prime movers being the Earl of Kelly, a dilettante symphonist who had studied in Mannheim with Stamitz.
A commercial world Emphasis has so far been placed on continuities from seventeenth-century performance practice at the expense of newer and more commercial trends, simply because traditional forms of patronage continued into the eighteenth century to a far greater extent than is often suggested. Even public opera in Italy or London typically drew on leading members of society for both influence and financial subvention; and while the upper galleries may have been frequented by lower orders of society, boxes and dress code emphasised social hierarchies just as much as in mid-European courts. Opera-going was simply an essential feature of patrician social life, and Italian opera houses ‘were owned and ultimately controlled by the nobility, irrespective of the degree of public 9 S. McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 3–4.
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access they granted’.10 Those underwriting the (almost inevitable) financial losses viewed these as a sacrifice for the entertainment of their fellow citizens, positioning themselves as benefactors rather than impresarios. Some of the same qualifications need be borne in mind in connection with public concerts. Tempting as it might be to view the public concert as a site of middle-class revolution, we should guard against over-exaggeration of the following kind: ‘Both the arena and the victor’s rostrum of this bourgeois musical struggle was the public concert. Its organisation, its construction and its extension provide the keys for understanding the musical and cultural advances and contradictions of the eighteenth century.’11 Musicians themselves did their utmost to attract audiences from every level of nobility and wealthy bourgeoisie – who were, after all, their patrons and pupils for the rest of the week. Indeed the expensive subscription series typically used for public concerts was a deliberate mechanism to maintain exclusivity, a club for the elite, wherever socially situated. The role of London – wealthy, entrepreneurial, unregulated – in developing public concerts in the wake of John Banister’s 1672 initiative has long been recognised. The lawyer Roger North left an interesting analysis of the process whereby the public concert developed out of an originally amateur society. First it transferred to a tavern, until the proprietor charging for admittance caused a rupture in the arrangements. He then decided to hire musicians himself for a ‘pecuniary consort’, to which ‘numbers of people of good fashion and quallity repaired’. Finally, the professionals themselves spotted the commercial opportunity, fitting out a fine building near Charing Cross for a Musick Meeting, ‘and all the Quallity and beau mond repaired to it’.12 Whether this schematised succession actually occurred is now beyond determining, but North unmistakably places emphasis on the high social status of the eventual audience, and on the role of the concert as a magnet for the cultured elite. Indeed London concerts went on to join the Italian Opera right at the heart of the high-society calendar. Those of J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel, initiated at the sumptuous Carlisle House in 1765, were quickly established as a central element of the season’s social round. While subscription tickets were indeed advertised and sold, the high price and use of ladies’ lists to vet audiences still
10 M. Talbot, ‘A Venetian operatic contract’, in M. Talbot (ed.), The Business of Music, Liverpool University Press, 2002, pp. 18–19, amplifying the work of John Rosselli. 11 Peter Schleuning quoted in T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 162. Further on the relationship between concert performance and society, see the series of books edited by H. E. Bödeker, P. Veit and M. Werner emanating from the European Science Foundation project ‘Musical Life in Europe 1600–1900: Circulation, Institutions, Representation’. 12 J. Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, London, Novello, 1959, pp. 352–3.
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provided a measure of social control. Moreover the ambience at the Hanover Square Rooms, where the concerts transferred in 1775 – the chandeliers, sofas, conversation and refreshments – was not so remote from the aristocratic salon or court concert. It is true that the London urban elite was already broadening to embrace a range of educated professionals and the ‘big bourgeoisie’, but public concerts in the most commercial environment in Europe were still packaged to resemble a private gathering of the higher echelons, mostly known to each other in a closely linked network of social, cultural and political contacts. Public concerts in northern Germany developed in a rather different fashion, through an increasingly commercial attitude towards the collegia musica encouraged by wealthy merchants and intellectuals. Telemann played a major part in these developments in both Frankfurt and Hamburg. In 1713 he reformed a collegium musicum that had provided music in bourgeois homes ‘to revive their spirits, wearied by their official business’.13 The new society organised professional concerts open to a paying public, promoting large works such as Telemann’s own Fünf Davidische Oratorien. Moving in 1721 to Hamburg, a trading seaport in close contact with England, Telemann immediately set up another collegium musicum: a series of private concerts leading to a full-scale public series given by local professionals on the city roster. The wealth and independence of Hamburg society encouraged a flourishing concert life not dissimilar to that of London, culminating in the building in 1761 of the new Konzertsaal auf dem Kamp, where Telemann’s successor, C. P. E. Bach, played a major role in promoting public concerts from 1768. While German cities could scarcely compete with the ostentatious luxury of the princely courts (in Burney’s view, ‘whoever therefore seeks music in Germany, should do it at the several courts, not in the free imperial cities’14), concert promotion provided a comparable boost in status for leading citizens as well as a competitive source of civic pride. In Leipzig the Grosse Konzert, a tavern society founded by merchants in 1743, was replaced in 1781 by city concerts at a more decorous hall fitted out in the Gewandhaus (the hall at the centre of the dominant textile business). These provided a focal point for municipal social life, dominated by an influential cadre of clothing merchants, publishers, judges and law professors. Although civic in origin, the Gewandhaus concerts were constituted as an elite form of high-principled entertainment, with a monopoly and formality that quickly became a cause
13 Georg Philipp Telemann: Singen ist das Fundament zur Music in allen Dingen: eine Dokumentensammlung, ed. W. Rackwitz, Leipzig, Reclam, 1985, p. 83. 14 Burney, An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands, p. 42.
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of social tension, as the wider middle classes were obliged to attend cheaper concerts in public houses.15 Mozart has always been projected as the most symbolic example of entrepreneurialism, following his extrication from the stifling small-court environment of Salzburg. In truth, his career as a concert impresario in Vienna was both short-lived and of comparatively little public import (with many concerts known to us only through his own correspondence). Certainly the Viennese environment was not entirely conducive to this kind of activity. Individual concerts (including Mozart’s ‘academies’) took place at the theatres or at the Redoutensaal; but these venues were closely controlled, and only in less conventional surroundings could an individual musician promote longer subscription series in hopes of a more sustained income. Thus in 1782 Mozart joined with a local impresario to give twelve Sunday summer concerts in the Augarten park, plus four grand serenades ‘in the finest open places of the city’. Later series featuring some of his grandest piano concertos were given in the Trattnerhof casino and the dance hall of the Mehlgrube restaurant. It was an intensity of promotion almost unprecedented in Vienna: nevertheless Mozart described the 1784 Trattnerhof series as private subscription concerts for the nobility (of the 174 names on the subscription list 50 per cent came from the high nobility, 42 per cent from the lesser nobility and only 8 per cent from the bourgeoisie);16 and he tried to impress his father as much with the thirteen aristocratic concerts he would attend in the course of a single month.17 While entrepreneurial attitudes towards concert promotion certainly expanded throughout the eighteenth century, one should not confuse the commercial aspirations of musicians themselves and Mozart’s celebration of liberty from courtly servitude with an alternative middle-class culture – what might be termed the ‘bourgeois trope’. Certainly, in some cities, concerts in merchants’ homes, as well as the public subscription concerts they encouraged, embodied the cultural aspirations of a wider middle class, in emulation of established aristocratic practice. But in most urban societies the wealthy and educated bourgeoisie were already starting to mix with the beau monde, anticipating the extended elite of the nineteenth century;18 while even in its most commercially developed form in London the musical world was still led by elite
15 W. Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 23–4, 42–3, 53. 16 N. Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 376. 17 The Letters of Mozart and his Family, ed. E. Anderson, 3rd edn, London, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 869–70. 18 W. Weber, ‘Musical culture and the capital city: the epoch of the beau monde in London, 1700–1870’, in S. Wollenberg and S. McVeigh (eds.), Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, pp. 71–89.
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society, certainly not by any bourgeois liberationist movement. Ironically the most well-known examples of public subscription concerts towards the end of the century – the Leipzig Gewandhaus series and the Salomon–Haydn concerts in London – were in reality so expensive and exclusive that there were repeated criticisms of general unavailability. It was indeed easier for the lower ranks to attend opera through cheap seats in the upper galleries – or, in some European societies, to attend court events for free.
Currents and counter-currents Mixed realms Eighteenth-century accounts traditionally divide musical practice into three performance milieux: church, theatre and chamber music. These three, apparently distinct, environments are clearly reflected in the organisation of music at the typical European Kapelle. Yet each takes in a remarkably wide range of musical experience, especially the ‘chamber’ category, which covers everything from the tavern musical society and collegium musicum to the court homage cantata and the grand Viennese charity concert. Furthermore, there were many circumstances in which such arbitrary boundaries were crossed. Church music, for example, migrated from liturgy to object of aesthetic contemplation in the concert hall. Restrictions on public music-making in Paris led to that peculiar variant of concert life, the Concert Spirituel, when in 1725 Anne Danican Philidor was permitted to promote concerts for a paying public on holy days when the theatre was closed. In lieu of French operatic extracts the programmes always contained a core of sacred pieces, especially the old-school grands motets by the acknowledged master of the genre, Michel-Richard de Lalande: a striking example of popular appreciation of comparatively severe music from the grand French tradition normally restricted to connoisseurs. Oratorio on sacred themes also permeated the public arena. Handel developed an English variant in London in the 1730s, and from 1743 Lenten oratorios were given as public concerts at Covent Garden playhouse: the singers at the front of the stage, Handel in the centre and the orchestra ranged on a raked platform behind. These biblical dramas contained a strong element of political allegory, though open to a rich variety of interpretations: if Solomon presents an idealised view of a prosperous trading nation at peace – spending money wisely on religion and the arts, presided over by a virtuous monarch dispensing exemplary justice – this could be read either as an appreciation of George II or perhaps as a commentary on his shortcomings.19 By drawing on 19 R. Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 309–17.
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elements of Italian opera, English masque and Anglican church music Handel successfully appealed to several layers of the establishment. Filling a large theatre of near 1,500 seats resulted in a highly profitable undertaking, especially when middle-class enthusiasm was unleashed with the abandonment of the subscription principle in 1747 and with associations of Judas Maccabaeus with the defeat of the Young Pretender. Remarkably, the practice continued after his death – Handel is the first composer whose music has never left the repertoire – but oratorios also took on different ideologies, becoming prominent in provincial cathedral festivals and closely associated with the growing ‘ancient music’ movement. All these strands were to unite in the massive Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey in 1784, a potent political symbol celebrating not only his centenary but also the renewed stability of the monarchy in a gigantic display of royal pomp (the entire royal family attended in full ceremony, the performers numbered 525). It was a deliberate identification of musical heritage with national image: a triumph of political manipulation. Oratorio also took on a political dimension in Vienna in the late works of Haydn. Following his return from London in 1795, he was quickly drawn by Baron Gottfried van Swieten into a new Austrian cultural project, culminating in the first performance of The Creation in 1798 (sponsored by a group of noble enthusiasts), with its public performance at the Burgtheater the following year: iconic events that lived on in the national memory. Haydn’s work served as potent expression of Viennese cultural status and political continuity during a time of threat to the nation from French revolutionary wars – and to the established social order from within.
Public and private The discussion so far has tended to imply a clear distinction between the private realms of music at court or the houses of the wealthy elites, and sites of public performance such as the opera houses and concert halls of London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. On the face of it, the distinction as to whether tickets were for sale or not seems clear enough; but in reality boundaries appear much more permeable. For a start, ticketed concerts were socially circumscribed in different ways, with even Mozart’s subscription concerts regarded as private concerts of the nobility. In the other direction, private or semi-private concerts in the less commercial Viennese environment achieved a cultural significance unmatched elsewhere. The concerts of Prince Galitzin, Prince Lichnowsky, the Princes Lobkowitz and so on were of course comparatively closed events, and there has been a tendency to exaggerate the free mingling of higher and lower nobility with the wealthy middle classes in line with the
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‘bourgeois trope’.20 But by the end of the century ‘the musical salon had become firmly entrenched in the Viennese cultural world’, such that anyone of reasonable means ‘had access to at least one or two musical coteries’.21 It was at such salons that Mozart and Beethoven shaped taste among their influential patrons, nurturing a genuine appreciation and a wider advocacy of the serious idioms of the high Viennese Classical style: during the 1790s Lichnowsky even hosted morning quartet concerts led by the celebrated violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, later so closely associated with Beethoven and leader of Count Razumovsky’s own string quartet. In Paris too, in view of the restrictions on public concert life until the Revolution, much of the most important music-making took place in more or less private circles of one kind or another: the extravagant concerts of fabulously wealthy financiers such as La Pouplinière, who maintained his own personal orchestra; or the ‘Concert des Amateurs’, renowned for its symphonic performances; or the masonic Société de la Loge Olympique, recipient of Haydn’s ‘Paris’ symphonies. Indeed, in many cities private performance was a typical route to the public concert sphere. The early history of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony provides a case in point. Composed in 1803, it was initially heard in private (a rehearsal at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz on 9 June 1804), then at further semi-public performances during the winter, before being released in front of a wider ticket-buying audience at the Theater an der Wien on 7 April 1805.22 Entry into the Concert Spirituel was generally preceded by noble discretion: The Baron of Bagge holds one of the finest private concerts in this capital at his house every Friday during the winter. It pleases him to patronise all the foreign and amateur virtuosos who wish to make their début in this capital and to make their talents known here.23
Even in London the Prince of Wales (later George IV) carried out much the same offices. This kind of private trial was not only an opportunity for comparatively informal rehearsal, but also gave the ruling class an important role in validating cultural trends. While in some circumstances an individual musician could promote whatever musical event they chose, for the most part the options were circumscribed by political, religious or civic constraints, as well
20 See M. S. Morrow, Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna: Aspects of a Developing Musical and Social Institution, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon, 1989, pp. 22–5; T. DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 37–59. 21 Morrow, Concert Life, p. 2. 22 T. Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 26–8. 23 Quoted in J. Mongrédien, ‘Paris: the end of the Ancien Régime’, in N. Zaslaw (ed.), The Classical Era, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989, p. 71.
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as by the practical need to engage the relevant tiers of society in every aspect of artistic policy.
Cosmopolitan and national Many factors contributed to an increasing cosmopolitanism as the century progressed. The pervasive European vogue for French culture at the beginning of the century was largely supplanted by Italian opera (buffa as well as seria) just as enthusiasm for the Italian concerto style spread out across Europe, courtesy of acolytes of Corelli, Vivaldi, Somis and Tartini. France continued to maintain allegiance to its own brand of serious opera, just as French organ and harpsichord music maintained a separate existence well into the century (featuring intricately delicate ornamentation and subtle inequality of note lengths in performance, as well as pictorial or other allusions in character pieces). But after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713–15) a new openness to foreign influence brought Italian music even into Parisian town houses, such as that of the Prince of Carignan of the House of Savoy, who attracted violinists of the Somis school from Turin to Paris. One such was Giovanni Pietro Ghignone, who in 1725 was pitted against Jean-Baptiste Anet in a competition between Italian and French styles: it is a sign of the increasing acceptance of the southern idiom that (restyled as Jean-Pierre Guignon) he was to become a pillar of French musical society. Gradual improvements in transport and the exchange of musical works through promoters, performers and publication led to a broadly shared universal musical culture – and even to the beginnings of a core repertoire. Although scorings were still constantly adapted to extant performance situations, publications were standardised for Europe-wide consumption: thus J. C. Bach’s overture to Zanaida, with its eccentrically colourful scoring for tailles and clarinets, was subsequently published in standard two-oboe format. Reputations were spread by the rise of musical journalism in newspapers and literary magazines, as well as the early musical press: by the time of C. F. Cramer’s Magazin der Musik, founded in Hamburg in 1783, news about performers and performance styles across Europe was already avidly reported. Opera stars, unless tied to a restrictive court, were no longer limited to one city, even negotiating mid-season arrangements with impresarios in northern Europe to enable appearances in Venice during Carnival season. With the development of the modern symphonic idiom, especially the Mannheim style, there was also a strong convergence of performing idioms, enabling an interchangeability of soloists across the courts and public arenas of Europe. Of the four wind soloists for whom Mozart wrote a sinfonia
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concertante in Paris in 1778,24 three were members of the Mannheim orchestra, and all four appeared at various times in London, where Wilhelm Cramer had trained the Hanover Square orchestra in the Mannheim idiom. It was still too early to start to speak of concert tours in the modern sense, but the example of Antonio Lolli, a proto-Paganinian virtuoso violinist, gives some idea of the extent of an individual musician’s range.25 Born in Bergamo, he was appointed solo violinist to the Stuttgart court in 1758, but he was still permitted to give concerts in Vienna and Paris in the early 1760s. In 1771 he crossed paths with the Mozarts in Italy and two years later toured northern Germany. His Stuttgart contract was terminated in 1774, but he soon alighted on an equally lucrative base as chamber virtuoso to Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. There followed further concerts in Poland, Scandinavia and Germany, and in the traditional manner he extended his period of leave from the end of 1777 to early 1780, despite intense official irritation. In 1783 he eventually left the Russian court, arriving in London in January 1785 for a none too successful season before further travels in Spain, Italy and northern Germany. Only in one area did clear differentiation of national cultures remain, and this was where the closest relationship was maintained with vernacular traditions. Except in Italy, where opera buffa was sung throughout, every country developed a form of comic or sentimental musical theatre in which the main action was carried on as a spoken drama, interspersed with lightly accompanied songs encouraging a direct musical expression in performance, and employing a far more naturalistic acting engagement with the audience than obtained in high Baroque opera seria. In France the local opéra comique tradition derived from the temporary theatres at the Paris fairs, where vaudevilles and parodies of serious operas vied for attention with buskers, acrobatics, trained animals and so on. Formalised in 1721 as the Opéra-Comique with a royal privilege, the genre soon found favour as a popular alternative theatrical entertainment, and (as was characteristic of initially plebeian – indeed subversive – theatre) it gradually became appreciated much more widely. Respectability was finally assured when in 1762 the OpéraComique was anointed as the official second musical stage. The transition in London took a similar course. The Beggar’s Opera (1728) announced its intentions from the start, not only parodying the absurdities of contemporary Italian opera but also satirising the prime minister, Robert Walpole, and political corruption in general. The music was appropriately lowbrow, drawing on 24 Johann Baptist Wendling (flute), Friedrich Ramm (oboe), Giovanni Punto (horn) and Georg Wenzel Ritter (bassoon), according to a letter of 5 April 1778. The Letters of Mozart and his Family, pp. 521–2. 25 A. Mell, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 15, pp. 82–3, art. ‘Lolli, Antonio’.
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popular tunes of the day, but again ballad opera was quickly incorporated into the theatrical mainstream, later directly influencing its German equivalent, the Singspiel. In each case the vernacular idiom became the basis of a national opera – leading in the case of France to the politically charged ‘rescue operas’ of Cherubini and in the German to Die Zauberflöte. In every case the national vernacular gradually became elevated towards high art aspirations, often drawing on more serious national musical styles or cross-referencing parallel operatic traditions. Singspiel in particular was politicised by the Viennese Emperor Joseph II as part of his Germanisation programme of the late 1770s, in a deliberate gesture to limit the independence of the opera-loving nobility. The admission of Singspiel was something of a concession, but it led to an early success in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782). In truth Mozart exceeded his brief with the richness of his musical imagination and the operatic virtuosity of the part of Konstanze (providing the context of the immortal imperial quip ‘far too many notes, my dear Mozart!’). Such foreshadowing of elements of nineteenth-century musical nationalism heralded a dissolution of the cosmopolitan consensus, a trend encouraged in concert programmes by musicians themselves as they drew on nationalistic rhetoric to defend their own interests.26 But for much of the century, despite the local variations, an overarching international perspective must surely have led to more uniform performance styles and a convergence of attitudes towards how performance was received and evaluated.
Professional and amateur Collegia musica and musical clubs in the early part of century often mixed amateurs and professionals, but gradual separation ensued as the century progressed – towards professionalised concerts for a passive paying audience on the one hand, and towards dilettante music-making for personal amusement on the other. This gap was further emphasised by increasing dissemination of printed music, which began to fix the ‘work’ as a definitive but abstract creation, something capable of interpretation by someone who had heard neither the piece itself nor the performance of its creator. Those without access to expert tuition from professionals at the heart of the musical culture thus had to seek guidance from treatises as to how to realise the printed score. At the same time it is true that in many different environments dilettante participation persisted, and indeed made a significant artistic impact – the Parisian Concert des Amateurs, salon concerts in Vienna, the Edinburgh 26 Weber, The Great Transformation, p. 80.
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Musical Society and so on. Even leading virtuosi might spend part of the summer at the country houses of their wealthy patrons or musical families, mingling in domestic music-making as described by Susan Burney: After tea our ears were healed by Kozeluch, charmingly played by Esther, & admirably accompd by the indefatigable Salomon – they played a great number of delicious lessons – then Richard gave a Dusseck – & last Mr Salomon played over 3 or 4 beautiful (at least as he played them) Pieces of his own, in wch Reinagle accompd him on the Violoncello – It was a truly delightful musical evening.27
Some amateurs aspired towards professional standards of performance and communication, especially those gifted women pianists with sufficient time or social pressure to practise. Mozart wrote one of his most brilliant concertos (K449) for his Viennese pupil Barbara von Ployer, daughter of a court councillor, while the unusual virtuosity of J. C. Bach’s Op. 14 was probably intended to showcase the brilliance of Madame Brillon de Jouy, one of the most accomplished stars of Parisian soirées. Similarly Haydn’s late piano sonatas were written for the outstanding London amateur Therese Jansen. Much domestic music did indeed replicate that performed by professionals, and a close relationship with music performed in the public sphere was deliberately emphasised, so that amateurs could identify not only with the latest music performed on stage or concert platform, but also with the actual performers they sought to emulate. For more modest talents, special amateur genres were developed, in particular in response to the early signs of what became the ‘piano culture’ of the nineteenth century. As the ability to play the piano and to sing became gendered as women’s accomplishments – a display of eligibility in both aristocratic and wealthy middle-class drawing rooms – the piano sonata accompanied by a male violinist and the song with piano formed a repertoire quite distinct from the professional sphere. Lighter, often descriptive pieces of dubious artistic value such as Kotzwara’s The Battle of Prague or Dussek’s The Sufferings of the Queen of France equally reflect the widening appeal of the piano as a middle-class pastime. Amateur vocal ensembles also developed specific repertoires, such as the Austrian part-song and the all-male British glee, staple of after-dinner male sociability. Still more important was a phenomenon that Charles Dibdin observed with some amazement in 1788: I have been assured, for a fact, that more than one man in HALIFAX can take any part in choruses from the Messiah, and go regularly through the whole 27 Quoted in I. Woodfield, Salomon and the Burneys: Private Patronage and a Public Career, Royal Musical Association Monographs 12, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003, p. 56.
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oratorio by heart; and, indeed, the facility with which the common people join together throughout the greatest part of YORKSHIRE and LANCASHIRE, in every species of choral music, is truly astonishing.28
The rise of amateur choral singing was of the highest significance for the future development of musical life across Europe.
Musicians The individual In most respects, however, this was the century of the individual: such genuinely European stars as opera singers Farinelli and Cuzzoni, violinists Veracini and Viotti, pianists Dussek and Steibelt. Their pre-eminence was reflected in the primacy of the operatic aria and the solo concerto, both ways of taming the individuality of solo display within an enclosed framework. Yet such top performers could establish a permanent reputation above and beyond the works they chose to perform. An intrinsic part of the star’s identity was the way in which they stamped a performing personality on public consciousness: certainly the castrato Farinelli’s persona was carefully constructed through image management in prints,29 but it was primarily through perceptions of the qualities of the voice itself that such opera seria luminaries achieved their individuality. Contemporary accounts typically polarise vocal characteristics into two contrasting camps, which only the most exceptional singers could combine. Thus Farinelli was as celebrated for the emotional intensity of his contralto range in slow arias as for his sustained power and brilliant soprano virtuosity: His throat was very flexible, so that he could produce the largest intervals quickly and with the greatest ease and certainty. Broken passages, as well as all the other runs, provided no difficulty for him, and he was very prolific in his use of the optional ornaments of an adagio.30
Quantz goes on to say that though Farinelli’s appearance was advantageous ‘acting he did not take greatly to heart’: indeed star singers tended to present themselves centre stage in static poses, with the librettist Metastasio even indicating how characters should be placed in symmetrical patterns to indicate their rank. In some ways the aria system was symbolised by the so-called ‘suitcase aria’, designed to show off a singer’s abilities to maximum advantage and 28 C. Dibdin, The Musical Tour of Mr. Dibdin, Sheffield, 1788, p. 196. 29 B. Joncus, ‘One God, so many Farinellis: mythologizing the star castrato’, British Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies, 28 (2005), 437–96. 30 Quoted in D. Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780, New York, Norton, 2003, pp. 35–6.
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transferable to any suitable operatic context, in what might be described a packaging of emotional responses. Certainly it was an intrinsic part of the composer’s task to ensure that he showcased each singer’s prime selling points. Thus Mozart in preparing to write Idomeneo was careful to match the arias to the individual singers, with whose talents he was already familiar. For example, Anton Raaff (Idomeneo) had a predilection for ‘andantino’ arias, of the kind that Mozart had written for him two years earlier. On that occasion he famously wrote to his father that he would ‘arrange the aria in such a way that it would give him pleasure to sing it, for I like an aria to fit a singer as perfectly as a well-made suit of clothes’; so it is hardly surprising that Idomeneo’s aria ‘Torna la pace’ is strikingly similar.31 But the example of Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni, ‘rival queans’ at Handel’s Royal Academy in the 1720s, suggests that more may lie beneath the surface than simple stereotyping might suggest. Faustina was projected at the time as the archetypal coloratura soprano with a naturally lissome brilliance, contrasting with Cuzzoni’s ‘soothing cantabile’ and deeply felt pathos. Yet, as Suzanne Aspden has argued, this binary polarisation was not inevitably inscribed in their vocal qualities (they had played quite different roles previously), but rather shaped by the opera company around their public personae in a subtle and complex play of identities.32 It was some time before instrumentalists were able to achieve a singer’s star billing. While earlier violinists – Corelli, Vivaldi, Geminiani and so on – were well-known figures in the abstract, it was largely through the distinctive style and widespread appeal of their music that they achieved fame rather than by their own performance. Some deliberately elected to keep their virtuosity to themselves; thus the prodigiously talented violinist Locatelli chose not to appear in public in Amsterdam, preferring private recitals where he played with an extraordinary combination of intense self-absorption and insouciance: He plays his Laberinthe [Op. 3/12] & another piece, wch he has lately composed 50 times more difficult, with more ease than I can humm ye Black Joke; and what is still more extraordinary, he never pulls off his Coat to play it, as I have observed most other great Musiciens do . . . He plays with so much Fury upon his Fiddle, that in my humble opinion, he must wear out some Dozens of them in a year.33
31 M. Everist, ‘ “Madame Dorothea Wendling is arcicontentissima”: the performers of Idomeneo’, in J. Rushton (ed.), W. A. Mozart: Idomeneo, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 50–4; The Letters of Mozart, p. 497. 32 S. Aspden, ‘The “Rival Queans” and the play of identity in Handel’s Admeto’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18 (2006), 301–31. 33 Quoted in A. Dunning, Pietro Antonio Locatelli: Der Virtuose und seine Welt, 2 vols., Buren, Knuf, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 203–4.
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Yet towards the end of the century Viotti achieved international celebrity for his commanding presence, his bold, arresting tone, and the overt bravura of his attitude. That this represents a cultural shift may be supposed in that this same heroic relationship of soloist to orchestra was exploited directly in the contemporary piano concerto: through swashbuckling virtuoso interaction (the opening of the ‘Emperor’ concerto); those imposing chordal statements with which Dussek grabbed the London audience’s attention on the powerful British piano; or the oppositional confrontations in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, a clear metaphor of heroic individualistic assertion against the power and rigidity of the massed orchestra. For the instrumental soloist, composition was regarded as an intrinsic expression of musical personality: creation and performance so intertwined as to be largely indistinguishable. Prodigies and women were permitted to play published concertos, but leading violinists and pianists guarded their own repertoire jealously, only releasing a concerto for publication once confident they had exhausted its public drawing power. There were exceptions of course (the clarinet concertos that Carl Stamitz wrote for Beer in the 1770s, or Mozart for Stadler in 1791); but it was only towards the end of the century that Mozart piano concertos or Viotti violin concertos began to constitute a repertoire that could legitimately be recreated by leading virtuosi. The publication of Beethoven’s concertos in the following decade wrought a decisive shift in the role of the soloist, leading to the modern concept of individual interpretation of canonic masterpieces. One way in which virtuosi differentiated themselves was through their skill and imagination in ornamentation, whether the realisation of notated ornaments or the free embellishment that composers like Corelli deliberately encouraged in sparsely notated Adagios. C. P. E. Bach emphasised the way in which ornaments indispensably heightened musical expression: ‘Embellishments provide opportunities for fine performance as well as much of its subject matter. They improve mediocre compositions. Without them the best melody is empty and ineffective, the clearest content clouded.’34 At the same time he urged moderation in the use of ornaments in order to enhance their impact (‘regard them as spices which may ruin the best dish or gewgaws which may deface the most perfect building’),35 a clear warning against midcentury excess. Many other treatises of the time, including those by Quantz, Leopold Mozart and Geminiani, are equally engaged with the realisation of ornaments and their potential for expressive communication. The latter’s 34 C. P. E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, trans. W. J. Mitchell, 3rd edn, London, Eulenburg, 1974, p. 79. 35 Ibid., p. 81.
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Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (1749) extends the subject to detailed attention to the nuances of minute dynamic inflexions on individual notes. Of course, the fact that such treatises were all published within the space of a few years is a clear sign not only of the burgeoning amateur market for printed music but also of the hunger for professional trade secrets about the ‘right way’ to perform. Many composers published embellished versions of sonatas for amateur performance (a good example being Telemann’s Methodische Sonaten) while simultaneously there was an increasing tendency for composers to communicate a fully worked-out ornamental line within the music itself, thus actually reducing any opportunity for individual creativity, as with the slow movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto. Still more daunting for amateurs to emulate was the ability to improvise: the creative immediacy in cadenzas, variations and even entire pieces that distinguished the most remarkable artists of the day. Improvisation was at the heart of ritualised competitions between leading soloists, enforcing the notion that performance was increasingly regarded as an end in itself. The pianistic battle between Mozart and Clementi for the entertainment of Joseph II in 1781 combined performance of their own compositions with extemporisation (in alternation) on a theme assigned by the emperor. As Tia DeNora has argued, such gladiatorial contests were set up as an entertaining dramatic combat, replete with sporting images (Beethoven and Wölfl as the ‘two athletes’).36 Yet they also provided a forum for aesthetic and stylistic debate at which the reputations of their backers were at stake, not to mention the national origins of the protagonists – Mozart representing the Habsburg Empire and Josephinian reform, Clementi the Catholic Church and Rome. The outcome was declared a draw, but Mozart was scathing about the mere digital dexterity of his opponent (‘he has not a kreuzer’s worth of taste or feeling – in short he is a mere mechanicus’); while Clementi in contrast graciously conceded that until then ‘I had never heard anyone play with such spirit and grace’.
The collective Alongside this tendency towards individualisation and the resultant elevation of the star soloist, a more modest shift can be detected towards a collective concept of music-making, which accelerated during the second half of the eighteenth century. The vogue for Italian comic opera, with its emphasis on ensembles and quick-fire exchanges, led to Italian comic opera troupes touring the capitals of northern Europe, introducing the concept of an operatic company rather than a mere collection of highly paid soloists. Similarly the 36 DeNora, Beethoven, pp. 150–2.
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orchestra itself began to assume its own identity. Of course Lully had already established an ideology of orchestral discipline and consistency in the Vingtquatre violons du roi and other ensembles of the French court: hierarchical, polished ensembles that represented ‘simulacra of a well-functioning autocratic society’.37 It was not, however, until the foundation of the Mannheim orchestra, and its clear identification with Stamitz’s new symphonic style, that a corporate body of orchestral expertise established a recognisable personality as an orchestra, with the force of attack, the vivid dynamic contrasts, the thrilling crescendos and so on that were celebrated across Europe. Certainly the Mannheim orchestra compared favourably with that at the Württemberg court in Stuttgart, where the ensemble was composed of some of the greatest virtuosos in the world – and indeed that was its problem. Each player constituted his own little circle, and conformity to any system was anathema to them all. In ordinary passages one would often hear ornamentation that did not fit in with what the others were playing.38
The corporate concept was explicitly advertised in London’s Professional Concert (1785–93), an orchestra of outstanding individuals identified by name in advertisements and organised as a profit-sharing collective. Generally, however, for a true identity to emerge strong leadership was required. Throughout the eighteenth century such leadership was provided from two angles, both tending eventually towards the ultimate symbol of musical leadership, the conductor. The Kapellmeister or Kantor was inevitably a keyboard player and organist: such dominant figures as Telemann and Handel (or, more locally, J. S. Bach) were highly influential not just in the style of their music but in the context and manner of its performance. Such qualities were passed to Bach’s own sons and thence to the next generation of pianists such as Mozart and Hummel. An alternative springboard for leadership came from violinists such as Corelli and Vivaldi, Pisendel and Stamitz, who as Konzertmeister or orchestra leader proved hugely influential in establishing both orchestral discipline and character. Such notions were further reinforced by the founding of the Paris Conservatoire in 1795, with the specific intent of enhancing French artistic prestige and making possible a unified performance style. While to some extent the uniformity of the modern orchestra represented a suppression of individuality – orchestral discipline was customarily captured in military images as a triumph of rational social organisation – the modern symphony also allowed individual musicians to express themselves in the varied solos and orchestral timbres. Other genres were also designed to enable 37 Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, p. 99.
38 Ibid., p. 255.
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performers to interact in comparatively standardised, generally understood, modes of discourse. Thus the string quartet became the locus classicus for intelligent conversation or debate between four equal performers, while the easy-going symphonie concertante (initially popularised in France in the 1770s) provided its counterpart in the orchestral concerto sphere. In the vocal domain, the kind of communication pioneered in the comic opera ensemble was transferred to the quartet sections of Haydn’s late masses or to his partsongs of the same period, examples of true vocal chamber music.
Venues and sonority We have so far traced the widely dispersed availability of high-quality music in court, church, theatre and private homes, as well as recognisable performance spaces such as long rooms in taverns, dancing schools or trade halls, and even some dedicated concert rooms. Of course, such venues varied greatly in size and scale, as did the vocal and instrumental forces used. A general increase in the size of theatres and concert halls throughout the century (and thus in the ensembles required to fill these larger spaces) represents something of a cliché of music history. Certainly examples are not hard to find: thus the orchestra of the Munich Kapelle increased from 25 around 1750 to 44 twenty years later, rising to as many as 88 in the early 1780s.39 It is usually assumed that such escalation was closely related to the need to accommodate increasing audiences. But what of the impact and performance aesthetics these contrasts and changes embody? To some degree, eighteenth-century performance is naturally associated with a small chamber aesthetic, with one instrument to a part (as was surely the intent with the Brandenburg Concertos): the sounds intermingling in a subtle interplay of mildly differentiated timbres of soft-voiced instruments and voices, a refined and nuanced engagement. Such intimate venues as the Holywell Music Room in Oxford (opened in 1748) or Drottningholm Theatre in Sweden, the audience inevitably close to the performers, seem designed for the purpose. This kind of aura is captured in a well-known print depicting Frederick the Great accompanied by an ensemble of no more than ten players; and Mozart published his three concertos K413–15 specifically with the possibility of single-string accompaniment in mind. Bach cantatas may or may not have been performed with only one voice or instrument per part, but there could never have been more than three or four to a line in regular circumstances.40 Even where we can justifiably speak of an orchestra in 39 Ibid., p. 318. 40 The bibliography on this contentious issue is too substantial to be cited here, but see also R. Maunder, The Scoring of Baroque Concertos, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2004.
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the modern sense, the numbers were often small. Haydn’s early symphonies were performed by an ensemble numbering 14 in the large room at Eisenstadt, while Handel’s Messiah was given at the Foundling Hospital in 1754 with only 24 singers to an orchestra of 40.41 Nevertheless, we need to bear in mind the acoustics of the places where music was heard. The impressive Eisenstadt room is unusually reverberant. On the other hand, the Hanover Square Rooms in London, where the Professional Concert had a regular complement of about thirty-two, was comparatively small (790 × 320 ) but clear and dry in acoustic. Considering this, the impact of the explosive effects and vivid orchestral timbres of the latest Haydn symphonies must have been extraordinary. Indeed eighteenth-century instruments themselves, though softer in volume, often exude a penetrating or raucous colour, as in stopped notes on the horn, or violin open strings, or the variable timbres of the fortepiano. The very differentiation of timbres lends a much less refined sonority: is it possible that performance in the eighteenth century was much more direct and raw than we like to imagine? Certainly in Mozart symphonies where modern tasteful performance might prefer a subtle fade, the composer often emphasises the final note of a phrase with a violin chord synonymous with strong attack. Nor should we forget that sublime grandeur and overtly thrilling choral and orchestral effects featured strongly in music in big ‘public’ spaces throughout the period. Roman society revelled in large orchestras, such as the 150 instrumentalists assembled at Queen Christina’s palace in 1687 to celebrate the accession of the Catholic James II to the English throne. Two years later an oratorio at Pamphili’s palace impressed with its powerful sonority: ‘The fullness of the instrumentation, with so many contrabasses for a foundation and with trumpets too, created such a resonance that the whole room seemed to echo.’42 Outsize ensembles reached their apogee with the 1,067 performers at the London Handel festival in 1791. But other indicators also suggest a much more widespread enthusiasm for volume and sonority in the later eighteenth century: thus when in 1795 Haydn’s London concerts were transferred to the larger Opera House Concert Room seating 800, the woodwinds were doubled as a matter of course. And Mozart hailed with unbridled enthusiasm the large orchestra at a charity concert for the Tonkünstler-Societät: ‘The symphony went magnifique and had the greatest success. There were forty violins, the wind-instruments were all doubled, there were ten violas, ten double basses, eight violoncellos and six bassoons.’43
41 McVeigh, Concert Life, p. 207. 42 Quoted in Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, pp. 119–20.
43 The Letters of Mozart, p. 724.
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By this time, of course, instruments themselves were already starting to mutate in order to provide greater volume and ever more brilliant tonal projection. Violin modernisation was already underway (Viotti introducing the powerful Tourte bow design in the 1780s); while the piano had transformed from the small square of the 1760s into the grand design that could hold its own in bold and dramatic concertos by Dussek and Beethoven. The large and resonant British pianos, heavier in action than the quicksilver Viennese, were capable of muscular chords and rich sonorities, as well as the beginnings of a noble legato. British technology was indeed intimately related to the identification of a distinctive London pianoforte school in the wake of Clementi, with modern piano virtuosi appearing in J. B. Cramer, Field and Dussek, the latter reportedly pioneering the sideways placing of the piano so as better to exploit his attractive profile. He himself promoted Broadwoods at London concerts during the 1790s, in a striking synergy between musical style, performance and commerce. That a sense of elevated performance demanded a sense of strain at the limits of technology is vividly captured in Reicha’s account of turning pages for Beethoven in a Mozart concerto as early as 1795: I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers struck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted on finishing the concerto and so, back and forth I leaped, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page and I worked harder than Beethoven.44
The report need not be taken too literally, but this impression of Beethoven’s aggressive, emotionally charged style of playing certainly chimes with his advocacy of a more powerful and more resonant Viennese instrument – one more closely resembling its London counterparts.
Performance as musical experience Every sphere of eighteenth-century musical life witnessed a heightening of professional skills, length and formality – from Bach in the organ loft to the Singspiel stage to the symphony concert hall. An increasing formality and professionalism raised musical performance towards a more universal and public significance: a shift in the very notion of performance from mere diversion to an end in itself, even one central to the smooth running of society. Its ritual functions had been quietly transferred from court and church to alternative sites appropriate to its changing social roles: to the formal design 44 Quoted in DeNora, Beethoven, p. 175.
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of the public concert, the public Italian opera season, the glee club, the domestic music-making of the eligible daughter of the house. Meanwhile the main musical genres were in turn formalised and aligned with the main performing groups: the concerto grosso with the emerging concept of the orchestra, the symphony with the modern classical line-up, the oratorio with the incipient choral society, the string quartet as an inherent celebration of intellectual equality.
Programming and listening As active participation in music-making that mixed amateurs and professionals gradually declined in favour of a more passive reception, so events took on more formal conventions of their own. The look and feel of the concert (what was expected of performers and audience alike) changed completely, with early indications of silent listening in dedicated halls – the so-called sacralisation of music most associated with the nineteenth century. The first London concerts were informal and sometimes insalubrious. Banister ‘procured a large room in Whitefryars, near the Temple back gate, and made a large raised box for the musitians, whose modesty required curtaines. The room was rounded with seats and small tables alehouse fashion. One shilling was the price and call for what you pleased.’45 Six years later Thomas Britton, the self-educated ‘musical small-coal man’ began his unorthodox concerts above his warehouse in unfashionable Clerkenwell, the narrow, low-ceilinged room accessible only by crawling up an outside staircase. ‘Notwithstanding all, this mansion, despicable as it may seem, attracted to it as polite an audience as ever the opera did’, the Duchess of Queensbury being among the most prominent patrons.46 Even the early professional concerts at the York Buildings room suffered from rivalries between ‘spightfull’ musicians and a lack of leadership: Besides the whole was without designe or order; for one master brings a consort with fuges, another shews his guifts in a solo upon the violin, another sings, and then a famous lutinist comes foreward, and in this manner changes followed each other, with a full cessation of the musick between every one, and a gable and bustle while they changed places.47
Compare this with the well-ordered pattern of the late eighteenth-century concert, a regular alternation of vocal and instrumental items in a ten- or twelve-item programme in predictable succession. The ambience of a concert 45 Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, p. 352. 46 J. Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols., London, Novello, Ewer & Co., 1875, vol. 2, p. 790. 47 Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, p. 353.
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hall such as the Hanover Square Rooms was more stylised, formal, ‘polite’, with rows of benches ranged down the hall and sofas along the side, and a clear separation from the performers, who were assuredly not permitted to mingle with the company. Nevertheless, we should not conclude that such concerts already inspired the detached but intense emotional and intellectual involvement that the nineteenth century bequeathed to the present day. In most circumstances there were no serried ranks or quiet reverence – indeed listeners were always willing to show their appreciation after individual movements, and even during the music itself. The extent to which audiences actually paid attention to the music, how far they really listened, has been the subject of a great deal of recent scholarly attention. If opera and concerts were primarily a complex social ritual, it is hardly surprising that audiences conversed and wandered around, took refreshments, gossiped, flirted, or played cards – indeed theatre boxes were specifically designed to provide private space with precisely such social intercourse in mind. It was even considered infra dig. to be seen to be too attentive. The audience, especially if it included royalty or sovereign, was after all the main show, as one visitor to Mannheim made abundantly clear: After six o’clock the court entered, the elector and electress, the dowager electress of Bavaria, and the ladies-in-waiting and cavaliers. Then the music began and at the same time everyone began to play cards. There was such a crush of people that I at first despaired of getting through to see their Highnesses up close . . . The Electresses, who were my real object, were seated so that I was unable to see their faces. So I waited patiently and listened in the meantime to the orchestra.48
Yet at the same time audiences would have become very familiar with operas heard night after night, whether by Lully or by leading Italian composers; and as William Weber has justly observed, even if a wide range of social etiquette pertained at concerts and opera during the eighteenth century, one could certainly listen when one wanted to.49 Programmes, too, were designed for disparate tastes. It would have been unthinkable to present a concert programme without an agreeable mixture of vocal and instrumental genres, and there are numerous descriptions of London audiences crowding forward to pay attention when the favourite singer came on or a Haydn symphony began, but wandering off whenever they lost interest. Was there a change in attitude as the century progressed? Certainly at different times and in different places we can identify evidence of what James
48 Quoted in Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, p. 258. 49 Weber, The Great Transformation, p. 17.
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Johnson has termed ‘the new attentiveness’.50 For example, in earnest northern Germany (by contrast with Vienna): There they are content with the pure enjoyment of the music, without wishing to have the pleasures of card playing, eating and drinking in addition. There you would think you showed both the music lovers and professional musicians a discourtesy and dishonored the music, if you rattled playing chips and hot chocolate cups throughout.51
Indeed when the Leipzig symphony concerts moved to the Gewandhaus, backed by civic intervention, this was an explicit rejection of the casual etiquette of the former tavern concerts. The espousal of high musical values and devoted listening as a virtue in itself was enshrined from the start in the motto painted on the ceiling: ‘Res severa est verum gaudium’ (A thing seriously pursued affords true pleasure).
Reaching an audience There are many strands to this debate. In the first place, the very notion of communicating with an audience began to be described in quite different language around the middle of the century. While earlier aesthetic theory had emphasised an indirect model of ‘raising the affections’ in the listener – a system of static emotional responses encoded in conventional musical figures – the age of sensibility encouraged a much more direct relationship, whereby the performer could manipulate the feelings of the audience as the piece went along. C. P. E. Bach’s Empfindsamer Stil, with its exaggerated contrasts of mood and its hyper-intense emotional roller coaster, involved the performer explicitly: A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must of necessity feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his audience, for the revealing of his own humor will stimulate a like humor in the listener. In languishing, sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad. Thus will the expression of the piece be more clearly perceived by the audience. Similarly, in lively, joyous passages, the executant must again put himself into the appropriate mood. And so, constantly varying the passions, he will barely quiet one before he rouses another.52
Additionally, with ‘real life’ characters in both opera buffa and in the vernacular forms of musical theatre, the second half of the century witnessed some shift from an emphasis on virtuosity towards stage performance, whether in ensemble interaction or in the affecting romance of opéra comique. The naturalistic
50 Johnson, Listening in Paris, pp. 53–70. 52 C. P. E. Bach, Essay, p. 152.
51 Quoted in Morrow, Concert Life, p. 54.
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acting of the British Shakespearian David Garrick proved hugely influential on theatrical delivery, partly through his impact on the choreographer Noverre, while a new simplicity and directness of musical expression lay at the heart of Gluck’s reforms of serious opera. These shifts redefined the relation between performer and public, as audiences engaged with an immediacy of feeling in both music and drama, identifying with the characters’ intense emotions as they glimpsed a reflection of themselves on stage. With this engagement came signs that theatre audiences were beginning to listen more intently, as a Paris journalist reported in 1779: ‘An extreme and uninterrupted attentiveness, the strongest emotions visible on every face . . . prolonged by enthusiasm one moment and cut short the next for fear of losing a word or a note of music: such were the signs of interest and approval.’53 Yet at the same time the expansion of audiences in the second half of the century undoubtedly meant a wider spread of musical understanding, typically expressed in simplified typology as ‘Kenner und Liebhaber’ (connoisseurs and amateurs). The distinction was exaggeratedly guyed by Leopold Mozart: I advise you when composing to consider not only the musical, but also the unmusical public. You must remember that to every ten real connoisseurs there are a hundred ignoramuses. So do not neglect the so-called popular style, which tickles long ears.54
Mozart himself was certainly alert to the potential of responding directly to the tastes of the Parisian public: Just in the middle of the first Allegro there was a passage which I felt sure must please. The audience were quite carried away – and there was a tremendous burst of applause. But as I knew, when I wrote it, what effect it would surely produce, I had introduced the passage again at the close – when there were shouts of ‘Da capo’.55
When he arrived in London, Haydn too showed his awareness that music should appeal to different constituencies and tastes, recognising a distinct and diverse English audience in revising his Symphony No. 91 (‘for I have to change many things for the English public’).56 It was, as so often, a fine line. For many, music itself had been cheapened by the commercialisation of public performance. Even in the 1760s there were those who castigated the new symphonic style as an abrogation of the art of music, and the gradual accommodation of the ‘long ears’ led to accusations of vulgarisation in the attention-grabbing public effects, the folk-song rondos, 53 Quoted in Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 59. 54 The Letters of Mozart, p. 685. 55 Ibid., p. 558. 56 Quoted in H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn in England 1791–1795, London, Thames & Hudson, 1976, p. 140.
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the programmatic symphonies, the jingoistic military images. Shallow virtuosity, whether at the Italian opera or in the solo concerto, came under constant attack. As a result, across Europe there arose sites of classicism and connoisseurship where artistic reaction was explicitly voiced.
Counter-cultures Through the works of Rameau and his contemporaries, French opera maintained the essence of Lully’s emphasis on serious classical drama, in which the matching of French poesy to declamatory recitative and short airs was valued far above mere vocal display – and, indeed, there exists some evidence that audiences were more quietly attentive at the Opéra than at its Italian equivalents. The so-called ‘reform’ operas of Gluck partook strongly of this French aesthetic, adopting from Greek models the concentrated intensity of individual tragedy, while valuing simplicity of melodic expression and monumental choral writing over the attenuated instrumental melismas of the Italianate vocal style. Even Orfeo ed Euridice, though first performed in Vienna in Italian, had its musical origins in Paris. The choice of Gaetano Guadagni for the principal role was significant too. He had learnt acting and dramatic illusion from Garrick in London, and Charles Burney described his style of performance in unique terms: ‘The Music he sung was the most simple imaginable; a few notes with frequent pauses, and opportunities of being liberated from the composer and the band, were all he wanted.’57 The new emphasis on simplicity as an attribute of performance and musical communication was of profound importance in the late eighteenth century, extending far beyond French opera. It is also significant that the Opéra preserved works by dead composers, comprising at least 50 per cent of the productions around 1760.58 La musique ancienne was also a feature of the Concert Spirituel, in the form of Lalande’s grand motet, a bastion of French tradition lauded by those connoisseurs opposed to ‘abusive new customs’, but also much more widely appreciated. Burney reported of a 1770 performance: But though this wholly stunned me, I plainly saw, by the smiles of ineffable satisfaction which were visible in the countenances of ninety-nine out of a hundred of the company, and heard, by the most violent applause that a ravished audience could bestow, that it was quite what their hearts felt, and their souls loved.59
57 C. Burney, A General History of Music, ed. F. Mercer, 2 vols., London, Foulis, 1935, vol. 2, p. 876. 58 Weber, The Great Transformation, p. 74. 59 An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in France and Italy, p. 17. This passage has sometimes been misinterpreted: what stunned Burney was the violence with which a counter-tenor attacked his solo, but the general point about audience reaction still stands.
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Yet attachment to older music in the late eighteenth century was far from merely a conservative revulsion against the superficiality and vulgarity of modern music. Rather it was an assertion of lasting values, in an explicit linkage between continuity of heritage and that of the established social order. Veneration of ‘ancient’ music – whether vocal music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or (eventually) that of Handel and Bach – brought about an important shift of perspective. London’s Academy of Ancient Music (founded in 1726) was dedicated to maintaining not only earlier repertoire but also what were perceived as universal values of contrapuntal interplay and harmonic solidity. Later in the century the role of ancient music in the national heritage was increasingly emphasised, particularly as the older social order was coming under threat. Indeed the aristocratic Concert of Ancient Music, by explicitly banishing music less than twenty years old, was specifically orientated towards a backward-looking agenda. When George III threw his weight behind the movement, the society’s concerts effectively became court events, controlled by the king and witnessed in reverential silence. It is yet another sign of the classicising values of the ancient movement that it was associated with the reaction against ornamentation: Burney noted that Rubinelli sang ‘Return, O God of hosts’ at the Abbey plain and unadorned, quite at variance with authentic Handelian practice.60 Another devotee of older music was Gottfried van Swieten, who in Vienna in the early 1780s formed a coterie of amateurs and musicians (including Mozart and Salieri) to perform and discuss older music. He supported performances of Handel oratorios at the Tonkünstler-Societät and at private performances for his Gesellschaft der Associierten Cavaliere, for which Mozart made his modern orchestra arrangement of Handel’s Messiah, among other works. This is the background – in addition to Haydn’s own experience of Handel’s music in London – against which Haydn’s late oratorios should be placed.
The new musical seriousness The ‘listening trope’ – highlighting the shift from music as instrument of social intercourse towards music as object of intense aesthetic contemplation – has in recent years supplanted (or at any rate become fused with) the ‘bourgeois trope’. But such an emphasis presents a further set of paradoxes. To what extent can we identify this ‘new attentiveness’, or what William Weber has described as ‘musical idealism’, with a rising bourgeoisie?61 The picture already presented is diverse enough, in all conscience. On the one hand, the new musical seriousness was the preserve of aristocratic 60 Burney, A General History, vol. 2, p. 899.
61 Weber, The Great Transformation, pp. 85–121.
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connoisseurs cleaving to older musical traditions as symbolic of their own social position (the French Opéra, the Concert of Ancient Music, the ‘Associierten’); or of those Viennese noblemen who nurtured a highbrow culture around Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. On the other hand, national theatres or bourgeois societies were leading the assault against the frivolous aristocratic culture of Italian opera and the miscellaneous concert (the OpéraComique, the Castle Society, the Leipzig Gewandhaus symphony concerts). Ironically the strongest aristocratic reaction against ‘modern’ music around 1780 coincided with the very moment when the latest symphonic productions – more challenging in musical argument, more intense in contrapuntal exchange, more profound in emotional range – were being claimed by a different clientele. It may be tempting to argue that the new attitudes reflected middle-class values of moderation and industriousness (‘res severa’) by contrast with aristocratic extravagance and excess, as contemporary periodicals were keen to emphasise. Certainly the Gewandhaus concerts identified a bourgeois association with the serious values of later symphonic culture, and the notion of symphony concerts as the pinnacle of musical art spread in the early nineteenth century to the Paris Conservatoire concerts, the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, London’s Philharmonic Society and others. But we should be wary of over-simplification. In the later part of the period, music was enjoyed by diverse urban clienteles in every major European city, while ‘middle class’ was an increasingly slippery concept, as its upper tier broke away to meld into a more widely drawn social elite. In truth, new attitudes were coming into play: London’s Philharmonic Society, for example, placed artistic credentials above social class in selecting members for admittance. Musical taste had assuredly begun to override social distinctions.
Conclusion The eighteenth century laid the basis for much that still endures in terms of attitudes towards performance, in so far as it was increasingly seen as the preserve of professionals, to be attended by a passive audience, whose own amateur performance sphere was strictly circumscribed. In most circumstances, however, music played a largely functional role within other rituals of primarily social and political import. This is not to argue that, even in such circumstances, people failed to enjoy music for its own sake, taking pleasure in an emotionally and intellectually rewarding experience; but only gradually did the act of performance itself become the object of consideration. In part the change can be attributed to the seemingly inexhaustible fascination with star performers (and, by extension, orchestras); in part to the formalisation of the
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sites of performance into a few standard patterns, centred around opera (in both cosmopolitan and vernacular forms) and the weekly symphony concert. Instrumental music had assuredly achieved by the end of the century an equal footing in the musical landscape, even in some circles an artistic ascendancy. Court rituals emphasising social hierarchy and aristocratic extravagance, in which enjoyment of music was only a fraction of what was on offer, were gradually replaced by new etiquettes of listening and new hierarchies based on artistic understanding (‘Kenner und Liebhaber’). The culture of attentive listening, symbolised by the rise of formal concert structures in dedicated halls, was intimately connected with the development of enduring repertoire, first associated with Handel oratorios, then gradually extended to the symphonies of Haydn (‘the Shakespeare of music’) and, at least after his death, to Mozart. The concept was irrevocably cemented with Beethoven’s instrumental music. With the decline of improvised performance practices, and even of ornamentation in some spheres, a concentration on ‘the music itself’ might be thought to have detracted from the role of the performer. Increasingly punctilious definition of expression within the score, even metronome marks, certainly reduced the scope for creativity. But paradoxically the idea that musical works could maintain an existence independent of their progenitors began to lend performance itself a separate status, something that was to become still more apparent through the nineteenth century, as highly personal renditions of a canonic repertoire were compared and debated. For a piano soloist to shape his own interpretation of a Beethoven concerto was an entirely different concept from the eighteenth-century notion that a performer’s artistic personality was wrapped up in his compositional imagination and flair as an improviser.
. 21 .
Vocal performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’ JOHN POTTER
Public music-making in the eighteenth century was essentially a sociable and an urban activity, with singing to be encountered in the streets, in theatres, concert rooms and churches, as well as in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. At the end of the seventeenth century there was still a recognised division between ‘gentlemen’, who made music for their own pleasure, and masters, ‘who are to earn their support by pleasing not themselves, for it is their day labour, but others’, as Roger North put it.1 This socio-musical distinction is one of the defining aspects of the period, but by the early years of the nineteenth century the line between gentlemen and players was less distinct; there was an international opera circuit, institutionalised music teaching, and a popular engagement with singing and singers that would have been unrecognisable to the dilettante of a hundred years earlier. The period saw some of the most important developments in the history of singing; the castrati came into their own and continued to represent the acme of vocalism even as great women soloists established themselves as serious competitors. It was the age of the first star tenor soloists – not the power performers that we now associate with the voice, but lyrical singers, often taught by castrati, who exploited their head register to take them to great heights. Twentieth-century music history identified two distinct eighteenth-century periods – the Baroque and the Classical – but in practice the developments in composition meant very little to singers, whose freely creative contribution to the art of performance was probably greater than at any time before or since. There is some evidence that the Renaissance ideal of separate performance styles for church, chamber and theatre continued on into the eighteenth century, but the differences between them were increasingly of scale rather than substance (and the aristocratic ‘chamber’ increasingly gave way to the bourgeois drawing room). Beyond this, there was almost no concept of stylistic appropriateness at all, as most of Europe succumbed to a common set of Italian practices, which gave singers
1 J. Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, Being a Selection of his Essays Written during the Years c. 1695–1728, London, Novello, 1959, p. 15.
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the means to improvise in a manner that now only survives in jazz. In the words of Domenico Corri, ‘The vocal music of all the other European nations bears no distinguishing peculiarity of style; their melodies in general appear to have derived from the Italian school.’2 The key issue is the set of relationships singers had with their audiences, their critics and the composers who provided them with the raw material for their creativity. The composer was almost always the least important point in this matrix, his best hope being that he might enjoy some reflected glory from the singers for whom he tailored his work. Even the most successful singers were ‘masters’ rather than ‘gentlemen’ and as such were always conscious of their rather precarious position in the social hierarchy. Their aesthetic and musical judgement was always at the risk of ridicule from their social betters, who expected them not to exceed the boundaries of good taste. Singers were not generally born to ‘good taste’ – they had to learn and absorb it, and the performances that resulted were a complicated compromise between musical creativity – a masterly activity – and the restraint demanded by a socio-aesthetic convention that reached a long way back into the aristocratic past. The tension created by the interaction of these polar opposites informs the literature and performance practice of the entire period. The singerly expression of taste was further shaped by the relationship between composer and performer. This was a much more equal partnership than it would become in the nineteenth century: the music was in effect owned by performers at the moment of delivery, and they would routinely transcend whatever the composer had put down on paper. Charles Burney referred to it as ‘opportunities of being liberated from the composer and the band’.3 For the inhabitants of the eighteenth-century musical world it was the age of Farinelli and Pacchierotti, Faustina and Cuzzoni, Mara, Raaf and their star singer contemporaries, not the age of Handel, Haydn and Mozart that history would eventually construct.4 Many performers were themselves more than competent composers and were well aware of the skeletal nature of the written score. Ideally, the singer would create a performance that would improve on the composer’s blueprint and impress the wider public without distressing those who considered pandering to the audience impossibly vulgar. There was a balance to be struck between taste (which was fundamentally conservative and rooted in aristocratic tradition) and fashion or mode, a continually evolving 2 D. Corri, Singers’ Preceptor, London, Silvester, 1810, facsimile edn, ed. R. Maunder as Domenico Corri’s Treatise on Singing, New York, Garland, 1995, p. 70. 3 A reference to the singing of Gaetano Guadagni, in C. Burney, A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 5 vols., London, the author, 1789, vol. 4, p. 496. 4 J. Rice (‘Mozart and his Singers’, Opera Quarterly, 11/4 (1995), 31–52) succinctly sums up the historiographical problems associated with attributing creative vision solely to composers.
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popular response to the music that sometimes appeared to threaten not just the aesthetic but the social fabric as well. According to most commentators on singing (who clearly thought they could recognise good taste when they heard it), the performers who could resolve the taste–mode equation satisfactorily were very few and far between; the result is a century-long literature of complaint, as writer after writer lamented the fact that singing was much better in a previous era. Most of our evidence comes from singing treatises and commentaries by scholars, travellers and antiquarians. The treatises often include some basic theory: music was still considered something mysterious and exotic by those who consumed rather than produced it. They tend to be conservative, opinionated and retrospective, a pessimistic paradigm which has persisted in the genre until the present day. This is often in contrast to less dogmatic observers such as Burney, who sometimes rejoice in the very things criticised in the pedagogical literature. There are also useful instrumental sources that contain information about singing, the most significant being those by C. P. E. Bach and J. J. Quantz. As these two musicians considered themselves to be primarily composers, they contain rather more prescriptive information, which may reflect their own requirements rather than actual practice. The treatises need to be read with care, therefore, if we are to gain insights into what singers actually did.5 The castrati have been considered the dominant force in both performance and its evolving pedagogy. Castration had been a fact of musical life for many generations and although there were routine expressions of revulsion at the process itself, it was accepted as perfectly normal for a high male voice to sing either a male or female role.6 By 1700 castrati were well established in Italian churches and theatres and were appreciated in England, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and parts of Germany despite occasional ethical worries (the French never really took to singerly emasculation, with the exception of the court, where castrati were known as italiens).7 Castrated men had undeniable physical advantages over female singers: their large chests gave them huge reserves of breath which supported a child-size larynx. This enabled them to achieve unmatched control and great virtuosity with the minimum of effort. Burney
5 The modern ‘early music’ movement has often made little attempt to distinguish between what composers may have intended and what they actually got, largely though a failure to ask why the surviving treatises came to be written. 6 In the Papal States, for example, the Church banished women from the stage, so castrati played both male and female roles. For the performers of the time this was pragmatic decision-making (which pre-dates modern concepts of gender). 7 See L. Sawkins, ‘For and against the order of nature: who sang the soprano?’ Early Music, 15 (1987), 315–24, especially 318ff.
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recounts the story (heard from the singer himself) of how the seventeen-yearold Farinelli competed nightly at the opera in Rome ‘in brilliancy and force’ with a trumpeter. After much virtuosic interplay the instrumentalist gave up the struggle, whereupon the castrato ‘broke out all at once in the same breath, with fresh vigour, and not only swelled and shook the note, but ran the most rapid and difficult divisions, and was only silenced at last by the acclamations of the audience’.8 It was a subsequent conversation with the Emperor Charles VI in Vienna, however, that awakened the naive and enthusiastic youth to the virtues of aristocratic restraint, and by the time he came to England in 1734 Farinelli was able to mix his crowd-pleasing fireworks with a simplicity of delivery that delighted and moved the cognoscenti as well as the crowd.
An Italian in England: Pier Francesco Tosi and the pessimistic paradigm None of the greatest singers left any writings about how they did it. The most favoured musicians of the period had neither the time nor the inclination to commit their thoughts to posterity; even in retirement a successful performer was likely to be far too busy with teaching and social commitments. We are dependent on the often polemical writings of a number of lesser singers, many of them retired castrati with a mission to preserve their own reputations and the musical values of their youth, filtered through the experience of growing into the kind of understanding of aristocratic taste such as Farinelli learned from Charles VI. Although women singers were often very successful performers, their extra-musical social activities (especially after retiring from the stage) meant they were much less likely to become teachers, and with one or two exceptions women do not make a significant contribution to the literature until the twentieth century. Like Pistocchi, Bernacchi and the other great teachers of earlier in the century, Farinelli’s teacher, Nicola Porpora, left very few pedagogical remains beyond the names of his students.9 The page of exercises that he is said to have devised for his pupils may well have been quite typical of the minimal pedagogical material that teachers would normally provide: a highly condensed aide mémoire to be used in the absence of the master, rather than a comprehensive teaching manual.10 8 C. Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, London, Becket, 1771, facsimile edn, New York, Elibron, 2005, p. 206. 9 Pistocchi (1659–1726), a fellow castrato whom Tosi admired, taught the castrato Bernacchi (who would in turn teach the Mozart tenor Anton Raaf and many other high-profile soloists). Porpora, a tenor, equally famous as composer and teacher, numbered the castrati Caffarelli and Farinelli among an illustrious list of star pupils. 10 See M. Harris, Porpora’s Elements of Singing, London, 1858, for an edition allegedly from the original.
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The earliest comprehensive account of the vocal style and technique of the period is the Opinioni de’cantori antichi e moderni, o sieno Osservazioni sopra il canto figurato, published in Bologna in 1723 by the seventy-year-old castrato Pier Francesco Tosi.11 This is a typically pessimistic work, and much of what he writes is qualified by reference to an earlier and better time. He complains that ‘a false taste in music is so prevailing’ and that ‘it is incontestable, that the neglect of true study, the sacrificing the beauty of the voice to a number of illregulated volubilities, the neglecting the pronunciation and expression of the words besides many other things taken notice of in this treatise, are all bad’.12 But embedded in Tosi’s list of complaints are key stylistic traits that were current in his seventeenth-century youth and are still acknowledged (however imperfectly) by his contemporaries in the mid-1720s. The translation and subsequent dissemination of this work and its offshoots suggest that these core elements were still relevant and meaningful much later in the century; the surface detail of performance practice was subject to fashion and whim and was constantly in flux, but the fundamentals of style and technique show very little change from the Purcellian period of Tosi’s youth to the time of Mozart and beyond.13 In something of a publishing coup, Tosi addresses teachers, students and professionals, claiming that he is the first to deal comprehensively with singing beyond the basics (and the book does indeed mark the beginning of a publishing genre that continues to this day). There is some evidence that aspiring professional performers read Tosi, but most of his sales are likely to have been in the lucrative amateur market, where his musings would have supplemented the one-to-one master–protégé(e) model which was the norm.14 He may have realised (like Caccini before him) that his place in history was more likely to be secured by his writing than either his performances or his reputation as a teacher. His title is significant: the moderni that he refers to are the singers at his time of writing, whom he compares (always unfavourably) with the antichi of his youth in the second half of the seventeenth century. The differences are partly of compositional style – he is particularly exercised by the relentless cheerfulness of the moderns and their lack of sensitive adagio 11 P. F. Tosi, Opinioni de’cantori antichi e moderni, o sieno Osservazioni sopra il canto figurato, Bologna, 1723. References to the Opinioni below refer to the English translation by John Galliard: Observations on the Florid Song by Pier Francesco Tosi, London, 1743, facsimile edn, London, Reeves, 1967. 12 Tosi, Opinioni, p. xi. 13 So illuminating was Tosi’s book that it was translated into Dutch in 1731, English in 1743 and German in 1757. It was later plundered by Johann Hiller in 1780 and Domenico Corri in 1810, and is referred to by Manuel García the younger in 1841. For a history of Tosi’s publication in the context of the German translation by Agricola see J. Baird, Introduction to the Art of Singing by Johann Friedrich Agricola, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 239 n. 5. For examples of the whimsicalness of minor details such as the ‘correct’ application of appoggiaturas see her comments on pp. 13–14. 14 The German diva Mara is known to have studied Tosi’s writings as part of her training in Leipzig from 1766 onwards. See I. Emerson, Five Centuries of Women Singers, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2005, p. 84.
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singing – but his broader point is that modern singers have abandoned taste and technique for crowd-pleasing effects in an unprecedented ornamental freefor-all. He mentions the three basic styles required for church, theatre and chamber singing, although he acknowledges that the differences between them are quite unknown to many of his contemporaries.15 Each of these should have its own individual rhetorical style but all sound technique starts with simple common elements which would enable the student to learn any piece of music in the future without the help of a teacher (it was not the teacher’s task to coach specific pieces of music). Instruction begins with solfeggi, taught by a lesser master (and devised by him) and consisting of exercises on the solfa note names. These would instil a basic sense of tone and tuning, and (equally important, bearing in mind the lack of attention apparently given to rehearsal) an ability to sing at sight. Once sufficient progress had been made (which might take up to a year) students would progress to exercises on vowels. From the start the student would also be given exercises in messa di voce – literally ‘placing the voice’ (or ‘putting forth the voice’ as it is sometimes translated). A messa di voce is a single note which begins very quietly and crescendoes to a climax before gradually subsiding, the whole accomplished in one breath, and is one of the techniques that all authorities insist upon as an essential foundation for good singing. Tosi says it has an ‘exquisite effect’, although he does not actually explain that it must have formed the basis of a breathing technique.16 He says very little about breathing (one of the essential foundations for today’s singers), presumably because the effects of messa di voce were perfectly obvious to those attempting it. In practice, one cannot make a gradual crescendo and diminuendo on one note, holding a steady and consistent tone, without simultaneously (and presumably subconsciously in the case of Baroque singers) developing the musculature required to control the air flow. Singers would also need to know how to add ornamental graces to the music in the form of appoggiaturas and trills, and they should acquire a repertoire of ‘divisions’ from which could be generated the potentially infinite number of cadenzas for the three ‘final’ cadence points in a da capo aria. They should also learn how to join notes together using portamento, and to move from their chest register to the head voice (or falsetto) without the listener being aware of the change. By this time they were also expected to be able to accompany themselves on the harpsichord (essential for chamber performances) and to understand basic 15 Tosi, Opinioni, p. 92. This was a Renaissance tradition which went back many centuries and was presumably still current in Tosi’s youth. See Chapter 17 of the present volume. 16 For an acoustic analysis of the phonatory procedures during certain sorts of messa di voce, see J. Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy, University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 245–53.
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composition.17 This latter skill was needed for much the same reasons that jazz singers need to know about chords – so they can improvise without compromising the harmonic framework. Tosi complains about time-keeping, and his seemingly contradictory comments have sometimes confused modern performers. He says that soloists should ‘sing to the utmost rigour of time’, and that ‘I cannot sufficiently recommend to a student the exact keeping of time’, which seems to imply a strict sense of tempo.18 Later, however, he talks about rubato, ‘stealing time exactly on the true motion of the bass’, and then suggests that a flexible approach to tempo is absolutely essential: ‘Whoever does not know how to steal the time in singing knows not how to compose nor accompany himself, and is destitute of the best taste and the greatest knowledge. The stealing of time, in the pathetic, is an honourable theft in one that sings better than others, provided he makes restitution with ingenuity.’19 What he means here is something akin to the jazz musician’s concept of swing: the singer is free to move either side of the beat while the bass maintains the tempo, and he implies that in practice singers are often much freer than he would like them to be. Rubato can be combined with portamento in an effect that Tosi calls strascino. Galliard translated this as ‘dragg’ and gives two examples of this descending ornament for which the singer ‘begins with a high note, dragging it gently down to a low one, with the forte and piano, almost gradually, with inequality of motion . . . stopping a little more on some notes’.20 He advises combining this with messa di voce. This is an extremely complex and creative ornament and an example of just how much the singer was expected to fill out the composer’s outline. The singer would spontaneously recompose as he or she thought fit, adding additional notes to get to a position from which a flexible downward glide can be made, independent of whatever else might be going on, manipulating both pitches and tempo. Tosi’s complaints reveal a picture of vigorous and undisciplined creativity on the part of singers, who often seem to have very little regard for anything except the extravagant display of their own talent. The moderns have no idea of time-keeping – they make pauses when everything has to come to stop while they interpolate divisions to milk the applause (women are especially guilty here), whereas Pistocchi, Siface, Signora Lotti and Signora Boschi all managed without this kind of interruption.21 They rush their roulades and do far too many of them, trying to impress audiences with a torrent of notes; they do not stick to the rules about cadential trills; they do pre-prepared ornaments and 17 Tosi, Pistocchi, Porpora, Farinelli and many other star performers were also successful composers. 18 Tosi, Opinioni, pp. 64 and 99. 19 Ibid., pp. 129 and 156. 20 Ibid., pp. 178–9; there is a written-out example on p. 197. 21 Ibid., pp. 100–4.
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copy each other (especially women). He also makes an early reference to the practice of singers carrying their own favourite arias around with them and inserting them into whatever opera they were currently working on, and he hints darkly of singers who bribe composers to give them arias intended for others.22 We can also get an idea of the atmosphere that prevailed in opera houses: some singers talk and laugh on stage, a complaint also made by Tosi’s contemporary Marcello and by Giambattista Mancini many years later.23
Tosi’s successors: Mancini and the transmission of the essential elements An English translation of Tosi’s work by John Galliard appeared in 1743. Galliard was a German composer who had come to London as a court musician in 1706. He probably first encountered Tosi on one of the singer’s many visits to London and writes appreciatively of him in his preface. Galliard would have been in his mid-sixties when he made his translation and writes from a composer’s point of view (John Hawkins, writing in the 1770s, remarks that Galliard ‘led a retired and studious life, and had little intercourse with the musical world’).24 Like Tosi, Galliard is alarmed at ‘the false taste in music so prevailing’, and further confirms that the freedom allowed to singers has led to chronic lapses in taste.25 From the singer’s point of view this freedom to improvise was an essential part of their art, and Tosi himself makes the point that only incompetent singers (and women) write ornaments into the score: the true artist should be able to surprise and delight his listeners by reinventing the ornamentation anew at every performance. The core elements of performance style are still to be found some fifty years later in Mancini’s 1774 Pensieri e riflessioni practice sopra il canto figurato, published in Vienna, where the sixty-year-old castrato was the court singing teacher. Like Tosi’s Opinioni (which Mancini commends to his readers) the Pensieri were disseminated widely over many generations of singers: an Italian edition appeared in 1777, and two French translations in 1776 and 1796 (an English translation by Pietro Buzzi appeared in 1912, confirming Mancini’s 22 Ibid., p. 168. 23 Ibid., p. 167; G. Mancini, Pensieri e riflessioni practice sopra il canto figurato, trans. P. Buzzi as Practical Reflections on the Figurative Art of Singing, Boston, Badger, 1912, pp. 184–5; B. Marcello, ‘Il teatro alla moda, Part I’, trans. R. G. Pauly, Musical Quarterly, 34/3 (1948), 371–403. Singers were not the only people to permit themselves extra-musical distractions. Burney (The Present State of Music in France and Italy, p. 315) reports audiences talking, playing cards or falling asleep from boredom. 24 Sir J. Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, London, for the author, 1776, repr. 1875, facsimile edn, Graz, Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1969, p. 829. Hawkins (A General History, p. 764) also notes that Tosi gave weekly concerts in the 1693 London season. 25 See, for example, Tosi, Opinioni, pp. xi and 94 n. 5.
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lasting relevance). Mancini was also a pessimist, lambasting the avariciousness and lack of rigour shown by successful singers of his day. He also took issue with his fellow pedagogue Vincenzo Manfredini on several aspects of teaching practice, but they agree on the essential manifestations of style.26 The joining of registers so that they blend imperceptibly is still a key tenet, as is the artistic use of portamento, which is the first thing a student learns once he has mastered the register break. Next comes messa di voce, which Mancini says is ‘that art in which the singer gives to any sustained note its graduation, starting it with almost a thread of a voice and then reinforcing it proportionately to the greatest power in which it can be developed, and then takes it back with the same graduation that has been used in going from soft to loud’. Mancini devotes a whole chapter to this one-note effect, and his passing references to its effect in performance (as opposed to a mere exercise) are illuminating. He says that it is usually used at the beginning of an ‘aria cantabile’ or to prepare for a cadenza, and is especially effective when combined with a trill at the end of a cadenza.27 It is clear from Mancini’s instructions that, properly studied, messa di voce is a means of developing breathing and tone control simultaneously. There is an implied union of technique and style: one becomes the other, and neither has much to do with whatever the composer might write, beyond creating opportunities for such effects to happen. Students needed to study only a small number of techniques, which once mastered enabled them to deploy their vocal armoury in any context. Mancini then deals with the trill. This was one of the bones of contention between him and Manfredini, who saw it as an example of natural facility rather than a technique that could be learned. For Manfredini trilling was far less important than portamento, and their disagreement is a reminder of the huge variations in performance practice of the period. Mancini follows Tosi, who described eight varieties, including an arcane rising shake which ascends ‘imperceptibly, shaking from comma to comma without discovering the rise’ and its descending counterpart, a form of trill that few singers would risk today.28 Both condemn what Mancini calls goat and horse trills, which students do against the advice of their teachers, and which are presumably related to the seventeenth-century trillo. Mancini points to the effectiveness of a long cadential trill, but Tosi complains that singers often hold it for too long, waiting for ‘the eruption of an e viva! or bravo! from the populace’.29 Galliard 26 See Mancini, Pensieri, and P. Howard, A Critical Translation from the Italian of Vincenzo Manfredini’s ‘Difesa Della Musica Moderna/in Defence of Modern Music (1788)’, New York, Mellen, 2002. Vincenzo Manfredini (1737–99) was the brother of the castrato Giuseppe Manfredini. 27 Mancini, Pensieri, p. 118. He later suggests (p. 127) that a cadenza of just two notes would work, provided they include both messa di voce and a trill. 28 Tosi, Opinioni, p. 45. 29 Ibid., p. 48.
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in a footnote to Tosi’s conclusions on the shake, reveals (and cautions against) the many possible varieties: ‘Shakes are generally proper from preceding notes descending, but not ascending, except on particular occasions. Never too many, or too near one another; but very bad to begin with them, which is too frequently done.’30 The almost endless creative possibilities of this effect are confirmed by Lord Mount Edgcumbe’s description of the trilling of the castrato Pacchierotti, which ‘whether taken from above or below, between whole or semi-tones, fast or slow . . . was always open, equal, and distinct, giving the greatest brilliancy to cadences, and often introduced into his passages with the happiest effect’.31 There was clearly great individuality with regard to this one aspect of style: some singers do none at all (Manfredini), some perhaps do old-fashioned trilli (Tosi and Mancini), some start on the upper note, some on the lower (Mount Edgcumbe), some prolong cadential trills to milk the applause, or even begin an aria with one (Galliard). Then there would have been those who attempted Tosi and Mancini’s eight varieties. This variety of practice as revealed by pedagogical pessimism is perfectly illustrated by Mancini’s comments on cadenzas. He says there is a right way and a wrong way to do them: to be correct and of ‘good judgement’ one should begin with a messa di voce, and then recapitulate and recombine passages from the aria, do them in one breath and finish with a trill. The second way is ‘arbitrary’ (not a word helpful to teachers of historical performance practice) in which singers can do whatever they like to display their talent. ‘Many are of this opinion’, says Mancini, ‘but they are greatly mistaken.’32 Even the more rigorous ‘correct’ way requires ‘an inventive and creative mind’, however, and Mancini does not wish to be prescriptive, leaving the real business to the singer, ‘who must choose the leading movement from the ritornello of the song and by his own invention, develop on it all the required virtuosity that forms a well balanced cadenza’.33 There is no question of preparing anything in advance: what the author is saying is that even within the limits of taste there is considerable room for creativity.
Agricola, Hiller and the German succession The Italian style carried all before it, with the da capo aria proving to be the perfect form for singerly inventiveness and audience approbation. At the Prussian court in Berlin Italian singers were so numerous that native German 30 Ibid., p. 49, n. 19. 31 R. Mount Edgcumbe, The Musical Reminiscences of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, London, Andrews, 1834, repr. New York, Da Capo, 1973, p. 14. 32 Mancini, Pensieri, p. 143. 33 Ibid., p. 145.
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singers had to seek work elsewhere. Johann Agricola was appointed as one of the exclusively German court composers in 1751, remaining attached to the court until his death in 1774. A widely cultured man, he had been an organ pupil of J. S. Bach and had taken composition lessons with Quantz. In 1757 he published a German translation of Tosi’s Opinioni, heavily annotated with a commentary that reflected both his own extensive knowledge of singing pedagogy and the composerly discipline that Frederick II imposed on his singers.34 Agricola amplifies Tosi’s writings in all the key areas, but his writings confirm that the basic style and technique were broadly the same. Ornamentation was probably just as florid, but was in effect negotiated with the composer, who for the first time begins to have some control over the singer. Agricola’s composer contemporaries liked appoggiaturas to be precisely measured, and they were quite happy for singers to prepare their da capo divisions in advance. Agricola recommends that students should look to Quantz, whose Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen appeared in 1752. Quantz expects a singer to understand ‘das Tragen der Stimme’ (portamento) and ‘die Haltungen auf einer langen Note’ (messa di voce) but he understands that the listener may have to be more indulgent with singers than with players.35 Johann Adam Hiller in his Anweisung for singers published in 1780 draws on Tosi, Mancini, Quantz and Agricola, positioning himself firmly within the old tradition. Like Agricola, Hiller laments the decline in singing in Germany, and sees the importation of Italian ideas as crucial to remedying the situation. His preface quotes at length from Mancini’s potted history of recent Italian singers, contrasting this with the bleak situation in German opera houses and churches. He draws on Mancini again when going on to cite the need for perfect tuning, among his ten criteria for the ‘improvement’ of the human voice. Having dealt with solmisation and messa di voce in the first part of his publication in 1774 he returns to these in the second part, so fundamental were they to good singing. His remarks on declamation are especially pertinent as Hiller was himself a successful composer of Singspiele – he is well aware of the connection between singing and speech and the rhetorical implications of punctuation and intonation, all of which imply a sophisticated manipulation of tempo. He also demands, like Tosi before him, ‘the strictest observation of tempo’, but bearing in mind his advocacy of rubato and the dramatic flexibility needed for rhetorical declamation, this cannot possibly mean the metronomical process that a modern performer might understand by ‘strict’. He ends his treatise with two 34 J. F. Agricola, Anleitung zur Singkunst, Berlin, Winter, 1757, trans. and ed. J. C. Baird as Introduction to the Art of Singing by Johann Friedrich Agricola, Cambridge University Press, 1995. 35 J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, trans. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber, 1966, pp. 300–30.
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complete examples of ornamented arias in which we can see that whether performing these spontaneously or from the book, singers were still expected to expand the composer’s score with a vast amount of additional material.36
The Italian aesthetic in France In France, as in Germany, the Italian influence was moderated by longestablished vernacular traditions and by the compromises that singers had to make to accommodate the Italian language. The English commentators Burney and Mount Edgcumbe found singing in France very hard to tolerate (Burney returned to Lyons in 1770 ‘more disgusted than ever, at hearing French music, after the exquisite performances to which I had been accustomed in Italy’, while the ironic Mount Edgcumbe thought that the fact ‘that human ears can bear [grand opera] is marvellous’).37 French vocal tradition was much more closely geared to the expressive demands of the language than the virtuosic display of the singers. The seventeenth-century treatise by Bénigne de Bacilly devotes a substantial amount of space to the correct delivery of text, and similar considerations are to be found in French sources for several generations.38 The nasality of French pronunciation often made it difficult for French singers to master other languages sufficiently to be exportable. Despite this apparent parochialism and the provincial French resistance to castrati, the performance practice of the time was often interwoven with Italianate characteristics. Farinelli, Caffarelli, Guadagni and Pacchierotti were among many castrati to perform in France, and although they did not perform at the Opéra there was a regular castrato presence at the court chapel throughout most of the eighteenth century.39 The best French sopranos, such as Marie Fel, were compared with the greatest castrato singers in both tone and virtuosity. The Italian style was not something that could be learned from the French treatises of the period, but there were French equivalents to many Italianisms: the son filé was very similar to a messa di voce, and the port de voix is an almost literal translation of portamento di voce. The Solfèges d’Italie published in 1772 by JeanLouis Bêche and Pierre Levêque shows little change from Bacilly’s treatise of a hundred years earlier, while Jean-Antoine Bérard’s treatise L’Art du chant of
36 In the opening two bars of the ‘Aria con Variazione’ the original score assigns three notes each to the vocal and bass lines; the ornamented version contains thirty-four. S. Beicken, Treatise on Vocal Performance and Ornamentation by Johann Adam Hiller, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 144. 37 Burney, The Present State of Music, p. 389; Mount Edgcumbe, Reminiscences, p. 88. 38 B. de Bacilly, Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter, Paris, author, 1668, trans. and ed. A. B. Caswell as A Commentary upon the Art of Proper Singing, Brooklyn, NY, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968. See Chapter 17 of the present volume. 39 See Sawkins, ‘Who sang the soprano?’, 318–21.
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1755 is very much concerned with articulation and attention to appropriately rhetorical delivery.40 These writings probably reflect the performance practice of the haute-contre, the uniquely French high tenor with a head voice extension up to high D or E that features in so much of the music of Lully and Rameau. Denis-François Tribou created roles for both Lully and Rameau, but the most successful was Pierre Jélyotte, a multifaceted musician who was also a noted guitarist, cellist and composer.
The tenor as falsettist The French tenor, or taille, had a range similar to that of a modern baritone. Outside France the tenor also had a baritonal lower register, but made use of a falsetto extension at the top which could take the voice up to soprano F in some cases. For his operas Handel employed some of the best Italian tenors, including Annibale Pio Fabri, Francesco Borosoni and Giovanni Battista Pinacci, but in his English works he also explored homegrown singers where vocal exuberance could take second place to an ability to deliver the text in an appropriately rhetorical manner. John Beard must have been a remarkably flexible singer, to have sung in ten of Handel’s operas and most of his oratorios, as well as alternating with Thomas Lowe in The Beggar’s Opera. Handel does not generally write very high for tenor, but Haydn regularly took Karl Friberth up to top D, and sometimes down to bottom B in the same aria. Friberth and the Mozart tenors Anton Raaff, Guglielmo d’Ettori and Valentin Adamberger were all castrato-trained or influenced, and were able to disguise the break between their chest and head voices.41 Haydn noted in his London diary that the tenors Incledon and Johnstone both found the break problematic: ‘The first tenor [Incledon] has a good voice and quite a good style, but he uses the falsetto to excess. He sang a trill on a high C and ran up to G. The second tenor [Johnstone] tries to imitate him, but could not make the change from the falsetto to the natural voice.’42
Primo uomo and prima donna The twenty years between Tosi’s 1723 Italian publication and Galliard’s 1743 English edition saw the performance of all except the last seven of Handel’s 40 See Sawkins, ‘Who sang the soprano?’, 321–22; M. Cyr, ‘Eighteenth-century French and Italian singing: Rameau’s writing for the voice’, Music & Letters, 61/3–4 (1980), 318–37. 41 See J. Potter, Tenor: History of a Voice, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009, ch. 2 (‘Handel, Mozart and the tenor–castrato connection’), pp. 25–43. 42 Quoted in H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn in England 1791–1795, London, Thames & Hudson, 1994, p. 114. See also Potter, Tenor, pp. 37–9 for the career of Charles Incledon.
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Italian operas. The period between Galliard and Mancini (1777) encompasses almost all of Gluck’s operatic output, half the operas of Mozart (and almost the whole career of Metastasio, whose ‘serious’ librettos would have been sung by all the major figures of the period). Significantly (given that his instruction is aimed primarily at young castrati) it is two women that Tosi considers may ‘help to keep up the tottering profession from immediately falling into ruin’.43 In the year that the Opinioni appeared, the twenty-six-year-old soprano Francesca Cuzzoni made her London debut as Teofane in Handel’s Ottone, having had a successful career in northern Italy. Faustina Bordoni, who arrived in London in 1726, was a truly international star, having performed in Munich and Vienna as well as the great Italian opera houses. There was considerable rivalry between the two, who had appeared together many times before their famous altercation during Bononcini’s Astianatte in 1727.44 The singing of these two great prime donne, each in her different way, astounded and moved those who heard them. Tosi appreciated the virtuosity of Faustina (as she was known) and the cantabile of Cuzzoni (Galliard and Mancini both confirm that English audiences appreciated the differences between the two).45 Mancini also recalled the effortless agility of Faustina, whom nobody was able to imitate, and the astonishing invention of Cuzzoni, who ‘knew how to adorn and embellish [an aria] with such varied “gruppettos” and passages without marring the melody; now blending, then vibrated with trills and mordents, now “staccato” and then sustained, and then loose runs in a redoubled style, soaring with a portamento from a chest tone to a high head tone . . . with that fine perfection that caused admiration and wonder’.46 We know that Mancini admired tasteful restraint, and this description presumably encapsulates the essence of it, which suggests that the more extravagant singers that he and Tosi objected to were capable of extraordinary licence.47 Burney’s description of Cuzzoni’s singing parallels Mancini’s, and specifically praises her trill and her rubato: ‘Her shake was perfect, she had a creative fancy, and the power of occasionally accelerating and retarding the measure in the most artificial and able manner, by what the Italians call tempo rubato.’48 Hiller’s position as director of the Grosses Concert in Leipzig gave him ample opportunity to encourage young singers in the Italian manner, and he 43 Tosi, Opinioni, p. 171. 44 Satirised in The Beggars Opera of the following year. 45 Tosi, Opinioni, p. 171; Mancini, Riflessioni, p. 40. 46 Mancini, Riflessioni, p. 39. 47 For a close analysis of the contributions of these two sopranos to Handel’s Royal Academy operas see ‘Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni: the rival queens’, in C. S. La Rue, Handel and his Singers, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 44–181. Biographies of Cuzzoni and Bordoni can be found in Emerson, Five Centuries, pp. 59–76, and H. Pleasants, The Great Singers, London, Gollancz, 1967, pp. 97–100. See also G. Hogarth, Memoirs of the Opera, 2 vols., London, Bentley, 1838/1851, repr. New York, Da Capo, 1972, vol. 1, pp. 296–301. 48 Burney, General History, vol. 4, p. 307.
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was a mentor to the young soprano Gertrud Schmeling (later known more usually by her married name of Mara). Madame Mara went on to become the most successful non-Italian singer of her time, performing in all the major European centres of music drama. At the Prussian court she impressed Frederick II (who had expected to prefer the neighing of his horse49); in England Mount Edgcumbe thought her ‘agility and flexibility rendered her a most excellent bravura singer’.50 Burney, hearing her in Berlin when she was twenty-three years old, was astonished by her trill. Mozart, however, found her arrogant when he heard her in Munich in 1780.51 She could accompany herself on the guitar in recitals and like her fellow soloists carried with her a selection of arias that could be substituted in opera productions for anything that she did not like (another of Tosi’s grievances).52 More than ten years after her rejection by Mozart, she was still one step ahead of the competition: the London Times observed that when rehearsing Haydn’s Armida ‘she totally laid aside those cadences which are now so much hackneyed at every musical assemblage by her numerous imitators, and gave new graces to each passage’.53 The most successful singer of the century, acclaimed throughout Europe, was undoubtedly Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli. Farinelli made his debut in Naples in 1720 in a work by his teacher Porpora. Four years later, at his first rehearsal in London (at the apartment provided for Cuzzoni), the accompanying ensemble was unable to keep up, ‘having not only been disabled by astonishment, but overpowered by his talents’.54 At a subsequent performance his rival castrato Senesino was so overcome that he abandoned his character – a tyrant opposite Farinelli’s chained captive – to embrace him on stage.55 He could spin out a messa di voce that incredulous listeners thought was assisted by an instrument playing in unison while he surreptitiously took a breath. He had an inexhaustible supply of divisions into which he would interpolate trills. For Mancini, he was the perfect exponent of good singing, ‘The perfect art of holding the breath, and retaking it with such cleanness, so as not to allow any 49 Hogarth, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 156. 50 Mount Edgcumbe, Reminiscences, p. 52. 51 See Mozart’s letter to his father of 24 November 1780, which is a colourful account of Mara singing before the Elector Karl Theodor (The Letters of Mozart and his Family, ed. E. Anderson, 3rd edn, rev. S. Sadie and F. Smart, London, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 670–2). 52 See Emerson, Five Centuries, pp. 77–96 for currently the most authoritative account in English of Mara’s life. Substituting favourite arias was normal practice even in the presence of the composer. For an example of the commission of these by the soprano Margherita Gualandi in the mid-1720s, see D. Freeman, ‘An 18th-century singer’s commission of “baggage” arias’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 427–33. 53 T. Fenner, Opera in London: Views of the Press 1785–1830, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, p. 199. 54 Burney, General History, p. 380. Burney is a key witness to Farinelli’s standing as the greatest singer of the era. See especially General History pp. 378–81 and Present State, pp. 202–17. 55 Senesino was among the most respected singers in Europe, and it was he whom Handel’s employers insisted that he engage for the Royal Academy. For Senesino’s Handel roles see ‘Senesino and the heroicanti-heroic male role’, in LaRue, Handel and his Singers, pp. 105–24.
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one to know when he was breathing, started and ended with him. The perfect intonation, the unfolding, the extending and expanding of the voice, his portamento, the perfect union of the registers, the sparkling agility, and perfect trill were all in him the same degree of perfection.’56 Burney confirms the practice of beginning an aria with a messa di voce in his description of Farinelli’s performance of Riccardo Broschi’s ‘Son qual nave’, in which ‘the first note he sung was taken with such delicacy, swelled by minute degrees to such an amazing volume, and afterwards diminished in the same manner, that it was applauded for full five minutes’.57 The same principles still appear in treatises from the early nineteenth century. Domenico Corri’s Singers’ Preceptor of 1810 emphasises the importance of long and patient study of messa di voce, text articulation, ornamentation, rubato and portamento. He describes messa di voce as ‘the soul of music’ and devotes two pages of examples to it, advocating its use ‘on every note of any duration’.58 This is a real insight into what the singing might have sounded like: each note shaped and energised by a controlled swell. Corri’s sometime apprentice, Isaac Nathan, wrote a musical treatise in 1823 (subsequently enlarged as Musurgia Vocalis in 1836) in which he gives a page of diagrams illustrating the different ways in which notes can be shaped by messa di voce. For Nathan the device is fundamental to good singing, for ‘on it depends the principal art of singing, for it sweetens, enriches, and gives the delicious roundness and fullness to the tone . . . which makes the music respond to the various passions, and passes the feeling of one mind to another’.59 Corri frequently uses language or speech as an analogy: ‘A phrase in music is like a sentence in language.’ Each of his phrasing examples is shaped like an expanded version of the treatment given to individual notes. Occasionally devices from speech actually penetrate the singing; words of grief, such as ‘dying’, ‘sighing’ and ‘alas’ should be broken by a rhetorical breath that demonstrates the singer’s emotional state: Sigh – (suspiration) – ing etc.60 Singers had probably been using this kind of effect for generations and continued to do so well into the nineteenth century.61 He also sees portamento as a 56 Tosi, Opinioni, p. 122. 57 Burney, Present State, p. 208. The composer Riccardo Broschi was Farinelli’s brother. 58 Corri, Singers’ Preceptor, pp. 14 and 15, 52. 59 I. Nathan, Musurgia Vocalis, London, Fentum, 1836, p. 145. Nathan’s diagram is also reproduced in D. Mason, ‘The teaching and learning of singing’, in J. Potter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 209. 60 Corri, Singers’ Preceptor, p. 65. 61 García’s transcriptions of arias confirm that the practice was normal rhetorical practice. See M. García, A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing, the editions of 1841 and 1872, collated, ed. and trans. D. V. Paschke, New York, Da Capo, 1984. See Will Crutchfield’s examples from García in Chapter 25.
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rhetorical effect, which can be compared to elegantly articulated speech, and in his description of it as ‘the sliding and blending one note to another with delicacy and expression’ we can perhaps see a parallel with the indeterminate pitch glides of spoken delivery.62 As he was writing the Socratic dialogue that constitutes the preface to his Singers’ Preceptor Corri came across the work of Tosi for the first time. Rather than duplicate his illustrious predecessor, he then listed the major points on which the two were of like mind, some ninety years apart.63 Although he earned his living as a teacher, Corri considered himself to be primarily a composer, and on ornamentation he takes the composer’s line, remarking that many great singers (he names Farinelli, Aprile, David and Raaff among others) ‘sung compositions with very little ornament’ and only where the composer indicated it.64 In his Select Collection of the Most Admired Songs of 1788, he includes three excerpts from Gluck’s Orfeo, as sung by the castrato Gaetano Guadagni. The young Guadagni had been a ‘young and wild’ pupil of Burney in the late 1740s, when he had prepared the castrato for working with Handel, who subsequently asked him to take over the roles in Messiah and Samson that he had written for the actress Mrs Cibber.65 At about this time Guadagni came into contact with Garrick, and from then on combined an attention to dramatic detail with a vocal restraint that was very unusual in any singer of the period. If he had a natural facility for divisions he often chose not to use it, declining opportunities to incite applause and not even acknowledging applause with the customary bow after arias. This was a risky strategy, which often saw him hissed from the stage, but it made him the perfect collaborator for Gluck in his ‘reform’ opera Orfeo.66 Corri’s transcriptions are indeed simple, and hint at a fundamental change in the relationship between composer and performer that would ultimately result in singers becoming interpreters rather than co-creators.67 Orfeo was a success largely because of Guadagni’s unique contribution in the title role, but the work was problematic for listeners. When Guadagni performed it in England for the first time it was as a pasticchio, which included some music of his own, and Gluck later rewrote the central role for both mezzo-soprano and tenor. 62 Corri, Singers’ Preceptor, ‘Dialogue between master and scholar’, pp. 3–4. For more detail on this and the history of portamento see J. Potter, ‘Beggar at the door: the rise and fall of portamento in singing’, Music & Letters, 87/4 (2006), 523–50; D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Portamento and musical meaning’, Journal of Musicological Research, 25 (2006), 233–61; C. Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900, Oxford University Press, 1999, ‘Portamento’, pp. 558–87. 63 Corri, Singers’ Preceptor, p. 9. 64 Ibid., pp. 3 and 9. 65 Burney, General History, vol. 4, p. 459. 66 See D. Heartz, ‘From Garrick to Gluck: the reform of theatre and opera in the mid-eighteenth century’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 94 (1967–8), 111–27. 67 See W. Crutchfield, Chapter 25.
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The survival of old techniques in institutionalised teaching The old traditions were by no means dead, however, but in mainland Europe there were institutional changes that fundamentally altered the way singing was taught. This encouraged the more disciplined singing that Tosi and Gluck had called for, and which nineteenth-century composers would try to insist on. The Paris Conservatoire was founded in 1795/6 and the new centralised learning could not afford (either financially or ideologically) long apprenticeships and personalised instruction. Although there were individual lessons, much of the singing teaching was done in classes, and very soon we find a didactic literature authorised by the Conservatoire (and, by extension, the state). The French had been resistant to the vocal charms of the castrati, but the influx of Italian composers and singers in the early years of the nineteenth century and the consequent success of the Paris Opéra saw major developments in vocal culture outside Italy for the first time. The new rigours of the post-revolutionary educational system also bore fruit in the series of pedagogical works produced for the Conservatoire de Musique. Singing instruction manuals were aimed at serious students and had to be licensed by the Conservatoire. This nationalistic institutionalisation of learning did not preclude private teachers setting up their own schools but it did mean that French treatises of the period show a comprehensiveness and an objectivity that is new in pedagogical writing: these are not, on the whole, the writings of successful performers seeking to publicise their own teachings, but are genuine attempts to understand and improve the process. The first Méthode de chant du Conservatoire de Musique, published in 1804, was a joint effort by the Italian tenor and teacher Bernardo Mengozzi and his fellow pedagogues Richer, Garat, Gossec, Méhul, Ginguene, Langlé, Plantade and Cherubini.68 Mengozzi had been taught by the castrati Guarducci and Potenza before making a successful career as composer and performer and he was probably the driving force behind the treatise’s claim to apply the teachings of the school of Bernacchi.69 It is self-consciously Italian-orientated, preferring Italianate terms such as ‘ténor’ and ‘régistres’ instead of the traditional French ‘taille’ and ‘Jeu de l’orgue’. All of the traditional principles are explained in considerable detail and complemented with exercises for every aspect, but there are
68 B. Mengozzi et al., Méthode de chant du Conservatoire de Musique, Paris, 1804, facsimile, Méthodes et Traités, Série II/1, Paris, 2005. 69 Mengozzi was married to the soprano Anna Benini and made his London debut in 1787. Mount Edgcumbe claims that his subsequent move to Paris was because he found the English climate disagreeable. See Mount Edgcumbe, Reminiscences, p. 57.
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important differences which reveal a much clearer understanding of how the voice works and the whole publication is a far more rigorous method for producing good singers. It begins with a description of the functions of the vocal tract, something that an eighteenth-century student would probably have found distasteful, and emphasises the importance of daily breathing exercises and avoiding nasal or guttural production. There is a brief but significant section on breaking voices: the reader is not expected to be a castrato, but a teacher who will have to deal with young singers whose voices will change drastically at puberty (Mengozzi recommends continuing to have lessons during the change, so that the teacher can monitor developments). Scales are the basic pedagogical tool, with a twenty-second messa di voce on each note to assist with tuning and breathing. The joining of registers is fundamental: Mengozzi identifies a mixed or medium register that acts as a link between head and chest. His exercises begin with a single note on which the singer alternates between ‘poitrine’ and ‘medium’, which is then extended into a short scale that crosses the break. This is then repeated from ‘medium’ to ‘tête’. Mengozzi’s approach is a combinative, almost holistic one. Portamenti come next, and he combines these with messa di voce, just as Tosi had done three quarters of a century before, suggesting that for good measure the student finishes the exercise by attempting a trill (which the student will not actually be instructed on until much later in the Méthode). There then follows a series of exercises over increasingly wide intervals, alternating portamento with cleanly attacked sounds (for variety) and finishing with a reminder that the joining of registers must be regularly practised. Throughout, Mengozzi marks breathing points, and refers at one point to the importance of the diaphragm, an early reference to the band of muscle that exerts pressure on the lungs, enabling a regulated supply of breath. Once these essential techniques are mastered the student goes on to learn basic ornamentation, and exercises are provided for simple roulades, appoggiaturas, trills and the like. He emphasises the relationship between breathing and phrasing, and like his predecessors urges the proper pronunciation of words. The final parts of the treatise are devoted to aspects of style and genre, including ‘points d’orgue’ or cadenzas. Surprisingly, Mengozzi gives no examples of actual cadenzas but insists that they begin with a messa di voce in the time-honoured manner and end with a trill, the whole being done in one breath. The transformation of French vocal culture was given new impetus by Napoleon’s obsessive interest in Italian music. He heard the castrato Girolamo Crescentini in Vienna in 1805 and was so impressed that he appointed him singing teacher to his own family. He is said to be the only singer who ever
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brought tears to the emperor’s eyes.70 Crescentini was one of the last great castrati, and his presence in Paris further helped to legitimise the newly energised vocal scene by associating the traditional Italian style and technique with the new French pedagogy. He produced a bilingual French–Italian volume of exercises in 1811 and a further set of vocalises a few years later.71 The explanatory preface to the 1811 publication, dedicated to his students, states three aims: to give them the means to overcome any technical difficulties, to fill their heads with a knowledge of embellishment and to teach them how to phrase with expression and economy of breath. The vocalises, which are annotated with varied attacks and messa di voce, are all marked ‘sempre legato’, the first one also qualified by a slur and ‘e portando la voce’ (which may be implied for all the exercises). They are clearly intended to teach and test traditional techniques; there are long held notes on which a messa di voce would be essential, scales which cross register breaks and arpeggiated figures that achieve the same effect by leap. Crescentini’s rules stress colour and expression, energy and suppleness, variety in execution and, most importantly, he urges his students to aim to touch the heart of his listeners, however good or bad their voices may be. Crescentini’s passionate creativity is inspirational and a perfect paradigm for teachers to present to their students but it is very much a product of an age that was already receding from view, to be replaced by the more powerful and dynamic singing that we begin to see espoused in later French treatises. The basic tenets will still be taught, but against an increasing sense of loss. The treatises of Crescentini, Aprile and Rauzzini (who published similar sets of principles and exercises in 1795 and 1812 respectively) are among the last attempts by surviving castrati to set down the essence of unfettered creative vocalism that had sustained their art for some two hundred years. The basic techniques – messa di voce, portamento, the joining of registers – still applied (and were still taught), but in the context of a singing that would be increasingly driven by composers rather than performers. One of the last and greatest survivors of what has been called a golden age was the castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti, who died in Padua in 1821 after twenty-eight years of distinguished and comfortable retirement. When Mancini was compiling his Reflessioni Pacchierotti would have been starting out on a career that took him to all the leading European opera houses with a repertoire that ranged from Handel to Haydn (whose Arianna a Nasso he
70 P. Barbier, The World of the Castrati, London, Souvenir Press, 1998, p. 231. 71 G. Crescentini, Raccolta di Esercizi per il canto all’uso del vocalizzo/Recueil d’exercices pour la vocalisation musicale, Paris, Imbault, c. 1811; facsimile edn, Méthodes et Traités, Série II/1, Paris, Fuzeau, 2005; Vingtcinq nouvelles vocalises ou études de l’art du chant, Paris, 1818–32; facsimile edn, Méthodes et Traités, Série II/II, Paris, 2005.
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performed with the composer at the keyboard during his last visit to London in 1791). His friendship with Burney and Mount Edgcumbe ensured that there are many references to his performances, and all suggest that his command of all of the fundamentals dealt with by the singing treatises was absolute. More than this, however, he was able to use his creative potential to move people rather than simply impress them. Burney and Mount Edgcumbe were both first struck by his extraordinary ability to reinvent a piece every time he sang it. He managed the taste/mode equation by confining his dazzling bravura passages to one aria per opera, ‘conscious that the chief delight of singing, and his own supreme excellence, lay in touching expression, and exquisite pathos’.72 As with Farinelli, it was his supreme artistic judgement that so often reduced his audiences to tears, and sometimes even the musicians accompanying him. The impact of this history on modern performances has been mixed. There have been two principal consequences of the absence of any vocal revolution to compare with the reinvention of early instruments. Rather than seeing the past as a creative opportunity, singers have tended to ignore the implications of any research which might undermine their professional credibility. This limited engagement with history has in turn resulted in hybrid performances which often feature historically informed playing supporting unreconstructed singing. The evolution of the modern concept of ‘early music’ was characterised by an over-zealous attempt to rid vocal performance of those aspects which did not accord with current taste, which meant that key stylistic notions such as portamento, messa di voce and rubato have remained firmly in the past, while elements that are essentially foreign to much eighteenth-century style such as strict tempos, accurate pitching and tastefully pre-prepared ornaments have been legitimised by selective reference to ancient writers, who often simply did not like what they heard.
72 Mount Edgcumbe, Musical Reminiscences, p. 13.
. 22 .
Instrumental performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’ PETER WALLS
Arcangelo Corelli dated the dedication to his Opus 5 violin sonatas 1 January 1700, suggesting an awareness that the new century might usher in a change of outlook. By 1710, these sonatas had appeared in numerous editions across Europe and were being imitated by a multitude of composers in Italy, France, England and Germany. In a sense, they establish an agenda for the genre. The Calcinotto engraving of Giuseppe Tartini (dating, it seems, from the early 1760s) has a border with violin, bow and open music clearly marked ‘Corelli’ (plus, interestingly, volumes with ‘Zarlino’ and ‘Plato’ on their spines). In the last decade of the eighteenth century at least fifteen editions of Corelli’s Op. 5 were published in Italy, Spain, France and England. Muzio Clementi produced an edition in 1800 while J.-B. Cartier brought out what he described as the ‘15th edition’ with a preface suggesting continuity between the school that Corelli established and ‘the famous artists of our times’. The sonatas of Opus 5 were to provide formative study material for generations of violinists. A case could thus be made for treating the (actual) eighteenth century (1 January 1700 to 31 December 1799) as a coherent style period. These sonatas were, however, mid-career productions for a composer whose Op. 1 appeared in 1681. The ‘long eighteenth century’ is a useful category precisely because it accommodates changes initiated more or less anywhere in the last few decades of the seventeenth century and replaced somewhere in the early nineteenth century. Corelli as a dominant influence on violinists fits well into such a period view. From the point of view of instrumental performance there are other equally useful bookends. (The bookend metaphor seems apt, given the essential adjustability of these very practical devices.)
Woodwind instruments and strings A woodwind player might see the long eighteenth century as inaugurated by Hotteterre and dismissed by Boehm. The most famous account of these beginnings was written c. 1740 by Michel de La Barre:
[527]
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[In the time of Louis XIV, when] all the arts were brought to perfection, music became infinitely dazzling . . . Above all, [there was] the famous Lully. One could say that he should be called the Apollo of France, but his rise ensured the total demise of all the old instruments, with the exception of the oboe, thanks to the Philidors and Hotteterres, who went through an enormous amount of wood . . . until they had finally succeeded in making these [instruments] suitable for concerts.1
The redesign of the oboe had preceded (and perhaps inspired) this broader transformation by a few years. Lully’s scores suggest that what we now know as the Baroque oboe had replaced the shawm by about 1670.2 It is not quite so easy to talk of a corresponding revolution at the end of the period. The development (and, more particularly, the acceptance) of various innovations that were destined to transform the entire profile of woodwind instruments was both uneven and more gradual. Changing musical demands through the eighteenth century meant that – especially from the 1780s on – keys were being added to allow players to bypass the cross-fingerings (with their more veiled tone) that were hitherto needed to produce certain notes. Nevertheless, the fundamental design principles of the Hotteterre revolution remained intact. Theobald Boehm, whose reforms were eventually to displace these principles (with repercussions for the entire woodwind family) was to open his factory in Munich in 1828. The long eighteenth century was the golden age of violin making. Jacob Stainer died in 1683 and the greatest of the Amatis, Nicolò, in 1684. Antonio Stradivari (c. 1649–1737) began his career in earnest at about the same time. His contemporaries in Cremona included Giuseppe Guarneri (‘del Gesù’) and Carlo Bergonzi (1683–1747). At about this time, too, gut strings wound with fine silver wire were developed for use as the lowest string of each instrument (the violin’s G string, and the viola’s and cello’s C string), in each case producing a more tonally satisfactory lower register. (Here, for once, the language of improvement may be justified.) In the late seventeenth century, violin bows were far from standard – but those being used by advanced players would have been approximately
1 ‘Jusques au tams de Louis quatorse, sous le célébre raygne ou tous les arts on esté portez a leur perfection, la musique a brillé infiniment . . . Mais sur tout le celebre Luly; on peut dire que on devroit l’apeller l’apollon de la France, mais son elevation fit la chute totalle de tous les entiens istrumens, a l’exception du haubois, grace aus Filidor et Hautteterre, lesquels ont tant gâté de bois et soutenus de la musique, qu’ils sont enfin parvenus a le rendre propre pour les concerts.’ French text, Marc Écochard, ‘A Commentary on the letter by Michel de La Barre concerning the history of musettes and hautboys’, in J. Wainwright and P. Holman (eds.), From Renaissance to Baroque: Change in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeenth Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, p. 48. I have not used the translation provided in this volume. 2 See B. Haynes, ‘Baptiste’s Hautbois: the metamorphosis from shawm to hautboy in France, 1620–1670’, in Wainwright and Holman (eds.), From Renaissance to Baroque, pp. 23–46.
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2400 (61 cm) long. What all bows from this era have in common is that the distance between bow hair and stick is less at the point than at the heel. For the early part of this period, this effectively means a stick that curves away from the hair rather than towards it, but some of the more sophisticated bows in use even in the early eighteenth century had complex curves. All of these bows lack the ferrule, or metal band, that later would hold the hair flat as it passes out from the frog. Towards the end of the period, two things happened that would usher in a revolution (albeit slow-burning) in violin playing and musical expression. First, those wonderful instruments of Amati, Stradivari and their contemporaries were subjected to quite radical alteration – all in the interests of producing a stronger sound. In 1806 the Abbé Sibire wrote at some length on the subject in La Chélonomie, attributing these structural changes to a need for the instruments to produce more sound: I shall confine myself hereafter to a daily occurrence . . . It is a kind of restoration (loosely called) which is purely accessory and yet at the same time crucial. This is a process which does not imply the slightest deterioration and yet which virtually every old violin, no matter how well preserved it is in other ways, could not avoid: REBARRING. The revolution which music has experienced needs to be replicated in instrument making; when the first has set the style, the other must follow . . . Formerly it was fashion to have necks well elevated, bridges and fingerboards extremely low, fine strings, and a moderate tone. Then the bass bar, that necessary evil in the instrument, could be short and thin because it was sufficient for it to have enough strength to sustain the weight of five to six pounds which the strings exerted on it. But since then music, in becoming perfect, has placed a demand on violin making. The tilting back of the neck, the raising of the bridge, of the fingerboard, and the amplification in sound, necessitate increasing by a full third the resistant force. Repairers have only one choice: strengthening the old bar, or replacing it with a new one.3
It seems that the process of replacing necks was in full swing by the end of the eighteenth century. Vincenzo Lancetti, writing in the early 1820s, implied that this started in Paris: ‘About 1800 the Brothers Mantegazza were restorers of instruments who were often entrusted by French and Italian artists to lengthen the necks of their violins, after the Paris fashion, an example which was followed by amateurs and professionals all over North Italy.’ 4 These interventions in the design of violin-family instruments are commonly regarded as marking the boundary between period and ‘modern’ string instruments. It is 3 L’Abbé Sibire, La Chélonomie, ou le parfait luthier, Paris, 1761, pp. 242–4. 4 V. Lancetti, Biographical Notices (Milan, 1823), quoted by K. Skeaping, ‘Some speculations on a crisis in the history of the violin’, Galpin Society Journal, 8 (1955), 10.
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ironic that the popular assumption that Stradivari was the greatest violin maker of all time sits unconcernedly alongside the idea that later violin makers knew better than he how to make a satisfactory sound (an inference that surely might be drawn from the fact that all Stradivari instruments have undergone the transformation described by Lancetti and the Abbé Sibire). The other part of this revolution in string playing (a process that began in the 1780s and was probably not complete until about the third decade of the nineteenth century) was the ascendancy of a bow design perfected by the great Parisian luthier François Tourte (c. 1747–1835). The Tourte bow differs from earlier models in having a stick that curves back in towards the hair, a hammer-head point, and a frog with a silver band (a ferrule) that keeps the ribbon of hair flat near the player’s hand regardless of how much pressure is being applied. Such a bow serves a very different set of phrasing and tonal priorities from all its predecessors. It is capable of a martelé attack at the heel and it lends itself to producing an equally strong sound on both down and up bows. Perhaps we should be grateful that the Stradivari model was capable of adaptation to meet the aspirations of nineteenth-century composers and performers (not to mention the increasingly grand purpose-built concert venues that that age produced). The early decades of the long eighteenth century constitute the golden age of the viol as a solo instrument, with an expansion to wonderfully resonant seven-string instruments (apparently thanks to the Parisian composer–performer Jean de Sainte-Colombe). The first half of the eighteenth century produced a rich literature for the instrument – from Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray in France, Johannes Schenk and J. S. Bach in Germany. But this glorious instrument effectively disappeared in the later eighteenth century. When one of its last champions, Carl Friedrich Abel, died in 1787, Charles Burney noted that an obituary in The Morning Post had ‘justly observed’ that ‘his favourite instrument was not in general use and will probably die with him’.5
The orchestra The long eighteenth century is when the orchestra unequivocally emerges as a stable entity, distinct from any of the other large (but essentially repertoire or occasion-specific) instrumental ensembles that are documented in earlier
5 C. Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, to which is prefixed, a Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, 4 vols., London, author, 1776–89, vol.4, p. 669.
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epochs. The essential element here is an ensemble based on a harmonically complete (violin-family) string section.6 The reinforcement of this string section with instruments at 160 pitch is an intriguing strand in the early history of the orchestra. This practice became common in Italy towards the end of the seventeenth century and gradually spread to other parts of Europe, though pinpointing its origins is not straightforward (particularly given the ambiguities surrounding the term ‘violone’).7 At the very end of the period, the orchestra underwent quite a dramatic expansion in numbers and composition. On 22 December 1808 Beethoven directed a concert at which the first performances of both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were given.8 The C minor Symphony incorporated trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon into the symphony orchestra for the first time (though they had been used in opera and sacred music). This Symphony was also singled out by E. T. A Hoffmann as a work that signalled a radical shift in the emotional scope of musical expression (but more of that later). The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony inaugurated another strand in Romanticism, one that would be picked up a few years later by Berlioz. From a purely symphonic perspective, that cold wet night in Vienna might be regarded as the end of the long eighteenth century.
Keyboard instruments At the beginning of this period, the harpsichord was entering its grandest phase. Through the process known as ravalement, two-manual Ruckers transposing instruments (with the lower keyboard sounding a fourth lower than the upper) were being modified to provide a greater dynamic and timbral palette. The end of the eighteenth century saw the demise of the harpsichord as a solo instrument (though opera houses may have continued to use them in the pit to accompany recitative for some time to come). In 1790 Haydn urged Maria Anna von Genzinger to replace her harpsichord with a fortepiano, since that would be much better suited to the style of his keyboard sonatas: It is just a pity that your grace does not own a Schantz fortepiano that lets you express yourself so much better; I think your Grace should let Fräulein Peperl
6 Neal Zaslaw established a list of defining criteria for the Orchestra in his, ‘When is an orchestra not an orchestra?’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 483–95. This essentially provides the basis for his book with J. Spitzer, The Birth of the Orchestra, Oxford University Press, 2004; see p. 19. 7 See S. Bonta, ‘From violone to violoncello: a question of strings?’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 3 (1977), 64–99, and ‘Terminology for the bass violin in seventeenth-century Italy’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 4 (1978), 5–43. 8 The concert also included the first public performance of the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major Op. 58 and the Choral Fantasy Op. 80.
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have your admittedly very good harpsichord, and get a new fortepiano for you yourself. Your beautiful hands and your technical virtuosity deserve this and much more. I know that I should have arranged these sonatas to suit your keyboard, but it was not possible for me to do that since I have got into quite different habits.9
Thanks to Bartolomeo Cristofori (1665–1731), the gravicembalo col piano e forte had arrived on the musical scene before 1700 when it is mentioned in an inventory of instruments at the Medici court in Florence. The fortepiano developed in sophistication – and popularity – through the eighteenth century, with two of the more notable landmarks being Bach’s encounter with Silbermann instruments at the court of Frederick the Great in 1747 (to which, arguably, we owe the inspiration for The Musical Offering) and Mozart’s excitement at discovering the musical capabilities of Andreas Stein’s escapement action fortepianos on his visit to Augsburg in 1776.10 Despite the gradual ascendancy of the fortepiano over the harpsichord, the latter remained an important contributor to music-making right through the century. At the time of his death in 1793, Pascal Taskin had as many harpsichords as fortepianos under construction.11 In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the harpsichord all but disappeared, while the piano underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis from a comparatively light, fiveoctave and musically supple first cousin to the harpsichord into a physically heavier, tonally more powerful, seven-octave giant capable (as Schumann was to observe in 1830s) of rivalling the orchestra.12 9 Letter dated 27 June 1790 from Haydn in Esterháza to Maria Anna von Genzinger in Vienna: ‘nur schade, daβ Euer gnaden kein Forte piano von Schantz besitzen, indem sich alles besser ausdrücken läst: ich dächte, Euer gnaden solten Ihren zwar sehr guten Flügl der freylein Peperl überlassen, and fur sich ein neues Forte piano einschaffen. Ihre schöne hände, und die organisirte schnellkrafft in denenselben verdienen diss, und noch mehr. Ich weis, daβ ich diese Sonaten hätte auf die arth Ihres Claviers einrichten sollen, allein es war mir nicht möglich, weil ich es ganz aus aller gewohnheit habe.’ In D. Bartha and H. C. Robbins Landon (eds.), Joseph Haydn: Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1965, p. 242. 10 See The Letters of Mozart and His Family, ed. E. Anderson, London, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 327–8: ‘This time I shall begin at once with Stein’s pianos. Before I had seen any of his make, Späth’s claviers had always been my favourites. But now I much prefer Stein’s for they damp ever so much better than the Regensburg instruments. When I strike hard, I can keep my finger on the note or raise it, but on taking it away the sound ceases almost immediately. In whatever way I touch the keys, the tone is always even. It does not tinkle disagreeably. It never jarrs. It is . . . always even . . . His instruments have this special advantage over others that they are made with escape action. Only one maker in a hundred bothers about this. But without an escapement it is impossible to avoid jangling and vibration after the note is struck. When you touch the keys, the hammers fall back again the moment after they have struck the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them.’ 11 W. R. Dowd and J. Koster, ‘Taskin, Pascal.’ Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 26 June 2009: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27535. 12 ‘This severing of the bond with the orchestra, as we have seen, was long in preparation. Modern pianistic art wants to challenge the symphony [orchestra], and rule supreme through its own resources; this may account for the recent dearth of piano concertos . . . Surely it would be a loss, should the piano concerto with orchestra become entirely obsolete; but on the other hand, we can hardly contradict the pianists when they say, “We have no need of any assistance; our instrument can achieve a complete effect
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Tuning and temperament – keyboard instruments The displacement of the harpsichord by the fortepiano could almost be described (appropriating a metaphor from the recording industry) as a crossfade. What these keyboard instruments have in common through the eighteenth century, however, is an approach to tuning that, theoretically at least, made all keys available but at the same time preserved for each of them a distinctive character or colour. In the interests of seeing the big picture here it may be worth indulging in another oversimplification: the long eighteenth century was a period dominated by circulating irregular temperaments, preceded in the seventeenth century by mean-tone tunings as a norm and followed, in the nineteenth century, by equal temperament (which is, of course, still standard). Descriptions of various temperaments (in the eighteenth century just as in the twenty-first century) almost inevitably involve consideration of baffling mathematical ratios. What follows is an attempt to explain some important concepts in more accessible terms. The pitch of any note is determined by its frequency (the number of vibrations per second). Every note produced on a musical instrument (including the voice) has a superstructure of ‘harmonics’ that are all multiples of the fundamental frequency. If isolated, these multiples of the fundamental frequency would produce notes sounding first at the octave above the original note, then at a fifth above that and so on. Consequently, the original note and that sounding a fifth above it have frequencies that form a very simple mathematical ratio. The stack of harmonics above a fundamental is known as the ‘harmonic series’. The way in which specific instruments amplify selected harmonics and de-emphasise others in the harmonic series is what determines timbre (and thus makes a harpsichord sound different from a fortepiano or an oboe different from a violin). If two notes sounding together have fundamentals that form a simple ratio then the resulting interval will have a special clarity or ring. If, however, the second note’s frequency does not quite coincide with a multiple of the other note then we hear the difference as ‘beats’. (Anyone travelling in a two-engine prop aircraft will have experienced this phenomenon on start-up as the pilot synchronises the engine speeds.) The problem that all tuning systems attempt to solve is this: tuning pure intervals (no beats) right around the circle of fifths produces a final note that is entirely by itself.” And so we must confidently await the genius who will show us a brilliant new way of combining orchestra and piano, so that the autocrat at the keyboard may reveal the richness of his instrument and of his art, while the orchestra, more than a mere onlooker, with its many expressive capabilities adds to the artistic whole.’ ‘Das Clavier Conzert’, quoted by L. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967, p. 204.
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sharper than the starting note. The degree to which this overshoots is known as a Pythagorean comma. Another version of the same problem is that superimposing three pure (no beats) major thirds (C to E, E to GÖ, Ab to C) produces a top note that sounds flat in comparison to the starting point. In other words, this procedure will not result in a pure octave. The extent to which this octave falls short of a pure octave is known as a syntonic comma. The modern solution – equal temperament – was always a theoretical possibility, discussed by theorists and briefly advocated even by so eminent a musician as Rameau.13 But, as a practical solution, this was not widely taken up. Equal temperament is so named because the Pythagorean comma is divided equally around the circle of twelve fifths. Two pre-eighteenth-century approaches to dealing with the problem were, first, to tune eleven of the twelve fifths in the circle pure leaving one that is very out of tune (Pythagorean tuning), or (the default position in first half of the seventeenth century) to shrink all but one of the fifths by a quarter comma so as to produce beautifully sweet (pure) major thirds in strategic positions (‘meantone’ tuning). Both systems involve leaving an unusable “wolf ” fifth (the one that looks as if it would close the circle) in a position where it is least likely to be used, normally GÖ (i.e. Ab) to Eb. (With a Pythagorean tuning this fifth is too small while in mean-tone it is too wide.) With mean-tone tuning some keys are simply unavailable. (Playing – inappropriately – the opening C major Prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on a mean-tone keyboard and then transposing it up a semitone into Db major can be a very instructive exercise. The first version, in the right key, magnifies the sense in which even the dominant seventh chord needs resolution in the sweetness of the tonic. The second version, in the wrong key, is meaningless cacophony.) Getting to the point where no chord is completely cacophonous involves compromise. Compromise is what ‘circular’ (sometimes referred to as ‘circulating’) unequal temperaments are all about. By the end of the seventeenth century in France, the tempérament ordinaire had gained widespread acceptance. In Germany, Andreas Werckmeister began publishing his tuning theories in the mid-1680s. These circulating temperaments adjusted (that is, ‘tempered’) selected intervals in ways that made any chord whatsoever usable but which prioritised the most frequently used harmonies. Hence, in virtually all systems, an F major triad would have a pure major third whereas an F sharp major triad would be characterised by a very wide FÖ –AÖ interval and sound rather strained.
13 Rameau advocated equal temperament in his Traité de l’harmonie (1722) and Génération Harmonique (1737).
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As these systems evolved, the degree of contrast between good (F major) and bad (F sharp major) chords became less pronounced. Tartini praised a tuning system developed by Antonio Vallotti in which the Pythagorean comma is distributed equally among six fifths. (This temperament is therefore an exact halfway house to equal temperament.) What Tartini valued about Vallotti’s system was the way it preserved the expressive character of individual keys. He used the word ‘chiaroscuro’ to describe this: I infinitely applaud the opinion of P. Vallotti, our organ-master . . . He observes what pleasure results in playing on the organ . . . from the contrast of the greater and less perfection of the chords, according as different modulations occur. If the temperament was equal or a little more, a little less, in different places, there would not be that chiaro oscuro which in practice produces a fine effect.14
One very simple way of thinking about the relative consonance and dissonance of chords in any of these circulating tuning systems (and, for that matter, in mean-tone) is to recognise that the double (sharp/flat) identity of all the black notes on a keyboard is where the compromise becomes most obvious. As a rule of thumb, a circular unequal temperament will favour the accidental that is lowest in the sequence of sharps and flats. In other words, the first black note above C will sound well in tune as CÖ (No. 2 in the sequence of sharps) but be somewhat inadequate as Db (No. 4 in the sequence of flats). [E] 7: Fb <
[B] 6: Cb
1: FÖ 5: Gb
2: CÖ 4: Db
3: GÖ 3: Ab
> 4: DÖ 2: Eb
5: AÖ 1: Bb
6: EÖ [F]
7: BÖ [C]
Confining ourselves for the moment to major triads, those involving no black notes (C major, G major, F major) will sound fine as will those with accidentals that occur early in the sequence (D major, A major, B flat major, E flat major). But the third in a B major triad is a note that works better as Eb than DÖ (so B–Eb–FÖ ) while an F sharp major triad is essentially made up of the notes FÖ –Bb–CÖ (and sounds as dissonant in most tuning systems as that spelling suggests). It is easy to see how this translates into key characteristics. F major has a very in-tune dominant (C major) and subdominant (B flat major). (Johann Mattheson described it as fitting for ‘the most beautiful sentiments, generosity, constancy, 14 Quoted by R. Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 68–9.
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love’.)15 B minor has a lovely tonic and subdominant, but a tension-filled dominant (F sharp major); for Mattheson this key seemed ‘bizarre, morose, melancholic’). The eighteenth century (and, in fact, the first half of the nineteenth century) is strewn with descriptions of the expressive character and emotional potential of various keys; clearly keyboard temperaments played a large (but gradually decreasing) part in shaping these perceptions. It is in this context that the significance of Bach’s title, Das Wohltemperierte Klavier needs to be considered. As a way of presenting two complete cycles of preludes and fugues written in every key, it clearly celebrates the potential of a ‘well-tempered’ system that would provide for such migration. Nothing could illustrate more vividly the gradual ascendency of equal temperament as a possibility than the heated dispute between Friedrich Marpurg (who, championing equal temperament, believed Bach was on his side) and Johann Philipp Kirnberger (supported by C. P. E. Bach) about Bach’s tuning preferences. The evidence points to Bach’s being an advocate of circular unequal temperaments. His exact system is not known, though doubtless it will continue to stimulate musicological debate.16
Tuning and temperament – other instruments Temperament is an issue that relates specifically to keyboard instruments. But those writing about key characteristics were also very aware of the availability of open strings in particular keys for string instruments and the natural preferences of wind instruments. The terms major and minor semitone used by some eighteenth-century theorists relate to a finely graded chromatic scale in which CÖ is lower than Db, DÖ lower than Eb and so on. Such a concept had a bearing on the relationship between good tuning and violin fingering.17 It also provided the driving motivation for Quantz’s development of alternative Eb and DÖ keys on the flute.18 The cohesiveness that adherence to a particular temperament could provide was sometimes acknowledged even in an orchestral context. In 1799, Friedrich Rochlitz described the value of the (disappearing) keyboard continuo in orchestral pieces in exactly these terms: 15 See G. J. Buelow, ‘Mattheson and the invention of the Affektenlehre’, in G. J. Buelow and H. J. Marx (eds.), New Mattheson Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 401. The descriptions quoted are from Der neu-eröffnete Orchestre, Hamburg, author/Schiller, 1713. 16 The most recent flurry of discussion has been prompted by B. Lehman, ‘Bach’s extraordinary temperament: our Rosetta Stone – 1’, Early Music, 33 (2005), 3–23 and 211–31. This prompted a response from J. O’Donnell, ‘Bach’s temperament, Occam’s razor, and the Neidhardt factor’, Early Music, 34 (2006), 625–33. 17 See P. Barbieri, ‘Violin intonation: a historical survey’, Early Music, 19 (1991), 69–88. 18 J. J. Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, trans. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, 2nd edn, London, Faber, 1985, pp. 31, 46.
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So you are yet in doubt as to the appropriateness and wisdom of the current practice of banishing the harpsichord from the orchestra? Allow me to share my thoughts on the matter with you. . . . If one wishes to do away with the harpsichord as a keyboard instrument, then one also excludes its substitute, the pianoforte, turning over the direction, as becomes ever more usual, to the violin. . . . One thus forgoes the surest and most convenient means of preserving in performance the so-called irregular temperament [schwebende Temperatur], upon which, however, our entire present tonal system is based. And one runs the danger of reintroducing all the well-known abuses that result from the playing of mathematically perfect fifths by the violins – abuses of which we have only recently managed to rid our orchestras. (That our violinists now use a tempered tuning you will not deny.) . . . But if a tempered keyboard instrument of some kind is present, the other instruments will tune in accordance with its fifths, and all will be in order.19
Despite the theoretical mobility afforded by circular temperaments, it is interesting to note that the outer limits for the home keys of Haydn instrumental works are A flat major (four flats) and B major (four sharps), though the ‘Farewell Symphony’ in F sharp minor has the trio section of its third movement with six sharps in F sharp major. (Special crooks were manufactured to enable the Esterházy horn players to perform this piece.) Mozart never ventured beyond keys with three flats or three sharps (though this does not take into account more remote keys visited during, say, the development sections of sonata form movements). D major was the default key for composers of symphonies (or overtures) in the second half of the eighteenth century, with C major a close second and E flat major in third place. Given the different factors involved in determining key choices within various genres (keyboard temperament, the availability of open strings, the natural preferences of woodwind and brass instruments) it is interesting to look at key distribution in instrumental works by Haydn and Mozart. These are summarised in Figs. 22.1 and 22.2. Both composers conform to the norm in their choice of keys for stand-alone orchestral compositions (though Haydn particularly is more ready to deviate from this than most of his confrères). What is, perhaps, most interesting is that both composers show a leaning towards flat keys for piano works and string chamber music. The favoured status of B flat and E flat major suggests that the brightness of an open E string was not highly prized. (In fact, Sir John Hawkins noted in his 1776 History that ‘the half shift, [i.e. the use of second position]
19 L. Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance, New York and London, Norton, 1999, p. 296.
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25
Percentage
20
15
10
5
0 Ab
f
Eb
c
Bb
g
F
d
C
a G Key
e
String Quartets
Symphonies
D
b
A
f#
E
c#
B
c#
B
Solo keyboard
Fig. 22.1. Haydn instrumental works – percentage distribution by key 40% 35%
Percentage
30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Ab
f
Eb
c
Bb
g
Symphonies
F
d
C
a G Key
e
D
String Quartets (& Quintets)
b
A
f#
E
Solo keyboard
Fig. 22.2. Mozart instrumental music – percentage distribution by key contrived to avoid the disgusting clangor of an open string, and enable the performer to shake with the third instead of the little finger, is but of late invention’.)20 A comparison of Mozart’s choice of keys for piano concertos 20 Sir J. Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 2 vols., London, 1776, repr. New York, Dover, 1963, vol. 2, p. 903n. For more on open E-string avoidance, see P. Walls, ‘Violin fingering in the 18th century’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 300–15.
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30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Gb eb Db bb Ab
f
Eb c Bb g
F
d C Key
a
G
e
D
b
A
f# E c# B g#
TOTAL
Fig. 22.3. Chopin distribution of works by key with solo keyboard works shows no significant difference. (We might, perhaps, have expected a pull towards the orchestral home base of D major in the concertos.) Beethoven’s practice is not significantly different. As a way of registering the massive increase in harmonic mobility that was to take place immediately after Beethoven’s death, however, it is interesting to compare the tables above with the snapshot of Chopin’s key choices provided by Fig. 22.3 (where works in F sharp major/D sharp minor have been equated with G flat major/E flat minor). Even without the Twenty Four Preludes Op. 28, Chopin utilises the full range of keys and, moreover, seems to have a strong liking for those with plenty of black notes (particularly A flat major and and C sharp minor). Nothing could illustrate more clearly the triumph of equal temperament. What each of the histories of instruments and of the orchestra have in common is a sense of arrival late in the seventeenth century with a design that favoured a new sophisticated aesthetic (one that we might characterise as an indoor, or even chamber, aesthetic) and a corresponding sense at the end of the period of the limitations of these same instruments in serving a quite new expressive outlook. Hotteterre and his disciples were about to be swept aside by Boehm and his; Stradivari’s instruments were being retro-fitted; the Ruckers tradition had one last glorious flowering in the instruments of Taskin; the sense of kinship extending back from Anton Walther to Stein, Silbermann and ultimately Cristofori was about to be broken, on the one hand, by an astonishingly rapid expansion in the range and weight of the Viennese
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piano, and on the other hand, by a radical redesign of the instrument by Érard and Broadwood.
Instrumental instruction All of these instruments were associated with an approach to playing that was moulded around the expressive ideals of the period. The long eighteenth century established a tradition that continues to this day of treatises on instrumental performance addressed to serious players (rather than, like so many of the more rudimentary seventeenth-century manuals, at amateurs whose ambitions extended no further than playing the melodies of country dances or popular songs).21 The chronology here, though, is not particularly tidy. Amongst the plethora of ‘self-instructor’ volumes are a handful of more interesting instrumental treatises (such as John Lenton’s The Gentleman’s Diversion, or the Violin Explained (London, 1693) ). Early in the period, Bernardo Pasquini, Andreas Werckmeister, Étienne Delair, François Couperin, and Francesco Gasparini all published on continuo playing. This list is impressive for the fact that it encompasses Italian, German and French practices.22 Jacques Hotteterre’s Principes de la flûte traversière appeared in 1707, the first instruction manual for the instrument that his family had perfected. There was an extraordinary mid-eighteenth-century surge in the publication of manuals for advanced performers (whether professional or amateur). Violinists were especially well served, with Geminiani’s Art of Playing on the Violin (London, 1751), Joseph de Herrando’s Arte y puntual explicación del modo de tocar el violín (Paris, 1756), Leopold Mozart’s Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756) and the Principes du violon (Paris, 1761) by L’Abbé le Fils. The Geminiani volume appeared in a French edition in 1752 and in German in 1782. Johann Joachim Quantz published his magnificent flute treatise (a volume that, particularly in its last section, is immensely useful to all instrumentalists) in 1752.23 A year later the first part of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s equally substantial volume on keyboard performance appeared (with the second part following in 1762).24 Johann Mattheson, too,
21 In Chapter 3, Robin Stowell gives a broader picture of the development of instruction manuals for performers. 22 B. Pasquini, Saggi di contrappunto (1695) and possibly also the lost Regole per ben suonare il cembalo o organo; A. Werckmeister, Die nothwendigsten Anmerckungen und Regeln, wie der Bassus continuus oder GerneralBass wol Könne tractiret werden (1698); F. Gasparini, L’armonico pratico al cimbalo (1708). 23 Quantz, trans. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber, 1985. 24 C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin, 1753–62), trans. W. J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, New York, Norton, 1949.
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was prolific in his advice to musicians (though there is more of an emphasis on compositional technique than performance in his writings). Although there are many instruments not specifically addressed in the titles of this group of treatises, most of the essential food groups are covered: keyboard, woodwind and strings. Johann Ernst Altenburg published an important treatise dealing with trumpet and timpani right at the end of our period in 1795 though it had been available on subscription in manuscript form from 1770.25 At the very end of the century, there were a number of publications that can be regarded as continuations – updates even – of Geminiani, Quantz, C. P. E. Bach and Leopold Mozart. The Geminiani ‘brand’ was kept alive through a stream of publications with titles such as The Compleat Tutor for the Violin. Containing the best & easiest instructions for learners to obtain a proficiency. With some useful directions, lessons, graces, &c. by Geminiani. (This first appeared c. 1770 but variants of it remained in print for decades.) Leopold Mozart’s treatise went through four editions in the second half of the eighteenth century, appeared in a Dutch translation in 1766 and in an (unauthorised) French version c. 1770.26 It was commended by C. F. D. Schubart in 1784–5 (published in 1806) and then (as with Geminiani) the brand was appropriated by Michel Woldemar in his Méthode de violon par L. Mozart rédigée par Woldemar. The title is completely misleading; Woldemar’s volume has almost nothing in common with the Violinschule. Of far more interest, Francesco Galeazzi’s Elementi teoricopratici di musica con un saggio sopra l’arte di suonare il violino analizzata, ed a dimostrabili principi ridotta (1791 and 1796) gives a fascinating view of violin playing from an Italian perspective. Johann Tromlitz published in 1791 an extremely thorough manual for flute players, which he presents as a sequel to Quantz’s Essay. In the foreword to this volume, Tromlitz writes, ‘I would not have dared to have put myself on a level with this very highly qualified man if I had not been quite convinced that the experiences and observations I have made studiously over more than forty years would lead the amateurs of this instrument on a very secure path.’27 Daniel Gottlob Türk’s Clavierschule of 1789, together with his Kurze Anweisung zum Generalbassspielen, provide a late eighteenth-century overview of keyboard technique and the obsolescent art of figured bass realisation. 25 J. E. Altenburg, Versuch einer Anleitung zur heroisch-musikalischen Trompeter- und Pauker-Kunst, Halle, Hendel, 1795, trans. E. H. Tarr as Essay on an Introduction to the Heroic and Musical Trumpeters’ and Kettledrummers’ Art, for the Sake of a Wider Acceptance of the Same, Described Historically, Theoretically, and Practically and Illustrated with Examples, Nashville, TN, Brass Press, 1974. 26 The third edition (1787) was revised by Leopold Mozart. See L. Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, trans. E. Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, Oxford University Press, 1948, p. xxv. Mozart had been keen to have the treatise translated into Italian. 27 J. G. Tromlitz, Ausführlicher und gründlicher Unterricht die Flöte zu spielen (Leipzig, Böhme, 1791), trans. and ed. A. Powell as The Virtuoso Flute Player, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 4.
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The foundation of the Paris Conservatoire in 1795 might be seen as setting a new direction away from a dynastic and towards a democratised profession where talent and prowess, rather than family expectations or patronage, provided the keys to a professional future. The Conservatoire ushered in a new era in advanced instrumental training and was responsible for the publication of a series of treatises covering, eventually, the full range of instruments of the orchestra. Important early examples were the 1803 Méthode de violon coauthored by Baillot, Rode and Kreutzer, and Louis Adam’s 1804 Méthode du piano du Conservatoire (which was translated into German and Italian). It is fair to say that this new generation of treatises addressed performers of a new generation of instruments (the piano in a form that was fast evolving into something closer to the modern Steinway than to the Stein that so excited Mozart in 1776 and string instruments played with Tourte bows and modified bass bars and necks). But for all that, quite a number of nineteenth-century treatises claimed some kind of continuity with the pedagogical foundations of the great eighteenth century. There are, for example, numerous nineteenthcentury violin treatises that continue to present themselves as new editions of Geminiani or Leopold Mozart’s work. (Few of these have any connection with their putative source.) The history of instruction manuals is paralleled by the production of compositions that were identified as being appropriate study material for developing performers. Sometimes the two coalesce. Geminiani’s Art of Playing on the Violin, for example, contains extended ‘examples’ that could legitimately be viewed (and used) as studies. But it concludes with twelve ‘Compositions’ for violin and basso continuo. The most distinguished compositions to be presented as study material can be found in the four parts of J. S. Bach’s Clavierübung or ‘keyboard exercise’ (1726–31).28 From the late sixteenth century on, the English had been using the word ‘lesson’ as a synonym for what in the nineteenth century came to be known (not just in French but across all European languages) as an ‘étude’.29 But this usage takes hold in the later seventeenth century and becomes virtually the standard English word for a self-contained instrumental composition throughout the long eighteenth century. Typically, An account of printed musick, for violins, hautboys, flutes, and other instruments, by several masters (1724) lists works by Froberger and D’Anglebert (presumably the 1689 Pièces de Clavecin) in a section entitled ‘Lessons for the Harpsichord and Organ’. 28 Bach adopted a title used by his predecessor as Kantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, Johann Kuhnau, who had published two volumes each containing seven keyboard suites in 1689 and 1692. 29 The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest recorded incidence of the word in this sense as William Barley’s New Booke of Citterne Lessons (1593).
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The creation of self-sufficient instrumental solos as study material became a hallmark of the next era. Kreutzer’s celebrated Études (still considered central in a violinist’s training) were published in 1796 by the Paris Conservatoire – seven years ahead of the treatise that he co-authored with Baillot and Rode.
Technique and style The elements of musical style (phrasing, articulation, treatment of vibrato, dynamic nuance and so on) are dependent on technique. In other words, technique ultimately becomes the handmaiden for the dominant aesthetic of the age. It ought to follow that the approaches to specific technical issues across diverse instruments within a contained historical period would promote a coherent musical style serving a consistent aesthetic perspective. Here, however, we must pause. In the 1970s and 1980s, during the spring tide of stylistic innovation prompted by the revival of interest in period instruments and the concomitant curiosity about eighteenth-century approaches to performance, it had seemed that historical principles relating to bowing, tonguing and keyboard fingering cooperated in encouraging a style that was highly articulate and in sharp contrast to the privileging of a vibrato-enriched sound, a seamless legato and a deliberate metrical vagueness that were seen as defining traits of performance practice in the Romantic era. Not that musicologists and performers were entirely unanimous. Schools of playing were identified on the basis of their treatment of sustained notes. While all period-instrument performers acknowledged that the messa di voce (swelling and diminishing the sound of a long note) was part of eighteenthcentury expressive vocabulary, English-trained players used it in a more restrained way than some of their colleagues on the Continent. Interestingly, their reserve echoed the reactions of some eighteenth-century French listeners who were offended by Italian singers’ extravagant use of this device. François Raguenet noted in 1702 that an Italian will ‘make a Swelling of so prodigious a Length that they who are unacquainted with it can’t choose but be offended at first to see him so adventurous’.30 It is salutary to be reminded that – within any period – there are likely to be quite wide-ranging differences in stylistic approach. One of the most striking aspects of the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s was the extent to which technical convenience or sometimes simply habit influenced which version of historical ‘truth’ was espoused by performers or even 30 Quoted in J. O. Robinson, ‘The “messa di voce” as an instrumental ornament in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Music Review, 43 (1982), 2.
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championed by musicologists.31 In a battle long since lost, those arguing that the most admired virtuoso violinists in the eighteenth century probably played without any stabilising support from the chin were countered with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century advice from generalists and amateurs (notably the organist Johann Jacob Prinner) suggesting that it was, after all, acceptable to secure the violin between shoulder and chin. An irrelevant engraving that de la Chevadière used as a frontispiece to his c. 1770 edition of Geminiani’s violin treatise was repeatedly cited as evidence that the instructions on holding the instrument given within the volume itself need not be taken seriously.32 A contemporary engraving of a proudly chin-off Antonio Veracini was dismissed as an unreliable publicity shot. In fact, whether or not violinists put their chins on the tailpiece has a direct bearing on the sound of the instrument – not just because of the damping effect of this contact but also because it significantly changes left-hand technique in relation to shifting and vibrato. (The – broadly true – statement that eighteenth-century musicians regarded vibrato as an ornament rather than as a basic constituent of good tone takes on a very different significance for string players depending on how they hold their instruments.) The implications of this debate were serious for twentieth-century violinists who had the choice between virtually relearning their instrument and simply adapting a technique that they had already invested years in trying to perfect. The incentives to side with Playford and Prinner against Geminiani, Veracini and (yes) Leopold Mozart were huge.33 Nevertheless, guidelines for articulation across a whole range of instruments were seen as advancing a distinctively eighteenth-century sense of metrical perspective. While this is complicated, there seems little doubt that a quite radical and coherent shift in tonal ideals and musical phrasing took place across different families of instruments at the end of the eighteenth century. It is not an easy matter to pin down the specific technical/stylistic components. The most obvious aspect of the link between technique and stylistic profile in the eighteenth century is the way in which the fundamentals of performance 31 In History, Imagination and the Performance of Music, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2003, pp. 19–21, I explore the extent to which preconceptions about beauty of tone distorted twentieth-century research on eighteenth-century attitudes to vibrato. 32 Note that the 1782 German version of Geminiani’s Art of Playing on the Violin alters Geminiani’s instructions on how to hold the instrument. Geminiani’s ‘The Violin must be rested just below the Collar-bone’ (accurately rendered in the French version) becomes ‘Die Geige muß zwischen dem Schlüsselbein und dem Kinnbacken . . . gehalten werden’ (my italics) – literally ‘The violin must be held between the collarbone and cheek’. 33 I nailed my own colours to the mast in the 1980s, arguing that many virtuosi continued to play without chin support well into the eighteenth century. See P. Walls, ‘Violin fingering in the 18th century’, 300–15; and ‘The Baroque era: strings’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 44–79.
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on different instruments cooperate with or facilitate a clear sense of metrical hierarchy. (By contrast, in the nineteenth century, a great deal of attention is given to developing the ability to override or disguise a natural dominance of strong beats in the interests of communicating a more fluid sense of metre.) Principles of bowing for string instruments, tonguing for wind and brass, and fingering for keyboard instruments produce complementary articulative patterns. They tend towards more rhythmically nuanced articulative patterns in which metrical stress is reinforced by subtle variation in note length. The attempt to document this, however, leads us into a forest of qualification, one in which the eighteenth-century’s refusal even to acknowledge such a putative orthodoxy joins hands with the nineteenth century’s loyalty to it. Nevertheless, the proposition that I seek both to defend and to qualify here is that works as different from each other as, say, Corelli’s ‘La Folia’, Bach’s B minor (French) Overture BWV 1067 and the Haydn Symphony No. 104 agree on the way melodic material fits within a clearly articulated rhythmic matrix that is itself determined by a harmonic structure that has syntactical force. This fusion of melody, harmony and metre projected through performance conventions is exactly what Liszt, Chopin and even Beethoven (in places like the opening movement of the Op. 101 Piano Sonata) set out to subvert or at least to blur. The clearest (or perhaps the crudest) statement of performance convention underlining rhythmic structure is the violinist’s ‘rule of the down bow’ – basically a matter of ensuring that stressed beats were taken on down bows. Given the way eighteenth-century bows amplify the difference between downbow and up-bow (rather than minimising this as the Tourte bow is designed to do) the ‘rule’ becomes a significant factor in defining a characteristically eighteenth-century sound. The most thorough and systematic elaboration of this principle comes in Georg Muffat’s 1698 preface ‘on the manner of playing Airs de Ballets in the French style’ – most often referred to simply as ‘Muffat’s rules’.34 Nearly sixty years later, Leopold Mozart (dealing with a less specialised repertoire than Muffat) still insisted that ‘the first and chief rule should be . . . whether it be even or uneven time [i.e. duple or triple], one endeavours to take the first note of each bar with a down stroke’.35 Muffat was specifically concerned with the specialised and very mannered style emanating from Lully and his disciples and he reminds us that Italian music demanded a rather more fluid approach. Geminiani, too, fulminated 34 G. Muffat, Florilegium Secundum, Passau, 1698, preface, ed. H. Rietsch in Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 4, Vienna, 1895. An English translation of the preface is available in Georg Muffat on Performance Practice, ed. and trans. D. K. Wilson, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001. 35 L. Mozart, A Treatise, ch. 4, §3, p. 74.
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Ex. 22.1. Francesco Geminiani, The Art of playing on the Violin (London, 1751), Essempio VIII, Section 20
against ‘that wretched Rule of drawing the Bow down at the first Note of every Bar’. In his violin treatise, he provides a series of exercises that are designed to develop complete adaptability, including one in which a repeat forces the student to play the same passage with diametrically opposite bowings (Ex. 22.1). Many of the bowings would seem counter-intuitive even to an orthodox twenty-first-century player, let alone to one who has absorbed Muffat and Leopold Mozart’s principles. At the end of the period, J.-B. Cartier wrote in the preface to his edition of Corelli’s Op. 5: ‘It is wrong to think that upbeats must always come on upbows, or that down-bows must mark the beat. The school of Corelli never subscribed to this servile rule, and the French Corelli, Gaviniès, has never ever adhered to it. The bow must be free, and the beauty of the sound depends on the way in which it is used.’36 Warnings that violinists should not adhere slavishly to the traditional, mechanical rules increased in frequency. For all that, however, the tyranny of the bar-line was never seriously challenged in the long eighteenth century. Early keyboard fingering methods navigate scale passages through pairs of fingers (mostly commonly 3–4 going up in the right hand and 3–2 coming down and with the left hand mirroring that). The thumb and little finger were basically reserved for the top and bottom notes in such passages. The neglect (if that is the right word) of the thumb as a pivot is maybe explained by the shortness of the keys themselves, which ensured that the thumb was not naturally positioned over the keyboard as with later instruments (though 36 A. Corelli, XII Sonates à violon seul et basse . . . Oeuvre V, Quinzième édition par J. B. Cartier (Paris, c. 1800); quoted by R. Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 303.
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Saint-Lambert in 1702 advises players to have their fingers ‘curved and all arranged at the same level based on the length of the thumb’).37 Obviously, such a system lends itself to articulating in pairs and may even encourage a slight inequality. Nevertheless, Rameau (and others) writes of the desirability of achieving a good legato in scale passages. C. P. E. Bach attributed the emancipation of the thumb to his father: My deceased father told me that in his youth he used to hear great men who employed their thumbs only when large stretches made it necessary. Because he lived at a time when a gradual but striking change in musical taste was taking place, he was obliged to devise a far more comprehensive fingering and especially to enlarge the role of the thumbs and use them as nature intended for, amongst their other good services, they must be employed chiefly in the difficult tonalities. Hereby, they rose from their former uselessness to the rank of principal finger.38
His C major example gives the standard modern fingering (RH: 1231234(5); LH: 54321321) as an alternative to the ‘perhaps more usual’ system (RH: 12343434 . . .; LH: 43212121 . . .).39 For woodwind players, tonguing provides the most direct of means of giving rhythmic definition. As already noted, the history of ‘civilised’ woodwind instruments (by which I mean instruments capable of rivalling or partnering violins as participants in sophisticated indoor music) begins in France. The tonguing syllables favoured in the early part of this period (tu and ru), were consistent with (rather than, I think, encouraged or implied) a slight inequality, allowing quavers in stressed positions to receive not just a subtly more marked onset but also ever so slightly more length). But these syllables were gradually replaced by others which facilitated more even articulation – though the eighteenth-century tradition in tonguing syllables was not completely abandoned until well into the next century.
The prevailing aesthetic Arching above any partnership between instrumental set-up, technique and style was the sense of a dominant aesthetic. There are several strands to this story, and we should begin with one that treats it from the point of view of national styles. At the beginning of the period, a debate raged about the relative merits of the Italian and French styles. The first was characterised by spontaneity and 37 M. de Saint-Lambert, Les principes du clavecin, Paris, Ballard, 1702, trans. R. Harris-Warrick as Principles of the Harpsichord, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 74. 38 C. P. E. Bach, Essay, p. 42. 39 Ibid., p. 46.
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emotional excess. It is associated with the free embellishment of melodic lines for which the most famous model is the 1710 Étienne Roger graced edition of Corelli’s Opus 5 Sonatas.40 By contrast, the French style required the mastering of metrical conventions related to a myriad of dance forms and the acquisition of an extended vocabulary of fixed ornaments that added a sense of rhythmic piquancy. Reference has already been made to notes inégales – the practice of subtly lengthening the first note in pairs of quavers moving by step. This might be seen as a particular instance of a tendency to use length as well as accent to underline metrical stress – though the extent to which this could be codified in groupings of the dotted quaver plus semiquaver variety as implying double-dotting or over-dotting has been vigorously debated.41 Overriding all of the rhythmic conventions and attitude to ornaments, the French style conveyed a sense of decorum. A vigorous (but perhaps not entirely serious) debate took place in the late seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century. Lully, the champion of French convention, parodied the Italian style (in, for example, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) while François Couperin proposed a conflated style, a ‘goût réuni’. (His Apothéose de Corelli of 1724 is a delightfully witty exemplar of this idea.) François Raguenet summarised the binary in 1702 (here as translated into English by Nicola Haym in 1709): ‘The French, in their airs, aim at the soft, the easy, the flowing and coherent . . . The Italians venture at everything that is harsh and out of the way, but they do it like people that have a right to venture and are sure of success.’42 It still seemed to Quantz in the mid-century that an awareness of these opposing national styles was essential for performers. He neatly summed up the differences: The Italian manner of playing is arbitrary, extravagant, artificial, obscure, frequently bold and bizarre, and difficult in execution; it permits many additions of graces, and requires a seemly knowledge of harmony; but among the ignorant it excites more admiration than pleasure. The French manner of playing is slavish, yet modest, distinct, neat and true in execution, easy to imitate, neither profound nor obscure, but comprehensible to everyone, and convenient for amateurs; it does not require much knowledge of harmony,
40 A. Corelli, Sonate a violino . . . troisième edition ou l’on a joint les agreements des adagio de cet ouvrage, composez par Mr. A. Corelli, comme il les joue, Amsterdam, Estienne Roger, [1710]. 41 For a sense of the controversy surrounding this issue see P. Walls (ed.), Baroque Music, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011, pp. xxiii–xxiv, 347–400. 42 F. Raguenet, Parallèle des Italiens et des Français en ce que regarde la musique et les opéras, Paris, Moreau, 1702, trans. N. Haym as A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick and Operas, London, Lewis, 1709; see O. Strunk (ed.), rev. L. Treitler, Source Readings in Music History, New York and London, Norton, 1998, p. 675.
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since the embellishments are generally prescribed by the composer; but it gives the connoisseurs little to reflect upon.43
Quantz introduces the subject as a dual hegemony: In recent times . . . there are two peoples in particular who have earned considerable esteem through their improvement of musical style; led by their natural proclivities, they have each taken different paths to achieve this goal. These two peoples are the Italians and the French. Other nations have given the greatest approbation to the styles of these two peoples, and have sought to imitate and adopt some aspects of the styles of either the one or the other. In consequence, the two peoples mentioned have been seduced into setting themselves up as sovereign judges of good style in music; and since none of the other countries has been able to oppose them they actually have been, to a certain extent, the legislators in this regard for some centuries. From them, good style has since been transferred to other peoples.44
Awareness of national stylistic orientation in different parts of Europe seems to have varied enormously. There is minimal commentary on the subject from the Italians themselves. They clearly saw little need to familiarise themselves with practices elsewhere. (Quantz observes that Italians had little interest in performing French music.)45 The French, on the other hand, were almost obsessed by the distinction between their own practices and those of the Italians (with much of the continuously renewing debate reflecting a kind of envy of Italian freedom). It could almost be argued that the opposition of a meticulous French style with expansive Italian expression was a French construction. But it is also interesting to note how many of the most useful accounts of the practices associated with each style come from other parts of Europe. Raguenet, as already noted, was translated into English. Before that, Purcell had done his best to document the essentials of the Italian style (in, for example, the introduction to the Sonnata’s of III Parts (1683)). His instrumental overtures and chaconnes show a similar alertness to French convention. In the preface to the published score of Dioclesian (1691), Purcell (or, more probably, Dryden as ghost writer) asserts that English music ‘is now learning Italian, which is its best Master, and studying a little of the French Air, to give it more of Gayety and Fashion’. Georg Muffat provides a wonderfully thorough documentation of the conventions associated with the French style in his lengthy preface to a set of his own French-style orchestral suites, Florilegium Secundum (1698) (the preface referred to above as ‘Muffat’s Rules’) while he introduces his Italian-style concerti grossi in Ausserlesene Instrumental-Music (1701) with a similarly
43 Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 335.
44 Ibid., p. 320.
45 Ibid., p. 332.
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informative account of Italian practices. It is fascinating that the second part of Bach’s Clavierübung (1732) contains just two works – a ‘Concerto in the Italian Taste’ (BWV 971) and an ‘Overture in the French Style’ (BWV 831). In other words, knowledge of these two genres and the conventions associated with them seems almost to have been viewed as providing a complete stylistic education. It seems obvious now that the Purcellian synthesis of contemporary Italian and French trends with a rich English tradition of mannered counterpoint produced something much greater than the sum of its parts. To an even greater extent, Bach’s ability to assimilate French and Italian traits within a musical language that is deeply indebted to his German/Lutheran inheritance produced some of the most profound music ever written. In the second half of the eighteenth century the French/Italian binary gave way to a dominant Austro-German musical language – though this, in itself, might be seen as largely an outgrowth of the Italian style. It took up Italian genres (the concerto/sinfonia) and was assisted by the large numbers of Italian musicians who (like the much-resented Jomelli in Stuttgart) found employment in musical establishments in Austria and Germany. By the 1780s, Vienna (not Paris, Venice or London) started to look like the musical capital of Europe with its dominant genres, performance formats and – principally – resident composers who had an influence way beyond the Habsburg territories. But the composers of the (first) Viennese school were also seen as the initiators of a new aesthetic that signals the opening of a different chapter in performance history. E. T. A. Hoffmann famously spelled out the metanarrative in his essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music of 1813. For Hoffmann, Haydn belonged safely in eighteenth-century pastoral, while Mozart gave us a glimpse of music that could reach beyond rationality and conventional ideas of beauty. But it was Beethoven whose music ‘opens up to us also the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable . . . [setting] in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism’.46 Haydn, though, is more of a pivotal figure in this change than Hoffmann gave him credit for. The evocation of chaos in the prelude to The Creation (1798) asks performers to animate a very different musical language from that which had prevailed through the long eighteenth century, with its clear, syntactical harmonic progressions, predominantly transparent textures and an alignment of periodic melody and metrical accompaniment. Instead, mysterious triplets and sextuplets bubble through a common-time environment and metrical 46 Strunk (ed.), Source Readings in Music History, p. 1194.
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clarity is undermined through surging entries that anticipate the bar-line or strong subsidiary beats while a large orchestra helps create saturated textures (within a basic piano dynamic that is disrupted by irrational forte events and sforzandi). Carl Friedrich Zelter, writing 1802, recognised that a sea-change in musical expression had taken place: The overture . . . is, in our opinion, the greatest section of the work . . . With almost all possible instruments available as raw materials, a gigantic, almost incalculable web of artistic splendour is woven and formed. The objection that Chaos cannot be depicted by means of harmony, melody and rhythm now falls to the ground . . . Almost all discords that occur are deliberately treated with complete freedom. The unusual combination of figures and note values, which include semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers and semiquavers, triplets, roulades, trills and grace-notes, gives the score a peculiar and mysterious look. One is astonished at the multitude of small, playful figures that swarm around huge, dark masses, like clouds of insects against the great horizon. All these things in combination, in the dark imagery of Chaos, make up an endlessly harmonious fabric, in which the succession of modulations is indescribably beautiful and in many places so sublime and lofty as to evoke awe.47
Haydn was pleased with this description, writing to Zelter in 1804, ‘You are a man with a profound understanding of music, as is proven by your correct analysis of my “Chaos”.’48 With its origins ultimately in Milton’s Paradise Lost (first published 1667), the Vorstellung des Chaos – for all that it leads into a C major affirmation of rationality – seems like an apt signal that European music was moving into a new era.
47 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 4 (1801–2), 390ff; quoted by H. Schenker in The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook, vol. 2 (1926), ed. W. Drabkin, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 103. 48 Ibid. As always it seems, the overarching story is not quite so uncomplicated. Haydn’s was not the first eighteenth-century representation of Chaos. Jean-Féry Rebel began his ‘Simfonie nouvelle’ Les Eléméns (1737) with a remarkable movement entitled ‘Le Cahos’. In a preface to the volume, Rebel explained his concept: ‘I dared to undertake to link the idea of the confusion of the elements with that of confusion in harmony. I hazarded to make heard first all sound together or rather all of the notes of the octave united as a single sound.’ (Translation from www.early-music.com/view.asp?ID=1136.) Rebel’s movement (and the suite as a whole) belongs within the tradition of French character pieces that have their origin in the dances of the ballet de cour.
. 23 .
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies in E flat major K543, G minor K550 and C major K551 COLIN LAWSON
Mozart today The original sound world of Mozart’s last three symphonies can arguably never be recreated, if only because the evidence is fundamentally insufficient. In any case, to what extent can modern taste cope with primary materials that are sometimes decidedly uncomfortable? This is a fundamental question, since it would be scarcely surprising if the many intricacies of Mozart’s last symphonies were not revealed at their premieres. It further seems likely that subsequent early performances would not have exhibited the degree of standardisation and consistency to which we have become accustomed. If this chapter cannot aspire even to speculate effectively, it can at least aim to open up some fruitful areas for reflection. The example of twentieth-century composer Edward Elgar is instructive; his own recordings from the 1920s and 1930s remain readily available yet have never been truly recreated, despite their primary perspective on both performance styles and technical standards.1 This would surely be true of aural evidence from 140 years earlier, were we to possess it. Mozart’s last three symphonies have come to occupy a special position even within his own output. They have attracted the attention of generations of scholars. Robbins Landon, for example, addresses the works with characteristic insight, signposting the challenges faced by the first performers, while nevertheless aligning himself with elements of nineteenth-century reception in his laudatory descriptions: In the last three symphonies we have a kind of bird’s eye of Mozart as composer. From the warmth and autumnal beauty of the E flat Symphony no. 39 (with clarinets but no oboes) we move to the frantic and anguished 1 Elgar’s own comments on Mozart are also highly instructive. In 1905 he wrote, ‘Turning from a modern score to this small attenuated orchestra [for the G minor symphony], we may wonder how it is possible that a great art-work could be evolved from such sorry materials . . . We have to marvel that with such a selection of instruments, a variety and contrast can be found sufficient to hold the attention for thirty minutes.’ See N. Kenyon, The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart, London, Faber, 2005, p. 17.
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neuroticism of no. 40 in G minor (to which clarinets were added later) and finish with no. 41, the majestic ‘Jupiter’ (no clarinets), where the fruits of Mozart’s interest in counterpoint and his involvement with Bach and Handel reveal themselves in the spectacular finale, one of the greatest contrapuntal achievements of the eighteenth century. The overall mood of each one of these symphonies is, however, staggeringly diverse – in the slow movement of no. 39 the autumnal serenity is disturbed as if by a violent storm; amid the nearhysteria of no. 40 we are, again in the slow movement, introduced to a magical world which has the same kind of depth as those mysterious landscapes in the background of many a quattrocento Italian painting; and, in the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, the slow movement introduces a kind of violent unrest into the otherwise rather detached and lofty major world of the rest of the work.2
Nineteenth-century deification of Mozart runs deep, though for much of the period before 1900 only a relatively small fraction of his non-operatic pieces was in active use – broadly the last three symphonies, the Requiem, the late string quartets and quintets and the D minor Piano Concerto K466. During his entire career Mahler conducted (apart from the operas) only the last two symphonies and the Requiem. Between 1848 and 1910, only seven symphonies were in the repertoire of the Vienna Philharmonic. The early profile in Vienna of Mozart’s G minor and ‘Jupiter’ symphonies set the trend, as David Wyn Jones has ably illustrated in respect of the concerts under the patronage of Joseph Würth (1803–5), the Liebhaber Concerte (1807) and the series of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Concerts Spirituels (both from 1819). Jones sets a context for the continued popularity of these two symphonies (and to a much lesser degree the E flat) alongside the newer output of Beethoven and his contemporaries.3 Although relatively few Viennese performances of Mozart symphonies during the decade 1790–1800 have yet come to light, Jones detects a perceived distinction of the works that was ‘part of a growing transcendence that marked the composer’s image in the years immediately after his death’.4 Whereas in his lifetime Mozart had prioritised the piano concerto, his symphonies came to profit from the esteem that was accorded to those of Haydn. Acknowledgement of Mozart from the nineteenth-century public derived in large measure from regular performances of Don Giovanni – regarded as the greatest and most modern Mozart – together with Figaro and Die Zauberflöte. Yet Mozart’s name continued to be widely revered, on a par with Shakespeare, Goethe and, as Otto Jahn suggested in 1858, even Sophocles. The nineteenth century of course produced numerous biographies, a detailed work catalogue, 2 H. C. Robbins Landon, Mozart: The Golden Years, London, Thames & Hudson, 1989, p. 198. 3 D. W. Jones, The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 121, 124, 185. 4 Ibid., p. 56.
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a collected edition and adoration from a whole range of composers. In an era where modern music was especially valued, the view that Mozart and his music were childlike, superficial and old-fashioned, continued to hold sway. Sir Hubert Parry wrote in 1890 that ‘Mozart was not naturally a man of deep feeling or intellectuality’, whilst Delius went so far as to write that ‘if a man tells me that he likes Mozart, I know in advance that he is a bad musician’.5 But since 1900 the Mozart revival, including the last three symphonies, has gathered an inexorable momentum, initially at the hands of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Felix Weingartner and many others, on the crest of an antiRomantic wave that was initially a reaction to Wagner’s music. Since the bicentenary of Mozart’s birth in 1956, the avalanche of scholarship has not entirely freed us from concepts of genius, a vision of the symphony post-Mozart and a relationship of the composer and the work that he would scarcely have recognised. In the musical world over the last fifty years, what happened to Mozart’s music is summed up in Nicholas Kenyon’s concise phrase: it has become serious. All this is highly relevant in any discussion of performance practices from Mozart’s own day. Disaggregating myth and reality in Mozart’s life and works has been a central theme of modern scholarship and this relates directly to performance as well as composition. During the past twenty years of radical change in Mozart performance styles, players, scholars and listeners have had the benefit of Neal Zaslaw’s penetrating and exhaustive Mozart’s Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford, 1989), which contains a great deal of information about contemporary performance practices and standards. Much further detailed evidence is to be found within Clive Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750– 1900 (Oxford, 1999). As historical awareness develops and reinvents itself, there is every reason to suppose that fashions in Mozart performance will continue to change, so that no interpretation can ever claim to be in any sense definitive. Something of a milestone was reached in 2008 with the release of a recording of Mozart’s last four symphonies (including the ‘Prague’ K504) by Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. It won BBC Music Magazine ‘Disc of the Year and Orchestral Award 2009’, attracting fulsome praise: ‘Mackerras gets so much light and shade in these works, even grandeur. . . . Yet everything is alert and alive – nothing appears to be an accompaniment figure, but everything seems to be part of a grand design.’ The octogenarian Mackerras declared himself absolutely delighted by the success of the record, ‘because I’ve spent my whole life trying to get those four symphonies 5 Kenyon, The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart, pp. 16, 18.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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right . . . when I think about this recording, I don’t think I can do them any better – that’s my final word on those marvellous works’.6 While perfectly satisfied with his Prague Chamber Orchestra recordings from the late 1980s, Mackerras continued in the intervening years to perform the works with a variety of period and modern-instrument orchestras. ‘I think I’ve got a greater understanding of the way Mozart’s mind worked now,’ he added, acknowledging that his approach was now faster, crisper, more phrased, less sustained and legato then before. He had also become convinced of the need to use natural horns and trumpets: ‘You get that wonderful “punch” to the sound as they can blow loudly without overwhelming the orchestra.’ The accompanying CD booklet draws attention to the relatively modest size of the theatres, halls, music rooms and salons in which Mozart performed his symphonies. The orchestras were correspondingly small and listeners were positioned correspondingly closer to the musicians. ‘These factors meant that orchestral music must have sounded more intimate, nuanced and transparent than we often hear in large modern halls with enlarged performing forces. How delightful, then, that the close microphones and digital technologies of a modern CD . . . seem to restore some of the intimacy, nuance and transparency we imagine that Mozart’s audiences enjoyed.’7 Reviewers agreed that this was a special, benchmark release; it was nominated as the number one classical record of 2008 by Sunday Times and HMV Choice. ‘These are the finest versions of Mozart’s greatest symphonies to have appeared on disc in years,’ enthused The Guardian. Beautifully packaged and adorned with the celebrated painting Reception at a Freemason’s Lodge in Vienna, c. 1784, attributed to Ignaz Unterberger, Mackerras’s disc seemed on its appearance to represent to many critics almost everything in late Mozart that one could possibly wish for. It clearly illustrates an intersection of period principles with (mainly) modern instruments entirely characteristic of its era, representing the increasing cross-fertilisation of styles which Kenyon has already highlighted in Chapter 1.
‘Period’ principles: authentic or not? By the time of Mozart’s anniversary in 1956 a trickle of ‘historically informed’ Mozart was already under way. But in the 1960s, LPs by the magisterial Karl Böhm acquired the status of a benchmark interpretation, giving the symphonies enormous weight and significance. Böhm’s recording at the time felt 6 BBC Music Magazine, May 2009, pp. 22–3. Yet, as Nicholas Kenyon implies in Chapter 1, Mackerras clearly regards none of his recordings as definitive, recognising that tastes change through the generations. 7 Symphonies 38–41, Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Sir Charles Mackerras, Linn CKD 308 (2008), pp. 6–7.
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definitive, characterised by grand and dramatic gestures. His symphonic cycle had the flavour of a series of true masterworks – even if this was a term that Mozart himself would certainly never have recognised.8 In the 1970s Karajan was civilised and always without edge, his sound memorably described by one of his record producers as ‘exquisitely polished, free of anything that is unbeautiful, of great brilliance, and loudness without the click of an attack’.9 Böhm and Karajan can be seen as the culmination of a performance tradition in which different stylistic periods of composition were much less radically differentiated. But then along came Christopher Hogwood in the early 1980s to remove Karajan’s gloss with his leaner, more dissonant period textures; as we shall see, he was soon provoking an argument (to which Kenyon has already referred) about whether orchestral Mozart needed interpretation at all. Richard Taruskin shockingly asserted that historical performance was in fact ‘the most modern sound around’. Yet the colours of period instruments really did bring life to the detached, small-scale phrasing that has now come to be acknowledged as the heart of Mozart’s utterance. His original scoring was based upon a sensitive and precise understanding of the capabilities and qualities of the instruments of the time. The tone colours, relative weighting and playing techniques were crucial factors in Mozart’s judgement and it was sensibly argued that, had the instruments been different, he would have written differently for them. Already in the nineteenth century there were complaints that the tone of various wind instruments was being altered beyond recognition by mechanical improvements to deal with more complex chromatic music. The addition of valves and pistons to brass instruments made them more versatile technically but significantly altered their tone-quality. Stringed instruments similarly increased in volume, while players radically revised attitudes to vibrato, bowing and slurs. Hogwood’s return to detailed articulation and phrasing complemented a radical rethinking of tempo, particularly at the slower end of the spectrum. Movements designated Andante or Minuet were reckoned to have become much more sedate since Mozart’s death, notably in the hands of Wagner and his disciples. But how radical was this? Hans Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1929 effectively show that Hogwood’s brisk tempo for the introduction of K543 was far from innovative. And a conductor such as Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic in the 1950s raises additional
8 Böhm’s tempos are by no means the slowest on record; for example, compare Václav Talich and the Czech Philharmonic in the mid-1950s. 9 E. Schwarzkopf, On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge, London, Faber, 1982, p. 226.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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questions of the extent to which tempo flexibility is appropriate (and effective) in Mozart’s symphonies. Hogwood’s pioneering set was followed by many other ‘period’ interpreters, including John Eliot Gardiner, Ton Koopman, Roger Norrington, Jaap ter Linden and Trevor Pinnock. It is highly significant that, working from broadly the same pool of historical evidence, such conductors came to radically different conclusions in their approaches to Mozart’s late symphonies. Pioneering historically informed style was subsequently absorbed by the mainstream orchestras, sometimes under the direction of these same musicians. Zaslaw’s 1989 labels ‘neo-classical’ (the approach by ‘early music’ specialists) and ‘post-romantic’ (the approach generally offered by internationally famous soloists, orchestras and opera houses) now seem far too differentiated; he also underestimates the extent to which modern instruments can match period instruments’ ‘fully adequate approximation’. This author’s personal experiences of ‘period’ Mozart has been quite varied; for example, it was evident that Pinnock was inclined to prioritise sound and intonation, whereas Norrington used the tonal palette as a means to the language of gesture, shape and form. Both conductors were typical in showing absolutely no interest in the pedigree of the instruments being used for any particular project. In the harsh world of late twentieth-century media, that situation led to some compromising situations. Pinnock’s understandable pragmatism led to an overriding dread that ‘unacceptable’ sounds would be emitted, especially from the winds. Yet when he came to celebrate twenty years of the English Concert, he was bold enough to write: ‘Some of the publicists’ myths about “authenticity” have been exploded, but for us the simple fact remains the same: we like to use the tools designed for the job in hand. Instruments good enough for Bach should surely be good enough for us.’10 It is of course an uncomfortable fact that the very presence of a conductor in the modern sense is decidedly unhistorical. Hogwood’s project was heralded in a stimulating article by Neal Zaslaw.11 He dismissed the notion of an unbroken tradition of performance practice as a myth, surveying instruments and playing techniques, interpretative problems, orchestral placement, concert rooms, standards and personnel. The celebrated Mannheim orchestra was to be an inspiration as remembered in Burney’s characterisation as ‘an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle as to fight it’. And Schubart had written of it in 1784, ‘Its forte is like thunder, its crescendo like a great waterfall, its diminuendo the splashing of a crystalline river disappearing into the distance, its piano a breath of spring.’ After Zaslaw’s 10 T. Pinnock, ‘20 Years of the English Concert’, Early Music News, 174 (May 1993), 1. 11 N. Zaslaw, ‘Toward the revival of the classical orchestra’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 103 (1976), 158–87.
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promise of historical riches, it was something of a shock in 1984 to read Eric van Tassel’s review of Hogwood’s complete Mozart set, which (as Kenyon has already noted) appeared to delight in its adherence to mere notes on the page. Van Tassel praised the orchestral tone colours, intonation and the vivid recording, before continuing: ‘the . . . minimalist approach, which even in the last symphonies consists simply in getting all the details right, need not prevent our penetrating the surface of the music if we are willing to make some imaginative effort. . . . a performance not merely “under-interpreted” but un-interpreted offers potentially an experience of unequalled authenticity, using the word in a sense as much existential as musicological. If the notes are all you hear . . . you have to become a participant: you are invited to complete a realization of the music that begins in the playing.’12 Malcolm Bilson responded that any decision on tempo or dynamics constitutes interpretation. Addressing the question of lack of rehearsal in the eighteenth century, Bilson drew attention to top jazz musicians, who often play sophisticated idioms at their first meeting. As another example, Viennese musicians have a common understanding of waltz idioms. Zaslaw returned to the question of interpretation in his 1989 book on the Mozart symphonies, treading a middle course. There could never be no interpretation, but recreated Mozart must speak for itself more than it would under a post-Romantic conductor; the results are bound to be more neutral and less personal, more objective and less subjective. This seems perilously close to the situation in 1950s Cambridge highlighted by Harry Haskell, where ‘early musicians’ were thanked for the ‘voluntary restraint in the display of their artistic capabilities’ when recreating an atmosphere of appropriate equanimity and tranquillity – admittedly in much earlier repertoire than Mozart. Reviews of Hogwood brought into question not just issues of leadership but of orchestral standards. Van Tassel had suggested that players today ‘may far surpass the composer’s contemporaries in technical skill’ and that Mozart never ‘led a band that played so well together’. He subsequently claimed to have had in mind Burney’s strictures on the wind intonation of even the Mannheim band; the implications behind Bremner’s advice to orchestral players; the report by Burney’s informant in 1772 that the Salzburg orchestra had in the past been ‘accused of being more remarkable for coarseness and noise, than delicacy and high-finishing’; and Mozart’s own view in 1778 of Mannheim’s virtues as reflecting badly on Salzburg. In fact Zaslaw in his introductory article had unearthed an even more notorious illustration. A sober bureaucratic report prepared for the sponsors of the orchestra at Lyon 12 E. van Tassel, review of Academy of Ancient Music’s Mozart symphonies, in Early Music, 12 (1984), 125ff.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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in 1785 noted that its leader had neither intelligence nor an accurate style of performance; among the second violins ‘one had no tone and another was incapable of improvement, due to nonchalance and little intelligence; the first oboist, who was also the first flautist, took it upon himself to be absent for the overture and often for the entr’actes; some players, including the principal cellist, never attended rehearsals, and the cellist attended only performances of operas and major ballets; the first bassoonist appeared only when he liked the part, often staying away for a week at a time, and the second bassoonist followed his lead; and some members of the orchestra were in the habit of leaving after the overture in order to give lessons to their pupils’.13 This salutary tale serves to remind us that there is plenty of historical evidence associated with Mozart and his contemporaries that is routinely ignored, both for artistic and fiscal reasons.
Historical accuracy versus practical expediency There are, in any case, a number of overarching questions as we contemplate Mozart’s intentions (or expectations). It may be that the use of period instruments in recreating music of the past is not really a significant factor compared with musical understanding, cultural and social context, acoustical considerations and concert-giving situations. There can be no assurance that we shall understand a composer’s piece of music merely by restricting ourselves to the means he had available, which may arguably inhibit our full expression of the piece. Taruskin’s ‘debunking’ of historical performance as the most modern sound around has been borne out by what have continued loosely if not falsely to be described as ‘original instruments’. Improved copies of instruments have a long and distinguished pedigree. As long ago as 1932 Arnold Dolmetsch’s pupil Robert Donington remarked of his teacher’s reconstructions: ‘the old harpsichord has certain limitations [and produces] a jangle, slight in the treble but audible in the bass. . . . The new instruments, which remedy these historical oversights, have proved both purer and more sustained than any previous harpsichord.’ In the 1960s he argued that music lying within the public domain was ours to use as best we like and can, but that ‘giving explicitly or implicitly false information is, perhaps, another matter and in a bad case might almost amount to fraudulent misrepresentation’.14 Scholarly forays into the relationship between copies and original instruments have been rare indeed. It is important to emphasise that ‘period’
13 L. Vallas, Un siècle de musique de théâtre à Lyon 1688–1789, Lyon, Masson, 1932, p. 432. 14 R. Donington, The Interpretation of Early Music, New York, Faber, 1974, pp. 44–5.
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performances do not necessarily reflect the detailed sound world of Mozart’s own time. The trumpet is a case in point. In 1998 Robert Barclay drew attention to the finger-holes often placed on copies of the natural trumpet, so that ‘the so-called out-of-tune harmonics of the natural series . . . will not be unpleasant to modern sensitivity’.15 He was able to claim that the natural trumpet was the one instrument not yet fully revived for use in the performance of Baroque music. Barclay observed that to a great extent the idiosyncrasies of the natural harmonic series were still considered to be beyond reliability in the recording studio or in live performance. ‘The vented instruments that have resulted from this recent “invention of tradition” are often equipped with so many anachronistic features that the result is a trumpet which resembles its Baroque counterpart only superficially, whose playing technique is quite different, and whose timbre is far removed from that expected for baroque music.’ In the 1960s dissatisfaction with the performance characteristics of the natural trumpet had led to ‘improvement’ by the use of finger-hole systems, ‘providing the player with a means of correcting the problematic harmonics (chiefly numbers 11 and 13), and providing security for other notes by giving access to more widely spaced overtones’.16 But the transformation to the vented trumpet was carried a great deal further: A tapered lead pipe was applied to some models, thus improving centering of the notes. A modern, narrow-bore receiver was used in place of the wider one found on all period instruments, thus excluding the possibility of using oldstyle mouthpieces. Smooth transfer between the modern valved instrument and the new invention was the primary motivation for these developments. For speed in manufacturing, seamless tubing, and spun or pressure-formed bells, produced by modern manufacturing methods, were used in favour of traditional hand-made components. On some models rigid metal stays, in place of the wood block and cord characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were soldered between the components. In some extreme examples, the traditionally formed ball of sheet metal or a casting, which lies approximately at the center position of the bell, was replaced by an off-the-shelf doorknob.17
It is certainly the case that modern musical life dictates a virtuosity and flexibility with some decidedly unhistorical elements. As Crispian Steele-Perkins has 15 R. Barclay, ‘A new species of instrument: the vented trumpet in context’, Historic Brass Society Journal, 10 (1998), 1–13. 16 Ibid., 3. ‘The three-hole system, still used predominantly in continental Europe, was popularized by Otto Steinkopf. It comprises a thumb hole, transposing from C to F, and two smaller holes to eliminate alternate partials. The four-hole system characteristic of the English school was pioneered by Michael Laird, and adopted by a number of other makers. In this system, two holes are used to correct harmonics 11 and 13, and the others eliminate alternate partials.’ 17 Ibid., 3.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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written, ‘A dedicated performer . . . needs a good copy of a genuine antique trumpet upon which he can train his or her lip, and a good modern finger-holed instrument with which to earn a living in an environment where time is money and where there are monstrous egos to be satiated.’18 Systematic dissimulation and confusion of natural and vented trumpets in the name of authenticity have become widespread, even within performances claimed as such that the composer would have recognised. But at least one scholar has claimed that handmade trumpets are easier to play and more in tune than modern machine-made facsimiles. The difficulty of playing such reproductions led to such problems in the first place, especially when accurate historical mouthpieces were not used. Barclay called for a return to historical fidelity rather than mere practical expediency and this has been reflected in certain areas of the trumpet world since he wrote the article. Revealingly, Barclay is also bold enough to claim that woodwind copies have been made entirely by pre-industrial revolution techniques and with appropriate materials and tools. This is certainly not the case. As an illustration emanating from this author’s personal experience, the ‘period’ clarinet has manifestly occupied a variety of positions on the historical spectrum. This particular example is representative of the woodwind and brass sections as a whole with their culture of reeds, mouthpieces, bores and materials. The manufacture of classical clarinet copies has often been influenced by modern tastes formed from years of experience with the Boehm system. Replacement of ivory trimmings with plastic may (or may not) affect the sound. Mouthpieces made of ebonite rather than wood will have a greater effect on tone-colour, whatever the perceived gain in stability and consistency of response. The exigencies of air travel and the microphone offer no historical excuse for such transformations. The small hard reed that was characteristic of the clarinet in Mozart’s Vienna (and pictured in Nicholas Shackleton’s article ‘clarinet’ in The New Grove) has often been eschewed in favour of the modern German cut (often of softer strength), with a ‘period’ mouthpiece design radically altered to accommodate it.19 Although there is considerable evidence that the five-keyed clarinet was the norm in Mozart’s day, many players have been content to opt for a more generously mechanised instrument that is characteristic of a later era. The present author has ample experience of clarinet replicas that have been ‘improved’ and made more reliable through modernised ebonite mouthpieces 18 C. Steele-Perkins, ‘The trumpet’, Early Music Today (February/March 1998), 12. Barclay also cites Andrew Pinnock’s observation in ‘We all fall from grace at the studio door’, Galpin Society Journal, 44 (1991), 192. 19 This is the mouthpiece/reed set-up that can be heard in the recordings of Symphonies nos. 39 and 40 by Norrington and by Pinnock.
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and over-generous mechanisms. Such a hybrid allows for greater volume to be produced, but at the expense of the kaleidoscopic chromatic scale that is a feature of the true classical instrument. The temptation to employ electronic tuners during manufacture of ‘early’ wind instruments can produce a reliable chromatic scale, yet tends to discourage any excursions away from equal temperament. Some surviving wind instruments enable important deductions as to ensemble temperament and chordings.20 Different national characteristics of clarinets (and other woodwinds) have not always been reflected in the studio. This is important for Mozart; comparison of woodwinds made by Doleisch in Prague with those made by Griesbacher in Vienna reveals some fundamental differences in design.21 During the heady days of British recording activity in the early 1990s Clive Brown issued a timely warning that the characteristics of some of the orchestral instruments employed in recently issued period Beethoven cycles would certainly not have been familiar to musicians in Beethoven’s Vienna. He could easily have made the same point in relation to Mozart. The commercially motivated rush to push period-instrument performance ever more rapidly into the nineteenth century did not offer much hope for the consolidation of historical playing styles. The public was in danger of being offered ‘attractively packaged but unripe fruit’.22 The regularisation of historical pitches has been ironic, given that Quantz in 1752 lamented the lack of a uniform standard, which he reckoned was detrimental to his work as a flautist and to music in general. Significantly, a wind instrument manufacturer’s advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung of 25 February 1789 contained a request that prospective foreign clients should specify the required pitch, ‘whether Viennese pitch, Kammerton, or even French pitch, or send him a tuning fork’. It was within this non-standardised environment that Joseph Froehlich advised in 1811 that because each individual wind instrument was slightly different in design from the next, one had to make up the fingerings for oneself.
The symphonies in performance, 1788 How might Mozart’s symphonies have sounded in 1788? Musical and technical priorities must surely have been very different. Can one progress further than 20 Though not present in the scoring of any of Mozart’s symphonies, three basset horns (numbered 1–3) by Stadler’s maker Theodor Lotz survive in Krásna Hôrka, Slovakia; they may well have been used for Mozart’s Divertimenti K439b. 21 Compare, for example, items 90 and 242 in the Museum of Instruments at the Royal College of Music, London. 22 C. Brown, ‘Historical performance, metronome marks and tempo in Beethoven symphonies’, Early Music, 19 (1991), 248.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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mere guesswork in relation to intonation, ensemble and general accuracy of execution, let alone tempo and tempo flexibility? Simon McVeigh’s remarks in Chapter 20 are surely pertinent here; ‘The very differentiation of timbres lends a much less refined sonority: is it possible that performance in the eighteenth century was much more direct and raw than we like to imagine? Certainly in Mozart symphonies where modern tasteful performance might prefer a subtle fade the composer often emphasises the final note of a phrase with a violin chord synonymous with strong attack.’ The context for late Mozart symphonies is of relatively small-scale ensembles, performing newly written music with steady rhythmical flow, with the concept of ‘interpretation’ some way in the future. The individual movements of Mozart’s last three symphonies present a rich variety of musical character, with intricacies of texture that would surely not have been familiar to the players. As Zaslaw points out, the brief symphonies of the 1760s and 1770s were most commonly employed in a framing or articulating function and were not themselves the main event in theatre, church or chamber. They were certainly not merely art for art’s sake. This symphonic environment is promoted in Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule in 1756, where he expresses admiration for the orchestral player’s ability immediately to grasp the character of each movement: To read the musical pieces of good masters rightly according to the instructions, and to play them in keeping with the outstanding characteristics of the piece is far more artistic than to study the most difficult solo or concerto . . . The former . . . is not so easy. For, not only must one observe exactly all that has been marked and prescribed and not play it otherwise than as written; but one must throw oneself into the affect to be expressed and apply and execute in a certain good style all the ties, slides, accentuation of the notes, the forte and piano; in a word, whatever belongs to tasteful performance of a piece; which can only be learnt from sound judgement and long experience.23
Leopold continues: Decide now for yourself whether a good orchestral violinist be not of far higher value than one who is purely a solo player? The latter can play everything according to his whim . . . while the former must possess the dexterity to understand and at once interpret rightly the taste of various composers, their thoughts and expressions . . . The former has to play everything at sight and, added to that, often such passages as go against the natural order of the time division, and he has, mostly, to accommodate himself to others. A solo player can, without great understanding of music, usually play his concertos 23 L. Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, Augsburg, author, 1756, 3rd edn, Leipzig, Lotter, 1787, trans. E. Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 216.
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tolerably – yea, even with distinction – but a good orchestral violinist must have great insight into the whole art of musical composition and into the difference of the characteristics; yea, he must have a specially lively adroitness to be prominent in his calling with honour, in particular if he wishes in time to become the leader of an orchestra . . . Few solo players read well, because they are accustomed to insert something of their own fantasy at all times, and to look after themselves only, but rarely after others.24
Yet, as Zaslaw explains, the genre gradually underwent substantial development; Mozart wrote symphonies in Vienna because the best new examples of the genre were increasingly of a longer, more complex, serious type – works that were increasingly moving the symphony from the periphery to centre stage. Joseph II’s sole rule (1780–90) brought to Vienna a new expansion of public concerts, though noble patrons remained essential for a successful career.25 Jones has effectively charted the changes in musical taste and financial resources that was to lead towards widespread dismantling of court orchestras in favour of Harmoniemusik. He observes that ‘at the end of the eighteenth century in Austria the symphony was particularly vulnerable . . . to the changes that were occurring in musical patronage . . . Public concert life in Vienna, with its focus on single concerts for the benefit of an individual or charity, was poorly equipped to take on the responsibility of promoting the symphony.’26 By comparison with Leipzig, London or Paris, Vienna did not develop a consistent and accessible concert series during the eighteenth century. Sisman observes that in Vienna it was common for public concerts to begin with a symphony, and the evidence suggests that they concluded with one, or with a symphony finale, as well. Moreover, every possible performing venue featured symphonies, and writers often drew distinctions among three kinds of symphonies based on these venues and the styles common to each: concert or chamber symphonies, performed in concert rooms . . . the larger salons of the nobility, and casinos and gardens; theatre symphonies, including opera overtures and music performed between the acts of plays . . . The ‘overture’ function of a concert symphony, with subsequent portions given to vocal and instrumental soloists performing arias, concertos, and improvisations is clarified by the often-cited programme of Mozart’s concert in the Burgtheater on 23 March 1783, at which Emperor Joseph II and perhaps Gluck were present.27
Symphonies became the touchstone of instrumental style, notwithstanding their function within concert programmes. These were characterised by a 24 Ibid., pp. 216–17. 25 For the various types of concert in Vienna, see E. Sisman, Mozart, the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 4. 26 Jones, The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, p. 56. 27 Sisman, Mozart, the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, p. 1.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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mixture of instrumental and vocal music – of solo music, chamber music, and orchestral and choral music. During the late eighteenth century symphonies came to be seen as the highest form of instrumental music. They offered an opportunity for an audience to evaluate the skill of the composer, without the distraction of assessing solo and vocal contributions. As Jones points out, despite the fragmented nature of concert life of Vienna in the 1790s with its sporadic promotion of the symphony, Haydn and Mozart were already being accorded special veneration. How did performers cope with the new complexities in Mozart’s last three symphonies, which in so many ways were revolutionary? Zaslaw observes that however beautiful, novel or clever such symphonies may have been, they were generally meant to be easily performed and easily listened to – and in fact, Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies were occasionally criticised for overreaching these constraints. A report of 1792 about the Hamburg orchestra, for instance, said that the group’s members were ‘such good, strong players and keep so calm that they perform correctly and at sight without error’, but that when reinforced to play the latest symphonies, they would be ‘heroes to venture to play Haydn’s symphonies (let alone Mozart’s) at sight’.28 A window into the contemporary view of Mozart is provided in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden of 1793; it is surely as characteristic of performers as much as composers: Mozart’s talent appears to be an original one, which nevertheless tends toward affectation, towards bizarre, surprising and paradoxical passages, both melodic and harmonic, and avoids natural flow so as not to become ordinary . . . His melody is so overburdened with too many harmonic changes, accompaniments, and difficult striking intervals . . . a genius who worked according to a plan in which one cannot sanction the harsh modulations, improper imitations, and intricate accompaniments.29
A movement such as the Andante of the E flat Symphony brought the winds to a new prominence, inevitably introducing unfamiliar problems of ensemble and balance; individual players (and not just principals) found themselves firmly in the spotlight. The virtuosic finale of this Symphony continues to be part of the staple diet of orchestral violin auditions to this present day. The opening of the second half of the finale of the G minor Symphony presents across the entire orchestra an unfamiliar, unstable harmonic idiom. The finale of the ‘Jupiter’ attracted a great deal of contemporary comment in its contrapuntal intricacies. Yet for all the difficulties in the last three of Mozart’s symphonies, recent experience has shown that leadership from the violin can 28 Zaslaw, Mackerras liner notes, p. 4.
29 Kenyon, The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart, p. 13.
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be very effective even in the context of such relatively intricate movements; the imposition of a conductor self-defeating. It is significant that the single orchestral parts of the three symphonies were published by André in 1797, 1794 and 1793 respectively. The fact that full scores of symphonies and operas did not appear before 1800–10 is an interesting detail in the development of musical practice. As audiences and orchestras increased in size as a consequence of the burgeoning bourgeoisie, the concertmaster (leading the orchestra with his bow) had to cede direction to a Kapellmeister, conducting the orchestra with a baton and requiring full scores.30 Primary evidence relating to the art of music-making (rather than the craft) is especially significant. C. P. E. Bach’s remarks about the importance of moving an audience surely deserve special attention. And the clarinet of Anton Stadler (one of the original performers in Mozart’s late symphonies) was described in a contemporary review as having so soft and lovely a tone that no one with a heart could resist it.31 At the same time Stadler could write elegant German, quote from the classics and was familiar with music theory and music journalism. As we noted in Chapter 5, his ambitious six-year curriculum for music students supplemented practical matters with the observation that anyone wanting to understand music must acquire a broad knowledge of the world, and mathematics, poetry, rhetoric and several languages. How might such philosophy have inflected the lives and attitudes of the players who took part in the first performances of the late symphonies? The technical accomplishments of Stadler’s colleagues can be determined from the solo parts of Mozart’s concertos. A further indication of the virtuosity of the Viennese winds can be gleaned from the musical scope of the demanding Serenade for 13 Instruments K361, performed in 1784. The orchestral palette was influenced by the fact that Viennese wind instrument manufacture was at the leading edge within Europe. Other aspects of performance practice are made difficult to determine by the general lack of standardisation prevalent in Mozart’s day. Although no single orchestra dominated Viennese musical life, Zaslaw has suggested that principles for orchestral placement included: taking into account the visual and the acoustical; placing forward the carriers of the melody; central location of section leaders and continuo players; all bass instruments and keyboard continuo 30 Jones, The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, p. 39, notes that symphonies in the courts of the Austrian lands were habitually performed by much smaller orchestras than featured in the public concert life of London and Paris and at the semi-public concerts at Mannheim. 31 Stadler’s own professional life offers a number of clues for an understanding of the musical ambience of Mozart’s day and beyond. Stadler was of modest social origins, his father a shoemaker, his mother a midwife. He rented lodgings in the suburbs of Vienna, moving frequently and often in crowded conditions. His career illustrates the vicissitudes of the transition from the Kapelle to the free market. But he had the opportunity in Masonic lodges to interact with men from a broad social spectrum and came regularly into contact with the aristocracy.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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being grouped together. He further suggests that standardisation beyond this was considered undesirable because each hall, repertoire and orchestra required its own arrangement.32 In such circumstances local traditions and preferences proved to be important. Mozart’s increased use of wind instruments was widely commented upon and the resulting ensemble difficulties caused at least one commentator to argue in favour of a continuo instrument even late in the eighteenth century.33 This of course does not prove its presence in the premieres of Mozart’s last three symphonies, where harmonically it would have been redundant. While orchestras tended to vary radically in size, the prominence of the winds caused Koch to recommend at least six first violins and six seconds.34 Other significant performance issues have recently surfaced, not least the observation of repeats in the interests of restoring original proportions. In da capo minuets the tradition of omitting repeats on the return cannot be traced back to Mozart, who (for example) specifies senza replica in the Clarinet Quintet K581, where this is apparently an exception to normal practice. It has been suggested that the brevity of the first half of the Minuet in the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony makes it ineffective without repeat, even in da capo. Whilst orchestral players may have been taken aback by the increasing complexity of the symphony, they may well have been helped in immediately characterising the music by an instinctive understanding of moods associated with particular keys. This issue has tended to be debated with particular reference to composers, though in characterising the Affekt performers were surely also influenced by key characteristics. This would have been especially true for natural horn players, with the range of crooks presenting individual challenges and tonal palettes. With the less mechanised woodwinds of the eighteenth century the effect in different keys is distinctive and less homogeneous, because of the distinctive quality of each note of the chromatic scale and the plethora of cross-fingerings. In relation to conventions regarding key affects, Rita Steblin concludes her ground-breaking study of key characteristics by opening up the possibility of a practical application of her ideas: ‘It might even convince musicians today that keys really are “keys” apt to unlock some of music’s hidden nature.’35 Importantly, the sound of unequal temperament is no longer in our ears, nor has it been widely introduced through ‘period’ performance outside the 32 Zaslaw, ‘Toward the revival of the classical orchestra’, 166. 33 F. Rochlitz, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1799–1800), II, cols.17–19. Zaslaw cites F. Schlichtegroll (‘Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Mozart’ in Nekrolog auf der Jahr 1791, Gotha, 1792, vol. 2, pp. 82–112) as evidence for Mozart’s orchestral leadership from the keyboard; whether this applies to symphonies as well as concertos and operas remains open to question. 34 H. C. Koch, Musikalisches Lexicon, Frankfurt am Main, 1802, ‘Besetzung’, cols. 237–40 and ‘Begleitung’, cols. 232–7. 35 R. Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1983, p. 192.
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keyboard domain. She affirms that when Schubart wrote his descriptions of the different keys c. 1784 unequal temperament was still the rule, a factor sometimes glossed over in modern ‘period’ performance.36 The tuning systems most commonly in use were designed to make C and its most closely related keys sound purer than the keys farthest removed from C. ‘Hence, the description of C as a pure key, of F and G as calm and gentle keys, of B as wild or piercing, and of DÅ as unnatural or degenerate may well have been inspired by tuning procedures.’37 Steblin’s catalogue of characteristics imputed to keys includes the following descriptors in relation to the three tonalities represented by Mozart’s last symphonies.38 The Viennese aesthetician Daniel Schubart (c. 1784) comes closest chronologically and geographically to Mozart, but there is also consistency from Mattheson (1713, 1719) through Ribock (1783), Knecht (1792), Heinse (1795), Galeazzi (1796), Hand (1837) and many others. E flat major: beautiful, majestic, honest; noble and ardent . . . cinnamon with orange blossom; the key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation with God; through its three flats it expresses the holy trinity; splendid and solemn; solemnity of priesthood; noble, solemn, dignified; heroic, extremely majestic, grave and serious. G minor: almost the most beautiful key . . . uncommon grace and kindness . . . it is suitable and thoroughly flexible to both moderate plaintiveness and tempered cheerfulness; the lament of a noble matron, who no longer has her youthful beauty; discontent, uneasiness . . . resentment, dislike; moving; frenzy, despair, agitation; melancholy unites with joy, and depression with cheerfulness39 36 Steblin charts the ‘Marpurg versus Kirnberger’ controversy about the value of equal versus unequal temperament. Among proponents on each side associated with Mozart’s music are cited sources by the publisher Johann Anton André (1832) and Daniel Gottlob Türk (1808). 37 Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics, p. 188. 38 J. Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, Hamburg, author/Schiller, 1713; Exemplarische OrganistenProbe, Hamburg, Schiller and Kissner, 1719. G. J. Vogler, ‘Ausdruck (musikalisch)’, Deutsche Encyclopädie, oder Allgemeines Real-Wörterbuch aller Künste und Wissenschaften, 23 vols, Frankfurt-am-Main, Varrentrapp Sohn und Wenner, 1778–1804, vol. 1; J. J. H. Ribock, ‘Über Musik: an Flötenliebhaber insonderheit’, Cramer’s Magazin der Musik, 1 (1783), 686–736; C. F. D. Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Vienna, Degen, 1804. G. C. Kellner, ‘Etwas von Tönen und Tonarten’, Cramer’s Magazin der Musik, 2/2 (1786–7), 1185–90. J. H. Knecht, Gemeinnützliches Elementarwerk der Harmonie und des Generalbasses, Augsburg, 1792. I. F. Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-practici de musica, Rome, Cracas, 1796, vol. 2. 39 With regard to G minor, Ferdinand Hand (Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Leipzig, Jena, 1837, vol. 1), somewhat contradicts Schubart (‘discontent, uneasiness . . . resentment, dislike’) in writing: ‘As the ideal for this key, who does not have in mind Mozart’s symphony, which I would like to compare in a way to Goethe’s Iphigenia. If passion lies stamped on it, it still consists of the purest discretion, and does not appear adventurous or extravagant; dignity is held upright, and beauty is transfigured to the most loveworthy state. But the whole is permeated with a secret pain, and even where the feelings gain lively motion and bright energy, a touch of melancholy encompasses them. In all this the master has handled the key with matchless skill.’ Cited from Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics, p. 275. Robert Schumann in ‘Charakteristik der Tonleitern und Tonarten’ (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 2 (1835), 43–4) described K550 as of ‘Grecian lightness and grace’.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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C major: rude . . . impudent, but also rejoicing. It serves to rouse an army (namely, with trumpets, drums, oboes, etc.); splendid; perhaps serviceable for every affect, but will not express one that is very strong and marked; completely pure. Its character is innocence, simplicity, naivety . . . a mixture of happy cheerfulness and gentle seriousness; cheerful and pure; grandiose, military, fit to display grand events, serious, majestic, and tumultuous; innocence, self-sufficient simplicity, pure naturalness, and also simple seriousness, firm resolution and confidence. Whilst the sharp–flat principle of key characteristics can be seen to derive from stringed instruments, the situation with wind instruments is more variable. It was Gottfried Weber who twenty-five years after Mozart’s death noted directly that ‘the character which this or that key assumes, perhaps from the peculiar nature of wind instruments, may be exactly the reverse of that which the nature of stringed instruments imparts to it’.40 This is manifestly the case with horn crooks, where the shorter the brighter the sound. (The use in the G minor Symphony of two horns with different crooks, whilst enabling a wider range of notes, makes for a more ambiguous tonal palette. It is also broadly true of BÅ and A clarinets, where the latter is darker and more melancholy.) An important factor in the premieres of the three symphonies is Mozart’s own involvement (or lack of it). There are certainly some significant works which Mozart probably never heard, including the Serenade K361 and the Clarinet Concerto K622. But were Mozart’s last three symphonies performed in his lifetime? It is well known that he entered them into his catalogue in the summer of 1788; the E flat on 25 June, the G minor on 26 July and the C major on 10 August. A distillation of the long-standing attitudes to the composition of the trilogy appears in this highly influential passage by Alfred Einstein: To the summer of 1788 belong the three last symphonies Mozart wrote . . . all composed within the unbelievably short space of about two months. We know nothing about the occasion for writing these works. It is strange that Mozart should have written symphonies during the summer. Perhaps he hoped to be able to give some ‘Academies’ during the winter of 1788–89, and these plans fell through just as the plans for the following years did . . . It is possible that Mozart never conducted these three symphonies and never heard them . . . But this is perhaps symbolic of their position in the history of music, and of human endeavour, representing no occasion, no immediate purpose, but an appeal to eternity [following] an inner impulse.41
40 G. Weber, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, Mainz, Schott, 1817–21, trans., cited from Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics, p. 214. 41 A. Einstein, Mozart, His Character, His Work, Oxford University Press, 1945, p. 234. Einstein’s viewpoint is sustained in A. Steptoe, ‘Mozart and his last three symphonies – a myth laid to rest?’, Musical Times, 132 (1991), 550–1.
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Zaslaw has taken a lead in re-forming scholarly opinion, observing: ‘The very thought that Mozart would have written three such symphonies, unprecedented in length, complexity and seriousness, merely to please himself or because he was “inspired” flies in the face of his known attitudes to music and life and the financial straits in which he then found himself.’42 Furthermore, ‘when a commission or opportunity for performance dried up, he would sometimes abandon a work in mid-course’.43 In fact, Mozart yearned to be asked to write music because people wanted it. Zaslaw’s findings will be but briefly summarised here. Within a depressed economic situation Mozart’s income had fallen and he began to accumulate debts, apparently because he did or could not adjust his lifestyle accordingly. His plans included a series of three subscription concerts that were probably scheduled for the autumn of 1788. Such concerts were private and so attracted no attention in the press, though some evidence has been produced that a series took place.44 A visit to England was even planned.45 There were certainly concerts in Dresden and Leipzig in 1789 and in Frankfurt and Mainz in 1790, each of which contained two symphonies. A further public Viennese concert directed by Antonio Salieri on 16 April 1791 (repeated the next day) was given by personnel precisely matching the second version (with clarinets) of the G minor Symphony. The very existence of this version of K550, written on paper of the same date as the original manuscript, proves that performances were in prospect. As Robbins Landon has pointed out, Mozart must have made the revisions almost immediately after completing the autograph proper and must have made them for a concert in 1788: ‘they were surely not made for the desk drawer’.46 The change in instrumentation has a radical effect on the character of the 42 N. Zaslaw, ‘A working stiff’, in J. M. Morris (ed.), On Mozart, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 107. See also D. W. Jones, ‘Why did Mozart compose his last three symphonies? Some new hypotheses’, Music Review, 51 (1990), 280–9. 43 Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies, p. 421. 44 Zaslaw, ‘A working stiff’, notes that on Sunday, 24 August a Danish visitor Joachim Preisler called on the Mozarts and noted that Constanze ‘cut quill-pens for the copyist’. An undated begging letter to Puchberg invited him to concerts in the [Trattnerhof] Casino the following week and enclosed two complimentary tickets. If arrangements were so advanced, the concerts surely took place. See also H. C. Robbins Landon, 1791, Mozart’s Last Year, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988, pp. 31–3. Zaslaw’s evidence also includes a listing of various sets of orchestral parts for the three symphonies. See Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies, p. 431, n. 151. He further adduces advertisements by the publishers Rellstab & Westphal. 45 His British friends Michael Kelly, Nancy and Stephen Storace may well have assured him that he would make considerably more money than in Vienna. 46 Robbins Landon, 1791, Mozart’s Last Year, p. 33. He also draws attention to ‘a distinct tradition of manuscript parts of the four last symphonies which derive, obviously, from the first manuscript performance material rather than directly from the autographs themselves’. He further notes that the April 1791 concerts were probably the last time that Mozart heard a huge orchestra: the Society’s concerts usually boasted a band of well over 100 players.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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G minor Symphony as a whole. It is significant that in Mozart’s operas, oboe and clarinet occupy different dramatic personae. For example in Così fan Tutte the oboe is associated with Don Alfonso, the clarinets with the pairs of lovers. Furthermore, there is some justification for the recent assertion that at the end of the eighteenth century the relatively new clarinet came to symbolise progress and new ideals, whereas the oboe retained an association with the aristocracy and the monarchy.47 Recognition of Mozart’s pragmatism has a special relevance for first performances of the last three symphonies. Unquestioning acceptance of Mozart’s natural fluency as a composer has recently been tempered by more detailed research into his working methods, which were in turn influenced by performance opportunities. Ulrich Konrad’s article ‘Compositional method’ is something of a tour de force within The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. However many sketches were thrown away by Constanze and others, we can dismiss the notion that Mozart always wrote down fully finished pieces straight from his head, however impressive his actual feats of memory and intellect. Meanwhile, his ability to tailor his work both for individual singers and instrumentalists is clearly an important factor in studying the performance practice of any of his music, including the symphonies.
The curtain of history Even if by some miracle we could hear K543, K550 and K551 as they were first performed, we should inevitably listen to them with a great deal of cultural conditioning that was alien to the 1780s. The twin twentieth-century icons of air travel and the microphone are themselves sufficient to ensure that unalterable position. As Paul Hindemith observed as long ago as 1952, ‘Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfection, can never have for us precisely the same meaning it had for them. We cannot tear down the barricade that separates the present world from things and deeds past; the symbol and its prototype cannot be made to coincide absolutely.’48 Performances of Mozart’s symphonies inevitably carried a different resonance for their original listeners. As Sisman has observed, ‘It is possible that in our hectic, noise-ridden age, we have trouble imagining the potentially transporting effect of even relatively small massed instrumental forces in an eighteenth-century concert room.’49 It is easy to ignore primary evidence 47 J. Jeltsch, ‘La clarinette de Mozart’, Crescendo: Le Magazine de la musique ancienne, 34 (1990), 13. 48 P. Hindemith, A Composer’s World, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1952, pp. 170–1. 49 Sisman, Mozart, the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, p. 15.
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that suggests that audience attentiveness at concerts was variable, to which Haydn’s experiences in London bear particular witness.50 Recent writers have increasingly followed Hindemith’s lead in recognising that no one can hear earlier music with the ears of those who first heard it, if only because our experience includes consciousness of many other kinds of music. It has been rightly observed that we encounter music from the one vantage point available to us – our own aesthetic experience. But this should not be mistaken for the aesthetic experience of past listeners. Oral orientation is the most elusive strand to capture, since its components have left only the faintest of traces, in comparison with more concrete evidence such as notated scores. In posing the question ‘Did people listen in the eighteenth century?’ William Weber argues for the integrity of their response, claiming they were inclined to exaggerate their lack of auditory staying power.51 As Weber says, today’s concert is a step apart from mundane existence and the compromises involved there. It is a shift into a highly internalised realm where we achieve purity of both intellect and feeling such as we find in few places in our lives. Religion no longer provides this. But words such as classical, serious, musical, genius and masterpiece carry a set of overtones foreign to the eighteenth century. This is relevant to the now iconic status of the last three of Mozart’s symphonies, written when music was more closely linked to other social activities than we can imagine. It is highly significant that in the earliest critique of the E Flat Symphony K543 from 1806, it was described as ‘Mozart’s splendid symphony’, which is ‘well enough known to permit the assumption that the reader knows it by heart’.52 This is something that within today’s cultural environment can by no means be taken for granted. Investigating original performing conditions is made more difficult for us by the fact that in many parts of the world an over-exploited and over-exposed Mozart has almost come to represent Western Classical music itself. He has come to occupy a very different position from, say – to take at random the great composers with anniversaries in 2009 – Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. Friedl Jary’s article ‘kitsch’ in The Cambridge Mozart Enyclopaedia is instructive; the great man is invoked to sell confectionery, 50 ‘The first half was usually disturbed in all sorts of ways by the noise of latecomers . . . Now imagine in a concert hall where not a few but many persons with their snuffling or snoring or hanging of heads present the true listeners with something to chatter about or more probably to laugh at, whether quiet can reign there?’ A. C. Dies, Biographische Nachrichten von Joseph Haydn, Vienna, Camesinaische Buchhandlung, 1810, trans. V. Gotwals in Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits, Madison, WI, University of Milwaukee Press, 1968, pp. 129–30. 51 W. Weber, ‘Did people listen in the eighteenth century?’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 678–91. He further remarks that contemporary paintings telescoped the activities of an evening, including music and conversation, thus giving a false impression that they always took place at the same time. 52 A. Apel, ‘Musik und Poesie’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1806), cols. 449–57, 465–70.
Case study: Mozart, Symphonies K543, 550 and 551
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cheese, spirits, clothing and tobacco. You can have a Mozart ski holiday or attend a ‘meet Amadeus’ event. As was noted in Mozart’s 250th anniversary year in 2006, it is not just that his music represents a heavenly panacea in a turbulent world, but that he can play any role you give him – political or commercial, comic or spiritual, popular or highbrow. At the start of the celebrations, Kenyon remarked that a Google search would yield some 8 million items about Mozart, on a par with Jesus Christ and Shakespeare and ranking well above Wagner, his nearest rival among composers.53 He notes that the special quality of Mozart’s music is responsible for this level of interest – utterly direct yet emotionally elusive, simple yet infinitely complex. The last symphonies epitomise the symmetry, the artful use of dissonance, the colours and the sheer quality of musical material which contribute to an experience that seems somehow to have a special resonance for our own troubled times.54
53 Kenyon, The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart, p. 1. 54 Jary notes that at a symposium at Salzburg University in 1990, the German musicologist Inka Stampfl, in discussing the marketing of Mozart’s melodies, produced the following order of popularity: first movement of Symphony no. 40 K550, followed by movements of K467, K331, K525 and excerpts from Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte.
.
PART VI
.
PERFORMANCE IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
. 24 .
Performance in the nineteenth century: an overview MICHAEL MUSGRAVE
Introduction The nineteenth century saw a greater transformation in musical life than any period before or – setting aside recording and marketing – since. It links the still easily recognisable patterns of early twentieth-century public musicmaking with a now totally vanished world of privileged and predominantly localised activity: a world that could never have conceived of the breadth of musical activity to come, symbolised in the emergence of the public concert as the new focus of quality music-making, usurping the traditional role of court and church. This change came about through major shifts in social structure subsequent upon the economic changes wrought by industrialisation and commerce, and the political reform towards greater independence in many spheres – and associated in the arts with the Romantic movement. But though it is impossible to prioritise the influence of artistic creativity and that of the society of which it is a part in effecting change, it is the circumstances of musical life that are the more tangible in considering musical performance. The century is naturally divided by the revolutionary events of 1848, anticipating the increasing economic expansion and stability after 1870 – an age of hitherto unknown levels of investment and economic growth and consequently of personal wealth and municipal expansion. It did not, however, announce the equality of opportunity for the common man of which social reformers had dreamt: that would have to wait for the development of a grassroots socialist movement with political muscle taking real effect only after 1900. Rather, the ascendant political liberalism was embodied in the wider consolidation of a new affluent and aspirant middle class that increasingly took over the responsibility for cultural life from the nobility. The achievements of this class and the growing importance to them of music and the musical profession underpin the world of musical performance in the nineteenth century. But given the still very diverse world of 1800–50, much was continued from the past and only slowly adapted. Indeed the eighteenth-century foundation of [577]
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music at court and church still provides the natural starting point to observe both the continuities and transformations affecting performance. Within a broad overview, the theme of access, in varied dimensions, is central; and my emphasis on the role of musical life in Britain reflects the fact that, if, by comparison with the Continent, it produced no great composers, it still provides a special vantage point for the role of music in an expanding market, and an environment to reflect dynamic change in general.1
Continuities: court, church and concert music The British situation emphasises fundamental differences in the socio-economic foundations of the leading European countries in this period. In 1800 Britain was the economically dominant power. Its centrality on London was driven by economic entrepreneurism, in which the royal court played a very minor role. Rather, London’s music was driven by individuals and group organisation in the most commercially vibrant city of Europe through the eighteenth century, a situation which also spread to fashionable provincial cities.2 In contrast, the French court up to the Revolution of 1789 had been lavish in musical provision and patronage of the Chapelle Royale; and it continued with the various restorations after the Revolution and Napoleonic period up to the Third Republic of 18703 – the traditional network of musical activity emanating from the court kept Paris as a musical centre of comparable importance to London (though of very different character), and its theatrical musical life the liveliest in Europe. The picture in Germany/Austria was entirely different (closely intertwined politically as culturally until the rapid rise of Prussia after the Austro-Prussian war of 1866); the picture in Italy was also different, subject as it was to external, especially Habsburg influence. Though by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, with its radical changes of boundaries and political alignments, the 121 courts/ units of independence/independent German states still active in 1779 had been absorbed, there were still 39 consolidated states. These existed alongside large cities, some traditionally based on courts but growing independently, such as Berlin or Vienna, and traditionally independent cities, such as Hamburg, 1 The increase in the size of Britain’s cities in the nineteenth century far exceeded any European country: in 1840 there were only forty-seven cities in Europe with a population of more than 100,000 (only twentytwo in 1800), of which twenty-eight were in England. The population of London was 960,000 in 1850, and 2 million by 1850, twice that of Paris, the second largest European city. 2 The Chapel Royal had diminishing influence on musical life and the royalty sponsored individual organisations and performers at a personal level, though much more so with Queen Victoria’s marriage to the music-loving German consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg. 3 First Louis XVIII in 1814, then Charles X to the July Monarchy in 1830 with Louis Philippe until 1848, then Louis Napoléon as president of the Second Republic, elected Emperor Napoléon III of the Second Empire from 1852.
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principal city of the Hanseatic League till 1760, and Leipzig, a traditional merchant city. In Italy national integration was far less advanced till 1861. It was in 1800 still a patchwork of kingdoms, principalities and republics with different political affiliations and little to link them: and after 1861 unification was still slow.4 Although the fortunes of the centres rose and fell with political circumstances and the tastes of the rulers, virtually every composer of importance in Germany and Italy was connected with court patronage in some way, though it gradually lost its priority (even if the directors retained their old formal titles). Of leading German composers, for example, Liszt was at the notably brilliant court of Weimar; Wagner at the courts of Dresden and then Munich; even Brahms, who could never commit to an institutional job, worked three winters at the small court of Lippe-Detmold and relied for important early performances on the court orchestra at Hanover, where his friend Joseph Joachim was concertmaster, having previously been Liszt’s concertmaster at Weimar. Hans von Bülow built the finest German orchestra of its time for Herzog Georg II at Meiningen, to be succeeded by the young Richard Strauss, and later by Max Reger. This institutional framework held, whilst growing ever closer in practice towards municipal and civic control and support (the Meiningen court was only dissolved at the appearance of the Weimar Republic in 1918). Robert Schumann was unusual among leading figures in being titled a municipal music director when he was responsible for music in Düsseldorf, a free city without a court.5 The traditional focus and glory of court music had been ‘high opera’: the cultivation of vocal performance at the most refined level, regarded as offering the most direct appeal and entertainment, added to visual spectacle and dramatic content, for which courts prided themselves and vied with each other. This role has remained continuous to the present: the corporate boxes at the highest prices at the New York Metropolitan or Covent Garden have inherited the role of the eighteenth-century aristocracy and nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie. For this reason opera has shown itself remarkably resistant to essential functional change. Many eighteenth-century opera houses of the court or aristocracy have been rebuilt – often several times on the same or adjacent sites – even as their courtly titles have gradually morphed into ‘National’ or ‘Municipal’ opera house. The tenacity of operatic
4 From the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to unification the principal states were Piedmont-Sardinia, Lombardy-Venetia, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Papal States, the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. 5 For the music of Düsseldorf, see C. H. Porter, ‘The new public and the re-ordering of the musical establishment: the Lower Rhine music festivals 1818–67’, 19th-Century Music, 3/3 (1979–80), 211–24.
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status is most clear in the aftermath of the French Revolution when the royal opera changed name with changing regimes; first administered by the city, it was the Académie Impériale de Musique in 1804, and then returning to its traditional status, the Académie Royale de Musique in 1814 with the Restoration. Although operatic styles and subjects were constantly evolving, often in reflection of contemporary events, there is a great continuity of the leading operatic traditions. For well into the nineteenth century, the eighteenthcentury association of the highest vocal culture with the Italian tongue continued: in Vienna, for example, court opera was in Italian until 1848.6 London had at different times four opera houses dedicated to Italian opera.7 Even in France, with its tradition of tragédie lyrique in the native tongue, Italian opera continued to be popular. But the eighteenth century also bequeathed a continuity of more popular traditions. Most important of these was the French opéra comique with its established theatres. These were to be tenacious and to generate many new forms as the comic and folk types of the eighteenth century blossomed into national and popular forms with new theatres and the gradual change towards the popular demands of audiences, especially after 1850. Church music represented a much more conservative continuity. The great days of high-art church music, operatically or instrumentally inspired, were over by 1800 as a consequence of political change, reduced funding or prevailing apathy through ideological attack, especially the influence of Rationalism. Most notable was France, where the Revolution closed the churches and banned the established religion from 1789 into the early 1800s, shutting down the Chapelle Royale.8 In other Catholic countries the elaborate Masses of the Catholic Church in southern Germany and Austria were cut in the Josephine reforms. In Italy church music was reduced to purely academic compositions or current theatrical styles by unsuccessful operatic composers. In Lutheran Germany, the reforms had removed the distinctive role of instrumental music, including organ music and its concomitant choral music. In England, the tradition of cathedral music with men and boys was in a state of
6 The Kärtnertortheater was built behind the city wall at the Kärntnertor, replacing the Burgtheater (literally, next to the Hofburg), which became the main location for spoken drama. The new Hofoper was opened in 1869 nearby, on the newly constructed Ringstrasse. 7 The term Royal Italian Opera was used for four different companies and theatres that presented Italian opera in London; first at Her Majesty’s Theatre, then Covent Garden (named Royal Italian Opera House from 1847 to 1892); also Drury Lane and the Lyceum. 8 The Chapelle Royale had thirty-five instrumentalists when it closed in 1792, but was restored to fifty and the choir to thirty-four by Napoleon in 1810. See S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 14, p. 208.
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serious neglect. Only in some of the great European centres of tradition did high standards continue.9 But the liturgy of the Church represented a continuity that could be reinvigorated, as soon happened in France with the restoration of the Christian religion by Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801. However, potentially touching far more people, and representing a newer continuity that could develop in new social circumstances, was the English choral festival stemming from provincial cathedral meetings: first that of the Three Choirs, 1724; of Norwich, 1770; also the Birmingham Festival in 1768 (founded in support of local hospitals, at St Philip’s Church: subsequently from 1834 in the new Birmingham Town Hall). The popularity of Handel oratorio as purely choral music had accelerated since its staged London performances in 1731, the first Three Choirs’ performance of Messiah being at Hereford in 1759. Concert music, however, had no such functional role: no consistent institutions underpinned the emerging world of public musical activity – the increasingly ambitious and extended instrumental composition and performance destined to represent the future of popular access to quality music by the end of the nineteenth century. Although high-quality instrumental music also existed naturally within court and aristocratic settings, and in various social settings in towns and cities, it never had the class status of opera nor its locational identity. Numerous locations served instrumental performance: theatres, opera houses, churches, public rooms, university halls, as well as assembly rooms of the court, of which ballrooms and banqueting rooms were particularly appropriate when available,10 and, not least, private homes: a dedicated concert room was virtually unknown. The Leipzig Gewandhaus is an apparently unique example of a musical organisation (the Musikübende Gesellschaft) sponsored by leading citizens with access to a suitable room, here the Cloth Hall (Gewandhaus) which quickly became an institutional base for serious music. The few strands of regular public music-making outside the court which were inherited from the eighteenth century were all attached to a social function: these all traced their origins to charitable activities of some kind and were mainly annual. They included charity concerts, benefit concerts of many types for individuals or organisations, as well as concerts during the many penitential days when opera was banned, most notably Holy Week: the 9 Outstanding were St Thomas’s Church and school in Leipzig, the Sistine Chapel, Rome, the Hofkapelle in Vienna, and some of the English collegiate chapels of Oxford and Cambridge, with musical traditions dating from medieval times. 10 In Vienna the Grosse Redoutensaal in the Hofburg, formerly used as Maria Theresa’s grand ballroom, was permitted for use on special occasions, and hosted many important performances till later in the nineteenth century; the Spanish Riding School was also used; in late eighteenth-century Mannheim, concerts took place in the Rittersaal of the Palace, normally used for banquets.
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important tradition of eighteenth-century Concert Spirituel had grown from this source. 11
Transitions: 1800–1850 Opera For all its status, opera was always a major economic commitment, in major cities as well as the small regional courts. Already in the eighteenth century, aristocracy and bourgeoisie had collaborated in maintaining leading opera houses and the social nature of support gradually broadened; accordingly in some major cities – the new economic hubs of society – a broader audience base was already reflecting social change.12 The main consequences of this were a gradual transformation in the design of theatres, and in the nature of the repertoire, both with influence on performance. When, increasingly, new houses were built by non-aristocratic entrepreneurs as unsubsidised commercial undertakings, they reflected changing social attitudes as well as musical values in their design. The old royal and aristocratic theatres had been traditionally dominated by many successive tiers of boxes arranged around a converging U-shaped design, with a central royal box in the first tier and a relatively small central ground area for sitting or standing (parterre) with sightlines orientated towards the audience rather than the stage, which was a small focal part. The effect could be one of intimacy (as at Versailles) or of greater spaciousness (as at the Kärtnertortheater). The privacy of the boxes, which were curtained and had private ante-rooms, reflected the essentially exclusive social nature of opera attendance that included conversation and entertaining, with no necessary attention to the stage. The change was towards continuous tiers of open seating and a growing parterre with sight of the stage and increasing attention to it. In time the second tier became the most prestigious and the top tier the realm of the popular audience. And with new bases of economic support came new social attitudes towards the repertoire, now reflecting changing times in new contemporary themes, especially nationally aspiring forms, and the use of the native language, especially German, its operas raising the traditionally popular and minor forms of Singspiel and opéra comique to new creative prominence. 11 Some such concerts continued as annual fixtures of musical life, such as the Pension concerts of the Leipzig Gewandhaus through the nineteenth century. 12 Most notably in free commercial cities. In Hamburg, Frankfurt and Leipzig, middle-class audiences had favoured German opera from before 1800; the transition of a traditional court city to a commercial centre is clear in Berlin, where the National Theatre was opened in 1786 for Singspiel, and the first complete German opera given at the Hofoper by 1798. See also Chapter 25.
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Changing times naturally affected Italy most radically because of its longestablished traditions of vocal performance with fixed conventions of musical forms and production, and little interest in revolutionary opera or in the new German Romanticism with its instrumental emphasis. Several factors affected its life 1800–50: the diminishing importance of its courts meant that it no longer offered the most prestigious employment for singers, who were now better served at the bigger centres. The introduction of repertory opera towards the mid-century, consequent upon the increase in publication and dissemination, especially the introduction of Italian copyright law in 1840, gave composers rights and thus independence from court employment with all its conditions; in consequence the traditional role of the maestro di cappella was fundamentally changed: now he became not mainly a composer/conductor of new works, but increasingly a conductor of other works and success was not necessarily guaranteed in this more demanding role. This had potential consequences for composers: they gained at least the opportunity, if not always the capacity, to control performance tradition through repeated performance, also through the increasing role of the impresario/manager. And with this came the inevitable desire of ambitious composers to work in major centres, and an increasing focus on the leading cities and houses, existing or new – and their works transformed towards a more centralised value system. Like singers, leading Italian composers were also drawn abroad. Such was the importance of opera in Italy that many more public opera houses continued to be built, but they now relied on repertory opera.13 Paris was a magnet for the serious Italian composer of opera for a host of reasons. It had the largest number of theatres in Europe, several performing Italian opera. At the Paris Opéra itself there was a stable salaried company of singers and a large regular chorus and orchestra;14 it offered rehearsal periods and production budgets unheard of in Italy. And its traditions of lavish spectacle and production offered artistic stimulus as well as income (the opera
13 The dominance of opera in musical reception and the social structure of Italian towns had meant that all classes of society had had access to opera through the eighteenth century: though audience accommodation was stratified according to class (lower classes in the upper tiers), all had access, and leading houses accommodated huge audiences. The largest Italian opera house was S. Carlo, Naples (3,500); La Scala, Milan, and La Fenice, Venice, had 2,500; most theatres of any importance had at least 1,500 seats: see D. Pistone, L’opéra italien au XIXe siècle de Rossini à Puccini, Paris, Champion, 1986, trans. E. T. Glasgow as Nineteenth-Century Opera from Rossini to Puccini, Portland, OR, Amadeus, 1991, pp. 83–5; Italian opera was given in St Petersburg from 1843 and Verdi’s La forza del destino premiered there in 1862; John Rosselli (Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Portland, OR, Amadeus, 1991, pp. 140–2) states that by 1907 there were around 3,000 theatres in Italy, many producing operas. See further Chapter 25. 14 The main Paris Opéra (traditionally named Académie Royale de Musique) was sited at the Salle Le Peletier on the rue Peletier from 1821 until 1874, when the Palais Garnier was opened on the rue des Capucines. Italian opera remained very popular within the rich theatre life of Paris, at the Théâtre Italien as well as other theatres.
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traditionally included ballet, though elsewhere had generally been severed from this traditional association decades earlier). These factors created by the second quarter of the century one particularly strong representation of the emerging taste of the newly rich class based on banking and industry, blossoming under the Restoration of 1814 and the aegis of Louis Philippe from 1830; the changing social class also changed modes of behaviour towards greater decorum. By the 1820s Paris’s leading composers were émigrés, either from Italy (Cherubini, Rossini), or from Germany (Spontini, though Italian, had worked in Berlin; and Meyerbeer was born German and had been working in Berlin). Rossini produced his last five operas at the Paris Opéra, Donizetti two between 1840 and 1843. This diverse confluence of talents, as well as of consumers with a love of spectacle, inevitably tended to produce an international rather than a national style – a new generation and French/Italian mix. The result was a change in values: the last works of Rossini and Donizetti, which draw on the grand effects of Auber’s La muette de Portici (Masaniello), are Parisian grand operas (such as Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Donizetti’s Les martyrs and Dom Sebastien, roi de Portugal ). The emerging form was developed to the full by Meyerbeer. Musically stiff and full of spectacle, with sensational and sometimes horrific subjects (most successful was Les Huguenots, with the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day), it made dramatic use of the chorus and of orchestral writing with new combinations of sounds and new types of instrument such as bass clarinet and saxophone; Meyerbeer also changed the traditional layout of the opera orchestra and moved groups of players for dramatic effect. In his Treatise15 Berlioz quotes from Les Huguenots to show the ‘magnificent’ effect of the combination of the cor anglais and the clarinets in their lowest register in the duet ‘Tu l’as dit’. But the emphasis on grand effects led the audience to expect them more and more and these posed major problems of aesthetic unity and value relative to existing traditions, to composers as well as critics. The situation in Germany was completely different, since, unlike Italy, it had no dominant native tradition but rather had to create one. The process was slow into the century and it was not until 1821 that the founding work of the German Romantic opera tradition appeared in Weber’s Der Freischütz at the German Opera of the Dresden court (where Weber had been appointed in 1816, a year after its foundation in 1815), an opera which still combined many influences of the Singspiel genre. This presented many distinctive problems by comparison with the established Italian opera at Dresden. Since German 15 H. Berlioz, Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, Op. 10, Paris 1843, 2nd edn, 1855, trans. M. C. Clarke as A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, London, Novello & Ewer, 1882, pp. 99–100.
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opera traditionally had much spoken dialogue, the parts were normally taken by singing actors; although Weber was allowed to use singers from the Italian company, they rarely spoke German. And the chorus was at first non-existent, soprano and altos taken by schoolboys, as was the custom in German theatres. He resolved the solo problem by recruiting quality singers to perform opera in French and Italian in the vernacular and trained them in his new repertoire. Central to his reform was the rehearsal and disposition of the orchestra for his more instrumental writing. In 1818 he rearranged the orchestra, which had hitherto been placed in the manner of Italian opera, that is, with brass and wind on the sides and the continuo keyboard in the centre, to a more modern layout. Most important was the way in which all elements, including staging (he introduced more flexible lighting with new lamps instead of candles) were united, with the music director now in control of all musical elements including the chorus, the conductor positioned between orchestra and stage. But this reform took place against great resistance at this conservative court, which supported Italian opera. The transformation of voice types is a particular indicator of change. With opera houses built to accommodate more people, an expanding technology for productions and the accompanying expansion of artistic expression (whatever the propriety of influences), increasing vocal power and volume and the delineation of increasingly specific voice types became apparent in Romantic opera 1820–60. For female roles, the weightier dramatic soprano appeared in German, Italian and French repertoire, most famously in the roles of Brunnhilde, or later Tosca. A more flexible and powerful male voice combined the characters of bass and baritone in such parts as Wotan and Hans Sachs, and the traditional basso cantante of Don Giovanni developed the robustness needed for the part of King Philip II in Don Carlos or Gurnemanz in Parsifal. The Wagnerian Heldentenor took over this voice character, in turn supplanting the lyrical tenor in earlier German opera (for example, from Max in Der Freischütz to Siegfried in The Ring); the tenor robusto or tenor di forza emerged in Italian opera (as in the part of Otello). These changes were not universally welcomed. Berlioz thought opera houses too big.16 Newly built concert halls, reflecting growing orchestral and choral size, also placed pressures on concert and oratorio singing. Jenny Lind was exceptional in managing to maintain her bel canto qualities in major public venues. But singers capable of penetrating larger spaces were increasingly at a premium, as, most spectacularly, those who mastered the cavernous acoustic of the Crystal Palace Handel Festivals, or
16 H. Berlioz, A travers chants, Paris, Lévy, 1862, trans. E. Csicsery-Rónay as The Art of Music and Other Essays, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994.
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the opening of the Great Exhibition, most notably the soprano Clara Novello and tenor Sims Reeves. But many singers were judged to have challenged their voices in adapting to changing circumstances: Clara Schumann even noted that Joachim’s wife, the alto Amalie Joachim, had ‘ruined her high notes’ by singing Wagner.17
Religious music The necessary rethinking of the role of music in public worship in the changing attitudes of the nineteenth century was to require time, taking different forms in different traditions, though conspicuous in the High Church traditions of the Continent of Europe through the Cecilian movement. For the time, however, the interest in the appropriateness of the unaccompanied stile antico model was more the preserve of Romantic theorists, seeing in it the ‘purity’ of an idealised past.18 But from the larger social perspective, it is the continuing transformation of congregational vocal participation in the liturgy in the more animated hymns introduced by the evangelical wing of the Church of England, through the Methodist movement founded by John Wesley (1703–91) and composed by his brother Charles Wesley (1707–88), that gradually ousted the centrality of traditional responsorial psalmody, and that have provided the backbone of congregational performance experience to the present day.19 Though Lutheran chorales were more staid by comparison, the limited congregational participation was also greatly increased in the nineteenth century, by virtue of the diminishment of choir music, though in Catholic countries there continued to be little congregational participation in the liturgy. With elaborate settings of liturgical texts such as complete Mass, Requiem Mass or individual items such as the Te Deum finding performance only in the most conservative situations as in Austrian abbey churches or Italian court chapels, such settings were now increasingly performed in church concerts or even in secular concert locations. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, for example (though originally intended for liturgical performance at the enthronement of Archduke Rudolf as cardinal), was first given through its aristocratic sponsor Prince Galitzin by the Philharmonic Society of St Petersburg a month before 17 Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896, ed. B. Litzmann, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1927, repr. Hildesheim, G. Olms, 1989, vol. 2, p. 546. 18 Most prominently by A. F. J. Thibaut, who founded his Singakademie for performance of Palestrina in Heidelberg in 1811 and wrote the influential book Über Reinheit der Tonkunst, Heidelberg, Mohr, 1825, revised and enlarged 1826, which stressed the continuing tradition of the music of the Sistine Chapel, Rome. 19 John Wesley was an ordained member of the Church of England; however, the hymns of the Independent Isaac Watts (1674–1748) (Congregationalist) have been as influential in the larger development of modern English hymnody; see B. L. Manning, The Hymns of Wesley and Watts, London, Epworth, 1942.
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its first Vienna performance in the Kärntnertortheater on 7 May 1824 (plus three movements at the first performance of the Ninth Symphony). However, such high-art music represented a tiny arena of access for audiences and performers, especially choral singers. Festival choral music satisfied new preferences for a more direct, dramatic and secular style of the musical expression of religious texts within an increasingly mixed social class setting. The most popular large-scale performances in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, those of the Handel oratorios, followed the tradition of the Three Choirs Festival and were in major churches: the 1784 Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey had hitherto unparalleled forces,20 and the 1834 Commemoration there continued the tradition, laying the ground for later expansion. But the oratorios of Haydn, first inspired by the 1791 Handel Festival at Westminster Abbey, and which soon assumed similar choral status, were first given in secular settings, though without inflated festival numbers: The Creation, for example, first given in the Schwarzenburg Palais, Vienna, on 30 April 1798, and then in the Burgtheater on 19 March 1799; in London at Covent Garden Theatre on 28 March 1800, and at Drury Lane Theatre on 17 March 1803; and in Paris at the Théâtre des Arts (24 December 1800). The forces for the first performance of The Creation have been estimated at 180 (orchestra of 120 players and 60 men and boys in the choir (in Paris 250)).21 But large-scale choral performances also influenced Vienna. The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, founded in 1812, grew from recent public performances by amateurs of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with around 1,000 performers (a tradition continued until 1847 in the Spanish Riding School). Though, in France, public choral performance is also linked by size, most notably in the forces required by Berlioz in such works as the Requiem and Te Deum (two three-part choruses and an additional choir of 600 children’s voices as well as large orchestra),22 the background stems rather from the great massed assemblies of public choral performance in the Revolution and under Napoleon.
Concert music The few inherited threads of regular public concert music were, of course, but a tiny part of the huge amount of public music-making that went on in the eighteenth century in diverse locations. Even the most prominent of these only
20 The 1784 event had an orchestra of 157 strings (48–47–26–21–15) and 89 wind (6–13–13–26, with double bassoon) and brass (12–12–6) and 261 in the choir of men and boys. 21 See N. Temperley, Haydn: The Creation, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 39–41. 22 Berlioz’s concept was also influenced by his experience of the huge Charity Schools Concert at St Paul’s Cathedral during his London visit in 1851 (Haydn had the same overwhelming experience in June, 1792).
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lasted a few years, such as the Bach–Abel concerts in London or Salomon’s subscription concerts that introduced Haydn to England. An established concert life required permanent organisation and guaranteed support from a much larger number of supporters than previously, appropriate locations and professional standards, thus predominantly professional participation. This had to come from existing traditions and would take time to establish.23 The numerous eighteenth-century organisations that had promoted concert music had been run largely by amateurs and their performances often involved amateur participation and also direction. Germany was especially rich in organisations devoted to instrumental music, drawn from the liaison of town, church and court: the Collegium Musicum and Musikalische Akademie had been particularly prominent in the eighteenth century, and, though they had declined by its end, prominent public amateur activity did not decline immediately. But after 1800 there is an increasing desire of professional musicians attached to the court to explore emerging and more challenging repertoire clearly perceived as beyond effective amateur performance. Many of these ventures were short-lived, but they pointed to the future. In Vienna, Franz Lachner (1803–90; appointed assistant conductor at the Hofoper in 1827) had the idea of forming a Künstlerverein of opera players in 1833. Ten years later this idea was taken up again by members of this orchestra to found a philharmonic society, with Otto Nicolai (1810–49; principal conductor of the Kärtnertortheater) as conductor, giving its first concert in 1842 at the Grosse Redoutensaal, though these concerts were not regular until 1860. Prior to this, the more autonomous London concert scene had maintained a link between the Salomon concerts and the foundation for the Philharmonic Society in 1813 of London’s first self-managing orchestra with many of the same personnel and 350 subscribers.24 The pioneering Beethoven symphonic performances of François Antoine Habeneck came through the Paris Conservatoire, whose Société des Concerts du Conservatoire began in 1828. If the organisation of professional orchestras pointed to the future, the employment of musicians themselves remained variable and potentially insecure. At court, princely circumstances could change; private orchestras and aristocratic employment gradually tapered off after 1815, and in any case varied greatly in size. Apart from the court theatre orchestras, seasonal musical
23 The Hanover Square Rooms were built by J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel for their concerts (1765–81) and used from 1775. 24 On Salomon, see further M. B. Foster, The Philharmonic Society of London 1813–1912, London, Bodley Head, 1912, pp. 1–6; and on the Philharmonic links see further S. McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 69, 168, 204. See further Chapter 26.
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employment in entertainment gardens or spas and the church music positions, greatly reduced by 1800, even highly competent musicians had to piece together a living from different sources and from teaching (a situation that has continued in many settings to this day). The ideal situation appears to have been again in Paris through visionary state education developed by the Revolutionary government,25 which provided salaried positions at the Conservatoire. Eighteenth-century London had bequeathed the most highly developed ad hoc system in Europe with a pool of professional players, working and teaching, available for a fee for each performance. But their priorities were fixed: those who played at the Philharmonic owed it their prime allegiance for the only eight or so concerts of the season. In this system, the avoidance of rehearsal clashes with other orchestras was key, and the consequent deputy system a source of friction, which continues to the present day. The increasing dominance of professional musicians in concert life began to define the concept of a profession of music, something not known in the general sense before, and by the same token indicated a need for growing education, including transferable qualifications. The traditional training of instrumentalists had been direct from father to son or through local apprenticeship; eighteenth-century Italy had stood out in this regard through its many schools for singing, which included instrumental study and general musicianship, but these had declined rapidly in the later eighteenth century. The Paris Conservatoire set an ideal model of organisation. In London, by comparison, the Royal Academy of Music, though it had George IV as patron when founded in 1822, had to rely on subscriptions and donations with no government funding and was always in financial difficulties. There was nothing in Germany to rival the Paris Conservatoire until the Leipzig Conservatoire was founded with Mendelssohn as first director in 1843.26 This soon became the focus of aspiring German-oriented musicians.27 Since they were determined by such a wide range of local institutional circumstances, orchestras, repertoire and the structure of the programmes varied commensurately. During the period 1800–50 many orchestras were no larger than previously. The orchestras of the Philharmonic Society of London and the Paris Conservatoire were quite exceptional in having more than thirty 25 The Paris Conservatoire was founded by the Convention Nationale in 1795 on the basis of existing organisations dating from 1784. 26 Educational qualifications and the emergence of the professional generally in Britain are discussed with wide perspective in C. Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History, Oxford University Press, 1985. See also Chapter 5 of the present volume. A focused listing of conservatoires is given in W. Apel (ed.), The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd edn, London, Heinemann, 1970, p. 200; for the relation of Conservatoires to schools of performance see Chapter 26. 27 The Mendelssohn Scholarship was endowed in the UK for study at Leipzig Conservatoire and the first scholar elected in 1856.
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violins. But size on each occasion was determined by specific repertoire. In Vienna in 1813 a Beethoven orchestral work (unnamed) required strings divided 8 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, 2 basses, with double wind and brass including trombones; but in 1814 at the Redoutensaal numbers of strings were 36–14– 12–17, with wind and brass again double. For the Ninth Symphony premiere in 1824 at the Kärntnertortheater strings of 24–10–6–6 were required, again with double wind and brass.28 Performance of orchestral works with instrumental features drawn from opera or choral music required additional instruments: thus, the cor anglais, standard in the opera house, was required by Berlioz for the ranz des vaches in the ‘Scene in the Country’ movement of the Symphonie Fantastique.29 Opera orchestras had a wider range of instruments: the Vienna court orchestra had a double bassoon by 1807 (Haydn’s Seasons and Creation both use one); the Paris opera orchestra had a bass clarinet and eight harps as standard by 1850. Festival orchestras were often of much bigger size to match the large choral forces, which were determined by social and accommodation factors as much as musical. The concept of the independent conductor only developed of necessity from these changing conditions. It was still most appropriate for the leader to lead with the bow in a small, string-based orchestra. But with larger forces, central control was essential to achieve unity with wind and brass instruments or with chorus. In choral music or opera, the conductor typically stood between the orchestra and chorus, or orchestra and stage; the modern front position became common from the 1830s, when Mendelssohn was noted as using a white stick.30 All public performance throughout the century took place against a background of continuing private performance, its changing social status and character reflecting changing times: every visiting performer had a list of private engagements comparable to the public performances; these extended beyond vocal recitals to chamber performances which might even include concertos with piano reduction of the orchestral part. Though private orchestras died out, the private cultivation of small-scale works continued with the bourgeoisie (the house orchestra hired for the young Mendelssohn is an example of a bourgeois continuation of the aristocratic tradition) and chamber music thrived through the century; as a consequence, especially in leading musical centres, performances still often combined amateur and professional 28 Orchestral Figures given in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn., vol. 13, p. 690. 29 Berlioz even suggests in his Treatise of 1843 an ideal orchestra of 84 strings (21–20–18–8–7–10) with 27 brass and wind ‘for a room scarcely larger than that of the Conservatoire’ which would balance a choir of 126; he suggests doubling or tripling this number in the same proportion for a festival orchestra: See the section ‘The Orchestra’ in his A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, pp. 240–4. 30 Jullien is illustrated conducting an orchestra and four military bands from a central position in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, vol. 9, p. 749. See further Chapter 26 on the creation of new orchestras.
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(the participation of Brahms’s friend the great surgeon Theodor Billroth in early performance of Brahms’s chamber music in Billroth’s apartment in Vienna is an example).31 The origin of its transplantation into the public realm was specific to the musical circumstances of Vienna and the performance of Beethoven’s quartets. First led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh in private performance in Prince Lichnowsky’s Vienna apartment c. 1794, he then led them in public subscription concerts playing a major role in their introduction to the public, followed by Georg Hellmesberger, who became concertmaster at the Hofoper on Schuppanzigh’s death in 1830 and by his son Joseph, who held the same position from 1860 and brought new prominence to the late quartets in public performance: the favoured location was the (old) Musikvereinsaal in the Tuchlaben. In London, the chief initiative was through John Ella’s Musical Union, a series of morning chamber concerts that first took place in the small concert room of Henry Blagrove in 1845, later in the new St James’s Hall.32 This venue, opened in 1858, was home to two series of Popular Concerts. The Monday Popular Concerts were intended to attract a new audience and to promote the new hall on the subscription principle, with mixed concerts including chamber music by the finest players, Joachim being central throughout its existence until 1898; a second series of Saturday concerts began in 1865, and in all 500 concerts were given to an audience Weber has defined as upper middle class. Public chamber music developed rapidly in France only after 1850, again prominently featuring Beethoven’s quartets, as in the Société des derniers Quatuors de Beethoven, 1851. The repertoire of emerging public concerts could only draw from existing channels of public performance, in which operatic and religious solo vocal items and choruses were prominent: the orchestral element of many programmes was also from opera or oratorio as overtures and set pieces. The solo instrumental repertoire mirrored this: principal soloists were violinists and pianists playing operatic transcriptions and arrangements, and variations on such material, as well as display concertos usually of their own composition. Large-scale orchestral works grew from the impact of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, which developed simultaneously in London (for which the late Haydn symphonies had been written and were first performed) and Vienna, and spread quickly to the main venues. Thus there is no hard distinction between ‘mixed’ items, or between the ‘serious’ and the 31 Theodor Billroth (1829–94), professor of surgery at the University of Vienna from 1864. 32 For the Musical Union, see further C. Bashford, John Ella and the Musical Union, Music and British Culture 1785–1914. Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 193–214. William Weber, Music and the Middle Class, London, Croom Helm, 1975, p. 53, has described this audience as ‘high status’, and this applied also to the Popular Concerts at the same venue. See Chapter 26 on the development of chamber music.
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‘popular’ in programme structure: these are retrospective terms drawn from the later standardisation of the public concert to a ‘Classical’ programme of largely orchestral works.33 The first performances of some standard works situate them in their social context. The first performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on 23 December 1806 was closely framed by its institutional setting: the work was written for the conductor of the orchestra of the Theater an der Wien, Franz Clement, and performed there at his benefit concert. The great length of some programmes was because of circumstances rather than conventions of programming, which did not exist in the later sense. Thus, in the performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, mentioned above, it appeared as the final of three works, preceded by three movements from the Missa Solemnis (described as Three Hymns because the censor would not permit the work to be advertised as a Mass outside church) and opening with the overture The Dedication of the House. The location was the court theatre beside the Kärtnertor. If the four-hour programme of Beethoven’s own benefit concert on 22 December 1808 was determined by his desire to make the most of this hard-won chance to have his music performed (in the Theater an der Wien), the programme also shows very different assumptions of convention. The two parts of four items each were framed by the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto and the Fifth Symphony and Choral Fantasy respectively, with inner items such as the scena ‘Ah Perfido’ and Gloria from the Mass in C, the Sanctus from that work and an extemporised piano fantasia from the composer. The generic and stylistic mixture of programmes had not changed significantly towards the mid-century when Clara Schumann gave the second performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The concerto concluded the first half, but only after the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ with full choir, preceded by the aria ‘O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion’, the concert opening with Mozart’s Overture to Die Zauberflöte. The character of public concert-giving is especially associated in the early century with the emergence of the star soloist. But though the dominance of the opera and the growing role of the oratorio guaranteed that vocal soloists were most familiar and notable – and string teaching still regarded the voice as the prime performance model – it was the piano that dominated because of its rapid technological advance towards the capacity to simulate the orchestra and
33 For background on the inputs to the emergence, and nature, of the ‘Classical canon’ of orchestral and instrumental works, see further W. Weber, ‘The history of the musical canon’, in N. Cook and M. Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 341; and Chapter 26.
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thus give the soloist an entirely new musical status.34 The rapid development of piano technology is inseparable from the rise of the virtuoso, though in this case (by comparison with Wagner’s overt demands for new instruments to complete his orchestral compass, as in low brass instruments), the primacy is capable of different interpretations, and composers inclined to different instrumental traditions and builders. But there was no dedicated public setting for solo piano performances, solo or with orchestra, any more than for the orchestra. The first appearances of a new generation of pianists, Chopin and Liszt in Paris and later in London, were, if not in the theatre, at the piano showrooms such as Salle Pleyel in the rue Rochechouart. The richness of the musical life of Paris (which also had the greatest concentration of instrumental builders in Europe) provided not only a public audience but also reception in private salons, which were the focus of social gathering and the arrangement of private teaching at high fees that provided a main income for these performers. But regular long-distance travel by performers was still unusual until around the mid-century with the rapid spread of the rail network and regular steamships to the USA, prompted both by developing technology and need, following the massive increase in emigrations at this period.
Standardisations 1850–1900 Opera The fact that history has judged the exactly contemporaneous Wagner and Verdi (b. 1813) as the dominant figures of German and Italian opera, respectively, in the second part of the nineteenth century reflects not merely the scope and seriousness of their work, but the acceptance by audiences of new values, which have defined expectations of the genre ever since. The Wagnerian audience, especially, is one of the most striking illustrations of the growth of bourgeois artistic support, this new social constituency embracing subject matter of new dramatic and psychological substance as well as political resonance, and challenging music with diminishing emphasis on purely vocal display or stage effects. And implicit in their approach is the permanence of work in regular performance and thus all its demands on audiences and performers. As a consequence of their ambitions, Wagner 34 The technical and social development of the piano is succinctly outlined in C. Ehrlich, The Piano. A History, rev. edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990. The state of piano technology by mid-century is especially evident in the instruments displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851; see further M. Musgrave, ‘The musical legacy of the Great Exhibition’, in F. Bosbach and J. R. Davies (eds.), with S. Bennett, T. Brockmann and W. Filmer-Sankey, The Great Exhibition and its Legacy, Munich, Sauer, 2002, pp. 521– 54. See further on the piano and pianists, Chapter 26; the first intercity telegraph line was inaugurated in 1844 in the USA.
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and Verdi shared difficult relations with the often entrenched operatic world – its economic and social constraints, performance traditions, including the autonomy of soloists and slack traditions of theatre orchestras, and limitations of conductors, which made innovation as difficult for Verdi as for the radically theorising Wagner. Both constantly complained about insufficient rehearsal, and the need for one central director, echoing Weber; Wagner even commented that he preferred good Italian provincial theatres because ‘only at a suburban theatre in Turin’ had he witnessed a ‘correct and complete performance of the “Barber of Seville” . . . Even shallowest theatrical concoctions, at the smallest Parisian theatres’ are effective because ‘carefully rehearsed and correctly rendered’, with the control (as in ballet performances in Vienna or Berlin) ‘in the hands of one man’.35 Though both had put the values of grand opera behind them,36 its resources influenced their subsequent expectations. But the artistic character they sought was ultimately completely different. Wagner basically wanted to create a musico-dramatic language as lofty as the instrumental music he understood and performed, pre-eminently Beethoven symphonies, and give it comparable status: thus to create a new kind of serious audience. To do this he felt he needed to transform every aspect of performance and reception into a new kind of unity, training his performers and informing his audiences.37 This confronted him with operatic conditions outside the Parisian grand opera. Of the multiple dimensions he sought to transform, the size and character of the orchestra he required is illustrative – not merely now additional instruments for special effects, but an independent instrumental chorus in each department, in the case of brass and wind requiring newly invented instruments for which he provided the specifications: bass trumpet, bass trombone, double bass tuba. Comparison over fifteen years shows the changes in his resources in Germany: for Lohengrin under Liszt at Weimar in 1850 the orchestra of the Hoftheater had 21 strings (5 first and 6 second violins, 3 violas, 4 cellos, 3 double basses) and double wind with 4 horns, 2 trumpets, one trombone, one tuba, timpani, though the strings must have been augmented for the four-part division of both solo violins and 35 R. Wagner, Űber das Dirigieren, Leipzig, Kahnt, 1870, trans. E. Dannreuther as On Conducting: A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music, London, Reeves, 1887 (repr. 1989), pp. 89–90. 36 Wagner premiered Tannhäuser (revised version with Act 3 ballet music) in 1861 at the Paris Opéra; his grand opera in the Paris tradition, Rienzi, was given at Dresden in 1842, where he was appointed joint Kapellmeister in 1843; Verdi had closer connection: his premieres were Jérusalem, 1847, Les vêpres siciliennes, 1855 and Don Carlos, still reflective of the Grand Opera background, in 1867. The requirement of ballet was conservative by this stage, as the traditional connection of ballet with opera had been severed as far back as Beethoven’s Prometheus ballet music. 37 Wagner wrote his ‘Zukunftsmusik’ to prepare the Parisian public for Tannhäuser in 1861 and envisaged the schooling of singers, players and conductors of his works, plans partly realised in his writings. See The Artwork of the Future and Actors and Singers in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. W. A. Ellis, 8 vols., London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893–9, vols. 1, 1895, and 5, 1896.
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remaining violins in the Prelude.38 At Munich for Rheingold he had 68 strings, triple woodwind with cor anglais and bass clarinet, 8 horns, 3 trumpets with bass trumpet, 3 trombones with bass trombone, one bass tuba, 2 harps and percussion. At Bayreuth for the complete Der Ring des Niebelungen in 1876 he required 64 strings (16–16–12–12–8) plus wind and brass as above. Implicit in the size of orchestra was the challenge to its accommodation and effect in existing opera houses. Wagner had first rehearsed Tristan und Isolde in the Munich Residenztheater, but realised that the work was out of scale with the theatre and reverted to the larger Hoftheater, which held about 2,000 people.39 And his first attraction to Bayreuth was to the Margrave Opera House because it had one of the largest stages in Germany. But again he decided against it for the envisaged first Ring performances, deeming it unsuitable. His eventual decision that only a specially designed theatre would satisfy his needs was based, among many musical considerations, above all on his concern for a new audience and opposition to the traditional social features of theatre design, especially in court opera houses. He wanted a new design to embody a democratic principle of audience access and now designed Bayreuth with Gottfried Semper on the principle of the Greek auditorium. The original design had 1,460 seats with boxes behind rather than on the side, and the main area on a single raked level converging in a fan shape onto the stage (which had huge influence on theatre design generally). The orchestra was now hidden under a canopy that veiled the full effect so that no voice was ever overwhelmed. The conventions of audience behaviour that he introduced at Bayreuth – the requirement of silence and no applause for Parsifal – represent the final stage of the education and initiation of a new audience for the operatic principle in its guise as musical drama. In contrast, Verdi composed within the Italian operatic tradition and with the established theatres in mind: from 1850 La Fenice, Venice (Rigoletto, La traviata and Simon Boccanegra), Apollo, Rome (Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera), La Scala, Milan (revision of Simon Boccanegra, La forza del destino, Don Carlos, Otello and Falstaff ). His transformation of audience expectations was to be through the impact of size and dramatic effect, and in the length of his works. Though he was interested in Wagner’s dramatic ideas, and particularly concerned about the tightness of librettos (and all his operas are serious save Falstaff ), he was vulnerable to the charge of German influence through the 38 The Lohengrin orchestral figures are given in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, vol. 13, p. 687; the Valkyrie orchestral figures are from E. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 4: 1866–1883, London, Cassell, 1947, repr. Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 207–8. 39 Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 3: 1859–1866 (1945), repr. Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 367–8; the Munich Hoftheater was the location of all Wagner’s premieres, save for Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, first done at Bayreuth in 1876, and Parsifal, 1882.
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increasing role of the orchestra within the texture, as well as in musical language. He shared Wagner’s frustration with variable and poor orchestral standards. Both their conceptions required the unique standards of the Paris orchestras, whereas standards elsewhere fell far short. Viola and cello players were a particular problem (especially violas, the weakest players traditionally given this filling role in the string texture). Verdi insisted that before La Scala mounted La forza del destino (1862) and Don Carlos (1867) it should have a full complement of middle strings, an orchestra of 100 and enough rehearsal time for ‘delicate things’.40 Verdi dominated Italian opera until the appearance of Verismo towards 1890, developing from the more naturalistic tendencies, fierce passions, and lower-life characters of Verdi (Rigoletto, of 1850, for example), but also from the greater realism of other traditions, such as the opéra comique in its outstanding modern work, Bizet’s Carmen. But common to all dramatic works was the increasing issue of the role of the orchestra and its influence on the various traditions of singing, not least the prized French lyric tradition. The growing fusion of elements set a challenge of genre to the potential audience and tended to encourage stratification.
Religious music Religious reform accelerated rapidly from around mid-century, driven partly by the inevitable reaction against long-standing apathy and much more immediately by the materialism perceived in technology and by scientific challenges to belief (Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859), leading to a move towards symbolism and ritual, and musical reforms with it, though these varied with traditions. The Cecilian movement, predominantly associated with Catholic liturgies, now gathered momentum. In seeking the complete integration of music into the liturgy rather than its autonomy of expression, the Cecilian hierarchy of musical elements placed Gregorian chant first, followed by polyphony, organ music and hymns. Beginning in Germany, 41 it spread rapidly through Europe and to North America. In France the movement is especially associated with the revival of Gregorian chant at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes, resulting in the 1889 Paléographie Musicale, the norm for modern plainchant editions.42 In Italy the papal Motu Proprio of 1903 symbolised the consummation of this reform with its detailed comments on the 40 Verdi called the cellists and violists ‘a lot of dogs’; see Rosselli, Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy, p. 124; Wagner had comparable contempt for violists: see Wagner, On Conducting, pp. 3–4; see also Chapter 25. 41 The founding of the Allgemeine Cäcilien Verein by F. X. Witt in 1869 established Cecilianism in Germany. 42 Paléographie musicale, comprising the principal manuscripts of the Gregorian, Ambrosian, Mozarabic and Gallican plainsong, was published in quarterly facsimiles from 1889 (vols. 1–13, ed. Dom
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conduct and training of musicians, use of instruments and the form of compositions, above all inspired by Gregorian chant as embodiment of the sacred and liturgical. In England, as well as the restoration of the cathedral tradition, the notable social feature was the development of parish church music, with sung services increasingly apparent in the many new churches, especially in suburban and new town situations arising from population increase, Victorian middle-class wealth and religious commitment that had followed the 1831 church building act. Two figures had a major influence on this. Thomas Helmore (1811–90) was closer to the Cecilians in promoting unaccompanied choral music in psalms and responses, and in encouraging plainsong for congregational participation, on which he became the authority in England. F. A. Gore Ouseley (1825–89), a High Churchman, though with a distaste for extremes of ritual, founded with his own money the College of St Michael and All Angels, Tenbury, to create his ideal of a cathedral service, free of secular influences (in hymn tunes, for example).43 The standardisation of Anglican hymnody began with the publication in 1861 of Hymns Ancient and Modern, reflecting High Church influence in its translations of medieval office hymns, though subsequent revision contained more contemporary melodies.44 Symbolic of church reform in England was that at St Paul’s Cathedral, which increased its choir number in 1872 to twenty boys and eighteen men, improved discipline, introduced regular rehearsals and a much broader repertoire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Though Cecilianism placed instrumental music low in priority (the use of the organ for trivial music, often opera transcriptions, in Catholic churches in Italy and France had been a characteristic of the decline), the technical development of the organ transformed music elsewhere. In Britain the rapid development of English organs as the supporting instrument for choir as well as congregation became key to this revival. Grasping the innovations of the French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–99) and with a symbolic showcase at the Great Exhibition of 1851, English builders (most prominent being Henry Willis I, father of the Willis dynasty: 1821–1901) filled churches old and new with instruments with full continental pedal boards, extensive pneumatic assistance to the keyboard and coupling actions (later more efficient through A. Mocquereau, and vols. 14–15, ed. Dom J. Gajard); the Schola Cantorum in Paris was founded in 1894 to study Gregorian plainsong and the revival of music of the Palestrina school with the aim of raising the standards of music in French churches. 43 Thomas Helmore was appointed precentor of St Mark’s College, Chelsea, a new institution for the training of teachers in church schools, where he coached students for daily choral services; (Sir) Arthur Gore Ouseley was also a major collector of the era who bequeathed St Michael’s College his library of over 3,000 volumes of music and theory books. An excellent perspective on its subject is given in B. Rainbow, The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church 1839–1872: Studies in Church Music, Oxford University Press, 1970. 44 The first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, with tunes, appeared under the editorship of W. H. Monk from Novello, London, 1861.
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electrical contacts from the 1880s), and a new range of ‘orchestral’ stops additional to the traditional English organ tone of flutes and diapasons. These organs possessed an array of brass and woodwind characters far beyond the traditional flute and trumpet stops (also available on the pedals); they also, for the first time, had a ‘swell’ mechanism to produce crescendo and diminuendo, traditionally unknown on the organ (achieved by opening or closing the Venetian blind mechanism enclosing the pipes relating to one or more manuals). These innovations stimulated a new era of ‘orchestral’ service music and symbolised a religious quality that gave rise to a rich succession of works through the twentieth century. The continuing composition of large-scale orchestral liturgical settings of, for example, Bruckner and Liszt, were thus at odds with the reformers. Indeed, the greatest of them, Verdi’s Requiem, was not written for the liturgy but as a memorial for the Italian novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) and first performed at a church concert in Milan Cathedral and subsequently at La Scala. Ironically, the largely banished Masses of Haydn and Mozart were now sung in Anglican churches as part of the liturgy, courtesy of transcribed organ accompaniments and to English translations provided by a new generation of publishers; most famous was the Novello publishing company, whose mass-production vocal scores in place of full scores literally enabled the whole choral movement to gain its force through access.45 But though heard by many in church, liturgical music involved few performers and listeners by comparison with public choral events to religious texts, which increased in their role as the major focus of religious musical performance. The obsession with the public performance of Handel oratorios reached an early climax in the Handel Festivals at the Crystal Palace from 1859 with a preliminary festival in 1857, then triennially, with unheard-of performance numbers of around 250 orchestra, 3,000 choir, and 30,000–40,000 audience, the biggest musical event in history, even exceeding those in France, and attracting huge interest on the Continent, where it was reported in detail, and the USA, where the influential Cincinnati Choral Festival from 1881 was inspired by it. The location was the vast arena of the centre transept of the rebuilt Crystal Palace at Sydenham where the Sacred Harmonic Society provided the core of a choir drawn from choral organisations of the principal towns and cities of the country. But these performances were essentially musical celebrations
45 For the impact of the provision of vocal scores at low prices by Novello, which involved new technologies, see J. Bennett, A Short History of Cheap Music as Exemplified in the Records of the House of Novello, London and New York, Novello, 1887. The indication ‘organ ad lib.’ for the orchestral accompaniment of choral works, as in Brahms’s German Requiem, is indicative of the desire by publishers to gain concert hall as well as church performance, where an organ could not always be guaranteed.
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of British power and authority and the sheer acoustic challenge was never really resolved, nor the event taken seriously by connoisseurs.46 The now burgeoning regional festival tradition was much more typical of serious choral aspiration and took on a new impetus through the growth of festivals in industrial cities, bringing an entirely new social and political dimension through the participation of nonconformists that symbolised the new prominence of religious nonconformity (middle class, and politically liberal) in public life. Thanks to an extensive transport network by the 1850s, provincial festivals could rely on London soloists and orchestral players from the freelance system that guaranteed metropolitan standards. Fine new city halls and other civic buildings, often with centrally positioned organs, became as important, indeed more appropriate, to the new stance of choral music as the church. St George’s Hall, Liverpool, was regarded as having the finest acoustics in Europe. The Bradford Festival was the first of the new generation to gain prominence with a chorus of 220 plus a new Hill organ and orchestra of eightyfour in 1853;47 British events set the pace, but were paralleled on the Continent. In France, Lamoureux was inspired by the Sacred Harmonic Society to found the Societé de l’Harmonie Sacrée, after giving Messiah in 1873; in 1868 Pasdeloup had founded the Societé des Oratories in Paris; in Germany the Stern Gesangverein in 1847 (–1911) overtook the longestablished Berliner Singakademie, founded in 1791, in giving modern repertoire; and Siegfried Och’s Berlin Philharmonic Choir, founded in 1882, achieved new performance levels; in Austria, the Singverein of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and Wiener Singakademie were both founded in 1858. Though large performances stand out, the depth of the choral movement in the period is apparent in numerous small developments of existing traditions and new ones. Standing in complete contrast to the hugely public status of Handel, the increasing dissemination of the music of Bach, greatly stimulated by the contents of the Leipzig Bach Ausgabe from 1851, prompted the foundation of many Bach choirs, notably of Berlin, 1862, of London, 1875 (created to give the first British performance of the B minor Mass), and, in the USA, the important Bach choir at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1898. Male-voice choirs developed apace during this period, especially in Germany and France. The Wiener Männersangerverein, founded in 1843, is the oldest Viennese choir and 46 See, M. Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 27–57. 47 Figures given in P. A. Scholes (ed.), The Mirror of Music 1844–1944, 2 vols., London, Novello, 1947, vol. 1, p. 162; see also Chapter 6. The industry of oratorio composition and performance might almost be seen as the closest that Britain came to a nineteenth-century musical genre as nationally esteemed as was opera in Italy. For a representative list of the oratorio repertoire and locations of performance see P. A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford University Press, 1938, pp. 651–3.
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numerous regional choirs followed in Germany and Austria. In France, the Orphéon male voice choir, founded in 1833, was a national institution with a competition festival at Lyon from 1849, giving an annual Paris concert (3,000 performed at the London Crystal Palace in 1860). In England the Vocal Association was founded in 1856 as the equivalent of the German Gesangvereine. The English eighteenth-century tradition of glee singing for small unaccompanied choirs continued and had particular fruit in the musical culture of American colleges.
Concert music The rate of expansion and internal variety of public concert music make the comparison of access with opera and church music particularly apparent. Of prominent institutions, both the orchestras of the Paris Conservatoire and the Philharmonic Society of London had established prophetic models of organisation and social position since the earlier years of the century, but were now out of touch with the new times and perceived as elitist. The increased access to and understanding of the concert repertoire they had helped to establish provided the basis on which by the 1850s go-ahead figures could see that there was a new and large audience to be won and nurtured further. By the same token, these individuals developed from where they were, finding new locations that were free of the traditional class associations of privileged groups or societies and representative of new ones. Four individuals in the transitional period from the 1850s are notable in reflecting the same ideals in entirely different situations. In Manchester, the pianist Charles Hallé (1819–95, born Karl Halle), who had left Paris in 1848 through its diminished musical circumstances, and taken over conductorship of the long-established Gentlemen’s Concerts in 1849, transformed it into an orchestra of his own of forty players in 1857 with the backing of local businessmen. Its move to the new major civic hall, the Free Trade Hall, can be compared in social terms to the Gewandhaus in Leipzig as a civic location adapted to musical use.48 At the re-erected Crystal Palace at Sydenham, the new director of music, August Manns (1825–1907), took over the Palace’s resident wind band in 1855 and transformed it in months into a full symphony orchestra, though only obtaining a permanent location in the vast building after five years by conversion of the side of the great central transept as a permanent hall: the economic dimension of orchestral support was in this case hugely helped by the fact that the secretary of the Palace was the
48 The Free Trade Hall opened in 1840.
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music-loving George Grove.49 In Paris, Jules Pasdeloup (1819–87) started with his former Conservatoire pupils in 1852 what became by 1856 his Societé des Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire Impériale de Musique at the Salle Herz, now sponsored by the Conservatoire, which provided rehearsal rooms and instruments. In 1861 Pasdeloup hired the Cirque Napoléon, seating 5,000, for his Concerts Populaires de Musique Classique to bring classical works to an audience not then permitted to enter the Conservatoire concerts.50 Pasdeloup’s example prompted later conductors, notably Éduard Colonne and Charles Lamoureux, to achieve rising standards: since the Conservatoire Hall remained the only dedicated concert hall in Paris, the spacious concert halls of piano makers were also used. In the USA another German immigrant, Theodore Thomas (1835–1905), not only conducted existing orchestras (first the Brooklyn Philharmonic, founded 1857, then the New York Philharmonic, founded 1842), but promoted his own named orchestra, beginning with his own sponsored orchestral concerts in New York and touring with his orchestra across America and Canada. In response to the establishment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Thomas was offered the support for an orchestra of his own in Chicago, established as the Chicago Orchestra in 1891 (later the Theodor Thomas Orchestra and then the Chicago Symphony Orchestra).51 The establishment of Thomas’s Chicago Orchestra may be seen as symbolising another phase of orchestral development. Now towards the end of the century orchestras were increasingly civically run and funded, taken over from individuals or the court, often with new purpose-built locations, and thus representing the foundation of modern concert life. In 1858, London’s first purpose-built public concert venue was erected. Consisting of a complex of two halls, the larger, upper hall, accommodating 2,127, St James’s Hall, financed by the publisher and entrepreneur William Chappell, took over the role of the Hanover Square Rooms. It was the focal concert hall of the metropolis until the opening of Queen’s Hall in 1893 and used by all orchestras: the New Philharmonic Society (established in London in 1852–79, to 49 The ‘Crystal Palace’, first built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was re-erected and expanded at Sydenham as an exhibition of leisure and arts and opened in 1854; August Manns, formerly a military director of music in Germany, was the second director of music; the daily orchestra gave a big concert on Saturdays with string stiffening from central London orchestras. See also Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace, pp. 74–81. 50 Colonne’s Société National (1873) began with the support of the publisher Hartmann at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1873; Lamoureux, who had played in Pasdeloup’s student orchestra created the Société des Nouveaux Concerts (Concerts Lamoureux) in 1881 with new music to high standards of preparation. 51 Theodore Thomas came to New York aged ten from East Frisia, was conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from early 1860s, later the New York Philharmonic. See also E. Schabas, Theodore Thomas. America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835–1905, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 18–194; see also Chapter 6.
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achieve the standards and repertoire lacking at the Philharmonic Society); the Society itself, which had moved there by 1869; the Richter Concerts from 1879; and the [Georg] Henschel concerts from 1886. The Royal Albert Hall, built as a memorial to the late consort in 1871, was for large meetings and choral performances and was never suitable for orchestral concerts till modern acoustical modifications.52 Elsewhere concert life had to wait till political events were more stable. In Germany, the achievement of unification in 1871 put German cultural activities into high gear (and through its indirect beneficial economic influence French music as well). The years 1870–1900 saw the increasing establishment and development of orchestras with new halls. As the new German capital, Berlin developed particularly rapidly. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra came about after fifty-four members of the Bil’sche Kapelle left in 1882 to form the new orchestra, directed by Franz Wüllner and promoted by the impresario Hermann Wolff. 53 Dresden, traditionally dominated by the court, opened the Gewerbehaussaal in 1870 as its first public concert hall. In Hamburg, the old Wörmerscher Konzertsaal was converted to modern standards in 1871; in Leipzig in 1884, the Neue Gewandhaus replaced the original cloth hall, now with two halls seating 1,700 and 640, respectively. The year 1870 saw the foundation of the new Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde building also with two auditoriums, seating 1,654 with standing room for 300, and the later-named Brahmssaal seating 679, also with standing room: this immediately became the performance venue of the Philharmonic Orchestra, which, continuing from its origins, served as the orchestra of the Hofoper. Though no comparable background of concert life had existed in Italy, the growing sense of national identity accelerated with communications and growing middle-class access after unification in 1861, with the old court establishments already much swept away. The growing interest in orchestral music manifested itself in philharmonic societies and others founded by aristocracy and the middle class in the main cities: first arising to prominence were, in Turin, the Concerti Popolari in 1872, and in Rome the Accademia Filarmonica Romana 1876, both focused on Beethoven’s orchestral music. Even more dramatic was the transformation in the USA. The huge wave of European emigration from 1848 that exceeded anything previously had its impact on the establishment of cultural life, part of the expression of a civic sense, in which a central component was the establishment of orchestras 52 The Royal Albert Hall Choral Society was founded soon after the building was completed with 1,000 singers at its first concert on 8 May 1872 and renamed the Royal Choral Society in 1888; it is the oldest surviving London choral society. 53 It was founded in 1867 by Benjamin Bilse. See further Chapter 26 on the Berlin Philharmonic.
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attached largely to German communities and dominated by the German symphonic tradition. Following the New York Philharmonic in 1842 and the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1857 were: the New York Symphony in 1878; Boston as the first self-governing orchestra in 1881; Chicago in 1891; Cincinnati in 1895; Philadelphia in 1900. These were usually stimulated by German associations and groups: for example the Germania Orchestra of Philadelphia, which gave annual concerts from 1856 until 1895. A conspicuous characteristic was the nurturing of cities with nascent orchestral organisation by visits from neighbouring established orchestras (for example, Pittsburgh had visits from the Boston Germania from 1853, but its own orchestra not until 1895).54 This huge development in concert life cost money. And although there was certainly a social dimension of community and class – a sense that the appreciation of the newly emerging orchestral repertoire, especially German, embodied cultivation and thus expressed aspiration and self-esteem – this cannot alone explain the expansion of the repertoire and acceptance of much new challenging music. A new audience was being educated by enterprising performers. There was a growing awareness of the richness of the German instrumental tradition, especially of the symphony as a ‘serious’ genre – much of it new to audiences. Conductors exposed their audiences to radical challenges, and used the growing familiarity with the Classical repertoire as a benchmark for orchestral standards. As well as achieving entirely new levels of training and discipline, all were notable in developing the repertoire they offered. But ease of reception varied with local circumstances. Though Mendelssohn and, to a lesser extent, Schumann, were increasingly received in England and Germany, in Paris Pasdeloup had a riot on his hands when he promoted German music, especially that of Wagner even before the 1870–1 war. And seasons also varied with circumstances: many, like the Philharmonic of London, had only eight concerts, and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde’s season of choral concerts was also of eight. But in other situations, the season was longer: the unique situation at the Crystal Palace – closer to the pleasure garden tradition than to public concert life – with a permanent salaried orchestra, enabled Manns to give around thirty Saturday concerts a season for over forty years, utilising his daily orchestra with string stiffening from central London. Consistent with all these factors of expansion – civic buildings, expanding repertoire, and growing audience demand, reflecting growing population – was the doubling of the size of orchestras in fifty years. The major orchestra 54 The banker Henry Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is an example of the rich financiers and industrialists who underwrote many of the American orchestras as civic ventures. See also Ian Pace in Chapter 26.
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c. 1850 still featured around 50 players, which remained in some court situations. Thus when Brahms chose to have his First Symphony premiered in 1876 by his friend Dessoff, court Kapellmeister in Karlsruhe, he committed himself to 49 players only; but for the Second Symphony performed by the Vienna Philharmonic the following year, he had 76 (Schumann had anticipated only 46 or so in 1846 for his Second Symphony at Zwickau). The Leipzig Gewandhaus had by 1850 56 players, and 72 in 1881 (strings 12–10–8–8–6), 44 in 1839 (9–8–5–5–4) and 98 in 1890 (20–20–13–10–10); the Vienna Philharmonic had 78 players in 1864, 100 in 1885 and 114 in 1810.55 By now the regular inclusion of operatic instrumental music in programmes – including extracts from the Wagner music dramas – required the full Wagnerian orchestra (as previously indicated). In considering the design of halls, new concert halls and town and civic halls also now increasingly featured centrally placed organs. Like the choral performance it so often shared, the organ became a symbol of civic pride, its sheer power enabling it to parallel the orchestra through orchestral transcriptions, popular in public recitals, which now began to burgeon. Though only the most outstanding court conductor would cope with the growing demands of orchestral music, the training ground continued to be the opera house, with which the chief conductors were associated. Bülow (1830–94, appointed conductor of the Munich court opera in 1864) stands out, with the capacity to understand as well as control the entirely new slowness and quiet dynamics of the Prelude and Liebestod in the first performance of Tristan und Isolde there in 1865, though guided by the composer.56 The vast expansion of performance activity and solo standards put a huge premium on training. As well as private teaching by great performers and by their pupils in continuance of their traditions, many institutions were, like orchestras and choirs, founded by individuals (for example, the Kullak Academy in Berlin in 1850; and the Hoch Conservatoire in Frankfurt in 1878).57 Major civic organisations also followed the foundation of the Leipzig Conservatoire. Comparison also of the two major British conservatoires shows 55 Figures from R. Pascall, Playing Brahms. A Study in 19th-century Performance Practice. Papers in Musicology No. 1, Department of Music, University of Nottingham, 1991, pp. 11–12; R. Schumann, Neue Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werke, Serie 1/2, vol. 1, ed. B. R. Appel, Mainz, 2003, p. 210. 56 See Wagner, On Conducting; the theoretical foundation of conducting technique and the disposition of the orchestra had previously been most notably given by Berlioz in 1843 (Treatise, p. 245), and later for instrumental and orchestral developments after 1848. See also Chapter 26. 57 Theodore Kullak (1818–82) founded the Neue Akademie der Tonkunst in 1855 for the training of pianists, which soon became the largest private musical institute in Germany; the Hoch’sche Conservatorium was founded by a wealthy Frankfurt music-loving merchant J. Hoch (Clara Schumann taught at the Hoch’sche as well as privately in Frankfurt, assisted by her daughters); for discussion of Conservatoires see Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 19–21; see Chapter 5, and also Chapter 26 for details of schools of performance attached to these conservatoires.
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the changing status of the music profession: they were created with active not nominal royal support and clearly involved a widening social net of recruitment through scholarships, as well as a new institutional emphasis on British as opposed to continental music. However, teachers for the newly expanded brass and wind sections tended to be recruited from the military, where regimental bands had the finest training and ensembles in all countries. However, the newly burgeoning conservatoire culture created tensions as well. Wagner, seeing the danger of a new mediocrity to prolong the low standards he perceived in Kapellmeister training, opposed them vehemently. 58 The expansion of the social role of public concerts combined with the natural increase in communications by railways and by sea to give a massive impetus to the solo performer’s career: they effectively created it. In major concert venues audiences saw leading performers on a more or less annual basis (the Philharmonic, the Crystal Palace), literally so with long seasons. In London, as greatest focus, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim travelled annually to England over thirty- and forty-year periods respectively, as well as playing throughout Germany and elsewhere. Transatlantic travel was also increasingly routine by the end of the century; Jenny Lind had already undertaken an extensive tour in 1850–2,59 von Bülow in 1875–6 with 139 concerts (the sea journey by steamship Liverpool–Boston took ten to eleven days at this time). Although virtuosity increased apace with the proliferation of teaching, another vital factor was the standardisation of performance as a result of the standardisation of the repertoire, which gradually changed the nature of performance. It set new expectations of the authority of performance; as an example, Joseph Joachim’s regular appearances playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto gained a ‘canonical’ status. With all this communication came the development of an entirely new world of marketing and control that continued the earlier role of operatic management in the control of every aspect of the newly developing business. Clara Schumann’s agent in London, Arthur Chappell (1834–1904), was a proprietor of St James’s Hall, where many of her concerts took place. In Germany, Hermann Wolff’s agency ‘Konzert Direktion Wolff’ in Berlin was a major influence in the development of concerts.60 The impact of expansion on standardisation is especially clear in basic parameters of musical performance, pitch and tempo, as well as in the growth of interpretation. Up to the early nineteenth century, pitch, though completely unstandardised and often specific to cities and organisations, changed little. 58 Wagner, On Conducting, pp. 7–11. 59 Jenny Lind’s tour of the USA in 1850–2 was organised by the entrepreneur and circus manager Phineas T. Barnum. 60 Hermann Wolff was an editor, manager and composer (1845–1902).
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But through the nineteenth century, changing performance conditions and requirements had a major effect in a gradual though often variable increase in pitch that changed performance style and character. Instruments contemporary with Mozart reveal a0 at 424Hz (cycles per second). Yet in the era of Weber at the Dresden Court Opera (1817–21) a0 was still 423.2; but by 1826 his successor Reissiger used a fork at a0 =435. The year of the first Italian version of Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes at La Scala, 1856, reveals a0 exceeding 451Hz. The Paris Opera had a0 at 423 in 1810, increasing to 431.7 by 1822. The French government established the diapason normal at a0 = 435 in 1859 (which also reflected the tolerance of a wooden framed/metal-braced piano of that period). There was constant pressure from performers to return to this (especially singers, who naturally resisted this challenge to their technical training and capacity), as did Covent Garden by 1880. But the trend towards greater sound projection was irresistible, not least through the adoption of the single cast-iron piano frame permitting thicker strings and higher tension. The present-day standardisation to a0 =440 (by no means still always observed) only appeared in the 1950s.61 The increasing length of musical compositions and greater degree of internal contrast and variety also had great consequences for the sense of tempo throughout the nineteenth century. The inherited assumptions about the relationship between character and tempo, and of proportional temporal relations between sections (for example, the equivalence of bar lengths in changing metres) were gradually loosened. While some composers of more traditional orientation retained this sense – see, for example Brahms’s comments to Dessoff regarding the performance of his works – many new works defied this assumption. For example, Berlioz notes Mendelssohn’s inability to gauge the correct tempo of his music. The survival of metronome marks does not by itself confirm correct tempo, as the calculation can never be retrospectively checked for accuracy (whether, for example, calculated for the whole movements or only for the opening or a part) or the correct functioning of the device: many still seem much too fast to modern performers. Moreover, many composers opposed their use, or at least qualified it, not least since the power of an instrument or size of ensemble and performing space certainly affects the sense of an appropriate tempo (see further Chapter 25.) 62 And tempo variation 61 Account summarised from the article ‘Pitch’, in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, vol. 14, p. 785, and from A. J. Ellis, ‘On the history of musical pitch’, Journal of the Society of the Arts, 28 (1880), 293. 62 See the letter of Brahms to Dessoff of 19 October 1878, in C. Krebs (ed.), Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel XVI: Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Philipp Spitta und Otto Dessoff, Berlin, 1922, Deutsche BrahmsGesellschaft, repr. Tutzing, Schneider, 1974, p. 207. The relation between tempo marking, musical character and choice of metronome marking is discussed by Kolisch in a range of Beethoven’s music; see R. Kolisch (ed. R. Busch), ‘Tempo und Charakter in Beethovens Musik’, Musik-Konzepte, 76/7, Munich, July 1992. And Clive Brown (Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 299–414) takes the topic through the century. The specific topic of tempo rubato, especially with
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is also a major aspect of the developing art of interpretation. With the rise of the single commanding conductor of an increasingly large ensemble in an increasingly socially prominent performance setting, the refinement and control of performance detail became increasingly possible, with figures such as von Bülow and Nikisch especially noteworthy (see Chapter 26).
Perspectives By 1900 the institutional foundations of modern musical life were in place with the increasing standardisation and stratification of repertoire, programme structure and promotional organisation. Yet access to it was not total in the modern sense. Indeed the recurrent terms ‘popular’ and ‘public’ of the preceding century, though certainly indicating a widening audience, are relative only. Many promoters included orchestral music in seeking the ‘popular’ audience, but few ever assumed that the lower middle classes, still less the labouring classes, would become part of it. The so-called ‘shilling’ audience (economically lower middle class) had limited disposable leisure time and was free of daily work only on the few public holidays (full Saturday working was common until the 1950s in Britain). Though there had been regular attempts to bring concert music to low-income audiences, they were always the consequence of particular localised social initiatives lacking larger impact, or of short season.63 A truly consistent popular audience appears only towards 1900. The consumers of concert music were still mainly at the other end of the scale, and part of ‘society’: Shaw often refers to the relatively high cost of tickets for the consumer. 64 A key moment in the UK is the development of the Promenade Concerts at the Queen’s Hall (from 1895) under Henry Wood with Robert Newman as promoter, which pointedly took place in the summer months when ‘society’ had traditionally been out of town and thus no quality music was available; the promenade concert had been the main model for popular public concerts including orchestral music, most notably from Louis Jullien (1812–60), who sought ‘to ensure amusement as well as attempting instruction by blending in the programmes the most sublime works with those of a lighter school’.65 regard to the solo piano music of Chopin, is discussed in R. Hudson, Stolen Time. The History of Tempo Rubato, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, repr. 1997. Berlioz (Memoirs, ed. D. Cairns, London, Gollancz, 1969, pp. 355–6) is quoted. 63 The People’s Concert Society stands out in popularising Classical music in the poorer parts of London with a vast number of concerts 1878–1935 in different locations; Rosa Newmarch (in Henry J. Wood, London, n.d., p. 13) recalls that the Covent Garden concerts conducted by Alfred Mellon for several weeks in the autumn were at that time ‘the only cheap concerts in the metropolis’. Theodore Thomas also included many concerts for children, as did Henschel in his London Orchestral Concerts from 1886. 64 See D. H. Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Music, 3 vols., London, Bodley Head, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 272–3. 65 Jullien quoted from The Illustrated London News in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, vol. 9, p. 748; he performed in London at the Drury Lane Theatre as had Philippe Musard (1793–1859) before him, also in Paris, though Musard’s promenades were all of dance music.
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In setting the new audiences in perspective, it is appropriate to point out that limited access to public concerts was not the only defining factor in their growing participation. Instrumental and vocal music was also as accessible as choral music through the local church, still the hub of many communities throughout Europe, as well as a traditional cradle of musical education, which by its nature offered a certain social levelling as well as social interchange. Solo and ensemble performances, which grew naturally from the organ/choir foundation of church music, offered exposure and opportunity from an early age, often to a high standard, and certainly provided one foundation for the readiness of new audiences for serious music. A purely sociological explanation of ‘lowerclass consumption’ with stereotyped musical correlatives such as the music hall is unhelpful. Socio-economic class is not the same as musical class, which can emerge from any background. Increasing standardisation did not necessarily imply equality of standards or a balance between major spheres of public music. For all the achievements of the earlier generation, general standards of execution and direction were uneven. Wagner’s criticism of Kapellmeister inadequacies in relation to new music continued to be true in new orchestral music, which demanded a level of individual skill, reliability and collective discipline that was still being established. Thus new music continued to be a major challenge and only a new generation coming to maturity c. 1900, with new levels of preparation and understanding of the modern orchestra, would resolve this. But music was not the only challenge to standards. Much of the new art of conducting was concerned with the consequences of expansion. Larger orchestras and more powerful instruments created an increasing gap between the score and its performance. Classical scores had been written for performance in clearly imagined ways regarding sonority and balance, and features of expression, dynamics and articulation were long forgotten by 1900. As well as the still largely current interventionist view that, for example, Beethoven’s horn parts were constrained by his restriction to the harmonic series and could be rewritten more effectively for valved instruments, many of the revisions and rescorings of conductors (Mahler and Weingartner are notable at this time),66 were an attempt to offset problems of balance, especially the relative power of wind and brass, because the primary aim was always effective performance. Wagner 66 See Weingartner’s comments on Wagner and the challenge of balances in the modern orchestra in F. Weingartner, Die Symphonie nach Beethoven, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898, trans. J. Crosland as On the Performance of Beethoven’s Symphonies, London, 1908, ‘Introduction’, pp. i–x. Evidence of a similar tension in an earlier generation appears in comparing the attitudes of Michael Costa and August Manns in connection with the Handel Festivals: see M. Musgrave, ‘Changing values in nineteenth-century performance’, in C. Bashford and L. Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture 1785–1914. Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 169–91.
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had faced this very issue in the theatre with the relation of vocal parts to the orchestra, but had been able radically to surmount them by designing his own theatre to compensate. But this was not possible in normal circumstances (and in large choral performances these issues were never seemingly addressed). Halls were designed for largely social reasons, and excellent acoustics were still essentially a matter of luck.67 Though instrumental music pointed to the future for audiences as well as composers, in 1900 performance as a choir member would still have been the central or most common musical experience of the bulk of musical people. But this implied constraints and encouraged different qualities. Many choristers had limited reading abilities relative to instrumentalists, who read staff notation (the sol fa movement, basic to the spread of large-scale performance of choral music, was aimed at fixing intervals in largely diatonic repertoire by ear, not sight, and the performance emphasis thus placed strongly on tone production and expression). This was part of a vocally based culture, one that was intimately associated with personal artistry. Many sources indicate that the standards of polish and expressive communication to be found in the highest choral performances were the best anywhere. Bernard Shaw, a keen observer of all kinds of music, found the standards in brass-band festival pieces as comparable and superior to many professional orchestras for the same reasons of personal commitment – and clearly of social and religious stimulus.68 But the social context and limited repertoires of choral societies made them vulnerable to coming social change. Instrumentally based concert music offered diversity, of genres and repertoire, of an appeal to the growing musically educated class and generation, with more emphasis on personal choice. Growing musical literacy also contributed to a shift of emphasis whereby a predominantly aural performance-based culture was beginning to yield to one increasingly controlled by the details of the printed score, central to instrumental performance, and thus to later concerns: for the authority of the 67 The ‘shoebox’ model has, however, long been thought to guarantee the best focus and resonance, given appropriate resonating spaces: the ‘Golden’ concert hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, built by Theophil Hansen in 1870 (Musikverein), is generally regarded as a prime example in sound as well as appearance. 68 The Tonic Sol-fa method was based in England on the ‘movable doh’ principle, rather than the more complex fixed doh that required inflections of the vowels with chromatic change. It was developed in England by John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister, who founded the Tonic Sol-fa Association in 1853. On the growth of the Sol-fa movement in England, see B. Rainbow, The Land without Music. Musical Education in England 1800–1860 and its Continental Antecedents, London, Novello, 1967; and on musical education In Britain more broadly, see E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music, Studies in Social History, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Shaw is quoted in Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace, p. 263 n. 79. See further Chapter 6 on the quality of the Leeds Choir under Coward: evidence of Coward’s methods is shown in H. Coward, Choral Technique and Interpretation, London, Novello, n.d.
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score itself – not only its accuracy to its sources, but what it actually means in relation to performance conventions and individual performing instincts – was to become an increasing preoccupation in the twentieth century; in the early twenty-first century, these issues seem as controversial and challenging as ever. 69
69 See further Chapter 6; a broad perspective on these issues, especially regarding choral societies and performance is given in L. Botstein, ‘Listening through reading: musical literacy and the concert audience’, 19th-Century Music, 16/2 (1992–3), 129–45.
. 25 .
Vocal performance in the nineteenth century WILL CRUTCHFIELD
The nineteenth century, which produced the majority of the music that is still sung in concert halls and opera houses today, also saw changes in the art of singing more rapid and more radical than seem to have occurred in any previous century – to be surpassed in extent only by those of the twentieth. At its beginning, the great majority of professional public singers (outside churches at any rate) were still native Italians, expounding a tradition whose predominance all Europe had embraced for centuries; operas were still tailored to the immediate members of their casts and mostly forgotten (or re-tailored) soon after; the solo singer in many genres was still a kind of co-composer, responsible through ornamentation for much of the surface detail of his music. By its end, Germany, France and Russia had operatic repertoires of interest beyond their own borders; a vast new repertoire of piano-accompanied song had arisen (and commanded the attention of leading composers) outside Italy; contemporary opera had banished improvisation and embraced modern symphonic procedures; and – though Italians could still lay some claim to preeminence – the vocal profession had become thoroughly cosmopolitan. In 1800 Haydn was still active, Mozart was a living memory to thousands, and the odd virtuosi we call castrati were still performing and teaching. In 1900 Verdi had retired, Mahler was running the Vienna State Opera, Pelléas and Jenufa were just around the corner, and Feodor Chaliapin had already started to give new meanings to the idea of the ‘singing actor’. Along the way, there were broad changes in what it meant – professionally, culturally, musically – to be a singer, and countless narrow changes in the style and technique of singing. Any attempt to understand what vocal performance was like during these transformations, though, must begin where they end, because of the other factor that sets the nineteenth apart from all earlier centuries: we can hear with our own ears how people sang at its close. Serious study of early recorded sound has grown by leaps and bounds in the last twenty-five years, yet most observers probably still underestimate the extent to which nineteenth-century vocalism is documented. The earliest surviving recordings of professional singers date from 1889–90 and
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include one cylinder by an artist (the Danish bass Peter Schram) born as early as 1819, singing fragments of a role (Mozart’s Leporello) that he had been performing since 1841. Throughout the 1890s, recordings were made mostly for private use, and few survive, though some of those that do are highly informative. Around the turn of the century this changed dramatically as techniques for mass reproduction were developed and a vast market for sales began to be cultivated. In the early twentieth century, recordings – sometimes extensive – were made by at least seven singers born in the 1830s, twenty-two born in the 1840s, and well over two hundred born in the 1850s and 1860s.1 These range from forgotten journeymen to international stars, and include collaborators of Verdi, Wagner, Gounod, Brahms, Grieg, SaintSaëns, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák and Massenet, among many other composers. The primitive conditions under which these recordings were made are familiar to everyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the field, and the constraints these impose on our interpretation of what we hear have been discussed by many writers. The principal difficulties can be summarised in a quick list. Time limits (from around two to around five minutes depending on the format used) may have induced distortions of tempo, and certainly induced awkward musical abridgements. Some recordings were accompanied by inexpert studio pianists, and many by crude band arrangements, either of which could compromise the interpretation a singer might have given with an experienced opera orchestra or a trusted keyboard collaborator. The acoustical limitations of the recording process itself, along with caution over the heavy surface-noise that could drown soft sounds and the vulnerable groove-walls that could break in replaying loud ones, sometimes militated against the use of the singer’s full dynamic range (quite apart from failure to reproduce the full range of overtones inherent in the voice itself). The sheer strangeness of the experience – performing for a machine, with the expectation of 1 The list of recorded singers born through 1850 is short enough to be given in full. Those known to me are, in chronological order: Peter Schram (1819–95); Jean-Baptiste Fauré (1830–1914); Charles Santley (1834–1922); Gustav Walter (1834–1910); Harald Edvard Christophersen (1838–1919); Antonio Aramburo (1838–1912); Victor Capoul (1839–1924); Thorvald Lammers (1841–1922); Carl Fredrik Lundqvist (1841– 1920); Alexandra Santagano-Gorchakova (1842–1913); Marianne Brandt (1842–1921); David Ney (1842– 1905); Leon Melchissedec (1843–1925); Adelina Patti (1843–1919); Nina Hagerup Grieg (1845–1934); Edward Lloyd (1845–1927); Niels Juel Simonsen (1846–1908); Emma Albani (1847–1930); Alberto de Bassini (1847–?); Jean Lassalle (1847–1909); Richard Temple (1847–1912); Giuseppe Kaschmann (1847– 1925); Lucien Fugère (1848–1935); Pedro [Pierre] Gailhard (1848–1918); Lilli Lehmann (1848–1929); Victor Maurel (1848–1923); Joseph Mödlinger (1848–1927); Achille Aliberti (1849–1937); Hermann Winkelmann (1849–1912); Jean de Reszke (1850–1925); Georg Henschel (1850–1934); Arvid Ödmann (1850–1914); Francesco Tamagno (1850–1905). All traceable surviving items by all of these singers – 415 sides or cylinders in total – have been consulted in the preparation of the summary that follows, along with far more numerous recordings made by singers born in the next two decades. At the same time I have tried – unsystematically – to filter out any new trends arising among artists born after the late 1860s, such as Caruso, Chaliapin, Tetrazzini and Slezak.
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permanence – was novel in a way that we can no longer easily imagine, and we know from their own accounts that it was disconcerting or inhibiting for some participants. Finally, when we consider the performers whose professional lives reached farthest back into the nineteenth century, there is the added caution that singers vary widely in the ability to realise their musical intentions when age has begun to take a toll on their voices – and this variation may have been more extreme when singers could not, as they now can, monitor their own work by listening to it. However, all these limitations are susceptible to critical analysis, and rational distinctions can be made between what are (or may be) distortions and what are legitimate reflections of the artists’ work. There is no more reason to say ‘primitive recordings are unreliable’ than to say ‘Beethoven’s sketchbooks are illegible’ – it is simply a matter of overcoming the difficulties to derive reliable (or legible) information from them. Bearing the limitations always in mind, we can draw a fair picture of singing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, just as one would be able to give a decent description of late twentieth-century singing based on the work of mid- and late-career artists in the first decade of the twenty-first. The gulf between hearing and reading can scarcely be overemphasised. Any professional baritone who is a good technician and a good mimic, if he listens attentively to a selection of recordings by Mattia Battistini (1856– 1928), will be able to give at least a superficial imitation of the style, perhaps including aspects he could not consciously analyse; no scholar could write a dissertation specific enough to enable such a thing in the absence of direct aural experience. Above all, we bring to any written account our own unconscious assumptions about the sounds being described, and our own set of questions, whereas hearing a recording challenges assumptions, answers questions we had not known to ask, and raises new ones. It seems essential, then, to start our account here, as hypotheses about singing in the first three-quarters of the century will inevitably be strengthened by passing the test of plausible continuity into the known quantities of the fourth quarter. We can give a capsule summary of those known quantities by comparing them to the singing familiar to listeners today, passing over the often considerable contrasts between individuals, and giving only slight attention to those between national schools, in an attempt to define a few basic differences that were general. *
Vibrato. Johan Sundberg’s 1994 survey of research on vibrato in operatic voices posits the range of professionally acceptable vibrato as being between
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5 and 8 undulations per second. All singers heard on early records had vibrato rates near or slightly above the fast end of this range, and all had a pitch oscillation that would today be accounted very narrow. In several Italians and Spaniards, this fast vibrato was very prominent (that is, accompanied by marked oscillation of volume and timbre), which may provoke pejorative descriptions such as ‘bleating’ or ‘fluttering’ from modern listeners (Fernando de Lucia, Gemma Bellincioni and José Mardones are wellknown examples). In northern and eastern European voices, the vibrato tended to be less intense, and in a few cases (such as Nellie Melba or Emma Calvé), a casual hearing today may give the impression of almost no vibrato at all, though close listening (or analysis of wave-forms) confirms that continuous vibrato in the modern sense was always present except on occasional short notes. The intense Latin vibrato just described is practically unknown today, and generally considered a defect when it occasionally appears. Conversely, the slow end of Sundberg’s range – characteristic of many late twentieth-century artists, along with distinctly wider cycles of pitch and volume – is never approached by late nineteenth-century singers, not even those who recorded in extreme old age. Pitch range. Though there were numerous individual exceptions, early singers on the average contented themselves with a shorter working range than is usual today, and in particular, many of them did not develop the facility with high notes that has become professionally obligatory for their modern counterparts. Added high notes that later came to be regarded as ‘traditional’ in the Italian repertoire (in arias such as the Pagliacci prologue, ‘Sempre libera’ from La traviata, Figaro’s cavatina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, the Duke of Mantua’s ‘La donna è mobile’ among many others) were included in only a minority of performances; high notes present in composers’ scores were sometimes edited out at need; and transposition – almost always downward – was much more common than it later became. Some singers commanded exceptional high notes and used them freely, but there was far less uniformity than later became the case, and in all voice categories the average high end of the working range was lower than it is today. (This does not imply a greater extension on the low end; individual singers who found low notes inconvenient also freely adopted alternative readings.) Registration. In female singers on early records, a clearly audible shift between chest voice and head voice was almost universally present – sometimes skilfully blended, sometimes blatantly exposed. The point of transition was almost always in the area of e0 , f 0 and f#0 with most women (nearly all Latin ones) singing f 0 consistently in chest; very few sang e Å 0 or d0 in head
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except in occasional pianissimo passages.2 In male singers the situation was more variable. Many high baritones and most tenors were prepared to shift into head voice at roughly this same pitch juncture for soft notes, but were alternatively able to pass through and above it with chest-dominant sounds in forte. French tenors in particular cultivated head-voice high notes and used them often, up to the D above high C (d00 ) in some cases, and wellprojected piano singing up to the top of the tenor range was a common occurrence in all nationalities. But at the same time, numerous other artists had adopted some version of the chest-dominant techniques that later became prevalent, and had embraced the forte-oriented dynamic range that (in most though not all voices) comes with them. Timbre and vocal types. As a rule, early recorded singers produced their vowels in a way that would be subjectively described today as ‘bright’. This, along with the quick vibrato and perhaps also some aspects of phrasing and dynamics, contributes to a perception of most turn-of-the-century voices as ‘lighter’ or more ‘lyrical’ than their typical counterparts today. This may be deceptive, since we cannot infer the sheer volume of a voice from a primitive recording, but it is probably correct that there has been a shift in the centre of gravity. Francesco Tamagno, the first Otello, has a sunny timbre and a ductility of motion around the top of the staff that might likelier make us think of Rodolfo or the Duke of Mantua; Hermann Winkelmann, the first Parsifal, might be taken for a clarion-voiced Tamino. Both tenors were past fifty, semi-retired, and in occasional vocal difficulties – but when all goes well their tones have a bright freshness we do not associate with the roles they spent most of their time singing. Heard in unfamiliar pieces by a casual modern listener, more than a few baritones could be taken for tenors, basses for baritones, or contraltos for sopranos. To a certain extent this reflects something we can observe in biographies as well: there was less vocal ‘type-casting’ than we are used to today – more apparent readiness to hear one singer in widely divergent roles or one role interpreted by widely divergent voices (almost all the early interpreters of Canio in Pagliacci, for instance, also sang Almaviva in Barbiere or Elvino in Sonnambula, or both; it is difficult to think of even one tenor in the past fifty years who has made such a combination). Legato. Across all repertoires and national schools, the general approach to vocal phrasing in early recorded singers was consistently, often extremely,
2 Registration in singing has a vexed vocabulary, and some pedagogues would dispute the term ‘head voice’ for the notes above this transition. The point here is simply to note the existence, and the consistent pitch-location, of a transition between two qualities of sound whose difference is clearly apparent to the ear.
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more oriented towards legato than later became the norm. This was true in multiple dimensions: the frequency of audible portamento between notes; the full-voiced execution of such portamentos; the avoidance of aspirate sounds between successive notes on a single syllable; and the maintenance of either uniform volume or of steadily graduated crescendos and diminuendos within a phrase (as opposed to frequent small-scale shifts in volume). Perhaps the most striking distinction is the entire absence, in the early recordings, of tones that might subjectively be described as ‘breathy’, ‘unfocused’, or, in the jargon of voice teaching, ‘off the voice’. These sounds occurred neither as intentional expressive choices nor as incidental byproducts of phrasing and dynamics; in present-day practice, they are so ubiquitous in both roles that it might not occur to a singer to wonder whether they had ever been absent in previous eras (or indeed to take conscious note of the fact that they are now in use). Agility and related technical issues. As is well known, composers moved decisively away from virtuosic florid writing around the mid-point of the nineteenth century, and as one might expect, some of the singers we can hear on early records had already abandoned the technical disciplines involved in executing it. No one was yet a ‘revivalist’ in the sense that characterises the specialist pioneers of Baroque and bel canto music in the late twentieth century; at the same time, one can hear that certain basic technical capacities were still being taught more generally than was later the case. So we find an often surprising level of expertise in precisely articulated scales and turns, even among singers whose main preoccupations were Wagner or verismo, and some singers were able to turn to older music at a truly virtuosic level of velocity and distinctness (Santagano-Gorchakova, for instance, achieved complete clarity in a roulade from Ruslan i Ludmila at a speed corresponding to semiquavers at crotchet = 144,3 and there were others able to match or even surpass that mark). One interesting detail that emerges clearly from a broad survey is that training in late nineteenth-century France was more rigorous (more conservative?) than elsewhere in this regard: even their deep basses and heaviest-voiced dramatic tenors tended to define their ‘little notes’ nimbly without loss of resonance or legato, and they seem almost without exception to have been capable of well-defined trills in full voice. The latter skill was less widespread outside France, but still more common (especially among sopranos) than it soon became, and here too there is a detail one might not have expected: singers who lacked an expert trill tended not to sing a half-hearted gesture in its direction, but rather to
3 Gramophone & Typewriter Co. (G&T), 23082.
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replace it frankly with a simple sustained note or a turn. (Similarly, there was a tendency for singers less than expert in coloratura to make frank simplifications of florid lines, and then to sing the simplified versions cleanly, rather than make a blurred attempt at the original.) When we turn from technical and timbral issues to musical ones, the summary account must be even more limited, both because it is impossible to do justice to the differences between individual singers, and because a full account of what they do could only come as part of a more general discussion of period music-making, instrumental as well as vocal. One such shared aspect is the presence of liberal rubato, both in the sense of allowing solo and accompaniment to go out of phase with one another and in the sense of speeding and slowing the overall tempo. Crescendos (and also build-ups of harmonic complexity) were often accompanied by accelerandos; perfect cadences, even after very short spans of music, often called forth a rallentando. Along with these went a readiness to give apparently identical rhythmic figures a great variety of shapes and timings, and a strong tendency to add dotted rhythms (or to sharpen those already present). Some other aspects are at least partly particular to singing. Notes chosen for fermatas were held far longer than is customary today: the idea of musical meaning in a single tone sustained out of tempo clearly held great potency for this generation, most pronouncedly in opera, but also in Lieder. Rubato is sometimes governed by the pitch-shape of a phrase, stretching around its highest notes (and often accelerating just before the stretch). Strikingly different from current interpretations is the assumption that rhythmic values might vary markedly based on the delivery of text – a concept we tend to associate only with recitative, but strongly in evidence in measured music in the early recordings. In Italian and German, with their long stressed syllables, this led pairs of equal notes to migrate towards triplets or dotted rhythms more often than not; in English, conversely, pairs might be converted into ‘Scotch snaps’. In all languages, there was a strong tendency to arrive early at strong beats when these are approached by a short unaccented syllable. Truly precise notation of these modifications would be unbearably fussy, but an approximate transcription of a few examples should be given, because this is the aspect of late nineteenth-century performance practice remotest from our own, and is very little treated in written accounts (presumably because the writers took this sort of rhythmic inflection for granted). One is naturally curious to know how far back in the century, and in what forms, it may have been used (see Exx. 25.1a and b). Exx. 25.1a and b are typical; in French, with its less pronounced metric qualities, the modifications were subtler but nevertheless strongly present, as
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Ex. 25.1a. Schumann, ‘Die beiden Grenadiere’. Top line: transcription from recording by Georg Henschel (Columbia L2302); bottom line: Schumann’s notation
Ex. 25.1b. Handel, Judas Maccabeus, ‘Sound an Alarm’. Top line: transcription from recording by Edward Lloyd (G&T 02123); bottom line: Handel’s notation
for instance when Meyrianne Héglon (1867–1942) recorded in 1903 a song by Saint-Saëns (‘Rêverie’)4 written mostly in equal quavers; scarcely any two successive notes have the same length, nor is what we would call a ‘steady’ tempo maintained for as much as a single phrase. In the Italian repertoire, and in Italianate pieces elsewhere, the tradition of incidental ornamentation still had surprising vigour. Cadences in particular tended to call forth a fluent vocabulary of small-scale decorations, of which the short examples (Exx. 25.2a and b) are typical. Modern singers and coaches may also find it surprising to learn that the variant cadenzas long considered ‘traditional’ in Italian opera were not so at the dawn of recording; rather, each singer tended to have his or her own cadenza for familiar arias, so that, for instance, ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ was recorded with at least 4 G&T 33471.
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Ex. 25.2a Bellini, La sonnambula, ‘Ah, non credea mirarti’. Top line: transcription from recording by Adelina Patti (G&T 03084); bottom line: Bellini’s notation
Ex. 25.2b. Verdi, La traviata, ‘Pura siccome un angelo’. Top line: transcription from recording by Mattia Battistini (1856–1928; Gramophone Co. 054395); bottom line: Verdi’s notation
nine quite distinct endings; since the death of Caruso, tenors have practically without exception imitated the one found on his best-selling Victor record, and the same uniformity gradually took hold elsewhere in the repertoire as well. A famous recording that brings together many of these features is Alfredo’s aria from La traviata as sung in 1906 by Fernando de Lucia (1860–1925),5 the tenor who introduced Pagliacci to the Metropolitan, La Bohème to Covent Garden and Tosca to Rome. Frequent rubato from the third bar onward; rallentandos (and sometimes ornaments) at internal cadences; passionate forward motion at crescendos; rhythms freely adjusted to the tenor’s sense of poetic declamation; high notes alternately in head voice and chest voice; a range of dynamics as wide as the ¸ to Ä specified by Verdi, but often in different places; a variant cadenza never heard since; deeply personal phrasing and expression from the murmured opening to the full-throated conclusion – this disc, unremarkable in its time, is often held up today as an example of the 5 G&T 052129.
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magic singers were once allowed to work, and just as often as an example of the intolerable distortions that were permitted until a Toscanini came along to clean house. The liberties in this and other records like it are so extreme by modern standards that there is an automatic temptation to wonder whether they might not be the ‘bad behaviour’ of self-indulgent singers in an age when singers reigned,doing things that composers and conductors wished they had not. One cannot rule that out entirely; certainly a part of the change in musical style that was soon to occur had to do with the curbing of individual spontaneity in favour of supervised discipline. But as a broad explanation of De Lucia’s rhythmic behaviour this does not hold up to the evidence. It can be tested, for instance, against a live performance of Ernani led at the Metropolitan Opera early in 1903 by Luigi Mancinelli (1848–1921), a conductor whom Verdi had tried to engage for the premiere of Falstaff. Fragments from the Act 3 finale were captured on cylinders by Lionel Mapleson, the Metropolitan’s music librarian, and they offer a kind of ‘reality check’ for the studio recordings of the day.6 Here we have not a self-conscious experiment in a primitive recording laboratory but a live performance in a leading theatre; not a subservient studio pianist but a famous composer and conductor on the podium; not a soloist’s romanza to be accompanied but a massed ensemble to be led – and yet we find exactly the same concepts of the relation between tempo, rhythm and melodic shape that we hear in De Lucia and his peers (Ex. 25.3). It is fascinating to compare the first eight-bar statement of the fragment captured (No. 14, bars 125–32) with the same music as led by Antonino Votto at La Scala in 1969.7 The music is in common time with rolling triplets, three quavers to each beat of the bar. Votto takes a basic tempo of quaver=144 and maintains it nearly unchanged through the whole eight-bar period, broadening slightly at the climax without ever dipping to a metronome value below 136. Mancinelli starts at exactly the same tempo, but makes a rallentando at the end of the third bar, a bigger one with a short fermata at the end of the fourth, a stringendo to about quaver=164 in the fifth (building up to the forte entrance of the chorus and orchestral brass), and then a long gradual rallentando to the end of the passage, with the last bar steady at about quaver=90 until a further rallentando on its last beat. The fifth bar lasts less than half as long as the eighth; in Votto’s performance they are almost identical in length.
6 These privately recorded cylinders have no issue numbers; those discussed here have been issued on CD by, among others, Romophone (81027). The complete surviving Mapleson Cylinders have been issued on vinyl LPs by the New York Public Library, R&H 100. 7 This opening-night broadcast performance has been unofficially released on several CD labels, including MYTO 51304.
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Ex. 25.3. Verdi, Ernani, ‘O sommo Carlo’. Piano-vocal reduction of eight-bar recorded fragment
So it will not do to explain De Lucia, Battistini and the rest as eccentrics; this is how late nineteenth-century Italy thought Verdi’s music went. Frivolous self-indulgence is improbable in many other cases as well: Henschel was primarily a composer and conductor; when Héglon recorded her Saint-Saëns item, her accompanist was the composer himself. The upshot is that late
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nineteenth-century singers were working with assumptions about the basic nature of tempo and rhythm radically removed from those we make today. Lest this account seem a simple paean to the skills of another era, it should be mentioned that some aspects of performance practice that can scarcely have been satisfactory at the time were nevertheless widespread. Along with charismatic rhythmic freedom and creative embroidering of notes came a depressing amount of ordinary inaccuracy. To return to a pair mentioned earlier, Hermann Winkelmann was far from having learned the right notes in Tannhäuser’s ‘Hymn to Venus’, and Tamagno’s many performances of Otello must have been highly dependent on cues from the conductor, to judge by entrances in his piano-accompanied records that would have brought any orchestra to a confused halt. And along with so many singers’ splendid expositions of their native languages came levels of inexpertise that would be unacceptable today when they ventured into others (singers who went through their entire careers introducing English diphthongs into Italian words; German-speakers who imported their ‘schwa’ sounds into languages that do not have them; Italians who pronounced silent consonants in French, and so forth). Moreover, notwithstanding the skills catalogued above, one can come up with a fair sampling of vocal disasters on the early discs as well; it seems that the very existence of recording, by allowing singers to keep track of their own work, has raised the level of consistency in many respects. All these are cautions to anyone still tempted by the naive notion of wanting to perform ‘as it was done in the composer’s time’; the purpose of studying performance’s history, after all, is not to turn back the clock, but simply to see whether we might find something inspiring that could augment our work today, or could expand our understanding of the music we interpret. With this account of the nineteenth century’s directly observable conclusion in mind, we turn to its remote beginnings with a list of questions that can never be fully answered, but on which much light can be shed by the copious evidence that survives in writing and notation. The great flowering of vocal ‘method books’ – comprehensive expositions of pedagogical and performing practice – that had begun midway through the eighteenth century continued and accelerated in the first half of the nineteenth. Detailed books appeared by Italians teaching abroad, by Italians at home, by Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen who had studied in Italy and sought to instruct their countrymen in its ways – and by theorists of the same nationalities who consciously sought independence from Italian hegemony in vocal art. The climax of this process came in the 1840s, with a work so comprehensive that it changed the landscape for all successors, and requires a word to itself in
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any account of the century’s vocal practice. This was Manuel García’s Traité complet de l’art du chant, published in two parts in 1840 and 1847, and extensively republished (sometimes with new material from the author) for the rest of the century. The book attempts to be, in varying degrees, a scientific account of the human phonatory organs and their action; a history of European artistic singing; a practical exercise book for the formation of the operatic voice; a manual of pronunciation, prosody and declamation in Italian and French; and a complete guide to musical interpretation, phrasing, vocal coloration and nuance, and ornamentation. The author’s curiosity ranged wide (from the unfamiliar methods of tone-production in non-Western cultures to the metronomic value of the repercussions in a trill) and his attention to detail was minute (from the positions of tongue, lips and teeth required for each vowel and consonant to the contingencies of ornamentation on each chord in the common harmonic vocabulary). The same analytical bent of mind led him to the invention of the laryngoscope, permitting direct observation of the vocal mechanism in a living subject for the first time in history. García’s achievement remains unique: nothing remotely approaching this comprehensive survey had been attempted before, and even the many detailed books that have appeared subsequently stop well short of its ambitious scope. Not all of García’s surmises about the musical practice of earlier eras have been confirmed by later research, and the scientific aspect of his work has been largely superseded (though its basic insights have proved sound) – but given the state of knowledge as it existed at the time, his contribution is nothing short of awe-inspiring. As an account of musical practice, it is concentrated on Italian and French opera and on the period stretching from the heyday of the author’s father (Manuel García the elder, the most celebrated tenor in Europe before the advent of Rubini) to that of his sisters (Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot). But if that span – roughly the early 1810s to the early 1840s – is narrow, the amount of detail García provides for it so exceeds anything attempted by other observers that the book inevitably remains a point of reference for earlier and later decades as well.8 Most of what is known about the details of nineteenth-century singing comes down to us in terms of the central Italian operatic tradition. That is so not just because it was the most popular genre, but because even in other nations, the basic idea of cultivated singing was understood to be an essentially
8 The publication history of García’s Traité within its author’s lifetime is vast and has not yet been thoroughly documented. The most comprehensive version is that published in 1847, comprising the first edition of Part Two and a second edition of Part One; this has been reproduced in modern facsimile by Éditions Minkoff. Later editions often contain useful supplementary material, and correct some misprints in the copious musical examples, but most of them also have abridgements.
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Italian art. Italians, and foreigners who had studied in Italy and immersed themselves in its style, were in demand throughout Europe and the New World as pedagogues; there was no corresponding diaspora of teachers specialising in French, German, English or other styles. Those other styles were defined in relation to Italian models mainly by subtraction: some elements of Italian style might be deemed less appropriate for other repertoires, but there was no affirmative exposition of other elements lacking in the Italian model. When Mendelssohn’s friend Adolf Bernhard Marx wrote a comprehensive vocal treatise in 1826, the pieces chosen for extended performance analysis ranged widely: an Italian aria (from Tancredi), two pieces from eighteenthcentury opera (from Handel’s Tamerlano and Gluck’s Alceste), a German Lied (by Zumsteeg) and an extended recitative (from Don Giovanni) – but although he gives ornamentation for Rossini and not for the other pieces, the vocal approach expounded in each has reference to the same Italian-based precepts he has laid down in the technical part of the book, even though Marx is typically critical of the latest Italian innovations and clearly interested in fostering artistic independence for German opera. Even the separate vocabulary of French agrémens, maintained through much of the eighteenth century, had largely given way to an international Italian-based system of ornamentation and delivery, and so we are not surprised to find prominent singers like Laure Cinti-Damoreau and Giovanni Mario moving back and forth between the French and Italian theatres of Paris. All this, of course, does not mean differences did not exist; we have seen already in discussion of the early recordings that preferences in vibrato and tone colour were quite diverse among the European nations, and there is no reason to suppose that this was not so in the earlier part of the century as well – but the differences seem to have lain in aspects of vocal sound itself more than in elements of style that can be described or taught.
Ornamentation The easiest aspect of early nineteenth-century singing to document is embellishment, simply because it can be written down, and uncountable thousands of examples of it survive. The assumption that an important part of ‘singing’ involved the addition of detail to written lines remained strong, and not just in Italian or operatic genres. As Walter Dürr and others have shown, Schubert often ornamented his songs, in typical bel canto fashion, when he made new copies of them; this includes such favourites as ‘Die Forelle’ and such sombre subjects as ‘Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt’, both of which we know today in versions considerably more melismatic than what Schubert first wrote
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down.9 His collaborator, Johann Michael Vogl, applied the same approach to still other songs in copies that have survived, and for all we know the composer’s ornamentation in successive versions of his songs may reflect some aspects of the way Vogl had sung them in the meantime. This practice disappeared early from German traditions, however; some early ornamented sources for Der Freischütz and Fidelio exist, but the decorations are few and modest. Just around this time, Italian ornamental traditions experienced a new development that was not imitated internationally, as most previous manifestations of Italian singing had been, but rather vigorously rejected as part of the ongoing emancipation of non-Italian opera from its historic models. The new style involved both a simplification and a complication. Simpler melodic skeletons, over more primitive basses with little or no contrapuntal complication in the accompaniment, were adorned with a greatly increased quantity of vocal notes, often consisting of multiple successive repetitions of the same short ornamental pattern in unvarying rhythmic values. Rossini built much of his vocal writing around this style, and documented it extensively by writing it directly into his scores (Stendhal called this a ‘revolution’ and thought it a grave error; Reicha disapproved in milder terms).10 He was not, however, its originator; many examples of the style are documented in the work of singers who impressed him in his youth (Angelica Catalani) and of established artists who only later became his collaborators (Isabella Colbran, Andrea Nozzari, Manuel García the elder). Very little resembling the following examples is to be found in the history of eighteenth-century ornamentation, but their similarity to countless passages in Rossini is obvious at a glance (Exx. 25.4a and b). A sideline on this new mode of embellishment is that at least three of its most prominent protagonists – García, the tenor John Braham and (slightly later) the soprano Giuditta Pasta – were Sephardic Jews; some (Colbran and again García) came from Spain, where Sephardic influences were strong. Did the repetitive melismas of the new style owe something to those traditions? Some observers at the time seem to have thought so, not necessarily in a favourable way. Richard Mackenzie Bacon, reviewing in 1827 an aria composed for Pasta, drew attention to what he called a ‘Braham Cadence’ (see Ex. 25.5). He further called it ‘execrable thread-bare trash’ and reproached the composer (Pacini) for letting his name be associated with it: ‘We should as readily ask a gentleman of fashion to appear in Bond-street with the five-times cast off wearing apparel of a Jew salesman as think of inducing any composer so to expose his utter 9 W. Dürr, ‘Schubert and Johann Michael Vogl: a reappraisal’, 19th-Century Music, 3/2 (1979), 126–40. 10 Stendhal (Henri Beyle): Vie de Rossini, Paris, Boulland, 1823, ch. 14 passim. A. Reicha, Traité de mélodie, Paris, chez l’auteur, 1814, p. 60.
Ex. 25.4a and 4b. Catalani in Portogallo, Nozzari in Cimarosa (a) Portugal (Portogallo), La morte di Mitridate, ‘Teneri e cari affetti’. Top line: embellishments of Angelica Catalani; bottom line: Portugal’s notation. (b) Cimarosa: Penelope: ‘Ah, serena il mesto ciglio’. Top line: embellishments of Andrea Nozzari (as transcribed by Anton Reicha); bottom line: Cimarosa’s notation.* (a)
(b)
* Reicha (Traité de mélodie, pp. 56–7) describes in detail the process by which he transcribed the three ornamented airs he presents, but does not name the singer – who was one of the most significant artists of his day. However, a pupil of Reicha, Henri Gilles, emigrated to Baltimore and published there a little-known book in which he reproduces a portion of the same ornaments, ascribing them explicitly to Nozzari. See H. N. Gilles, The Complete Vocal Instructor, Baltimore, MD, Willig, n.d. [c. 1814], p. 56.
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Ex. 25.5. Pacini, Niobe, Didone, ‘Il soave e bel contento’. Vocal roulade as cited by Bacon
Ex. 25.6. Mercadante, Andronico, ‘Soave immagine’. Top line: ornaments by Giambattista Velluti; second line: ornaments by Domenico Crivelli; bottom line: Mercadante’s notation
want of taste.’ Pace Bacon, the taste was pleasing not just to Pacini but to Rossini and all his leading interpreters, who used this pattern and others like it constantly.11 Another novel aspect here is the frequency with which these repeated patterns begin on an appoggiatura. Appoggiaturas had been around from time immemorial, but fast virtuosic passages had usually placed consonant notes on the strong beats, where the new style welcomed dissonances. Alongside these new repetitive figures, meanwhile, the long established vocabulary of turns, passing-notes and the like continued to be used in cantabile music, and here too we encounter a growing quantity of appoggiaturas, and their application to ever-smaller subdivisions of the beat (Ex. 25.6). An excerpt from the 1825 Méthode of Alexis de Garaudé shows how this predilection for dissonances – especially chromatic and unprepared ones – was being applied by performers in a manner that suggests Bellini or Chopin to the modern ear, well before either composer was known to the wider world (Ex. 25.7).
11 R. Bacon, ‘Italian songs’ (unsigned review), Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 36 (1827), 542–3. The aria, extremely popular, was published in connection with various operas by Pacini, sometimes with slight differences of detail. It is most often associated with his Niobe, but the publication reviewed by Bacon ascribes it to Didone.
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Ex. 25.7. De Garaudé, Méthode de chant, simple phrase and (selected) possible variations
Ex. 25.8. Appoggiatura-based ornamental patterns in Bellini, Norma, and Verdi, Nabucco
Though reaction eventually set in against the extreme floridity of the Rossini generation’s style, certain aspects of it had embedded themselves in compositional thought, not just Chopin’s and Bellini’s but also Verdi’s and even Wagner’s – above all, the multiple repetition of simple appoggiatura-based patterns (Ex. 25.8). One result was that the appoggiatura, having been absorbed into the underlying musical texture, soon disappeared as a performer’s ornament. At around the same time, Bellini, Verdi and Wagner began to write directly into their scores the declamatory appoggiaturas that had been left to performers in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Omission of the latter in modern performances often creates the erroneous impression that this kind of melodic thinking sprang up overnight in the era of Bellini; in fact it had been developing for generations, as we know from multiple eighteenth-century sources, but was rarely written down because of continuo-era rules about keeping scores dissonance-free on strong beats.
Cadenzas An important feature of the soloist’s craft, the final cadenza, changed its complexion and details at around the beginning of the century. Throughout the Baroque and Classical eras, the cadenza had been sung after a pause on the
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Ex. 25.9. Zingarelli, Giulietta e Romeo, ‘Sommo ciel’. Top line: cadenza added to MS copy in I:Rsc; bottom line: Zingarelli’s notation as shown in the main text of the copy.
six-four chord, and had described a complete harmonic progression including a move to the subdominant, concluding with a trill on the supertonic resolving to the final keynote. Domenico Corri’s last instructional anthology, published in 1810, still taught this type of cadenza, as did J. F. Schubert’s Neue SingeSchule in 1804, though composers rarely offered occasion for it by that time, and a different style had already taken hold in practice. The new final cadenza was sung mostly – and after the 1830s exclusively – during a pause after the dominant seventh chord (in other words, at the point where the cadential trill would formerly have finished the cadenza). An aria from Zingarelli’s 1796 Giulietta e Romeo shows how this transition took place: the score still presupposes a cadential trill over the dominant chord, but sometime early in the new century an interpreter entered a cadenza on a manuscript copy showing a bit of new activity after the trill (Ex. 25.9). Once the centre of interest had shifted, the supertonic trill was set aside, and the main matter of the cadenza was an elaboration of the dominant seventh chord. The variety of the old multi-harmony cadenza, however, was recaptured by the addition of multiple chromatic notes (often approached by surprising disjunct intervals), by the emphasis on appoggiaturas, and by the novel device of borrowing notes from the minor mode to give expressive coloration to major-mode cadences (Ex. 25.10a,b,c). Later still, as syllabic declamation continued to supplant florid vocalism, a further type of cadenza came into use – still based on the dominant seventh chord, but replacing melisma with bits of text repeated from the aria’s final verse. Donizetti occasionally, and Verdi more often, composed this type of cadenza directly into their scores; where they did not, performers from the 1850s onwards sometimes interpolated them (Ex. 25.11).
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Ex. 25.10. Nineteenth-century final cadenzas (a) Rossini, La donna del lago, ‘Elena, o tu che chiamo’. Cadenza notated by Adelaide Kemble during her studies with Giuditta Pasta (private collection) (b) Unknown aria: cadenza attributed to Giovanni Battista Rubini (in Duprez, L’art du chant, Paris, Brandus, 1849) (c) Bellini, I puritani, ‘Qui la voce sua soave’, cadenza by Jenny Lind (in O. Goldschmidt et al., Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt, London, Murray, 1891) (a)
(b)
(c)
Ex. 25.11. Verdi, Ernani, ‘Infelice, e tu credevi’. Top line: syllabic cadenza (in Sieber 1858); bottom line: Verdi’s melismatic cadenza
Explicit final cadenzas like these disappear from opera after the 1860s, but the impulse to embellish cadential phrases in general remained strong throughout the century, especially in Italy, as we have already seen in observing early recordings.
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Voice categories, role distribution, adaptation At the century’s beginning, voices were still mostly described in terms of the four classical types: soprano, alto, tenor and bass. By its end, the mezzosoprano and baritone were firmly established as intermediate categories, and there was already a tendency – though not nearly as strong as it became over the course of the twentieth century – for singers to specialise in sub-categories within what were now six main groups. This diversification, however, has to be understood in the context of compositional changes at least as much as vocal developments. In fact there were already many singers habitually using the ranges that came to be called ‘baritone’ and ‘mezzo-soprano’, but there was no need to define them in an era when operas were routinely both composed and adapted for specific individual voices. In effect each singer was his or her own ‘type’, and transposition was a constant. The well-known case of Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia gives an example: in the original score the part has a low-ish contralto tessitura; for many years it was sung most often by high sopranos who transposed the entrance aria from E to F and altered many details elsewhere; much has been made in recent decades of restoring it to lower voices. But what is less commonly realised is that the very second person to sing the role (Joséphine Fodor-Mainvielle, for whom Rossini added a new aria in Act 2) was already a high soprano who transposed the entrance aria not to F but to G.12 This was typical, especially for leading female singers. The contralto and soprano ranges, as treated operatically, do not lie all that far apart in pitch; given a fairly wide-ranging voice of either type, a few transpositions and alterations can erase the difference altogether. So we find singers like Malibran, Pisaroni, Viardot and Alboni – most often described as contraltos or mezzo-sopranos – appearing as Lucia, Sonnambula, and all sorts of other ‘soprano’ roles, while apparently high sopranos like Pasta and Sontag took over not just Rosina but also the hero’s part in Tancredi and the heroines of L’italiana and La Cenerentola. Transposition remained so common at the end of the century that the Royal Italian Opera in the 1870s printed up gummed labels, specifying the transposition of a whole or half tone upward or downward, with a blank for the date to be filled in; these were then affixed to orchestral parts, which the players were expected to transpose at sight. Even when transposition was not involved, local details were so freely rewritten to suit individual ranges that it is impossible to infer a singer’s
12 A version of the aria in that key, with ornaments attributed to Manvielle-Fodor, was published in Paris by Carli around 1820.
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Ex. 25.12. Bellini, Norma, three fragments from the role of Pollione as altered by Giovanni Mario
range from a list of roles; one would have to see the artist’s personal version of the role. Several such versions survive. Bellini wrote the role of Pollione in Norma for Domenico Donzelli, a rather baritonal tenor who had made his name mostly in the parts Rossini composed for Andrea Nozzari (see below); Donizetti wrote the role of Ernesto in Don Pasquale for Giovanni Mario, a much higher tenor who had made his name mostly in the parts Bellini composed for Giovanni Battista Rubini. What happened when Mario was called upon to sing Pollione? From his vocal score, preserved at the Santa Cecilia library, we can see precisely: he simply replaced Bellini’s formulas with other, equally idiomatic ones throughout, creating a vocal line with the same tessitura as Ernesto’s (Ex. 25.12). It is easy to see both how all this worked for as long as it did and why it had to change. When closed numbers were connected by freely modulating continuo recitative; when the accompaniment of the voice was largely confided to string instruments, mostly playing variants of a few familiar patterns; when both bravura passages and melodic cadences conformed to a small group of formulae – then it was easy both to transpose pieces and to alter their range without
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doing violence to the music. Singers and composers alike did so constantly. As the musical fabric of operas became more continuous, and composers brought more individuality to the transitional and connective passages, transposition became more difficult. As orchestration came to include more direct interaction with the vocal line in the form of doublings and harmonisations, and as more instruments were involved, local modification of the voice part became more inconvenient. One has only to compare the blunt schoolroom modulations used by Luigi Arditi and Pauline Viardot to lower the part of Lady Macbeth with the inspired transitions Verdi composed when he decided on transpositions in Traviata, Ballo, Forza and Otello to see why this aspect of performance practice had to give way.13 The upshot was that opera – very gradually, with a much longer maintenance of adaptive options than is generally recognised – reached the point at which many roles required a voice of a certain range and certain capacities within that range. Against this background, we can draw a closer focus on a few areas in which there was not only greater definition but also an actual change in range, technique, or role-assignment. The voices that changed least over the course of the nineteenth century were the soprano and the bass. The former continued almost inevitably to play the heroine; the latter added to his usual repertoire of kings, priests, old men and trusty servants the colourful option of playing demons and devils once the role of Bertram in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable had popularised the type. What happened to the voices in between was more complex. At the beginning of the century, principal parts for contralto were almost exclusively in imitation of the fast-vanishing castrato, whose long reign as primo uomo had made it seem musically right in opera seria for the hero and lover of the soprano to sing in a register almost as high and brilliant as her own. Sometimes these singers were referred to by the castrato’s old name of ‘musico’. (Contraltos could also appear as – and outside opera seria were mostly limited to – old maids, mothers, servants and the like. Rossini famously cast the contralto as a spirited young heroine in his three most popular comedies, but this was not typical practice as far as we know.) Tenors, meanwhile, usually played an antagonist figure: a love-rival to the primo uomo, a tyrannical parent, an enemy general, or something of the kind. Once it became clear that the castrato’s departure was permanent, things gradually sorted themselves out in a way that remains familiar. It was natural enough that the tenor should take on the lover/hero role, which he already 13 Viardot’s adaptations are documented in L. Arditi, My Reminiscences, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1896; also in a score owned by Andrew Porter and described by him in D. Rosen and A. Porter, Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook, New York, Norton, 1984.
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played in opera buffa and in the French and German traditions where the castrato had never figured. It took a little longer for the modern baritone to emerge in the tenor’s former ‘antagonist’ position – which he eventually filled in all but two of Verdi’s operas and in countless others – and for the mezzo-soprano to become identified with a similar position among female characters. Works with two important female parts were likeliest to have a pair of sopranos early in the century (Norma and Adalgisa, Leonore and Marzelline, Agathe and Aennchen, Maria Stuarda and Elisabetta); only later, when the traditions of the travesti heroes had faded for a few generations, did it become normal to oppose distinctly higher and lower female voices in the fashion of Aida and Amneris, Micaela and Carmen, Gioconda and Laura – which was how the mezzo-soprano emerged as a distinct category. (A final category that persisted was an alternative type of travesti role: the pageboy or beardless youth played by a woman, usually a soprano in France and a contralto in Italy; Verdi’s use of a soprano for Oscar in Un ballo in maschera was one of many gestures to Parisian tradition in that opera.) The emergence of the modern baritone cannot be understood without a clear picture of what ‘tenors’ were doing early in the century. In Rossini’s serious Italian operas, when there is a contralto as primo uomo, the tenor retains his antagonistic role – but when there is not, as in several of the works composed for Naples, the composer turned to a format featuring two contrasted tenors (some operas, depending on the exigencies of the story, have both the contralto hero and the pair of tenors). The lower of the tenor roles in the Neapolitan series was always played by Andrea Nozzari (1775–1832), and his part typically descended to A or AÅ , far below the customary range of tenor soloists today, though common enough in the eighteenth century. The relation of this type of ‘tenor’ to the emergence of the ‘Verdi baritone’ was clearer to observers at the time than it has been since. Rossini’s Neapolitan operas, not surprisingly, lack any clearly defined baritone parts, but one of the bass-clef roles in the semi-seria La gazza ladra (La Scala, 1818) is written high enough to seem a ‘baritone’ part in today’s terms – and when Rossini brought that opera to Naples, he assigned this part to Nozzari (writing a new aria, in bass clef but with a two-octave range from A to a0 , a typical span for much of Nozzari’s ‘tenor’ music). As the modern baritone gradually established his place, the conservative pedagogue Francesco Lamperti wrote in the 1860s of ‘the tenori serii of the past, who now sing the baritone’, counting this as an aspect of Italian singing’s degeneracy.14 For a longish while, these categories were in 14 F. Lamperti, Guida teorico-pratica-elementare per lo studio del canto, Milan, Ricordi, 1864.
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flux: Bellini recast the baritone role in I puritani for tenor when he prepared a version for Naples, and as late as the mid-1840s two Italian tenors (Italo Gardoni and Luigi Cozzani) took turns singing Verdi’s ‘baritone’ roles opposite one another in Attila and Ernani. A key factor in this transition was the decline in favour of the extremely high head-voice notes still popular for tenors up to about the 1840s. The top F (f 00 ) written for Rubini in I puritani is famous; the same note appears in other music composed for him, and there are various reports of both Rubini and Giovanni Mario singing the gÅ 00 above it (Mario did so in cadenzas in Verdi’s I due Foscari). Rossini’s ‘heavy’ tenors sang high head notes too, Nozzari included. But as the declamatory style of mature Donizetti and young Verdi pushed these gradually out of fashion, the men who could rise convincingly to a0 , bÅ 0 and above in chest voice emerged as ‘tenors’, and those who stopped a little lower as ‘baritones’. That is not to say, though, that the baritone has no bass ancestry: there was also a long history of bass-clef parts rising to the eventual tessitura of the Verdi baritone – as there also was of ‘soprano’ parts having what we would today call a ‘mezzo-soprano’ range. Again, the key element is that as operas became less adaptable and singers had to specialise, it became possible to identify the ‘medium-range’ voices of both sexes by the roles they sang. Notwithstanding these fluctuations, the role of voice-type in operatic dramaturgy remained extremely strong throughout the century. Wagner, who set aside practically every other element of operatic tradition, still always made his young lovers sopranos and tenors and his kings and priests basses, just as Massenet or Tchaikovsky did. It took an unusual story (often one in which a character who might have been an ‘antagonist’ took centre stage), to bring any departure from tradition. Thus in Halévy’s La juive, the father, who might normally have been a bass, is a tenor (in a cast that has ‘typical’ tenor and bass parts elsewhere), and the main love interests in Der fliegende Holländer or Eugene Onegin can involve baritones (again with a ‘typical’ tenor in the background).
Other aspects of vocal production and style Overarching all the changes in singing style over the course of the nineteenth century is the simple demand for greater volume. Powerful voices had always been sought-after and admired, but the sheer practical requirement for them rose steadily and dramatically. This change is often colloquially associated with the building of ever-larger public theatres, and that may indeed have been a contributing factor, but others are probably more decisive: the introduction of massed choral scenes (including choruses that continue to sing during soloists’ lines), the increasing emphasis on large ensemble numbers, and the growth – in
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numbers and activity – of the orchestra. (One should remember, after all, that the San Carlo in Naples was already vast in the eighteenth century, and that the new demand for volume was felt equally in tiny provincial German theatres, as it still is today.) One comparison puts it in a nutshell: when two tenor heroes, Tamino and Tristan, anticipate reunion with their beloveds, both rise to a climactic top a0 over a dominant ninth chord – but Tamino (at ‘Vielleicht, vielleicht’) is accompanied only by orchestral strings playing a single bow stroke each, while Tristan (at ‘Isolde naht!’) shares the moment with all the orchestra’s woodwinds and brass, plus timpani, while the strings (‘as many as possible’, the composer specifies) play vigorously in their most powerful registers. Wagner was not alone here; there are similarly orchestrated passages in Verdi and even Rossini. Like all new trends in singing in all eras, this was opposed by conservatives, who predicted the ruin of good voices. There was sometimes truth in the predictions. An extreme case was that of Adolphe Nourrit, the leading tenor of the Paris Opéra from 1826 to 1837, whose head-voice top notes came under challenge when his eventual successor, Gilbert-Louis Duprez, startled audiences by taking chest-dominant sounds higher and higher, as some of his Italian contemporaries had been doing. Nourrit went to Italy, studied the new style with Donizetti himself, found that in mastering chest notes he had lost his head tones, and threw himself from a hotel roof in despair.15 But as with all other innovations, the new demand for power was absorbed by succeeding generations and singers arose who could take it in their stride and exploit the new possibilities with ease. At the same time, florid singing – and the textual repetition associated with it – ran afoul of a growing desire that the text of an opera should resemble that of a spoken drama, a natural consequence of composers’ growing ability to mirror moment-to-moment emotional shifts musically, rather than dwelling on a single affect for the space of a structured bit of composition. Here Verdi and Wagner are equally emblematic: the early operas of both require virtuosity, and though Verdi continued to call on it longer than Wagner did, by the end of their long careers both were writing operas in which it played practically no role. This had a far-reaching result. No musical instrument developed a solo repertoire eschewing velocity and agility, but the human voice did so. Lipservice at each stage was given to the idea that a fully formed singer should master Classical techniques alongside new ones, and that even Wotan and Otello could benefit from practising their scales: this was true beyond doubt, yet it was equally beyond doubt that many singers would lose the old 15 See L. Quicherat, Adolphe Nourrit, sa vie, son talent, son caractère, sa correspondance, Paris, Hachette, 1867.
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disciplines and find themselves in a position of incompetence when occasionally confronted with music requiring them. Most of this development was played out in the twentieth century – Wagner and the Italian giovane scuola were still too new at the end of the nineteenth for vocal pedagogy to envision singers who learned to do nothing else. But as noted above, we can already hear its beginnings in a few of the singers active when recording began, along with the emergence of singers who essentially performed all their music in forte – a development Wagner and Verdi never envisioned, but which their scores did much to set in motion. The surprising aspects of those early sound recordings, meanwhile, will be in our minds as we turn to some of the further questions they suggest. What about vibrato? Portamento? The extremes of rubato? We can hear how each of these has changed from 1900 to the present, and so the automatic question is whether they were changing in the same direction beforehand, or in some other way, or changing at all. Vibrato is the most difficult dimension to investigate, for reasons that performance practice researchers have long recognised. When a theorist from pre-recorded times writes of the presence and absence of vibrato, we do not know whether we – if we could hear the same sounds and measure them scientifically – might not say that the comparison is rather between a greater and lesser vibrato. This must have been the case at least some of the time; otherwise vibrato would have had to be ‘introduced’, and lost again, in successive generations, since observers can be found many decades apart suggesting that it was a novelty. One thing we can definitely say, however, is that several musicians in the first half of the nineteenth century considered the use of vibrato (or of more prominent vibrato?) to be an expressive choice under the singer’s control. Cinti-Damoreau, in her instructional treatise, produced musical illustrations with symbols to indicate the notes that ought to be vibrated, and several composers (including Meyerbeer, Halévy and Donizetti) specified ‘vibrée’, ‘vibrato’ or ‘canto vibrato’ over certain passages; this self-evidently implies the volitional application of something that would not have been employed everywhere. We cannot definitely say how that ‘something’ or its absence sounded, but it does seem to represent practice that had been lost, or nearly lost, by the time recordings allow us to hear directly. We can also trace an impression that the use (or prominence?) of vibrato increased over the course of the century, and that Italian artists led the way. Henry Chorley, recalling Rubini’s style years after his retirement, recounted how ‘his voice had contracted that sort of thrilling or trembling habit, then new here, which of late has been abused ad nauseam’. (He also observed that Rubini’s
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fanatical admirers were ‘ready to swear that his voice did not vibrate’ – underlining the problem of perception that confounds all attempts to define the history of vibrato.)16 Much later, in 1883, Alberto Bach praised Adelina Patti for her ‘refusal to sing tremolos’ despite the growing vogue for them, and in the following decade George Bernard Shaw paid Fernando de Lucia the back-handed compliment of saying that his tone ‘does not tremble beyond endurance’.17 Chorley lived to hear Patti and did not accuse her of having a ‘thrilling or trembling habit’ – but did he think she used more vibrato than Pasta? Would he have thought that De Lucia’s vibrato sounded like Rubini’s, or exceeded it, or was a different kind of ‘trembling’ altogether? We can only guess at answers. We can be at least a little more specific about rubato, thanks especially to García’s inclination to go into details. Some of his examples are as surprising as the freest of the primitive records. One treats a Rossini cabaletta that we are used to hearing in the sparklingly rhythmic performances of Marilyn Horne and her successors in the ‘bel canto revival’. García – who had been hearing it since it was new, and from artists who sang it in productions prepared by Rossini – prints it as shown in Ex. 25.13, with non-arithmetical notation to show notes lengthened out of tempo (he also presents it in the transposition that was used in Paris, where several sopranos borrowed it for use as an entrance aria in Otello). Many other examples – García’s and others’ – suggest that the unequal pairs, the anticipations and delays, and much else that we hear in the late nineteenthcentury singers had a long history behind them. One of the most startling practices, the frequent rallentandos or even fermatas at cadences even when the music seems on the page to presuppose continuous motion, can be confirmed through the extremely numerous fermatas at just such points marked in conducting scores throughout the century (for instance, one used for La donna del lago at the Theâtre des Italiens during Rossini’s directorship in the 1820s, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and another used for Il trovatore at the Royal Opera in the 1860s and 1870s, preserved at the British Library). Meanwhile, something like the early attack on strong beats observed above in the recordings of Henschel and Lloyd seems to be described by the great baritone and pedagogue Jean-Baptiste Fauré (1830–1914), who stresses the utility of ‘anticipations’ (‘to take from one beat a bit of its value in order to restore it on the following beat’), which ‘give the rhythm a greater liberty of allure, and give singing . . . the character of improvisation’. (He adds that these
16 H. F. Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2 vols., London, Hurst & Blackett, 1862, vol. 1, p. 21. 17 A. Bach [Albert Berhnard], On Musical Education and Vocal Culture, Edinburgh and London, Blackwood, 1883, p. 122. G. B. Shaw, Music in London 1890–1894, 3 vols., London, Constable, 1932, vol. 2, p. 104.
Ex. 25.13. García the younger’s interpretation of an aria from Rossini, La donna del lago (facsimile from his Treatise)
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could technically be written by the composer as a form of syncopation, but that this ‘would give the letter and not the spirit’.)18 The use of portamento is easy to confirm as well. The term itself did not originally have the meaning we now ascribe to it – it referred much more generally to ‘carriage’ or ‘bearing’ of the voice (‘portamento’ and ‘comportamento’ still have those meanings, as descriptions of personal conduct, in modern Italian). But the glissando-like effect that we mean when we use the term today was clearly a prominent part of this ‘bearing’, and writers around the beginning of the nineteenth century take the trouble to describe it in unmistakable terms. Sometime before 1808 Bonifazio Asioli (1769–1832) wrote of ‘carrying’ the voice through disjunct intervals ‘with such an inflection that it will pass by way of an indefinite number of sounds of which one cannot specify the pitch’, and J. F. Schubert observed in 1804 that ‘it cannot be done on the keyboard at all; on the violin, it happens when the player connects two different tones with one finger’, adding, like almost every writer, that it is beautiful when sung well and in the right place, and objectionable otherwise.19 Various writers use terms for what they considered the wrong way to do it, most frequently traîner, strisciare and strascinare. The implication usually seems to be that a heavy portamento, or one in which the voice takes on a crying or overly emotional tone, was being described – but on the other hand the same three verbs also turn up as composer’s instructions (in Meyerbeer, Rossini, Verdi and others). García is probably on target when he distinguishes between a ‘full’ portamento and a ‘soft’ or ‘sweet’ one, without saying that either is wrong, but showing how each might be appropriate to different sorts of expression.20 Notated examples, meanwhile, help to clarify what musicians at the time considered ‘the right places’. Corri provides many, from his first anthologies around 1780 to his last in 1810, which shows the beginning of one of Haydn’s English canzonets (he had been a partner in the firm that first published these) (Ex. 25.14). In several of these early accounts, there is a sense that portamento needs explaining to non-Italian students, but in none of them is there a sense that it is anything new. When we read Gerald Moore’s careful injunction that the same Haydn song illustrated by Corri must be kept ‘unsullied by any portamenti or slurs’, it is impossible to escape the realisation that the avoidance of portamento in ‘pre-Romantic’ music is a twentieth-century invention.21 18 J.-B. Fauré, Aux jeunes chanteurs: notes et conseils, Paris, Heugel, 1898, p. 27. 19 Asioli, quoted in W. A. Wordsworth, A Treatise on Singing, London, Balls, 1837, p. 22. J. F. Schubert, Neue Singe-Schule oder gründliche und vollständige Anweisung zur Singkunst, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1804, pp. 56–7. 20 M. García, Jr, Traité complet de l’art du chant en deux parties, Paris, author, 1847, facsimile edn, Geneva, Minkoff, 1985, pt. II, pp. 27–8. 21 G. Moore, Singer and Accompanist: The Performance of Fifty Songs, London, Methuen, 1953, p. 106.
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Ex. 25.14. Haydn: ‘She never told her love’ (Hob. XXVIa:34). Top line: performance indications in Corri 1810. Bottom line: Haydn’s notation
García, in an extremely useful and well-explained passage, puts this practice in the broader context of legato and articulation.22 He starts by saying that when two or more notes are sung on the same syllable, there are five ways the singer can make one note follow another: ‘On les porte; on les lie; on les marque; on les pique; on les aspire (manière exceptionnelle)’ (‘One carries them, one binds them, one marks them, one pricks them, one aspirates them [exceptional manner]’). By ‘pricked’ notes, he explains, he means the short staccato notes such as those sung by Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and he limits their use to soprano voices. The ‘exceptional manner’ of allowing aspirate sounds between notes is to be used exclusively when the singer imitates laughter; pains are to be taken that marcato notes – though each is to be emphasised with an impulse ‘from the stomach’ – must not be aurally separated from one another by aspiration or any other interruption. The remaining categories form the basis of cantabile: sons liés (legato notes), and sons portés (notes joined by portamento, to which García gives the modern meaning of passing through intervening pitches). He provides graphic illustrations of these, showing that his concept of legato admits of no momentary change in volume or resonance at the point where one note joins another, and explains that if the student has difficulty in achieving this connection, recourse must be had to the portamento in order to correct the fault. This last observation is particularly important, because in notes sung legato but without audible portamento, there exists in fact a portamento too rapid for the ear to perceive as such; given the nature of the vocal apparatus, there is no way to pass from one note to another without either doing this or interrupting the phonation in some way so as to restart it on the new pitch. What about singing outside the opera house? As far as we can tell, it followed the same models; indeed, it occasionally used the same music, as numerous
22 García, Traité complet de l’art du chant, pt. I, ch. 9, passim.
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visitors to Italy noted with chagrin when they heard the latest hits of Donizetti and Verdi fitted to Latin texts at Sunday Mass. The repertoire of pianoaccompanied song was addressed to a population that is scarcely occupied with it today, that of amateur music-makers at home. The gradual adoption of Lieder into public concert performance began mostly with relatively largescale songs, often orchestrated (Nourrit introduced Schubert’s songs into French concert life that way); the specialised Liederabend became a regular event only late in the nineteenth century, and even then almost exclusively in German-speaking countries. One of its earliest practitioners, though, left traces of his work: this was Gustav Walter, born in 1834, who continued to give recitals for at least ten years after his 1887 retirement from the operatic stage. His accompanist was often Brahms, many of whose Lieder he premiered, and when he made his few recordings in 1905, he chose two songs that had featured on their duo recitals (Schubert’s ‘Am Meer’ and Brahms’s own ‘Feldeinsamkeit’).23 What is their style? Almost anyone today would start with the term ‘operatic’. Extremely generous portamento, overtly emotional expression, broad rubato, even the trademark breaks in the voice that are colloquially called ‘sobs’. Along with these: astonishingly well-preserved steadiness of tone, and a deep and evident love of the music.
23 G&T 042097 and G&T 3–4 2155.
. 26 .
Instrumental performance in the nineteenth century I A N PACE
1815–1848 Beethoven, Schubert and musical performance in Vienna from the Congress until 1830 As a major centre with a long tradition of performance, Vienna richly reflects the varied locations and types of performance in the early century. Following the Congress of Vienna, which had consolidated the position of Austria and especially Vienna within the German Confederation, there was a shift away from aristocratic patronage of music towards professionalisation, with work for musicians in theatres, churches or military bands.1 At the same time emerged the concept of a ‘Viennese School’ of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.2 Concerts took place in the Burgtheater, Kärntnertortheater and Theater an der Wien, as well as the larger Grosse Redoutensaal or Winterreitschule at the Hofburg Palace, the latter of which could seat at least 1,500 people, maybe as many as 3,000.3 Music was dominated by opera, especially the work of Rossini, but there were also major series pioneering instrumental music, organised mostly by members of the aristocracy in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (hereafter the GdM), established in 1812,4 the Gesellschaft des Privat-Musik-Vereins, founded in 1818, and the Concerts Spirituels einer Gesellschaft von Musikfreunden, established in 1819.5 Audiences for these concerts constituted a genuine mixture of the
1 A. M. Hanson, Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 7–23, 110. 2 See D. W. Jones, The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 191, 209. 3 S. Weinzierl, Beethovens Konzerträume. Raumakustik und symphonische Aufführungspraxis an der Schwelle zum modernen Konzertwesen, Frankfurt, Bochinsky, 2002, pp. 65–80, 100–1, 135–75, 198–9, including full figures from 1828 for seating capacities; O. Biba, ‘Concert life in Beethoven’s Vienna’, in R. Winter and B. Carr (eds.), Beethoven, Performers, and Critics, Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press, 1979, p. 86. 4 On the GdM, see R. von Perger and R. Hirschfeld (eds.), Geschichte der K. K. Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Wien, 2 vols., Vienna, Holzhausen, 1912; E. Hanslick, Geschichte der Concertwesens Wien, 2 vols., Vienna, Graumüller, 1869–70, vol. 1, pp. 139–69. 5 O. Biba, ‘Schubert’s position in Viennese musical life’, 19th-Century Music, 3/2 (1979), 107; M. Handlos, ‘Die Wiener Concerts Spirituels (1819–1848)’, in E. T. Hilscher (ed.), Musik in Österreich: Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Mitteleuropas; Theophil Antonicek zum 60. Geburtstag, Tutzing, Schneider, 1998, pp. 283–319.
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upper and middle classes.6 There were also some more commercially oriented concerts, often featuring young virtuosi and private events in aristocratic salons.7 At the Congress itself, various of Beethoven’s works, including Wellingtons Sieg Op. 91, Der glorreiche Augenblick and the Seventh Symphony, were played as part of the festivities (Beethoven also gave his own last performance as a pianist during this time); his fame and wealth grew to an unprecedented level.8 Beethoven’s musical acquiescence with the intense militarism of his time9 is relevant for consideration not only of his works and their performance, but also for the developments ushered in, which would have profound implications throughout the nineteenth century. These included an expansion of instrumental resources, a new degree of compositional control expressed through ever more specific notation, and to some extent a more intensely mechanistic approach to tempo and rhythm through the use of the metronome. Contrary to some assumptions, the orchestras employed by Beethoven during this late period of his life were often relatively large for their time – a string section of 18–18–14–12–7 and two contrabassoons for the Eighth Symphony,10 24 violins, 10 violas and 12 cellos and basses together with doubled winds for the premiere of the Ninth. The orchestra of the GdM had a huge string section of 20–20–12–10–8, which apparently always remained the same, with winds doubled according to the requirements of the piece.11 Anton Schindler, however, suggested that Beethoven’s ideal was an orchestra of sixty players, the size employed for the Concerts Spirituels (after hearing the Seventh Symphony played with 120, Beethoven apparently denied he wrote ‘noisy music’).12 Beethoven’s students Carl Czerny and Ferdinand Ries, as well as others, attested to the importance he placed upon fidelity to the score and his 6 Biba, ‘Concert life in Beethoven’s Vienna’, 87; P. A. Bloom, ‘The public for orchestral music in the nineteenth century’, in J. Peyser (ed.), The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, New York, Billboard, 2000, p. 265. 7 Hanson, Biedermeier, pp. 92–102. 8 D. W. Jones, The Life of Beethoven, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 118–24; L. Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life, New York, Norton, 2003, pp. 192–3. 9 On this subject and also the growth of military bands during the Austrian Empire of this time, see B. Cooper, Beethoven, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 255; Hanson, Biedermeier, pp. 142–9; W. Kinderman, Beethoven, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 167–88; M. Solomon, Beethoven, London, Granada, 1980, pp. 296–322; H. G. Helms, ‘Ökonomische Bedingungen der musikalischen Produktion’, in H. G. Helms, H.-K. Metzger and R. Rhien (eds.), Musik zwischen Geschäft und Unwahrheit, Musik-Konzepte 111, Munich, Edition Text + Kritik, 2001, pp. 30–2. 10 M. Solomon, ‘Beethoven’s Tagebuch’, entry 18, in Solomon, Beethoven Essays, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 252–3; Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, rev. and ed. E. Forbes, 2 vols., Princeton University Press, 1967 (hereafter Thayer/Forbes I/II), vol. 1, pp. 575–6. 11 Biba, ‘Concert life in Beethoven’s Vienna’, 90. On Beethoven’s view of the relationship between the size of the space and the ideal number of instruments, see Jones, The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, p. 179. 12 A. Schindler, The Life of Beethoven, ed. and trans. I. Moscheles, Boston, Ditson, 1841, pp. 143–4.
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intentions;13 his letters attest to how much care he took over detailed markings in the scores.14 This was facilitated by the first appearance of Mälzel’s metronome at the end of the Congress in 1815. Beethoven added metronome marks for all his first eight symphonies (though there is no extant autograph for these),15 the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, the first eleven string quartets, and various other works,16 and signed a public declaration attesting to the value of the device,17 which he continued to use and favour despite occasional alleged outbursts against it.18 At the same time, however, a digest of varying accounts by Czerny, Schindler and Ries,19 as well as of Beethoven’s conducting,20 all demonstrate that Beethoven also desired and employed a fair degree of tempo flexibility. Beethoven urged the use of legato fingering over and above the ‘pearly’ (or ‘choppy’ (gehackte) ) effect favoured by Mozart and other earlier composers,21 though his careful notation of a plethora of articulations, right up to his final works, suggest a more varied approach is necessary than for the ‘London School’ of Cramer, Clementi and Dussek. Whilst Beethoven was given a London Broadwood piano some time in early 1818 and had earlier owned an Érard, all evidence points to his having favoured Viennese instruments, especially those of Streicher, throughout his life22 (almost all of his late piano works are unplayable on the smaller range of the Broadwood23); the coruscating trills and passage-work in the later sonatas have a much greater clarity on these instruments. 13 See Thayer/Forbes I, pp. 640–1; O. G. Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries, New York, Dover, 1967, p. 33; Remembering Beethoven: The Biographical Notes of Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, trans. F. Noonan, London, Deutsch, 1988, pp. 77–8, 94. 14 I draw here and elsewhere upon a variety of Beethoven’s letters from the last decade and a half of his life, too numerous to detail individually, as collected in S. Brandenburg (ed.), Ludwig van Beethoven: Briefwechsel Gesamtasugabe, 7 vols., Munich, Henle, 1996–8. 15 For a facsimile of the published version, see W. Malloch, ‘Carl Czerny’s metronome marks for Haydn and Mozart symphonies’, Early Music, 16/1 (1988), 75. 16 A full list can be found in G. Nottebohm, Beethoveniana, Leipzig, Peters, 1872, pp. 131–3. 17 See The Letters of Beethoven, ed. E. Anderson, 3 vols., London, Macmillan, 1961, vol. 3, pp. 1441–2. 18 See further I. Pace, Instrumental Performance from the Congress of Vienna to the Berlin Philharmonic (forthcoming). 19 The most insightful treatment of this issue of which I know is to be found in G. Barth, The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1992; see also S. P. Rosenblum, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music: Their Principles and Applications, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, pp. 387–90. 20 Louis Spohr’s Autobiography, trans. anon., 2 vols., New York, Da Capo, 1969, vol. 1, p. 186; Sonneck, Beethoven, pp. 39–42; Thayer/Forbes I, p. 570. 21 C. Czerny, ‘Recollections of my life’, Musical Quarterly, 42/3 (1956), 307; Schindler, Beethoven (1841), p. 156; C. Potter, ‘Recollections of Beethoven, with remarks on his style’, Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, 10/226 (1861), 152. I believe that Beethoven’s comments on the gehackte style apply to articulation rather than accentuation. 22 See W. Newman, Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing his Piano Music his Way, New York, Norton, 1988, pp. 45–67. 23 As pointed out in E. M. Good, Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand, 2nd edn, Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 109, 113–14.
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Ex. 26.1. Beethoven, String Quartet in B flat Op. 130, opening of fourth movement
Whilst I am not aware of any explicit comments by Beethoven on the execution of his plentiful short slurs (though evidence is available from contemporary treatises24), his need to notate explicitly slurs cut short (e.g. Ex. 26.1) suggests that this was not the default practice he envisaged.25 Franz Schubert’s profile in the Vienna of this time was larger than often imagined, though based primarily upon his Lieder, part songs, dances and short piano pieces.26 None of his symphonies was performed publicly in his lifetime, though Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 did receive private salon performances (apparently of a reasonably high standard), organised by Otto Hatwig, with an orchestra with string section 7–6–3–3–2 and doubled winds.27 The Ninth, however, Schubert donated to the GdM and was rehearsed by them in his presence;28 he may have envisaged the mighty sound of their large forces when writing passages as in Ex. 26.2. Source data relating directly to Schubert performance in the composer’s lifetime is relatively scarce; much has thus been made of wider contemporary 24 Various different views are given in the treatises of Türk, Joseph and Carl Czerny. See also Barth, The Pianist as Orator, pp. 103–5. 25 This question is evaded by both Rosenblum, Newman (Beethoven on Beethoven, pp. 121–62), and to some extent by Barth. 26 See C. H. Gibbs, ‘ “Poor Schubert”: images and legends of the composer’, in C. H. Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 36–55; Biba, ‘Schubert’s position in Viennese musical life’, pp. 106–7. 27 Biba, ‘Schubert’s position in Viennese musical life’, pp. 107–9; E. N. McKay, Franz Schubert: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 92, 116–17. 28 According to the memoirs of Leopold Sonnleithner, in O. Deutsch (ed.), Schubert: Memories by his Friends, trans. R. Ley and J. Nowell, New York, Macmillan, 1958, p. 431; Biba, ‘Schubert’s position in Viennese musical life’, pp. 107–8.
Instrumental performance in the nineteenth century
Ex. 26.2. Schubert, Symphony No. 9 in C D944, finale
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treatises.29 Albert Stadler attested to his clarity and expressivity, beauty of touch and quiet hand and fingers, whilst Schubert himself wrote to his parents about how much he disliked ‘this damnable chopping that even quite advanced pianists indulge in’, preferring the vocal style at the keyboard for which he himself had been praised after a performance of the variations from the Sonata in A minor D845.30 He expressed a clear preference in late 1823 for Viennese instruments, though he never owned one of the more recent models.31 He also left thirty metronome markings for his works,32 from which David Montgomery has made a strong case for the application of a very wide range of tempos to his music.33 Leopold von Sonnleithner emphasised how Schubert kept strict and even time in Lied rehearsal, except where indicated otherwise, and disallowed violent expression.34 Many of his scores employ accents on weak beats, which suggest deviations from strong and weak stress patterns,35 and make much more sense within a general context of stress on strong beats (e.g. in Ex. 26.3).
The age of virtuosity The early nineteenth century had witnessed the domination of the French school of violin playing, centred around the figures of Pierre Baillot, Pierre Rode and Rodolphe Kreutzer, involving brilliant and varied bow strokes, a strong tone and a high degree of expression,36 as well as a distinct German school headed by Louis Spohr, for whom imitation of the voice was a recurrent concern.37
29 For the most comprehensive studies of Schubert, see D. Montgomery, ‘Franz Schubert’s music in performance: a brief history of people, events, and issues’, in Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, pp. 270–83, and his more extended treatment of performance practice in Franz Schubert’s Music in Performance: Compositional Ideals, Notational Intent, Historical Realities, Pedagogical Foundations, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press, 2003. 30 O. Deutsch (ed.), Franz Schubert’s Letters and Other Writings, trans. V. Saville, London, Faber & Gwyer, 1928, pp. 97–8. 31 Montgomery, Schubert’s Music in Performance, p. 6; McKay, Schubert, pp. 184–5, 213. 32 See Montgomery, Schubert’s Music in Performance, pp. 220–6; two earlier studies, A. P. Brown, ‘Performance tradition, steady and proportional tempos, and the first movements of Schubert’s Symphonies’, Journal of Musicology, 5/2 (1987), 296–307, and C. Brown, ‘Schubert’s tempo conventions’, in B. Newbould (ed.), Schubert Studies, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998, pp. 1–15, rely heavily upon markings which Montgomery argues to be of spurious authenticity. 33 See Montgomery, Schubert’s Music in Performance, pp. 254–67 for the full table. 34 Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs, p. 116. 35 Montgomery, Schubert’s Music in Performance, p. 139. Examples cited by Montgomery include the last movement of D894, bars 143–7, and the first movement of the A minor Quartet D804, bars 44–9. 36 The details of this school of playing are amply described, with reference to contemporary treatises, in R. Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge University Press, 1985. 37 D. Milsom, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance: An Examination of Style in Performance, 1850–1900, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p. 18.
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Ex. 26.3a. Schubert, String Quartet in G, D887, first movement
Ex. 26.3b. Schubert, Impromptu D899, No. 2.*
*On the way in which Schubert’s use of accented weak beats constitute an integral part of the style hongroise (a factor neglected by Montgomery) see J. Bellman, The Style Hongroise in the Music of Western Europe, Boston, MA, Northeastern University Press, 1993, pp. 149–73, 191–2.
New developments in the instrument included the invention of the chin rest by Spohr in c. 1820, and occasional use of metal strings or coverings (though gut remained the norm).38 However, violin playing, and attitudes to soloistic virtuosity in general, were revolutionised by Genoa-born violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who created a Europe-wide sensation after playing 38 Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance, pp. 27–30, 46.
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outside Italy from 1828 onwards.39 Audiences were delirious by the spectacle of his playing, many believing him to be literally possessed by the devil, a belief fed by his eccentric and eerie stage manner. He captivated musicians such as Robert and Clara Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz40 and above all Liszt (see below). Paganini’s playing was theorised in an early treatise by Carl Guhr,41 who listed his primary innovations as scordatura (used to facilitate various pieces, such as his Violin Concerto no. 1 in E flat major42 (Ex. 26.4)), bowing, left-hand pizzicato, harmonics, performing on the G-string alone (he also often played on just two strings),43 fingering and ‘extraordinary tours de force’. Paganini’s bowing involved strong contrasts between long sustained tones, especially in his soft singing melodies, and many different varieties of springing. His distinct staccato was a result of firm pressure upon the bow and the use of the thumb and forefinger of the right hand to accentuate each note, whilst he Ex. 26.4a Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in E flat major, opening
Ex. 26.4b Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in E flat major, opening, as played
39 See J. Sugden, Niccolo Paganini; Supreme Violinist or Devil’s Fiddler?, Tunbridge Wells, Midas Books, 1980, pp. 77–101, and A. Kendall, Paganini: A Biography, London, Chappell, 1982, pp. 57–83 for more details of Paganini’s 1828 Viennese debut, subsequent tours and critical response. 40 See J. Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 94; M. Steegmann, Clara Schumann, London, Haus, 2004, pp. 9–10; G. I. C. de Courcy, Paganini the Genoese, 2 vols., Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1957, vol. 1, pp. 330–4; H. Goldberg, Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 278–81; The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. and ed. D. Cairns, London, Sphere, 1990, p. 173. 41 C. Guhr, Ueber Paganini’s Kunst die Violine zu spielen, ein Anhang zu jeder bis jetzt erschienenen Violinschule, Mainz, Schott, 1829. Some of the most important material in this is included in Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance. 42 Guhr, Paganini, pp. 2–5. 43 Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance, pp. 101–2; Kendall, Paganini, pp. 25–7.
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Ex. 26.5. Portamento as suggested in treatises of Habeneck and de Bériot
demonstrated a new mobility through his fingering.44 He used many brilliant glissandi as well as portamento effects between double stops. Guhr also used Paganini’s playing as an opportunity to systematise a series of harmonics, which he felt were otherwise neglected. Many other violinists were influenced by Paganini, including the Moravian Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1814–65), the Norwegian Ole Bull (1810–80), and the Belgians Charles Auguste de Bériot (1802–70) and Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–81); Ernst was thought by many to be the only one to match Paganini’s technique.45 The most influential other violinist of the period, however, was François Habeneck (1781–1849), whose Méthode théorique et pratique de violon was published around 1840.46 Habeneck paid considerable attention to the subject of bow speed and pressure and set down various rules of phrasing, matching dynamics with contour, ‘spinning out’ long notes, and emphasising dissonant pitches. De Bériot was also important in the development of a Franco-Belgian violin school; he stressed an expression based upon whole phrases47 and argued that ‘the performer will not be perfect until he can reproduce the accents of song’.48 Both Habeneck and de Bériot were clearer than their predecessors on the desirability of portamento if used tastefully (Ex. 26.5).49 Piano playing prior to 1830 had been dominated by Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837), Irishman John Field (1782–1837), Frédéric Kalkbrenner (1785–1849) and Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870), whose styles 44 Stowell, ‘Technique and performing practice’, in R. Stowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Violin, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 122–42, at p. 124; see also Sugden, Paganini, pp. 149–50. 45 B. Schwarz, Great Masters of the Violin: From Corelli and Vivaldi to Stern, Zukerman and Perlman, London, Hale, 1983, pp. 193–4. See R. Schumann, ‘H. W. Ernst’ (1840), in Gesammelte Schriften, 4 vols., Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914, vol. 1 (hereafter simply GS 1, likewise GS 2), pp. 466–8. 46 F. Habeneck, Méthode théorique et pratique de violon, précédée des principes de musique et quelques notes en facsimile de l’écriture de Viotti, Paris, Canaux, 1845. Much of this can be found in Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance. 47 On de Bériot’s model of phrasing, see Milsom, Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance, pp. 38–44. 48 Ibid., p. 32. 49 These examples are taken from Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance, p. 101, and Stowell, ‘Technique and performing practice’, p. 127.
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can be roughly characterised in order as (a) clarity and elegance involving high fingers; (b) singing of the melody, a ‘floating’ approach to passage-work and minimal finger action; (c) clean, even, brilliant playing known as the jeu perlé and (d) strength, agility and accuracy, as well as an interest in earlier repertoire.50 But as for the violin, pianism was transformed above all by one individual, Franz Liszt (1811–86), whose virtuoso style is generally believed to have been inspired primarily by the experience of hearing Paganini in Paris in 183251 (though it has also been suggested by his student Moriz Rosenthal that envy of Chopin was the galvanising factor).52 He certainly developed numerous pianistic techniques in imitation of Paganini’s playing, including wild leaps (Ex. 26.6), spiccato-like effects, tremolos, harmonics and glissandi (achieved through rapid chromatic scales, sometimes in double-notes).53 After hearing the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in 1830, Liszt was also moved to develop an ‘orchestral’ style at the piano, evident in his 1833 transcription of this work and much later music. This style was the antithesis of that of Frédéric Chopin, whose Parisian debut in 1832 was also heard by Liszt. The two were not close, with Chopin disliking both Liszt’s theatricality and the use of effects in his compositions.54 Numerous accounts of Chopin’s playing55 describe his ‘delicacy’ and ‘elegance’,56 though also it was suggested that he could not produce a great deal of power from his instrument;57 he told students to ‘Caress the key, never bash it!’.58 He preferred the lighter-toned 50 R. W. Gerig, Famous Pianists and their Technique, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1976, pp. 72–80, 133–7; P. Piggott, The Life and Music of John Field, 1782–1837: Creator of the Nocturne, London, Faber, 1973, pp. 102–9; Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé being an Autobiography (1819–1860) with Correspondence and Diaries, London, Smith, Elder & Co, 1896 (hereafter Hallé, Autobiography), pp. 213–14; J. Warrack (ed.), Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music, trans. M. Cooper, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 181–2, 191; J. Roche and H. Roche, ‘Ignaz Moscheles’, at Grove Online (accessed 13 March 2009). 51 See A. Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847, rev. edn, London, Faber, 1987 (hereafter simply The Virtuoso Years), pp. 174–5. 52 See M. Mitchell and A. Evans (eds.), Moriz Rosenthal in Word and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006, pp. 3–4. 53 See also D. Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 36–43, for more on this piece and related aspects of Liszt’s playing during this period. 54 See Walker, The Virtuoso Years, pp. 184–6 for more on the relationship between Chopin and Liszt. 55 Much the most important work on Chopin’s pianism is J.-J. Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by his Pupils, trans. N. Shohet, with K. Osostowicz and R. Howat, ed. R. Howat, Cambridge University Press, 1986 (hereafter simply Chopin), which draws upon a wide range of accounts. All evidence concerning Chopin’s playing comes from this source unless otherwise stated. 56 B. É. Sydow (ed.), Correspondance de Frédéric Chopin, vol. 1: L’Aube 1816–1831, in collaboration with S. and D. Chainaye, Saint-Herblain, Éditions Richard Masse, 1981 (hereafter Chopin, Correspondance I; similarly for II: L’Ascension 1831–1840 and III: La Gloire 1840–1849 (all 1981) ), p. 109. 57 See F.-J. Fétis, ‘The concert of Monsieur Chopin from Warsaw’, trans. P. Bloom (from Revue Musicale, 3 March 1832, pp. 38–9), in L. Treitler (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, New York, Norton, 1998 (hereafter Strunk), p. 1124. 58 As related by Mathias, in Eigeldinger, Chopin, p. 31. See also Z. Skowron, ‘Creating a legend or reporting the facts? Chopin as a performer in the biographical accounts of F. Liszt, M. A. Szulc, and F. Niecks’, in A. Szklener (ed.), Chopin in Performance: History, Theory, Practice, Warsaw, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopin, 2004, p. 14.
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Ex. 26.6. Liszt, Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur la Clochette de Paganini
pianos of Pleyel (and Broadwood in England) to Érards,59 though he also made some positive remarks about Grafs that he played in Vienna.60 Chopin believed pianists should have a quiet but flexible demeanour, with elbows close to the body and a curved hand, which could be turned to aid the thumb. He emphasised the individual sound of each finger, opposing strategies to ‘equalise’ them in the manner of Liszt. Otherwise his musical style can be summarised in terms of (a) long phrasing and the stressing of long, high, dissonant or syncopated notes (see Ex. 26.7 for an example of this as written out by Kleczyn ´ski); (b) musical declamation learned by listening to the best 59 For more on Pleyel pianos, see Good, Giraffes, pp. 191–4 and J.-J. Eigeldinger, ‘Chopin et la manufacture Pleyel’, in Eigeldinger (ed.), Frédéric Chopin: Interprétations, Geneva, Librairie Droz S. A., 2005, 89– 106, at pp. 95–7. On the differences in span between Érards and Pleyels, see R. Winter, ‘Orthodoxies, paradoxes, and contradictions: performance practices in nineteenth-century piano music’, in R. L. Todd (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, New York, Schirmer, 1990, p. 28. Érard pianos were associated with Liszt, and Pleyels with Kalkbrenner, Chopin and Ferdinand Hiller. 60 Chopin, Correspondance I, pp. 100–8, 120.
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Ex. 26.7. Chopin, Waltz in A flat Op. 69 No. 1, execution as described by Kleczyn ´ ski†. †
Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, ed. R. Howat, Cambridge University Press,
1986, p. 43.
Italian singers,61 (c) a legato and cantabile approach with unbroken lines, (d) tasteful but flexible rubato, which applies only to the melody, the accompaniment remaining steady, (e) ornamentation as if improvised, without slackening of tempo, (f) the widest range of subtle dynamic gradations, (g) the use of both pedals for colour and harmonic effects, though sparingly, (h) a study of the formal properties of works, and (i) simplicity, naturalness and spontaneity. His tempo rubato was much commented upon; Meyerbeer, upon hearing Chopin play the Mazurka in C Op. 33 No. 3, insisted that the music was in 2/4 rather than 3/4. His pedal markings are extremely distinct (and belie some of the other evidence), with long pedals crossing harmonic changes and the use of the pedal to imply particular phrasing or rhythmic accents; there is also considerable reason to believe that he would have used the pedal more selectively than is common nowadays. Perhaps the most serious rival to Liszt, however, was Sigismond Thalberg (1812–71). Able to move effortlessly in aristocratic company after having been brought up in such an environment, Thalberg had success in the late 1820s, and launched a major career after his 1836 Paris debut received unanimous praise.62 His playing was characterised by many at the time above all in terms of its 61 See Skowron, ‘Creating a legend or reporting the facts?’, p. 15. 62 Much of my material on Thalberg is drawn from I. G. Hominick, ‘Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871), ‘forgotten piano virtuoso: his career and musical contributions’, DMA thesis, Ohio State University (1991). See pp. 3–20 for an overview of Thalberg’s career.
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vocality, entailing a clear marcato emphasis upon the melody most of the time as well as the use of the pedals, as well as a still posture,63 in distinction to the playing of Liszt, frequently praised for its dramatic virtuosity and frenetic bodily motion, but much less for his ‘tone’.64 The introduction to Thalberg’s L’art du chant appliqué au piano, op. 70,65 suggests the most important attributes of his playing were (a) fingers close to the keys to produce a full sonority, (b) separation of the melody clearly from the accompaniment (and learning from singers) in terms of both dynamics and rhythmic displacement, and the use of close arpeggios for melodies in the upper notes of chords, (c) holding notes for maximum legato, (d) much variety of dynamics, colour and sonority and (e) using pedal (either one or both) at all times. Taken as a whole, these attributes constitute what might today be called a ‘beautiful tone’ approach to the instrument.66 Thalberg’s playing and music (mostly transcriptions and fantasies on popular operas of the time) have been argued to have had a particular appeal to a certain section of the aristocracy socially defined at the time as ‘dilettante’, drawn to Italian opera and disdainful of more ‘learned’ forms of listening, expressing through their enthusiasm for this music an affinity with the political order of the Restoration and the venues with which it was associated.67 He garnered firm support amongst a Paris high aristocracy still relatively inaccessible to Liszt, whose social networks were limited to more specific subsections of this class, dominated by women and literati.68 The rivalry this engendered led to a notorious ‘duel’ organised by the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio in March 1837 at her salon69 (with the princess giving an ambiguous verdict), and soon afterwards a commission for six leading Parisian pianists – Liszt, Thalberg, Johann Peter Pixis, Henri Herz, Chopin and Czerny70 – each to write a variation on a theme from Bellini’s I puritani to be presented in a combined performance
63 See Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 24–7, 48; K. Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 18. 64 Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 27–8, 42–52; also J. Huneker, Franz Liszt, New York, Scribner, 1911, pp. 285–7. 65 S. Thalberg, L’art du chant appliqué au piano, Op. 70, four series, Paris, Heugel, 1853–68. A summary of various of Thalberg’s main points can be found in Hamilton, After the Golden Age, pp. 158–61. Whilst these publications date from some time after the period in question, I have not encountered any evidence of a significant change in Thalberg’s style between the 1830s and the 1850s. 66 For one perspective upon this, see C. Rosen, Piano Notes: The Hidden World of the Pianist, London, Allen Lane, 2003, pp. 23–30. 67 Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 29–35. 68 Ibid. pp. 62–70. 69 Walker, The Virtuoso Years, pp. 237–40; Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 21, 73–6. For Liszt’s rantings on Thalberg, see many letters from Liszt to d’Agoult from 1836 and 1837 in D. Ollivier (ed.), Correspondance de Liszt et de la Comtesse d’Agoult, 1833–1840, Paris, Grasset, 1933, and Hominick, ‘Sigismond Thalberg’, pp. 66–7. 70 See K. Lutchmayer, ‘The Hexameron: wishful thinking, stylistic rivalry and Lisztian conquest in 1830s Paris’, Liszt Society Journal, 31 (2006), 3–33.
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(Liszt ended up also writing an introduction, version of the theme and finale, and performing the work – the Hexameron variations – alone).71 Liszt’s letters from later that year suggest his weariness for the rat race and disdain for mass audiences;72 earlier he had sounded a note of scepticism about those of his own liberties which dazzled such company.73 However, after a triumphant series of performances in April and May 1838, Liszt began a major period of touring, spanning ten years, during which time he travelled to almost every corner of Europe, playing well over a thousand concerts.74 Despite some noticing changes in Liszt’s playing during these years,75 there is no doubt that he favoured a much freer and more creative approach to musical interpretation around this time not only than many modern pianists, but also numerous of his contemporaries. Although there were some sceptical responses, especially in parts of northern Germany (in particular Leipzig, breeding a lifelong resentment of the city on Liszt’s part),76 his success was immense amongst audiences, not least in Berlin, where some critics worried about the generation of what was seen as irrational hysteria through his playing, especially on the part of his female admirers.77 During this time he brought in numerous innovations which have gone on to shape the modern concert, playing a repertoire from Bach to the present, placing the piano at right angles to the platform,78 and consolidating the practice of the solo recital with no other instrumentalists involved (though it took some time for this to become the norm).79 His repertoire was nonetheless overwhelmingly concentrated upon his own transcriptions of fashionable music of the time (especially from opera), in the manner of Roma musicians who would travel from city to city, acquainting themselves with the local music of each place, and perform and embellish it in their own manner.80 The period saw the emergence of his
71 Ollivier, Correspondance, pp. 135–6. 72 F. Liszt, An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique 1835–1841, trans. and annotated C. Suttoni, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 30. 73 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 74 Walker, The Virtuoso Years, pp. 285–95, 445–7, for a full list of all the places where Liszt played during this period, and a catalogue of all the work he played in public 1838–48. For the concerts which launched this period in his career, see C. Gibbs ‘ “Just two words. Enormous success”: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna concerts’, in C. Gibbs and D. Gooley (eds.), Franz Liszt and his World, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 167–230. 75 See H. Heine, ‘Musical Season in Paris’, supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg), 29 April 1841, trans. S. Gillespie, repr. in Gibbs and Gooley (eds.), Franz Liszt and his World, p. 449, and C. V. Stanford, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, London, Arnold, 1914, p. 59. 76 See M. Saffle, Liszt in Germany, 1840–1845: A Study in Sources, Documents and the History of Reception, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon Press, 1994, pp. 91–184; Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 158–63. 77 On this subject, see in particular Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 203–15. 78 Walker, The Virtuoso Years, pp. 285–6. 79 Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 83 n. 7; Hamilton, After the Golden Age, pp. 33–71. 80 See B. Sárosi, Folk Music: Hungarian Musical Idiom, trans. M. Steiner, Budapest, Corvina, 1986, pp. 145– 6, 150; I. Pace, ‘Conventions, genres, practices in the performance of Liszt’s piano music, part 2: Liszt and the style hongrois’, Liszt Society Journal, 32 (2007), 68–9.
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‘Hungarian’ style and works, drawing upon popular Hungarian melodies as played by Roma musicians, for which various sources imply his desires for the stressing of dissonant pitches, impulsive performance of extravagant harmonic shifts, a clear hierarchy between melody and accompaniment and free but stylised rhythm.81 The other most important pianist who came to prominence in this era (other than Clara Wieck/Schumann, who will be discussed below) was Adolph von Henselt (1814–89). His own particular singing style, legato touch, richness of sound even in quiet dynamics, free rubato (including tempo shifts, unlike Chopin’s) and in particular performance of arpeggios (he had huge hands) won much praise.82 Like Field before him, Henselt settled in Russia in 1838, where he was appointed to numerous teaching positions that provided him with significant influence of the development of piano playing in the country, especially in terms of training governesses and female teachers,83 despite having practically given up performing at the age of thirty-three, probably due to stage fright.84 As noted in Chapter 24, there were many important developments in the piano during the first half of the nineteenth century. Primary among these were Érard’s patenting of the new double escapement action in 1821, which enabled a key to be restruck without having to be fully released, greatly facilitating in particular the playing of repeated notes on English instruments (though Viennese manufacturers maintained their own distinct action), and also permitting the use of heavier hammers and a larger dip on the keys.85 In 1843, Jonas Chickering of Boston patented a full cast-iron frame, a decisive move in shifting the centre of more radical developments from Europe to the United States.86 Steel piano wire began to replace wrought iron from the 1840s; steel-wound strings had been in use by Érard since 1830.87 Érard reduced their range from CC–c00000 to CC–f0000 in 1834, though Graf extended
81 See Pace, ‘Liszt and the style hongroise’, for an extensive consideration of the subject. For other important perspectives, see S. Gut, ‘Nationalism and supranationalism in Liszt’, Liszt Society Journal, 19 (1994), 28–35, and especially K. Hamburger, ‘Franz Liszt und die “Zigeunermusik” ’, in G. J. Winkler (ed.), Musik der Roma in Burgenland, Eisenstadt, Wissenschaftliche arbeiten aus dem Burgenland, 2003, pp. 83–101. 82 See for example Robert Schumann to Clara, 5 January 1838, in The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, ed. E. Weissweiler, trans. H. Fritsch, R. L. Crawford, 3 vols., New York, Lang, 1994 (hereafter Clara/Robert Correspondence), vol. 1, p. 66, and B. Walker, My Musical Experiences, London, Bentley, 1892, pp. 153–324. 83 Walker, My Musical Experiences, pp. 235–6. 84 W. Lenz, The Great Piano Virtuosos from Personal Acquaintance: Liszt, Chopin, Thalberg, Henselt, trans. M. R. Baker, New York, Schirmer, 1899, p. 137; W. Mason, Memories of a Musical Life, New York, Century, 1901, pp. 77–9. 85 D. Rowland, ‘The piano since c. 1825’, in D. Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Piano, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 45–6; Good, Giraffes, pp. 167–72. 86 Good, Giraffes, pp. 153–63; Rowland, ‘The piano since c. 1825’, pp. 43–4. 87 Good, Giraffes, pp. 183–4.
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their higher end from e0000 to g0000 in the late 1820s, which became standard until the late 1840s when the higher register was extended further by some to a0000 . After this, some makers adopted a seven-octave range: AAA to a0000 by Érard, Collard and Kirman, GGG to g0000 by Broadwood. The former of these remained the standard until the 1870s.88 The piano also became an everincreasing presence in middle-class households, leading to a growth in the manufacture of square pianos through the course of the century, eventually replaced by the upright.89
Berlioz and the development of the orchestra and instruments in the first half of the nineteenth century The first half of the nineteenth century, especially after 1830, saw a growth in new orchestral societies devoted to instrumental music.90 Amongst the most important of these were the Hamburg Philharmonic Society (founded 1828), the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris (1828), the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne (1840), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (1840), the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg (1841), the New York Philharmonic (1842) and the Vienna Philharmonic (1842). Sizes are shown in Table 26.1 at the end of this chapter, with German court orchestras generally maintaining smaller forces than those in Paris, London and elsewhere. There were four principal German regional centres – Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden and Munich91 – of which the most important was Leipzig, whose Gewandhaus orchestra, originally founded in 1743, was the oldest.92 In London, the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1813, grew from an original twenty-two players to around seventy in 1833;93 the players were notable for their sight-reading abilities in a competitive and badly paid world.94 The Paris Conservatoire Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, founded by Habeneck (who conducted them with his bow),
88 Rowland, ‘The piano since c.1825’, p. 46. 89 A. Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History, New York, Dover, 1990, pp. 115–20, 128–38, 142– 4, 267–83; Good, Giraffes, pp. 120–44, and for most detail R. Harding, The Piano-Forte: Its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851, 2nd edn, Old Woking, Gresham, 1978, pp. 221–76. 90 See T. Carter and E. Levi, ‘The history of the orchestra’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 7, and P. A. Bloom, ‘The public for orchestral music in the nineteenth century’, in J. Peyser (ed.), The Orchestra, pp. 253–84. 91 See A. Carse, The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz, Cambridge, Heffer, 1946, pp. 107–59 for a comprehensive history of German orchestras during the period. 92 The best source on the Gewandhaus during this period remains A. Dörffel, Geschichte der Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig vom 25. November 1781 bis 25. November 1881, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1884; see also H.-J. Nösselt, Das Gewandhausorchester. Entstehung und Entwicklung eines Orchesters, Leipzig, Koehler & Amelang, 1943. 93 D. J. Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century: Size, Proportions and Seating, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1986, pp. 154–5. 94 C. Ehrlich, First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 10.
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were known for precision, unity of bowing and style, and feeling for tempo, whilst rehearsing more extensively than most other orchestras of the time.95 Various seating practices of the time differ from modern conventions; some German orchestras, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus (until around 1905), maintained the practice of having the violins and violas standing. Some orchestras broke with an earlier theatrical practice of grouping strings on one side, wind on the other; in place of this, first and second violins would be seated at opposite ends.96 After 1815, orchestras gradually moved away from the practice of ‘divided leadership’, split between the leader and the conductor,97 towards a singular conductor, as part of a wider Napoleonic cult of the commanding individual. Whilst Spohr made dubious claims to be the first baton conductor,98 the practice was developed by Weber and Gaspare Spontini (often described in terms of military metaphors),99 and consolidated by Mendelssohn100 and Berlioz. The latter cut an imposing figure on stage, making extravagant bodily gestures like Beethoven before him, but with a clear and emphatic beat. Eschewing what he saw as ‘approximate’ approaches of Habeneck and others, he would drive orchestras through many rehearsals (and sectionals) to obtain the results he desired.101 Most major developments in woodwind instruments took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, after which further modifications were essentially refinements. French and German instruments became more stratified, the former producing a brighter and thinner sound, the latter richer and more timbrally varied. The flute gained new keys, but in the German Confederation throughout the period they remained separately mounted within the ‘simple system’; Carl Boehm developed a new design in 1832 with separate holes for each chromatic note to produce evenness of tone and avoid the need for
95 R. Elvers, Felix Mendelssohn: A Life in Letters, trans. C. Tomlinson, London, Cassell, 1986, pp. 176–7; J. Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris 1828–1871, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 21–4. For Wagner’s hugely admiring view, see R. Wagner, Wagner on Conducting, trans. E. Dannreuther, New York, Dover, 1989, pp. 15–18. 96 See Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices, pp. 175–7, 201–37. See also D. M. Di Grazia, ‘Rejected traditions: ensemble placement in nineteenth-century Paris’, 19th-Century Music, 22/2 (1998), 190–209; R. Wagner, My Life, New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1911, pp. 339, 342–3. 97 See Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices, pp. 61–70 on the persistence of this practice. 98 See Spohr, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 81–2, and J. A. Bowen, ‘The rise of conducting’, in J. A. Bowen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 99–101 on Spohr’s claims. 99 Bowen, ‘The rise of conducting’, pp. 101–5. 100 See S. Reichwald (ed.), Mendelssohn in Performance, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 85–114. 101 M. Rose, Berlioz Remembered, London, Faber, 2001, pp. 124–35, 170, 176–7, 283–5; H. MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commentary, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 363 (for Berlioz’s thoughts on conducting); D. Cairns, ‘Berlioz and Beethoven’, in P. Bloom (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 231–2.
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‘cross-fingering’, and introduced a cylindrical rather than conical bore in 1847.102 A thirteen-key oboe became the standard in the German Confederation from 1825, whilst an eight-key instrument with the new ‘conservatoire’ system of fingering became used in France.103 The bassoon also followed divergent paths in France and the German Confederation through the century, the instruments being known as the ‘Buffet’ and ‘Heckel’ respectively. In both countries the bore was widened and extra keys added, culminating in a twenty-two-key bassoon which was produced in 1847 in France, and became the standard, whilst an eighteen-key model was more common in German-speaking countries.104 Iwan Müller developed a thirteen-key clarinet around 1810, from which other fingering systems were developed; the other major technological development of the instrument was the development of a Boehm system in 1843, inspired by the earlier system for the flute, by Hyacinthe Klosé, then professor at the Paris Conservatoire. This became the standard system in France, southern Europe, North and South America, and the most used and manufactured in England, though modified versions of Müller’s clarinet, including the later developments by Carl Bärmann around 1860, are appropriate for much of the Germanic repertoire.105 The first valved horns were introduced by Heinrich Stölzel in 1814, facilitating chromatic pitches; similar valves were introduced to the trumpet, cornet and trombone by 1825–30. Band players in the German Confederation took up the new horn, though it was not until the 1840s that most German orchestras had adopted it. It was resisted in France for most of the century, where the hand horn continued to be taught and studied.106 Rossini, Meyerbeer and Berlioz were the first to use the valve trumpet in the 1820s in France, though it was still rare by the 1840s. The process was slower amongst Germans, with the B-flat trumpet only beginning to be employed regularly in the second half of the century, and Wagner and Mahler notating parts in C so as to leave the choice of instrument to the performer.107 The early nineteenth century also
102 A. Baines, Woodwind Instruments and their History, London, Faber, 1967, pp. 62–7; R. Brown, The Early Flute: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 20–9. 103 Baines, Woodwind Instruments, pp. 101–106, 112–13; D. Charlton, ‘Woodwind and brass’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 410–11. 104 Baines, Woodwind Instruments, pp. 152–63; Charlton, ‘Woodwind and brass’, pp. 414–15. 105 Baines, Woodwind Instruments, pp. 131–42; C. Lawson, The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 16–17, 25–6. 106 R. Meucci (with G. Roccheti), ‘Horn’, at Grove Online (accessed 16 May 2009); J. Humphries, The Early Horn: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 32–5; Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 222, 249, 261–3; A. Baines, Brass Instruments: Their History and Development, London, Faber, 1976, pp. 206–26; A. Myers, ‘Design, technology and manufacture since 1800’, in T. Herbert and J. Wallace (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 115–30. 107 Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 262–3; E. H. Tarr, ‘The Western trumpet’, at Grove Online (accessed 17 May 2009). On early trumpets from the valve era, see Baines, Brass Instruments, pp. 232–42.
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saw a move away from trios of alto, tenor and bass trombones in favour of two or just one model. Berlioz, more than any other figure, was fascinated by the musical possibilities offered by the developing orchestra, especially after hearing Habeneck’s performances with the Société.108 He learned much through spending time with orchestral players, and became a major innovator within the medium, notable in particular for his insistence (as a non-pianist) that orchestra scores should not be thought of in terms of piano reductions.109 A stickler for the letter of the score, Berlioz compared the performer to a sun which illuminates a picture, though this did not contradict his desire for fervent, passionate performances.110 Berlioz set down many of his ideas on orchestras and instruments in his influential Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes of 1844.111 He envisaged an expanded version of the Société with extra brass and some additional instruments from military bands, such as the E-flat clarinet.112 At first favouring German clarinets, he would come by 1851 to write of the superiority of French instruments in general.113 Similarly, he would later come to favour valved rather than natural horns; in the Traité, however, he wrote about the individual properties of the latter, identifying ‘bad’ notes with poor timbre and tuning, which he would avoid even if it required breaking a unison, as in Ex. 26.8.114 Ex. 26.8. Berlioz, Overture to King Lear, bars 364–8
108 D. Cairns, Berlioz: 1803–1832: The Making of an Artist, London, Deutsch, 1989 (hereafter Berlioz 1), pp. 246–9. 109 Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 39, 72–3; Rose, Berlioz Remembered, p. 119. 110 Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 55–6, 166–7, 255; R. Pohl, ‘Beatrice und Benedikt’ (1862), in R. Pohl, Hektor Berlioz: Studien und Erinnerungen, Leipzig, Schlicke, 1884, pp. 177–8. 111 For the purposes of this chapter, the version I use is MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, which mediates well between the 1844 and 1855 editions of Berlioz’s original, provides an excellent commentary, and includes valuable diagrams of instruments and halls from the time. All of Berlioz’s preferences in this respect are taken from this source unless otherwise stated. 112 D. K. Holoman, ‘Performing Berlioz’, in Bloom, The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, pp. 176–9; MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, pp. 64–9, 102, 117–18, 137–9. 113 P. Bloom, The Life of Berlioz, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 128. 114 Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 261–3; MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, pp. 164–70, including this example.
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Berlioz also listed various types of détaché and other bowings, in a similar manner to Baillot and Habeneck’s treatises, and was very clear in the indications of specific techniques in his scores. There is no doubt that Berlioz favoured large orchestras: he specified a minimum string section of 15–15–10–11–9 for the Symphonie fantastique, Roméo and the overture Le carnaval romain and 15–15–10–12–9 for Benvenuto Cellini, whilst for the version of the Sinfonie funèbre et triomphale with strings, he gave figures of 20–20–15–15–10, which are combined with around double the usual number of winds and massed clarinets.115 In the Traité he fantasised about much larger orchestras, one of which would involve a whole 467 players and a choir of 360. His concerts got bigger and bigger, involving over a thousand musicians (around half of which were instrumentalists) for a performance of his Hymne à la France, and similar forces for movements from the Symphonie fantastique and Sinfonie funèbre et triomphale in 1844 as part of the Exhibition of Industrial Products in Paris.116 As the Marxist writer Hans G. Helms suggests, the 1844 concert, which took place in the Hall of Machinery, represents the one time of true convergence between the economic conditions of music-making and those of wider industrial mass production; Berlioz’s relationship to the orchestra was akin to that of a factory owner towards their workers, who he ensured (through his cooperation with instrument manufacturers including Adolphe Sax) gained those machines which enabled them to optimise their production. This possibility was utterly dependent upon fluctuations in the economy, and became untenable by the time of the 1848–9 revolutions, after which, during a recession, profits became used speculatively rather than to support further production.117 Berlioz was a strong proponent of the metronome, thinking it vital when a conductor has not ‘received instruction directly from the composer or if the tempos have not been handed down by tradition’, though warning about copying the ‘mathematical regularity’ of the device.118 Those metronome markings he left, and other accounts, suggest that he envisaged an extremely broad spectrum of tempos, especially in early works, though with a general inclination towards the faster end of the spectrum.119 115 MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, pp. 321–7; Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices, pp. 123–4. 116 See Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 298–306 for the composer’s own account of this occasion, in which, for example, there were a whole 36 double basses. 117 Helms, ‘Ökonomische Bedingungen’, pp. 34–6. See also Berlioz’s own critique of Ferdinand Hérold’s opera Zampa in Débats, 27 September 1835, comparing the music to industrial products (cited in D. Cairns, Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness 1832–1869, London, Allen Lane, 1999 (hereafter Berlioz 2), p. 65). 118 MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, p. 339. 119 See in particular H. MacDonald, ‘Berlioz and the metronome’, in P. Bloom (ed.), Berlioz Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 17–28, and Holoman, ‘Performing Berlioz’, pp. 188–92.
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Chamber music, Leipzig, Mendelssohn and the Schumanns Chamber-music performance developed distinctly from orchestral concerts; the medium was held up as a sophisticated and elevated alternative to the twin spectacles of virtuoso performance and opera that flourished especially between 1830 and 1848. Whilst various important quartet series had been founded earlier in the century, it was during the 1830s and 1840s that chamber music shifted from a private to a public medium,120 with the advent of the concerts of the mixed amateur/professional Beethoven Quartet Society in London in 1835,121 the chamber series formed by Ferdinand David in 1836,122 and the first touring quartet, the Müller brothers from Braunschweig, who were active from 1830 to 1855.123 The latter were much praised for their ability to play as a unified body without sacrificing each player’s individual character, as well as their precision and expressive range.124 After Schuppanzigh’s death in 1830, the focus of chamber music shifted to Leipzig, a city which was home to a large number of composers, performers and intellectuals; Mendelssohn, Schumann, David and the Wiecks all lived or worked there during the period leading up to the late 1840s. In contrast to Paris, Vienna and various other cities, Leipzig had little in the way of an aristocratic musical culture during this time; rather, the growing musical scene was based around the new middle class, though they themselves looked to emulate cultural pursuits associated with the aristocracy.125 The city also became world-famous through the ‘Bach Revival’, as the St Thomas Church there housed many of Bach’s manuscripts;126 a major catalyst in this revival was of course Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Singakademie, Berlin, on 11 March 1829.127 Mendelssohn himself was influenced by his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter of the importance of music as a ‘serious business’ and ‘high art’, the epitome of which was represented by
120 C. Bashford, ‘The string quartet and society’, in R. Stowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 7–12. 121 J. H. Baron, Intimate Music: A History of the Idea of Chamber Music, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press, 1998, pp. 320–1; R. Winter, ‘Performing the Beethoven quartets in their first century’, in R. Winter and R. Martin (eds.), The Beethoven Quartet Companion, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1994, p. 54. 122 W. Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste; Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 123, 134; Winter, ‘Performing the Beethoven quartets’, pp. 42–4. 123 Baron, Intimate Music, p. 320. 124 See Winter, ‘Performing the Beethoven quartets’, pp. 44–5, and Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 252. 125 Botstein, ‘History, rhetoric, and the self’, pp. 30–1. 126 A. Walker, ‘Schumann and his background’, in A. Walker (ed.), Robert Schumann: The Man and his Music, London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1972, p. 21. 127 See C. Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St Matthew Passion, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2005.
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Bach.128 Whilst this performance was far from ‘authentic’ by contemporary standards, using a large orchestra and with modified scoring, cuts and other changes,129 it nonetheless laid down a gauntlet in terms of a historicist attitude to music-making, and the formation of a Germanic canon, whose implications continue through to the present day. After taking over the Gewandhaus in 1835, Mendelssohn had them perform a repertoire based upon eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germanic music;130 in February 1838, he devised various series of ‘historical concerts’ at the Gewandhaus, which were designed to show the ‘succession of the most famous masters from one hundred or more years ago up to the present time’.131 As a pianist, Mendelssohn was noted for his elasticity of touch, elegance, roundness, unaffectedness, clarity of articulation and strict (though often fast) tempo, rather than Lisztian brilliance or Chopinesque seductiveness.132 As well as being a brilliant sight-reader, from an early age he frequently played from memory and probably played a significant role in establishing this practice.133 In 1831, he declared the metronome ‘an utterly useless invention’;134 only in his later works, when his opposition seems to have been loosened, do we find a fair number of metronome markings.135 Many, including Wagner, Liszt and Clara and Robert Schumann, noted (sometimes critically) his predilection as a conductor for fast tempos,136 though he also employed occasional tempo fluctuations in performance which seemed pre-prepared.137 Mendelssohn also performed sporadically on the violin throughout his life.138 Whilst at first favouring the broad bow and full tone of Eduard
128 See J. E. Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 209–13. 129 H. Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988, pp. 15–16. 130 R. L. Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 314–15; Dörffel, Gewandhausconcerte, pp. 83–137. 131 Dörffel, Gewandhausconcerte, pp. 91, 95, 115–16; Schumann, ‘Rückblick auf das Leipziger Musikleben im Winter 1837–1838’, in GS 1, p. 373. 132 R. Nichols, Mendelssohn Remembered, London, Faber, 1997, pp. 91–6, 162–4, 172, 185; C. Brown, A Portrait of Mendelssohn, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 221. 133 See Brown, A Portrait of Mendelssohn, pp. 204–6, 232–5. 134 At least according to Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 237; I use here the translation from Nichols, Mendelssohn Remembered, p. 172. 135 See S. Reichwald, ‘Mendelssohn’s Tempo Indications’, in Reichwald (ed.), Mendelssohn in Performance, pp. 189–95. 136 Wagner on Conducting, pp. 22–3; Nichols, Mendelssohn Remembered, pp. 95, 162, 164; The Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann, trans. P. Ostwald, ed. G. Nauhaus, London, Robson, 1994 (hereafter Clara/Robert Marriage Diaries), p. 44. 137 See D. Milsom, ‘Mendelssohn and the Orchestra’, in Reichwald (ed.), Mendelssohn in Performance, p. 87, and Brown, A Portrait of Mendelssohn, pp. 254–5 for further evidence of Mendelssohn’s (sparing) use of tempo fluctuation as a conductor. 138 C. Brown, ‘Performance of chamber and solo music for violin’, in Reichwald (ed.), Mendelssohn in Performance, pp. 59–60, 68–9.
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Rietz (1802–32),139 after Rietz’s death he became closely involved with the most important Leipzig string player of the time, Ferdinand David (1810– 73), a student of Spohr,140 who would become leader of the Gewandhaus in October 1836 at Mendelssohn’s instigation.141 David was noted for technical brilliance combined with intellect, though later accounts suggest a more ostentatious approach, which some saw as poor taste.142 He published his own Violinschule in 1863, which remains the best guide we have to his method and style.143 He appears to have used a violin with no chin rest or shoulder attachment, with a low left elbow, distinctive bow hold, bowing in a right angle across the strings with a loose and bent wrist, and a variety of types of bow strokes, including hitting with the point and a ‘springing bow’. Portamento was only to be used exceptionally, and vibrato employed sparingly. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto was written in consultation with David (who premiered it in 1845);144 David himself produced an edition of the work in 1875145 which has been analysed by a variety of writers.146 This contained a wide range of new markings, in particular counter-intuitive fingerings which would produce portamenti, as well as indications of harmonics (Ex. 26.9). The most prominent piano teacher in 1820s Leipzig was Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873), who published his own important treatise, Klavier und Gesang, in 1853.147 Wieck’s emphasis was upon a legato tone, a flexible wrist without use of the arm, but also staccato and ‘sprightly articulation’. He strongly disliked overuse of either pedal, was disparaging of young virtuosi, and urged a reverential approach to the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Weber. His most
139 Brown, ‘Performance of chamber and solo music for violin’, p. 63. 140 J. Eckardt, Ferdinand David und die Familie Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1888, pp. 7–8; F. Hiller, Mendelssohn: Letters and Recollections, trans. M. E. von Glehn, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan, 1874, pp. 162–3. 141 Dörffel, Gewandhausconcerte, pp. 86, 239. 142 N. Bickley (ed. and trans.), Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, London, Macmillan, 1914, pp. 49, 397; R. Stowell, The Early Violin and Viola: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 137–8; A. Moser, Joseph Joachim ein Lebensbild, Berlin, Behr’s, 1898, pp. 42–6; B. Borchard, Stimme und Geige. Amalie und Joseph Joachim, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, Böhlau, 2005, pp. 85–6 n. 60. 143 F. David, Violinschule. Méthode de violon, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1863; version with Eng. trans. Violinschule/Violin School, Leipzig and London, Augener and Breitkopf & Härtel, 1874. 144 Dörffel, Gewandhausconcerte, p. 109. On the communications between Mendelssohn and David surrounding the work’s composition and first performances, see R. L. Todd, ‘Introduction’, in Mendelssohn, Konzert in e-Moll, Kassel, etc., Bärenreiter, 2007, pp. iii-ix. 145 Violin Concerto neurer Meister Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Ernst, Lipinski, Paganini, ed. F. David, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1875. 146 See Brown, ‘Performance of chamber and solo music for violin’, pp. 72–6; Milsom, Late NineteenthCentury Violin Performance, pp. 86–7, and Stowell, The Early Violin and Viola, pp. 151–64. 147 Friedrich Wieck, Klavier und Gesang, Leipzig, Whistling, 1853, trans. M. P. Nichols as Piano and Song: How to Teach, How to Learn and How to Form a Judgement of Musical Performances, Boston, Lockwood, Brooks, 1875.
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Ex. 26.9. Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto, Allegro molto appassionato. Edition of David, with implied portamenti notated
prominent student was of course his daughter Clara (1819–96),148 whose early concerts, featuring works of Kalkbrenner, Herz, Czerny and others, drew praise for virtuosity and finished execution, as well as interpretation, accentuation and tonal shading.149 Later in life she would also play the music of Thalberg and Chopin, and included works of Bach, Scarlatti and Beethoven in her programmes from the 1830s onwards, gradually eschewing virtuoso pieces and moving decisively towards what would now be called a more ‘serious’ repertoire centred around what are now seen as classic figures of the first half of the nineteenth century (Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann) as well as some Bach and Scarlatti and a handful of mostly early works of Brahms.150 From an early stage she would play from memory, and also preferred the pianos of Graf to the heavier instruments of Érard.151 Critics came to associate her with the Werktreue aesthetic of performance (sometimes described as ‘objective’ sometimes as ‘faithful’),152 and her playing was seen variously as ‘intellectual’ and ‘refined’ (in contrast to more overt virtuosi), ‘elegant’, ‘solid’, ‘clear’, ‘pure’ and ‘deeply artistic’.153 Nonetheless she admitted to Brahms in 1871 that she was often beset by nerves,154 and was often perceived to play too fast,155 though she had earlier commented very critically 148 My observations on Clara’s playing are drawn from a digest of N. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, rev. edn, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2001; Steegmann, Clara Schumann; F. May, The Girlhood of Clara Schumann, London, Arnold, 1912; B. Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben, 3 vols., Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1920; B. Borchard, Clara Schumann. Ihr Leben, Frankfurt and Berlin, Ullstein, 1991. 149 May, Clara Schumann, pp. 64–5. 150 R. Kopiez, A. C. Lehmann and J. Klassen, ‘Clara Schumann’s collection of playbills: A historiometric analysis of life-span development, mobility, and repertoire canonization’, in Poetics, 37/1 (2009), 50–73. 151 N. B. Reich, ‘The correspondence between Clara Wieck Schumann and Felix and Paul Mendelssohn’, in Todd, Schumann and his World, p. 227 n. 5; Clara/Robert Correspondence, vol. 2, pp. 10–11, 53, 402, 461, and vol. 3, p. 274. 152 Reich, Clara Schumann, p. 272; A. App, ‘Die “Werktreue” bei Clara Schumann’, in P. Ackermann and H. Schneider (eds.), Clara Schumann: Komponistin, Interpretin, Unternehmerin, Ikone, Hildesheim, Zurich and New York, Georg Olms, 1999, pp. 9–18. 153 Reich, Clara Schumann, pp. 270–1. 154 Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896, ed. B. Litzmann, 2 vols., Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927, vol. 1, p. 636. 155 Reich, Clara Schumann, p. 270.
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Ex. 26.10. Schumann, Fantasy Op. 17
in her diaries about impetuous virtuosity and hurrying in the playing of other rival pianists.156 The pianist career of Robert Schumann, Clara’s husband-to-be, was curtailed at an early stage (by November 1832157), probably through his use of the chiroplast, as recommended by Kalkbrenner, Thalberg and others.158 Yet the subsequent period saw the production of the majority of his major piano works, most of which were performed, if at all, by Clara, often in private;159 Schumann himself sometimes discouraged public performances of his more ‘difficult’ works.160 Whilst his pianistic preferences were less definitive than those of Clara,161 he certainly thought highly of Viennese instruments such as those of Graf and Streicher;162 these facilitate not only the staccato chords such as in the F sharp minor sonata, but also the detailed short staccatos and accents that are often interspersed into passage-work, as in the Fantasy Op. 17 (Ex. 26.10). The lack of a sustained tradition of public performances of Schumann’s piano music during his lifetime makes his stylistic preferences difficult to ascertain precisely. In terms of other pianists he dismissed Kalkbrenner, became lukewarm about Hummel, but was highly positive about Moscheles; 156 See, for example, her comments on her female rival Amalie Rieffel, entry of 20 November 1840, in Marriage Diaries, p. 35. She followed this up with some extremely patronising remarks about Rieffel on 22 November (ibid., p. 36). 157 Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann. Nach den Originalen mitgetheilt von Clara Schumann, 2nd edn, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1886, p. 194. 158 The most sensible writing on this subject is in E. F. Jensen, Schumann, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 68–72. 159 See Reich, Clara Schumann, pp. 259–60, for a full list of the first performances given by Clara of Robert’s works; also B. Borchard, Robert Schumann und Clara Wieck. Bedingungen künstlerischer Arbeit in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Weinheim and Basel, Beltz, 1985, pp. 280–1. 160 Especially with Carnaval – see Clara/Robert Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 129–30, vol. 2, pp. 31, 210, and Schumann, ‘Franz Liszt: concerts in Dresden and Leipzig’, in R. Schumann, Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings, trans. and ed. H. Pleasants, New York, Dover, 1988, p. 161/GS 1, p. 484. 161 See Clara/Robert Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 125, for Robert’s interest in English pianos. 162 Clara/Robert Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 286, vol. 2, p. 50.
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Ex. 26.11. Robert Schumann, Arabeske Op. 18
later he would become utterly effusive about Chopin, Field and Liszt, massively enthusiastic about Henselt, and favourable towards Thalberg.163 In terms of Clara’s own playing, it should not be automatically assumed that this represented Robert’s ideal, as he sometimes compared her unfavourably or ambiguously with others,164 had difficulty persuading her to adopt his slower tempos, and sometimes doubted the infallibility of her technique.165 Schumann’s many very specific tempo modifications, such as in the first movement of the Fantasy, or the Arabeske Op. 18 (see Ex. 26.11),166 need not imply a rigid tempo elsewhere, but should be set into relief by contrast with other surrounding material at least through the degree of modification. His pedalling was sometimes remarked upon as being extravagant, blurring harmonic shifts, with a certain murkiness.167 He provided more detailed performance commentaries relating to two works, the Études d’après les Caprices de Paganini Op. 3 (1832),168 and the Album für die Jugend Op. 68 (1848);169 these eschew excessive bravura, forbid modifications or embellishments of texts 163 Schumann, GS 1, pp. 254–5, 478–85; Robert Schumanns Briefe. Neue Folge, ed. F. G. Jansen, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1904, pp. 30–2, 63, 75, 106–107, 149–50; I, p. 135; Clara/Robert Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 66, 283–4; Daverio, Schumann, pp. 21–2, 69, 87–8. 164 See J. Weingarten, ‘Interpreting Schumann’s Piano Music’, in Walker, Robert Schumann, pp. 93–4; Clara/Robert Marriage Diaries, pp. 9, 35, 42, 52; Jansen, Briefe, p. 53; J. Gabrielova, ‘Toccata op. 7’, in H. Loos (ed.), Robert Schumann. Interpretationen seiner Werke, 2 vols., Laaber, Laaber, 2005, vol. 1, p. 45. 165 Clara/Robert Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 115; Clara/Robert Marriage Diaries, p. 178; F. Niecks, ‘Schumanniana (1925)’, in Todd, Schumann and his World, p. 291. 166 See Winter, ‘Orthodoxies, paradoxes, and contradictions’, pp. 46–8, on how such things are ironed out in the Fantasy. 167 See F. Brendel, ‘Robert Schumann with reference to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the development of modern music in general (1845)’, trans. J. Thym, in Todd, Schumann and his World, pp. 322–3. 168 Schumann, ‘Preface to Opus 3’, in Etüden nach Capricen von Paganini, Opus 3 und Opus 10, ed. W. Boetticher, Munich, Henle, 1997, pp. xi–xxii. 169 The original text, ‘Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln’, is given in the Henle edition of Album für die Jugend, Munich, Henle, 2007, pp. 61–8, with translations into French by Liszt and by H. H. Pierson.
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(though sometimes varying material upon repetitions), and encourage the employment of vitality and variety of touch and voicing and sometimes shifts in the pulse. Ferdinand David was as important to Schumann as to Mendelssohn, though he was also impressed by the playing of Ernst and especially Ole Bull. David gave the first performances of all three of his string quartets (which required a new level of technique and ensemble playing), led (or conducted) the Gewandhaus orchestra in performances of various orchestral works and was also a major inspiration for the violin sonatas.170 Schumann was deeply impressed by the ensemble, regularity of rehearsals and depth of preparation of the Gewandhaus orchestra from the late 1830s onwards.171 They premiered his First Symphony in 1841 under Mendelssohn, a performance which met with huge admiration from the composer.172 Their forces and seating arrangement have already been noted; the antiphonal arrangement of the standing violins is particularly important for exchanges such as in bars 97–106 of the first movement. Various correspondence around subsequent performances and editions provides significant information concerning performance;173 Schumann was most concerned about the horns being sufficiently loud, with the execution of some tempo modifications, and with precise articulation in the first Trio. In November 1849, Schumann accepted a position as municipal music director in Düsseldorf.174 The orchestra there (mostly made up of amateurs or military musicians) had 27 strings, 8 woodwind, 2–3 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, and timpani,175 significantly less than the Gewandhaus’s 60 players. Almost all of Schumann’s orchestral works from the beginning of this period exhibit thicker orchestration than those from hitherto, including the December 1851176 revision of the Fourth Symphony (whose 1841 first performance under David is generally believed to have been a failure).177 In 170 Daverio, Schumann, pp. 246–7; W. Schwarz, ‘Eine Musikerfreundschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts. Unveröffentliche Briefe von Ferdinand David an Robert Schumann’, in C.-H. Mahling (ed.), Zum 70. Geburtstag von Joseph Müller-Blattau (Saarbrücken Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 1), Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1966, pp. 294, 297. 171 See Schumann, ‘Rückblick auf das Leipziger Musikleben im Winter 1837–1838’, p. 378. 172 Clara/Robert Marriage Diaries, p. 72; Jansen, Briefe, p. 251. 173 Many of Schumann’s other letters concerning this work are translated in J. W. Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition: The Genesis of the First Symphony Op. 38, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 122–6. 174 On this orchestra up to when Schumann took over, see C. H. Porter, ‘The reign of the dilettanti: Düsseldorf from Mendelssohn to Schumann’, Musical Quarterly, 73/4 (1989), 476–512. 175 P. Kast (ed.), Schumanns rheinische Jahre, Düsseldorf, Droste, 1981, p. 11; see also the account of L. Mason, Musical Letters from Abroad: Including Detailed Accounts of the Birmingham, Norwich, and Düsseldorf Musical Festivals of 1852, New York, Mason, 1854, pp. 184–5. 176 R. Schumann, Tagebücher, ed. G. Eismann, 4 vols., Leipzig, Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1971–82, vol. 3, pp. 579–80. 177 B. Schlotel, ‘The orchestral music’, in Walker, Schumann: The Man and his Music, pp. 288, 299, 303 n.1; Schwarz, ‘Eine Musikerfreundschaft’, p. 286.
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particular there are many doublings of the string parts by the winds and denser textures, as well as relentless use of the basses. This transformation of Schumann’s orchestration is too sudden and consistent to be attributable merely to a lessening of competence, as suggested by Brian Schlotel;178 rather it seems likely that Schumann’s preferences changed, or (in my opinion more likely) he made allowances for the smaller and somewhat less accomplished string section at Düsseldorf, and possibly also for his own somewhat mediocre conducting skills.179
1848–1890 Introduction The disruption of musical life subsequent to the events of 1848 and the following years was noticed by many,180 with a major decline in the number of concerts and an end to the optimism of the virtuoso years. The 1848–70 period in particular was not an especially fruitful one for the production of instrumental music of previously existing genres; very few historically durable symphonies were produced after Schumann’s Third in 1850, nor much important chamber music prior to Brahms’s early works in the 1860s. The range and diversity of piano composition also fell, despite the appearance of a new range of performers; the major exceptions are to be found in the mid-period works of Liszt and the early work of Balakirev. The other most important development in instrumental music from the period is to be found in the symphonic poems of Liszt and then further programmatic or otherwise ‘realistic’ music of Borodin, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov at the end of the period. In 1860, a journalist in the Viennese Recensionen und Mittheilungen über Theater und Musik wrote of the fundamental changes in concert life over the past ten years: ‘no more tumults of virtuoso concerts, but rather great instrumental and vocal presentations . . . the ungodly proliferation of concert promotions has given way to the present flood of ‘classical’ taste’.181 These transformations were keenly felt as much in the world of performance as that of composition. 178 Schlotel, ‘The orchestral music’, p. 314. 179 On the quality of the Düsseldorf orchestra, see Porter, ‘The reign of the dilettanti’, pp. 482–99; Erler, Schumanns Leben, p. 204; on Schumann’s conducting, see R. Pohl, ‘Reminiscences of Robert Schumann’ (1878), trans. J. M. Cooper, in Todd, Schumann and his World, pp. 249–51; Niecks, ‘Schumanniana’, in Todd, Schumann and his World, pp. 290–2; Walker ‘Schumann and his background’, pp. 32–4. 180 For example, Anton Rubinstein and Berlioz: see Autobiography of Anton Rubinstein, 1829–1889, trans. A. Delano, Boston, MA, Little, Brown, & Co., 1890, p. 16; P. Citron, ‘The Mémoires’, in Bloom (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, p. 129. 181 ‘Zehn Jahre aus dem Wiener Musikleben’, in Recension und Mittheilungen über Theater und Musik, 6 (1860), cited in W. Weber, ‘The rise of the classical repertoire’, in J. Peyser (ed.), The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, New York, Billboard, 2000, p. 381.
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The piano and pianists after 1848 In February 1848, Liszt abandoned his career as a touring virtuoso to take up the position of Kapellmeister in the small German principality of Weimar.182 From this point onwards his music also changed: he revised many of his earlier transcendentally virtuosic works into (somewhat) more playable forms (which are those most frequently played today); his major original piano works from the time demonstrate a characteristic virtuoso approach to the instrument, but rarely with the level of extremity (or bombast) of his earlier productions.183 Liszt also became involved with the rising tide of historicism, through his increased championing of Beethoven and the shift in focus of his transcriptions towards organ pieces of Bach.184 In his Weimar house, called the Altenburg, Liszt kept a new Érard concert grand on the ground floor,185 together with pianos of Streicher and Bösendorfer on the second floor, and elsewhere the Broadwood which had belonged to Beethoven, of which he had come into possession during his tours.186 He pursued a long pedagogical career from this point until the end of his life; his students from this period included Hans von Bülow (see below), Carl Tausig, Joachim Raff, Peter Cornelius, Karl Klindworth and William Mason.187 Accounts of his teaching, right up to his final years, are relatively consistent,188 and have been summarised as follows: (a) the music should flow 182 On this major shift in Liszt’s career, see J. Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 134; D. Altenburg, ‘Franz Liszt and the legacy of the classical era’, 19th-Century Music, 18/1 (1994), 46–63; La Mara (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Carl Alexander GrossHerzog von Sachsen, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1909, pp. 7–12. 183 Alan Walker suggests that Liszt’s revisions from this time reflect the heavier actions of new pianos, in A. Walker, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years 1848–1861, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 147–9. 184 See Walker, The Weimar Years, pp. 157–9, and Altenburg, ‘Franz Liszt and the legacy of the classical era’. 185 See Mason, Memories, pp. 88, 92; also Walker, The Weimar Years, p. 5 on Liszt’s special relationship with Érard pianos. 186 Walker, The Weimar Years, pp. 74–7. 187 See Mason, Memories, pp. 86–182 for a documentation of these times. 188 Amongst the most important memoirs to consult on Liszt’s teaching (and playing) are Mason, Memories; A. Fay, Music-Study in Germany (1880), New York, Dover, 1965: F. Lamond, The Memoirs of Frederic Lamond, Glasgow, Laclellan, 1949; A. Siloti, My Memories of Liszt, trans. anon., Edinburgh, Methuen Simpson, n.d.; A. Friedheim, Life and Liszt: The Recollections of a Concert Pianist, ed. T. L. Bullock, New York, Taplinger, 1961; B. Walker, My Musical Experiences, pp. 85–115; Mitchell and Evans, Moriz Rosenthal, especially pp. 17–39; E. von Sauer, Meine Welt, Stuttgart, Spemann, 1901; and A. Strelezki, Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt, with Anecdotes of Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Wagner, &c., &c., London, Donajowski, 1893, as well as the three extremely detailed accounts of Liszt’s masterclasses from his late years: R. Zimdars (ed. and trans.), The Piano Masterclasses of Franz Liszt, 1884–6: Diary Notes of August Göllerich. Edited by Wilhelm Jerger, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996; A. Walker (ed.), Living with Liszt from the Diary of Carl Lachmund, an American pupil of Liszt, 1882–84, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon Press, 1995; and L. Ramann, Liszt Pädagogium, 2nd edn, ed. A. Brendel, Wiesbaden, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996. Note that most of these come from the last decade and a half of Liszt’s life; Mason’s is one of the few from the early Weimar period. The most prominent account of Liszt’s early teaching comes from his teaching of Valérie Boissier, whom he taught in the winter of 1831–2; see J. Rink, ‘Liszt and the Boissiers: notes on a Musical Education’, Liszt Society Journal, 31 (2006), 34–65.
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in long phrases marked off by strong accents; (b) the musical sense should continue through the many rhetorical pauses; (c) expression (and bodily gestures) should avoid sentimentality at all cost; (d) the piano should produce a quasi-orchestral range of sonorities; (e) melodic figuration should more often be lyrical rather than brilliant; (f) tempo should be flexible, not metronomic; (g) rubato can take the form of interruptions to the beat or prolongings, quite distinct from that of Chopin; and (h) a lack of expressiveness is much worse than a few wrong notes.189 In what is arguably Liszt’s crowning pianistic achievement of this period, the Sonata in B minor, he made use of a dichotomy between short, terse staccato writing (such as one might associate with earlier Viennese pianos and pianism), which he would later instruct students to play as ‘muffled timpani strokes’ (dumpfer Paukenschlag)190 and much more expansive quasi-vocal lines (lending themselves to the more resonant pianos of Érard), running through the whole work (Ex. 26.12). In this sense the work stands on the fault-line dividing competing schools of instruments and piano styles.191 The Sonata was given its first public performance by Hans von Bülow (1830– 94), who, after a brief early study with Wieck, worked with Liszt in Weimar from 1851, and became one of his favoured protegés.192 From an early stage Bülow was also devoted to Beethoven,193 and became a champion of the late works, giving all-Beethoven concerts and series in various German cities in the 1860s.194 After a long period in which he focused upon conducting (see below), he began to tour again from 1872, also making a major American trip in 1875– 6, which included the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.195 In the 1880s he began to play all five of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas in recitals.196 A series of masterclasses he gave in Frankfurt from the mid-1880s reveal much about his pianistic and interpretive priorities. Focusing above all on the 189 K. Hamilton, ‘Performing Liszt’s piano music’, in K. Hamilton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 182. 190 Ramann, Pädagogium, vol. 5, p. 3. This is the only known account of Liszt’s teaching of this work. 191 See I. Pace, ‘Conventions, genres, practices in the performance of Liszt’s piano music’, Liszt Society Journal, 31 (2006), 70–103, for a more in-depth exploration of this aspect of the work. For a wider overview of the piece, see K. Hamilton, Liszt: Sonata in B Minor, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 192 See F. Haas, Hans von Bülow. Leben und Wirken, Wilhelmshaven, Noetzel, 2002, pp. 17–24. 193 The Early Correspondence of Hans von Bülow, ed. by his widow, selected and trans. C. Bache, New York, Appleton, 1896, p. 77. 194 See H.-J. Hinrichsen, Musikalische Interpretation Hans von Bülow, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1999, pp. 94–105, on the centrality of Beethoven to Bülow’s musical outlook. 195 R. A. Lott, From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 232–88. 196 Including brief transitional sections to connect them – see R. L. Zimdars (ed. and trans.), The Piano Master Classes of Hans von Bülow, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 135, for an example. For a comprehensive list of Bülow’s concerts as pianist and conductor, see W.-D. Gewande, Hans von Bülow. Eine biographisch-dokumentarisch Würdigung aus Anlass seines 175. Geburtstages, Lilienthal, Eres, 2004, pp. 218–331.
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Ex. 26.12a. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, opening
music of his holy trinity of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, he urged diaphanous and differentiated approaches to Bach, cited Wagner in support of certain interpretive practices in Beethoven, and suggested that, as well as providing Brahms with much colour and expression, one should conceive the music in poetic rather than abstract terms.197 Opinions of his playing varied, many admiring his facility, strength, endurance and variety of touch, or his reverence for text and style and ability both to ‘command’ and ‘obey’, but others finding him cold and unable to generate serious enthusiasm amongst audiences.198 197 Zimdars (ed.), Bülow Master Classes, pp. 17, 23, 32, 37, 70–3, 82, 90, 94, 104, 113–14, 124. 198 See, for example, Pohl, Franz Liszt, p. 35; L. Auer, My Long Life in Music, London, Duckworth, 1924, pp. 249–50; D. Legány, Ferenc Liszt and his Country 1869–1873, trans. G. Gulyás, Budapest, Corvina Kiadó, 1983, pp. 123–6; Fay, Music Study in Germany, pp. 274–5.
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Ex. 26.12b. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, towards end of first ‘movement’
Ex. 26.12c. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, conclusion
The other most prominent pianist of this era was the Russian-Jewish Anton Rubinstein, a student of Field’s pupil Alexander Villoing (1804–78).199 Idolising Liszt (whose reputation he came to mirror), Rubinstein attempted to mimic his theatrical mannerisms; also, like Chopin before him, he claimed as a major influence the opera singer Rubini, whose tone he would attempt to imitate on the piano.200 Accounts of his playing draw attention to his rich and full tone (but also delicacy), his wild and impetuous nature at the instrument 199 Rubinstein, Autobiography, pp. 6–10. 200 C. D. Bowen, Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicolai Rubinstein, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1939, p. 170.
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as a reflection of his volatile temperament, often opting for quite extreme (and flexible) tempos, his inimitable use of the pedal, and general grandeur of style,201 though some were critical of excesses and clumsiness. After leaving the St Petersburg Conservatoire (see below), Rubinstein’s career flourished, becoming the first major Russian musician to tour America in 1872–73.202 But his crowning achievement was the series of ‘Historical Concerts’ he gave between autumn 1885 and May 1886 in Berlin, then various other cities around Europe, featuring the history of European piano music from English virginalists to contemporary Russian composers,203 which deeply impressed the young Rachmaninov.204 He followed these with a series of ‘Historical Lectures’ at the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1888, in which he emphasised the employment of a variety of historical styles, and advocated C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard treatise, and urged smaller orchestras to use clarity and restraint in the music of Haydn, Mozart, Hummel, Weber and Mendelssohn; on the piano, though, he believed that full modern resources should be employed for Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin.205 Various schools of pianistic pedagogy were consolidated during this period, including the style sévère in France – clear, brilliant, elegant, strict in rhythm and tempo, and with a basically thin and non legato touch206 – whose most brilliant representative was Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)207 and a finger school in various conservatoires, especially in Stuttgart.208 What could be practical for Hummel and Czerny, working on very light Viennese pianos, now became a form of pianist torture, a merciless and grinding technical regime that produced much stiffness and unwanted harshness.209 These schools encountered some early challenges,210 but the most significant came
201 Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 127–8, 219–20, 295, 301; Stanford, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, pp. 59–60; Mason, Memories, pp. 173–4; Auer, My Long Life, pp. 114–15; A. Delano, ‘Rubinstein as a pianist’, in Rubinstein, Autobiography, pp. 165–71. 202 See Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 226–50, and Lott, From Paris to Peoria, pp. 170–230, on Rubinstein’s American tours. 203 For the complete programmes, see P. S. Taylor, Anton Rubinstein: A Life in Music, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 269–71. 204 Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 291–2; Gerig, Famous Pianists, p. 294. 205 See Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 311–17 on these lectures. 206 See C. Timbrell, French Pianism: A Historical Perspective, 2nd edn, Portland, OR, Amadeus, 1999, pp. 37–40; Gerig, Famous Pianists, pp. 315–17. 207 On Saint-Saëns’s playing, see S. Studd, Saint-Saëns: A Critical Biography, London, Cygnus Arts, 1999, pp. 6–13, 49–51, 60–1. 208 See Fay, Music-Study in Germany, pp. 21–2, 264–8 for her experiences of this school and wider thoughts on German Conservatoires. On the Lebert/Stark Stuttgart school of technique, see Gerig, Famous Pianists, pp. 229–33. 209 Gerig, Famous Pianists, p. 235. For a strongly worded but cogent critique of this type of approach, see G. Sándor, On Piano Playing, New York, Schirmer, 1981, pp. 52–78. 210 Including from William Mason, Adolf Bernhard Marx and Theodor Kullak – see Gerig, Famous Pianists, pp. 236–50.
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through the pioneering teaching of Ludwig Deppe (1828–90).211 Deppe advocated the distribution of motions amongst all the components of the anatomy (hand and arm), involving circular movements of the hand and upward motions of the wrist, as well as a type of ‘controlled free fall’, by which the whole apparatus is allowed to drop freely under gravity. Amy Fay, who studied with Deppe from 1873, found his methods to be revelatory, relating them to what she had seen in Liszt’s playing. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the difference between Viennese and English pianos was noticed very strongly;212 the intervening period saw the growth of large-scale industrialised production of pianos, especially in the United States, facilitated by new woodworking machinery and hammercovering machines.213 At the 1862 London Great Exhibition, Steinway exhibited their iron-frame, cross-stringed piano, which had been patented in 1859; this provoked a variety of opinions at the time, but would become the standard model for all instruments, right up to the present day, though some other distinct pianos were manufactured for a short while.214 The few new developments during the remainder of the century included an extension of the upper range to c00000 , the new iron frame curved up from its fastenings, and the addition of the middle pedal, which won Liszt’s advocacy for such works as his third Consolation215 (Ex.26.13).
Violinists and violin playing 1848–1890 In the period immediately after 1848, four violinists became most prominent: Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–81), Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), Henryk Wieniawski (1835–80) and Leopold Auer (1845–1930). Vieuxtemps, a prodigy who also spent five early years in Russia as soloist to the Tsar,216 was described as having perfect intonation, an excellent staccato, an avoidance of portamento, whilst avoiding an overly ‘expressive’ style, for which he was criticised from various quarters,217 whilst Joachim, who worked first in Leipzig in the 211 Deppe’s methods are set down in E. Caland, Artistic Piano-Playing as Taught by Ludwig Deppe, together with Practical Advice on Questions of Technic, trans. E. S. Stevenson, Nashville, TN, Olympian Publishing Co., 1903. Most of Deppe’s short 1885 article entitled ‘Armleiden des Klavierspielers’ is reproduced in Gerig, Famous Pianists, pp. 252–4. The account here of Deppe’s methods is taken from these two sources, and also Fay, Music Study in Germany, pp. 285–91. 212 Rowland, ‘The piano since c.1825’, p. 45. 213 For more on this subject more widely, see Good, Giraffes, pp. 197–256. 214 Rowland, ‘The piano since c.1825’, pp. 44–7. 215 See Liszt’s 1883 letter, reproduced in F. Clidat, ‘The Transcendental Studies: A Lisztian pianist’s impressions’, in M. Saville and J. Deaville (eds.), New Light on Liszt and his Music: Essays in Honor of Alan Walker’s 65th Birthday, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon Press, 1997, p. 316. 216 Schwarz, Great Masters, pp. 210–12. 217 See Schwarz, Great Masters, pp. 214–15; J. S. Campbell, V. F. Odoyevsky and the Formation of Russian Musical Taste in the Nineteenth Century, New York and London, Garland, 1989, p. 251; Mason, Memories, p. 149.
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Ex. 26.13. Liszt, Consolation No. 3
Gewandhaus with David, moved to become leader of Liszt’s orchestra in Weimar, then left this environment, dissatisfied, to become royal music director at Hanover,218 and developed an intensive relationship with both Schumanns and the young Brahms. Like Clara, he was known for his fidelity to works and avoidance of effects, as well as varied styles for different works, unaffected expression, and the performance of a core German repertoire.219 His technique involved the ‘Joachim grip’, a very low arm pressed to the body and a highangled wrist, with rotary motion of the wrist and stiff fingers to change at the frog, which came to be opposed by many later players not least for its unsteadiness.220 In his late years, Joachim published a treatise with his student and biographer Andreas Moser,221 in which they expressed their reservations about the new dominance of the Franco-Belgian schools, a move from a singing style towards ‘effects’, and opposed trends towards continuous vibrato. Wieniawski was in Weimar at the same time as Joachim, and like Vieuxtemps was a prodigy who settled in Russia, first in the early 1850s, then for twelve years until leaving in 1872.222 His playing seems, however, to have been more
218 Borchard, Stimme und Geige, pp. 96–113. 219 See Milsom, Violin Performance, p. 20; R. Pohl, Franz Liszt. Studien und Erinnerungen, Leipzig, Schlicke, 1883, p. 20. 220 Schwarz, Great Masters, pp. 271–2; The Memoirs of Carl Flesch, trans. H. Keller, ed. Keller and C. F. Flesch, London, Rockliff, 1957, pp. 33–5; Milsom, Violin Performance, pp. 21–2. 221 J. Joachim and A. Moser, Violinschule/Violin School, 3 vols., Berlin, Simrock, c. 1905. See in particular vol. 2, p. 96a, vol. 3, pp. 32–3. 222 W. Duleba, Wieniawski, trans. G. Czerny, Neptune City, NJ, Paganiniana, 1984, pp. 26, 37, 50; Schwarz, Great Masters, pp. 221–2.
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subjective, temperamental and colourful than that of Vieuxtemps,223 whilst employing a very different bow technique to Joachim, with a high right elbow, pressing the bow with the index finger above the second joint, and stiffening his arm to produce the so-called ‘devil’s staccato’ on a single string, a technique which later was referred to by some as the ‘Russian bow grip’.224 Auer, a student of Joachim, who also had played to Vieuxtemps at a young age, replaced Wieniawski in Russia.225 He broke with Joachim’s teaching by employing a standard Franco-Belgian grip and to the end of his career was adamant in his opposition to the continuous use of vibrato, despite the fact that this practice was adopted by many of his students.226 The most significant later nineteenth-century violinist was Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), a protégé of Vieuxtemps and student of Rodolphe Massart and Wieniawski227. Ysaÿe himself perceived distinct schools descending from Vieuxtemps and Paganini, definitively preferring the ‘romanticism’ of the former to the ‘mechanics’ of the latter.228 His playing emphasised a singing tone above all else, continuous but containing distinctive sonorities, with the use of a practically immobile right upper arm, playing from the point of the bow, simplicity of fingering, rhythmic cohesion and smooth transitions, as well as a greater amount of vibrato (though still only on selected notes) and portamento than earlier players, and a highly spontaneous and declamatory rubato.229 He was closely associated with Fauré, César Franck and Max Bruch; works such as the Franck Violin Sonata (written as a wedding present for Ysaÿe in 1886) provided a new customised outlet for the French and Belgian violin schools (Ex. 26.14).
The orchestra between 1848 and 1890 After 1848 orchestral repertoire also became much more focused upon the classics (including a small increase in performances of works from the Renaissance and Baroque periods) and a canonical repertoire,230 whilst 223 On Wieniawski’s playing see, Duleba, Wieniawski, and R. Stowell, ‘Henryk Wieniawski (1835–1880): Polish, French, Franco-Belgian, German, Russian, Italian or Hungarian?’, in M. Jabłon ´ski and D. Jasin ´ska (eds.), Henryk Wieniawski and the 19th-Century Violin Schools: Techniques of Playing, Performance, Questions of Sources and Editorial Issues, Poznan ´ , Henryk Wieniawski Musical Society, 2006, pp. 9–28. 224 B. Schwarz and Z. Chechlin ´ska, ‘Henryk [Henri] Wieniawski’, at Grove Online (accessed 2 March 2009). 225 Auer, My Long Life, pp. 32–5, 114–17. 226 Schwarz, Great Masters, p. 421; L. Auer, Violin Playing as I Teach It, New York, Stokes, 1921; repr. New York, Dover, 1980, p. 23. On the rivalry between Franco-Belgian and German schools in general, see Milsom, Violin Performance, pp. 25–7. 227 L. Ginsburg, Ysaÿe, trans. X. M. Danko, ed. H. R. Axelrod, Neptune City, NJ, Paganiniana, 1980, pp. 19–31. 228 Ysäye, interviewed in F. H. Martens, Violin Mastery: Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers, New York, F. A. Stokes, 1919, pp. 3–4. 229 Flesch, Memoirs, p. 79; Ginsburg, Ysaÿe, pp. 19–31, 35, 41, 45, 270–1, 356–82, 491–2. 230 Weber, ‘The rise of the classical repertoire’, pp. 372–4. On F.-J. Fétis’s earlier Concerts historiques at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1830s, a prototype for this tendency, see K. Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 22–5.
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Ex. 26.14. César Franck, Violin Sonata, from fourth movement
orchestras became national institutions rather than private societies. The most important new orchestras were the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra (1853), the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra (1855), the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester (1858), the Pasdeloup Orchestra in Paris (1861), the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra (1864), the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich (1868), Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra (1870), Concerts Colonne in Paris (1873), Berne Symphony Orchestra (1877), Boston Symphony Orchestra (1881), Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris (1881), Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (1882), Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra (1882), St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra (1882), Detroit Symphony Orchestra (1887), Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra (1887) and Concertgebouw Orchestra (1888). The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra had been founded as the Philharmonische Akademie in 1842 with just a few annual concerts; after a
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quiet period between 1848 and 1859,231 the opera director Carl Eckert started a series of subscription concerts which has continued through to the present day.232 From the second season, they were conducted by Otto Dessoff, under whom they played (uncharacteristically for the time) a large number of world or Vienna premieres.233 Desoff’s interpretations differed considerably from others of his time, in terms of highly extended pauses and a massive dynamic range, as well as some very slow tempos. Hans Richter directed the subscription concerts from 1875 to 1898, a period which has been described variously as the ‘full flowering’ or ‘golden era’ of the orchestra. He described his ideal as being guided by the orchestra and its individuality, rather than subjugating it as if with a whip. By 1884, it had expanded to ninety players.234 Liszt regularly conducted the relatively small court orchestra at Weimar (see the Table 26.1 for the size in 1851),235 performing numerous Beethoven symphonies and staged performances of Wagner operas.236 His conducting was of mixed quality, employing various body signals to signify nuances, colours and rubato, and describing arc-like shapes with the bow, but lacking some basic technique.237 He deeply opposed metronomic tempos, which he said led to a situation whereby ‘the letter killeth the spirit’,238 and used symbols R . . . and A . . . to indicate light tempo modifications around particular motives, as in the symphonic poem Orpheus. Some of his principles were extended further still by Wagner, who published his hugely influential tract on conducting, Über das Dirigiren, in 1869. This set down many of the principles upon which twentieth-century approaches to conducting were founded, in opposition to various existing practices he had experienced.239 Identifying a different style required for Beethoven and after than for earlier composers, he advocated the centrality of the melodic line or melos to be rendered in the manner of a singer, as well as selecting the appropriate tempo (wary of excesses of fast or slow) and its
231 See C. Hellsberg, Demokratie der Könige: Die Geschichte der Wiener Philharmoniker, Zurich, Vienna and Mainz, Schweizer, Kermayr and Scheriau & Schott, 1992, pp. 93–116, on these years. 232 Hellsberg, Demokratie der Könige, pp. 117–28. A full list of the Vienna Philharmonic’s subscription concerts from 1860 to 1901 has been compiled and is available at http://concertannals.blogspot.com/2009/ 04/wiener-philharmoniker-1860–1870.html (accessed 6 July 2009). 233 Hellsberg, Demokratie der Könige, p. 138. 234 E. Mittag, The Vienna Philharmonic, trans. J. R. L. Orange and G. Morice, Vienna, Gerlach & Wiedling, 1950, pp. 26–33. Koury, Orchestral Performance, p. 141. 235 On this and earlier and later forces, see Koury, Orchestral Performance, p. 134; Pohl, Franz Liszt, pp. 105, 188–9; Walker, The Weimar Years, pp. 124, 161–2, 418. 236 See Pace, ‘Conventions, genres, practices’, pp. 95–6 for more on Liszt’s performances of Beethoven, and Walker, The Weimar Years, pp. 112–34 for his efforts on behalf of Wagner. 237 Walker, The Weimar Years, pp. 276–9. See Bowen, ‘The rise of conducting’, pp. 108–10, on Liszt’s theories of conducting and the rather mixed results of their application. 238 La Mara, Letters 1, pp. 175–6. See also Pohl, Franz Liszt, p. 18. 239 See, however, Wagner on Conducting, pp. 5, 15–17, for Wagner’s admiring comments on Habeneck and French orchestras in general.
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Ex. 26.15. Wagner, Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, bars 89–90, 97–8.
modification according to the qualities of individual sections of a work.240 Wagner left detailed comments on various Beethoven symphonies as well as for the overture to his own Die Meistersinger.241 He wished the movement to begin with a vigorous 4/4 beat, pushing ahead in bars 89–90, whilst for the second theme in E, the conductor should hold back the tempo (in the manner of ‘a somewhat grave 4/4 time’) but lend the music a ‘passionate, almost hasty character’ (Ex. 26.15). Bülow was also as central a figure as a conductor as a pianist during this period. Beginning his career in Berlin, and moving on to work in Leipzig, Munich and elsewhere, he focused upon the music of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner242 (giving the premieres of Tristan and Die Meistersinger in 1865 and 1868).243 Whilst he described his conducting in Napoleonic heroic terms,244 it was noted by others for similar qualities to his piano playing;245 he also conducted without a score. He directed the Meiningen Court Orchestra from 1880 to 1884, taking them to a new level of renown and in the process establishing a new orchestral practice.246 Bülow would give as many as six rehearsals per concert including sectionals, and took great care to synchronise dynamics, bow strokes and articulation amongst the players;247 he also retained the practice of having higher strings standing.248 He devoted the whole of the
240 Wagner on Conducting, pp. 17–28, 39–66; C. Fifield, ‘Conducting Wagner: the search for Melos’, in B. Millington and S. Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 1–14. 241 Wagner on Conducting, pp. 15–18, 25–8, 35–8, 42–3, 92–100. 242 For Bülow’s signature featuring the names of these three composers, see H. von Bülow, Briefe, ed. M. von Bülow, 7 vols., Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1898–1908, vol. 3, p. 439. 243 See A. Walker, Hans von Bülow: A Life and Times, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 83–160; Haas, Bülow, pp. 144–79. 244 Hinrichsen, Bülow, p. 86. 245 See Pohl, ‘Drei Musikaufführungen unter Hans von Bülows Leitung in Karlsruhe (1873)’, in Pohl, Liszt, p. 325; The Letters of Franz Liszt to Olga von Meyendorff 1871–1886 in the Mildred Bliss Collection at Dumbarton Oakes, trans. W. R. Tyler, Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1979, p. 344; W. Damrosch, My Musical Life, New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1930, pp. 78–9. 246 On Bülow’s time in Meiningen, see above all Südthüringer Forschungen. Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Meiningens, Meiningen: Staatliche Museen Meiningen, 1991, and also Haas, Bülow, pp. 199–227. 247 S. Avins, ‘Performing Brahms’s music: clues from his letters’, in M. Musgrave and B. D. Sherman, Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 19. Bülow’s ‘Meiningen Principles’ were laid down in an 1880 article reproduced in part in Bülow, Briefe 6, p. 36 n. 2, and Haas, Bülow, p. 204. 248 E. Hanslick, ‘The Meiningen court orchestra’, in Hanslick, Music Criticisms 1846–99, trans. and ed. H. Pleasants, London, Penguin, 1950, p. 234.
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1880–1 concert season to Beethoven’s music, and also developed a very strong relationship with the music of Brahms.249 Bülow is also credited with generating widespread acclaim for the Berlin Philharmonic, which was founded in 1882 by a breakaway group of fifty-four players from the Bilsesche Kapelle, run from 1867 to 1882 by Benjamin Bilse.250 The Berlin Philharmonic began giving a series of ‘Philharmonic Concerts’ conducted by Franz Wüllner, featuring important symphonic works, subscription concerts conducted by Joachim and Klindworth, and some popular concerts as well. They quickly flourished, with the help of major private contributions, giving 50 concerts (with 110 rehearsals) in the 1883–84 season, and a total of 20 subscription concerts in the 1884–85 season, though this fell to 12 in the next two seasons.251 Joachim became their Principal Conductor in 1884, followed by Bülow in 1887, who introduced public general rehearsals and gave didactic speeches from the podium to the audience. Whilst reactions to the latter were mixed, concerts sold out during his tenure, with thousands of people turned away.252 The establishment of this orchestra reflected wider growth in the city, whose population increased from 400, 000 in 1848 to four million in 1914; and Berlin was home to a range of major banks which exerted commanding power over German industry.253
Bruckner and Brahms in late nineteenth-century Vienna The two most enduring composers based in Vienna from the 1860s to the 1890s were Anton Bruckner and Johannes Brahms, bitter rivals within a charged critical climate in which the ‘War of the Romantics’ continued to be fought, generally to the benefit of Brahms. Bruckner’s formative musical experiences derived from the organ, military bands and dance orchestras;254 he described the Trio of the Fourth Symphony as a dance tune played to hunters during their meal.255 Bruckner had mixed experiences at first with the Vienna Philharmonic, with various rejections, hostility from the players, or even walk-outs from the 249 Hinrichsen, Bülow, p. 62; for the important Brahms programmes given by the orchestra in 1882, see R. and K. Hoffmann, Brahms als Pianist und Dirigent. Chronologie seines Wirkens als Interpret, Tutzing, Schneider, 2006, pp. 207–8. 250 W. Stresemann, The Berlin Philharmonic from Bülow to Karajan: Home and History of a World-Famous Orchestra, trans. J. Stresemann, Berlin, Stapp, 1979, pp. 37–40; P. Muck, Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester, Erster Band: 1882–1922, Tutzing, Schneider, 1982. On the Bilsesche Kapelle in 1870, see Fay, Music Study in Germany, pp. 42–3. 251 Stresemann, Berlin Philharmonic, pp. 40–2. 252 Ibid. pp. 47–56; Muck, Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester, vol. 1, pp. 95–160. 253 G. Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, trans. M. Jackson, London, Pimlico, 1996, pp. 200–1. 254 C. Howie, Anton Bruckner: A Documentary Biography, vol. 1: From Ansfelden to Vienna, Lewiston, NY, Edwin Mellen, 2002 (hereafter simply Bruckner 1, likewise Bruckner 2 for Howie, Anton Bruckner: A Documentary Biography, vol. 2: Trial, Tribulation and Triumph in Vienna), pp. 7, 67, 122, 172, 194, 211–12, 230–1. 255 Howie, Bruckner 2, p. 335.
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audience (from the Third in 1877);256 this prompted him to make cuts and other changes, one reason for the often bewildering number of versions of his works.257 In general, the first published versions of his works have more detailed indications of tempo, dynamics and expression than the manuscripts, as Bruckner would revise writing he felt to be impractical or misleading. He was also very concerned to be clear about his tempos and their modifications (though he wrote in one letter that many important details, as well as tempo modifications, are not indicated in the score).258 Furthermore, varying conceptions of Bruckner as treating the orchestra like an organ, or alternatively as a Wagnerian symphonist (a view that was especially prevalent during the Third Reich), may affect one’s approach to performance.259 Bruckner’s organ-playing was described by August Stradal as ‘monumental’ with ‘no false sentimentality, no daintiness, no fancy touches played purely for special effect’.260 This sort of musical ideal seems to have informed his wishes for his orchestral music as well: he implored Felix Mottl to extend the dynamic range and adopt a slow, solemn tempo in the funeral music (in memoriam to Wagner) for tubas and horns in the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony261 (Ex. 26.16). Similarly, Bruckner wanted practically as slow a tempo as possible for the Sanctus from his E minor Mass at an 1885 performance.262 Letters between Bruckner and Felix Weingartner also suggest that he liked the large string section of the Vienna orchestra.263 Brahms’s twenty-four orchestral works rarely extend beyond the forces common in the first half of the century, but there is some debate about his preferred size of string section, on the basis that he had an equally strong association with the Meiningen Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.264 The arguments for his preferences are too intricate to do justice to here;265 I maintain 256 A. Harrandt, ‘Bruckner in Vienna’, trans. J. Williamson, in J. Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 30–1. 257 D. Watson, Bruckner, London, Dent, 1975, pp. 34, 61–4; B. M. Korstvedt, ‘Bruckner editions: the revolution revisited’, in Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, pp. 121–37. 258 See Korstvedt, ‘Bruckner editions’ and Williamson, ‘Conductors and Bruckner’, in Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, pp. 135, 233. 259 See J. Horton, ‘Bruckner and the symphony orchestra’, in Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, pp. 139–40, also C. Brüstle, ‘The musical image of Bruckner’, in Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, pp. 244–60, and L. Botstein: ‘Music and ideology: thoughts on Bruckner’, Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996), 5–9. 260 S. Johnson, Bruckner Remembered, London, Faber, 1998, p. 74. 261 Howie, Bruckner 2, pp. 463–4. 262 Howie, Bruckner 1, pp. 174–5; Bruckner 2, p. 481. 263 Howie, Bruckner 2, pp. 620–2, 624. 264 For a highly partisan comparison, see Hanslick, ‘The Meiningen court orchestra’, p. 233. 265 Robert Pascall and Styra Avins argue for Brahms’s preferences for smaller and larger orchestras respectively. R. Pascall, Playing Brahms: A Study in 19th-Century Performance Practice, University of Nottingham, 1991, pp. 11–12; Avins, ‘Performing Brahms’s music: clues from his letters’, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, pp. 11–47. For a further detailed critical examination of the evidence, see I. Pace, Brahms Performance Practice: Documentary, Analytic and Interpretive Approaches, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011.
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Ex. 26.16. Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, Adagio. Funeral Music
that Brahms seems probably to have favoured a larger orchestra for his Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies in particular, though he could equally be happy with the works played with smaller forces when the playing was of the standard produced at Meiningen.
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Ex. 26.17. Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 119 No. 1
Brahms was not fond of the metronome and left few markings; some evidence suggests a general preference for moderate tempos, though with exceptions such as the Intermezzo Op. 119 No. 1 (Ex. 26.17), which he told Clara could hardly be played slowly enough.266 However, performances of the symphonies have been demonstrated to have slowed progressively since Brahms’s death, though he himself wrote that a ‘normal person’ would take a different tempo ‘every week’.267 Other documents suggest that he desired and executed a fair amount of tempo flexibility and nuancing, though was critical of both Bülow’s use of mannered rhetorical pauses and Richter’s inflexibility in both tempo and phrasing.268 Of younger conductors, Brahms had kind words about both Fritz Steinbach and Felix Weingartner, but seems especially to have favoured the former’s flexible approach.269 A crucial aspect of performance practice in Brahms concerns the execution of his numerous two-note slurs. In a letter to Joachim of 1879, Brahms made clear that he believed that the second note in such slurs should be shortened (though not in longer slurs);270 this is corroborated in accounts by Florence May, Charles Villiers Stanford and Siegfried Ochs,271 as well as in Steinbach’s 266 See B. D. Sherman, ‘Metronome marks, timings, and other period evidence’, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, pp. 99–130; Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896, ed. B. Litzmann, 2 vols., Hildesheim, Olms, 1989, vol. 2, p. 513. 267 See W. Frisch, Brahms: The Four Symphonies, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 169–73, and Sherman, ‘Metronome marks’, p. 123. 268 See in particular R. Pascall and P. Weller, ‘Flexible tempo and nuancing in orchestral music: understanding Brahms’s view of interpretation in his Second Piano Concerto and Fourth Symphony’, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, pp. 220–43; also Johannes Brahms, Briefwechsel, 2nd edn, 16 vols., Leipzig, Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908–1922, vol. 1, pp. 145–6. 269 See W. Frisch, ‘In search of Brahms’s First Symphony: Steinbach, the Meiningen tradition, and the recordings of Hermann Abendroth’, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, pp. 277–301; S. Avins, Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 726; Brahms, Briefwechsel, vol. 12, p. 169. For a more detailed consideration of Brahms’s relative views on Steinbach and Weingartner, drawing upon the available evidence, see Pace, Brahms Performance Practice. 270 Brahms, Briefwechsel, vol. 6, p. 168. 271 F. May, The Life of Johannes Brahms, 2 vols., London, Arnold, 1905, vol. 1, p. 19; Stanford, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, p. 57; S. Ochs, ‘A German Requiem to words of Holy Scripture for soloists, choir and orchestra (organ ab libitum), from Der deutsche Gesangverein’, trans. M. Musgrave, in Musgrave and Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms, p. 160.
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Ex. 26.18a. Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, opening of seventh movement, ‘Selig sind die Toten’
Ex. 26.18b. Brahms, String Quartet in C minor Op. 51 No. 1, third movement.
markings for the symphonies,272 in which almost all two-note slurs are rewritten with the second note shortened. The two-note slur is a recurrent feature of much of Brahms’s output (see for example the passages in Ex. 26.18, some of which would then suggest faster tempos than are commonplace).273
272 A great many of these are illustrated in W. Blume (ed.), Brahms in der Meininger Tradition: Seine Sinfonien und Haydn-Variationen in der Bezeichnung von Fritz Steinbach, Stuttgart, Suhrkamp, 1933. 273 Other prominent examples would include the fifth variation of Book 1 of the Paganini Variations, Op. 35, the opening of the Second Symphony, the Klavierstück Op. 118 No. 2 in A major, or the opening of the Clarinet Sonata Op. 120, No. 1.
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Ex. 26.18c. Brahms, Violin Concerto, first movement, bars 347–52, 460–3, solo part
Other important considerations for Brahms performance include his preferences for pianos: he made clear his liking for those of Streicher, though also played Bösendorfers in most of his concerts in Vienna, whilst in the last fifteen years of his life he became enthusiastic about Bechsteins and Steinways, requesting one or other of these for performances of his piano concertos.274 He also favoured natural over valved horns, telling Ochs in this context that ‘The natural is always the artistic’,275 and took an interest in the ‘reform flute’ (with a modified non-Boehm simple system) developed by Maximilian Schwedler, which produced a powerful and reedy sonority.276
The Rubinsteins and the transformation of Russian musical life A general atmosphere of paranoia in Russia after 1848, with increased censorship, executions and control over education, came to a head following defeat at the hands of Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853–56) and increased isolation. Tsar Alexander II reformed an antiquated political and economic structure, including the phasing out of serfdom, beginning in 1861.277 Musical life had earlier been dominated by Italian and French opera, in large measure directed by foreign musicians; the emergence of Russian-language operas from the 1830s onwards did little to change this situation,278 though there was a private Symphonic Society organised by Count Matvey Wielhorski from 1841, and a symphonic concert series conducted by Karl Schuberth at the
274 G. S. Bozarth and S. H. Brady, ‘Brahms’s pianos’, in W. Frisch (ed.), Brahms and his World, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 56, 58–9, 61, 64 n. 56; Clara Schumann–Brahms Briefe, I, 471; Avins, Life and Letters, pp. 417, 586–7; Brahms, Briefwechsel, vol. 7, p. 208. 275 S. Ochs, Geschehenes Gesehenes, Leipzig, Grethlein, 1922, pp. 297–8. 276 Brown, The Early Flute, p. 30. 277 H. Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917, Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 274–9, 319–31, 334–48; G. L. Freeze, ‘Reform and counter reform 1855–1890’, in G. L. Freeze (ed.), Russia: A History, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 171–2. 278 J. Maes, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. A. J. and E. Pomerans, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, pp, 14–17, 30; S. Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880: An Anthology, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. xvi (hereafter Russians on Russian Music I).
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Peterschule in St Petersburg from 1842, as well as a tradition of amateur chamber music and numerous visits by prominent foreign musicians.279 Anton Rubinstein, who had spent some of his childhood in Germany, attacked the perceived backwardness of Russian musical life in a Viennese journal in 1855, to much criticism.280 He was to make a profound change through his foundation of the Russian Musical Society (Russkoe Muzykal’noe Obshchestvo or RMO) in St Petersburg in 1859,281 who performed at first a mostly Germanic orchestral and chamber repertoire, and the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1862, made possible after some limited relaxation of earlier restrictions upon higher education after 1855,282 and with the support of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. The first faculty was highly international, including Rubinstein himself, Leschetizky, Anton Gerke and Alexander Dreyschock on piano, Wieniawski on violin, and Schuberth and Karl Davidov on cello.283 The teaching of both Rubinstein and Leschetizky laid the foundations of two Russian piano schools: the former stressed tone, rhythm and general musicianship (over technique),284 the latter a quiet demeanour, cantabile playing, a mixture of curved fingers and some wrist motion, chords played close to the keys, displacement between melody and accompaniment, judicious use of the pedal, sustained bass lines and flexibility of tempo and rhythm.285 Wieniawski, and after him Auer, continued the influence of the Franco-Belgian school in Russia, following on from Rode, Lafont, de Bériot and Vieuxtemps.286 Davidov, who succeeded Schuberth in 1863, taught an approach to cello tone derived from listening to violinists.287 279 R. Schumann, ‘Russian Customs’, in Clara/Robert Marriage Diaries, p. 307; R. C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1981, p. 11; Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, pp. 41–3. See also R. Stites, ‘The domestic muse: music at home in the twilight of serfdom’, in A. B. Wachtel (ed.), Intersections and Transpositions: Russian Music, Literature, and Society, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1998, pp. 187–205. 280 Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, pp. 64–73. See also Chapter 5 of the present volume. 281 Taylor, Rubinstein, p. 886. See also L. Sargeant, ‘A new class of people: the conservatoire and musical professionalization in Russia, 1861–1917’, Music & Letters, 85/1 (2004), 41–61. 282 Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, pp. 357–8; T. Chapman, Imperial Russia, 1801–1905, New York and London, Routledge, 2001, p. 102. 283 Gerig, Famous Pianists, p. 272; C. Barnes (trans. and ed.), Russian Piano School: Russian Pianists and Moscow Conservatoire Professors on the Art of the Piano, London, Kahn & Averill, 2007, pp. xv–xvi; also the history on the conservatoire’s own website: http://eng.conservatory.ru/historyeng.htm (accessed 17 March 2009); L. Kovnatskaya, ‘St Petersburg’ at Grove Online (accessed 22 March 2009). For a list of professors at the conservatoire, see Taylor, Rubinstein, p. 101. 284 See Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 334–8 for more on Rubinstein’s teaching in his later years in particular. 285 The primary treatise is M. Brée, The Leschetizky Method: A Guide to Fine and Correct Piano Playing (1902), trans. A. Elson, New York, Dover, 1997; see also M. Prentner, Leschetizky’s Fundamental Principles of Piano Technique (1903), New York, Dover, 2005, and E. Newcomb, Leschetizky as I Knew Him, New York and London, Appleton, 1921. 286 See Stowell, ‘Wieniawski’, p. 15, n. 29. 287 Bowen, Free Artist, p. 170; E. Raychev, ‘The virtuoso cellist-composers from Luigi Boccherini to David Popper: A review of their lives and works’, DMA thesis, Florida State University (2003), pp. 73, 76–7.
Instrumental performance in the nineteenth century
689
Nationalistically minded composers were from the outset uniformly opposed to the Conservatoire, and its perceived Germanic bias.288 A rival Free School of Music, in which Balakirev was closely involved, was established in the city in 1862.289 The School hosted a series of concerts featuring first Classical repertoire, then foreign figures neglected by the RMO, including Schumann, Berlioz and Liszt,290 towards the establishment of a nationalistically inclined flavour of programming and the concept of the ‘Mighty Handful’ or kuchka.291 By 1867, Rubinstein had resigned from both the RMO and the Conservatoire (weary of constant tensions);292 Balakirev took over the conducting of the RMO concerts the same year, and steered their programming in a similar direction.293 Dismissed two years later, he returned to the Free School in 1869 and pursued an ‘anti-RMO’ programming policy with increased fervour, eschewing almost all pre-nineteenth-century music, or any of a purportedly conservative tendency favoured by Rubinstein, though this policy in turn was undermined by a greater inclusion of the Neudeutsche Schule and Russian music by the RMO.294 Nikolai Rubinstein set up a branch of the RMO in Moscow in 1860, and a second conservatoire in the city in 1866, of which he was the first director.295 His early faculty included Anton Door and Karl Klindworth for piano, Ferdinand Laub for violin and Bernhard Cossman for cello,296 the latter three of whom had worked with Liszt in Weimar. Less dogmatic than his brother, Nikolai could entertain better relations with the kuchka faction.297 The initial standard of performance was apparently not high, but this would change in later eras.298 The teaching of Nikolai Zverev, Paul Pabst, Alexander
288 See Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, pp. 73–85, 89–91 for some of the key articles; also Maes, A History of Russian Music, pp. 38–41; Taylor, Rubinstein, pp. 77–81; Ridenour, Russian Music, p. 90. 289 E. Garden, Balakirev: A Critical Study of his Life and Music, London, Faber, 1967, pp. 47–8, 81. 290 See César Cui’s reviews in Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, pp. 85–9, 178–83. 291 This was a term coined by Vladimir Stasov for Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin, Cui and RimskyKorsakov after a Free School concert in 1867. See Stasov, ‘Mr Balakirev’s Slav concert’, St Petersburg Bulletin, 13 May 1867, no. 130, in Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, pp. 183–6; Maes, A History of Russian Music, pp. 42–3. See also Chapter 5 of the present volume. 292 Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 217–18. 293 Garden, Balakirev, pp. 82–6; Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, pp. 186–95. 294 Ridenour, Russian Music, pp. 172–7, 180–4. 295 See Campbell, Odoyevsky, pp. 157–64 for a good overview of the events from the foundation of the Moscow branch of the RMO to the opening of the Moscow Conservatoire; also Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 187–8, 200–1. 296 Barnes, Russian Piano School, p. xvi; G. A. Pribegina, Moskovskaia konservatoriia 1866–1991, Moscow, Muzyka, 1991, pp. 20–1, 32. 297 Campbell, Russians on Russian Music I, p. 91. 298 For an early account of concerts in Moscow, see Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Letters to his Family: An Autobiography, trans. G. von Meck with annotations by P. M. Young, New York, Stein & Day, 1981, p. 27; see also N. A. Minorova, Moskovskaia Konservatoriia. Istoki (The Moscow Conservatoire. Origins), Moscow, 1995, available online at www.mosconsv.ru/page.phtml?11134 (accessed 24 June 2009), ch. 3, pt. I; on the transformations in both cities as noticed by Berlioz, Wagner and Bülow, see Cairns, Berlioz 1, pp. 757–66; R. Bartlett, Wagner and Russia, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 18–35; Bülow, Briefe 3, p. 587.
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Siloti and Vasilii Safonov on piano, and Adolph Brodsky and Ivan Hřimaly on violin, would have immeasurable effect upon twentieth-century performance schools headed by their students.299 After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, his son moved the country away from German sympathies towards a cultural ‘Russification’, especially in St Petersburg, to inspire a new sense of ‘belonging’; this led to increased discrimination against other citizens, especially Jews, who were falsely blamed for the assassination.300 Rubinstein returned to run the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1886 (it had previously been directed by Mikhail Azanchevsky, during whose time a certain rapprochement was achieved between opposing factions by inviting Rimsky-Korsakov to teach there,301 then Davidov); ultimately fear of anti-semitism and the possibility of pogroms led him to resign for the final time in March 1891, bringing a uniquely cosmopolitan era to an end.302 During his final tenure, however, Rubinstein drove up standards through ruthless examinations, leading to dismissals, and the creation of an international competition for composers and pianists to take place in different European cities,303 a prototype for twentieth-century competitions. Some information concerning Russian orchestras can be gleaned from the writings of Rimsky-Korsakov.304 A pragmatist who believed that a composer should write idiomatically for whatever orchestra was available, one can fairly assume that the orchestras Rimsky knew were ideal for his compositions. He lists numbers of strings in present-day orchestras (though in which year is not entirely clear) as follows: Full: 16–14–12–10–8/10; Medium: 12–10–8–6–4/6; Small: 8–6–4–3–2/3 (occasionally with more strings and/or woodwind doublings).305 In his Russian Easter Overture (1887–8), Rimsky specifies string forces lying roughly between ‘Full’ and ‘Medium’: 20/12–18/10–14/8–12/8–10/6; in passages such as Ex. 26.19, the appropriate relative proportions are very important in order for the cellos and basses to be able to provide a depth of sound upon their pulsations and not be overshadowed by the horn or harp. Rimsky’s descriptions of the characteristics of different strings306 makes clear that he would have known gut strings with steel-wound gut on the violin G and viola and cello G and C, which would produce a particular timbral 299 Barnes, Russian Piano School, pp. xvi-xvii; Pribegina, Moskovskaia konservatoriia, pp. 32, 47, 52, 56. 300 G. Hosking, Russia: People & Empire: 1552–1917, London, Fontana, 1997, pp. 367–97; Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, pp. 460–1, 485–505. 301 Maes, A History of Russian Music, pp. 45, 169–70. 302 Bowen, Free Artist, pp. 299, 339–42. 303 Taylor, Rubinstein, p. 197. 304 Above all Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Principles of Orchestration, with musical examples drawn from his own works, ed. M. Steinberg, trans. E. Agate, London, Russian Music Agency, 1911, and My Musical Life, trans. J. A. Joffe, London, Eulenburg, 1974. 305 Rimsky-Korsakov, Principles of Orchestration, p. 6. 306 Ibid., p. 9.
Instrumental performance in the nineteenth century
Ex. 26.19 Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian Easter Overture
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differentiation in the opening violin solo and various other passages in Scheherazade. By 1890, there were music educational institutions not only in St Petersburg and Moscow, but also Kiev, Kharkov, Saratov, Tiflis, Odessa, and Omsk (in Siberia), though most of these were not full conservatoires.307 Russian schools of performance, especially on piano and violin, would come to be hugely influential in the twentieth century, especially in the charged geopolitical environment that characterised the Cold War, whilst German schools eventually declined somewhat in prominence. Whilst many of the styles entailed would certainly have become modified in the interim period,308 there is little doubt that they have roots in the particular conflation of European influences and counter-reactions that bred those schools of playing that emerged in the late nineteenth century in both St Petersburg and Moscow. 307 Rubinstein, Autobiography, pp. 110, 130–1. 308 For one view on a ‘Soviet’ style of performance, see R. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 89.
Table 26.1 Orchestral sizes in the nineteenth century Orchestra and Date
Violins Violas Cellos Basses Flutes Oboes
Clarinets Bassoons Horns
Trumpets
Trombones Tubas
Timp/perc./ other
18+18 7+6
14 3
12 3
17 2
2 2
2 2
2 2
2 0
0 0
T+P T
20+20
8
7
7
Unknown, depending on requirements of piece (often doubled)
4+4 11_11 18 12 10+10 13+13 12+12 25 15+15
3 7 4 2 10 6 8 6 8
2 10 5 2 6 6 10 6 12
2 7 5 2 4 8 8 5 8
2 2 5+picc 5 5 5 Unknown 2 2 2 2 3 3 7 7 4 3
8+8 14+14 9+8 15+15
4 8 5 10
3 8 5 13
15+12 10+10
10 7
Vienna Redoutensaal 1814 Vienna Hatwig orchestra for Schubert 1810s Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde 1810–20s Prague Conservatoire Orchestra 1820 Berlin Court Opera 1823 Dresden Court Opera 1823 Vienna Hofkapelle 1825 Vienna Concerts Spirituels 1825 Milan La Scala 1825 Paris Opéra 1826 Munich Hofkapelle 1827 Paris Societé des Concerts du Conservatoire 1828 Leipzig Gewandhaus 1831 London Philharmonic Society 1837 Leipzig Gewandhaus 1839 Paris Société des Concerts du Conservatoire 1841 Paris Pasdeloup Concerts 1841 Vienna Philharmonische Akademie 1842 St Petersburg Peterschule Orchestra 1842 Frankfurt Opera 1843 Stuttgart Court Opera 1843 Weimar Court Opera 1843 Hanover Court Opera 1843 Berlin Court Opera 1843a New York Philharmonic 1843
30
Dresden Court Opera 1844 Munich Hofkapelle 1844b
2 2
2 2
2 4
2 5 5
4 5 5
2 8 6
2 3 2
0 2 0
0 2+flugel 0
T T, hp, pno T, organ
2 2 3 7 4
2 2 4 6 4
4 4 4 8 4
2 2 2 ? 2
3 3 3 1 3
0 Serpent 0 0 Ophicleide
T T+P, kbd T, hp T, hp T
3 6 4 11
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 4 Unknown – probably similar to 1831 4 3 2 4 4
2 2
3 3
0 0
T T
4
3
0
T, pno
13 4
11 5
4 3
9
8
4
Unknown
8+8 8+8 22 7+7 14+14 22
4 4 7 3 8 6
5 4 7 4 10 4
4 4 7 3 8 5
8+8 6+6
4 2
4 3
4 3
3 3
2 4
4 3
4 6
4 4
3 4
0 0
2 T+2 P, 2 hps 2 T+2 P, 2 hps
2 2 Unknown Unknown Unknown 4 4 3+picc 2
2
2
4
2
3
0
T
4 2
4 2
4 4
4 1
4 3
0 0
2 2
2 2
2 2
4 2
4 2
3 0
1 0
T+P, 2 hps T/P, various kbd T+P T
2 2
Table 26.1 (cont.) Orchestra and Date
Violins Violas Cellos Basses Flutes Oboes
Clarinets Bassoons Horns
Trumpets
Trombones Tubas
Timp/perc./ other
Vienna Hofkapelle 1844 Paris Opéra 1845 London Philharmonic Society 1846 Berlin Court Opera 1849 Hanover Court Opera 1849 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 1849c Dresden Court Opera 1850 Weimar Court Opera 1851 Manchester Hallé Orchestra 1858 Paris Société des Concerts du Conservatoire 1859 London Philharmonic Society 1860 Vienna Philharmonic 1860 St Petersburg Philharmonic Society (Bülow) 1864 Leipzig Gewandhaus 1865 London Philharmonic Society 1870 Bayreuth Opera Orchestra 1876
6+6 12+12 15+14 27 8+8 12+12 18 5+6 10+10 15+14
2 8 10 8 3 8 5 3 6 10
2 10 9 11 4 6 5 4 5 12
3 8 9 7 3 6 5 3 5 9
3 2 5 2 2 4 2 2 4
3 2 5 2 2 4 2 2 2
4 2 5 2 2 4 2 2 4
6 4 9 4 4 5 4 4 4
4+2corn. 2 3 2 2 4 2 2+2 cornets 2+cornet
3 3 3 3 3 3 1 3 3
Oph. Oph. 0 0 0 0 0 0 Oph.
T, 2 P, 2 hp P 2 T/P T T T, hp T T+P, hp T, hp
12+12 13+12 48
8 7 12
8 7 12
8 7 ?
2 2 2 4 4 3 Doubled winds
2 4
4 6
2 4
3 3
0 Bomb
T 2 T+P
16+14 14+14
8 10
9 11
5 10
2 2 2+picc 2
2 2
2 2+cbsn
2 4
4 1
3 3
0 1
T T+3 P, 2 hp
16+16
12
12
8
4
4+bcl
4+cbsn
7
4+btpt
4+cbtbn 1cbt
2tnr, 2bst,
3 T, 8 hp
Karlsruhe Court Orchestra 1876 Paris Société des Concerts du Conservatoire 1878 Hamburg Philharmonische Gesellschaft 1878 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 1879 Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, 1880s Boston Symphony Orchestra 1881 Leipzig Gewandhaus 1881 Meiningen Court Orchestra 1882 Vienna Philharmonic 1883
18 15+14
4 10
4 15
4 10
1 1 Unknown
1
1
Unknown
25+22
16
14
10
2
2
2
2
4
2
3
?
T+?P
14+12 14+14
8 10
7 10
7 10
2+picc 2 Unknown
2
2
4
2
3
Euph.
T+P
13+11 12+10 10+? 18+18
10 8 ? 12
8 8 3 10
8 6 5 10
2 2 2 2+cbsn 4 2+picc 3+ca 3+bcl 3+cbsn 5 Unknown (total size of orchestra: c. 48 players) Unknown
2 3
3 3
1 0
T, hp T, hp
3 2 4 2 2 4 2 2 2
4+ca
St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra 1885 Meiningen Court Orchestra 1886 Concertgebouw Orchestra 1888 Boston Symphony Orchestra 1889 London Philharmonic Society 1890
16+14
12
8
10
Unknown
6+6 12+10 17+14 14+14
3 7 10 10
3 6 9 9
3 6 8 9
Unknown 2 2 3 3 2+picc 2+ca
Leipzig Gewandhaus 1890 Berlin Philharmonic 1890
18+14 17
10 6
10 6
8 5
Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra 1891 Berlin Philharmonic 1891 New York Philharmonic Society 1892
8+8 12+12 34
6 8 14
4 8 14
4 6 14
2+picc 2+ca 4 2(incl. ca) 3 3 3 3+ca 2+picc 2
2 2 2+bcl
2 2 2+cbsn
4 5 4
2(+2 cnts) 2cnts 4
3 3 3
1 1 1
2+bcl 2+bcl
2+cbsn 2+cbsn
4 4
3 3
3 3
1 1
3 2+bcl 2
3 2+cbsn 2+cbsn
6 4 4
3 3 3
3 3 4
1 1 4+bass
3 T, hp T+P, hp T+4 P, hp, organ T+P, hp 2 T/P, hp T/P, hp 2 T, hp 2 T+3 P, hp, organ
a The 1843 forces come from Berlioz. Carse also gives much smaller forces for 1844 (3+picc–2–2–2/4–2–3–1/timp+perc/2hp/8–8–6–8–4). However, forces available in 1820 and 1830 were closer to Berlioz’s figures. b A very different set of figures is given for this year by Carter and Levi (7–6–7–4/5–5–0–0/2timp + perc (number unknown)/26 total violins, 3 violas, 8 cellos, 6 basses), but this must be assumed to have been for a special occasion. A similar balance for 1827 is cited by Carse. c This is the planned ‘Grand Band’ as projected by Zeugheer Herrman in his manifesto of 1849. The string figures were minimums. Whether this corresponded with the actual forces used at this date is unclear. There was also a planned smaller orchestra of 2–2–2–2/2–2–0–0–/timp/5–5–3–3–3. See Henley and McKernan, The Original Liverpool Sound, pp. 34–5. Sources: H. P. de Boer, Concertgebouw and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Ludion, 2003); A. Carse, The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz (Cambridge, Heffer, 1946); T. Carter and E. Levi, ‘The history of the orchestra’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–21; C. Ehrlich, First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995); C. Hellsberg, Demokratie der Könige: Die Geschichte der Wiener Philharmoniker (Zurich, Vienna and Mainz, Schweizer Verlagshaus, Kermayr & Scheriau & Schott, 1992); D. Henley and V. McKernan, The Original Liverpool Sound: The Royal Liverpool Society (Liverpool University Press, 2009); J. Gibbon Huneker, The Philharmonic Society of New York and its Seventy-Fifth Anniversary (New York and London, Novello, Ewer & Co., 1917); D. J. Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century: Size, Proportions and Seating (Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1986); W. Langhans, ‘Hans von Bulow and the Meiningen Hof-Capelle in Berlin’, Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, 23/468 (1882); P. Muck, Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester. Darstellung in Dokumenten. Erster Band: 1882–1922 (Tutzing, Hans Schneider, 1982); S. Weinzierl, Beethovens Konzerträume. Raumakustik und symphonische Aufführungspraxis an der Schwelle zum modernen Konzertwesen (Frankfurt, Verlag Erwin Bochinsky, 2002); The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. and ed. D. Cairns (London: Sphere Books, 1990); Hans von Bülow to August Steyl, 30, November 1885, in Bülow, Briefe 7, p. 1; ‘Correspondenzen. Köln’, in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 9, September 1891, p. 392.
. 27 .
Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde ROBIN STOWELL
Richard Wagner (1813–83) was opera’s most revolutionary figure. Dissatisfied with existing conditions and standards, he articulated his aspirations for the genre in numerous essays and introduced several reforms, eventually establishing the Bayreuth Festival (1876) specifically for the optimum performance of his works. Tristan und Isolde (1856–65) represents the quintessence of his mature style, summing up his innovations in both theory and practice and achieving a true synthesis of words and music. This exploration of the agony and ecstasy of erotic love, with its pervasive tonal ambiguity and restless chromaticism heightened by suspensions, unresolved dissonances and sequential variation, changed the course of music history, exercising a potent influence on succeeding generations of composers; more than any other work it symbolised the end of one era and the start of another.
Genesis: theory into practice After the completion of Lohengrin (1848) Wagner composed no more music until his sketches for Das Rheingold (1853). The years between, though troubled ones (he was exiled from the German states until the early 1860s), were not creatively fallow. He contemplated his planned operas: Siegfrieds Tod (eventually Der Ring), Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal, as well as others eventually abandoned, and he wrote essays to explain why and how dramatic music should be developed from traditional ‘grand opera’ to what he termed ‘music drama’.1 These essays proved to be convenient progress benchmarks for him, even though, in the creative event, he sometimes bypassed them.2 Wagner’s central theory of opera argues for the resources of drama, poetry, instrumental music, song, acting, gesture, costumes and scenery to be reunited
1 None of his operas is so subtitled, however. Der Ring is labelled a ‘Stage Festival Play’, Parsifal a ‘Stage Dedication Festival Play’, and Tristan an ‘Action’ [Handlung] or ‘Drama’. Die Meistersinger has no such subtitle. 2 The most important of Wagner’s Zurich reappraisals of opera are: Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849), Oper und Drama (1850–1), and Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (1851).
[696]
Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
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to revive Classical Greek concepts and for the new art-work to be created by a fellowship of artists representative of the entire community. His dramathrough-music differed from other contemporary opera, in which ‘a means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the expression (the drama) has been made a means’;3 by contrast, Wagner aimed to present archetypal situations as experienced by the characters, and to this end music was a means. Wagner deemed mythology to be the ideal source for his subject matter, the profundity of which often had a quasi-religious significance.4 He replaced the stage spectacle and stiffness of ‘Romantic Grand Opera’5 with a more flexible form of music drama that incorporated interior spiritual action. Recitatives were ousted in favour of a ceaseless melodic line (as much for the orchestra as for voices), which occasionally became more tense and lofty for the equivalent of an aria or ensemble. A new form of free verse setting (Versmelodie) was employed, in which the melody grows organically out of the verse and is organised according to Stabreim (‘stem rhyme’), characterised by its use of alliteration. The characters were given time to respond fully – and normally independently6 – to dramatic events, which were linked by lengthy, coherent spans of ‘symphonic’ music. Melodische Momente – recurrent, developing reminiscence motives (labelled by Wagner’s disciples Leitmotiven) – were employed to recall events, situations and emotions, or simply to provide unity. Because the drama in Tristan unfolds on a metaphysical plane, its Leitmotiven tend to represent several concepts rather than just one (those associated with ‘night’ and ‘day’ are exceptions), some in the mind and others more concrete and real. For example, the motives of the work’s very first phrase recur throughout in various guises and representations (‘Tristan’; ‘Tristan’s suffering’; ‘grief’; ‘the confession’, ‘Isolde’s revenge’, ‘Isolde’s curse’ et al.), the ominous deathportending motive (Act 1 scene 4) returns at significant junctures, as does also the so-called ‘Tristan’ chord (bar 2) (representing the love potion, love itself, bliss,
3 R. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd edn, 10 vols., Leipzig, E. W. Fritzsch, 1887–8, vol. 3, p. 231. 4 The reader is referred for more detailed discussion to R. Scruton, Death-devoted Heart. Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Oxford University Press, 2004. For Scruton, Tristan embodies a religious idea – ‘that sacrifice is the price of redemption’ (p. 159) – but this redemption ‘needs no God to accomplish it. . . . Through their sacrifice’, Tristan and Isolde ‘restore belief in our human potential and renew in us the will to live’ (p. 194). 5 Lohengrin is so subtitled. 6 In Tristan the lovers express their passion towards the end of Act 1 scene 5, first in alternating fragments of phrases, then, contrary to Wagner’s earlier theoretical principles that more than one character should not sing at the same time, together. They also sing in duo, for example, in their love duet ‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe’ and in ‘O ew’ge Nacht’ in Act 2 scene 2. Interestingly, Wagner also relaxed this particular theory at one moment in Die Walküre, often in Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, and subsequently admitted the vocal ensemble when dramatically appropriate.
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rapture, betrayal as the obverse of love, as well as other related emotions), which also resonates beyond Tristan in Wagner’s oeuvre.7 Several of Tristan’s motives are founded on semitone movement, most notably the ‘Wound’ motive. Wagner also skilfully interweaves several motives for dramatic ends, as in Act 3, where the dazed Tristan ruminates on his past and the tragic circumstances of his birth from which he derives his name, his love for Isolde, the dichotomy of day and night and how the day brought sorrow and the night rapture. At this point Wagner combines the motives of the Wound, Day, the Potion and two sections of the Shepherd’s pipe theme in striking counterpoint with psychological intent. The eventual outcome is a shrill version of the pipe tune, ascending, while the other motives descend. Wagner’s imagery in Tristan is also enriched by detailed orchestral coloration. In Tristan and Isolde’s long ‘Tagesgespräch’ duet (Act 2), for example, their discourse’s change from the atmosphere of day as against night is closely reflected in Wagner’s vivid orchestral palette, even though these contrasting atmospheres are founded on almost identical musical material. The seeds for Tristan were probably sown as early as 1847, when Wagner first became acquainted with the Tristan legend in Gottfried von Strassburg’s epic poem. Unfinished at his death (1210), Gottfried’s Tristan was dovetailed with an earlier Norman version by Thomas the Breton (Roman de Tristan), probably by Hermann Kurtz, whose German translation of the complete story, published in 1847, was Wagner’s source.8 Daverio describes Gottfried as ‘an elegant and mellifluous versifier whose graceful rhymes and fondness for rhetorical devices such as chiasmus left their mark on Wagner’s text’.9 Wagner’s first recorded mention of Tristan was in a letter to Liszt of 16 December 1854. He remarked: ‘As I have never in my life tasted the true joy of love, I will set up a memorial to this most lovely of all dreams, in which from first to last this love shall for once be satisfied utterly.’10 Wagner combined three of Gottfried’s characters into that of the courtier Melot and introduced the subsidiary characters of the sailor, shepherd and steersman. He also avidly read the writings of the celebrated German philosophers Hegel, Schelling, Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche, and especially Schopenhauer. He informed Liszt that Schopenhauer’s philosophy had entered his ‘lonely life like a gift from Heaven . . . What charlatans all these Hegels etc. are
7 It is used also in Götterdämmerung and Parsifal. For a detailed analysis of this chord’s function in Tristan, see R. Bailey (ed.), Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from ‘Tristan und Isolde’, New York, Norton, 1985. 8 For a detailed description of the genesis of Tristan see R. Bailey, The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and a Study of Wagner’s Sketches and Drafts for the First Act, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1969. 9 J. Daverio, ‘Tristan und Isolde: essence and appearance’, in T. S. Grey (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 130. 10 In R. L. Jacobs, Wagner, 2nd edn, London, Dent, 1974, p. 68.
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beside him!’11 Particularly significant for the conception of Tristan was the chapter on ‘the metaphysics of sexual love’ in Schopenhauer’s death-wishful Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, the absorption of which, combined with his own melancholy, had resulted in Wagner’s ‘attempt to find an ecstatic expression of the profoundest elements’ in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.12 Schopenhauer ‘believed that suffering and striving were inevitable in this life, that the only escape lay in denial of the will, in attaining the state of Nirvana, or cessation of individual existence’.13 Wagner modified slightly Schopenhauer’s views, mirroring also the ‘ideological content, rhetorical thrust, and poetic imagery’ of early German Romantic writers such as the poet Friedrich Novalis (Hymnen an die Nacht) and the novelist Friedrich Schlegel (Lucinde) and giving ‘metaphysical dignity to a quintessentially physical phenomenon: sexual love’.14 Tristan and Isolde ‘merge their identities in the realm of inner consciousness, the ultimate reality, symbolized by “death” and “night” ’.15 The existence of two worlds, opposed to each other but in their profoundest sense a unity, was a consistent factor in German (and Wagner’s) thought, and the symbolic language in Tristan reflects this concept of dualism in, for example, the contrasts of life and death, hate and love, and day and night. In April 1857, the Wagners, whose marriage was unstable,16 moved to live in a house (the ‘Asyl’) on the Zurich estate of the wealthy silk merchant Otto Wesendonck and his wife Mathilde, whom they had befriended in 1852. Having finished Act 2 of Siegfried by 9 August 1857, Wagner gave all his energies to the scenario, and then the libretto, of Tristan, completing the libretto on 18 September 1857. Like Siegfried, but unlike his other music dramas, each act of Tristan was drafted and completed in sequence before the next was even sketched; and each act was engraved separately in sequence because Breitkopf & Härtel was eager to publish the work quickly. Wagner completed his fair-copy score of Act 1 on 3 April 1858 in Zurich, of Act 2 on 18 March 1859 in Venice, and of Act 3 on 6 August 1859 in Lucerne. Although he had informed Liszt that Tristan would be ready for production in Strasbourg in the summer of 1858, Wagner actually composed most of the 11 Wagner, letter to Liszt, 16 December 1854, in S. Spencer and B. Millington (eds.), Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, London, Dent, 1988, p. 323. 12 A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Leipzig, 1818–19, 2nd enlarged edn, 1844, 3rd edn, 1859, trans. E. F. J. Payne as The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., New York, Dover, 1966; Wagner, letter to Liszt, 16 December 1854, in Spencer and Millington (eds.), Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, p. 323. 13 In B. Millington (ed.), The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, New York, Schirmer, 1992, p. 300. 14 Daverio, ‘Tristan und Isolde’, pp. 122–3. 15 In Millington (ed.), The Wagner Compendium, p. 300. 16 Minna already had a daughter from an earlier affair, and she once left Wagner for another man. She also favoured Wagner pursuing a conducting rather than composing career, not least to enable them to extricate themselves from debt.
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love music of Act 2 and King Marke’s soliloquy alone in Venice (from August 1858), after the end of his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck.17 Many believe that the influence of this relationship, which ended with Wagner’s enforced removal from ‘Asyl’ (1858), lent a special colour to the work’s intimate expression, for Tristan embodies not only Wagner’s guilt in the face of Otto Wesendonck but also his feelings about the three most important women in his life – Minna Wagner (from whom he was separating), Mathilde and Cosima von Bülow (his future wife). Significantly, too, Tristan is not only a love story but also one of betrayal – all the cast except Marke have betrayed somebody. Practising what he preached,18 Wagner pruned Kurtz’s translation of Gottfried’s poem severely, establishing the ‘three love scenes’ as the pillars of his libretto’s design.19 He explained (1860): ‘I immersed myself in the depths of the psyche and from this inmost centre of the world boldly constructed an external form . . . whereas the writer of a historical text is obliged to give a detailed exposition of the external events of his plot obscuring any revelation of its inner motives, in my case the detailed exposition is of just those motives and only those. Life and death, the import and existence of the external world here depend entirely upon inner psychic events. The whole affecting story is the outcome of a soul’s inmost need, and it comes to light as reflected from within.’20 The earliest surviving musical sketches for Tristan date from 19 December 1856. While they reveal that Wagner’s music was not initially associated with specific words, his eventual use of them confirms that they were closely linked with a poetic idea or sentiment, focusing on love and desire. And, as Daverio concedes, ‘they lend some credence to attempts by scholars such as Carolyn Abbate to deconstruct the “myth” that Tristan contains Wagner’s “least text-bound music” and is in that way also his most symphonic or musically “absolute” ’.21 However, despite some passages in which music reigns supreme (for example, sections of the love scene in Act 2 and Isolde’s ‘Transfiguration’ in Act 3),
17 Minna had fallen ill and went elsewhere for a health cure. The two tried to revive their marriage in Paris late in 1859, but with little success. 18 For detailed discussion of Wagner’s theories, see D. Borchmeyer, Das Theater Richard Wagners. Idee – Dichtung – Wirkung, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1982, trans. S. Spencer as Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, Oxford University Press, 1991. 19 In Cosima Wagner: Die Tagebücher, 1869–1883, ed. M. Gregor-Dellin and D. Mack, 2 vols., Munich and Zurich, Piper, 1976–7, trans. G. Skelton as Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 2 vols., New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–80, 16 January 1871. For further detail on the relationship between Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem and Wagner’s libretto, see A. Groos, ‘Appropriation in Wagner’s Tristan libretto’, in A. Groos and R. Parker (eds.), Reading Opera, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 13–25. 20 R. Wagner, ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (1860), trans. R. L. Jacobs as ‘Music of the future’ in Three Wagner Essays, London, Eulenburg, 1979, p. 35. 21 Daverio, ‘Tristan und Isolde’, p. 120; C. Abbate, ‘Wagner “On Modulation”, and Tristan’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 1 (1989), 33–58.
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there are many more passages in which music and text have equal significance, not least Tristan’s ‘Delirium’ scene in Act 3.22 Wagner subtitled Tristan ‘an action [Handlung] in three acts’, a reference to Calderón de la Barca’s sixteenth-century Spanish dramas on spiritual themes. This description reflects his desire to create a theatre that would unite philosophical ideas and poetry with a concrete celebration of the human being through the total expression of movement and feeling: the human body set in action by music and words, just as in Greek tragedy. He conceded that the term was a misnomer, as traditional visual action in Tristan is limited.23 However, that perceived inaction is the result of Wagner’s focus on states of mind and the thoughts of his characters as they recount events both seen and unseen in their words, illuminated by the music (for example, Isolde’s ‘Narration’ in Act 1, Brangäne’s admission in Act 3 and much of Tristan’s ‘Delirium’ scene in the same act); further, it gives due emphasis to the action that does occur, for example, when King Marke and his followers discover the two lovers in Act 2 scene 3.
Performance history Wagner experienced considerable difficulty in staging a production of Tristan. Several theatres showed interest, among them Strasbourg (Gottfried’s home), Karlsruhe, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden (after Wagner’s amnesty), Hanover, Stuttgart and Prague; but all were obliged to decline the opportunity of hosting the premiere on discovering its various challenges, causing critics to ridicule Wagner’s phrase ‘the artwork of the future’! A production overseen by Wagner even had to be abandoned after several rehearsals in Vienna, where Lohengrin had been staged in 1861.24 Wagner found himself in serious financial straits; but the death (March 1864) of Maximilian II and the accession of Maximilian’s young son Ludwig changed things for the better. Ludwig, already obsessed with Wagner’s work, pledged his support for the composer’s artistic vision, including the completion of Der Ring, the construction of a festival theatre and the premiere of Tristan in May 1865. Hans von Bülow, husband of Cosima Liszt, was appointed musical director of the Munich Opera. With Wagner’s collaboration with Bülow began a ‘liaison’ between Cosima and Wagner. On 10 April 1865, the day of the first orchestral rehearsal of Tristan
22 See T. S. Grey, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 342–7. 23 R. Wagner, ‘On the name Musikdrama’, in Richard Wagner’s Proseworks, trans. W. A. Ellis, 8 vols., 1893– 9, repr. New York, Broude, 1966, vol. 5, p. 303. 24 The incompetence, either physical or vocal (or both) of the tenor, Alois Ander, is often given as the main reason for this.
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in Munich under Bülow, Cosima gave birth to her third daughter, who was christened Isolde. It was no secret that Wagner was the child’s father. Plans to mount a production in Munich’s Residenz Theatre became impracticable – the larger Court Theatre proved viable, however – and the premiere had to be postponed because Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld (Isolde) ‘lost’ her voice. Eventually, the delayed first night arrived (10 June 1865) with Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1836–65) as Tristan, his Danish wife Malvina (1825–1904) as Isolde, Anna Deinet as Brangäne, Anton Mittenwurzer as Kurwenal, and Ludwig Zottmayer as King Marke. Bülow (1830–94) conducted. Further performances were given on 13 and 19 June. The Schnorrs evidently had an exceptional understanding of Wagner’s musico-dramatic rhetoric and an eloquent and intense delivery of his vocal lines.25 Bülow claimed ‘the greatest success that a new Wagner work has ever had anywhere. The Schnorrs were unbelievable; all the others quite tolerable; orchestra excellent.’26 Ludwig immediately ordered three more performances during that season, but fate was to intervene. After the work’s third performance, Ludwig Schnorr became ill and eventually died on 21 July 1865. Within six months, political pressure forced Wagner to leave Bavaria. Bülow remained and conducted a second set of Tristan performances in 1869, cutting some 83 bars from the score to accommodate the new Tristan and Isolde, Heinrich (1845–1900) and Therese (1845–1921) Vogel. The work was then given six times more in Munich in 1872, produced in Weimar (1874) and later in Berlin, after preparation by Wagner, on 20 March 1876, with Karl Eckert (1820–79) as conductor; it was also performed in Leipzig on 2 January 1882. The first performance outside Germany was in London, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 20 June 1882, with Hermann Winkelmann (1849–1912), Rosa Sucher (1849–1927), Marianne Brandt, Emil Kraus and Eugen Gura, conducted by Hans Richter (1843–1916). The Viennese premiere followed on 4 October 1883 with Winckelmann as Tristan. The first production at Covent Garden took place on 2 July 1884, when Richter conducted a cast that included Heinrich Gudehus (1845–1909) and Lilli Lehmann (1848–1929) in the principal roles. Tristan was not performed in Bayreuth until 1886, when Felix Mottl (1856–1911) conducted and Therese Malten (1855–1930) and Gudehus took the leading parts. It reached America that same year when
25 See Wagner’s essay ‘Erinnerungen an Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld’, which idealises Schnorr, and through his example, outlines Wagner’s ideal qualities of his singers. See also W. Ashbrook, ‘The first singers of Tristan und Isolde’, Opera Quarterly, 3/4 (1985–6), 11–23. 26 Letter to Joachim Raff, 21 June 1865, cited in E. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols., London, Cassell, New York, Knopf, 1933–46, repr. 1966, vol. 3, p. 381.
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Richter-pupil Anton Seidl (1850–98) conducted Albert Niemann (1831–1917) and Lehmann in the principal roles at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Other famous Tristans through history have included the Germans Max Alvary (1856–98), Franz Völker (1899–1965), Max Lorenz (1901–75), Ludwig Suthaus (1906–71), Wolfgang Windgassen (1914–74) and Peter Hofmann (b. 1944), the Pole Jean de Reszke (1850–1925), the Belgian Ernest Van Dyck (1861–1923), the Danes Erik Schmedes (1866–1931) and Lauritz Melchior (1890–1973), the Dutchman Jacques Urlus (1867–1935), the Englishmen Frank Mullings (1881–1953) and Walter Widdop (1892–1949), the Swede Set Svanholm (1904–64), the Canadian Jon Vickers (b. 1926) and the Chilean Ramón Vinay (1912–96). Celebrated in the role of Isolde have been, amongst others, the Germans Sophie Sedlmair (1857–1939), Marie Wittich (1868–1931), Eva von der Osten (1881–1936), Gertrude Kappel (1884–1971), Frida Leider (1888–1975), Martha Mödl (1912–2001) and Hildegard Behrens (b. 1937), the Canadian Emma Albani (1847–1930), the Swedish-American Olive Fremstad (1871–1951), the Americans Lilian Nordica (1857–1914), Edyth Walker (?1867–1950), Minnie Saltzmann-Stevens (1874–1950) and Helen Traubel (1899–1972), the Russian Félia Litvinne (1860–1936), the Croatian Milka Ternina (1863–1941), the Austrians Thila Plaichinger (1868–1939), Anna Bahr-Mildenburg (1872–1947), the Czech Ždenka Mottl-Fassbender (1879–1954), the Swede Nanny LarsénTodsen (1884–1982), the English soprano Dame Eva Turner (1892–1990), the Australians Florence Austral (1894–1968) and Marjorie Lawrence (1909–79), the French Germaine Lubin (1890–1979), the Norwegian Kirsten Flagstad (1895– 1962), and, more recently, the German Helena Braun (1903–90), the Swedes Birgit Nilsson (1918–2005) and Catarina Ligendza (b. 1937), the SwedishAmerican Astrid Varnay (1918–2006), the Czech Ludmila Dvořáková (b. 1923), and the Welsh soprano Dame Gwyneth Jones (b. 1936). Other celebrated conductors of Tristan have included Arthur Nikisch (1855– 1922), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Bruno Walter (1876–1962), Sir Thomas Beecham (1879–1961), Albert Coates (1882–1953), Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954), Erich Kleiber (1890–1956), Karl Böhm (1894–1981), Rudolf Kempe (1910–76), Sir Reginald Goodall (1901–90), Herbert von Karajan (1908–89), Sir Georg Solti (1912–97), Carlos Kleiber (1930–2004) and Daniel Barenboim (b. 1942).
Critical reception The first Munich performances of Tristan passed without the expected political demonstrations over the huge subsidies Wagner had enjoyed from Ludwig II,
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but their critical reception was mixed. Wagner’s running battles with critics are well documented.27 There was some hissing at the end of each act and the reviews were generally unfavourable; nevertheless, Wagner appeared on stage between his Tristan and Isolde at the opera’s end and was warmly applauded. One British critic later panned Tristan as ‘the embodiment of stupendous boredom . . . the lady shrieked spasmodically, while the gentleman growled, occasionally varying it with a shout’.28 In Vienna (October 1883) Hanslick wrote that ‘the over-all impression of the work, despite its outstanding individual beauties, remains one of oppressive fatigue resulting from too much unhealthy overstimulation’.29 He particularly criticised the inaction of Wagner’s ‘Action’, asking questions such as: ‘Is it really dramatic when Wagner, at the close of the second act, avoiding any kind of ensemble, fills the stage with deaf and dumb figures who take no more part in the shattering events than the garden benches around them?’ Or, ‘is it dramatic that the mortally ill Tristan spends an hour in the third act singing while he dies and dying while he sings?’30 In other quarters Tristan has often been embraced as an emblem of decadence, notably in writings by, amongst others, Nietzsche, Mann and the various French, English and Italian authors of the generation between, who became known collectively as the ‘decadents’. Tristan was for them ‘a prime symbol of morbid desire, spiritual corruption, and feverish hedonism’.31 Wagner’s own identification of the work’s characteristic ‘colour’ as ‘mauve, a sort of lilac’ confirms this,32 as does the following extract from his correspondence with Mathilde Wesendock (April 1859): This Tristan is turning into something terrible! This final act!!! – I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance–: only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad.33
Richard Pohl, on the other hand wrote about the work’s ‘simple grandeur’ and ‘moderate yet compelling power’, and Nietszche pinpointed its ‘severest austerity of form, overwhelming . . . simple grandeur’ and its appropriateness ‘to the mystery of which it speaks, the mystery of death in life, of unity in duality’.34 For him, Tristan was ‘the central work and of a fascination that has no
27 Summarised by R. Taylor in Millington (ed.), The Wagner Compendium, pp. 126–8. 28 Punch, 10 June 1882. 29 E. Hanslick, Vienna’s Golden Years of Music 1850–1900, trans. and ed. H. Pleasants, London, Gollancz, 1951, p. 261. 30 Ibid., p. 262. 31 Daverio, ‘Tristan und Isolde’, p. 116. 32 In Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, ed. Gregor-Dellin and Mack, 3 June 1878. 33 In Spencer and Millington (eds.), Selected Letters, p. 452. 34 In Bailey (ed.), Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan und Isolde, p. 19; F. Nietzsche,
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parallel, not only in music but in all the arts’.35 Many recognised the work’s clear and solid architecture, focusing essentially on the interrelationship and musical content of ‘three love scenes’ (towards the ends of Acts 1 and 3 and the long duet in the middle of Act 2). Two balancing narrations (Isolde’s in Act 1 scene 3 and Tristan’s in Act 3) and three sections of offstage music at the opening of each act contribute to the broad symmetry, which is underpinned by a simple tonal scheme.36
Performance demands In his multifarious role as composer, conductor, theorist, writer and critic, Wagner recognised ‘the prevailing evils of the German theatre’, especially the serious shortcomings in performing standards and styles.37 In his proposals to Ludwig II for the establishment of a new music school in Munich, Wagner opined that the only way forward was to have a specially chosen and trained group of performers to give model performances in the appropriate style.38 His aim was to encourage convincing, meaningful and faithful performances, believing that performers should ‘add nothing to . . . [the text] nor take anything away; he [the composer] is to be your second self’, he urged.39 His efforts towards ‘decent and correct performances’ of his own dramatic works involved provision of detailed instructions for conductors, singers, instrumentalists and stage personnel.
Production and design After the Tannhaüser debacle in Paris 1860–1 and the aborted Viennese premiere of Tristan (1862–3), Wagner demanded a more formal arrangement of production preparation to ‘lift . . . theatrical routine out of its grooves’.40 He required an equal collaboration in production between the chief musical coach, conductor and director; indeed, his influence in establishing performance standards at Bayreuth is often considered the true beginning of modern opera production. ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, in ‘Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen’, trans. R. T. Gray as ‘Unfashionable observations’, in E. Behler (ed.), The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 20 vols., Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 1995, vol. 2, p. 303. 35 Letter to Carl Fuchs, 27 December 1888, in G. Colli and M. Montinari (eds.), Nietzsche Briefwechsel, Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1984, p. 554. 36 In Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 16 January 1871. Many have written in more detail about the work’s tonal scheme. See, for example, R. Knapp, ‘The tonal structure of Tristan und Isolde: a sketch’, Music Review, 45 (1984), 11–25; C. Dahlhaus, ‘“Tristan”–Harmonik und Tonalität’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 4 (1978), 215–19. 37 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 8, p. 173. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 172. 40 R. Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, ed. G. Strobel, W. Wolf et al., Leipzig, Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1967– 2000; Wiesbaden, 1999–, vol. 3, p. 394; trans. F. Hueffer as Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, 2nd edn, rev. W. A. Ellis, 2 vols., New York, Vienna House, 1973, vol. 1, p. 97.
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Hanslick called Wagner ‘the world’s first Regisseur [Director]’,41 and the Festival remained for over a century ‘one of the chief power-houses of developments in dramaturgy’.42 Wagner deplored the recycling of sets and costumes from repertory stock, and embraced Georg II’s (Duke of Saxe-Meiningen) coincident innovations in stagecraft for his travelling troupe of actors, notably the use of scenery (threedimensional, using the box set) designed to accommodate the actors’ movements and the imaginative exploitation of costumes, props and lighting to create atmosphere and mood. In collaboration with choreographer Richard Fricke, Wagner stressed the role of improvisation and inspiration in stage blocking. Traditional stock histrionics were replaced by a ‘naturalistic’ acting style, and singers were encouraged to ignore the audience and respond only to fellow performers on the stage. This was ‘the apogee of illusionism, the prevailing mode in the spoken theatre, at least, from the mid-18th century’.43 Wagner’s Bayreuth opera productions in the late 1870s and early 1880s also pioneered a darkened auditorium and an orchestra hidden from view, resulting in an intensification of audience involvement. Sometimes, of course, the illusion faltered because much of the desired scenic world was beyond nineteenth-century technology. When Cosima Wagner assumed the Festival’s reins after the composer’s death, she continued to encourage naturalistic acting, acknowledge the sanctity of the text and pursue the ‘ideal’ performance such as her husband would have approved. She maintained that Wagner had ‘left us with everything for the performance of his works in the most precise detail. Even the lighting of individual figures or groups at various dramatic moments is quite fixed . . . The Master himself staged all his works and informed us what worked in these performances and what did not. It is not a question of discovering new things, merely of perfecting individual details.’44 Her first production was Tristan (1886), and she completed a Bayreuth canon of Wagner’s mature works either by preserving production details from the first two festivals or by incorporating elements from existing stagings in Munich and Vienna. Her rigid, prescriptive and faithful approach resulted in a stagnation of the production process, drawing fierce criticism from, among others, Felix Weingartner and George Bernard Shaw.45 41 E. Hanslick, Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart: Neue Kritiken und Studien, ‘Moderne Oper’, Berlin, Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Litteratur, 1885, p. 324. 42 S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 18, pp. 461ff., art. ‘Opera’. 43 Ibid. 44 Cosima Wagner to Count Hermann Keyserling, quoted in C. Wagner, Das zweite Leben, ed. D. Mack, Munich and Zurich, Piper, 1980, p. 630. 45 See C. Dyment (ed.), Felix Weingartner: Recollections and Recordings, Rickmansworth, Triad Press, 1976; G. B. Shaw in The English Illustrated Magazine (October 1889).
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Following Cosima’s well-intended, yet blinkered attempts to confine Wagner’s works to the pictorial world of nineteenth-century grand opera,46 snapshots of significant productions through history reveal that producers/ designers began to free Wagner from Wagner! The first to loosen the chains was Adolphe Appia (1862–1928), who attended Cosima’s 1886 Tristan and later expounded his theories on opera production.47 Appia believed that the overall impression of Wagner’s music was betrayed by the accompanying succession of illustrative, static tableaux, illuminated with unchanging predictability. He supported Wagner’s Schopenhauerian recognition that music was pre-eminent in the hierarchy of the constituent elements of the Gesamtkunstwerk, believing that it contained ‘the drama’s original life’ and should inform all aspects of the staging. However, he rejected scenery painted on flats in favour of vaguely suggestive, or even coldly abstract settings independent of reality – mostly geometrical structures inspired by contemporary constructivist principles. He cleared the stage in order to focus attention on the singing actors, dressed in simple, stylised costumes. Imaginative lighting projected the mood and atmosphere, exploiting the potential of the recently invented electric lighting console to orchestrate a play of light on the stage in sympathy with the music. The latter also determined actors’ movements, gestures and vocal expression, Appia undertaking some eurhythmic work with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (from 1906) to develop quasi-symbolic, non-realistic stage movements based more on choreography than on conventional theatrical style. Toscanini invited Appia to design Tristan for La Scala in 1923.48 For this production Appia abandoned the ‘geometric, abstract severity’ of his mature style and returned to a visionary scenario of the 1890s.49 Jean Mercier collaborated as technical director and added albeit minimal colour, such as a dark-blue cyclorama for Act I, to Appia’s characteristically monochromatic scenario. Appia evidently designed Act 2 first, because it required the severest ‘scenic reduction’, such that he ‘would be committed to no more than the bare necessities for the third and first acts’.50 He aimed to interiorise the drama and make the audience see it through the eyes of the two principal characters:
46 She produced an even more subdued version of Tristan in 1906, her last season. 47 See, for example, A. Appia, La mise en scène du drame wagnérien, Paris, Léon Chailley, 1895, trans., Basel, Birkhäuser, 1982; Die Musik und die Inszenierung, Munich, Brukmann, 1899, trans., University of Miami Press, 1962. 48 P. Carnegy (‘The staging of “Tristan and Isolde”: landmarks along the Appian Way’, in N. John (ed.), Tristan und Isolde: English National Opera Guide 6, London, Calder, 1981, p. 32) points out that Appia had in fact made his first designs for Tristan in the 1890s. 49 P. Carnegy, ‘Designing Wagner: deeds of music made visible?’, in B. Millington and S. Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992, p. 54. 50 Carnegy, ‘The staging of “Tristan and Isolde” ’, p. 32.
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When Isolde enters at the beginning of the second act, ‘she sees only two things: the absence of Tristan and the torch; the reason for his absence’. The stage is thus to be dominated by ‘a large bright torch in the centre of the picture . . . When Isolde extinguishes the torch, the setting takes on a uniform chiaroscuro in which the eye loses itself, unarrested by any line or object. Isolde rushing to meet Tristan is plunged into a mysterious darkness, increasing the impression of depth which the setting gives to the right half of the stage’.51
Critical reaction to Appia’s 1923 design was variable, veering towards the negative, but his ideas had already become influential in France and his native Switzerland (courtesy of Oskar Wälterlin and Jacques Copeau), as well as in America (thanks to Jean Mercier). Appia also encouraged producers such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, who debuted with an imaginatively reductive Tristan in St Petersburg (1909), to abandon Romantic opulence and take fuller advantage of the potential of electric lighting. Meyerhold and his designer, Alexander Chervachidze, reduced their sets to a single sail, castle walls, rocks and the allimportant cyclorama. Meyerhold considered that ‘metal helmets and shields glinting like samovars’ constituted a ‘historicism without secrets’ and that imaginative costume designs and props were more convincing and credible.52 Gustav Mahler, Alfred Roller and August Stoll adopted a partially stylised, pared-down approach to Tristan in a production at the Vienna Hofopfer (February 1903) in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Wagner’s death. This production proved to be a landmark in theatre design, breaking away from Wagnerian orthodoxy in favour of ‘suggestion and stylization of almost expressionistic intensity’,53 with production detail emanating directly from the score.54 Roller cleared the stage of excessive scenery and irrelevant props, opted for clarity and simplicity, and exploited the relatively new cyclorama and a rapidly developing lighting technology to expressive colourful effect. He also split the ship’s deck level in Act 1 to separate Isolde’s dark quarters from those of the crew, created an effective play of light on the waves, conjured up a starry night sky for Act 2, and employed fluctuating light to mirror the lovers’ moods and feelings.55
51 Carnegy, ‘Designing Wagner’, p. 54. 52 Cited in O. G. Bauer, Richard Wagner: Die Bühnenwerke von der Uraufführung bis heute, Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna, Propyläen, 1982, p. 206, trans. S. Spencer as Richard Wagner: the Stage Designs and Productions from the Premieres to the Present, New York, Rizzoli, 1983, p. 222. For a more detailed description of the St Petersburg 1909 production see P. Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 212–20. 53 In Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 57. 54 Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, pp. 157–8. 55 For a more detailed description of the Vienna 1903 production see Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, pp. 165–9.
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Joseph Urban, who had worked with Roller and Mahler at the Vienna Hofoper, was also influenced by Appian principles in his simple, dimly lit 1912 Tristan for the Boston Opera, conducted by Weingartner. Donald Oenslager’s radical Tristan for Philadelphia in 1934 (with director Herbert Graf and conductor Fritz Reiner) used a single permanent set and exploited lighting effects to enhance the musical mood, gaining only a mixed reception. With the Nazi accession to power, production methods broadly became cruder. Siegfried Wagner initially perpetuated his mother’s production style, but made a more individual contribution after 1924 when the Bayreuth Festival resumed after the First World War. His 1927 Tristan, designed by Kurt Söhnlein, reconciled his father’s original intentions with the introduction of solid three-dimensional sets, more simplified staging, and other cautious innovations more attuned to the times (e.g. extending the stage depth, introducing less conventional Germanic costumes, improving the lighting system and allowing the singers greater freedom of movement). It especially focused on the psychological inner action of the drama, the lighting, for example, generally reflecting the characters’ states of mind. The traditional sombre hues and soft illumination were replaced by ‘a “symphony of colours” ’,56 to emphasise the contrast between the worlds of day and night. Emil Preetorius opted for greater realism in his 1938 Tristan, creating ‘more geologically credible rock forms with a stratified, horizontal emphasis’ in Act 3. It was not until 1951, when Siegfried’s sons Wieland (1917–66) and Wolfgang (1919–2010) revived the Bayreuth Festival as co-directors after the Second World War, that any Appian revolution began in earnest. Convinced that his grandfather’s operas did not require the old-fashioned explicit scenery and stage action prescribed, Wieland opined that ‘Cosima’s ban and curse on Appia’s book Musik und Inszenierung was responsible for stuffing Bayreuth with moth-ridden conceptions for decades, so that its original revolutionary function changed into its opposite’.57 Only in Germany and Switzerland, he claimed, ‘have any courageous attempts been made to break free from this slavish attitude by placing the conceptions of twentieth-century cubism, expressionism, and abstract painting at the service of Wagnerian opera’.58 Wieland’s 1950s Bayreuth productions embraced the work of Appia and Edward Gordon Craig as well as the bare mechanics of Classical Greek theatre. He reduced stage movement and created neutral non-specific settings, 56 Ibid., p. 154. 57 W. Wagner, in ‘What is “faithful representation”?’, Die Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele 1967: III – ‘Tannhäuser’. 58 Ibid.
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emphasising the importance of lighting (especially coloured light) and singeractors who eschewed nineteenth-century conventions and moved in a style commensurate with the prevailing mood. He was particularly fortunate in having the imaginative Paul Eberhardt as lighting designer. Effects of lighting displaced the pictorial drops or flats of yesteryear, along with simple, elemental shapes and objects on stage. It was a theatre of depth-illusion: darkness enveloping and uniting stage and audience. The singers emerged from total gloom. Specific visual imagery was kept to minimal points of reference and the imagination completed the picture, thus solving the problem of representing on stage the impossible alluded to in the text. Wieland tended to be selective in his interpretations, focusing on particular aspects of a work in order to throw light on its whole, but he continually revised and developed his productions such that many Bayreuth ‘revivals’ were essentially new stagings. Wieland’s art studies impacted positively on his settings of Tristan, which became more abstract (the symbolic sculpted shapes in his 1962 production were influenced by the work of Henry Moore); stage movement also became more statuesque. He was especially resourceful in devising visual symbols to complement his perception of the music drama rather than to serve its external narrative action. In his 1962 Tristan, for example, each act was dominated by a phallic representation – whether the towering stylised prow of the ship, the allseeing totem of Act 2 or the sharp pierced segment which presided over Tristan’s delirious death-throes.59 Carnegy explains: The curve of the stage floor suggested the surface of some mysterious, alien planet. In her transfiguration, Isolde, in yellow, rose up like a new sun while the light behind her was that of the moon’s final eclipse into eternal night.60
The concept of Werktreue as a performing goal had thus been abandoned. ‘A naturalistic set today’, Wieland argued in 1966, ‘would simply destroy an illusion, not create one.’61 Wolfgang Wagner assisted his brother in mounting his controversial modernist productions and himself produced a gloomy Tristan in 1957. He represented Tristan and Isolde existing ‘in a world apart; a world closed to all but their most trusted attendants, Kurwenal and Brangäne. Their magic space was symbolically denoted by a circle of light, from which others were excluded.’62 The set for Act 1, in which a tarpaulin divided the stage (the foredeck), with
59 In Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 62. 60 Ibid. 61 In P. Boulez, P. Chéreau, R. Peduzzi, and J. Schmidt, Histoire d’un ‘Ring’: Bayreuth 1976–80, Paris 1980, reproduced in Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 65. 62 F. Spotts, Bayreuth, A History of the Wagner Festival, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1994, p. 254.
Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
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Isolde’s cabin in the foreground, was dismissed by Joachim Kaiser as ‘less a ship than a psychotherapist’s office’!63 Wolfgang assumed the sole directorship of the Bayreuth Festival on Wieland’s premature death in 1966, devoting himself almost exclusively to Wagner opera productions. Though influenced by his brother’s approach and sharing his predilection for lighting effects, Wolfgang’s productions tended to be more conservative, sometimes embracing romantic and semi-naturalistic elements. His policy (from 1969 until his retirement in 2008) of inviting directors from outside the family to assume responsibility for staging one of Wagner’s works in turn has effectively resulted in the disappearance of a recognisable ‘Bayreuth style’. In 1981, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932–88) mounted a genuinely Romantic, medieval production of Tristan, acclaimed for its imaginative visual beauty and sense of theatre.64 However, ‘Tristan and Isolde were transformed into Pelléas and Mélisande. Melancholy was present but little tragedy’,65 and Isolde was absent from the stage for her Liebestod to exist only as a figment of Tristan’s fevered brain.66 August Everding and Josef Svoboda combined on a ‘pure son et lumière’ Tristan in 1974. Changes of colour and lighting modes set the various scenic atmospheres commensurate with the music and dramatic action. Frederic Spotts remarks: Each act was punctuated by a shift from the real world to the private world of the two lovers. After Tristan and Isolde drank the love potion, for example, there was a sudden blackout after which the two were bathed in a pool of deep blue light while behind them the sail glistened in moonlight.67
This kind of approach facilitated the introduction of affective human touches in the production and, as a result, the audience’s identification with the principal characters. Away from Bayreuth, David Hockney’s (b. 1937) Tristan production in Los Angeles (1987) was highly praised, while Ruth Berghaus and Axel Manthey’s deconstructionist Hamburg staging (1988) was experimental to the point of being confrontational with the Wagnerian ethos and legacy.
Vocal techniques and styles Tristan’s sheer length created severe tests of stamina for performers, particularly the principal singers.68 The constant urge to raise standards of pitch 63 Ibid., pp. 253–4. 64 Ponnelle’s first Wagner production had been one of Tristan in Düsseldorf (1962). 65 Spotts, Bayreuth, p. 290. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 280. 68 Some singers may have ‘benefited’ from certain cuts, notably in the first part of the long scene between the lovers in Act 2 and in the scene of Tristan’s delirium in Act 3.
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through history also took its toll; despite the French decree of 1858, fixing a0 at 435Hz, singers were regularly compelled to sing at higher pitches, notably at the 1877 Wagner Festival in London’s Royal Albert Hall, where a0 was 455.1Hz.69 Hanslick’s view of Wagner’s vocal demands summarises many of the other technical and musical problems posed: It would be hard to find music more unvocal, more unsingable, than is to be found in Tristan . . .The roles of Tristan and Isolde sin not only in their excessive demands upon the voice; because of the unnatural intonation, the dominance of the chromatic and the enharmonic, the restless, inconclusive modulations, they are ultimately difficult to impress upon the memory . . . thanks to Wagner, the singers’ memories have learned to walk the tightrope, but their voices have broken their necks in the process.70
The symphonic nature of Wagner’s music, manifest in the orchestral contribution and texture, heaped more responsibility on his singers to realise accurately the expressive detail of his vocal lines and to enunciate the text with the utmost clarity and the most impassioned delivery. This was achieved by means of a flexible parlando, or speaking-through-singing style of vocal writing, the singers often projecting their words in sustained tones and creating long melodic lines. The expressive power of the orchestra was used to define the emotions. Wagner expected his singers to be masters of the full dynamic range, without losing any sense of firmness or tonal resonance in mezza voce singing, and to use ornaments expressively as appropriate to the melody. His passion for fine detail and a then unheard-of naturalism in operatic acting made important new demands, his singers being required to give no less attention to the drama than to the music. His celebrated handwritten notice, pinned up backstage during the first Bayreuth performances of Der Ring testifies to his vocal and verbal expectations: Last request to my Faithful Artists! Distinctness! The big notes will take care of themselves, the little notes and the text are the chief things. Do not address the audience, but always each other – in monologues look either up or down but not directly in front of you! Last wish! Be good to me, you dear Children!71
Wagner held as a model the dramatic and interpretative powers of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, even if her vocal technique may have lacked polish and 69 A. J. Ellis, ‘On the history of musical pitch’, Journal of the Society of the Arts, 18 (1880), 329. 70 Hanslick, Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, pp. 258–60. 71 In R. Hartford (ed.), Bayreuth: The Early Years [1876–1914]: an account of the early decades of the Wagner Festival as seen by the Celebrated Visitors and Participants, London, Gollancz, 1980, p. 51.
Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
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sophistication. As Cosima Wagner recorded in her diary about the Parsifal/ Kundry scene in Act 2 of Parsifal: ‘R. complains about how insensitive the singers are . . . and he thinks of Schröder-Devr., how she would have uttered the words “So war es mein Kuss, der hellsichtig dich machte.” Now the music has to do it all.’72 Wagner also praised Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s ‘understanding’ and moving performances of his work, during which Schnorr was scrupulous in following the composer’s prescriptions.73 At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the prominent German styles of vocal performance was that of Julius Hey (1832–1909), who became the first singing teacher at Munich’s Königliche Musikschule. Hey’s goal of clear enunciation of the text as a springboard for expressive singing is articulated in his four-volume Deutscher Gesangunterricht (Mainz, 1885),74 while his book on Wagner spells out the composer’s enunciation requirements of his singers.75 However, the unfortunate enunciation and less than mellifluous singing promoted by Cosima Wagner and Julius Kniese at Bayreuth proved to be an incomplete and partially uncomprehending adaptation of Hey’s precepts. Cosima believed that Wagner’s music dramas contained scenes ‘which are to be more spoken than sung’,76 and was adamant that performers were ‘dutybound to present the action, and to allow it to be as intelligible as possible through clear pronunciation; if something must be slighted, then music must yield to the poem rather than the poem to music’. This commonly resulted in a ‘dry-toned, brittly enunciated caricature of singing . . . encouraging undue emphasis on consonants’.77 Although standards of Wagner singing appear to have deteriorated for some years after the composer’s death, when the so-called ‘Bayreuth bark’, a more forceful style of declamation akin to shouting, began to supplant the smooth lyrical approach favoured by Wagner, especially in Germany, Hey’s precepts were successfully adopted by numerous singers. Among them were Felix von Kraus, Friedrich Brodersen, Julius von Raatz-Brockmann, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink, whose recordings demonstrate the apparent spontaneity and wide-ranging expressive potential of Hey’s approach. Several different styles of Wagner singing soon developed in the early twentieth century, even within Germany and Austria – Breckbill writes of the ‘sweet lyricism and 72 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, vol. 2, 9 July 1882. 73 Das Braune Buch: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1865–1882, ed. J. Bergfeld, Zurich and Freiburg, Atlantis, 1975, p. 165, trans. G. Bird as The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book, London, Gollancz, 1980, p. 139. 74 This treatise was later condensed into a single volume by Fritz Volbach and Hans Hey as Der kleine Hey, Mainz and Leipzig, Schott, 1912. 75 H. Hey (ed.), Richard Wagner als Vortragsmeister: Erinnerungen von Julius Hey, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911. 76 In D. Mack (ed.), Cosima Wagner: Das zweite Leben, Munich and Zurich, Piper, 1980, pp. 150–1. 77 In Millington (ed.), The Wagner Compendium, p. 364.
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accurate musicianship’ cultivated in Dresden and the ‘more poised but less colourful’ Berlin style and one ‘predicated on luxuriating in luscious voices in Vienna’78 – resulting in a synthesis which emphasised a more lyrical and ‘vocal’ approach to expressive characterisation. Since the Second World War, as Breckbill points out, the diversity and plurality of Wagnerian interpretations ‘has resulted in the discovery of “non-traditional” personality traits in Wagner’s characters, which in turn discourages prospective Wagner singers from finding value in establishing a vocal type which embraces a number of Wagner roles’. Consequently the specialist ‘Wagner singer’ has all but died out, as has the ‘innate stylistic reservoir’ on which (s)he drew, and Wagner has become ‘just another composer in the operatic mainstream’.79
Expression
>
Wagner’s expressive and other interpretative prescriptions became increasingly more intense and prolific as it became paramount for him to control performance details as closely as possible. He added most of his expressive detail in his orchestral scores, with optimum balance and audibility of the voices in view. In the period between Rienzi and Tristan he even began to use new markings and to refine the meanings of old ones. Clive Brown80 observes that Wagner used fp and > as accent markings from the outset, clearly differentiating between accent and diminuendo in his notation. In his writings he refers to > as indicating the ‘merest sigh’;81 as an indication to accent strongly and firmly, as introduced in Rienzi (and often associated with the term marcato); sf, indicated very sparingly in his early works, begins to be used regularly in Tristan. He also tended to add accents at specific points in the vocal parts where he wished the text to be projected especially clearly in conjunction with the musical line. Brown also highlights Wagner’s change of attitude towards staccato dots and strokes, indicating that, from Tannhaüser onwards, the stroke begins to predominate as the composer’s principal staccato marking, dots becoming increasingly rarely used for that purpose.82 However, Wagner introduced dots under a slur to indicate a string portato (as opposed to slurred staccato) and, by contrast, lines under a slur, doubtless to request a smoother, more sustained string portato effect.83
78 Ibid., pp. 364–5. 79 Ibid., p. 368. 80 In Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 113. 81 Wagner (of Weber’s Der Freischütz), ‘Über das Dirigieren’, in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 8, p. 297. 82 See also E. Voss, ‘Wagners Striche im Tristan’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 132 (1971), 644–7. 83 In Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 115.
Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
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Wagner’s indication of specific ornamentation also became more precise, developing from using conventional ornament signs to writing out most ornaments in full, either in small or normal-size notation. Turns, for example, were indicated at the outset by the one conventional sign (irrespective of whether a normal or inverted turn was intended), leading to some confusion as to their interpretation,84 but the two varieties of turn were later spelled out and fully differentiated. In Tristan they are written out in either small or normal-size notes and should be performed ‘in a very broad way, so the notes formed part of the principal phrase’.85 Trills, however, are indicated by the conventional sign and are normally intended to start on the main note.86
Vibrato Vibrato was generally used sparingly as an ornament throughout most of the nineteenth century and was normally applied in a variety of speeds and intensities as a colouring or ‘sweetening’ for particular notes within phrases. The violinist Bériot maintained that vibrato ‘becomes a fault when too frequently employed’,87 particularly noting its injurious effect on ‘strict intonation’. His brother-in-law, the celebrated singer/pedagogue Manuel García, permits the use of vibrato (tremolo) ‘to depict sentiments, which, in real life, are of a poignant character – such as anguish at seeing the imminent danger of anyone dear to us; or tears extorted by certain acts of anger, revenge etc.’. However, even under those circumstances, it should be used with taste, and in moderation; for its expression or duration, if exaggerated, ‘becomes fatiguing and ungraceful’.88 Wagner’s concertmaster for the first Bayreuth Festival, August Wilhelmj, confirms that vibrato ‘should be used with discretion’, the finger-movement emanating ‘from the wrist or even from the fore-arm’.89 His compatriots Joachim and Moser also advocate that ‘the steady tone is the ruling one’ and that vibrato be introduced ‘only where the expression seems to demand it’.90 Although this German view was somewhat conservative by the turn of the century – violinists such as Massart and Wieniawski had included vibrato more prominently in their expressive
84 See C. Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 515–16. 85 E. Dannreuther, Musical Ornamentation, 2 vols., London and New York, Novello, Ewer & Co., 1893–5, vol. 2, p. 141. 86 Ibid., p. 172. 87 C.-A. de Bériot, Méthode de violon, Mainz, [1858], p. 242. 88 M. García, Traité complet de l’art du chant, Paris, 1840–7, trans. and ed. D. V. Paschke as New Treatise on the Art of Singing, London, 1855, p. 66. 89 A. Wilhelmj and J. Brown, A Modern School for the Violin, London, 1898, bk. IIIb, Preface. 90 J. Joachim and A. Moser, Violinschule, 3 vols., Berlin, Simrock, 1902–5, vol. 2, p. 96a.
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vocabulary – the evidence of early recordings substantiates it in both vocal and orchestral contexts.91 Brown cites a unique instance where Wagner used the horizontal line to indicate ‘a discrete vibrato (which also has some implication of accent)’,92 recalling Porges’s account of the composer’s expressive vocal use of the device;93 otherwise, apart from a few isolated instances,94 notated either with a wavy line or by the term itself, Wagner rarely prescribed vocal or orchestral vibrato. Broadly speaking, he would have expected its introduction only as a special effect where the dramatic expression demanded. Indiscriminate or excessive vocal usage would have militated against the clarity of diction and projection of the text that he held so dear; and Wagner’s (and Wilhelmj’s) ideal string sound involved a sonorous, seamless sostenuto, produced with generous bow usage, but only selective employment of vibrato. Small wonder, then, that Breckbill objects to the ‘heavy wobble or tremolo’ and rhythmic imprecision in Wagnerian singing since the Flagstad era.95
Portamento To what extent portamento featured in Wagner’s sostenuto style in Tristan is a vexed question, which it is impossible to answer conclusively, not least because the indication he used vocally for its introduction, the slur, was employed also to signal other very different interpretative elements, notably the phrasing or the syllabic presentation of a melismatic passage. For example, any slurred pair of notes in which the second is set to a new word or syllable appears to have been intended as a clear indication for the introduction of portamento. García recommended introducing it only rarely, otherwise ‘singing would be rendered drawling. Some singers,’ he continues, ‘either from negligence or want of taste, slur the voice endlessly either before or after notes; thus the rhythm and spirit of the song are destroyed, and the melody becomes nauseously languid.’96 Orchestrally, portamento was undoubtedly part of Wagner’s string sound world; critiques and theorists’ views of the period confirm this, as do various annotated fingerings in orchestral string parts. Bériot distinguishes between three types of port de
91 See C. Brown, ‘Bowing styles, vibrato and portamento in nineteenth-century violin playing’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 113 (1988), 97–128. 92 Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, pp. 130–1. 93 H. Porges, Die Bühnenproben zu der Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876 (Chemnitz and Leipzig, 1881– 96), trans. R. L. Jacobs as Wagner Rehearsing the ‘Ring’, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 109. 94 In Siegfried (Act 1 scene 3) the use of vibrato is especially apt as Mime sings the word ‘bebend [trembling]’ and Wagner also prescribes the direction ‘mit schütternder Stimme [with quivering voice]’. 95 In Millington (ed.), The Wagner Compendium, p. 367. 96 García, New Treatise, p. 53.
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voix (vif, doux and traîné) and provides musical examples illustrating their expressive use in a variety of appropriate contexts dictated by character and mood. Emulation of the human voice is his principal goal,97 as it is also with Joachim and Moser.98 However, portamento was probably not used as liberally during Wagner’s lifetime as it was a few decades after his death, a trend against which many later reacted strongly.
Conducting and tempo modification Wagner conceived the conductor’s role as pivotal in mastering an opera’s architectonics, teasing out its inner detail, pacing its performance, and communicating to the performers a highly expressive and dramatic interpretation, using a wide dynamic range and remarkable flexibility of tempo. He considered metrical flexibility as ‘the principle conditioning the very life of music’,99 believing that the specific character and expressive quality of the melos should determine tempo; tempo and melos, which he defined as a singing style which shaped melodic phrases with rubato, tonal variation, and expressive and structural accentuation liberated from what were perceived as the restrictions of metre and tempo, were to him ‘indivisible, the one conditions the other’.100 He also indicated frequent tempo changes in his scores, particularly latterly, but abandoned the addition of metronome marks after Tannhaüser,101 acknowledging the uncertainty of the mathematics–music relationship and believing that performers should themselves divine the ‘right’ tempo from their understanding of and empathy with the dramatic and musical situations.102 Few conductors (with the possible exceptions of Bülow, Liszt, Mahler, Strauss and, more recently, Reginald Goodall) have fully understood and mastered the effective realisation of Wagner’s melos. Breckbill singles out Richard Strauss’s 1928 recording of the Tristan Prelude, supported by documentary evidence discovered by Willi Schuh (1982) in which Strauss confirms that he learned his conception of this work from his erstwhile mentor Bülow, 97 Bériot, Méthode, p. 237. See R. Stowell, The Early Violin and Viola: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 61. 98 Joachim and Moser, Violinschule, vol. 2, p. 92. 99 R. Wagner, ‘Über das Dirigieren’ (1869), trans. R. L. Jacobs as ‘On conducting’, in Three Wagner Essays, London, Eulenburg, 1979, p. 66. 100 Wagner, Three Wagner Essays, p. 57. For more on Wagner’s concept of the melos and its application, see C. Fifield, ‘Conducting Wagner: the search for Melos’, in Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, pp. 1–14. 101 Clive Brown (Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, pp. 346, 360) notes Wagner’s inconsistency in the use of terminology for slow tempos in Tannhaüser. 102 Wagner, ‘Über die Aufführung des “Tannhaüser”’, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 5, p. 144.
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as a significant source for demonstrating Wagner’s conducting approach to his own music.103 He explains: What Strauss’s performance enshrines is a style of conducting in which the varied tempi which Wagner urged for symphonic works are applied to brief motifs even when densely intertwined melodic fragments would seem to preclude such an approach. In Strauss’s performance of the Tristan Prelude – a passage which today is understood as a grand symphonic sweep describing a single arc – the drastic hairpin of acceleration and deceleration for the ‘Glance’ motif in bars 17–22 is astonishingly detail-oriented. Even more illuminating is the series of abrupt shifts between two plateaus of tempo in bars 63–73, so that the numerous statements of the ascending chromatic motif first introduced in bar 2 serve as solemn foils to the exulting upward runs that urge the Prelude towards its climax. This performance is so unlike Strauss’s otherwise streamlined approach to the conducting of both Wagner and other composers that one can be forgiven for suspecting that the conception does indeed stem at least from Bülow, and probably from Wagner.104
Orchestral instruments The nineteenth century was one in which there were numerous advances in instrument construction and playing techniques as a result of the desire for greater volume and sonority and new instrumental colours. Wagner seems to have had mixed views about some of the outcomes. He found the tone qualities of several wind and brass instruments preferable in their former guises than in their newly developed forms, even objecting, in some cases, to the increases in volume and projection gained. He commented (1869), for example, that flautists had ‘turned their once so gentle instruments into veritable tubes of violence – a delicate sustained piano is hardly to be attained any more’;105 and he implied a preference for the ‘natural’ horn when he noted, in the preface to his Tristan score, that the nobility of tone and smooth legato of which the earlier (crooked) instrument was capable should be emulated on the valve instrument. Despite this perceived reluctance to espouse all the instrumental developments of his age, Wagner incorporated various new instruments into his orchestras as permanent resources for his sound world. He included the bass clarinet in his normal woodwind section from Lohengrin onwards; and from Rienzi onwards he regularly used valve horns and valve trumpets. His Tristan 103 Hans von Bülow conducted the first performances of Tristan and was thoroughly familiar with Wagner’s own conducting style. 104 In Millington (ed.), The Wagner Compendium, p. 354. 105 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 8, p. 283.
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orchestra does not require some of the rarer instruments employed, say, in Der Ring (e.g. Wagner tubas, or bass trumpet), but he substituted an ‘alto oboe’ for the cor anglais in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung and suggested in these two operas’ prefaces that this instrument should replace the cor anglais in all his scores. The woody, mellow-toned tarógató has traditionally been used in Budapest, Vienna and Bayreuth performances of Tristan for the off-stage shepherd’s solo (Act 3 scene 1), originally scored for the principal orchestral cor anglais player.106 Most of Wagner’s string players were equipped, as appropriate, with Tourtemodel bows and nineteenth-century aids such as a chin-rest and shoulder pad (violins and violas) and end-pin (cellos). Tone and sonority will have been coloured by the use of pure uncovered gut for the violin E, A and D strings; gut wound with silver for the violin G string and at least the lower two strings of the viola; and gut strings wound with silver or silver-plated copper wire for the cello. The form of double bass employed was less standardised, varying from three-, four- or five-stringed instruments, with various tunings, in the century’s first half to the four-stringed bass, tuned in fourths upwards from E, as the norm by the middle of the century. Bass bows were normally held ‘underhand’. Wagner founded his instrumentation practices in Tristan on a web of string sonority with rather less emphasis on brass instruments than in, say, Der Ring. The melancholy double-reed sonorities convey the unfulfilled longing of Tristan and Isolde, and the harp is used tellingly, yet sparingly (notably in Isolde’s Liebestod towards the end of Act 3, the instrument’s first entry since the love music of Act 2). The score is peppered with detailed indications for string players, ranging from specific una corda markings to con sordino, sul ponticello, pizzicato, and other effects and numerous prescriptions for divided or halved forces. The principal viola is also given unusual solo prominence (especially in a soaring chromatic passage as Brangäne produces the love potion), as are two solo basses, if in somewhat different light. Further, the third and fourth basses are required to tune their E string down to C# in Act 2 scene 2.
Orchestral constitution Throughout Wagner’s early career as a conductor and composer orchestras were small and their players overworked, under-rehearsed and under-paid.
106 Wagner discusses the practicalities of this use of personnel in his preface and suggests the possibility of using another musician to play the ‘simpler joyful strain’ at the end of Act 3 scene 1, ‘either likewise on the English horn (with the reinforcement of other woodwind), or . . . on a simple natural instrument expressly made for the purpose’. He mentions an Alpenhorn or a special instrument of wood (employing only the natural scale), having previously called the instrument a Schalmei (shawm or reed pipe).
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Brown comments that while the orchestra of the Paris Opéra had a regular complement of around 50 string players during the first half of the nineteenth century, German theatres tended to employ far fewer: Leipzig in 1825 had only 18, and Liszt premiered Lohengrin in Weimar (1850) with only 21.107 Koury also notes that Wagner is believed to have conducted an orchestra of 24 players at Riga in the late 1830s, with a string quartet complement of 2–2–2–1, and a sketch of a performance of Rienzi in Dresden (1842) suggests an orchestra of about 29 players.108 Wagner’s ideal ensemble was considerably larger and he lobbied both for more string players to maintain a satisfactory balance with the wind and brass and for a greater variety and number of wind instruments (as in Paris) to extend the palette and cultivate more refined timbres. He wrote: In orchestrating Tannhaüser I envisaged a particularly large string section and did so with such clear intent that I must insist that all theatres increase their complement of strings to exceed their usual number; and my demands in this regard may be measured by this very simple standard – I declare that an orchestra which cannot muster at least four good viola players can convey only the most garbled impression of my music.109
Wagner suggested radical reforms to the Dresden Orchestra when he was Kapellmeister there (1843–9),110 but succeeded only in securing an expansion in the number of its string players from 16–4–4–4 to 20–6–5–4. His plan (1849) for an orchestra of 62 players for a national theatre in Saxony involved a string section of fairly similar strength (20 violins (including 2 concertmasters), 6 violas, 6 cellos and 5 basses), along with 3 flutes, 3 oboes (including cor anglais), 3 clarinets (including bass clarinet), 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and timpani.111 Wagner achieved his ideal orchestral palette and balance at Bayreuth, where he regularly had an orchestra of about 120 players – in 1876 it comprised a large string section (16–16–12–12–8), 4 flutes, 4 oboes, cor anglais, 4 clarinets, bass clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 7 horns, 4 trumpets, 1 bass trumpet, 4 trombones, bass trombone, 2 tenor tubas, 2 bass tubas, 1 contrabass tuba, 3 timpanists and 8 harps.112 He referred to the orchestra pit at the Festspielhaus as ‘the “mystic chasm”, because its task was to separate the real from the ideal’.113 Just as the extended proscenium gave a distant feeling from the events on stage,
107 In Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 100. 108 In D. J. Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century: Size, Proportions, and Seating, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1986, p. 133. 109 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 5, p. 144. 110 Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols., Leipzig, 1911–16, vol. 12, pp. 151–204. 111 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd edn, vol. 2, pp. 264–6. 112 A. Lavignac, Voyage Artistique à Bayreuth, 2nd edn, Paris, Delagrave, 1898, p. 519. 113 In Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary 2nd edn, vol. 3, p. 6, art. ‘Bayreuth’.
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yet allowed them to be clearly viewed and understood, the Schalldeckel or hood over the orchestra not only obscured the players from the audience’s view but also assisted in overcoming potential problems of balance. Nevertheless, it is no surprise to learn that Wagner beseeched his players to play fortissimos ‘fp’ and pianos ‘pianissimo’: ‘Remember how many of you there are down there,’ he said, ‘against the poor single human throat up here alone on stage!’114 In similar vein, Wagner’s handwritten backstage notice for the first performances of Der Ring, reminded the orchestra: ‘Piano, pianissimo and all will be well!’115
Orchestral placement Wagner learnt much about orchestral placement from Spontini, adopting the latter’s conducting position and principles and his separation of the two violin sections, but rejecting his unorthodox placement of the oboes. In Dresden, he positioned the violin sections on either side of the conductor (who stood next to the stage with his back to the players) instead of having all the strings to the left with wind and percussion to the right as previously. His aim was for the orchestra to ‘form a complete whole, the wind instruments giving the effect of lights’.116 He was criticised, however, for grouping the cellos and basses together in the middle instead of the traditional practice of distributing them throughout the orchestra for the purposes of better ensemble.117 Wagner essentially designed the Bayreuth Festspielhaus around the orchestra pit and had consolidated his views on instrument placement by the mid1870s. Caroline Kerr describes the sunken space arranged upon steps as follows: The strings were placed under the upper sounding-board, the harps and woodwinds in the uncovered space, in order that their delicate quality might assert itself, and the brasses and instruments of percussion were relegated to a position under the stage projection, in order that the aggressiveness of their tone might be modified.118
Wagner appears to have retained something of the Dresden tradition in placing the first and second violins opposite each other (but curiously with the first violins to the conductor’s right as he faced the stage) and in dividing the cellos
114 In A. Neumann, Personal Recollections of Wagner, trans. E. Livermore, New York, Holt, 1908, p. 151. 115 In Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years, p. 51. Strauss, Furtwängler and Rudolf Kempe were among those conductors who remained unconvinced of the benefits of Wagner’s Schalldeckel. 116 In Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 27 June 1882. 117 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 47 (1845), 97. 118 In R. Wagner, The Story of Bayreuth as Told in the Bayreuth Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. C. Kerr, Boston, Small, Maynard & Co., 1912, pp. 224–5.
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and basses into two equal groups and distributing them symmetrically at either side of the orchestra. Bryan Magee, among other writers, expressed the wish to see a Wagner production that does literally what the composer requests.119 While acknowledging that acting in a nineteenth-century manner ‘might be too hammy for modern tastes’, he points to Wagner’s theatrical background (his stepfather was the actor Ludwig Geyer) and the fact that he, ‘like Shakespeare, was not a solitary genius or an academic but a Jack of all trades in the working theatre. He was a pro. And one reason why he made his instructions so detailed is that he knew what he was talking about.’120 Others believe that several of Wagner’s scenic instructions, as well as other elements of his work, were tied to the age in which he lived and were fated to vanish with that era. They opine that to cultivate such historical rigidity would lead to aesthetic staleness and they encourage music directors, producers and designers to strike out in new directions, particularly those ostensibly in keeping with the spirit of modern times. For them, too many images (mental, aural, optical) reach beyond Wagner’s age and may even have a topical meaning in the present. Whichever one’s view, Wagner’s works have proved their enduring vitality and capacity and ‘are prized both for what they are and as a perennial catalyst for theatrical change and renewal, as oracles whose answers echo our own enigmatic questions’.121
119 B. Magee, Aspects of Wagner, London, Alan Ross, 1968, pp. 109ff. 121 In Millington and Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, p. 73.
120 Ibid., pp. 111, 112.
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PART VII
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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND
. 28 .
Musical performance in the twentieth century and beyond: an overview STEPHEN COTTRELL
Nineteenth-century legacies For the purpose of considering musical performance, at least, it is now useful to conceive of the ‘long’ twentieth century, since the cultural, technological and economic forces that shaped performance in that century have their roots in practices that arose in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This is particularly true of the impact of sound-recording technology, which so profoundly changed the nature of performance in nearly all genres and contexts throughout the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, for present purposes, Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 marks the beginning of the long twentieth century. It is still perhaps a little too early, and we are at this point too close to it, to be sure where it might be seen to end, although some speculation is offered below. The impact of recording technology is thus a recurring theme in this chapter, but there are other overarching trends also worthy of note. Closely intertwined with the development of the new technology was the rise of those culture industries that sought to exploit it. Sound recording allowed musical performances to be commodified, and thus packaged, distributed and sold around the world in large quantities. Record companies soon realised there were substantial profits to be made if the right market could be found for the right artist. Successful sales ensured that both the companies themselves and a small number of high-profile performers became increasingly wealthy as the century progressed. But many performers benefited financially to some degree from the income generated by sales of recordings, particularly those in the West, where the larger and more successful record companies were usually based. This dissemination of commodified musical performance was made easier by increasingly efficient methods of transportation. A performer’s reputation could be established by the success of a given recording long before they might be heard live in a particular area. But the speed of travel also meant that performers could relatively easily follow their recordings around the globe. Initially by boat, rail and road, and most especially in the second half of the century by air, performers travelled faster, further and more often than [725]
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ever before. Although the travelling virtuoso was already a common figure in the nineteenth century, far greater numbers of performers exploited the ability to travel easily in the twentieth century. Successful performers with national reputations might become international icons; star performers, who in the early decades might rely on one agent to deal with their relatively local affairs, or even handle the bookings themselves, would eventually identify different agents to cover various territories around the world. Agents themselves became increasingly powerful multinational operations, retaining a roster of performers from a variety of countries whom they sought to place via their connections with record companies, orchestras, opera houses and concert promoters. While this was true of many different musicians and ensembles, of none was it more true than orchestral conductors. Figures such as Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954), Otto Klemperer (1885–1973) and, perhaps above all, Herbert von Karajan (1908–89), became international icons who wielded exceptional power in the worlds of symphonic and operatic music. Karajan, for example, at one point held four chief conductor appointments simultaneously in different cities around the world.1 Ultimately some of these names became brands, able to command high fees for individual appearances, musical directorships and especially recording contracts. The capacity of a particular conductor to sell a recording on the strength of his brand alone became a powerful marketing tool for the record companies, and an important component of the overall economic jigsaw that supported Western art-music production around the globe. In the latter part of the century something similar would be true for superstar rock and pop musicians. As both conductors and the record companies became increasingly powerful, so the musicians whose work they directed and profited from looked to retain some semblance of independence and control. Protective associations and unionisation became more common: the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union was formed in England in 1893 and the American Federation of Musicians in 1896, to give just two examples.2 Such organisations sought to look after the interests of their members and protect their work as musical performers, through trade agreements, negotiated contracts and so forth. The creation of self-governing orchestras arose for similar reasons of self-preservation and independence. When Sir Henry Wood demanded in 1904 that the musicians of his Queen’s Hall Orchestra should no longer employ substitutes (a common 1 N. Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth, London, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 133. 2 For a detailed overview of unionisation of British musicians around the turn of the century see C. Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 142–56.
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practice at the time that ensured musicians could take the most lucrative work on offer to them) the musicians refused and left his orchestra in order to run their own: the London Symphony Orchestra. The co-operative model they established (an executive team drawn from the members of the orchestra with professional management overseeing day-to-day affairs, but the musicians themselves deciding who should conduct them) formed the basis for many orchestras established during the century, notably the Vienna Philharmonic. Elsewhere, state and city patronage provided alternative means of support. Orchestras such as the BBC Symphony in London or the Berlin Symphony were heavily supported by those corporations or civic authorities who established them. These organisations often provided greater stability and better pay for the musicians, but also left them at the whim of changing political landscapes or corporate priorities. Unionisation and protection came to be seen as particularly necessary in relation to film and studio work, so that performers might somehow share in the profits being made by the record companies through mass reproduction of performances and international sales. Written contracts became essential, and these would stipulate the number of hours to be worked, rates of pay, limits of exploitation of the musical material and so forth. Slowly but surely the music profession mutated into the music business. Another characteristic of the century was the increasing plurality of musical styles and genres that developed, particularly in Europe and America but also elsewhere. These offered greater employment opportunities for performers as well as a greater diversity of music and performance events to choose from for listeners and concert-goers. In the early part of the century these different genres remained relatively distinct. For many Europeans and Americans Western art music was seen as the pre-eminent ‘serious’ or ‘legitimate’ tradition, with other traditions frequently construed as somehow subservient or secondary to it; the development of hot music and jazz in the 1920s, for example, provoked particularly furious responses from those who saw it as musically worthless. But as the century wore on these comfortable distinctions broke down, and in the latter part of the century the mainstays of the Western art-music tradition found themselves competing with a broad range of other festivals, venues and artists for audiences and financial support. As Nicholas Kenyon points out in Chapter 1, opera houses and orchestras, particularly in Western Europe and the USA, were no longer construed as having some inalienable right to exist, but were expected to justify their existence in a variety of ways, perhaps by demonstrating their commitment to commissioning new works, or by expanding audiences and engaging in educational outreach activities.
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Although the symphony orchestra had something of a golden age in Europe and the USA between perhaps 1900 and 1950, it declined in popularity somewhat thereafter, notwithstanding the fact that standards of orchestral playing increased constantly over time. Internationally renowned orchestras such as the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonics managed consistently to combine popularity and artistic excellence with longevity, but other European and American orchestras sometimes struggled to raise enough funding to stay solvent. Elsewhere, however, and particularly in East Asia, symphony orchestras flourished, with numerous new orchestras being established (the Central Philharmonic Orchestra in Beijing in 1951, the Taipei City Symphony Orchestra in Taiwan in 1969, etc.).3 Underpinned by growing urbanisation, an expanding middle class and a growing interest in Western art music, the symphony orchestra appeared in such contexts as emblematic of certain aspects of Western culture. This increasing popularity of orchestral music led to rising local demand for performers able to work in these orchestras. While many Asian musicians initially trained in the conservatoires of Europe and America, local music conservatoires also rapidly expanded, often largely copying the systems of musical training developed in Europe. These globalised cultural ties were frequently further reinforced through the widespread legitimation of such training with systems of certificates and awards long common in Western Europe. This widespread preoccupation with rewarding achievement in musical performance by bestowing paper qualifications was very much a legacy of nineteenth-century European attitudes towards musical training and performance. Increasing musical plurality not only provided more employment opportunities for performers, it also necessitated competence in a greater range of musical styles. While many performers continued to remain specialists in Western art music, devoting themselves to the long and intense period of training necessary for success, others chose to diversify, particularly in those urban contexts that increasingly offered differentiated types of music-making. In turn-of-the-century America musicians were already adept at moving from circus and vaudeville groups into the professional military-style bands run by Sousa and others, and the best of these musicians might be found in opera houses or orchestras also. In the second half of the century this flexibility applied to a broader range of Western musicians, who became skilled at moving not only between the various styles of Western art music itself, both historical and contemporary, but also between the demands of the recording
3 See S. Cottrell, ‘The future of the orchestra’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 260–2.
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studio, the film score session, the theatre pit and more. Although a number of musicians continued to be tied to orchestras in the symphony hall or opera house (and even here would often take part in other engagements beyond), a large number of performers worked independently, building on nineteenthcentury traditions of freelancing; the ‘portfolio’ musician became commonplace, skilled in a range of performance styles, maintaining a wide range of professional connections, and engaging in teaching and other educational work. Professional music-making, particularly in the orchestras and opera houses, remained a largely masculine occupation for much of the century. Again, nineteenth-century preconceptions about the inappropriateness of certain instruments for women, and/or the undesirability of seeing female participation on the public musical stage, took a considerable time to wane. Conductors, particularly, were almost exclusively male, albeit with a few female conductors such as Marin Alsop (b. 1956) or Sian Edwards (b. 1959) establishing themselves in the latter part of the century. Orchestral players were also largely male, and orchestral music-making often somewhat chauvinistic as a result. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, for example, was notoriously proud of its all-male tradition, until it too was obliged to accept female players in 1997 in the face of changing social legislation (although very few were actually appointed to the orchestra). Vienna apart, however, in the latter years of the century the gender imbalance began to be redressed, with women forming much larger proportions of orchestras in general. Some of these themes will resurface in the following pages. But this mixture of increasing globalisation, supported by sophisticated transport and communication links and combined with rapid advances in the technology of sound recording, provide the broader context within which the lives and work of musicians changed over the course of the twentieth century.
The impact of recording on musical performance Edison speculated as early as 1878 that his phonograph could be used to reproduce music, but such recordings appear not to have been made until 1887, by the pianist Josef Hofmann in New York.4 The potential of the new machine to record musical sound was quickly exploited, however, and by the 1890s numerous wax cylinders were being produced and sold to a rapidly expanding market. Initially these were of light music and dances popular at 4 T. Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 1.
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the time, but by the early twentieth century core Western art-music repertoire had become an increasingly significant part of record company catalogues. The implications for both performers and audiences of this new technology were profound. For the first time in history a listener did not need to be physically present at a performance to hear how it sounded. Previously one could know something of a performance taking place elsewhere only by hearing about it, reading written descriptions of it, or through the examination of performance materials, instruments, or similar. Now one could simply listen to the performance itself. Any given performance became fixed and immutable; it could be disseminated widely, repeatedly listened to and thus repeatedly enjoyed.5 This kind of repeated listening allowed closer analysis of a performance, which could then be used as a model or stimulus for other performances. Notwithstanding the centrality of the sophisticated notation system underpinning Western art music, oral/aural tradition had always been part of the tradition, not least in the instructions and demonstrations that occurred during teaching. But the advent of recording technology greatly expanded the importance of the aural tradition. Now one could hear the phrasing of great singers such as Nellie Melba (1861–1931) or Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), or the interpretations of conductors such as Bruno Walter (1876–1962), regardless of whether one could hear them perform live or not. Equally significantly, the contexts in which the work of performers were heard inevitably changed. Whereas musical performance had usually been an essentially public event (in the sense that an audience was always present, whether in the private salon or the concert hall) sound recording allowed the musical transaction between performer and listener to become often a private event. Performers might construct their performances in the recording studio – and later the editing suite – with no audience except a few engineers; then a performance would be sold by an intermediary before perhaps being privately consumed in the drawing room at home or elsewhere. The advent of the personal stereo in the 1980s provided perhaps the ultimate in private consumption of musical performance since, like the mp3 player that followed, it allowed a musical performance to be listened to anywhere, at any time, under almost any circumstances. This is all so familiar to us now that it is difficult to conceive the impact of recording technology on those pioneer performers using it for the first time. The German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow (1830–94), for example, is said nearly to have fainted in Edison’s laboratory when he heard himself 5 Exactly a century after Edison’s invention the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer would refer to this mediated splitting of sound from its original context as ‘schizophonia’. See R. M. Schafer, The Tuning of the World, New York, Knopf, 1977, p. 90.
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performing a Chopin mazurka he had just recorded.6 In contrast, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) threw kisses into the recording trumpet, so enraptured was she at hearing her own recording of ‘Voi che sapete’ from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.7 Recordings not only allowed performers to hear themselves in something akin to the manner in which their audiences heard them, they could also use the new technology for pedagogic and autodidactic purposes. As early as 1909 a mixture of instructional books and recordings was published as ‘The Hermann Klein Phono-Vocal Method’ by the Columbia Graphaphone Company, intended as a learning aid for singers.8 This was probably the first in a long line of pedagogic materials, which would go on to include later enterprises such as ‘Music Minus One’, in which the accompaniments to various concertos would be recorded without the solo line, allowing the aspiring concerto soloist to add this in the privacy of their own home. Recordings of accompaniments to instrumental and vocal exams fulfilled a similar purpose. In other traditions, particularly jazz, the autodidactic nature of the learning process came to rely heavily on recordings. For example, when Charlie Parker (1920–55) and Dizzy Gillespie (1917–93) evolved the jazz style known as ‘bebop’ in the 1940s, the extremely fast tempos, the speed of the harmonic rhythm and the densely chromatic melodic lines all made it difficult for neophyte jazz players to learn at speed. The opportunity to listen repeatedly to a solo – and, if necessary, to reduce the playing speed of the gramophone – was an essential element in the largely aural tradition through which this latest improvisational language could be learned.9 The technology underpinning recorded sound evolved considerably over the course of the twentieth century. Each new development brought different challenges for the performers whose work it sought to capture, but would also often create welcome extra employment for performers, as record companies sought to re-record their catalogues using the latest technology. Early recordings were made via an acoustic process: that is, the recording horn simply captured the sound waves and transferred them directly onto wax cylinders and discs. Performances were represented rather badly, however. The recordings had a small dynamic range and limited frequency response, meaning that much of the rich frequency spectrum that characterises many instruments was lost. This acoustic process was very inefficient: performers needed to be as close to the recording horn as possible, and some often ended up leaning right into the middle of the horn itself, leading one accompanist to observe that it 6 Day, A Century of Recorded Music, p. 1. 7 Ibid., p. 142. 8 Ibid., p. 220. 9 See for example M. Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2004, pp. 72–84.
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was rather difficult to communicate with the singer if all he could see were his buttocks.10 Large ensembles – such as a full orchestra – were very difficult to accommodate, and works were often reorchestrated for smaller or different forces than those heard in the concert hall. Orchestral layouts often changed quite markedly from the concert hall, and performers might experience a certain amount of discomfort as they endeavoured to crowd around the recording horn, lending a rather disconcerting aspect to the recording process for the seasoned orchestral player. Timothy Day describes the extent to which orchestral performance practice needed to be rethought in the studio context: Nearest to the recording horn would be the strings, the cello sometimes mounted on a moveable platform, with flutes, oboes and clarinets almost poking their instruments into the string players’ necks; bassoons often sat opposite the violins and beneath the recording horn; the French horns would be further away with their backs turned so that the bells of their instruments were directed towards the horn, using mirrors to see the conductor, with the other brass instruments ranged as convenient further back . . . if a woodwind instrument had a solo he had to stand up and lean forward or even scurry round and make obeisance to the horn at a distance of a couple of inches.11
Some instruments recorded better than others. The voice generally recorded quite well, and the preponderance of vocal recordings in early catalogues attests to this, as well as reflecting the popularity of vocal performances in live concerts of the time. The piano has always been difficult to record properly, and early recorded piano timbres are poor indeed. Wind and brass instruments recorded reasonably well, but string instruments less so, since their relative lack of power made them difficult to capture under the acoustic process. Thus some violinists were obliged to learn to play the Stroh violin, in which the soundbox of the instrument was replaced by a diaphragm and a small metal horn, allowing the amplified violin sound to be directed more precisely towards the recording horn. But the Stroh instrument produced an inferior tone to the standard violin, a fact that doubtless deflated those violinists who had devoted many hours of practice to developing a good tone on their wooden instrument. A further major drawback of early cylinders and discs was the very limited amount of music they could contain. Only between two and five minutes’ worth could be recorded, depending on the size of the disc. This too affected performance practice, because in order to make a piece fit onto one side performers were required either to make significant cuts (with or without 10 G. Moore, Am I too Loud? Memoirs of an Accompanist, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1962, p. 60. 11 Day, A Century of Recorded Music, pp. 11–12.
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the composer’s consent), or to play considerably faster than normal. For example, Josef Hofmann’s recording of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor lasts 40 3000 on his 1923 recording, but 80 0600 on a piano roll released only three years later;12 this suggests that he was playing nearly twice as fast in the recording studio as in the concert hall. These constraints on recording time, with longer movements necessarily segmented among multiple sides, lasted until the middle of the century. Moreover, such changes were not only confined to the Western art-music tradition. Indian musicians, for example, had similarly to curtail their normal practice in order that their traditionally lengthy performances might fit within the limits imposed by the gramophone.13 In 1925 a system of electrical amplification was introduced, building on developments in radio technology, which circumvented some of the problems of the acoustic process. Now complete orchestras could be recorded in their normal disposition, with the electrically enhanced signals from microphones providing a more faithful reproduction of the original sound. This was the major benefit for art-music practice, together with claims (not altogether verified by the recorded evidence) that the contexts of recordings – the acoustic ambience – could now be more easily heard. Electrical amplification in live performance remained largely eschewed, however, with orchestras and soloists keen to retain the acoustic balance conceived by the composer in the score. But for popular music practice the effects were more dramatic. Singers particularly benefited from microphone technology. No longer constrained by either the quasi-operatic vocal technique of light classical music or the over-enunciated projection needed for the rowdy music hall, they exploited a range of different vocal timbres. ‘Crooning’, a more intimate and conversational form of popular music singing that required less breath passing the vocal cords and a mixture of chest and head voice in the lower registers, became widespread in the 1930s and 1940s. Singers such as Bing Crosby (1903–77), Dean Martin (1917–95) and Frank Sinatra (1915–98) enjoyed extensive commercial success with this style, as well as undoubtedly enjoying the portrayal of masculine sexuality that this new singing style frequently connoted.14 After the Second World War two particular developments again impacted on the work of performers in the studio. The use of vinyl rather than shellac as the material from which discs were made allowed finer grooves to be cut into the disc. This meant more groove length on one side of a disc and a slower rate 12 Ibid., p. 7. 13 G. Farrell, ‘The early days of the gramophone industry in India: historical, social and musical perspectives’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2 (1993), 49–51. 14 For an extensive reading of the gendered aspects of crooning, see A. McCracken, ‘ “God’s gift to us girls”: crooning, gender, and the re-creation of American popular song, 1928–1933’, American Music, 17/4 (1999), 365–95.
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of rotation on the turntable: 3313 rpm as against the earlier 78 rpm. Consequently, more music could be recorded without interruption; over twenty minutes could be accommodated on one side of a new ‘Long Playing’ (LP) disc rather than the previous five minutes or so, making the listening experience considerably more satisfying. The implication for performers in the studio, however, was that rather than having to play for five minutes without making any errors which might nullify the recording, they would now need to produce near-perfect performances for the full twenty minutes. For a live performance art, wherein occasional slips were accepted as perfectly understandable, this was barely conceivable and would have created significant pressures on the studio performers involved. Fortunately the second technological development, the use of magnetic tape, mitigated this problem. Although magnetic tape had been used to hold film soundtracks in the 1930s, it was not until the Germans developed it during the war that it became of sufficient quality to use in recording studios. It had many advantages, of which the most significant from the recording artist’s perspective was that it could be edited. Previously a performer would record several performances in one session, and the producer would select the preferred version to be pressed and released, discarding the other ‘takes’ (recorded segments). Now mistakes from a particular take could be extracted, and the same section from a different take spliced in; with care, the join was imperceptible. This had profound implications for musical performance. A musician’s recording was no longer a replica – more or less – of a performance in the concert hall; it became a synthetic concoction, piecing together the best passages of numerous takes done over several hours or perhaps days. It was not even necessary to play a piece in its entirety in the studio; it could be recorded section by section, even bar by bar if the complexity of the music demanded. The Czech conductor Jindřich Rohan (1919–82) observed in 1977 that he only ever recorded in sections, and that he would expect a symphony recording to have ‘80, 100, or even 120 stops and retakes’,15 while the pianist Susan Tomes notes that a typical producer’s comment might be something like ‘what I need is: bar 32 without a split note from the piano, bars 34–36 with good octaves between the strings, bar 38 without a page-turn noise, and a really good attack from all of you at the same moment in bar 42’.16 In theory, and occasionally in practice, a performer could be made to appear capable of much greater feats of musical performance in the recording studio than they could actually achieve on stage. Even so-called ‘live’ recordings could have obvious errors exchanged from
15 Cited in Day, A Century of Recorded Music, p. 27. 16 S. Tomes, Beyond the Notes, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2004, p. 146.
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‘patches’ taken from a recording of a rehearsal, or, occasionally, specially rerecorded in the same hall after the audience had left. In one sense this was a distinct advantage for performers, since a single error no longer carried the same consequences as previously and could easily be corrected. But the development of editing within the studio environment also had a profound effect on live musical performance. Detailed editing allowed the creation of flawless performances on record, and audiences attending concerts began to anticipate hearing similarly flawless performances recreated live. Listeners came to expect the same level of infallibility from performers on the concert stage as they had become used to from the fabricated performances heard at home, and these expectations inevitably drove up concert performance standards. For much of the century the record companies exerted considerable control over the work of performers. But the introduction of cassette tapes in 1963 marked the first step in redressing the balance of power between the two groups. Cassettes were relatively low cost, and low-fi in sound quality, but they were more robust than vinyl discs, they could be easily and cheaply duplicated, and usefully re-recorded and recycled. In time, low-cost equipment became available that meant musicians could more easily record and promote themselves. While this initially had little impact on Western art-music performance, because of the generally higher levels of sound quality anticipated by performers and listeners, it had significant consequences in many non-Western contexts, where ‘cassette cultures’ evolved: large-scale but low-cost recordings of local music for the local market, made by local musicians and distributed (often) by local companies.17 In many areas where music-reproduction technology was previously unavailable or simply too expensive, cassettes transformed the relationship between performers and audiences in much the same way as had the gramophone elsewhere half a century earlier. The rise of digital technology in the early 1980s again revolutionised both the listening and recording experience. The introduction of small PVC Compact Discs, coated with protective aluminium inscribed with digitally encoded information that was simply read off by the CD player, proved to be enormously successful and once again encouraged the record companies to rerecord, or transfer, their back catalogues. The discs were extremely robust, with no deterioration in the sound regardless of the number of times they were played, and able to carry 70 minutes or more of music without the need to change the disc. They soon became the medium of choice for many listeners,
17 See, for example, P. Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
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who enjoyed the crispness and clarity of the sound they produced. But the transparency of the digital sound again provided challenges to the musicians making the recordings, since it meant that any extraneous noise in the recording studio would now be heard as obtrusive. A poorly oiled valve or key, or the too-hurriedly turned page from an inside-desk violinist, while ordinarily unnoticed in the context of a live performance, would now be picked up by highly sensitive microphones and be clearly distinguishable against the otherwise perfectly silent background. This exacerbated the problem of audience expectations prior to live performance, therefore, since listeners were now attending concerts not only anticipating near-flawless standards of execution but also perfectly quiet contexts for listening, unimpeded by non-essential sounds. So prevalent was recording technology in the later twentieth century that it had in some contexts inverted the previous relationship between live performance and recorded sound. Early recordings sought, however imperfectly, to capture performances as heard in the concert hall, and then replicate them. For much of the century recordings tended to follow performances; indeed, recordings of live performances became a niche marketing tool, as well as implicitly suggesting that performances manufactured in the studio were somehow deficient, or at least different, from those heard live. But in certain music-making of the latter part of the century the studio work was undertaken prior to the performance, thus inverting the relationship between the two. This was particularly the case in popular music. Many albums by popular artists from the mid-1960s onwards were developed in highly sophisticated studio environments, using a range of production techniques which then required careful reconstruction in the contexts of live performance; sometimes mixtures of live and pre-recorded sounds would be employed to effect this. Such technology impacted on Western art-music practice also. Musique concrète arose in the late 1940s, building on composers’ new-found capacities to manipulate sound objects in a studio environment; the early classics of the genre, such as Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6) or Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), exploited contemporary studio technology to the full. Live performance could only follow once the work had been finished in the studio, and in these concerts there might be only one performer, the sound diffusionist controlling the distribution of the piece in the concert hall around a sophisticated network of speakers and amplifiers. Later works would combine this new technology with live performers. Edgard Varèse’s Desert (1954) for winds, piano, percussion and tape, provides an early example; several of Steve Reich’s works (for example, Different Trains (1988) for string quartet) mix live performers with pre-recorded and multi-tracked tapes. In such cases the sound engineers, and later others such as video artists, would become seen as
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part of the ensemble of performers, playing important roles in the final shape and sound of the performance. For most of the twentieth century the majority of professional musicians spent at least some of their time in the recording studio. For some musicians it became the focus of their work, and this was particularly true for those performers servicing the demands of the film music industry in Hollywood, London, Mumbai or elsewhere. Some artists virtually abandoned the stresses of live performance in preference to the studio. Undoubtedly the most famous example of this was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–82), who gave his last public performance in 1964. He then spent the next eighteen years making only recordings and never again performed live, citing a variety of ideological and musical objections to concert performance such as, for example, that it led the performer to create ‘certain musical distortions in the musical structure in order to overcome acoustic problems like poor instruments, or poor placement of instruments’.18 Towards the end of the century the diminishing costs of recording technology meant that performers were able to take more control over their recorded work, and in some ways the recording of musical performance became increasingly democratised. Smaller ‘cottage industries’ evolved, creating local record companies that concentrated on specific composers or repertoire that was uneconomic for the larger companies to consider, and thus catered for more fragmented specialist markets. Ultimately it became possible, for those sufficiently inclined and technologically proficient, to produce a CD of a performance using basic recording equipment and a home computer, without recourse to a conventional studio of any kind. These could be used to promote specialist interests, or as promotional tools, and might be sold at concerts or, in the last years of the century, via the Internet. This benefited not only performers working within the Western art-music tradition but also musicians in other traditions, who could again produce discs aimed at their local market as well as, in some cases, finding international niches for their work. The general reduction in the cost of electronic music equipment led to a rapid growth in popular music-making. Synthesisers and samplers connected to the home computer became common in bedroom-cum-studios around the world, allowing large numbers of people to create their own music and disseminate it to others, sometimes without ever having to perform live in front of an audience. Ultimately, the rise in music technology that had underpinned and influenced so much musical performance throughout the twentieth century had also made possible the production of music that required no ‘performer’ at all. 18 E. Angilette, Philosopher at the Keyboard: Glenn Gould, New Jersey, Scarecrow, 1992, p. 95.
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Changing performance aesthetics Although we are used to conceiving Western art music as a history of composition, through close study of composers’ scores and other literature, the rich historical legacy that we now have of recorded music performed over the course of the twentieth century allows us to understand something of the history of music as a history of performance. Certainly, what recordings do reveal to us is the significant change in performance aesthetics from the late 1800s up to the present day. They also demonstrate how much higher, in general, were performance standards by the end of the twentieth century than those at the beginning, while simultaneously illustrating a decreasing amount of interpretative diversity. Indeed, so different are recordings of orchestras and ensembles in the early twentieth century that, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, we must acknowledge that we are engaging with very different performance cultures. This is particularly true in relation to the precision of ensemble performance. Early orchestral recordings often demonstrate what we now hear as a lack of precision, with different sections of the orchestra perhaps slightly at variance with each other, articulation details rather haphazard, certain passages hurried and scrappy, and tuning, particularly amongst the woodwind section, often less accurate than in most performances in the latter part of the century. To some extent this may be attributable to the often under-rehearsed nature of these early orchestral performances. For the first three decades of the century at least, and frequently later, orchestral concerts and recordings would be done on very little rehearsal, perhaps one run-through if time allowed; and because deputies were often employed by musicians who had acquired alternative and more lucrative engagements, a conductor might well be confronted with many different faces in a performance from those who had attended the relevant rehearsal. In this respect recordings may demonstrate some of the better performances given at the time, since the recording itself would usually have been made immediately following whatever (minimal) rehearsal time might have been allocated for it, and the personnel would almost certainly have remained the same. That such performances still sound to modern ears as rather ‘exotic’, arguably even slipshod, is a measure of how much crisper and tighter orchestral performance became over the century, and how much latitude was considered acceptable in earlier ensembles when compared to our own times. Also evident from early orchestral recordings is a much greater variety of both individual and collective instrumental timbres. Over the course of the century ideas about musical sound moved from those that celebrated and even
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promoted timbral variety as a positive trait, to those which valued homogeneity, balance and timbral blend above all else. National differences became to a significant degree subsumed within global ideas about how orchestras should sound. For example, up to the early 1930s, one can hear distinct differences between English flute players, performing usually on wooden flutes with a broad tone and little or no vibrato, and their French counterparts, using metal instruments and with a noticeable confident vibrato. English reed instruments often sounded reedy, with a rather thin tone, and were again played largely without vibrato, whereas woodwind players in Vienna or Berlin cultivated a darker sound, albeit again largely heard without vibrato. Vibrato in general was much less widely employed in the early years of the century than was to become the case later. Most wind players avoided it, and although it was a little more common among string players and singers, it assumed greater importance as an expressive gesture only from the 1930s onwards. Brass sections also became more homogeneous and less easily identifiable. The brass playing of Russian orchestras up to the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the Leningrad (now St Petersburg) Philharmonic, was easily identified: it was vibrant, ‘blaring’, with noticeable vibrato. By the 1990s the Russians too were losing this distinctiveness and emulating a more universal, homogeneous and less brash orchestral sound. While it would be an oversimplification to say that every orchestra by the end of the century sounded more or less the same, it was certainly the case that it was more difficult to tell them apart than it had been at the beginning of the century. How did such homogenisation come about? In part, as always, because of the widespread dissemination of recordings, and through them the increased influence of the most internationally significant orchestras – in Vienna, Berlin, New York, London and so on. But concepts of orchestral sound travelled also with those internationally peripatetic and powerful conductors whose job it was to shape orchestras, and who would take their ideas with them from one music directorship to another. Norman Lebrecht asserts that players in one chamber orchestra who found themselves unexpectedly working with Georg Solti for a few weeks found that ‘not only did their timbre alter instantly, but . . . they retained the Solti sound in their playing for two months afterwards’.19 The increasingly international conservatoire and music education system also played a part; musicians from different areas of the globe would find themselves immersed in the performance aesthetics prevalent in a given educational setting, and then take them back to their home country or elsewhere. Performers would also take their individual sounds and musical 19 Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth, p. 8.
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ideas with them as they sought employment among different orchestras in an increasingly globalised job market. High-profile soloists were particularly influential in changing attitudes towards performance style. The French flautist Marcel Moyse (1889–1984) established a brighter, more intense French flute sound in which vibrato played a significant role; the Russian/American violinist Jascha Heifetz (1901–87) is often credited with initiating a modern school of violin playing, his similarly intense style being accompanied by a rapid vibrato and emotionally charged but more sparing use of portamento than that heard previously; the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876–1973) almost single-handedly established the cello as a solo instrument in the early twentieth century, his warm phrasing and free, lyrical style reflective of his technically freer approach to the instrument; Casals’s compatriot Andres Segovia (1893–1987) similarly transformed the profile of the Spanish Guitar as a concert instrument. Lack of space precludes here a more exhaustive list of those individuals whose performances had a disproportionately significant effect on the development of their instrument or voice, but in all cases their work achieved greater impact because of the widespread dissemination and popularity of the recordings they made, in addition to their concert and teaching work. This trend towards internationalised sound ideals was further reinforced through the widespread adoption of particular types of instruments, and the increasing global success of a smaller number of manufacturers. This was particularly true of the wind and brass sections that most obviously affect orchestral colour. German bassoons based on Heckel’s nineteenth-century innovations, offering a darker but more homogeneous timbre, became more widely used than the lighter-sounding French bassoon; the French-style Boehm clarinet largely superseded local variants such as the wide-bore clarinets previously beloved of many English players (although German and Austrian players have usually retained a preference for their own Oehler systems); technological innovations in both the drawing of brass instruments and valve manufacture again led to more homogeneous and less differentiated brass instrument sounds. In the last three decades of the century new manufacturers, particularly from East Asia, began to develop highly successful instruments that were also widely disseminated. Part of the success of such instruments lay in their smoothness and clarity, again reducing those idiosyncrasies of earlier instruments that had in part contributed to timbral variety. Musical performance in the Western art-music tradition changed noticeably in other ways, particularly in relation to musical flexibility and shape. The trend in the latter half of the century towards complete musical synchronisation and exactitude, with highly polished ensembles and orchestras apparently
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working in unanimity, was not a characteristic of performances in the early decades of the century, nor, necessarily, an aspiration of the performers. Many musicians were untroubled at deviating from the vertical alignment of the instruments as implied by the score, particularly in the relation between soloist and accompaniment. The music educationalist Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), who accompanied the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), later recalled Ysaÿe’s instructions to him: In rubato melodic passages, he instructed me not to follow him meticulously in the accelerandos and ritenutos, if my part consisted of no more than a simple accompaniment. ‘It is I alone’, he would say, ‘who can let myself follow the emotion suggested by the melody; you accompany me in strict time, because an accompaniment should always be in time. You represent order, and your duty is to counterbalance my fantasy. Do not worry, we shall always find each other, because when I accelerate for a few notes, I afterwards re-establish the equilibrium by slowing down the following notes, or by pausing for a moment on one of them’ . . . In the train he would try to make up violin passages based on the dynamic accents and cadences of the wheels, and to execute ‘rubato’ passages, returning to the original beat each time we passed in front of a telegraph pole.20
The striking visual metaphor Dalcroze offers neatly captures the greater degree of musical flexibility allowed to performers between those points at which they should then re-engage. In its increasing rationalisation and preoccupation with smoothness and exactitude Western art-music performance has in the twentyfirst century to a considerable degree lost this level of interpretative freedom. It remains an integral part of other traditions, however: in jazz, where performers may move away from the underlying rhythmic and harmonic cycle in their improvisations, before re-establishing their engagement at the beginning of the next cycle; and similarly in Indian music, where the first beat of the rhythmic cycle (tal) is often used by musicians and audience alike to demonstrate their shared understanding of the rhythmic alignment, notwithstanding the complexity of what may have occurred in between. The greater musical flexibility of earlier performance styles is demonstrated in other ways, for example through greater elasticity in phrasing. Portamento, the sliding between notes that is available to string players by allowing their fingers to glide along the instrument rather than move cleanly between positions, is far more evident in recordings in the first two decades of the century than it is later. Comparing performances by Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) or 20 E. Jaques-Dalcroze, ‘Eugène Ysäye: quelques notes et souvenirs’, Revue Musicale, 188 (1939), in R. Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 110.
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Arnold Rosé (1863–1946) with those by Jascha Heifetz, for example, is to hear two very different schools of violin playing. The first pair make a cooler, more restrained sound with comparatively little use of vibrato and much portamento, whereas Heifetz played with slightly less portamento but a richer, fuller violin sound that made much more use of vibrato as an expressive device. String portamento was not confined to soloists but can also be heard in orchestras and quartets, once more adding to the sense of multiplicity and variety that one gets from listening to early orchestral recordings, while reinforcing later differences in homogeneity and standardisation that became more normal from about the 1950s. Portamento among orchestral string sections is particularly significant, because it indicates that decisions regarding its use were being made prior to the performance (so that all performers could glide together), almost certainly by the leader of each section. Understanding how to employ portamento within the performance was part of the skill set then required for competent orchestral playing; and not just a generic portamento, since different sections and orchestras would use different types – slow, fast, heavy, light – according to the tastes prevailing at the time in a particular context.21 Pianists also often played rather differently in the early part of the century. Again, the rhythmic precision and exact coordination between the two hands that we now take for granted (that is, reproducing the vertical alignment implicit in the score), is in fact a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier players quite deliberately separated the two hands at times, for expressive purposes and in order to distinguish the material in them. This rhythmic dislocation, similar to the dislocation noted above between soloist and accompaniment, was quite consciously fostered, although it is often again taken today to sound as though it is slipshod or somehow uncontrolled. But the range and stature of pianists who at times employed the technique is such that it cannot be construed as somehow accidental; Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963), Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943), and particularly Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941) and Vladimir de Pachmann (1848–1933) all demonstrate differing degrees of asynchronicity in their recordings.22 Some pianists were also given to arpeggiating chords (playing the notes within a chord at slightly different times), even though there would be no indication in the score to suggest such arpeggiation; this vertical misalignment was again characteristic of performances in the early part of the century, although by the 1940s the clearer and more 21 For a detailed examination of both solo and orchestral portamento, see R. Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900–1950, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 143–204. 22 See Philip, Performing Music, p. 131.
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coordinated styles with which we are familiar today had already become the norm.23 The inadequacies of the early acoustic recording process were such that we do not always get a good sense of a singer’s tone. But it is clear that vocal production changed quite noticeably through the century (a point more fully explored in Chapter 29). Early twentieth-century vocal styles tended to be rather lighter than we are used to today, still with great flexibility and, as with string players, much use of portamento. Vibrato was generally shallower and faster than later norms. Changes in vocal production, in Western art music as in other cultures, owe something to the development of instrumental forces. As instruments became more powerful and orchestras louder both on the concert stage and in the opera house, so singers necessarily developed more powerful voices to compete, with greater penetration to the sound and a wider vibrato also often employed to aid projection. Again, the crispness and clarity that became increasingly part of recorded sound also encouraged singers to develop brighter vocal timbres, with crisper attacks and more emphasis on diction and enunciation.
Modernism and postmodernism in musical performance It was not only the increasing fidelity of sound recording that drove performance standards higher through the twentieth century, profound changes in the musical language of Western art music also presented challenges to the technical abilities of performers. The early shoots of musical modernism, for example, began to make increasingly complex demands of individuals and ensembles. In 1912 Schoenberg’s melodrama for female voice and small ensemble, Pierrot lunaire, had introduced the concept of ‘Sprechstimme’, literally ‘speech-song’, a hybrid form of vocal production very different from the bel canto style used in the concert hall and on the operatic stage prior to that point. Only one year later Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring caused a near riot at its first performance in Paris. The piece remains challenging for professional orchestras and conductors, but the degree of difficulty it presented to the orchestra accompanying Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913 can be judged from the extensive rehearsals set aside for it prior to its first performance. As noted above, much orchestral music-making around the turn of the century, particularly for repertoire that had been performed before, was 23 For an explicit example of this in relation to the work of Myra Hess see D. Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Using recordings to study musical performance’, in A. Linehan (ed.), Aural History, London, British Library, 2001, pp. 8–9.
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done with almost no rehearsal whatsoever; occasionally the briefest of runthroughs might be scheduled. Stravinsky’s Rite required no less than seventeen orchestra rehearsals plus five stage rehearsals in the two weeks preceding its first performance;24 such a lengthy rehearsal schedule is indicative of the new challenges the musical language of the piece presented to orchestral musicians. The virtuoso demands already made of soloists in the late nineteenth century, especially of pianists and string players, were further expanded, and lateRomantic repertoire of the early twentieth century – such as Rachmaninov’s piano concertos or Sibelius’s Violin Concerto – continued to portray the soloist in a valiant, intrepid light: the quintessential ‘artist as hero’. But increasing levels of individual virtuosity were demanded from composers working in a range of styles. Indeed, by the 1960s certain performers were engaging in what might be termed ‘hypervirtuosity’, in which their command of instrument or voice went well beyond the capacities conventionally ascribed to performers, and beyond that which had previously been considered possible. The use of extended techniques – producing sounds which lie outside the conventional parameters ordinarily associated with an instrument or voice – became important components of the performance style of certain performers. The oboist Heinz Holliger (b. 1939), or the singer Cathy Berberian (1925–83), to name only two, provide examples of performers who explored the limits of what could be achieved in performance, often in collaboration with composers who sought deliberately to expand these boundaries. Luciano Berio’s Sequenza series of unaccompanied but highly challenging works is illustrative of this trend of composers collaborating closely with specific performers to exploit instrumental and vocal possibilities. These developments are more fully explored in Chapters 29 and 30. Hypervirtuosity provoked by modernist developments in musical language was not confined to Western art music. In the jazz tradition, for example, the rise of bebop in the 1940s also demanded much greater levels of individual technical and musical skills. Performers such as Parker and Gillespie changed perceptions of what was musically possible in an analogous fashion to artmusic practitioners. In Parker’s case it was the speed and intensity of his solos that were so different from other jazz players, and his work provided a platform for later virtuosi such as John Coltrane (1926–67) and Ornette Coleman (b. 1930). Coleman’s ‘free jazz’ style in particular, with its extensive use of glissandi, split notes and multiphonics, had something in common with similar sound worlds being imagined by Western art-music composers in the 1960s. Notwithstanding their very different aesthetic roots, the sonic overlap 24 S. Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934, London, Cape, 2000, p. 202.
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between these two areas of avant-garde music-making – the (largely) improvised jazz tradition and the (largely) notated art-music tradition – would be increasingly exploited in the latter part of the century, by artists as diverse as the saxophonists Anthony Braxton (b. 1945) and John Zorn (b. 1953), and the pianist Cecil Taylor (b. 1929), for example. This development of hypervirtuosity inevitably required an exceptional technical control of instrument or voice derived from many long years of practice. In contrast, there were other developments that either lessened the technical skills required of the performer or in some cases obviated them almost entirely. A work such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Aus den Sieben Tagen (1968) is composed entirely of poems written by the composer, to which performers are asked to respond in something akin to a quasi-meditative state; no other instructions or notation are provided. John Cage’s renowned 40 3300 (1952) was written for any instrument or combination of instruments, the instructions on the score stipulating only that no instrument should actually be played for the duration of the piece (Cage’s point being that any extraneous sounds heard during the performance would constitute ‘the music’). Graphic scores, in which conventional staff notation might be replaced by shapes, doodles or images of one kind or another, similarly do not necessarily require advanced performance skills for their execution. Such approaches were further reinforced by English experimentalists such as Cornelius Cardew (1936–81), founder of the Scratch Orchestra in 1969, and Gavin Bryars (b. 1943), who established the Portsmouth Sinfonia the following year. Neither group required musical competence as a condition of entry; indeed the latter stipulated that members had to be either non-musicians or, if musically competent, to play an instrument otherwise unknown to them. As Michael Nyman put it, ‘rhythm in the Sinfonia is something not to be relied upon; most players get lost, are not sufficiently in control of their instruments to keep up the pace, may suddenly telescope half a dozen bars into one, or lose their place’.25 Such groups were quite deliberately conceived as challenging the authoritarian, hierarchical structures underpinning Western art-music performance, which conventionally assumed that meaningful performances could only be given by those who had submitted themselves to a programme of rigorous training and study over many years. This increasing democratisation of musical performance was, unsurprisingly perhaps, most noticeable in the rapidly expanding area of popular music practice. The rising popularity and diminishing costs of instruments such as the saxophone and the electric guitar, the greater diversity of musical styles appealing to and marketed towards younger generations, and later in the 25 M. Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 162.
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century the widespread availability of music technology specifically conceived to facilitate creative work, all combined to engage increasing numbers of people in musical performance. In fact, although empirical evidence would be hard to come by, it appears likely that, in Euro-American cultures at least, more people were developing musical performance skills in some form by the end of the century than at any previous time in history. By the 1970s not only were performers necessarily devising new ways to play new music, they were also finding new ways to play old music. The performance of ‘early music’ (a rather nebulous term whose meaning changed much over the latter part of the century) was particularly subject to reappraisal, in the context of what was originally known as the authenticity debate. It was felt by a small group of musical pioneers that attempting to recreate the original sounds of music from earlier periods would give greater insight into what the music might have meant for its original audiences, as well as different understandings of the performance of that music for contemporary audiences. In truth, the roots of this ‘authentic performance’ movement can be traced back to the early years of the century, when Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) first began to reconstruct historical instruments. His enthusiasm was passed on to his family, and their home in Haslemere in southern England became a focus for the recreation of historical instruments and performances on them. By the late 1960s performers such as David Munrow (1942–76), Nigel North (b. 1954) and Christopher Hogwood (b. 1941) were bringing new ways of playing medieval and Renaissance music to a much wider audience. Numerous performers became specialists in this area, allying musicological detective work to performance skills in an endeavour to recreate the sounds of earlier performances. Different instruments were usually employed – for example, violins using gut strings instead of steel and played with different bows, wind instruments with different mouthpieces and key layouts – involving copies of instruments that would have been in circulation at the time of the original performance (and even, occasionally, original instruments themselves). These were usually tuned at a lower pitch than modern instruments, replicating what was taken to be the pitch levels prevailing at the time the music was first performed. Performances tended to be faster and lighter, with expressive gestures such as rubato and vibrato much more sparingly employed, if at all. Vocal timbres were similarly light and transparent; purity of vocal sound was much prized, as demonstrated in recordings by one of the best-known singers working in this area, Emma Kirkby (b. 1949). Greater consideration was given to what were taken to be ‘the composer’s intentions’ as indicated in the score, with decades of editorial intervention stripped away. Additional information could be gleaned from iconographic sources (that might show the disposition of
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performance forces at a given event, for example), methods and treatises (indicating how instruments were learned or voices trained), and from a variety of other sources such as newspapers, diaries, original performing parts and so on. Colin Lawson explores many of these issues in more detail in Chapter 23 of the present volume in relation to Mozart’s late symphonies. The notion that we might experience musical performance as original audiences experienced it was compelling. However, the description of such performances as ‘authentic’ was widely criticised, on the grounds that, notwithstanding intensive scholarship, nobody could be sure exactly how the music sounded when it was performed; not, at least, prior to sound recording. Moreover, as Lawson also points out, even if the notes and timbres of such pieces could be recreated adequately, audiences would still be listening to the music of Bach, for example, having experienced later composers such as Mahler, Schoenberg or Stockhausen. Thus the aesthetic response to the performance could never be the same as for those who had heard the music in their own times. For these reasons and others, the description of such performances as ‘authentic’ was recast to the rather less pejorative ‘historically informed’. Historical awareness and notions of authenticity affected the work of performers beyond the Western art-music tradition, however. Many traditional musics around the world – most of which are not normally underpinned by systems of musical notation – experience tensions between performances that are deemed to be authentic or inauthentic in relation to that tradition. While certain performers are performing music that is still very much part of their everyday lives (‘folklore’), others may have less tangible connections with such performance traditions and are reconstituting musical performances for political or economic ends, or simply out of cultural curiosity (‘fakelore’). In other contexts performers may be put at the service of political agendas that endeavour to promote nationalist orthodoxy: the totalitarian regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe, particularly after the Second World War, often used musical performers drawn from (or imitating) rural or ‘peasant’ traditions as emblematic of ideas about collective identity, in an attempt to underpin the legitimacy of one particular version of cultural history. The Russian folk singer Dimitri Pokrovsky, for example, observes that ‘up until the late 1920s, there were commercial folklore ensembles that sang absolutely authentic folk music – for example, the Piatnitsky Choir. But in the 1930s, everything changed . . . Stalin ordered the creation of official Soviet folklore. The Piatnitsky Choir was a good institution to do it, and so they were ordered to create this folklore.’26
26 T. Levin, ‘Dimitri Pokrovsky and the Russian folk music revival movement’, in M. Slobin (ed.), Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1996, p. 18.
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Elsewhere, the oral/aural nature of jazz, and the importance of those individual improvisation styles that lie at the heart of the tradition, have meant that performers have a keen sense of jazz history. But dance music or ‘swing’, while historically closely related to the development of jazz, is now often seen by jazz players as somehow inauthentic, largely because of its distinctly commercial nature and the relative lack of musical space for individual creativity. Similarly, rock music performance styles are often taken by aficionados as being legitimate, independent and thus authentic, whereas pop music performance is seen as manufactured, commercialised and inauthentic. Notions of ‘authenticity’, therefore, of the importance of stylistic authority and historical validity, became increasingly important to performers in a wide range of musical genres as the century progressed, and remain so in the early twenty-first century. By the final decades of the twentieth century the plurality of available musical styles had led to a noticeably broader range of opportunities for performers than had existed at the beginning of the century. This in turn not only provided opportunities for such performers to move between these different styles, for aesthetic and/or economic reasons, it also resulted in the creation of hybrid musical genres, often as a result of increasing globalisation, and underpinned once more by the international record companies. Thus performers who had achieved distinction in one field would sometimes ‘cross over’ into other music, either – if travelling in the direction of popular styles – to achieve greater commercial success, or – if travelling in the direction of Western art music – for purposes of legitimisation. This arguably had its roots in the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy, when a concert featuring three of the world’s most distinguished tenors, Jose Carreras (b. 1946), Placido Domingo (b. 1941) and Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007), was broadcast to millions around the globe. Subsequent international record sales of the pot-pourri of popular and operatic extracts they performed were huge. The record companies realised there were significant profits to be made, and ‘classical crossover’ became an established genre, at least for marketing purposes. Later examples included Domingo making an album with the American folk/popular singer John Denver (1943–97); the violinist Nigel Kennedy (b. 1956) recording music by the American rock group The Doors; the Berlin Philharmonic working with German rock band The Scorpions, and so on. Similarly, successful popular music artists endeavoured to demonstrate that they could be taken seriously in other genres. The jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961) recorded several albums of classical trumpet concertos; the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett (b. 1945) recorded discs of keyboard music by Bach, Shostakovich and others; the singer Sting (Gordon Sumner, b. 1951) recorded an album of songs based on music by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland. Not all of these endeavours were highly regarded
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artistically (and much of the crossover work undertaken by classical artists has often been regarded in quite the opposite fashion), but the record companies have long argued that the money they make from such projects allows them to subsidise the recordings of other, less popular, repertoire. If these kinds of crossovers were seen by some as rather opportunistic, there were examples of more successful collaborations between musicians working in very different genres. Such collaborations perhaps have a rather longer history, and would include George Gershwin’s work with Paul Whiteman’s jazz band in the 1920s, Gunther Schuller’s efforts to create a ‘third stream’ fusion between classical music and jazz in the 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s collaborations with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in the 1970s and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s work with his ‘Silk Road’ ensemble, which endeavoured to bring together musicians from America and Asia in the 1990s. Indeed, this last example is indicative of the increasing interest in traditional music and musicians from around the world in the last two decades of the century, with much closer collaborations between performers coming from very different musical backgrounds. While Western art-music composers such as Henry Cowell (1897–1965) or John Cage (1912–92) had long drawn compositional inspiration from music systems used in other countries, by the last decades of the century such interactions were often being driven by performers. Perhaps because of the very different sound worlds existing in other music cultures, contemporary music specialists have often been particularly interested in engaging with musicians from elsewhere. The work of Germany’s Ensemble Modern with Indian and Chinese musicians provides one of several examples. From the 1980s the Westernisation of traditional musical performance, both through the use of polished studio production values and through collaborations between, say, Western pop musicians and South African performers, or jazz players and Indian or flamenco musicians, had become a significant part of the work of many record companies, often subsumed under the umbrella term ‘world music’. By the turn of the twenty-first century many listeners around the globe would have been more familiar with, for example, the qawwali singing of Pakistan’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948–97) than they would with the latest prodigy appearing on the opera house stage.
Conclusion It is perhaps too soon to provide a definitive answer as to where the long twentieth century will end. That will be for future scholars to determine. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century it is clear that the dissemination of Western art-music performance is once again being profoundly changed by
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technological evolution. The importance of the Internet, and particularly the opportunities offered by downloading and file-sharing, suggest that we are on the verge of yet another chapter in the history of performance. The twentieth century was dominated by the recording industries, through which Western art music (and more) was commodified and sold to consumers through various media: 78s, LPs, CDs and so on. With the exception of radio and television broadcasts, when musical performance was not experienced live it was at least captured within some kind of physical medium: there was something to hold, to examine, to pass on to others. But we are now seeing the decline of such media. A performance can be recorded directly onto a computer, stored in a variety of file types, uploaded to the internet and then sold or made freely available to anybody who wishes to listen to it; the listener can in turn stream it immediately, or download it onto their computer, their mp3 player or their phone, divorced from any kind of packaging and thus with no physical evidence remaining of the performance or the performers at all. This recourse entirely to digital storage of recorded music may yet be seen to signal the end of the long twentieth century, at least in relation to musical performance. It might be argued that this lack of a visual source for the musical sound is yet another stage in a process through which performance has become in some ways more ‘dehumanised’ than previously. Obviously this is true in the sense that the performer is no longer physically present when music is listened to via a recording or on the radio. But it is also true in other ways: in the aspiration of producers to remove those sounds ‘peripheral’ to a performance that indicate human beings are involved (page turns, key clicks etc.); in the widespread use of music (such as muzak) which is often simply composed digitally, with no physical presence needed other than that of the computer operator; even in some of the ways in which Western art-music performance has itself changed – for example, the abandonment of portamento by string players so that we no longer infer the physical act of the hand sliding up or down the neck of their instrument. But in other ways performers have become increasingly visible over the course of the twentieth century, and a number of successful individuals have become international icons, whose influence has extended far beyond their musical endeavours. This is certainly true of particular popular music figures such as Joan Baez (b. 1941) and Bob Dylan (b. 1941), who became closely identified with the peace protests of the 1960s and early 1970s, or Bob Geldof (b. 1951), who organised in 1985 an international series of concerts – Live Aid – to raise awareness of famine in Africa. But it is also true of certain Western art-music performers, such as the Russian cellist Mstistlav Rostropovich (1927–2007), who sped to Berlin to give a free concert in 1989, playing in front of the divisive Berlin Wall as it was brought down by popular protest; or the pianist and
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conductor Daniel Barenboim (b. 1942), who formed the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999, bringing together Jewish and Palestinian musicians in an attempt to achieve through musical performance some degree of rapprochement between those two otherwise antagonistic communities. In such cases the culture industries and mass media have raised the profile of these performers so that their lives and work have taken on a broader cultural and historical significance. But commercial and artistic success are no longer prerequisites for international recognition, since the Internet has made it possible for a wide range of performances to be visible on the global stage. Video file-sharing sites such as YouTube allow even the most neophyte of performers to upload their performances, however flawed they may be, and share them with whoever can spare the time to view them. This is the ‘rehumanising’ of musical performance on a truly global scale. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra has also demonstrated how quickly the Internet has impacted on the social organisation of musical performance. In 2009 YouTube asked performers to upload videos of themselves playing a specially commissioned piece by the Chinese composer Tan Dun. Other viewers voted on what they deemed to be the best performers, and the winners were invited to play together as an orchestra at a concert at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (b. 1944). Millions of people around the world became interested in an event that made headline news in many countries, and such has been the demand that YouTube now has a separate channel dedicated to the ongoing work of the orchestra.27 It would be difficult to find a more explicit example of the manner in which digital media has democratised musical performance. These visual records further enhance what is perhaps the most significant aspect of the twentieth century of recorded sound, which is that it has allowed performers to remain in the public ear long after their death. Historical figures such as Anton Stadler (1753–1812), for whom Mozart wrote his clarinet concerto in 1791, or Franz Clement (1780–1842), the dedicatee of Beethoven’s 1806 violin concerto, appear as footnotes in musical history through their association with these composers; we cannot hear their work, we can only hear of it. But performers in the twentieth century and beyond are kept alive for us and future generations through their recordings, and are thus perhaps on a more equal footing with those composers of previous centuries whose legacy similarly persists in the scores they left behind. Thus the influence of past performers on current and future practice is potentially that much greater – if we listen to what they have to play. 27 www.youtube.com/symphony.
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Of styles and genres The vast and far-reaching changes in musical style that have occurred in the past hundred years make it a richly rewarding period for singers. Faced with such a chaotic and variegated tapestry of stylistic strands, ranging from the truly bizarre to the comfortably familiar, the contemporary singer can be forgiven for proceeding with extreme caution. Yet, for those committed to keeping in touch with the new, it is a privilege to be caught up in the aftermath of the early twentieth century’s exhilarating maelstrom of contrasting artistic influences, inspirations, experiments and occasional shockwaves, all of which reverberate to the present day. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many European ‘late Romantic’ composers were working within the basic vocal traditions of the nineteenth century, while others had chosen to strike out in bracing new directions. In opera, composers such as Puccini (1858–1924) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949) maintained the tradition of predominantly lyrical writing, with a growing diversity of vocal characterisation, and the less-known figures of Franz Schreker (1878–1934) and Erich Korngold (1897–1957) enjoyed runaway successes with Der ferne Klang (1912) and Die tote Stadt (1920). The emergence across Eastern Europe of a new kind of pungently declamatory vocal writing, pioneered in the previous century by Musorgsky (1839–81), found its fulfilment in the Janáček operas, and those of Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Shostakovich (1906–75). Often employing strong folkloristic and nationalist features, with rhythms fitting the speech patterns of the various languages used, the new manner led to an increased awareness of the different weights and types of voice needed. A generation of singers emerged, able to cope with these dramatic and linguistic as well as vocal requirements. Alban Berg (1885–1935) with Wozzeck (1917–22) and Lulu (1929–35) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) with his monodrama Erwartung (1909) and the unfinished Moses und Aron (1930–2) made further demands and innovations, as did Gershwin (1898– 1937) in Porgy and Bess (1935), with its use of black singers, and Ernst Krenek
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(1900–91) in his jazz opera Jonny Spielt Auf (1925–6). Many operas involved ensemble casts, signalling the end of the age of the prima donna, and, later still, modernist composers even subverted the conventions of opera altogether. Nowadays ‘opera’ tends to be treated as an entirely separate category in newspaper reviews and listings, and attracts its own public, including followers of theatre as well as of music. As for its popular appeal, major sports fixtures are frequently enlivened by the presence of a famous opera star singing patriotic songs to capacity audiences in the world’s great arenas. During the past century ‘grand’ opera began to yield some ground to work on a smaller scale, often for practical and economic reasons. Masterpieces of chamber opera were created by Benjamin Britten (1913–76), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and others. As a further response to the huge budgetary demands of opera, and the fact that pioneering ventures do not attract large audiences, a new type of ‘Music Theatre’ emerged, simply staged on concert platforms, employing modest vocal and instrumental forces. Stravinsky’s Reynard (1915–16) was an early example. Later, Britten’s trilogy of church parables, Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968), influenced by Japanese Noh plays, provided another, and refreshingly original form of simplification. Many smaller opera companies sprang up, ready to commission new works from younger composers, giving them, and their casts of young singers, a valuable opportunity to gain experience. The rise of the opera director – a powerful, occasionally tyrannical figure, increasingly from the world of straight theatre or even cinema – and the tendency towards elaborate productions, shifted the emphasis onto the visual rather than the musical aspects of a performance. Singers were increasingly expected to be proficient and agile actors, physically as well as vocally convincing in their roles. A new genre of vocal chamber music also came into being early in the century, and innovative works for voice and mixed instrumental ensemble by such composers as Ravel (1875–1937), Stravinsky and Schoenberg have now become classics. Here, the singer has to be acutely aware of the specific timbres of other instruments, and acquire the knack of matching them in quality. Tuning the voice to a non-tempered instrument is a very different proposition to singing with piano. Meanwhile, the solo art song continued to develop through many metamorphoses. Composers as diverse as Rachmaninov (1873–1943), Fauré (1845–1924) and Strauss continued to use the voice mainly as a passionately lyrical instrument, to project soaring romantic lines, yet with increasing syllabic detail in recitative-like stretches. Singers were required to be more versatile and adept at encompassing different styles, while texts were now on an equal footing with melodies. Within the predominant
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Austro-German tradition, Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) had achieved the perfect marriage of words and music in his Lieder, and Strauss and Mahler (1860–1911) followed suit, showing both heightened romantic lyricism and more fragmented detail in their text settings. The composers of the Second Viennese School went still further in refining the relationship between words and music, while French composers, freeing themselves from Austro-German dominance, began to develop a fresh and sensuously beguiling approach to the art song, based on the distinctive characteristics of their own language. Simple folksong idioms were rediscovered and recycled in inventive ways, by composers as diverse as Bartók (1881–1945) and Grainger (1882–1961). Today’s singers have to be able to assimilate a great variety of musical idioms, while adhering to the practice of good basic voice production, which they neglect at their peril. The tradition of bel canto, with its concentration on evenness and beauty of tone has been challenged by many other ways of using the voice. Rapid articulation of complex texts, difficult rhythms and extremes of register and timbre are often required, sometimes within the same piece. This kind of detailed work is perhaps less suited to the opera house, where the distance between stage and audience, and the presence of the orchestra can obscure some of the finer nuances, and restrict the singer’s range of dynamics. The greatest artists are still those able to conjure an atmosphere without the aid of expensive trappings. However ‘modern’ the production, singers, even the lithest among them, would still prefer to sing their major solos when comfortably placed and relatively static (whether in front of elaborate sets or not) rather than poised perilously on high-built scenery, or ducking and diving in perpetual motion. Many singers, especially on the Continent, have enjoyed successful parallel careers in opera and concert, but this was difficult for British singers before the establishment of permanent opera companies in the 1930s.1 Indeed there was a generation of leading oratorio singers in the UK for whom opera was a no-go area, and one well-known concert agent was known to have disapproved of the medium, perhaps adhering to an earlier view of the theatre as socially suspect. Some distinguished British opera singers, such as Eva Turner (1892–1990), Mary Garden (1874–1967) and Maggie Teyte (1888–1976) made their reputations on
1 The Carl Rosa Opera Company had begun its touring activities in New York as early as 1869, giving its first London season in 1877; and around the same time the D’Oyly Carte Opera, specialising in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, began its London seasons and regional tours. But Glyndebourne Opera, our first permanent company, was not established until 1934, and Sadler’s Wells Opera (formerly the Vic–Wells Opera) was founded a year later. It was renamed English National Opera in 1974, and in 1978 developed a branch based in Leeds known as ENO North. This became the autonomous Opera North in 1981. The Royal Opera, originally known as Covent Garden Opera, was established in 1946, Welsh National Opera in 1950 and Scottish Opera in 1962.
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the Continent: Turner a legendary Turandot, lauded in Italy, and Garden and Teyte working closely with Debussy (1862–1918) on the role of Mélisande.2 Nowadays the opera world is truly international, and, in Britain, Glyndebourne led the way with its policy of assembling casts from many different nations.
The singer in today’s world The singer is alone in having to identify and place pitches without the aid of keys, valves or strings. Housing one’s instrument within the confines of the body remains an intimate affair, rendering the singer curiously vulnerable. It was doubtless always so, but for the modern artist, profoundly affected by technological developments, the pressures are surely more acute. At the simplest level, singers can now hear themselves as they really sound, and, thanks to the miracle of recording, can iron out minor discrepancies. However, some can now spend entire careers in the recording studio, and there is a danger that the listener may harbour unreal expectations: a live performance so rarely matches the refinement of an edited recording. At the same time, the processed perfection of a recording cannot compete with the visceral experience of a live performance, and Janet Baker (b. 1933) is eloquent on this subject.3 Despite this, gramophone recordings earlier in the century allowed a number of iconic singers to gain huge followings among people who never had the chance to hear them in the concert hall. Steve Cottrell has charted the progress of the march of recording technology, which enabled the great opera singers, such as Caruso (1873–1921), Gigli (1890–1957), Chaliapin (1873–1938), McCormack (1884–1945) and Joan Hammond (1912–96), to attain wide popularity with single arias or ballads. Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Turandot retains its appeal through successive generations. In Hammond’s adopted country of Australia, singing standards remain high, and aria competitions, redolent of a less sophisticated age, still flourish. In Britain, listeners responded strongly to the art of Kathleen Ferrier (1912–53), whose personal warmth seemed to emanate from her distinctive vocal sound, while Heddle Nash (1896–1961), Peter Dawson (1882–1961) and many others attained similar popularity through their recordings. Duet teams such as Anne Ziegler (1910–2003) and Webster Booth (1902–84), and Hollywood’s Jeanette MacDonald (1903–65) and Nelson Eddy (1901–67) were also much celebrated. These seem to have few modern equivalents, unless one counts the illustrious operatic duo of husband and wife Angela Gheorghiu (b. 1965) and Roberto Alagna (b. 1963),
2 Mary Garden created the role and Maggie Teyte was the composer’s choice to succeed her in 1908. 3 See J. Baker, Full Circle, London, Macrae, 1982.
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although some curiously ill-matched pairs have teamed up for public occasions: Freddie Mercury (1946–91) and Montserrat Caballé (b. 1933), for example, recording their hit ‘Barcelona’ (1988), which became, appropriately, the official theme song of the 1992 Olympics. Maria Callas (1923–77), perhaps the definitive opera diva of the age, was habitually praised for her compelling dramatic abilities rather than for her vocal attributes. She was, in fact, a matchless musician, whose every phrase spoke volumes. In a sadly shortened career, she rarely strayed outside the Italian repertoire, with Puccini’s Tosca one of her most memorable twentiethcentury roles, famously perpetuated on film. By contrast, the reputation of Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007) rested on his superb voice and solid technique, rather than on any musical or dramatic subtlety. Throughout his career he sang only in his native language, and in more recent years, won wide popular acclaim as one of ‘The Three Tenors’, alongside Spaniards José Carreras (b. 1946) and Placido Domingo (b. 1941), the latter proving an exceptionally musical and durable artist. A number of Italian singers have also kept their voices in prime condition over long careers. These include Mirella Freni (b. 1935), Renata Scotto (b. 1934) and Carlo Bergonzi (b. 1924), their training based, like Callas’s, on bel canto principles. It is perhaps regrettable that few such artists have attempted anything more modern than Puccini. However the legendary Magda Olivero (b. 1910), still enjoying singing in her nineties, was a memorable exponent of La voix humaine (1959) by Poulenc (1899–1963). As for concert singers, some smaller-scale voices with a clear resonance have benefited from the rise of the record industry. The enduring appeal of the ‘pure’ soprano voice, for instance, is demonstrated by a range of iconic artists from Isobel Baillie (1895–1983) and Gracie Fields (1898–1979) to Emma Kirkby (b. 1949) and Julie Andrews (b. 1935). There may be an interesting psychological subtext here, with an implication of innocence seldom required of other voices. Although the tenor voice retains its special hold on popularity, the heavy contralto of such as Clara Butt (1872–1936), much celebrated in her day, has gone out of fashion. Larger voices may suffer under the close scrutiny of a microphone, despite impressive projection in concert hall or theatre. Technology has left other problems in its wake: in contemporary repertoire as well as in the established classics, there has been a rise in the importance of ‘presentation’ and visual allure, stemming from increasing exposure on screen. The physical effort of singing can now be all too visible, but when singers mime to their pre-recorded voices, they can appear to be unengaged with what they are doing. Occasionally the voice may not even be their own: the accomplished American soprano Marni Nixon (b. 1930) provided the singing voice for
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famous film actresses in a number of classic Hollywood musicals,4 and the formidable Marilyn Horne (b. 1929) memorably adapted her voice to portray the ‘black’ Carmen for Otto Preminger’s film of Carmen Jones.5 The work of such brilliant professionals was rarely acknowledged at the time. Those few opera singers lucky enough to combine film-star looks with acting talent may even conquer mainstream cinema audiences, as the 2009 feature film of La bohème, directed by Robert Dornhelm and starring the personable Anna Netrebko (b. 1971) and Rolando Villazón (b. 1972), shows. For most of today’s professional singers, the reality is that the opera house provides virtually the only means of earning a regular living. Few countries can offer the enviable opportunities provided by the German system, with an opera house in every large town, often with a Studio attached, where young singers can gain experience.6 In the UK and elsewhere, the most promising vocal students are sometimes picked out by agents while still at music college, and may be tempted into work unsuitable for them, perhaps never having the chance to realise their full potential. Some young tenors and baritones, often ex-choral scholars, have found themselves in big operatic roles that would be impossible for them without amplification, and baritones have even been encouraged to become tenors, to increase their chances of getting work. Nevertheless, standards of musicianship amongst British singers are rightly admired: the baritone Bryn Terfel (b. 1965) deservedly enjoys an illustrious career in all genres, but commercial pressures have occasionally found him collaborating with artists who do not match his quality. At least when working in the organised regime of an opera house, structured rehearsal periods allow more time for preparing the music than that often afforded concert singers, who have to work out their own schedules. However, an undue reliance on répétiteurs can inhibit singers from developing their own interpretative ideas. The modern jetset lifestyle can take its toll: faster means of transport have encouraged artists to cram their diaries with engagements. Learning a new work by dint of repeated listening on portable electronic devices whilst travelling can help rest the voice, but carries with it the danger
4 Miming to Marni Nixon’s singing voice were Deborah Kerr in The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956), Natalie Wood in West Side Story (Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins, 1961) and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), amongst many others. 5 The stage musical Carmen Jones, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein to Bizet’s music had its Broadway premiere in 1943. The 1954 film starred Dorothy Dandridge in the title role, miming to Marilyn Horne’s singing voice. Le Vern Hutcherson provided the singing for the leading male actor Harry Belafonte. 6 In Britain numerous small companies continue to come and go, many offering valuable opportunities for young singers. Of these, the most significant was Kent Opera (1969–89) which was compelled to fold due to public funding cuts. Opera Factory, English Touring Opera, and the Festival-based companies of Garsington and Grange Park have continued to make their mark, and, at present, British Youth Opera provides a useful entry into the profession for singers at the start of their careers.
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of imitation. Individuality seems to count for less than it used to, and national differences between voices are becoming less pronounced. Nevertheless, the general cultural and intellectual level of singers is probably higher today than ever before, and there has been a huge expansion of knowledge and linguistic accomplishment.
The great divide It is unfortunate, though hardly surprising considering the difficulties involved, that the past century has seen a tendency for singers to leave contemporary music to ‘specialists’. Few now seem to give priority to the music of their own time, and many celebrated figures avoid dealing with all but a handful of major composers.7 Concert singers committed to contemporary music can often find themselves appearing in a restricted context, entirely divorced from that of the established artists who fill their programmes with standard fare. However, the opulent voice of Jessye Norman (b. 1945) has been heard in a great deal of contemporary music, and dramatic soprano Anja Silja (b. 1940) has shown an exemplary range, from her compelling Janáček roles (rare examples of major character parts for mature sopranos) to operas by Schoenberg and Berg. A younger generation of gifted Nordic singers, successors to the superb Kirsten Flagstad (1895–1962) such as Karita Mattila (b. 1960) and Anne Sophie von Otter (b. 1955) have shown willingness to promote the contemporary music of their own countries, and also to inhabit both opera and concert worlds with equal success. The Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström (b. 1927) brought her artistry to a wide range of modern music. Yet in no other century has the music of previous eras carried such importance. For recital purposes, the well-loved songs of Debussy, Fauré, Mahler, Poulenc, Rachmaninov, Ravel and Strauss provide many riches, as do the English-language songs of Samuel Barber (1910–81), Britten, Gerald Finzi (1901–56), Ned Rorem (b. 1923), Michael Tippett (1905–98) and William Walton (1902–83), and it has proved tempting for singers and promoters to look no further when building programmes. But the musical and vocal challenges of the early songs of Schoenberg and Berg are certainly no more daunting than those found in Strauss, and should have been more readily tackled. In recent years, groups of singers like the Songmakers’ Almanac have 7 Nicholas Maw (1935–2009) was indeed fortunate in his soloists for the premiere of his lusciously Straussian early work Scenes and Arias (1962) for three female voices and orchestra: Heather Harper, perhaps the finest soprano of her day, the distinguished operatic mezzo Josephine Veasey, and, taking the alto line, Janet Baker.
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paved the way to more imaginatively themed programmes, in which songs are interspersed with appropriate readings, and in this context brief unfamiliar pieces can be introduced relatively easily.8 In the earlier part of the twentieth century many composers and their publishers gave their songs every chance of regular performance by making them available in a choice of keys to suit different voices, as with the classics of the Lieder repertoire. The songs of English composers such as Roger Quilter (1877–1953), Ivor Gurney (1890– 1937), Peter Warlock (1894–1930), John Ireland (1870–1962) and Frank Bridge (1879–1941) all benefited from this, but the practice is no longer prevalent. Composers now tend to write for a specific voice’s area of optimum resonance from the outset, and find also that transposing their increasingly rich harmony and texture distorts the expressive meaning. It always needs emphasising that, although a musical idiom may be unfamiliar, the mode of vocal delivery is often no different from that required by more traditional writing. The voice is a flexible instrument, well suited to the wide leaps and angularities of modernism. These may appear awkward on the page, but can actually show the voice to excellent advantage, leaving only the musical challenges to be mastered. For example, in the jewel-like songs of Anton Webern (1883–1945), models of brevity and precision, dynamics and word-setting are judged to perfection. Nevertheless such music marked a step in creating an ominous break between composer and performer, and also composer and audience. In the nineteenth century, the Lieder repertoire for voice and piano was intended as much for domestic use as for professional performance. The vast expansion of musical language at the start of the next century, aided by the rise of the professional concert singer, led inevitably to a deeper divide between amateur and professional. The situation was exacerbated by the emergence of music of extreme complexity during the late 1940s. After the pioneering work of Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), this avant-garde movement reached a peak with the unprecedented complications of pitch and rhythm found in, for instance, the vocal writing of Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) and Michael Finnissy (b. 1946). Many new works, both solo and choral, were now perceived as being beyond amateur capabilities, and suitable only for a small band of devotees, often possessing exceptional ranges as well as absolute, or, more importantly, secure relative pitch. Indeed, numerous performances of 8 Graham Johnson formed The Songmakers’ Almanac while at the Royal Academy of Music, with colleagues Felicity Lott (soprano) and Richard Jackson (baritone). With mezzo Ann Murray and tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson completing the vocal quartet, the group made an acclaimed debut at the Purcell Room, South Bank in October 1976, where its programme included a new work by Judith Bingham. In later appearances it regularly broke fresh barriers by featuring songs from American and British musicals alongside classical repertoire.
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contemporary music, including the established works of the Second Viennese School, have found even professional singers floundering with pitches. This would appear to be a problem unique to the past hundred years, and it remains to be seen whether increasing familiarity with the music will improve matters. Some composers have, laudably, attempted to simplify their music to make it more accessible, especially for singers, but have not always avoided the trap of writing anachronistically.
Experiments and challenges In contrast to those composers who have preferred to use the voice in a relatively conventional manner, there were always those whose aim was innovation. They aspired to liberate the voice from its old associations and create a new vocal language, using so-called ‘extended vocal techniques’. Such experiments were not always successful, largely because of the nature of the instrument: technically, the way the voice is produced according to Western taste cannot deviate too widely without considerable care and experience, otherwise physical limitations will be encountered, or, worse still, damage from misuse. Nicolas Obouhov (1892–1954), one of a group of ‘White’ Russian composers who settled in Paris, wrote some astonishing and fearlessly avant-garde songs. ‘Berceuse d’un bienheureux’ (1918), from the cycle Livre de vie, rumoured to have been written out in the composer’s blood, bears directions for piercing shrieks, cackles, exaggeratedly varied timbres within an enormous range, and extreme vocal characterisation: for instance, the Lamb of God makes an appearance – whistling! Many so-called ‘extended techniques’ often seem to involve the rediscovery or reassembly of familiar sounds and noises taken from everyday life, some more usually heard in playground or farmyard. John Cage (1912–92) asks the singer to imitate a duck and a pigeon in his charmingly enigmatic vocalise, A Flower (1950). The simplest warming-up exercises, such as the vocal ‘fry’ (gently vibrating the vocal folds to produce a low ‘rattle’) can yield interesting multiphonics under close microphone scrutiny. Paradoxically, singers have had to re-acquaint themselves with the conventions of earlier times – paring down vibrato, for instance, to make sure of plotting intervals cleanly and maintaining clarity in fast-moving detail. There are a myriad ways of producing the voice in both singing and speaking modes, with many gradations in between, and the past century has highlighted an increasing awareness of the indissoluble link between speech and song. The perception of the piano accompanist has also changed. The towering figure of Gerald Moore (1899–1987) dominated the middle of the twentieth century, and a lifetime spent accompanying world-class singers emphasised his
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superb adaptability in what was essentially a supporting role. Today’s recital accompanist, however, is quite likely to be a soloist of virtuoso ability, who is very much an equal partner; and exciting duos have sprung up, in which an established solo pianist has teamed up with a leading singer. Some younger composers in the 1960s, such as Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934), tended to avoid writing for voice and piano, mindful of its powerfully traditional overtones. Others preferred to exploit the keyboard’s percussive qualities, or experiment with effects inside the instrument. John Cage asks his accompanist to drum with fingers and knuckles on the outer woodwork in his celebrated The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), and Ancient Voices of Children (1970) by George Crumb (b. 1929) requires the soloist to sing over the piano strings, with the resulting vibrations electronically amplified. More recently, however, there has been a return to writing ‘traditional’ song cycles, albeit in a more complex musical language, as with Of Challenge and of Love (1994) by Elliott Carter (b. 1908).
Singer and text It is the dual task of projecting words and music simultaneously that sets singers apart, and different languages directly affect the placing of the vocal sound which is needed to promote an idiomatic delivery. The characteristic syllabic stresses of the Czech language, found, for instance, in Janáček, add a distinctive colour, and Debussy’s natural settings of parlando passages impel the voice forward into a bright resonance. Singing American music such as Charles Ives (1874–1954), Barber or Aaron Copland (1900–90) requires subtle adaptations in legato and articulation if it is to sound convincing, while the Russian language with its guttural consonants promotes a more expressionistic delivery, suitable for works from Rachmaninov to Shostakovich. The most crucial performance issue affecting singers of contemporary music is therefore the quality of the text setting. Intelligibility of words is surely the goal to aim for when writing for voice, although a small minority of composers seems concerned to focus the effect of the effort being made, which involves writing against the nature of the voice in a way that no previous era has witnessed. Far too often a singer is blamed when words are inaudible. Critiques claim that ‘the vibrato obscured the text’, when the music has made impractical demands. Surprisingly, even established composers can lack an understanding of such practicalities as allowing for relaxation during a long piece, or being aware of which consonants help vocal placing and legato, and which hinder. In a recent workshop exercise, a group of singers was asked to improvise on a given text. The listening composers all remarked on how audible the words were; this was
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because the singers had instinctively placed them where they could be comfortably articulated without strain, reserving melismas for open vowels free of strangulating consonants. This is something a singer-composer like Samuel Barber achieves naturally, through an innate knowledge of phrasing and breathing capacity, but singer-composers are thin on the ground these days.9 In modern operas, perhaps following on from such as Strauss’s Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos (1912–16) and Berg’s Lulu, there remains a predilection for spectacularly high soprano writing. Strauss and Berg were masters of textsetting, but less experienced male composers may not easily envisage how it feels to be enunciating a busy text while suspended in the heights. The opera The Tempest (2004) by Thomas Adès (b. 1971) cast Ariel as a fearlessly stratospheric soprano. Had there not been surtitles, one might have thought it a mostly wordless vocalise. There now appears to be an acceptance of the fact that titles are necessary even when a work is sung in English. Another opera composer who stretches singers to the limit is Gerald Barry (b. 1952), who sets syllable per note at dizzying speeds, posing problems of breathing space as well as of clarity.10 However, it seems that as composers increase their demands, so singers emerge who are capable of fulfilling them.
Stylistic variety The extremely wide divergence of contemporary vocal styles has forced the modern concert singer to be an exceptionally adaptable artist. The 1950s first saw the rise of the avant-garde singer, typically a flexible soprano, with threeoctave range – a descendant of the bel canto artist, but able to cope with more advanced musical idioms. Influenced by popular entertainers, some contemporary composers even favoured the ‘untrained’ voice. We have John Cage and his followers to thank for discouraging a perceived ‘elitism’ in cultivated singing. It is a little frustrating to have to feign a naive manner, and deny the use of technical expertise acquired over years of training. Singers have often had to reinvoke the styles of earlier centuries, for example in the neoclassical works of Stravinsky, especially his opera The Rake’s Progress (1951), which requires a special vocal flexibility and precision. Light voices suited to early music have often transferred particularly well to contemporary pieces, although the counter-tenor voice has been surprisingly under-used in new music, despite the number of excellent practitioners 9 Judith Bingham (b. 1952), a mezzo-soprano and former BBC Singer, has written many successful vocal works (especially for chorus), which exhibit her understanding of the voice. 10 For example: The Intelligence Park (1990), The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit (1991–2), and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2005).
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capable of surmounting any musical hurdles. However, Britten, Tippett and Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934) have created memorable roles for counter-tenor in opera and concert.11 The unnerving effect of a bass voice howling in falsetto over beating drums in Cassandra, which Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) added in 1987 to his Oresteia of 1966, gives an indication of what could be achieved in a more radical style.12 Amongst twentieth-century opera composers, Britten, Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926) and the often overlooked Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) have written rewardingly for the voice without resorting to extremes, and others, such as British composers Richard Rodney Bennett (b. 1936), Birtwistle, Mark-Anthony Turnage (b. 1960) and Judith Weir (b. 1954) have largely followed in that tradition. By contrast, more experimental operatic works have come from Luigi Nono (1924–90): Intolleranza, (1960) and Stockhausen, whose mammoth cycle of Licht operas, one for each day of the week, was written between 1977 and 2003. Die Soldaten (1958–60) by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–70) attained notoriety for its extravagant vocal and budgetary demands – the soloists endured literally hundreds of rehearsals before the delayed first performance. John Cage showed a more flexible approach in his five Europeras (1987–91), which consist of overlapping mosaics of unaccompanied operatic arias chosen by the singers, with only their stage positions and timings tightly controlled, creating a musical collage in which pianists also play opera transcriptions, and gramophones emit vintage recordings. Stephen Cottrell has already drawn attention to the influence of nonWestern cultures and their music.13 Most significantly perhaps, this has led to an increasing interest in microtones. Singers of Indian classical music have long commanded microtonal inflection in their elaborately structured improvisations, where the technique seems to involve singing directly on the glottis rather than with supported, diaphragmatic breathing. But it was not until 1946 that microtonality impinged upon European modernism in Le Visage nuptial, by Boulez, and it has subsequently coloured the work of an increasing number of composers. The sensuously melismatic writing of Boulez in other works like Le Soleil des eaux (1948) and the Improvisations sur Mallarmé (1957–9) has proved highly influential. In contrast to such mellifluous lines, Elliott Carter has favoured a muscular, somewhat angular idiom, epitomised in his chamber 11 For example, Britten’s Canticle Abraham and Isaac (1952), Tippett’s Songs for Ariel (1962) and the role of the Priest in Maxwell Davies’s opera Taverner (1972). 12 The recording company NMC recently boosted the repertoire by commissioning a short song from each of 96 composers featured in their catalogue. The CD set The NMC Song Book (2009 – NMC D150) includes pieces for all voices, including counter-tenor. 13 See Chapter 28.
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piece A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975). The neglected Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75) wrote works for both opera and concert platform that show an effortless Italianate lyricism within a highly disciplined framework. In contrast, the songs of that great original Charles Ives, ranging from seemingly naive jingles to fully realised art songs, have undeniable vitality, but like some of Stravinsky’s vocal pieces, they can be a little awkward in phrasing and wordsetting, and do not always lie well. Perhaps as a reaction to increasing complexity, a new simplicity of style has been pursued by a number of composers, and singers have had to grapple with fresh challenges to their taste and judgement. Minimalist music, based on machine-like repetitions of tonal patterns, as developed by the likes of John Adams (b. 1947), Louis Andriessen (b. 1939), Philip Glass (b. 1937) and Steve Reich (b. 1936), has proved highly popular with audiences; but for a ‘breathing instrument’ like the voice, it can be especially problematic. The relentless progress of the music gives little time to rest or take breath, and severely limits creative input, while incessant repetitions within a limited pitch area can quickly tire the voice. The listener may be quite unaware of the extreme difficulty of the task, when even the slightest discrepancy will be apparent. Adams’s operas Nixon in China (1987) and, especially, Dr Atomic (2005) do, however, provide respite in interrupting the motoric passages with lyrical and dramatic scenas, whose soaring and scooping lines would grace any Strauss opera. Madame Mao’s aria in the former is a tour de force of piercing successions of high notes, cunningly approached by wide intervals, rendering them practicable, although stamina is fully tested. Another aspect of the new simplicity is to be found in the religious works of Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) and John Tavener (b. 1944), where repetitions occur over much broader vocal spans, again quite taxing for the voice. A rare case of a composer rewriting a work to make it more practicable for the singer is that of Hindemith. Between 1936 and 1948 he made a new version of his song cycle Das Marienleben (1922–3) which lies far more comfortably in the voice than the original, and is less relentlessly driven. Certain illustrious non-singers, led by pianist Glenn Gould, have continued to vaunt the superiority of the first version, but singers will be grateful for the composer’s consideration. One twentieth-century vocal master who uses the voice to its fullest effect is Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), a composer who understands the singer perfectly. His three major song cycles, Poèmes pour Mi (1936), Chants de terre et de ciel (1938) and the mammoth Harawi (1945), are pillars of the repertoire and deeply satisfying to sing. He spins long phrases in brightly glowing keys, and each could be used as an exercise in attaining perfect legato. His use of syllables in his
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own custom-made, highly onomatopoeic texts helps the voice to project naturally, aiding precision and awareness: one can monitor tone quality throughout while enjoying an exhilarating physicality. Accents are used to highlight specific consonants according to their intrinsic weight. As with Britten and Schoenberg, the singer has merely to obey the score in every respect. In Harawi, the device of employing chords a split second before the vocal entry (written as tied acciaccaturas) gives the singer the chance to take breath comfortably before launching phrase after phrase at full capacity. The work’s progress is gauged so as to allow the singer to warm up gradually. Messiaen understands the need to rest between bouts of strenuous vocal activity, but also the urge to spring into re-attack once energised. The excitingly manic Il ne parle plus comes directly after the longsustained lament of Adieu, the work’s centre, at which point the voice will feel secure and well exercised. Fast-moving incantations and wild cries are gratifyingly easy to manage, with the repeated ‘pia, pia’s of Syllabes perfectly geared to the span of air supply: one can go for surprisingly long stretches without needing to breathe. The yodelling jungle calls of Répétition planétaire help release any vocal inhibitions.14 In recent years, with less pressure to obey the dictates of the avant-garde, proponents of a new eclecticism have proved popular, with singers required to show their prowess in a welter of different styles, often including cabaret, and references to music of the past. Composers as diverse as William Bolcom (b. 1938) in the US and Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960) have ploughed this furrow with success, and works by such as Bruno Maderna (1920–73) and Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) have contributed a further dimension.
Creative partnerships The 1960s marked an exhilarating wave of experimentation and adventurousness in writing for the voice, with composers and singers often working closely together in chamber music in particular. Many innovative works from this period of creative freedom have maintained their place in the repertoire. If the female voice was unduly favoured, as, indeed it still is today, this has mainly been a question of supply and demand. The mezzo Cathy Berberian, wife of Luciano Berio (1925–2003), and sopranos Dorothy Dorow (b. 1930) and Bethany Beardslee (b. 1927) are just three artists whose
14 Nigel Simeone, ‘Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA’, Musical Times, 149 (Winter, 2008), 25–44, recounts a charming incident told him by German soprano Sigune von Osten: in 1986, she was preparing Harawi under the composer’s supervision, and, in order to help her with the wild cries of Répétition planétaire, Messiaen asked if she was familiar with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films, proceeding to give a personal demonstration!
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gifts have inspired important new works. Following the tradition of such famous partnerships as Lotte Lenya (1898–1981) and Kurt Weill (1900–50), Peter Maxwell Davies wrote several spectacular music theatre pieces for the soprano Mary Thomas (1932–97). In more familiar territory, the legendary duo of Peter Pears (1910–86) and Benjamin Britten handed down a legacy of vocal music to be treasured. In both ‘grand’ and chamber opera, Britten created memorable roles for the leading singers of the day. Their sure techniques and reliable musicianship enabled them to perform effectively in ensemble. The predominantly male casts of Peter Grimes (1944) and Billy Budd (1951) were balanced by the variety of female roles in The Turn of the Screw (1954) and the vividly contrasting characters of Albert Herring (1947). Britten (like Stockhausen) preferred to work with a group of singers whose voices he understood well. He also wrote crucially important music for young voices, including the treble role of Miles in The Turn of the Screw, the only comparable example being the eponymous lead in Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007). Pears, whose idiosyncratic timbre and artistry linger in the memory, also championed other vocal composers, including Lennox Berkeley (1903–89), Priaulx Rainier (1903–86) and Michael Tippett, while the partnership of baritone Pierre Bernac (1899–1979) and composer Poulenc provided a benchmark for an impeccably authentic style in the performance of French vocal music.15 Great artists personally associated with important premieres include Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1915–2006) for whom Walton wrote his rich cycle A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table (1962). A chamber orchestral version was later created for Janet Baker. The vocal mastery of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b. 1925), unsurpassed in the Lieder repertoire, was also shown to advantage in modern operas. Memorable in Doktor Faust (1916–24) by Busoni (1866– 1924) he had major roles created for him by his compatriots Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, 1959–61) and Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) (Lear, 1978). The Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (b. 1926), possessor of a rich and colourful vocal palette, inspired works by both Shostakovich (the virtuoso cycle Seven Poems of Alexandr Blok for soprano, violin, cello and piano (1967), arguably one of the most significant vocal chamber works of the century) and Britten (The Poet’s Echo, 1965). Other pioneers have included the American tenor Paul Sperry (b. 1934), whose tireless commitment to new music has instigated many important commissions such as Voices (1973) by Henze, and soprano 15 A worthy successor to Bernac was Gérard Souzay (1918–2004). His light lyric baritone was ideally suited to the intimacy of French Song, and his occasional opera appearances included the role of Golaud in Pelléas et Mélisande.
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Dawn Upshaw (b. 1960), whose technical security and flexibility have led numerous composers to write for her. Vocalist Joan La Barbara (b. 1947), together with her composer husband Morton Subotnick (b. 1933), has developed a rather more specialised repertoire, involving much use of ‘extended techniques’. The distinguished Hungarian György Kurtág (b. 1926), composing in finely wrought post-Webernian vein, has created several large-scale works for his compatriot, soprano Adrienne Csengery (b. 1946), and, in Britain, Harrison Birtwistle wrote central roles in his two major operas for the Royal Opera House (Gawain in 1990 and The Minotaur in 2007) for the magnificent bass of John Tomlinson (b. 1946). Much earlier, Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), in his Serenade to Music (1938), had uniquely featured solos for sixteen of the leading singers of his day, each part tailored to their individual vocal weight and character, a moving homage to the artists he admired.16
The voice in varying contexts Despite sporadic contributions from leading contemporary figures, opportunities for concert soloists performing with orchestra remain limited. Earlier classics, such as the Mahler cycles, Ravel’s Shéhérazade (1903), Britten’s Les Illuminations (1939) and Berg’s Seven Early Songs (1928) crop up fairly regularly, as do Strauss’s Four Last Songs (1948), most popular of all for their rapturous, intoxicating lyricism. But others, like Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi (the 1946 orchestral version), Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947) and Luonnotar (1913) by Sibelius (1865–1957), along with significant pieces by Dallapiccola and Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) are less often heard. Socrate (1918) by Érik Satie (1866–1925), that extreme antidote to expressionism and uniquely hypnotic test of tonal poise, has failed to establish itself, and Britten’s early Our Hunting Fathers (1936), displaying an imaginatively expanded range of effects which retain their freshness, has fared little better. Works in more advanced idioms such as those by Berio, especially his marvellous multi-voiced Sinfonia (1968), tend to be performed in more specialised contexts. The vocal chamber-music repertoire continues to build and develop upon the foundation of classic achievements from earlier in the century, yielding memorable pieces by such as Berio, Boulez and György Ligeti (1923–2006). Highlights from Berio’s prolific and varied vocal output include Laborintus II (1963), Folk Songs (1964) and Recital I for Cathy (1972), while Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître (1952–4) for voice, flute, viola, guitar, vibraphone, xylomarimba and percussion 16 These included the highly contrasting voices of sopranos Isobel Baillie and Eva Turner, alto Gladys Ripley, tenor Heddle Nash, and baritones Harold Williams and Roy Henderson (the latter a renowned vocal teacher).
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is, like Pierrot lunaire, a musical milestone. It introduces a glittering sound world, coloured by elaborate percussion writing, against which the voice is always clear. Though written in alto range, the low notes have light enough dynamics to suit a soprano or mezzo, with the added benefit of flexibility. Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles aventures have proved to be comic masterpieces. However, their demands are exceptional: each tiny phrase bears up to three different expressive indications, and phonetics change at breakneck speed within challenging rhythms, pitches and timbres, including audible inhalations and exhalations which require great care. In fact, complete accuracy is seldom achieved. Some works for voice and electronics have made an important contribution to the repertoire. Two major examples by Milton Babbitt (b. 1916): Vision and Prayer (1961) and Philomel (1964), are extremely demanding, the former entirely in Sprechstimme, with elaborate tape parts that are hard to follow. If the singer hesitates, the tape cannot wait, so the voice effectively takes an accompanying role. The pre-recorded voice in Philomel ’s complex ‘accompaniment’, with which the live singer has to coalesce, is that of Bethany Beardslee, the work’s first performer. Sadly, many such pioneering vocal works have now been superseded technologically, if not artistically, by the arrival of the digital age. However, specialised vocal groups, such as UK’s Electric Phoenix, have used the new resources to create a fresh repertoire for voices and electronics. The relatively new category of works for unaccompanied solo voice affords a fine opportunity for singers to display their fullest artistry. The obvious precedent of folk song has been developed beyond all recognition. Intonation is of course an important issue here, although pitch pipes may be used discreetly in some pieces. The effect of singing alone often carries a dramatic charge, even when a singer is technically vulnerable. Innovative and fascinating in their time, Berio’s Sequenza III and Berberian’s Stripsody (1966) remain among the few works to be heard regularly. Giacinto Scelsi (1905–88) wrote a series of demanding works for a specific singer, but his relentless use of microtones and extremes of range seems to have discouraged all but a few special artists. Maxwell Davies’s hour-long theatrical showpiece The Medium (1981) exposes a wide gamut of moods and styles, with heavy use of Sprechstimme and other non-singing effects, while the quasi-theatrical pieces of Georges Aperghis (b. 1945) have proved effectively droll and entertaining. Despite an increasing conservatism in our new century, such display pieces can make a refreshing surprise item within a standard recital. Judith Weir’s King Harald’s Saga, for solo female voice, now in the repertoire of many singers worldwide, provides a modest success story. Written for the author in 1979, this miniature opera, to the composer’s own text, tells its tale clearly and succinctly, with dashes of sly humour. The soprano takes
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eight contrasting roles, including that of the Norwegian army, and the vocal writing is rewardingly spectacular yet practical. With sequences of short scenes framed by a spoken narration, the piece has broad appeal without compromising taste or style. Since then, Weir has gone on to write several operas, in her characteristically lucid personal style, starting with the highly original A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987) written for Kent Opera. She is, by definition, a singer’s composer. Exceptional versatility on the part of some performers has led to the creation of a number of works where the singer is required to play an instrument as well as vocalise. Berio’s Circles (1960), in which the singer travels to various locations on the platform while playing finger cymbals, exerted a powerful influence on many younger composers, inspiring a number of other works requiring the singer to perform simple percussion parts: Birtwistle’s Ring a Dumb Carillon (1964–5) has the singer striking four large suspended cymbals. Conversely, some instrumentalists have ventured into the vocal field. A number of singing cellists have emerged, and virtuoso trombonists such as Vinko Globokar (b. 1934) and Christian Lindberg (b. 1958) have performed works that involve singing through their instruments. The highly specialised vocal research and extraordinary art of Roy Hart led both Henze and Maxwell Davies in the 1960s to utilise his prodigious skills. These included singing in designated chords and emitting sounds hitherto undreamed of.17 However, personal vehicles may tend to discourage other performers. So as to make his work more widely available, Maxwell Davies later adapted his Songs for a Mad King (1969) to suit a more conventional baritone range, albeit retaining use of falsetto and less specific shrieks amongst the varied vocal gestures. The way is now open for ever more bizarre manifestations: for instance the ‘performance artist’ – commonly a ‘vocalist’. Deriving from, and containing, elements from the world of music hall, circus and Dada, such performers depend heavily on their individual charisma, and while an ability to use imagination and sustain interest within a free structure is often in evidence, they can also raise questions of taste. The distinguished Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel (1931– 2008) provided the model in this field, creating a whole body of quirkily original theatrical works, some of which he performed himself. Some individual artists have created work for their own use rather than for others to follow. The extraordinary HK Gruber (b. 1943), billed as ‘chansonnier, conductor, composer and double bass player’, scored a notable success with his work Frankenstein!! One could not imagine anyone else performing it. Other 17 Roy Hart (1926–75) was a South African actor who studied at London’s RADA. In 1968 he founded the Roy Hart Theatre, eventually based in France, promoting a psycho-therapeutic approach to vocal creativity.
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multi-disciplinary artists such as Meredith Monk (b. 1942) listed as: ‘composer, singer, film-maker, choreographer and director’, and the Icelandic pop icon Björk (b. 1965), both classically trained, have contributed to the blurring of the lines between popular and classical vocal music. From the opposite perspective, ‘pop’ songs have become more sophisticated, and, owing to the growing use of video, have been inflated into larger forms. Queen’s much-celebrated Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) includes a dazzling array of different modes of delivery, including fascinating close-harmony passages, with, of course, considerable electronic enhancement. Rock operas have proved a popular genre of their own. Recently, Jerry Springer – the Opera (2003) has proved extremely controversial, although it is perhaps the subject matter and aspects of the staging, rather than the vocal writing, that have caused outraged reaction. As so often, the vocal apparatus is in perfectly normal use, despite wide-ranging musical gestures, and plentiful distractions of other kinds.
Between speech and song The modern singer needs to maintain a disciplined approach to articulation. Precision vocalising reached perhaps its highest point with Sprechstimme, as developed by Schoenberg in Gurrelieder (1901–11) and most notably Pierrot lunaire. Poised midway between speaking and singing, as outlined by Stephen Cottrell in the previous chapter, it is a rewarding medium, ripe for still further refinement. Indeed, Pierrot lunaire can lay good claim to being the most significant vocal work of the past century, teaching the vocalist to be acutely aware of the micro-timings of syllables, the subtlety of inflections between pitches, and the myriad opportunities for varying vocal timbre. It is possible that Schoenberg envisaged an even more precise result than he managed to notate, or that performers have thus far accomplished. Significantly, his use of declamation in later works, such as Ode to Napoleon (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), is less exactly notated. Perhaps his most effective Sprechstimme is found in the opera Moses und Aron, where Moses’s inarticulate, stumbling bass Sprechstimme is contrasted with the seductive tenor cantabile of his brother Aron. Many music theatre works have been written under the influence of Pierrot lunaire, such as Maxwell Davies’s Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974), but few employ Sprechstimme as continuously as Schoenberg’s. Boulez, for instance, like many others, prefers to use it sparingly as a special device to inflect the ends of phrases. Henze, however, uses it liberally to sustain the dramatic structure of his Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (1971), a Marxist tract of considerable power.
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Walton’s Façade (1921–2), like Pierrot lunaire in twenty-one movements, employs its jazz-influenced musical style as a deliberate antidote to the heavy late Romanticism which gave rise to Pierrot. Instead of Sprechstimme it has normal speech, the rhythms exactly notated, and requires a clean, precise delivery – no easy task. A singer with an advanced breathing technique possesses a clear advantage here over an untrained speaker, especially when it comes to the slow movements. In recent years, various artists have enjoyed themselves performing the movements in a variety of appropriate accents. It could even be said that today’s ‘rap’ or ‘hip-hop’ artists are successors to this tradition of precise rhythmic delivery of a swiftly moving text, and the crisp vocalising of Noel Coward (1899–1973) can be regarded as a form of Sprechstimme. Following on from the spoken melodramas of the Romantics, and led by Strauss’s setting of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1897), other composers began to employ melodrama, with chamber or orchestral accompaniment, no doubt influenced by new possibilities hinted at in the cinema. These ranged from Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis (1900–1), for narrator and ensemble, to the dramatic oratorio St Joan (1939) by Honegger (1892–1955), and Vaughan Williams’s Oxford Elegy (1949) based on Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy. Speech does not possess the penetrative power of song, and at the time of Façade’s premiere the necessary amplification was provided by a megaphone. Today’s sophisticated technology removes the need for such a cumbersome device, but Maxwell Davies employs a megaphone to startling effect in the theatre piece Revelation and Fall (1971) where a red-garbed nun shrieks through it at the work’s climax.
Practicalities and notation The early twentieth-century song repertoire in German, French and English bore an implied rubato that needed little explanation, even if Debussy, Ravel and later Austro-Germans were beginning to indicate subtle fluctuations of tempo. But the cultural traditions to which today’s composers bear allegiance are so varied that there is a need to notate and symbolise detailed variations of dynamic, attack and tone quality. One can be confronted with bewildering hieroglyphics, which have to be looked up in a glossary, before a new work can be learned. Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles aventures, mentioned before, carry a hefty supplementary booklet, in both English and German, containing all the composer’s obsessively detailed handwritten instructions from the score, plus an eight-page glossary of finely graded phonetics which are well-nigh impossible to differentiate at full speed. The problem of standardising the notation in such music has been addressed by the composer Trevor Wishart, who has
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worked assiduously to evolve and collate a new vocabulary of vocal gestures, and has made detailed annotations from his findings. When singing new music, practical considerations are paramount. Some composers are especially sympathetic in helping the singer to pitch accurately. Schoenberg, ever the master, is always thoughtful: in his song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten Op. 15 (1908–9), many of the songs take up the last pitch of the previous number, making transitions logical and relatively straightforward. Another effective solution to pitching problems can be found in Thomas Adès’s Life Story (1993), where the subtlest of cues are embedded in the piano texture, sounding through just when needed to keep the singer on the rails. Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83), another vocal master, uses the practical device of putting small acciaccaturas at the ends of long notes or melismas, to help place a final consonant. In the 1960s, many composers experimented with new methods of notation, and some of their symbols have gone into regular use, such as the upright cross for humming (bocca chiusa), and the insertion of crosses over note-stems, or substituting them for note heads to indicate degrees of Sprechstimme or gradations of speech. The notation of quarter-tones is becoming standardised: quarter-sharp and three-quarter sharps are often represented by one or three vertical lines, for instance, instead of the usual two. The glissando, frequently found in modern scores, notated by either a straight or wavy line is much liked by singers. Covering all the microtones within an interval, it can be negotiated without strain, and many have featured it to excellent effect, including Britten, who also uses, in Our Hunting Fathers, a small ‘o’, as in string harmonics, to indicate a non vibrato cry, suggesting an unearthly hunting-call. Some composers have ventured to give the singer more than one stave. Birtwistle’s Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970), has two: the upper one for staccato bursts of spoken text, the lower one carrying the main expressive content, with highly decorative, virtuoso effects. The singer alternates, often rapidly, between them. Peter Maxwell Davies’s A Stone Litany also employs two staves for contrasting material. ‘Space–time’ notation is another twentieth-century innovation that has proved highly practicable, once performers get used to the lack of traditional note values. Each bar, or system, is allotted a prescribed time in seconds, and note heads without stems are spread out irregularly on the stave. The music is to be played or sung the way it looks. Elsewhere, however, as in Lutoslawski’s Paroles tissées (1965) for tenor and orchestra, standard rhythmic notation is used, with metronome or tempo markings but no precise vertical alignments. Singers can thus have a certain freedom which allows them to show their creativity in a controlled form of improvisation. Other works involving extemporisation leave even more to the performer. Cage’s Aria, written in 1958
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for Cathy Berberian is typical in this respect: a graphic score, in different colours, indicates only the vaguest contours, with each page allotted twenty seconds, some containing only one sound. The singer acts as co-composer, making her own choice of which timbre to adopt for which colour. The indication of Berberian’s personal choices is both helpful and inhibiting.
Popular idioms Finally, there is the vast range of twentieth-century popular music to be taken into account. Since the advent of jazz, non-classical singing styles have proliferated, and the performance of popular songs has distanced itself increasingly in style and technique from that of ‘classical’ music. Whether in blues singing, scat, crooning, or simple balladeering, great artists as diverse as Billie Holliday (1915–59), Louis Armstrong (1901–71) or Ella Fitzgerald (1917–96) have displayed an improvisatory skill in pitch-bending and rubato, and have largely abandoned the full voice of the classical concert singer, adopting instead an intimate delivery, intensely focused on the word, one which needs the aid of a microphone, and favours lower voices. A breathy tone, which handicaps the classical singer, can be an asset in jazz, although phrases may be shorter as a consequence. The vocalising of such artists as Crosby and Sinatra, already referred to by Stephen Cottrell, suggests that they could, if inclined, have developed into operatic baritones with full vibrato, while the magnificently focused bass of Paul Robeson (1898–1976) shifted effortlessly from full to half-voice. The power of Edith Piaf (1915–63), honed in the hardening world of street singing, and the stentorian projection of Ethel Merman (1908–84) would be the envy of many an operatic diva, and Judy Garland (1922–69) was able to croon and belt alternately, varying vibrato according to context. Stemming from the folk and country and western traditions, Bob Dylan (b. 1941) and others have been extremely influential, although vocal standards are variable. Crossing style barriers can sometimes be a risky business: a recording of art songs by the supremely skilled Barbra Streisand (b. 1942) proved to be a well-intentioned mistake, and not all operatic artists successfully assume an idiomatic style for lighter music. However, distinguished opera singers from the past, such as Richard Tauber (1891–1948), always sang light ballads with great style. Arguably, there is less individuality and polish to be found in today’s popular singers, although some male rock stars have enjoyed remarkably long careers, unlike their female counterparts. Intonation and control of phrasing seem to have lapsed, along with a corresponding rise in aggressive marketing techniques, and some slender vocal talents have been elevated to unprecedented
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wealth and fame. Amplification is now an essential part of the ‘live’ as well as the recorded experience, and techniques have become so sophisticated that it is sometimes hard to tell whether a singer is being ‘miked’ or not. In live ‘pop’ concerts, especially those outdoors, the practice of miming to recordings is common. With such expert packaging, it is not surprising that the unschooled listener is unable to tell the difference between a genuinely gifted singer and a more ordinary voice artfully manipulated. Classical opera companies now frequently include operettas and musicals in their seasons. These attract a wider public but require singers to expand their stylistic range, as well as act and dance with aplomb. The brilliant musicals of Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930), for instance, require tremendous verbal panache to project their busy texts. Even the term ‘Music Theatre’ has acquired a new meaning, referring now to popular musicals, which use the full trappings of stage and orchestra and encourage a non-classical style of singing, invariably amplified. The piercing ‘quasi non-vibrato’ half-spoken tone, known as ‘belting’, if employed with skill, can cut through a band without causing vocal problems. It may be seen as a development from the ‘Cabaret’ style exploited so successfully in the vocal works of the ‘Berliner’ School of Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) and Kurt Weill, and also from the ‘chanson’ nightclub tradition of which Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972) were distinctive exponents. Highly trained vocal ensembles, such as the King’s Singers and Swingle Singers, have managed successfully to work in all styles from classical to popular, and have had pieces specially written for them by major composers including Berio. In the more popular world, close-harmony groups like the Beach Boys have triumphantly stood the test of time. Two other special ensemble categories must be mentioned: the incisively exciting Gospel Choirs emanating from the black Christian movement, and the American Barbershop ensembles with their highly disciplined approach to rhythm, harmony and even gesture. Their recent infiltration into areas usually reserved for classical groups has widened the field considerably.
Education, recreation and choral music All the musical developments and changes of style which solo singing underwent over the last century can also be seen to have affected the world of choral singing. From the very outset, amateur choirs were called upon to sing increasingly difficult music, often highly chromatic and requiring much stamina, as we see in such early twentieth-century classics as A Mass of Life (1905) by Delius (1862–1934), Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1906–7) and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder,
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and Die Jakobsleiter (1915–22). Later works like Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1931), Vaughan Williams’s Sancta Civitas (1923–5), Psalmus Hungaricus (1923) by Kodály (1882–1967), Britten’s Spring Symphony (1949), with its startlingly penetrating unison chorus of boys, and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time (1939–41), incorporating negro spirituals most appealingly, brought something fresh and new to the repertoire, but some choirs seemed unable or unwilling to move forward stylistically. The new music is still provided by a number of choirfriendly composers, writing expertly, if a little conservatively. In the opera house, composers writing new works have, latterly, tended to use smaller choruses, but amongst twentieth-century ‘classics’, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and Britten’s Peter Grimes, for example, have the chorus assuming a crucial role in the narrative, as in the large-scale oratorios already mentioned. Schoenberg and others have used choral Sprechstimme to haunting effect, and Puccini’s unique ‘humming chorus’ in Madama Butterfly (1904) still remains powerfully memorable. Carmina Burana (1937) by Carl Orff (1895–1982) and African Sanctus (1972) by David Fanshawe (b. 1942) are two works which, while retaining vestiges of modernism, ingeniously managed to appeal to choirs not technically assured enough to tackle, say, Stravinsky’s Les noces (1919). Orff achieved a diluted version of that composer’s repetitive primitivism, and Fanshawe, affected by the multi-culturalism of his times, brought the vitality of African gospel singing and drumming to the English choral tradition. Other composers were determinedly writing music which only the very finest amateur or professional choirs would be prepared to tackle, and the amateurs were soon setting their sights higher in order to cope. Choruses like the London Symphony, London Philharmonic and Philharmonia, newly formed with careful auditioning, were rehearsed to a professional standard; while more compact professional choirs, consisting of soloists, such as the BBC Singers, Stuttgart Schola Cantorum, John Alldis Choir and Purcell Singers, were proving capable of performing anything put in front of them. Later, specialist groups like Exaudi, New London Chamber Choir and the Hilliard Ensemble, have continued the tradition. Works making extreme demands on technique and musicality: the Webern Cantatas (1938–9 and 1941–3), Messiaen’s Cinq Rechants (1948), Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study III (1974) or Xenakis’s Nuits (1967–8), could now depend on an authoritative performance, while essays for large-scale forces such as Berio’s Sinfonia (1968–9), Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso (1955–6) and Prometeo (1984–5), St Luke Passion (1966) by Penderecki (b. 1933) and Stockhausen’s Carré (1959–60), using collages of variegated vocal effects, generated considerable interest and excitement for audiences and performers alike. All the methods of vocalising used in the contemporary solo repertoire, from pure singing to the most
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extended techniques, were now choral possibilities. Cry (1980) by Giles Swayne (b. 1946) for instance, written for the BBC Singers, is an important large-scale work for individual, amplified soloists which traces the development from inarticulate speech to song. For Stuttgart’s International Bachakademie’s Passion 2000 new Passions were commissioned from Golijov, the Russian Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), China’s Tan Dun (b. 1957) and Germany’s Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952), a major initiative intended to increase the range of innovative choral work. In recent years, many have bemoaned the running down of conventional music classes in UK schools, and the loss of a common experience in the singing of good quality hymns at ‘assembly’ – many of them by composers of the stature of Vaughan Williams and Holst (1874–1934). This has coincided with the gradual secularisation of society, and decline in opportunity for experiencing sacred music on a day-to-day level. The amateur choral tradition still survives in part, however, even if the numbers of choirs and choral societies is dwindling. After the heyday of the great choral societies in Britain in the early half of the twentieth century, a decline in live musicmaking by amateurs was probably inevitable, given the ready availability of entertainment at the touch of a button. Choral competitions still abound, however, and valuable educational influences, which have come from the Continent, help to invigorate the medium. The Kodály Method, with its focus on singing rather than instrumental playing as the basis of musicianship, has made a crucial contribution to choral standards, and not only in the composer’s native Hungary; while countries like Finland set a fine example in the number of excellent choirs, both for children and adults, which regularly perform contemporary music. The solfège system in Europe has continued to play a major part in aiding choirs to attain a high standard of musicianship with reliable pitching. Britten, ever aware of educational and communal needs in writing for children’s voices, as in A Ceremony of Carols (1942) and St Nicholas (1948), actually included the whole community in his Noye’s Fludde (1957), with local children taking solos and the audience joining in the singing. More recent works for the people of Spitalfields and Canterbury by Jonathan Dove (b. 1959) and Matthew King (b. 1967) have extended this vital and promising repertoire, highlighting local identity as a focal point of choral singing.18 At the same time, recent works by John Tavener and James MacMillan (b. 1959) have re-established the sacred and churchly aspect of choral performance, for long the mainstays of the 18 Matthew King (b. 1967) wrote his dramatic oratorio Jonah in 1996, and the community opera On London Fields in 2004. The cantata On Spital Fields by Jonathan Dove (b. 1959) was written in 2005, and the two composers then collaborated on the community opera Hear Our Voice (2006).
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tradition in contexts such as the Three Choirs Festival.19 Conductor Gareth Malone’s inspiring work with unskilled and initially unpromising choral forces, shown on television late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, provides a telling example of what can be achieved with a combination of vision and persuasive energy. The vital importance of recreational singing for our spiritual, physical and social well-being is perhaps being rediscovered.
19 For example, Tavener’s Celtic Requiem (1971) and, especially, the all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple (2003) and MacMillan’s Seven Last Words From the Cross (1993) and St John Passion (2008).
. 30 .
Instrumental performance in the twentieth century and beyond ROGER HEATON
Modernism has released its icy grip. During the latter decades of the twentieth century composers seemed able again to breathe Stefan George’s ‘Luft von anderem Planeten’ (‘Air of another planet’), the opening soprano line of the last movement of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet (1908), an iconic phrase emblematic of a newly extended or saturated chromaticism. These revolutionary beginnings of atonality (a negative term not favoured by Schoenberg) were hastened by the need to broaden the compositional palette, expressing and exploring a newly liberated emotional inner life. As Schoenberg memorably writes in his first letter to Kandinsky, ‘art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but what is inborn, instinctive.’1 Kandinsky’s initial letter to Schoenberg, after hearing his music in 1911,2 which provoked the composer’s enthusiastic response, in a sense clinches the movement towards expressionism: ‘In your works, you have realised what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.’3 And so that particular strand of the complex story begins. The neat but arbitrary use of 1900 as the starting point for many twentiethcentury music histories no longer seems to obtain. Invoking Dahlhaus, the Romantic nineteenth century might be seen to end with the death of Wagner, and the twentieth to start with the early modern period in German and Austrian music: Mahler, Wolf, Zemlinsky, early Strauss and tonal Schoenberg straddling the two centuries up to the beginnings of atonality in 1908 and perhaps further to the end of the Great War. As Dahlhaus suggests, this period might even end as
1 J. Hahl-Koch (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg–Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, trans. J. C. Crawford, London, Faber, 1984, p. 23. Letter dated 24 January 1911. 2 Besides the Second Quartet the Munich concert (January 1911) also included the Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11, the First Quartet Op. 7 and a group of five early songs including Erwartung. 3 Arnold Schoenberg–Wassily Kandinsky, p. 21. Letter dated 18 January 1911.
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late as 1920 as the ‘revolution in musical technique around 1910 was succeeded by a profound transformation of aesthetic outlook around 1920’:4 here he is looking to Stravinsky and the twelve-tone Schoenberg. For the subject of this chapter, performance practice and instrumental exploitation, the twentieth century is not ‘long’ but, I would suggest, quite short, covering the mid-century from the 1950s to the late 1980s.5 Much of this period’s instrumental experimentation and usage, the development of so-called ‘extended’ techniques, is embedded in modernism and its language of free atonality. The very life of these ‘new’ sounds seems to depend on the freedom begun by Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance: a modernist journey continuing through the familiar canonic tradition of post-serial composers associated with the Darmstadt summer courses, electronic music studios and American campuses, which reaches its peak during the 1980s with the considerable achievements of figures such as Ferneyhough and Carter. This journey was aided by the politics of modern music, a politics of both the ‘industry’ and the critics with their predilection for complexity and opaqueness, the two overriding prerequisites with which the cultural elite often legitimise their artists and their art. A review of Reich’s The Desert Music typifies the view: Take, for instance, an unremarkable melodic phrase, such as might have been served as an accompanying figure in a nineteenth-century ballet score. Hardly has it appeared quite early in The Desert Music than it is subsumed into a characteristic Reich pattern. Yet, before it has been fully ingested, it fleetingly evokes another world. The damage has been done. Heard in a non-Reichian context, its banality is painfully evident. These reminiscences are fatal. They confront Reich’s music with idioms more powerful than his own.6
Conductors, festival directors, radio controllers and most critics promoted and supported the modernist mission7 often to the detriment of other both more and less radical musics (William Glock’s tenure at the BBC 1959–73 is an example). Cage might have been tolerated, even revered, as a philosopher and inventor who happened to use music as his medium but much else, such as text pieces or Alvin Lucier’s 1970 tape loop piece I am sitting in a room, the beginnings of
4 C. Dahlhaus, trans. J. B. Robinson, Nineteenth-Century Music, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p. 335. 5 Perhaps 1990 is good place to stop with Ferneyhough’s Fourth String Quartet with soprano, a work commissioned as a companion piece for Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. 6 P. Heyworth, Observer, 4 August 1985. 7 There are, of course, notable exceptions, including, among the critics, composer Tom Johnson, writing in the New York Village Voice (1971–82), Keith Potter, writing in his own journal Contact from the 1970s to the 1990s and for the Independent British daily, and Michael Nyman, writing in the British weekly magazines and in Tempo during the 1960s and 1970s. Among radio producers, the composer Ernst Albrecht Stiebler during his time at Hessischer Rundfunk (1969–95) produced prize-winning programmes of music by Alvin Curran and Walter Zimmermann, Cage, Wolff, Feldman, Radulescu and others.
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minimalism, the Duchamp-inspired objet trouvé composers and the rest, was seen by this elite as peripheral and unmusical. The modernist supporters’ passionate, zealous campaigns and polemics enforced the tradition8 but this is music where, since the early 1990s, one has sensed the end of the road. Except, of course, to return to George’s ‘Luft’, this is only part of the story; there are important parallel histories of experimental, radical endeavour, neoconservative symphonic work and those quasi-serialists who eventually jumped the good ship Darmstadt wanting to be freed from purely atonal functions, Ligeti for example. Significant opera composers and symphonists, just to mention only a few of the lesser-known British ones such as Malcolm Arnold, Robert Simpson, William Alwyn and Alun Hoddinott, demonstrate a rich body of work which is even now only being rediscovered and recorded. But the radical experimental movement seemed like a sideshow for the initiated only, a ghetto deafened by the institutionalised big guns of fully notated atonality. As fashions change it has taken centre stage in current music-making in a number of guises, most significantly now in the form of tonal post-minimalism. This radicalism has a tradition with its beginnings in the eccentricities of Ives and Satie. Satie is of pivotal importance to European experimental composers, British in particular, as are such determinedly non-canonical figures as Lord Berners, Percy Grainger and others, musicians as influential, though perhaps less directly so, as Cage. The recent music of Bryars, Hobbs and Skempton,9 who started as text composers profoundly influenced by the visual arts, and who were founding members of the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, does not eschew functional diatonic harmony but rather embellishes, complements and subverts. The American influence on European experimental music is important (Bryars, for example, worked with Cage on preparing HPSCHD (1967–9) and with Reich’s group as a pianist) and the 1950s and 1960s particularly is the period most associated with indeterminacy and the work of the ‘New York School’: Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff. Pieces from this period still enjoy a performance life and recordings frequently appear as younger generations of performers discover this material. How do they approach it? There are documentary recordings of course, but as with performing any music from 8 Boulez is perhaps the most notable campaigner but one should not overlook his dogmatism and musical narrow-mindedness. Other influential figures include the musicologist Harry Halbreich who called the emerging composers of the German ‘new simplicity’ during the 1980s (including Hans-Christian von Dadelson and Wolfgang von Schweinitz) the ‘new simpletons’. 9 John White and Dave Smith are also part of this group with a large body of music for solo piano. Pianist John Tilbury has coined the label ‘New English Piano School’. For a discussion see S. E. Walker, ‘The new English keyboard school: a second “golden age” ’, Leonardo Music Journal, 11 (2001), 17–23.
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the past the player addresses the material with a sense of history, specifically a performance practice based on the tradition in which the music resides. Feldman’s Projections II (1951) is one of his first graph pieces with the instruments’ ranges divided into high, middle and low, with rhythm, dynamics (all generally very quiet) and performance techniques such as pizzicato notated. The two Intersections (1951–3) pieces for orchestra go a step further with only register given and everything else to be chosen freely. Feldman writes that the intention here is to ‘project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric that had no place here’.10 But he soon discarded graphic notation because ‘I began to discover its most important flaw. I was not only allowing the sounds to be free – I was also liberating the performers. I had never thought of the graph as an art of improvisation, but more as a totally abstract sonic adventure.’11 Cage remarked of Feldman’s later fully notated music as representing Feldman ‘himself playing his graph music’.12 There is certainly an element of fuzzy ‘dissonance’ between compositional intention and what players can produce in this music. It is possible to follow the letter of these graphic scores while still allowing for a sound world inappropriate to the style and the composer’s intentions. The problem is of players who might respond with a tonal or at least tonally reminiscent vocabulary which conflicts with the dissonant language of the modernist tradition in which these pieces exist: ‘allowing the sounds to be free’ rejects their rearrangement into musically meaningful (consonant?) constellations.13 10 B. H. Friedman, Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, Cambridge, MA, Exact Change, 2000, p. 6. 11 Ibid., p. 6. 12 As quoted in M. Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 53. 13 Dave Smith recounts the story of Feldman being extremely cross at a performance in Munich of Wolff’s Burdocks by the Scratch Orchestra. Smith’s email to me (30 March 2009) is worth quoting almost in full. ‘The Scratch Orchestra concert was at Munich radio station on 31st August 1972. The number “7” appeared in section 5 of Burdocks. This was the opening section (fairly extended) in this particular performance. The banjo player was Carole Finer. She played more than one folksong (the second was a phrase from “Clementine”) with appreciable gaps in between. Shortly after the third began, Feldman, after letting forth an extended “Ohhhh!” got to his feet and announced “I hope everyone here understands that this has nothing (at all) to do with Christian Wolff”. He ranted on for a couple of sentences. Richard Ascough, one of the members of the Scratch, had a few words with Cage, Feldman and Tudor after the concert. They had taken exception to a number of things including the folksongs. Cage said that the number 7 indicated 7 sounds: Ascough pointed out that there was nothing in the score to indicate that. They went through the score but couldn’t find it. Tudor reckoned there was another page which explained the symbols: it wasn’t in any score which the Scratch orchestra had. Tudor was wrong. There are “miscellaneous instructions” on the title page which briefly explain the usual Wolff notations, but nothing to explain a number 7. Cage also took exception to Bernard Kelly’s interpretation of Section 10, for which the instructions are “Flying, and possibly crawling or sitting still” (no explanation given). Bernard recited a poem which he had written. Ascough pointed out that in the Scratch Orchestra performance of Burdocks in London earlier in the year Sue Gittins had performed a recitation for Section 10 [and] had earned no objection from Wolff who attended both rehearsal and performance. The Americans were unrepentant. The performance was “bad”. . . was not in the spirit of Christian Wolff, and Tilbury and Cardew had “betrayed their special relationship with Christian Wolff”.’
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Tradition, performance aspects which become attached to works and styles and originate from the techniques and idiosyncrasies of specific performers, are consolidated over time and apply just as much here as in nineteenth-century music. With a very different work from the same period, Berio also felt the need to control performance in his carefully rewritten Sequenza I for flute (1958) which now exists in two versions: the original in time–space notation and the 1992 revised version rhythmically fully notated. Berio, in an interview before the 1992 rewrite, comments: [I] adopted a notation that was very precise, but allowed a margin of flexibility in order that the player might have the freedom – psychological rather than physical – to adapt the piece here and there to his technical stature. But instead, this notation has allowed many players – none of them by any means shining examples of professional integrity – to perpetuate adaptations that were little short of piratical. In fact, I hope to rewrite Sequenza I in rhythmic notation: maybe it will be less ‘open’ and more authoritarian, but at least it will be reliable.14
Whether the score is graphically notated or in time–space notation, or in some combination, this does not allow the performer licence to approximation. With text scores, the kind of intuitive music one finds in Stockhausen’s Aus dem sieben Tagen15 (1968), for example Set sail for the Sun from this collection,16 one assumes from the score this is a move from dissonance to consonance, could that mean to a gloriously, colourfully voiced major triad? Cage’s Music for Piano (1952–6) is his first use of indeterminate notation, with pitch and the order of events fixed and all other parameters left free; apart from Cage’s control over pitch, the result will be different each time it is played. David Tudor’s approach to the performance of these early works was to meticulously pre-prepare and notate the pieces. Cage’s Variations II, written for Tudor in 1961, is a particularly abstract piece of lines and dots: six transparencies with single lines and five transparencies with single points. Cage instructs the player/s to overlay the sheets and to measure the lines which represent ‘1) frequency, 2) amplitude, 3) timbre, 4) duration, 5) point of occurrence in an established period of time, [and] 6) structure of event (number of sounds making up an aggregate or constellation)’.17 Tudor’s realisation of the piece 14 D. Osmond-Smith, Luciano Berio, Two Interviews, London, Marion Boyars, 1985, p. 99. 15 There are, of course, hundreds of examples from Wolff and the early British period of Bryars, Skempton, Parsons, to recent British composers such as John Lely. Important composers include the Wandelweiser group of thirteen international composers (see www.wandelweiser.de), other recent American pieces can be downloaded at www.uploaddownloadperform.net. 16 The text reads, ‘play a tone for so long until you hear its individual vibrations[,] hold the tone and listen to the tones of the others – all of them together, not to individual ones – and slowly move your tone until you arrive at complete harmony and the whole sound turns to gold to pure, gently shimmering fire’. 17 Composer’s note in the score.
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(using an amplified piano) was again detailed, and could be said to have been appropriated by the performer, in a sense the work no longer belongs to Cage. James Pritchett convincingly argues that Tudor’s performance is not of Cage’s work but of a composition by Tudor himself.18 Into this stylistically pluralistic picture, what James Boros called in 1995 a ‘new totality’,19 we need to place performance and the performers of these very different musics. The relationship between composer and performer, alliances and allegiances, is little different now from how it has always been: Brahms and Joachim, Mozart and Stadler. The privileging of virtuosity remains an important aspect both for the fortunes of the itinerant soloist and for the composer providing a vehicle for the drama of virtuosity in all its different manifestations, not simply digital dexterity. Composers often come into contact with exceptional players and the resulting works extend the technical boundaries with both composers making demands that may at first seem impossible to execute (but soon begin to come within reach) and the players themselves encouraging the composers with what Ferneyhough has called their ‘box of tricks’.20 There is nothing new here: Haydn’s works for his Esterházy string players during the 1760s resulted in concertos with challenging parts; Spohr’s clarinet concertos required his favourite player, Simon Hermstedt, to add keys to his instrument to be able to execute certain otherwise unplayable passages; Weber might have been the first to use multiphonics at the end of the cadenza in his Concertino Op. 45 (1806, rev. 1815) for French horn,21 although the bassoonist Franz Anton Pfeiffer (1752–87) was noted for a kind of three-part harmony, presumably an early multiphonic effect also using voice. There are a number of significant differences and changes to the composer/ performer relationship in the twentieth century. What might be seen as new from the mid-century onwards are composers writing for particular players and specialist ensembles with talents in technical and sonic experimentation, musicians excited by the possibilities of their instruments beyond accepted idiomatic writing. These are players whose technical ‘toolbox’ goes beyond the all-pervading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music (with a smattering of Prokofiev, Bartók or Shostakovich) which still seems to dominate concert programmes. The composers associated with Darmstadt in the 1950s and 18 For a full discussion of Tudor’s papers in the Getty Research Institute see J. Pritchett, ‘David Tudor as composer/performer in Cage’s “Variations II” ’, Leonardo Music Journal, 14 (2004), 11–16. 19 J. Boros, ‘A “new totality”?’, Perspectives of New Music 33/1 and 2 (1995), 538–53. 20 J. Boros and R. Toop (eds.), Brian Ferneyhough Collected Writings, Amsterdam, Harwood, 1998, p. 370. 21 This is actually two-part writing, playing and singing, rather than multiphonics as such, but by singing a third harmonic often results.
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1960s did not extend instrumental resources in those early years but certainly extended traditional technique in terms of rhythmic asymmetry, range, the quick succession of widely spaced pitch, fast changes of extreme dynamics and the sheer quantity of non-adjacent, non-stepwise pitch collections. The Klavierstücke of Stockhausen, particularly, required the extraordinary technique of pianists such as Tudor, Paul Jacobs and Frederic Rzewski. Apart from the soloists, what is significant in the twentieth century is the demise of the string quartet as the standard bearer of all that is new and experimental and the rise of the small ensemble. The majority of new music since the Second World War has been written for ensembles either of one-to-apart chamber orchestra size (string quartet plus bass, wind quintet plus trumpet, trombone, piano and percussion) or smaller groups whose model is the instrumentation for Pierrot lunaire. Friedrich Cerha and Kurt Schwertsik’s Ensemble Die Reihe, founded in Vienna in 1958, is probably the first of the larger groups formed initially to play music of the Second Viennese School: Schwertsik played the horn and conducted, HK Gruber was the double bassist. A few years earlier Boulez was organising and conducting his own Parisian Domaines Musicales concerts.22 The Darmstadt Internationales Kammerensemble was an ad hoc ensemble made up of the instrumental teachers at the Summer Courses from its inception in 1946. Later groups such as the London Sinfonietta (formed in 1968), the Pierrot Players (formed by Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle in 1967, which became The Fires of London) and groups in the USA such as Speculum Musicae (formed in 1971) were all based to a certain extent on their continental forebears. Boulez’s own Ensemble Intercontemporain (formed in 1976) was itself modelled on the London Sinfonietta and, at its inception, had some of the same British players in common. Among the string quartets earlier in the century there are a few committed to new work. The Rosé Quartet played first performances of Schoenberg’s First and Second Quartets;23 the Kolisch Quartet, formed and led by Rudolf Kolisch (1896–1978) was also inextricably linked to Schoenberg (his second wife Gertrud was Kolisch’s sister) and played first performances of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Bartók.24 The Juilliard Quartet also played and recorded Schoenberg’s quartets in his lifetime, and later took on the difficulties of Carter’s quartets. The Parisian Parrenin Quartet was particularly active in new music during the 1950s and 1960s playing 22 For a detailed discussion of the beginnings of this society and ensemble see P. Hill and N. Simeone, Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 12–19. 23 The leader Arnold Rosé (1863–1946) was also the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic (1881–1938 with some breaks). 24 Kolisch, like Schoenberg, emigrated to the ‘paradise’ of Hollywood but returned to Germany particularly to teach at the Darmstadt summer courses, playing, for example, Schoenberg’s Phantasy Op. 47 with Eduard Steuermann.
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many first performances, Henze and Penderecki among them, and appearing in Darmstadt performing Boulez. But it is the Arditti Quartet’s extraordinary achievement which, despite the Kronos’s rather particular work in a much smaller focused repertoire, has almost single-handedly revived the medium,25 followed now by many younger less specialised but equally committed quartets. Orchestras, with the exception of some of the European radio orchestras, have been less willing in recent times to play or commission new work, a sorry tale that does not need re-examining here. But the new music ensembles have filled the gap. Their players are often soloists who have not trained to be orchestral musicians, or indeed have never played in an orchestra.26 It is unsurprising that many of these players during the 1970s and 1980s were also part of the early music ‘boom’, experimenting in the equally uncharted territories of boxwood, valveless/natural, gut string and the rest.27 Many of these players have particular technical skills beyond speed and accuracy, such as a variety of tonal resources or a command of the altissimo register or circular breathing, and instrumental experimentation comes to the fore, making an instrument do things it was not designed to do, introducing an idea of collaboration where players can lead the way. This new relationship with technique allows for works to be created that exist in a dimension apart from the concerns of traditional sound production and idiomatic writing. Here the phenomenon of the specialist has developed further, not far removed from the composer/performer travelling showman, certainly with the technique to cope with the new demands but also a musical personality where the music is often crafted to the strengths and the mannerisms of that performer: players and singers such as Cathy Berberian, Jane Manning, Harry Sparnaay, Irvine Arditti, Pierre Yves Artaud, Alan Hacker, Heinz Holliger and Vinko Globokar are instantly recognisable. Certain players have a curiously powerful and individual way of delivering material which almost appropriates the music for their own purpose, they create themselves in the music, project a style of approach which can develop into something more tangible as composers write in ways which assume their performance styles thereby creating a performance practice, a tradition. Performance practice in recent music is an area that musicology has left largely unexplored. Very few expert performers write about what they do, with 25 Founded in 1974 the Quartet describes its contemporary repertoire rather vaguely on its website as ‘in excess of several hundred pieces’. 26 Although the Die Reihe and London Sinfonietta ensembles recruited almost entirely from interested orchestral musicians. 27 Clarinettists include Hans Deinzer (who gave the first performance of Boulez’s Domaines), Alan Hacker (Birtwistle’s and Maxwell Davies’s clarinettist), and Antony Pay (for whom Henze’s concerto Le Miracle de la Rose was composed).
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some notable exceptions,28 some contribute in an anecdotal way,29 and some, in the time-honoured fashion, write treatises.30 These treatises are, however very different from those of earlier centuries (Quantz, Leopold Mozart, C. P. E. Bach) in that they deal purely with technique, descriptive ‘how-to’ manuals of new and extended techniques, and tell us little about expression, about the music itself. Charles Rosen writes, ‘In interpreting a work of twentiethcentury music, we can emphasize its radical nature, or we can try to indicate its nineteenth-century origins.’31 Players may believe that they do not have to reckon with the weight of an established performance practice, that they can create their own in new music, but there are approaches, for example born out of the Darmstadt works of the 1950s and 1960s, which demand a level of accuracy, cleanliness of attack, attention to colour and significant lack of expression which have become the accepted style: a tradition that adheres closely to the score (its ‘radical nature’). There is no room here for a performance which irons out the extremes of dynamics, speed and irregular rhythm, but this approach still often appears in tandem with the kind of conservatoirelearned musicality one might expect. If a phrase or section gesturally suggests music reminiscent of ‘nineteenth-century origins’ despite its use of intervals of seconds and ninths, expression comes into play, a kind of ‘utility musicality’ which may have nothing to do with the specific piece or its radical nature: performances of the opening oboe solo from Varèse’s Octandre is an example.32 Music, of course, needs to be brought to life by the player, and notation has become increasingly prescriptive in the composer’s attempt to control every parameter, but what is crucial for the performer in new music is to determine exactly where a strict rendition is obligatory and where greater freedom of rhythm and phrasing for the purposes of expression is more appropriate. This is nowhere more important than in the two extremes of compositional style that have dominated the last thirty years of the twentieth century: complexity and minimalism. All music is complex on some level, however simple its surface features may be. Complexity here refers not only to rhythmic irregularities, but also to the 28 Among them Pierre Boulez, Charles Rosen, Mieko Kanno, David Albermann, Steve Schick and Herbert Henck. 29 For example, Contemporary Music Review, 21/1 (2002), edited by Marilyn Nonken, is an interesting collection of interviews of performers on performance with mostly American singers and players, including Ursula Oppens, Rolf Schulte and Fred Sherry. 30 A number of treatises by way of example include: Pierre Yves Artaud, Robert Dick (flute), Heinz Holliger, Libby Van Cleve, Peter Veale and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (oboe), Daniel Kientzy (saxophone), Phillip Rehfeldt, Giuseppe Garborino (clarinet). 31 W. Thomas, Composition – Performance – Reception: Studies in the Creative Process in Music, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998, p. 72. 32 The opening four bars have almost no expression marks: a single mp, two small crescendo/decrescendo markings and an accent.
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way in which the serial tendency has required more information on the page to allow the performer access to something in addition to a technically accurate rendition. The increased detail of ‘action notation’, descriptive of the sounds intended and modes of execution, is evident from the late nineteenth century, for example in Mahler and in the Second Viennese scores. In the string writing one sees much use of different modes of bowing, sul tasto, sul ponticello, flautando, col legno (tratto and battuto), a wide range of dynamics with detailed use of the crescendo and diminuendo signs, accents, dagger/wedge and staccato signs, tenuto, tenuto with staccato, as well as complex tempo relationships, rhythmic groupings and so on. With this level of notation players could execute the score accurately but with little sense of style, and early performances of Webern attest to this.33 The increased detail of notation in later twentieth-century music is there to guide interpretation, to generate a new performance practice in unfamiliar music where traditions from earlier music are inappropriate. One might argue that much of the more recent music from the 1970s to the 1990s, putting rhythm to one side for the moment, is over-notated and prescriptive, constraining a player’s ability to interpret, but I would argue that quite the reverse is true. Scores increasingly look like the music sounds and, once the notes have been learnt, there is an internalising of the additional information, which leads to an understanding and ownership of the music. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern notate clearly to try to give a sense of style: for example the use of tenuto with staccato in triple time to give a precise waltz lilt, or at short phrase endings on the last note giving a sense of lift or being left in mid-air; their use of Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme is an attempt to balance complex counterpoint and texture. Brian Ferneyhough is a composer who has probably travelled furthest down this notational route yet his music largely comprises familiar gestures found elsewhere in earlier literature. What is challenging here is the speed at which the events occur, the density of the notation and the technical demands on the player not just in terms of pitch (particularly microtones in quick grace-note flurries) but the overlaying of additional sound treatments far in excess of anything before. Comparing the sound world of Berg’s Lyric Suite (1926) with Ferneyhough’s Third String Quartet (1986–7) reminds us just how ‘modern’ certain sections of Berg’s piece sound. The ponticello scurryings at the opening of the third movement Allegro misterioso which gradually transform into pizzicato at bar 14, the geschlagen (struck/bounced) semiquavers at bars 40–2, or the extraordinary Tenebroso section in the fifth 33 Peter Stadlen’s (1979) score of Webern’s Piano Variations Op. 27 is important here. Stadlen studied the work with Webern, gave the first performance, and later published a facsimile score with Webern’s added performance annotations. The score is said to have influenced Boulez’s interpretations of Webern’s music.
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movement Presto delirando with its crescendo flautando double stops and held double stops with tremolo ponticello interjections (bars 85–120) all find echoes and similarities in the first movement of Ferneyhough’s quartet. Despite the rhythmic complexities in Ferneyhough, the sound of the first movement (at least in the Arditti recording)34 is of periodic events and simultaneous attacks for all four players not unlike in Berg; the sound is exotically enticing, drawing the listener in, but what is different from Berg is its discontinuity. The movement is clearly structured as a juxtaposition of different types of material but the effect is of an episodic unfolding of statements, the longest of which is never more than eight or ten seconds in length. The second movement in contrast is a continuous fast-paced drama driving the listener forward. The form here is clear even on first hearing, beginning with a frenetic first-violin solo, adding the second in a duo, then the much slowerpaced viola and cello together leading to the first climax after a bar of fast rhythmic unison at the quasi recitativo (bar 56), and a final climax again with simultaneous attacks over a solo viola (bar 103) who completes the movement and the piece. Sometimes the music slows so one is able to hear stable pitch relationships (despite its microtonality one does not hear the quarter-tones, it all sounds remarkably well tempered!) as in the viola and cello’s first entry at bar 18, a kind of cantus firmus under the busy violins, but what one does hear are the familiar gestures of the expressionistic style present in the Lyric Suite. It is this kind of grounding of radical new work from the latter part of the century in the early expressionistic style that allows an ‘entry’ for both performers and listeners: gesture and salient events, not pitch. I hesitate to say that the music of the complex school sounds surprisingly old-fashioned, but the two issues which have overshadowed the actual sound of the music, giving it the patina of modernity and radicalism, and which have certainly concerned players, are rhythm and microtonality. Much of the discourse about this has been centred on Darmstadt during the Hommel era in the 1980s35 but it would be a mistake to associate Darmstadt only with complexity of the serial and post-serial kind. German institutions after the Second World War were recipients of considerable (American) funds to put culture back on track. De-Nazification was just as much a part of compositional style as it was of political cleansing.36 The Summer Courses began with an emphasis on modern tonal styles, Hindemith and Bartók, but Messiaen and Leibowitz
34 Brian Ferneyhough 1, Arditti String Quartet, Disque Montagne, 1994, M0789002. 35 Friedrich Hommel was the director of the Summer Courses from 1981 to 1994. 36 For a thorough discussion see A. Beal, New Music, New Allies. American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006. Also T. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007.
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changed the direction and soon after, the course’s first director, Wolfgang Steinecke, clearly had a vision to continue and develop the modernist tradition. But it did not last long. There were disagreements. Nono left in 1962, Boulez taught from 1962 to 1965, and Stockhausen from 1966 to 1970; in any case the arrival of Cage in 1958 fed the influence of indeterminacy, and a group of composers less interested in the prevailing strict procedures showed that a colourful, theatrical approach was also possible, Berio, Kagel and Ligeti among them. Significant here is the first visit to Darmstadt of David Tudor, someone who begins and almost ends our story with his influential post-Cageian electronic work with Merce Cunningham. Tudor arrived in 1956 to teach but also to illustrate a lecture given by Stefan Wolpe, playing examples by Sessions, Perle and Babbitt, as well as Cage, Brown, Feldman and Wolff. Tudor was particularly keen to present Cage’s Music of Changes (1951) in the interpretation classes,37 and to give the first European performances. Tudor and Cage gave a two-piano recital of music by Brown, Cage, Feldman and Wolff in 1958 and this seems to have been a significant turning point for the reception of this music and its aesthetic.38 The appearance of the three American pianists, Tudor, Paul Jacobs and Frederic Rzewski (who was there in 1956) is important for the performance of post-serial European music, particularly Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. Stockhausen wrote the first piano pieces during 1952–3 (numbers III and IV in the set of eleven), numbers I–IV were first performed in 1954 and V–VIII in 1955 by the Belgian pianist Marcelle Mercenier at Darmstadt. Number XI was first performed by Tudor in New York in 1957 and the first German performance was given by Jacobs at Darmstadt in 1957. Pieces V–X were originally dedicated to Tudor but Stockhausen later changed this to Aloys Kontarsky, who gave the first performance of number IX. Rzewski gave the premiere of piece X in Italy in 1962 and the German premiere of IX in 1963 and recorded them both. Klavierstück X is probably the most notorious of the set not least because of the forearm clusters and the cluster glissandi. Stockhausen suggests in the score’s notes that, ‘To play the cluster glissandi more easily and with enough rapidity, it is recommended that woollen gloves be worn, the fingers of which have been cut away.’ Kontarsky preferred rubber gloves and apparently Rzewski dusted the piano keys and his hands with talcum powder. The German pianist Herbert Henck, who studied under Kontarsky (and took
37 The structure of the summer school was, and still is, to have performers’ masterclass-based interpretation studios running simultaneously with composition studios, together with general lectures and concerts open to all. 38 The audience included Stockhausen, Berio, Penderecki, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Xenakis, the percussionist Christoph Caskel and pianist Paul Jacobs.
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over his teaching in Darmstadt in the 1980s) worked on the piece with Stockhausen, and subsequently wrote a very useful book on the work including a detailed analysis and a chapter on how to practise the piece.39 He acknowledges that the primary problem is rhythm. Stockhausen’s score is clearly notated with the length of sections given above the staves and the beams joining the flurries of notes denoting fast (horizontal beam), accelerando (rising beam) and ritardando (falling beam) collections of notes; the difficulty lies in the speeding up and slowing down within a fast tempo while maintaining an internal sense of pulse. All the grace notes are to be played ‘as fast as possible’ (‘so schnell wie möglich’, a direction that appears time and again in twentieth-century music) with the basic tempo also as fast as is playable. The early recordings, exciting as they are, give the effect of rapidity at the expense of the clarity of pitch and Stockhausen later talked about the grace notes as being melodic and suggested a slower basic pulse for clarity of articulation.40 Henck recommends an approach to practice which performers might use for learning challenging music of any period and suggests working very slowly in small sections, but also not to practise the piece in isolation: but always in conjunction with such music to which the hands are accustomed, which at least makes other (not more natural) demands on them. The mastery of very many technical problems in new music can often be excellently supported by their traditional counterpart. Thus for the sometimes ticklish chromaticism here, one should work on pieces like the Chopin Etudes Op. 10 No. 2 or Op. 25 No. 6. Or better still to invent studies for oneself.41
Rhythmic complexity and new ‘action’ notation are often the stumbling blocks for performers. A great deal of time is spent in music education becoming expert in quickly reading and translating symbols into sound.42 Composers often devised symbols for particular sounds in isolation of each other, working within and for their own discrete musical communities, and in doing so one of the problems until recently has been the lack of a common notation for certain effects, even quarter-tone notation, with its arrows, different shaped note heads and differing versions of accidental signs confusing players. Composers still strive to explore areas of sound which require a clear and unambiguous notation. In Ferneyhough the notation specifies as accurately as possible every possible parameter and, as I have said before, it may lead to a performance where the
39 H. Henck, Klavierstück X: A Contribution toward Understanding Serial Technique, Cologne, Neuland, 1980. 40 Ibid., p. 64. 41 Ibid., p. 61. 42 See M. Kanno, ‘Prescriptive notation: limits and challenges’, Contemporary Music Review 26/2 (2007), 231–54.
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performer’s concern with accuracy is paramount and a sense of ‘interpretation’, the final stage of transmitting the music, is missing. This is not always the case. Expert performers who have a knowledge of the style, and have worked with the composer, can transmit the essence of the music and create a tradition for that specific work. But how do new sounds enter the compositional and then notational process? Is there a gap between intention and realisation? Purely graphic notation, however beautiful it may be in works such as Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, or early works by Bussotti, allows for the kind of freedom where free improvisation is only a short step away. The scores serve as a visual stimulus for the interpreter’s creative energies, and can be used either to get the creative juices going or as a more prescriptive representation of potentially specific sound/symbol relationships. Any graphics, pictures, colours are potential material.43 What is more common are pieces that combine familiar music notation with other graphics. Cardew provides an example in his Octet ’61 for Jasper Johns where sixty-one events are notated combining hand-drawn pitches on staves with numbers and dynamics: a number seven might be seven repetitions of a pitch, or an interval of a seventh, or seven discrete sounds or effects and so on. Cardew recommends playing from the score only for experienced performers and gives in the preface a traditionally notated example of a possible realisation of the first six events which, while useful as a simple explanation or key to symbols, seems to me to miss the point: this kind of notation contains enough information to realise spontaneously. Hans-Joachim Hespos also combines graphic and traditional notation in meticulously detailed scores which sound like the kind of free jazz of players such as Evan Parker or Peter Brötzman combined with sometimes startling theatrical approaches to playing and to the fabric of the instruments themselves. The scores do not always contain exact pitch material, but do present a sophisticated notation for unusual sounds and considerable use of the voice where phonetic symbols are drawn in different sizes, thickness of type and placed on the page to give a clear and easily read representation of the actual sound, dynamic and relative register. The majority of composers have stayed with standard notation, measured or time–space, with the occasional graphic to represent the amplitude of vibrato, or a note as high as possible where specific pitch is irrelevant, but these scores are also often littered with symbols representing extended techniques and, by the 1980s, there was beginning to be a certain amount of uniformity of notational convention for these effects. The phenomena of extended techniques, or instrumental deviation, has its roots in a number of ideas, inventions and endeavours, not least after the Second 43 Cathy Berberian uses strip cartoons in Stripsody, for example.
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World War a parallel exploration alongside electronic music where traditional instruments could play with the machines (pre-prepared tape), be modified by them in delays, loops and ring modulations, but could also be made to emulate the new electronic sounds themselves. Composers and players have often accidentally stumbled across certain effects – the innocently inquisitive composer (‘what if . . .? Try this . . .’) has been at the heart of collaboration as has simply experimenting with unorthodox approaches to instruments. Satie was threading paper through piano strings in his 1913 Le piège de Méduse (Ravel also suggests this in L’enfant et les sortilèges). Pianos at the turn of the century were being modified with different dampers to give harp and lute-like effects. Ives’s Concorde Sonata (1911) uses a length of wood to produce a cluster. Henry Cowell in his now well-known works from c. 1913–30 was the first to systematically explore the piano’s possibilities with clusters, glissandi and use of the inside of the piano, plucking and damping/muting strings, which then led to Cage’s ‘invention’ of the prepared piano (around 1938). Much later Horatiu Radulescu put a grand piano on its side, retuned and bowed it with fishing line: his ‘sound icon’. There was an exploration of a wider range of percussion instruments, both exotic and scrap metal, with percussionists freed from the orchestra to play in ensembles and even solo recitals on un-tuned percussion. Jazz players were growling and singing down saxophones and trombones in Duke Ellington’s band of the 1920s and 1930s. Modest effects and the extension of range upwards began with works such as Varèse’s flute solo Density 21.5 (1936) with its high D, as well as probably the earliest use of key clicks. Berio’s Sequenza I (1958) for flute (for Severino Gazzeloni) has the first use of a multiphonic which influenced American clarinettist William O. Smith44 also to explore multiphonics, which he used for the first time in Nono’s A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida (1965–6). Bruno Bartolozzi’s influential New Sounds for Woodwind,45 giving multiphonic and microtonal fingerings, first appeared in 1967. What is at the heart of instrumental transformation is the simple notion that if these instruments are capable of a wider spectrum of sounds than is expected of them in common-practice repertoire, then these sounds should be added to the player’s ‘toolbox’ and made available to composers as a natural part of the instrument’s abilities. It is exactly these instrumental quirks, if you like an exploitation of the instruments’ imperfections, that gives an instrument its depth of character and immeasurably extends its expressive possibilities. Ferneyhough, in relation to his second solo flute piece Unity Capsule (1975–6), writes:
44 Also known as Bill Smith when he plays with Dave Brubeck. 45 B. Bartolozzi, New Sounds for Woodwind, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 1982.
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I began by elaborating a system of organisation based on the naturally occurring irregularities in the flute’s sonic character; on the one hand various types of microtonal interval capable of being produced by means of lip or fingers, on the other by recombining articulative techniques familiar to all flutists (tongue action, lip tension, larger or smaller embouchure aperture, intensity of vibrato) into hitherto unfamiliar constellations. What the piece is attempting to suggest . . . is that . . . no compositional style can achieve full validity which does not take as its point of departure that symbiosis between the performer and his instrument in all its imperfection, from which the life force of music emanates.46
Unity Capsule’s use of extended technique and its precise notation is still probably the most extreme example in the repertoire of any instrument.47 Firstly, basic sound production: normal tone with varying intensities of vibrato, a dynamic range from pppp (verging on inaudible) to as loud as possible with a different dynamic for every sonic event, breath sounds and the combination of breath and tone, embouchure changes (the differing angle of the mouthpiece to the lips and the tightness or looseness of the embouchure). Secondly, additional treatments and effects: air sounds, audible in-breaths as well as vocalisations through the instrument, glissandi (both finger and lip), flutter-tongue (both normal tongue flutter and throat growling or ‘gargling’), key clicks, ‘lip pizzicato’ (a kind of slap tongue). Thirdly, microtones: quartertones (a twenty-four note scale), fifth-tones (a thirty-one note scale with fingerings are given in the score’s Notes for Performance), and microtonal activity notated graphically as rapid un-pitched grace notes which are intervals smaller than a fifth-tone. What makes the piece particularly challenging is both the microtones (especially at speed as, in most cases, specific fingerings need to be employed) and the simultaneous production of the different effects and treatments for both flute and voice, with the music written on two staves, the lower one containing the vocal part. Ferneyhough talks about his awareness of overstepping ‘the limits of the humanly realizable’48 but his concern is with a musical ideal that not only relates to accuracy but to style and the essence of his music: he tolerates wrong notes and rhythmic inaccuracies if the latter is evident. Additional layers of notation for sound treatments appear in a number of pieces: the plunger mute notation below the stave in Berio’s 1965 Sequenza V for trombone, or a more recent trombone solo, Richard Barrett’s Basalt (1990–1), 46 Boros and Toop (eds.), Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, p. 99. 47 Ferneyhough as a flute player tested the effects and the general playability of the piece but also cites Robert Dick’s influential The Other Flute (Oxford University Press), published in 1975 at the time of composition, in the score’s ‘Notes for Performance’. 48 Boros and Toop (eds.), Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, p. 319.
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where the voice is used almost throughout the piece. The pioneer for trombonists, trombone technique and brass playing in general is the player and composer Vinko Globokar. His work has always explored new sounds and techniques not only for brass, yet what is significant here is that while the notation is always clear, precise and readable even when he is asking for very complex sounds (as a player he is well aware of practicalities), he is also a composer who often notates the impossible. Like Ferneyhough, whose music is in theory playable (certainly at a slower tempo), Globokar often asks for a number of different techniques simultaneously: vocalising together with pitched notes, percussive effects with fingers or mutes, playing on the in-breath, circular breathing and so on, a combination of which, unlike Ferneyhough are sometimes physically impossible to produce. But it is the tension and drama in the act of trying that is as much part of the musical intention as any kind of accuracy. The aim in much of this music is a performance that Ferneyhough has called an honourable or ‘intelligent failure’,49 ‘the knife-edge quality of the possibility of not achieving something’,50 but again unlike Ferneyhough, Globokar is an improviser so this element of chance, setting up a precise situation where the outcome may be unexpected, is acceptable. Similarly in Sciarrino’s important Six Caprices (1976) for violin he follows an arpeggiated style reminiscent of Paganini (an important reference in these pieces) but uses diamond note heads for half-pressed left-hand pressure resulting in some accurate harmonics but also in much more unstable and unpredictable pitches. The idea of the unplayable and the unpredictable is also largely the problem concerned with microtonal writing. Microtones have an honourable history, with early exponents such as Wyschnegradsky, Alois Hába, Julian Carillo, Ives and others. Performances of their work inspired instrumental modifications and new inventions. The instruments are now mostly in the museum and almost all microtonal music is written for standard orchestral instruments without modifications.51 There are a number of compositional approaches that result in these microtones being perceived in different ways. As I have mentioned, when played at great speed they are almost impossible to hear, when played slower they often, particularly in string playing, sound like poor intonation and are more successful in the woodwind with specific fingerings for quite accurate tuning.52 When played slowly they can be clearly heard as either inflections or
49 Ibid., p. 269. 50 Ibid., p. 270. 51 Scordatura, or detuning the lower strings, is widely used in Scelsi, for example, but never for microtonal tuning. Pianos and harpsichords have been tuned microtonally in works by Ives, for example, and more recently in pieces by Kevin Volans and Clarence Barlow. 52 Microtones on all orchestral instruments are also used for trilling on one note, colour trills, bisbigliando; what Radulescu calls ‘yellow tremoli’.
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bends (in much Japanese new music, in shakuhachi-influenced flute music, or the nausea inducing swooping in Xenakis), or as specifically tuned pitches. In post-serial music of the complex school the intention is a natural and further saturation of the chromatic scale, where the notes in the cracks, between the semitones, are heard as new pitches within, say, a twenty-four-note scale. The problems occur when pitches do not move stepwise facilitating a linear, contrapuntal style where microtones add to the expansion and expressiveness of the melodic line (and thereby allowing for perceptual ‘goodness’ because one can hear them against the stable pitches). If the music jumps in larger intervals, fourths or greater, the effect is of poor tuning. Some composers devise new modes/scales using microtones which arise naturally out of the material (much more successful from the player’s point of view) and what often results here is a music which is unafraid to mix dissonance (verging on noise) and consonance where the use of a consonant sonority, because of its context and how the music arrives at it, functions as just another sound or perhaps a resolution of more complex colours onto a primary one – what does not happen is the listener’s sharp intake of breath on hearing a major triad, a reminiscence of tonality, out of context. Giacinto Scelsi was doing this in the 1960s. After being a recluse for much of his life he seemed to be rediscovered in Darmstadt during the 1980s, and his pieces hovering microtonally around a single pitch are now quite well known. In the fourth movement of the Third String Quartet (1963) single pitches (primarily B flat) are explored with differing bow pressures, vibrato and quarter-tone glissandi, but what is striking is the arrival on consonant harmonies (G flat major second inversion then in root position) in no way reminiscent of tonality but purely as sonorous consonances. This idea of consonance and dissonance as coexisting without implying earlier styles is nowhere more apparent than in the work of the spectral composers. The predominantly French spectral music, a term originating from Hughes Dufourt and centred mostly on Paris, emerged in the early 1970s, led by Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. Its approach and aesthetic was markedly different from the then prevailing styles, and while influenced by electronic music it strove rather to explore a different world of texture and sound exploration using traditional instruments and sometimes live electronic treatments. This music is organic in the truest sense, based on the analysis and reproduction of natural sounds as well as notes themselves (like Scelsi or later Radulescu), getting inside the notes, dealing with sound’s density and grittiness. Additive synthesis in electro-acoustic technique (the building of complex sounds from simple ones: sine waves) gives the model for the creation of new sound complexes, new harmony and instrumental timbre.
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Instruments have particular characteristics in different registers. The clarinet’s low notes for example are rich in upper partials which can be highlighted by ‘splitting’ the note with the embouchure to reveal and simultaneously play some of the partials of the fundamental. The higher the pitch the fewer the partials resulting in increased thinness of tone. There are a considerable number of new compositional techniques here,53 but most seem to involve the reproduction of timbres analysed spectrographically. Murail’s large-scale orchestral piece Gondwana (1980) at its opening creates a bell sound transforming into a brass sound; Grisey’s Partiels (1975) takes as its starting point the sonogram analysis of a trombone’s low pedal E. Despite the differences between them, these composers’ fundamental interest is in the manipulation of sound for sound’s sake, influenced by acoustics and psychoacoustics: frequency as given in Hertz rather than pitch resulting from the division of the tempered scale into microtonal steps. Taking the range of composed music, the lowest note might be A0 (27.5Hz), the highest A7 (3520Hz) or the C above that 4186Hz. What is more difficult is to map these precise frequencies onto instruments designed for equal temperament. What results is an approximation using quarter, eighth and sixteenth tone notation, again incorporating a certain amount of effort on the player’s part to reproduce these with any accuracy. But the sounds, and their inherent natural expressiveness, are often glorious. And so to minimalism and experimental tonality. The challenge here for the performer is not one of technical excess but of something much more fundamental and familiar. Minimal pieces require a virtuosity of precise rhythm and an unfailing sense of accurate pulse, something which many musicians (unless working with a click-track) find difficult, not least because of their innate musical flexibility: there is no room here for ‘interpretation’ (rubato equals inaccuracy), and again it is the performer’s need to ‘interpret’ which arises as a problem in the music of tonal post-experimentalists. This music is often understated, rhythmically straightforward, diatonic, and can imply a tradition of performance familiar from the early twentieth century, if not before, while belonging to a much more recent experimental movement. To the uninitiated player this may not be apparent from the score as these scores often have little notated information apart from pitch and rhythm. This music, like Satie’s, can demonstrate that pieces sometimes lasting only a few minutes can be hypnotically repetitive without becoming tedious: simple, but not simplistic. The music is not concerned with intentional nostalgia, pastiche, satire or quotation yet there are references which can effectively conjure past musical styles. The 53 See J. Fineberg, ‘Spectral music history and techniques’, Contemporary Music Review, 19/2 (2000), 7–22.
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music can be played (referring to Rosen’s point) in two ways. A ‘correct’ performance represents its radical nature by presenting the material simply, without interpretative intervention, clean and unfussy. But a player’s innate and irrepressible musical reflex to project a personal response, born of retrieved tradition, will instantly recognise the familiar tonal contours and gestures and, even on a first sight-reading, will want to make explicit the implied character not far beneath the surface of these notes. It may be difficult for a player to suppress these romantic urges: the need to rallentando at phrase closures, to vary the lengths of the pauses/rests, to linger on appoggiaturas or to crescendo and diminuendo on rising and falling phrases. Where next? For composers the golden age of instrumental experimentation is over, and we are enjoying a period of pluralism where younger composers without, or consciously ignoring, a sense of tradition can pick’n’-mix using musics of other cultures and popular genres woven into their ‘art’ music. Many of them are seduced by digital technology: laptop composers and performers improvise with noise, but there is nothing new here apart from the speed and ease of production and manipulation. It seems to me that the great electronic pieces have been written: Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6) or Denis Smalley’s Pentes (1974). The cheapness of technology and the proliferation of music technology degree courses do not reflect a surge of interest in electronic composition: the courses are simply servicing the mammon of the media industry. For performers, instrumental experimentation is over too, and the instruments themselves have not changed because of it. The digital age hardly touches us at all in terms of performance (apart from recording); synthesisers, keyboard and wind, are in the second-hand stores, and for those pieces with live instruments and electronic manipulation the laptop simply replaces the banks of pre-digital hardware, the sounds are pretty much the same. For the performer the great melting pot of style and exploration that was the twentieth century has given us, and continues to reveal, great riches: a wealth of work rewarding and sometimes frustrating, probably too diverse for one player to encompass. In the current period of stylistic flux compositional trends and fashions will continue to come and go and committed players will be as busy as they always have been with new work, enjoying themselves in the musical playpen.
. 31 .
Case study: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen für drei Orchester WILLIAM MIVAL
At its world premiere, 24 March 1958, there would have been every reason to expect that future performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras would, at the very most, be extremely rare events. Gruppen should last for about twenty-five minutes – a relatively brief duration given the considerable instrumental resources which go into making it. The work is written for a total of 109 players. These include four flutes and one alto flute, three oboes and two cors anglais, an alto and a baritone saxophone, eight horns, six trumpets, seven trombones – five tenor, one bass and one contrabass – tuba and twelve percussion players as well as keyboard glockenspiel, celesta, piano, two harps, a large string section and an electric guitar. On its own this would be an orchestral line-up that could outpace even the excesses of some of the later Romantics, though here it is at the service of 1950s high modernism. But the most obviously and immediately demanding aspect of this extraordinary work is the splitting of this considerable range of performers into three roughly equal groups, each with its own conductor and placed to the front, left and right of the audience. This arrangement requires a space both large enough and with the flexibility to accommodate this highly individual orchestral disposition, which tends not to be most modern concert halls. Either an adaptable arena (and with a suitable acoustic) has to be found (let alone paid for) or an existing concert hall, if its architecture allows, has to be fitted out with some kind of temporary staging. But in spite of the risk of making enemies of every orchestral manager in the business, Gruppen has racked up a solid body of performances to the extent that it can today almost be thought of as a ‘repertoire’ work. Gruppen may not be ‘core’ orchestral repertoire, in the sense of say the Sibelius Violin Concerto or thesymphonies of Gustav Mahler, but it has generated increasing numbers of performances, by a widening variety of performers (and not just ‘new music specialists’), in just over the half-century since its premiere in Cologne. Universal Edition records seven performances of Gruppen in 2008 alone, two of them, in Madrid and Helsinki, on the same date, 10 October. It has to be admitted that this may well have been an exceptional year, as 2008
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would have marked Stockhausen’s eightieth birthday had he not died the previous December. However, the broader trajectory of the work’s profile in the context of the repertoire of recent years is clear. Stockhausen could be notoriously controlling over the performance (and publishing) of his work – it was this desire to maintain that control that, in part at least, led to his break with Universal Edition in 1971 and the establishment of his own publishing company, Stockhausen Verlag. While the initial public performances, Cologne, Donaueschingen (both 1958) and Vienna (1959) and the first commercially released recording (1965) were all led by the composer working with a variety of other conductors, notably Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna and Michael Gielen, there have since been many performances without the composer’s input and by individuals not always readily associated with cutting-edge contemporary music performance (unlike of course Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna). These have included the first UK performance in Glasgow, 1 May 1961, conducted by Alexander Gibson, John Carewe and Norman Del Mar as well as a series of performances in London (1983) and Berlin in 1994 led by Claudio Abbado (with various partners), the latter leading to a further commercial recording based on live performances with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon and released in 1996. In all, since 1958, there have been a substantial number of public performances. Unfortunately Universal Edition’s own records are incomplete and, with the exception of the world premiere, it only has accurate records of performances from 1970, making it impossible to be completely certain how many performances there have actually been. Furthermore many of these performances, perhaps even a substantial proportion, have been ‘double’ performances – two performances of the piece within the same concert. This was the case at the very first performance when two presentations of Gruppen were separated by Pierre Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata and a discussion of Gruppen by the conductors (who included, of course, the composer). This ‘double performance’ strategy clearly presents certain advantages. Most obviously an unfamiliar (and difficult) work gains in comprehension and recognition from an almost immediate repeat hearing while, on a more practical level, the necessary transformation of any performance space becomes more easily managed as less other repertoire may be needed. Amongst the many double performances have been those by students at the Royal College of Music in 1976, at the BBC Promenade Concerts in 2008 and in Tokyo with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in August 2009. As well as public performances there have also been at least three commercially released recordings as well as considerable numbers of broadcasts around the world. Add to this the availability of web-cast performances, which can
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currently be accessed on YouTube (Lucerne Festival with Pierre Boulez and the CBSO under Simon Rattle – fragments of rehearsal and a complete performance), and it is clear that the logistical challenges posed by the piece do not appear to have been a serious barrier to its dissemination. There are those who might even argue that the unique novelty of the work, its layout and design, have actually significantly contributed to its relatively high profile, compared with most large-scale orchestral works, in so far as they exist, by composers who might be thought to be part of the post-war avant-garde. The only other major avant-garde work to receive substantial attention in performance has been the Sinfonia by Luciano Berio. Universal Edition has records for 142 performances since 1996 alone. It is worth noting, however, that, unlike Gruppen, Berio’s Sinfonia is written, with the addition of voices, for a much more standard orchestral disposition. Given this, a performance of Gruppen can become a ‘happening’ – a concert experience unlike almost any other. If this were all it was then one might expect a work like Stockhausen’s own Carré (1960) for four orchestras and four choirs, with the instrumental forces this time arranged to surround the audience on all sides, to maintain a similar profile of performances to that of Gruppen. Universal Edition notes, however, only five performances of Carré since 1970 – considerably fewer than Gruppen in the same period. This relative popularity of Gruppen has to be down to nothing other than the force of its impact in performance and the real substance of its musical content. The instrumentation and the spatial distribution of the three orchestras is, however, just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the challenges the work presents. Stockhausen’s aim in Gruppen is similar to that of Pierre Boulez in his Structures Book 1 for two pianos of 1951/2. Each of these works tackles the issue of exploring a serial analogy, and developing a serial method, to govern the relationships between pitch, harmony and rhythm that operate in tonal musical structures. Boulez’s approach in Structures is the relatively crude paralleling of the twelve pitches of the chosen series, with twelve rhythmic durations, twelve dynamics and ten modes of attack. The music is then built by the application of serial procedures across each of these parameters. In Gruppen Stockhausen is both more subtle and more radical in his method and begins by completely redefining how the relationship between pitch and rhythm might both be articulated and be perceived in performance. Music consists of order-relationships in time; . . . We hear alterations in an acoustic field . . . and between the alterations we can distinguish time-intervals of varying magnitude. These time intervals may be called phases . . . Our sense
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perception divides acoustically-perceptible phases into two groups; we speak of durations and pitches.1
Stockhausen, then, sees no fundamental distinction between pitch and rhythm. In fact they are one and the same thing – it is only the way we as listeners perceive rhythm that changes. This becomes clear if we steadily shorten the length of a phase (e.g. that between two impulses) from 1 second to .5 sec to .25, .125, .0625, .03125, .015265 etc (i.e. to ¼, 8, 16, 32, 6 , etc). Until a phase duration of approx .0625 ( 16th of a second), we can still just hear the impulses separately; until then we speak of duration, if of one that becomes extremely short. Shorten the phase duration gradually to .03125 of a second ( 32nd) and the impulses are no longer separately perceptible; one can no longer speak of the duration of the phase . . . One perceives the phase duration as the ‘pitch’ of the sound . . . If a musician has learned to hear ‘absolute’ pitches in the scale system as we have known it up to now, he will say that he hears approximately double bass B.2
Having established that pitch and rhythm are essentially the same thing, or at least little more than different shades within the same spectrum (a realisation that perhaps only a composer already experienced with the manipulation of sound on magnetic recording tape could have made), Stockhausen’s next step was to design a serial method that might effectively operate across this entire rhythmic spectrum, simultaneously encompassing pulse and pitch. Put at its simplest, Stockhausen’s solution was to address the issue with tempo, or metronome speed, rather than in terms of a duration series such as that found in the Structures of Boulez and in other works contemporary with Gruppen. Stockhausen’s rationale for this relates to the predominance of 2:1 ratios in the rhythmic structure of tonal, and even the twelve-note, music of composers such as Schoenberg (i.e. the division of semibreves (whole notes) into minims (half-notes) into crotchets (quarter-notes) etc. The dominating 2–1 relationship seems to rest on a fundamental principle of our sense of perception, to be the acoustical ‘golden section’. In the sphere of micro-and macro-phases, of pitch and duration, all proportions based on the 2 are felt to be the ‘simplest’, to be regulative. Twice or half as high (a pitchoctave) or long (a duration octave) appears to us as the purest proportion, to which all the others are related.3
This 2-relationship serves then as ‘the fundamental phase’, or the ‘unit of perception’ as all other rhythmic and tempo values will refer to it. It might seem even too obvious, but Stockhausen recognises that octave relationships 1 K. Stockhausen, ‘wie die Zeit vergeht . . .’, trans. C. Cardew as ‘. . . how time passes . . .’, Die Reihe, 3 (1959), 10. 2 Stockhausen, ‘ . . . how time passes . . .’, 10. 3 Ibid., 16.
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exist in both pitch and tempo. A ‘rhythmic octave’ is simply a doubling of the metronomic speed – from say crotchet = 60 to crotchet = 120. Once that ‘octave’ is divided into twelve parts equal to the twelve semitones that divide the pitch octave then: Together with the seven or eight pitch octaves, ‘musical time’ would thus be circumscribed in fourteen or fifteen ‘time octaves’ in which the composer proportions phase-relationships both in the sphere of duration and in that of pitch.4
What drives the composer to these observations is both perceptibility and playability. There is an implicit critique here of the wilder demands made of performers by some of the music by his immediate contemporaries. Of course this does not mean for a moment that Gruppen is a stroll in the park for the performers, as we shall see later. But it does mean that the performance issues it raises have been addressed by the composer and that performing traditions and performance ability have defined the compositional structure of Gruppen to a degree perhaps not always fully acknowledged. Stockhausen’s concern with how Gruppen should be performed is evident in the Universal Edition published score which indicates in considerable detail the layout of the orchestras at the first performance, and the rehearsal schedule that led to it. The venue chosen was a hall in the Cologne ‘Messe’ or trade fair centre in Deutz, across the Rhine to the east of the main city. The Rheinsaal measured 36 metres by 19.5 metres and contained no built-in platform. As an exhibition space this guaranteed the flexibility that allowed three temporary platforms to be erected on which the three orchestral groups were placed in a formation that could surround the audience on three sides; orchestra one to the left, orchestra two to the front and centre and orchestra three to the right. Orchestras one and three were then also placed at a slight angle to orchestra two so that they fanned outward from orchestra two, an arrangement that was further helped in that orchestra two was placed against the longer side of this rectangular hall and orchestras one and three against the shorter sides. The audience found itself facing into a blunt wedge-shape, widening out towards the back of the hall, facing orchestra two, with orchestras one and three to the left and right respectively. It is important to note Stockhausen’s concern that the orchestras should, as far as possible, physically envelope the audience, allowing them to experience fully that crucial play with musical space that Gruppen became as its composition progressed.
4 Ibid., 21.
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Although its most striking feature, the spatial nature of the work, was one of the very last of its parameters to be decided upon. Stockhausen’s fundamental compositional concern when he began composing Gruppen was with the organisation of rhythm, or more accurately, musical time (and, remember, he sees pitch as just another form of musical time). Having arrived at a method that required the use of changes of metronome speed he then had to find a way to ensure that those changes could be realised in performance. Stockhausen’s division of the tempo octave from crotchet = 60 to crotchet = 120 (a 2:1 relation ship that precisely parallels the pitch octave) gives us the following values: crotchet = 60, 63.6, 67.4, 71.4, 75.6, 80.1, 84.9, 89.9, 95.2, 100.9, 106.9, 113.3, 120. Even if the decimal values were rounded up it would simply not be practical to demand that a single conductor cope with these shifts of tempo precisely enough for the serial relationships that bind it all together not to become entirely meaningless. However, in a sequence of astonishingly impressive leaps of both imagination and musical organisation Stockhausen realised several things. First (given a limited amount of rounding up of these metronome values), each of these tempos exists in a particular mathematical ratio to each of the others: secondly the existence of these ratios could allow more than one conductor to take cues, each from the other, that would allow them to realise these apparently hyper-precise changes of tempo with considerable accuracy. If each conductor were then allocated his or her own orchestral group then these shifts of tempo could be further focused in terms of their relationship to musical space; in effect the creation of a ‘harmony’ of rhythm and/or tempo. Finally the space itself, the interaction between the groups within that space, and the musical ideas that might cross between them, could become a dramatic element of the composition in its own right. Superficially, this might be seen as something of an annex to the purely serial processes that had generated it. But Stockhausen uses it to generate a multi-dimensional soundscape in which ideas ricochet within physical, rather than simply musical, space. Stockhausen in effect invents a kind of ‘hyper-harmony’ that operates some way beyond the realm of pitch and tempo. All of this is then ordered into a sequence of ‘groups’ and these 174 distinct entities, mostly lasting little more than a few seconds, give the work its title. Each of them is characterised and identified by its own tempo, rhythm, pitch material and instrumental profile, all derived from the single twelve-note row, and its parallel tempo series, on which the piece is built. Even here, Stockhausen’s original schema was quickly laid aside as some of these groups actually exist outside the mathematically precise format he initially evolved. At three points in the score (groups 16–22, 71–76 and 114–122), Stockhausen
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abandons the rigour of his planning and writes what is in effect a sequence of interludes within the main schema5 that allow him to let rip and work entirely intuitively with the very new ideas his methods were generating. Although they interrupt the rigorous serial logic of the design, these ‘interludes’ significantly heighten the purely musical tension, providing some of the most arresting and distinctive moments in the entire score. The last of them, groups 114–22 serves to generate the main climax of the work, beginning with perhaps the ‘trademark’ and most readily distinctive moment of the entire score when a chord in the brass is bounced from orchestra to orchestra before all three erupt together in a rare tempo ‘unison’. Gruppen as a whole evolves according to a highly individual and readily intuitive interaction with serial process and procedure. This apparent contradiction, between intuition and serial method is thoroughly characteristic of Stockhausen’s thinking and might be seen as a kind of acceptance of the role of chaos in creative thought. Chaos theory sets out to model the natural world and it cannot be a coincidence that the aural results that one hears in Gruppen seem at times directly shaped by the physical sounds of demolition, building collapse and construction which of course surrounded the young composer in the 1940s and 1950s as Germany struggled to drag itself out of the wreckage of the Third Reich. Gruppen, and the sonorous novelty it represents, could hardly be further from being merely a voguish and intellectual response to the ideas of serialism. It is an exceptionally highly charged emotional discourse by a young, ambitious and sensitive composer to the issues of how music could be ‘live’ again after the moral, physical and cultural degradation of the Hitler regime. Stockhausen’s own very personal and tragic experience of National Socialism certainly played a role here. His father disappeared on the Russian front while his mother, who suffered from depression, was killed in hospital as part of the state policy of euthanising mental patients and other ‘unnecessary’ drains on the economy. So Stockhausen confronts his performers and listeners with real challenges. As well as the more obviously criminal aspects to the regime, the Third Reich had also operated an aggressive and invasive artistic policy that shaped how people experienced art and listened to music. Stockhausen sought not just a new musical language but a rejection of what was seen as a discredited past and a renewal of music through a transformation of the relationship between composer, performer and listener. His work radically abandoned ‘conservative’ aesthetic sensibilities and a musical culture schooled in tonal practice and 5 J. Harvey, The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, London, Faber, 1975, pp. 55–76.
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nineteenth-century Romanticism. Stockhausen thrived on the hostility this could provoke. When asked if he had heard or conducted any Stockhausen, conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have replied, ‘no, but I’ve trodden in some’. This comment has been repeated with slight variations in a huge range of sources including many of the English-language obituaries of the composer and even on the official Stockhausen website. There is now some doubt as to whether or not Beecham actually said this.6 But whoever came up with this convincing imitation of typical off-hand Beecham put-down, its witless substance is emblematic of the enmity Stockhausen’s music could, and still can, engender amongst some audiences, professional musicians and those who would otherwise identify themselves as ‘music-lovers’. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s dismissal of Stockhausen’s music is more considered and proposes an intellectual justification. the most curious feature of the musical avant-garde in our century: its use of technicalities, both theoretical and practical, in the justification of its novel sounds. Serialism should not be understood as the ‘emancipation of the dissonance’, for, as I have argued, that emancipation never occurred. It should be seen as a kind of elaborate pretence at musical discipline: a congeries of rules, canons, and theories, and a mock exactitude (manifest at its most comic in the scores of Stockhausen and the set theoretic musicology of Babbitt and Forte) which strives in vain to overcome the listener’s sense of the arbitrariness and senselessness of what he hears. The affectation of artistic order is a mask for an inner disorder.7
Scruton either does not understand, or chooses not to understand, much of Stockhausen’s music – and Gruppen in particular sings itself in this ‘senselessness and arbitrariness’. It is a music that takes flight at the razor-edge between order and apparent disorder. Scruton’s so-called ‘elaborate pretence at musical discipline’ empowers this process, freeing the composer to play with a music that can seem to carry both the apparent order and disorder of ‘natural’ events within it. Others have been much less blinkered, including the conductor Norman Del Mar, by no means a natural friend to the musical avant-garde. Shortly after taking part in the first UK performance of Gruppen in Glasgow in 1961 Del Mar wrote that Stockhausen is nothing if not a resourceful composer and although I would hazard that in its 22 minutes ‘Gruppen’ is at least 5 minutes too long, it is certainly not dull and sometimes more than a little impressive.8
6 N. Lebrecht, ‘So which of the Beecham stories are true?’, La Scena Musicale, September 2008, www. Scena.org/columns/lebrecht/080903-NL-Beecham.html (accessed 4 July 2011). 7 R. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 471. 8 N. Del Mar, ‘On co-conducting Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” ’, Tempo, 59 (1961), 15–23.
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A result of Stockhausen’s ‘reformation’ of received musical practice is the transformation he wrought on the role of the conductor – in Gruppen every bit as much a performer as the musicians he or she is directing. There has to be an equal, and almost symbiotic, relationship between all three and this is reflected in the considerable amounts of time conductors have worked together, and need to work together, in preparing performances of Gruppen. In the published score Stockhausen notes six rehearsals of two hours each for each of the conductors alone, interspersed among sectional and full rehearsals. This actually seems very little compared to other performances. The first UK performance of Gruppen was given before the engraved and printed score that contains this information became available. Conductors Alexander Gibson, John Carewe and Norman Del Mar were working with a reproduction of Stockhausen’s original manuscript and quite possibly without any notes on the rehearsals for the first performance. After seeing the score for the first time Del Mar noted: It quickly became clear that we three, Gibson, Carewe and I, would have to rehearse privately before ever we dared face our orchestras. In the end we spent the greater part of three days together in this way, followed by a further afternoon and evening later in the course of the full orchestral rehearsals. It was a sight not to be missed as we sat in a semi-circle around our respective music rooms beating away in total silence (apart from occasional onomatopoeic outbursts) our eyes darting to and fro between each other and our scores, occasionally calling out numbers and rhythms or accusing each other of error. Gibson might consider my tempo of crotchet = 63.5 too fast, whereas I had taken great pains to fit my four beats against his seven. Perhaps he had not managed to strike an exact crotchet = 184 when negotiating his 7/16 and 3/8. (How does one gauge a crotchet tempo when occupied with bars of exclusively fractional duration?) Carewe felt that when we made our concerted crescendo of tempo from semiquaver = 60 to crotchet = 120 we had failed to reach quaver = 84 at the right bar, and so missed the exact gradation which was the essence of the section. Out came our stop watches; out too came the metronomes, and Alex’s triumph when he was vindicated sent us into such extended peals of almost hysterical laughter that our wives rushed in to see what was going on.9
In spite of the fun these three were having it was also clear to Del Mar that Our orchestra-less rehearsals were thus not merely useful adjuncts to the preparation; they were absolutely crucial and without them there is not the slightest doubt that the performance would have shattered to a standstill, not once but many times.10
The young British conductor Clement Power conducted Gruppen in Tokyo in September 2009 with fellow conductors Susanna Mälkki and Pablo Heras9 Ibid., 16–21.
10 Ibid., 21.
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Casado. He and his fellow conductors organised even more rehearsal time away from the orchestra than both at the first performance and that of Gibson, Del Mar and Carewe in 1961. The conductors’ rehearsals take up by far the most time. We’re working in May for two days solid, then we’re meeting again in July for five days (again solid) and then for a refresher-day in August, just before we go to Tokyo. When we had gaps in our schedule we decided to meet up.11
Power’s only experience of a live performance of Gruppen before his preparations for Tokyo were the workshops Pierre Boulez and Peter Eötvös led with student conductors at the Lucerne Festival Summer School in 2007. Watching the student conductors work on it in Lucerne was really instructive. It made you realise that this piece isn’t just about the tempi. Obviously you’ve got to get it right – that’s for your study time – You sit there for hours on end with your metronome and work it out. Once you stand in front of the orchestra and try to make the piece, it’s got to ‘zing’, the sound has got to ‘zing’ from one orchestra to the other – they’ve got to be connected.12
Power raises the central issue about performing Stockhausen’s Gruppen – how to make it work in performance, and to work as music and not just as a grid of related tempos that may or may not overlap. The demands placed on conductors might appear to leave little room for interpretation. Certainly interpretation and musicianship seemed almost the last thing on Del Mar’s mind in Glasgow in 1961. At last we confronted our players . . . it was important to press upon the players the necessity for a large degree of self reliance since we conductors would be far more divided in our attention . . . owing to our constant vigilance in watching the beats of our respective colleagues, in the far corners of the hall. . . . a new problem arose. This was the actual difficulty of recognising the sounds made by orchestras other than one’s own and reconciling them with the hieroglyphics on the score before one. In such a wholly a-thematic music consisting almost entirely of pops and gurgles interspersed with spasms of veritable pandemonium it was all too easy to look down at the score after an extended period of watching Carewe’s beat and find there nothing that could be immediately associated with what one’s ears were receiving.13
Del Mar’s reference to ‘pops and gurgles and spasms of veritable pandemonium’ might suggest a less than wholly sympathetic attitude to Stockhausen’s musical language but his comments do illustrate one of the very real challenges in performing Gruppen – the disparity between what individual conductors and performers experience and the ‘total’ auditory and sensory experience intended
11 C. Power, Interview with the author, April 2009. 12 Ibid. 13 Del Mar, ‘On co-conducting Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” ’, 21.
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by the composer. To a varying extent I suppose it might be argued that this can be an issue for all orchestral performance, though in Gruppen the ‘perceptual dissonance’ between individual activity and the intended overall effect reaches a unique extreme which encompasses even the conductors themselves. The impact of the piece depends on the play of ideas between the three orchestras – as already noted, this is in effect, the thematic and harmonic content of Gruppen. Probably only the audience can experience this to the fullest degree during performance when its players, as well as its conductors can be, to a significant extent, isolated from the full force of its musical argument. David Hockings is principal percussionist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and his words highlight the issues performers are confronted with in Gruppen as their individual experience of the work, not just in terms of their instrumental part, but also as a result of where they may be positioned in relation to the other orchestras, might be very fragmented. It’s interesting . . . I use the word interesting because it’s an unusual situation to have three orchestras around you and see how what you’re playing relates to the other bands. Basically it doesn’t most of the time – you can’t find how you fit with other things – you are, it seems, very independent. And the place to be is in the audience in the middle if you can get to where the middle is.14
Hockings deliberately took himself as close to that middle as he could get. His own first experience of Gruppen was as a listener and he acknowledges that the very powerful impression the piece made on him at the Royal Festival Hall (probably in February 2000) was decisive in shaping his ability to engage with it as a performer.15 But actually getting right into the middle, into that central space between all three orchestras, is not by any means straightforward. Stockhausen’s arrangement for the very first performance certainly ensured this. Photographs of the event clearly indicate that the entire audience was surrounded on three sides by the orchestras. But many other performances have departed quite significantly from Stockhausen’s instructions – including Glasgow in 1961 and the BBC Promenade Concerts in 1967. The Glasgow performance was given in St Andrew’s Hall, then the home of the Scottish National Symphony Orchestra. Photographs indicate that the three orchestras were placed in the body of the hall (the stalls – with the seats removed) and the audience seated only in the balconies and on the stage. This was similar to the arrangement adopted at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1967 – orchestra two on the stage and orchestras one and three in the central arena with the ‘prommers’ excluded from the very limited space in the middle of all three orchestras and corralled towards the rear. In both performances (and I know in 14 D. Hockings, interview with the author, April 2009.
15 Ibid.
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many others) the entire audience surrounded the orchestras, precisely the inversion of Stockhausen’s stated intentions. Of course these arrangements were dictated by nothing other than the practical considerations of getting the orchestras together in a single space, allowing the conductors to see each other and actually getting the work heard. There is an argument concerning the extent to which the musical content of Gruppen might be affected by these changes. Certainly in both performances the audience was, at the very least, effectively observing a process from the outside rather than being immersed within it. The experience of sitting directly behind one or other of the orchestras and individual players within them, a situation in which many of the audience at each of these performances would have found themselves, has to have blurred and to have diminished the experience to at least some degree. This was very new music in the 1960s. Recordings and broadcasts (even if they could have coped with the work) were barely available and then only to specialists. It has to be an inevitability that, under these circumstances, damage was done to a full and informed appreciation of this score. In spite of that damage, reviews of these first United Kingdom performances are largely sympathetic. An unattributed review in The Times noted: gimmickry. That, of course, is the word that the philistine in all of us will find most easy to fling at Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen, written in 1956–57, in which a large orchestra is spatially divided into three separate sections each under its own conductor (on this occasion Mr. Alexander Gibson was joined by Mr. Norman Del Mar and Mr. John Carewe) and each performing music of the utmost rhythmic complexity and apparent independence. But whether one likes Stockhausen’s music or not – and at times it seems to display all Schoenberg’s aggressiveness and intellectual power without any of his redeeming humanity – this is quite clearly the work of a real composer. Somehow or other, by concert performances or recordings, we must be allowed to increase and if possible deepen our acquaintance with it.16
Stephen Walsh, also writing in The Times following the first London performance was even more positive while also noting the special problems of hearing Gruppen under conditions that departed from the composer’s instructions. First, it should reluctantly be said that the conditions were by no means as prescribed in the score, though this, of course, was not really anybody’s fault. The crucial novelty about Gruppen is that it is spacial [sic], that the placing of the orchestras, and of the audience relative to them, is an important element of the structure. Indeed in some ways the only large-scale element, introduced precisely because of the all-inclusive serialism of the individual ‘groups’, robbed them of any possibility of formal tension in the conventional sense. 16 Unattributed, ‘An experiment in musical space–time’, The Times, London, 2 May 1961.
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From the left-hand stalls, for instance, one could appreciate the spacial articulation of orchestras I and II. But III appeared in a simple perspective relationship, roughly as one hears, say, the first violins and timpani in a normal lay-out. Stockhausen has actually suggested a specially designed concert hall, with the audience suspended on a central platform: if last night’s Prommers had hung from the dome they would have got their feet wet. But they would also have heard Gruppen as Stockhausen intended. Perhaps the surest vindication of the importance Stockhausen attaches to this problem is that the most thrilling moments were those where spacial definition was clear – notably where a single musical cell revolved from orchestra to orchestra. The individual groups, 174 of them, proved so active as to be static, like Schoenberg’s early atonality. But the seven large sections into which they fell made a definite structure, both by the conventional means of contrasts in density and tempo, and by the interrelationship of sound sources. If this sounds over-intellectual, the music itself is unmistakably like music, agreeable, meaningful and occasionally thrilling. Whether Gruppen is a work of great stature or simply an imaginative attempt to vary the degrees by which we perceive musical architecture, remains to be seen. But the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra and its three brilliant conductors, Pierre Boulez, Michel Tebachnik, and Edward Downes, are to be thanked for giving us the chance to start deciding.17
Today the language of Gruppen is familiar – even if the work itself retains its freshness and its power. A recurrent feature of musical history is that works that are genuinely innovative on their first appearance can become so imitated by lesser composers that they furnish a raft of derivative cliché for those of more limited imagination and creative vision. The power of Gruppen is evident in the extent to which it has transcended that abuse. Reviews of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s double performance at the Royal Albert Hall during the BBC Promenade Concerts’ Stockhausen day in August 2008 reflect a genuine enthusiasm for the work rather than the perhaps grudging, and slightly doubtful, respect afforded by earlier critics, although there is a sense from some that the performance itself did not entirely deliver the goods. Richard Morrison writing in The Times noted: Stockhausen’s frenetic yet surprisingly delicate 1957 magnum opus for three orchestras . . . If it didn’t quite have the anticipated impact, that was more a reflection of the layout than the playing. The music should flicker and swirl around the audience, but unless you were one of the lucky Prommers squeezed between the performers it was hard to differentiate between the groups.18
17 S. Walsh, ‘The chance to decide’, The Times, London, 6 September 1967. 18 R. Morrison, ‘Stockhausen day at the Albert Hall’, The Times, London, 4 August 2008.
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Tristan Jakob-Hoff, writing in the Guardian, was rather more enthusiastic than Morrison. But then he had been able to squeeze himself into the narrow, and heavily congested, ideal position between all three orchestras which, in contrast to the 1967 Proms Royal Albert Hall performance, the organisers had opened up in the central arena. Gruppen, with its three orchestras, was sensational – but only if you were a Prommer. Check out the lukewarm reviews from the seated critics if you don’t believe me. They have no idea what they were missing out on – imagine having an orchestra playing two metres away from you on your left, another one playing a metre to your right, and then a third one up on the stage in front of you. That was the layout from where I was standing, and it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I have had in a concert hall. Andrew Clements complained that the performance ‘lacked presence’: try telling that to the poor woman who stood too close to the percussion section of orchestra three and ran out clutching her ears halfway through.19
To a large extent this enthusiasm has to be the result of greater familiarity with the work especially amongst musical practitioners. What for Norman Del Mar in 1961 had been ‘pops and gurgles and spasms of veritable pandemonium’ are by 2009 part of a recognised and relatively familiar musical language, one every bit as historical as say Beethoven or Wagner. Today’s players bear this out. David Hockings was heavily involved in both the organisation for and the performances of Gruppen at the BBC Promenade concerts on 2 August 2008. His comments highlight two issues about performing Stockhausen today, the relative straightforwardness of the piece compared to some works that come before the BBC Symphony Orchestra and, by implication, the ordinariness of the musical grammar and language of the work to at least some of today’s orchestral musicians (or orchestral musicians who regularly play new and contemporary music). Fifty years ago I’m sure any of this sort of writing would have given headaches up to a point. Now it really is taken in one’s stride because there so many more difficult things that pop up almost weekly. It’s not difficult – It’s really not.20
Audiences and non-professionals have had a much more difficult time familiarising themselves with Gruppen in the fifty years since its composition. If, as a casual listener, you want to know about Stockhausen the last thing you can trust is broadcast and the recorded media. In fact Stockhausen seems to have spent his entire career deliberately writing in a way that would make the recording and broadcast of his work virtually meaningless, ensuring that much of his music could only be comprehensively realised and fully experienced in terms of ‘live’ 19 T. Jakob-Hoff, ‘Proms diary: marathon man’, Guardian, 6 August 2008. 20 Hockings, interview with the author, April 2009.
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performance. Kontakte (1960) requires a set-up in which electronic sounds swirl and race around the audience and the live performers – an effect virtually entirely absent in recordings and broadcasts. In Inori (1970) he composes a musical structure in which the solo line consists of ‘prayer gestures’ articulated and performed by one or two silent mime artists. The music itself is incomplete without them as its argument weaves between mime and sound. A sound-only broadcast is a fragmentary experience of the score. Most notoriously, the famous ‘Helicopter’ string quartet (1995) requires its players to perform in four helicopters each circling above a concert hall into which their sounds are then beamed. Essential to the experience is observing the musicians via televisual links in the helicopters as well as hearing the sound of the rotor blades interfering with the sounds from their performance. This really does have to be seen live, if only to be believed! For early radio broadcasts of Gruppen Stockhausen compressed a two-channel (effectively stereo) recording into a single channel (effectively mono) that could be broadcast. This of course completely wipes out any experience by listeners to the broadcast of the decisive spatial element of the score which, as already noted, is, in effect, the work’s harmonic content. Even stereo recording and broadcasting can only really create an approximate illusion of the depth and perspective required to fully apprehend the score. Quadraphonic, or 4.0 stereo, might have got us a little further along the way during the 1970s though it is only with 5.1 recording and the ‘surround-sound’ technologies developed mainly for cinema in the late 1970s and 1980s (originally in George Lucas’s first Star Wars film to create the effect of space fighters flying over the heads of the cinema audience) that the means can be found effectively to render Stockhausen’s multi-dimensional musical space. The growing ‘popularity’, or at least increase in the number of live performances, of Gruppen is traceable to the development of the means to capture far more of the ‘live’ experience of the work in recording. It is hardly surprising that the recorded history of Gruppen is uneven and rather messy – a series of compromises between the demands of the work and the capacity of the available technology – let alone questions of interpretation and musicianship. Stockhausen’s own recording of Gruppen with Bruno Maderna, Michael Gielen and the WDR Orchestra of Cologne was made in 1965 and originally released on vinyl well before any of the advances that might have enabled an increased depth of recording field. The composer used a threechannel recording – one for each of the orchestras – and mixed it down to a two-channel stereo version. There is very strong definition in the separation between the orchestras – one and three to the extreme left and right, respectively, and two in the centre. The playing is hard edged and there is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a certain sense of labouring over Stockhausen’s irrational and
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fractional rhythms. But balance is good, if rather solid and perhaps even inflexible, and the high points of the score are delivered with terrific confidence. Rather less happily, edit points, as you often find in recordings using the cutting and slicing of magnetic tape, are obvious, intrusive and even jarring and there are many of them, reflecting the pains that were obviously taken to get such an otherwise accurate account of the score. More recent recordings, including Claudio Abbado with Friedrich Goldman and Marcus Creed and the Berlin Philharmonic (1994) and Peter Eötvös with Arturo Tamayo and Jacques Mercier and, again, the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, certainly benefit from the breadth of technology available to today’s recording producers. What is perhaps less expected is the extent to which Abbado, in particular, manages to ‘interpret’ this score. The separation of the orchestras is far less focused than in Stockhausen’s own recording – there is more ‘bleed’ of the sound into the centre. This helps to create a more natural sense of a performing environment or, more probably, simply reflects the different circumstances in which the recording was made – Abbado’s was taken from live performances given by the orchestra in the Grosser Saal of the Philharmonie in Berlin, whereas the Stockhausen recording was entirely studio-based. The ‘stiffness’ of the Stockhausen recording is replaced in the Abbado by a quite unexpected flexibility and in places a deft lightness of touch that draws on the often considerable delicacy, and intricacy, of Stockhausen’s instrumental writing. Individual lines are shaped with enormous musicianship and sensitivity. Abbado finds lace-like arabesque and lyrical instrumental melisma in Stockhausen’s rhythmic complexity and he seems to free the players to execute it with effortless agility and a diamantine-like grace. The result is to create a much more flexible but nonetheless directed and controlled structural flow that replaces the granite-edged contours of Stockhausen’s recording with something much more implicitly romantic (or neo-romantic?) in its shaping. There are casualties along the way; balance is not always ideal, notably in the section for the various drums in each of the three orchestras that leads up to the work’s main climax (figs. 121–2) and I am sure purists will object to what I am charitably going to refer to as ‘rubato’ – occasional, and surprising, liberties can be taken with some of the speeds. The importance of the Abbado recording lies in the fact that it exists at all. It may not quite reinvent Gruppen but it does question received ideas about it. This is a work that is now generating both a debate about its performance practice and a history of its interpretation. Any questions about the substance of the work raised by those early critics have been answered not just by the fact that performances of Gruppen have continued but that they have increased in
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frequency and have been matched by recordings that can start to do justice to the quality of the musical experience within it. Greater familiarity with the work has served to increase interest. There is now no doubt that it is one of the most significant achievements of musical modernism – a towering masterpiece of conception, construction and idea that must have seemed so intimidating and alienating on its first appearances. But which now represents nothing less than a unique physical and musical experience of exceptional intensity.
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PART VIII
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The future? COLIN LAWSON AND ROBIN STOWELL
‘Without music, life would be a mistake, a hardship, an exile’, wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,1 a claim that is fully endorsed by the integral role that music has always played in society. However, for all its well-recognised transcendent qualities, classical music of the Western art tradition has sometimes appeared marginalised alongside jazz, popular and other musics, and it has recently had to contend with a change from its privileged position in society to one in which it is repeatedly challenged by other forms of music and mass entertainment. One may welcome the disappearance of the old patrician assumptions that classical music is the only truly valuable part of our musical activity and yet feel alarmed at its ensuing undervaluing. Performers now have an important advocacy role in relation to the inherent value of music, along with its transformational powers in health, education and well-being.2 The musical future is impossible to predict with any degree of assurance or accuracy, not least because of the volatility of the global economy, shifting musical tastes, and the speed with which technological developments are being achieved, bringing with them changes in music consumption and discovery. Yet the potential of classical music for elemental excitement is something to which every performer will want to aspire, whatever their working environment.
Music and the global economy While long-term prognoses inspire little confidence in the future, their eventual outcomes may well depend on how developed and developing societies react in the shorter term to the vicissitudes of the early twenty-first-century global economy. For example, state subsidy for the arts and the profile of music
1 Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Pewter Gast, 15 January 1888. Cited in K. Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity, trans. C. F. Wallraff and F. J. Schmidt, Baltimore, Maryland, The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 33. 2 Especially notable are the potential benefits for mental development and learning processes offered by ‘the Mozart effect’, and the use of music to reduce stress, depression, or anxiety; induce relaxation or sleep; activate the body; improve memory or awareness, listening disorders, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, autism, and other mental and physical irregularities and injuries.
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education themselves vary radically across different countries. A positive example is Finland, where classical music has retained a central cultural role. Enormous sums are invested in orchestras, opera houses, new-music programmes and music schools. As Alex Ross has recently pointed out, annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the US government spends on the National Endowment for the Arts.3 Nevertheless, when recession continues to bite in the music sector, ‘the easymoney junket’ becomes ‘a thing of the past’, and budgets and artists’ fees worldwide come under threat.4 At the time of writing the market for musicians even within the confines of Europe is highly variable. While artists’ fees have generally not been reduced in France and Germany, some Spanish orchestras have cut their artists’ budgets by as much as 20 per cent, while UK orchestras are seeking at least a 10 per cent cut and ‘have taken the big fee burners out of future plans’.5 According to Norman Lebrecht, ‘the Big Five US orchestras (Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland) are trimming lightly, despite running recently at large deficits – the Philadelphia Orchestra’s budget for 2009/10 was $47m and its anticipated deficit could be as high as $7.5m6 – but one level down the small-city orchestras are out of cash’,7 and wage freezes, even pay cuts for orchestral musicians and employees have resulted. Susan Elliott reports that wages in the Cleveland Orchestra have been frozen, while the Columbus Symphony’s minimum salary has dropped from $55K two years ago to $35K in 2010, Baltimore Symphony players have taken a 12.5 per cent cut, Cincinnati 11 per cent, Atlanta Symphony 5 per cent in 2010 and an additional 3.8 per cent in 2011. The Honolulu Symphony has declared bankruptcy and opera companies large and small have reduced their seasons, from Los Angeles to Michigan, to Atlanta, and to New York.8 ‘A typical $3,500 concerto fee is down to $1,000, take it or leave it’, writes Lebrecht.9 Financially, the future certainly holds considerable challenges. In economically adverse conditions, there can be no room for complacency in budgets, no place for duplication or mediocrity; ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership’ will become keywords in arts administration and concert hall managers will be obliged to draw together the various strands of performance, education and outreach work in their communities, as well as to engage with other major 3 A. Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, London, Harper Collins, 2009, p. 175. In identifying Sibelius’s long-term influence on the role of classical music in his native country, Ross identifies him as Finland’s chief celebrity in any field, a national treasure alongside the lakeside sauna, Fiskar scissors and the Nokia cellular phone. 4 N. Lebrecht, ‘Comment’, The Strad, 121 (April, 2010), 19. 5 Ibid., 19. 6 S. Elliott, ‘Letter from America – soldiering on’, Classical Music, 27 March 2010, 37. 7 Lebrecht, ‘Comment’, 19. 8 Elliott, ‘Letter from America’, 37. 9 Lebrecht, ‘Comment’, 19.
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providers, friends groups and subscribers, in order to develop audiences and assist in the survival or prosperity of their operations. Possible funding models for orchestras are discussed later in this chapter and elsewhere in this volume,10 but stability in the industry has always been hard to come by. Managers and performers will be required to be ever more enterprising in the product they offer, and public and private sponsors will need to be more innovative and perceptive about the future scope, infrastructure and sustainability of funding classical music. Businesses are usually attracted by adventurous cultural projects, for they have realised that growing their brand share is even more important in a shrinking market and that cultural collaborations provide one of the most effective ways of achieving that growth. Indeed, the private sector effectively holds the cards for many in the cultural sector, although the support of charitable trusts and foundations can only be at a level in proportion to returns on their invested capital, which is subject to market conditions.
Technology and musical transmission Nicholas Kenyon writes in Chapter 1 about the explosion of choice experienced in recent times. This explosion has been due largely to recent developments in technology, which have effected change in music production, distribution and consumption such that traditional models have been surrendering ground to the still nascent creative and commercial challenges of digital delivery platforms. In broadcasting, for example, technological developments have been instrumental in the remarkable transformation of the UK’s BBC Promenade Concerts (particularly since the 100th season in 1994), providing a model for other such operations worldwide in the quest to reach even larger audiences. The Proms season currently comprises over seventy main concerts each year; the range of repertoire and international performers and the number of associated additional events are apparently ever widening. The year 1996 saw the launch of Proms in the Park, Proms Chamber Music and the Proms Lecture. The first Proms recital followed in 1997, and special events have been introduced such as ‘Choral Day’ (1998), ‘1000 years of music in a day’ (1999), ‘Proms Millennium Youth Day’ (2000) and Proms celebrating music from the worlds of jazz, film and stage musicals. And with the launch of Poetry Proms at the Serpentine Gallery and ‘Composer Portraits’ at the Royal College of Music alongside an ever developing series of Pre-Prom talks at the Royal Albert Hall, each season seems to embrace more extra events than its predecessor. The outreach portfolio now includes ‘Creative Workshops’ (for ages 6–12), 10 See Chapter 28.
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‘Discovery Sessions’ (for musicians of all ages) and ‘Summer Springboards (for ages 13–15 and 16–18). All Proms are broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, ‘on air’ and online, and an ever-increasing proportion is transmitted on BBC Television; additionally, some concerts are streamed via the Proms website, including the internationally renowned ‘Last Night’. The Proms have also become interactive with BBC4, the BBC’s digital television service, enabling the public to email comments or questions for inclusion in the live broadcasts; further, by pressing the ‘red button’, digital viewers to BBC1, 2 and 4 television channels can enjoy synchronised programme notes. In 2004 programme notes were added to the DAB (digital audio broadcasting) service on radio and Freeview, and the Proms launched its first WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) site, accessible via mobile phones, alongside a free daily text message alert service, in the following year; and almost every Prom can be heard ‘on demand’ via the Proms website for about one week after the initial broadcast. The next decade will doubtless witness further additions to this enterprising list of developments as appropriate opportunities for advancement are created. Technological progress seems to be influencing concert programming, too, and will probably continue to do so. For example, a recent concert programme given by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and choirs under Thomas Dausgaard seems to have been inspired by the ‘shuffle-play’ feature of an MP3 player.11 Divided into three parts, the programme allowed Dausgaard to merge pairs of pieces in its first two segments without the intrusion of audience applause or restlessness and the accompanying stage activity. Thus, Ligeti’s Night; Morning merged seamlessly into Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in the first part of the programme; and in part two, at the conclusion of Ligeti’s Lux aeterna, Dausgaard conducted silent beats so that Rued Langgaard’s Music of the Spheres could follow it, as if emulating random play on an MP3 player. Critical reception of such pairings of pieces without a break was mixed, though many considered ‘stripping music of its context’ in this way as liberating, if strange. As one critic commented, ‘Somehow it shines on the music a whole new light in which everything is equal.’12 Perhaps such a random play approach to programming will prove to be a fruitful way of tackling effectively the public’s preconceptions about classical music in the future. Technological developments, the Internet boom, new methods of delivery, and the proliferation of social media have all spelled good news for the consumer. However, they have presented the recording industry with new challenges, and recent retail sales figures for the UK and US have given classical
11 This programme was performed at the BBC Proms on 11 August 2010. 12 A. Todes, http://thestrad.com/BlogArticle.asp?bID=123 (accessed 17 August 2010).
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music record labels cause for concern. Michael Quinn records that ‘Despite the UK’s recording industry growing in 2009 – the first time in five years – sales of classical recordings fell by nearly 15 per cent to account for just 3.2 per cent of the total market. Classical music’s declining slice of the US market, which lost 33 million CD buyers from 2007 to 2009, is even smaller at just 2 per cent.’13 The fall in CD sales is being sweetened somewhat by the burgeoning download marketplace – demand for UK classical downloads increased by 36 per cent in 200914 – customers clearly acknowledging the increased flexibility and commercial convenience of digital audio players (MP3s). However, online piracy, advertising-supported website services such as Spotify, Last.fm and video sites such as YouTube that often offer material to users gratis are becoming an increasing threat to the market, even if some companies can still regard them as good samplers, ‘allowing people to test and taste as much as they can’.15 The future of the fledgling relationship between CDs and downloads is certainly in a state of unpredictable flux. Creative industries will need to change their business models to become more cyberspace-friendly, for there seems little doubt that classical labels will gain their revenue in the future chiefly from digital delivery. The key to their survival and prosperity will involve their maintaining a flow of innovative and compelling product to the consumer, developing imaginative sale packages/ subscription models for classical music downloads16 (despite the abuse to which these may be subject),17 becoming more responsive to consumers’ audio and video demands and thereby encouraging classical collectors to become more accustomed to downloading music. Global growth of the market will be essential and they must expand their horizons beyond their core markets in the UK, US, France and Germany into vastly populated areas such as China, exploit the huge numbers of broadband users there as well as those in the expanding middle class throughout Asia who are eager to learn about classical music. Available data suggest that, overall, digital music is gaining ground in the world’s major music markets, and the decline in physical format income is slowly being offset. However, ‘since the rampant piracy in the music industry remains unequally widespread in the world and legal defenses against it remain far from harmonized, it is still difficult to extrapolate the “digital
13 M. Quinn, ‘Historical labels face digital future’, The Strad, 121 (July 2010), 13. 14 Ibid. 15 Graham Muir, head of marketing, Select Music, in Quinn, ‘Historical labels face digital future’, 13. 16 Naxos, for example, has demonstrated a sound model and a firm income base in downloads and streaming, the latter through its subscription scheme to the Naxos Music Library, which, at the time of writing, will shortly expand into video streaming. 17 For example, the downloading of everything required in the first month and then cancelling the subscription.
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trend” to other developed countries (such as Canada and Spain where piracy rates are relatively high), and even less so to developing countries’.18 The recording industry may well attempt to counter dwindling sales of physical formats and online piracy by embracing technological developments such as Blu-ray audio discs, which offer considerably more playing time than the c. 80-minute limit of a compact disc and vastly superior audio quality. In due course, there may be the possibility of adding video material such as reproductions of scores, and composer and performer biographies to recordings; and with the release of the iPad in 2010 and the commitment of many major publishers to publishing books for its iBooks application, it is likely that this tablet computer will be able to play music files embedded in the books, so that one may listen to, say, Beethoven’s music whilst reading about him. The upside for performers in all this will be that live performance will again be at a premium.
Composers At the turn of the millennium Arnold Whittall observed that ‘serious art music is still modern, still plural, its classicizing potential still strong, its radical inheritance continually reasserted and continually questioned, while its need to relate to aspects of the wider world, like ethnic identity and technological advance, remains undiminished’.19 Roger Heaton has also discussed the status quo in composition in Chapter 30, remarking on the end of the golden age of instrumental experimentation and the current period of pluralism being enjoyed by younger composers, as well as the lure of digital technology. However, Whittall’s crystal ball gazing indicated that there could be an extreme reaction against such twentieth-century concerns in the immediate years ahead, ‘with the twenty-first century striving to learn from the twentieth by rejecting it, lock, stock, and barrel, in order to secure the total and final demise of anything that might be thought of as avant-garde’.20 Whittall further suggested that ‘the twenty-first century might only be able to do that if it rejects everything pre-twentieth-century as well – Bach and Beethoven as well as Berg, Mozart as well as Mahler and Maxwell Davies’.21 Whether or not this will happen, only time will tell; but it may well be that composition of Western music is approaching something of a turning point. In line with Whittall’s thoughts, Robert Ehle has also recorded his views on the ‘exhaustion’ of the avant-garde idiom, claiming that composers have nothing new 18 http://www.dataxisnews.com/?p=16039 (accessed 7 July 2010). 19 A. Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 392. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.
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to express in that style.22 He views the ascendancy of the work of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and others as the beginnings of ‘the new tonality’, a new style of composition intended to freshen the public’s listening experience through working with sound itself, and especially timbre, as the primary material to be developed, a pathway already cleared to some extent by the likes of John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi and the innovative Mexican composer and theorist Julio Estrada.23 The latter has integrated his own theories, notably that of the ‘discontinuum’ (a new theory of interval classes for scales of any subdivision) into his working processes. He has also explored his theories of the ‘continuum’, ‘using unstructured tonal and temporal areas and material in transition (e.g. glissandos)’, and of ‘macro-timbre’, ‘a synthesis of pitch, amplitude and harmonic content in a continuum of rhythm and sound’.24 As he himself explains: The techniques and theories I have developed are based on mathematics and acoustics; the more neutral they remain, the better they serve the description of the imaginary: it is my ear – there everything is allowed – that gives birth to my music, which becomes the accurate, almost phonographic representation, of every detail coming from my inner hearing experiences.25
The American composer and Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Experimental Media Facility, Tod Machover, also shares the view that a new era in music is dawning, ‘one that will offer fresh and exciting answers to fundamental questions of language and organization, propose a clearer role for music in the social structure and a surer form of communication to a public, and integrate and express that which is most important about life as it is now and how it should or could be in future generations’.26 As one of the most experimental and innovative of the modern generation of composers, Machover is arguably one of the best placed to shape the future of his art. Celebrated for his development of ‘hyperinstrument’ technology, in which an instrument is linked to a computer, enabling the performer to create, control and play a variety of new textures in any combination, his unique vision has impacted on a wide variety of projects, including ‘robotic’ operas for worldwide stages, software that allows anyone to compose original music, and musical activities that can diagnose illness and restore health.27 22 R. C. Ehle, ‘Music and change: the music of the new millennium’, Music Review, 45 (1984), 287–92. 23 Cage (Silence: Lectures and Writings, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1961, p. 10), for example, advised: ‘Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expression of human sentiments.’ 24 M. Fürst-Heidtmann, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 8, p. 347, art. ‘Estrada, Julio’. 25 www.iceorg.org/3g/media/3G_Composers_optimized.pdf (accessed 18 July 2010). 26 T. Machover, ‘Thoughts on computer music composition’, in C. Roads (ed.), Composers and the Computer, Los Altos, CA, Kaufmann, 1985, p. 111. 27 See http://web.media.mit.edu/~tod/projects.html (accessed 19 July 2010).
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Computing technology will become increasingly ubiquitous in the music industry, with smart sound design and synthetic music pervading a wide range of creative practices. It has already been used in so-called algorithmic composition, in which composers may even use as inspiration for their music algorithms such as fractals, L-systems, statistical models and even arbitrary data that have no immediate musical relevance. The musical success or failure of these procedures depends largely on the mapping system employed by the composer to translate the non-musical information into a musical data stream. Technology can be of great assistance in such approaches, but too much of it can create serious problems in musical performance;28 as Peter Maxwell Davies has remarked, ‘it cannot take over and direct’.29 Computer-generated music, created ‘with little awareness of syntactical and grammatical procedure’ and by ‘automatic processes and little guidance from any “inner ear” ’, will never substitute convincingly for music created by ‘thought processes’.30 Nevertheless, the relationship between composers, performers and computing technologies will clearly be pivotal in promoting the future advancement of musical composition, for classical music must never become ‘a museum culture [. . .] All performers, to be really alive, must be in a mutually constructive and beneficial relationship with contemporary thought and culture, and this means with real live composers.’31 That volatile union has always sparked innovation of some kind or other, whether technical, timbral, notational, instrumentational, technological, structural, improvisational, rhythmical or theatrical, winning new expressive territories in the process. Whatever direction compositional practice takes in the future, that creative symbiosis between composers and performers will provide the vital key.
Audiences: the orchestra Various recent surveys have pointed to an ageing and diminishing audience for mainstream classical music, giving rise to its description as a niche activity rather than an enlightened, beneficial and indispensable part of society. This in turn has impacted adversely on music broadcasting and recording as well as on its media coverage. One of the most positive reactions against this situation has been the embedding of creative learning in the work of many performers, composers, orchestras and arts organisations in order to develop audiences and
28 See W. A. Schloss and D. A. Jaffe, ‘Intelligent musical instruments: the future of musical performance or the demise of the performer?’, Journal of New Music Research, 22/3 (August, 1993), 183–93. 29 P. M. Davies, ‘Will serious music become extinct?’, Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 24 April 2005, p. 14. 30 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 31 Ibid., p. 18.
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counter any feeling of ghetto-isation. Education projects, outreach work and greater flexibility in the presentation of music as a living rather than a museum culture will become increasingly important in generating interest both in new music and the established repertoire. There is a thirst for knowledge and understanding in our audiences that needs to be harnessed by performers, who have the knowledge and experience to guide them towards a more ‘open’ and perceptive mode of listening to contemporary forms and idioms. Allied to this, greater collaboration will need to be facilitated between musicians and educators worldwide, for little or no attempt is currently made in educational systems to develop sophisticated attitudes towards classical music in children from an early age. During the second half of the twentieth century Western culture became more widely disseminated throughout the world. As a result, Western art music has achieved a degree of popularity in areas where it is not part of the indigenous culture.32 Western-style educational institutions such as conservatoires and exam boards have found international acceptance, alongside the symphony orchestra. The reasons for this are various and complex. Stephen Cottrell’s three funding models form a useful basis from which to speculate upon the global future of the symphony orchestra. None of his models offers total financial security. Where the orchestra is financially supported by a civic authority or other body, the musicians are technically civil servants or staff members; the BBC and Berlin City Council are obvious examples and this is the prevalent model in continental Europe. In the second model, more common in the USA, the orchestra is run by an independent non-profit organisation, such as the New York Philharmonic, or even the Hallé in Manchester, UK; such orchestras may attract modest government funding, but rely upon private benefactors, trusts and foundations. A less common third model found in some London orchestras (and others such as the Vienna and Israel Philharmonics) is the players’ cooperative, where earned income looms large on the balance sheet. To a greater or lesser degree, uncertainty is a consistent feature. With audience numbers playing a crucial part in the financial mix, orchestras have been reassessing their static rituals and the necessity for formality, while balancing tradition and change in both their presentation and repertoire. As Cottrell puts it, ‘there is a consensus emerging that if the symphony orchestra as an institution is to survive for another century, then both the orchestras and the players within them will need to be as flexible and adaptable as possible. And orchestral managers will 32 See S. Cottrell, ‘The future of the orchestra’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 251–64, to which this paragraph and subsequent references to the orchestra are indebted. See also Chapter 28.
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need to show considerably more imagination, both in how resources are deployed and in the ways in which their concerts are presented, than might have been necessary for orchestras in the past . . . [yet] the orchestra is too important to be allowed to subside into a cultural antiquity for an everdiminishing group of interested historians.’33 At the other end of the spectrum, individual frustrations within the orchestra have been well documented. Dawn Bennett’s interviewees spoke of ‘dirty, sleazy politics’ and a ‘totalitarian workplace dynamics, appalling management . . . too little respect’. Absence of opportunities for creative and strategic involvement was cited as a cause for dissatisfaction and offers a clue as to ways forward for the orchestra of the future.
The Far East The Far East, and specifically China, seems destined to play a major part in the future of ‘classical music’. The post-war establishment of numerous new orchestras has already been charted in Chapter 28. Richard Kraus has remarked that ‘the artistic preferences of the Chinese middle class flow also from the social implications which are embedded within this [Western] musical culture’.34 How these implications are embedded may be open to question, though the one-child family, in which the hopes of a generation tend to be channelled into an holistic education, surely has a part to play. ‘At present, some parents are hoping beyond all hope that their children will change their lives through studying the piano’, experts said.35 Conservative programme planning, lack of opportunity to secure recording contracts and the withdrawal of state funding has gradually brought a degree of financial instability that has become familiar in the West. Classical music in China has traditionally served non-musical goals and has become yet stronger since the Cultural Revolution. Sheila Melvin and Jindong Lai have ascribed these developments to music’s ‘history as a sophisticated import enjoyed by emperors, intellectuals and revolutionaries alike; its modern and progressive image; and the sense that it is some ways superior to China’s own music because it is more scientific, or heroic, or international’.36 Accordingly, China is one of the world’s most prolific manufacturers of musical 33 Ibid., pp. 259, 264. 34 R. K. Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 8. 35 China Daily, 6 April, 2004. See also C. Sun in Shanghai Daily, 3 March 2004. ‘Parents always have endless dreams for their children, no matter whether they’re talented or not. And for many of those parents, the piano, seen as the instrument of the aristocracy, is the foundation on which their dreams are built.’ 36 S. Melvin and J. Cai, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music became Chinese, New York, Algora, 2004, p. 307.
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instruments, a major producer of violins and pianos and home to an estimated 45+ million pianists.37 Will Chinese musicians regenerate classical music throughout the world, or will they succumb to corporate greed, an excessive emphasis on stardom, bad management, poor music education and government indifference?38 Pianist Lang Lang (b. 1982) has become a role model for many Chinese young musicians, praised for his flair, communicative power, dazzling technique and charisma. Although some critics have countered that his playing is vulgar, immature and lacks sensitivity, more than five billion people viewed his performance in Beijing’s opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games. Named by Time Magazine as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people, Lang Lang’s explicit aims to spread the popularity of classical music around the world and to enrich the lives of the next generation will doubtless prove pivotal to his nation’s musical progression.
Performers ‘Musicians in the twenty-first century require a broad and rapidly evolving suite of skills on which to build and sustain their careers . . . Whilst globalization, emerging technologies, and creative and cultural industries can be perceived as threats, dilemmas or barriers, they present wonderful opportunities to explore, challenge and diversify one’s practice when they are positively portrayed alongside changes within the general populace such as an ageing population and an increasing focus on recreation and leisure time.’ So begins Dawn Bennett’s book Understanding the Classical Music Profession,39 which takes the portfolio career as its principal area for discussion and the author’s native Australia as a case study, though with liberal reference to developments elsewhere. Changes in pretertiary training have in some cases become less aspirational in the quest for wider participation. For example, changes in the Zimbabwean education system resulted in a recommendation to ‘consider admitting applicants who are able to demonstrate talent in, say, computer music skills, but who may not have all of the formal academic and music performance pre-requisites that have been the norm up to now’.40 Graham Bartle has observed that in Australia professional musicians are trained, ‘because they are there to be trained’, whereas in Denmark
37 Figure suggested by the Chinese pianist Lang Lang in an interview during the BBC Proms 2009 season. 38 Melvn and Cai, Rhapsody in Red, p. 300. 39 D. Bennett, Understanding the Classical Music Profession: the Past, the Present and Strategies for the Future, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008. 40 D. Maraire, ‘The task of preparing future musicians in a once colonized developing country’, in G. M. Oliva (ed.), The ISME Commission for the Education of the Professional Musician 1996 Seminar: The Musician’s Role: New Challenges, Lund, Universitetstryckeriet, Lund University, 1996, pp. 35–51.
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‘enrolment in music higher education is based upon an evaluation of the needs of society . . . What is necessary . . . is to educate the community as much as possible’. From Korea comes a plea that ‘each course should epitomise its raison d’être, its ethical position, its expectations, its value and its public image’.41 In addressing sustainability and attrition among musicians, Bennett identifies from responses to questionnaires six factors as crucial to the achievement of sustainable careers. These comprise entrepreneurship and business skills, industry experience and awareness, ongoing professional development, professional networks and industry mentors, teaching skills and community cultural development. It is of course instructive to benchmark such factors against the careers of past performers from different historical periods that feature throughout the chapters of the present book. How would such musicians respond to Bennett’s key attrition factors; insufficiency of regular employment, a lack of career mobility, irregular working hours, high rates of injury and low financial rewards? Personal attributes for a sustainable career include confidence and inner strength, openness and adaptability to change, motivation and drive, resilience and determination and passion for the field. Ongoing research into the performer’s experience has already been remarked upon in Chapter 5, ranging over areas such as practice techniques, performance anxiety, memorisation and professional issues such as alcohol and drug abuse. Aaron Williamon’s edited book on ‘musical excellence’,42 for example, draws on the fields of exercise science, psychophysiology, sports psychology, cognitive science and medicine. Indicative of further current areas of research are titles of papers delivered at the 2009 International Symposium on Performance Science held at the University of Auckland, including: ‘Discovering deliberate practice activities that overcome plateaus and limits on improvement of performance’; ‘Physical and psychological vulnerabilities in performers’; ‘Fast feedback error-detection mechanisms in highly skilled performance’; ‘A balanced approach to excellence: life skill intervention and elite performance’; and ‘Musicians’ dystonia: New aspects of treatment’. ‘Adaptability to change’ will be essential for performers, not least because musical boundaries will continue to shift and evaporate and many performers will doubtless be required to venture more away from the classical repertoire and conventional performing venues. Just as violinist Itzhak Perlman plays klezmer away from the concert platform, Nigel Kennedy is equally at home in
41 In Oliva (ed.), The ISME Commission, cited by Bennett, Understanding the Classical Music Profession, pp. 71–2; see G. Bartle, ‘Feet on the ground – head in the clouds’, pp. 183–94; L. Smith, ‘Training the performing artist: more than music’, pp. 117–21; Ki-Beom Jang, ‘Dear friends! Let us start over’, pp. 125–36. 42 A. Williamon (ed.), Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to Enhance Performance, Oxford University Press, 2004.
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jazz, Bryn Terfel has recorded Rodgers and Hammerstein, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma has collaborated in a variety of bluegrass and crossover projects with Mark O’Connor and others, so their successors will follow their lead. And composers will also take inspiration from colleagues such as Philip Glass, who has ventured into pop song writing, and Steve Martland, Mark-Anthony Turnage and others, who have allowed rock music to infiltrate their works. The continuing integration of historical performance is a further part of the changing landscape that has already been charted earlier in this book, especially in Chapter 1. The recordings of Mozart Symphonies by Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that are a focus in Chapter 23 illustrate the coming together of different performing traditions that can bear rich fruit indeed; they fully support the view that ‘The insights of periodinstrument performance changed certain things beyond recall, and as a result the tradition of performance has been completely altered by what has happened to our musical culture’.43 Students auditioning for most mainstream conductors will find this to be the case, and not just when in the presence of ‘period’/‘modern’ conductors such as Elder, Jurowski or Rattle. However, there is a certain over-confidence in the HIP movement born of commercial success;44 and with the repertoire covered by ‘period’ performers becoming ever broader, the warnings of Clive Brown, Bruce Haynes and others are not being heeded.45 For Haynes, HIP has evidently lost its counter-cultural edge and strong moral identity. Complacency, a casual attitude towards historical sources, and a distinct lack of scholarly rigour with which many in the movement’s vanguard have prepared their interpretations have resulted in false claims for historically informed interpretations. Gérard Lesne, among others, has recognised that vocal performance has ‘been going off track for the past ten years or so’,46 and Sigiswald Kuijken has also sensed that period performance is sometimes becoming retrogressive ‘in terms of compromise with instruments, technique, or even taste’.47 Commercial issues have turned HIP into ‘a game, a competition to be the first to record something with so-called period instruments, and it’s dissipating like smoke’.48 The longterm health and future of HIP will depend on more solid bridges being built between the academic and performing communities. By reflecting more accurately scholarly research, performers will be better equipped with the combination of theoretical knowledge and practical skill necessary to recreate 43 N. Kenyon, ‘Tradition isn’t what it used to be’, Royal Philharmonic Society 2001 Lecture, p. 7. 44 www.earlymusicworld.com/id3.html (accessed 25 August 2010). 45 See Brown’s view, cited in Chapter 23, and B. Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, 2007. 46 www.earlymusicworld.com/id3.html (accessed 25 August 2010). 47 S. Apthorp, ‘Lone crusader’, The Strad, 111 (July, 2000), 708. 48 Ibid., 711.
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faithfully relevant technical and expressive issues and apply them with greater sensitivity, historical propriety and stylistic understanding, not to mention that inevitable and vital ingredient, imagination.49 The requisite ‘adaptability’ of performers may need to involve instruments as well as techniques, compositional styles and other factors, as scientists, theorists and artisans constantly explore the potential for modifications to the available instrumentarium. For example, even though the violin remains one of the last vestiges of the Italian High Renaissance still used on a daily basis, its immunity to cultural metamorphosis may well be challenged in the future, whether on account of acoustical considerations, materials used in construction or technological influences.50 Indeed, some string players are becoming increasingly convinced by recent developments in lightweight, robust carbonfibre instruments, which are more resistant to damage, easier to maintain and can be more comfortable to play than traditional wooden instruments.51 Further, the shortage of pernambuco, the traditional wood used in bowmaking, will accelerate the acceptance of carbon-fibre bows;52 and some string players will take further advantage of the potential of playing instruments with more than the conventional four strings, or of working with versatile electric instruments and the amplification and variety of effects they offer through ‘treating the tone’ (which may involve changes in frequency response, rapid changes in amplitude, harmonic alteration (of overtones), echo and reverberation effects, distortion etc.). Related instruments such as the violectra, a small violin with thick strings and a piezo-electric sensor on its bridge, and sounding an octave lower than the standard instrument, have been taken up by Leila Josefowicz (particularly for performing John Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur) and jazz violinists Jean-Luc Ponty and Michal Urbaniak and may well have a more prominent future role to play. ‘The beginning of the twenty-first century is a time when, in many ways, people have lost their sense of certainty, and of the reasons for doing things. Politics, religion, international relations, financial markets, social structures, education, the arts, are all subject to the loss of stability and purpose. At the same time the speed of modern communications has resulted in globalisation. Perhaps it is not surprising that the performance of music should also be in the
49 See P. Walls, History, Imagination and the Performance of Music, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2003, and J. Butt, Playing with History, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 50 For example, Carleen Hutchins’s octet of stringed instruments (large bass; small bass; baritone; tenor; vertical viola; violin; soprano; treble), of which each member is acoustically scaled to the violin as the ideal, has gained general approbation but not as yet entered into the mainstream of performance. 51 Various ergonomic instruments have been designed for musicians with orthopaedic problems; experiments have also been made working with other woods such as balsa and koa. 52 Makers have also worked with some success on carbon-fibre flutes.
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state it is.’53 Performance ambience is indeed radically different from at any time in history. As Peter Maxwell Davies has written, ‘a place cannot come to life musically unless or until the inhabitants make and perform their own songs and other kinds of music which are relevant to that place, and to the lives of the people who live in it’.54 Music surrounds us on a daily basis, but do we have any real understanding of it? In a society that increasingly prizes visual stimulus and instant gratification, music can easily seem peripheral and little more than ornamental. Yet it is salutary to recall that from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution it lay at the very core of a general education. When music was patently a living language, it was felt to have the capacity to change listeners as well as performers. With its own vocabulary and syntax, it had an incredible power over man’s body and soul. Gradually we have come to prioritise music’s aesthetic and emotional aspects over rhetorical elements. Debates about the value of commercial classical radio stations will surely continue to revolve around the question of whether music needs to be understood or merely absorbed by listeners (and performers). In common with literature, there are naturally a huge number of levels on which music can be appreciated and delivered, leaving ample scope for the dismissal of others’ tastes. At the beginning of his 2005 Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture, Maxwell Davies reflected ruefully that his own feeling of happy and complete union with Bach’s St Matthew Passion is not shared by the general populace. Indeed, he regrets that ‘the vast majority of people is unaware of this richest of possible listening experiences: not only unaware but often actively antagonistic towards it, deeming it elitist, the exclusive domain of the elderly, or even of the semimoribund, irrelevant to contemporary life, the product of a long-dead European white male’.55 Music’s constant availability in our lives can paradoxically make it more difficult to listen to and to perform actively and creatively. Can we develop our appreciation of the value of sound (as well as silence), that most elusive of media? Critics have recently suggested that current comparisons of minor differences in the interpretation of art music and our obsession with the aesthetically pleasing can only mean that the position of music in our lives is in danger of being reduced to a sadly primitive stage. With a softening of divisions between pop and classical music, classical performers need to engage, thrill and move way beyond a narrow technical focus, following, for example, Brahms’s maxim that, in order to become a good musician, one should spend as much time reading books as practising. 53 R. Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 242. 54 Davies, ‘Will serious music become extinct?’, p. 7. 55 Ibid.
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Passion and conviction will surely remain the hallmark of successful performers into the foreseeable future. It is salutary to remember that in 1860s Vienna supporters of Brahms and Wagner actually fought in the streets over their musical differences. It is now hard to imagine a world without recording, when concerts had a distinctive ‘now-or-never’ flavour to them. Music was not just an aural experience, but also a matter of physical presence, social interaction and direct personal communication. We also find it difficult nowadays to imagine never hearing a note of music without being in the presence of a performer. Robert Philip recalls that concerts used to focus on putting across a narrative in a way which would make sense to an audience at a single hearing and was not primarily an exercise in giving a perfect rendition of the score. Points of emphasis were created by means of portamento, tempo rubato and other detail, with a spontaneous element to the manner of performance that has largely disappeared.56 There is much to be learned from the achievements of great figures of the past such as Cortot, Paderewski, Rachmaninov, Rubinstein, Schnabel, Casals, Sarasate, Elman, Szigeti, Huberman, Heifetz, Ysaÿe and Kreisler. It is surely not fanciful to claim that many of their performances were more vivid and richer in individuality than the uniformity that we currently experience. As Sandor Vegh remarked, ‘Learning a work and reproducing it the same way every evening is not a productive interpretation, it is a reproduction. You must always make it new and have the courage to follow that inspiration.’57 The differences between the ways in which musicians perform are much narrower than was the case a hundred years ago and ensemble players instinctively reach substantial agreement in marrying their interpretations. Within a general globalisation of styles, ensemble has become more tightly disciplined, the interpretation of notation more literal and tempo flexibility less widespread. The pressure to be neat and tidy also infected the ‘period’ movement. As Philip puts it, there has become a problem with the nature of the authority on which we base our performances. ‘There is now such a general consensus about the sort of playing that sounds comfortable, and such a high standard among musicians, that not much thought is needed to achieve a plausible result.’58 It has become difficult to preserve the ability to be surprised or shocked in a world saturated by music. During the twentieth century there was sometimes a danger that the place of contemporary music was taken partly by endless repetitions of familiar established repertoire, which routinely invited detailed comparison of minor differences in interpretation. 56 Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, pp. 13, 23. 57 R. Hicks, ‘Natural nurturing’, The Strad, 98 (May, 1987), 375. 58 Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, p. 250.
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The aforementioned need for that creative symbiosis between composers and performers is never more apparent. How far can we predict the future for performers, composers and listeners of Western art music? The ‘live’ experience has regained its attraction (even on record) – and not merely to satisfy financial imperatives. At the same time, downloads and Internet culture mean that classical music can compete for the attention of the young on an equal basis with other musics. Forming one’s musical tastes largely on the basis of peer pressure is likely to become less of an issue. The commitment to listen to a 45-minute symphony will surely remain the same in the mid-twenty-first-century, as will the degree of commitment to become a world-class violinist. But the nature of contemporary society will continue to be influential. ‘Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfection, can never have for us precisely the same meaning it had for them,’ as Hindemith wrote in 1952.59 And as another perspicacious commentator has observed, reflecting many of the contributions to this volume, ‘We encounter the vast musical treasures of the past from the one vantage point available to us – our aesthetic experience.’60 That experience is wide-ranging by comparison with generations of performers whose activities occupy the pages of this book. Looking to the future, there is much scope for optimism; the undoubted flair and imagination of young musicians at the beginning of the twenty-first century will surely be matched by new opportunities of kinds we cannot yet even imagine. When the next chapter in the history of musical performance comes to be written there will undoubtedly be stories to tell that are both creative and inspirational.
59 P. Hindemith, A Composer’s World, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1952, pp. 170–1. 60 S. Burstyn, ‘In quest of the period ear’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 695.
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Part I: Performance through history A Report on Orchestral Resources in Great Britain, The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970 Abraham, G., The Tradition of Western Music, Oxford University Press, 1974 Adam, J.-L., Méthode de piano du Conservatoire, Paris, Magasin de musique du Conservatoire Royal, 1804 Agricola, J. F., Anleitung zur Singkunst, Berlin, Winter, 1757, trans. and ed. J. C. Baird as Introduction to the Art of Singing by Johann Friedrich Agricola, Cambridge University Press, 1995 Anon., Euterpe; or, Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Music, as a Part of Modern Education, London, c. 1780 The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, 26/512 (1 October 1885), 613–14 Applegate, C., and P. Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity, University of Chicago Press, 2002 Arnold, D., ‘Instruments and instrumental teaching in the early Italian conservatoires’, Galpin Society Journal, 18 (1965), 72–81 ‘Music at the Ospedali’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 113/2 (1988), 156–67 Arnold, D. and E., The Oratorio in Venice, London, Royal Musical Association Monographs, 1986 Arts Enquiry: Music: A Report on Musical Life in England, The, sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees, Political and Economic Planning, 1949 Ashworth, J., and P. O’Dette, ‘Basso Continuo’, in S. Carter (ed.), A Performer’s Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music, New York, Schirmer, 1997, pp. 269–96 Bach, C. P. E., Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2 vols., Berlin, 1753 and 1762, repr. 1957, trans. and ed. W. J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, New York, Norton, 1949 Bailey, P. (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1986 Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge, Oleander Press, 1998 Bashford, C., The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2007 Bashford, C., and L. Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, Oxford University Press, 2000 Beale, R., ‘Opera in Manchester, 1848–1899’, Manchester Sounds, 6 (2005–6), 71–97 Charles Hallé: A Musical Life, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007 Beaussant, P., François Couperin, Paris, Fayard, 1980, trans. A. Land, Portland, OR, Amadeus Press, 1990
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Bent, I. (ed.), Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music, London, Stainer & Bell, 1981 Bente, M. (ed.), Musik. Edition. Interpretation. Gedenkschrift Günter Henle, Munich, Henle, 1979 Blake, A., The Land Without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, Manchester University Press, 1997 Blanning, T. (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 1996 The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789, Oxford University Press, 2002 The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815, Allen Lane, London, 2007 The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and their Art, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, Allen Lane, 2008 Blichmann, D., ‘Anmerkungen zur Musik an den venezianischen Ospedali im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Acta Musicologica, 74/1 (2002), 77–99 Boulez, P., ‘The Vestal Virgin and the fire-stealer: memory, creation and authenticity’, Early Music, 18 (1990), 355–8 Bowen, J. A. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, Cambridge University Press, 2003 Boyden, D. D., The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761, Oxford University Press, 1965 Brahms, J., Life and Letters, selected and annotated S. Avins, trans. J. Eisinger and S. Avins, Oxford University Press, 1997 Brown, C., Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900, Oxford University Press, 1999 Brown, H. M., Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Music, Oxford University Press, 1976 ‘Songs after supper: how the aristocracy entertained themselves in the fifteenth century’, in M. Fink, R. Gstrein, and G. Mössmer (eds.), Musica Privata: Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben, Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen, Innsbruck, Helbing, 1991, pp. 37–52 Brown, H. M., and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989 Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989 Brown, J. D., and S. S. Stratton, British Musical Biography: A Dictionary of Musical Artists, Authors and Composers, Birmingham, S. S. Stratton, 1897 Bujic, B., Music in European Thought 1851–1912, Cambridge University Press, 1988 Burrow, J., A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, London, Allen Lane, 2007 Busoni, F. (ed.), The Well-Tempered Clavichord by Johann Sebastian Bach: Revised, Annotated, and Provided with Parallel Examples and Suggestions for the Study of Modern PianoforteTechnique, New York, Schirmer, [1894] Butt, J., Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, Cambridge University Press, 2002 Carpenter, N. C., ‘Music in the medieval universities’, Journal of Research in Music Education, 3/2 (Autumn, 1955), 136–44 Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958
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Rose, S., ‘Music in the market-place’, in T. Carter and J. Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 55–87 Rosselli, J., ‘The castrati as a professional group and a social phenomenon, 1550–1850’, Acta Musicologica, 60 (1988), 143–79 Rousseau, J.-J., Dictionnaire de musique, Paris and Amsterdam, 1768 Sadler, G., ‘Charpentier’s void notation: the Italian background and its implications’, in S. Thompson (ed.), New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2010 Saint-Lambert, M. de, Les principes du clavecin, Paris, 1702; trans. and ed. R. HarrisWarrick as Principles of the Harpsichord by Monsieur de Saint Lambert, Cambridge University Press, 1984 Sanford, S. A., ‘A comparison of French and Italian singing in the seventeenth century’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 1 (1995), http://sscm-jscm.illinois.edu/vl/no1/ sanford.html Santa Maria, Tomás de, Libro llamado art de tañer fantasia, Valladolid, 1565 Sartori, C., ‘La prima diva della liricia italiana: Anna Renzi’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 2 (1968), 430–52 Savage, R. and M. Sansone, ‘Il Corago and the staging of early opera: four chapters from an anonymous treatise circa 1630’, Early Music, 17 (1989), 494–511 Sawkins, L., ‘For and against the order of nature: who sang the soprano?’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 315–24 Schrade, L., Monteverdi: Creator of Modern Music, New York, Norton, 1950 Snyder, K., Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, rev. edn, University of Rochester Press, 2007 Spink, I., Restoration Cathedral Music, 1660–1714, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995 Stembridge, C., ‘Interpreting Frescobaldi. The notation in the printed sources of Frescobaldi’s keyboard music and its implications for the performer’ (I and II), The Organ Yearbook, 34 (2005), 33–60, and 35 (2006), 95–133 Introduction to Frescobaldi; Organ and Keyboard Works, vol. 1, pt. 1, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2009 Stevenson, R., ‘Mexico City cathedral music: 1600–1750’, The Americas, 21 (1964), 111–35 Strunk, O. (ed.), Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn, ed. L. Treitler, New York, Norton, 1998 Tilney, C., The Art of the Unmeasured Prelude for Harpsichord: France 1660-1720, London, Schott, 1991 Tomlinson, G., Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987 Tosi, P. F., Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni, Bologna, Lelio dalle Volpe, 1723, facsimile edn, New York, Broude, 1968; trans. J. Galliard as Observations on the Florid Song, London, J. Wilcox, 1743, facsimile edn, London, Reeves, 1967 Troeger, R. W., ‘The French unmeasured harpsichord prelude: notation and performance’, Early Keyboard Journal, 10 (1992), 89–119 Tunley, D., ‘Glimpses of performance practice in Lully’s operas’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 361–4 Wainwright, J. P., ‘From “Renaissance” to “Baroque”?’, in J. P. Wainwright and P. Holman (eds.), From Renaissance to Baroque: Change in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeenth Century, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2005, pp. 1–21
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Webber, G., Aspects of Performance Practice in Buxtehude’s Organ Works, www.rco.org.uk Werckmeister, A., Musicalische Temperatur, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig, 1691 Hypomnemata musica, Quedlinburg, 1697 Whenham, J., Monteverdi: Vespers (1610), Cambridge University Press, 1997 Whenham, J., and R. Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 2007 Williams, P., The European Organ: 1450–1850, London, Batsford, 1966 Wilson, J. (ed.), Roger North on Music, Being a Selection of his Essays Written during the Years c. 1695–1728, London, Novello, 1959 Wistreich, R., ‘“La voce è grata assai, ma . . . ”: Monteverdi on singing’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 7–19 ‘Reconstructing pre-Romantic singing technique’, in J. Potter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 178–91 ‘Monteverdi in performance’, in J. Whenham and R. Wistreich (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 261–79 Zacconi, L., Prattica di musica, Venice, 1592, facsimile edn, Bologna, Forni, 1983 Zarlino, G., Dimostrationi harmoniche, Venice, 1571 Zaslaw, N., ‘Ornaments for Corelli’s violin sonatas, Op. 5’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 95–115
Editions Bartlett, C. (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers 1610, Wyton, King’s Music, 1986, rev. 1990; Monteverdi Vespers (1610): Edition for Performance by Voices and Continuo Only, Wyton, King’s Music, 1990; and Monteverdi: Vespers (1610): Guide to Liturgical Context with Plainsong Antiphons etc., Wyton, King’s Music, 1989 Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Opera omnia, vol. 9, Instituta et monumenta: Monumenta v, Cremona, Fondazione Claudio Monteverdi, 2005 Goehr, W. (ed.), Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), Vienna, Universal Edition, 1957 Kurtzman, J. (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine: Vespers 1610, Oxford University Press, 1999; and Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine: Vespers 1610: Critical Appendix, Oxford University Press, 1999 Malipiero, G. F. (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Tutte le opere, vol. 14/1–2, Vienna, Universal Edition, 1932 Redlich, H. (ed.), Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, Vienna, Universal Edition, 1949, rev. 1952 and 1955 Roche, J. (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, London, Eulenburg, 1994 Stevens, D. (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers 1610, London, Novello, 1961, rev. 1994 Wolters, G. (ed.), Claudio Monteverdi: Vesperae Beatae Mariae Virginis 1610, Wolfenbüttel, Möseler Verlag, 1966
Discography (arranged chronologically) Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), Taverner Consort, Choir and Players directed by Andrew Parrott. EMI Reflexe CDS 7 47078 8; recorded 1983, issued 1984 (reissued Virgin Veritas CDS 7 47078 8, 1996) Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, His Majesties Sagbutts & Cornetts, and the London Oratory Junior Choir
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directed by John Eliot Gardiner. Deutsche Grammophon Archiv DVD 073 035–9 and CD 429 565–2/4; recorded 1989, issued 1990 Claudio Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), New London Consort, directed by Philip Pickett. L’Oiseau-Lyre 425 823–2; recorded 1989, issued 1991 Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, Cantus Cölln and Concerto Palatino directed by Konrad Junghänel. Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472–77332–2; recorded 1994, issued 1995 Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino directed by Stephen Stubbs. Atma Classique ACD2 2304–5; recorded 2002, issued 2003 Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine, Yorkshire Bach Choir directed by Peter Seymour. Cloister Records CLOCD0304; recorded and issued 2004 Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643): Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610), Gabrieli Consort and Players directed by Paul McCreesh. Deutsche Grammophon Archiv CD 00289 477 6147; recorded 2005, issued 2006
Part V: Performance in the ‘long eighteenth century’ Agricola, J. F., Anleitung zur Singkunst, Berlin, Winter, 1757; trans. and ed. J. C. Baird as Introduction to the Art of Singing by Johann Friedrich Agricola, Cambridge University Press, 1995 Altenburg, J. E., Versuch einer Anleitung zur heroisch-musikalischen Trompeter- und PaukerKunst, Halle, Hendel, 1795, trans. E. H Tarr as Essay on an Introduction to the Heroic and Musical Trumpeters’ and Kettledrummers’ Art, Nashville, TN, Brass Press, 1974 Bach, C. P. E., Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 2 vols. Berlin, 1753 and 1762; trans. and ed. W. J. Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, New York, Norton, 1949 Bacilly, B. de, Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter, Paris, author, 1668, trans. and ed. A. B. Caswell as A Commentary upon the Art of Proper Singing, Brooklyn, NY, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968 Barbier, P., The World of the Castrati, London, Souvenir Press, 1998 Barbieri, P., ‘Violin intonation: a historical survey’, Early Music, 19 (1991), 69–88 Barbour, J. M., Tuning and Temperament: A Historical Survey, New York, Da Capo, 1953, repr. 1972 Barclay, R., ‘A new species of instrument: the vented trumpet in context’, Historic Brass Society Journal, 10 (1998), 1–13 Beicken, S., Treatise on Vocal Performance and Ornamentation by Johann Adam Hiller, Cambridge University Press, 2001 Bilson, M., ‘The Viennese fortepiano of the late 18th century’, Early Music, 8 (1980), 158–62 Bödeker, H. E., P. Veit, and M. Werner (eds.), Le concert et son public, Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002 Bonds, M. E., Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven, Princeton University Press, 2006 Bonta, S., ‘From violone to violoncello: a question of strings’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 3 (1977), 5–43 Borgir, T., The Performance of the Basso Continuo in Italian Baroque Music, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1987
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Boyden, D., The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761, Oxford University Press, 1965 Brown, A. P., Joseph Haydn’s Keyboard Music, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986 Brown, C., ‘Historical performance, metronome marks and tempo in Beethoven’s symphonies’, Early Music, 19 (1991), 247–58 Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900, Oxford University Press, 1999 Brown, H. M., and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989 Buelow, G. J., ‘Johann Mattheson and the invention of the Affektenlehre’, in G. J. Buelow and H. J. Marx (eds.), New Mattheson Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 393–408 Burney, C., The Present State of Music in France and Italy, London, 1771, facsimile edn, New York, Elibron, 2005 A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, to Which is Prefixed, a Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, 4 vols., London, for the author, 1776–89; repr. ed. F. Mercer, 2 vols., London, Foulis, 1935 Butt, J., Bach Interpretation: Articulation Marks in Primary Sources of J. S. Bach, Cambridge University Press, 1990 Byrt, J., ‘Alteration in Handel: a fresh approach’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001), 194–219 Carroll, P., Baroque Woodwind Instruments: A Guide to Their History, Repertoire, and Basic Technique, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1993 Corri, D., The Singer’s Preceptor, London, Silvester, 1810, ed. R. Maunder as Domenico Corri’s Treatises on Singing, New York, Garland, 1995 Couperin, F., L’art de toucher le clavecin, Paris, chez l’auteur, 1717; trans. M. Halford as The Art of Playing the Harpsichord, Port Washington, NY, Alfred, 1974 Crescentini, G., Raccolta di Esercizi per il canto all’uso del vocalizzo/Recueil d’exercices pour la vocalisation musicale, Paris, Imbault, c. 1811; facsimile edn, Méthodes et Traités, Serie II/1, Paris, Fuzeau, 2005 Vingt-cinq nouvelles vocalises ou études de l’art du chant, Paris, Imbault, 1818–32; facsimile edn, Méthodes et Traités, Serie II/2, Paris, Fuzeau, 2005 Cyr, M., ‘Eighteenth-century French and Italian singing: Rameau’s writing for the voice’, Music & Letters, 61/ 3–4 (1980), 318–37 Performing Baroque Music, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1992 Essays on the Performance of Baroque Music, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008 Denis, J., Traité de l’accord de l’espinette, Paris, 1643, trans. V. J. Panetta as Treatise on Harpsichord Tuning (1643), Cambridge University Press, 1987 DeNora, T., Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995 Donington, R., The Interpretation of Early Music, London, Faber, 1963, new version, London, Faber, 1974 Druce, D., ‘Historical approaches to violin playing’, in J. Paynter et al. (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, 2 vols., London, Routledge, 1992, vol. 2, pp. 993–1019 Duffin, R., How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), New York, Norton, 2007 Edgcumbe, R. M., The Musical Reminiscences of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, London, Andrews, 1834, repr. New York, Da Capo, 1973
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Einstein, A., Mozart, His Character, his Work, Oxford University Press, 1945 Emerson, I., Five Centuries of Women Singers, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2005 Fabian, D., Bach Performance Practice, 1945–1975: A Comprehensive Review of Sound Recordings and Literature, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003 Fenner, T., Opera in London: Views of the Press 1785–1830, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994 Finscher, L. (ed.), Die Mannheimer Hofkapelle im Zeitalter Carl Theodors, Mannheim, Palatium, 1992 Freeman, D., ‘An 18th-century singer’s commission of “baggage” arias’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 427–33 Fuller, D., ‘Dotting, the “French style” and Frederick Neumann’s counter reformation’, Early Music, 5 (1977), 517–43 ‘The “dotted style” in Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti’, in P. Williams (ed.), Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 99–117 ‘Sous les doits de Chambonnière’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 191–202 Galliard, J., Observations on the Florid Song by Pier Francesco Tosi, 2nd edn, London, J. Wilcox, 1743, facsimile edn, London, Reeves, 1967 García, M., A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing, the editions of 1841 and 1872 collated, ed. and trans. D. V. Paschke, New York, Da Capo, 1984 Gasparini, F., L’armonico pratico al cimbalo, Venice, 1708; trans. F. S. Stillings and ed. D. L. Burrows as The Practical Harmonist at the Keyboard, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1963 Geminiani, F., The Art of Playing on the Violin, London, Johnson, 1751, ed. D. Boyden, Oxford University Press, 1952 Germann, S., ‘The Mietkes, the Margrave and Bach’, in P. Williams (ed.), Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 119–48 Gramit, D., Cultivating Music: the Aspirations, Interests and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002 Guion, D., The Trombone: Its History and Music, 1697–1811, New York, Gordon & Breach, 1988 Hall-Witt, J., Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880, Durham, NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 2007 Harnoncourt, N., Musik als Klangrede, St. Polten, Residenz, 1982, trans. M. O’Neill as Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech, Portland, OR, Amadeus, 1988 Harris, M. (ed.), Porpora’s Elements of Singing, London, 1858 Hawkins, Sir J., A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols., London, author, 1776, repr. Novello, 1875, New York, Dover, 1963, facsimile edn, Graz, Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1969 Haynes, B., ‘Beyond temperament: non-keyboard intonation in the 17th and 18th centuries’, Early Music, 19 (1991), 357–81 ‘Tu ru or not tu ru: paired syllables and unequal tonguing patterns on woodwinds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Performance Practice Review, 10 (1997), 41–60 The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy, 1640–1760, Oxford University Press, 2001 A History of Performing Pitch: The Story Of ‘A’, Lanham, MD, Scarecrow, 2002 The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, 2007
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Heartz, D., ‘From Garrick to Gluck: the reform of theatre and opera in the mideighteenth century’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 94 (1967–8), 111–27 Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780, New York, Norton, 2003 Hefling, S. E., Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music: Notes Inégales and Overdotting, New York, Schirmer, 1993 Hindemith, P., A Composer’s World, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1952 Hogarth, G., Memoirs of the Opera, 2 vols., London, 1838, 2nd edn, London, Bentley, 1851, repr. New York, Da Capo, 1972 Hogwood, C., ‘The clavier speaks’, in S. Gallagher and T. F. Kelly (eds.), The Century of Bach and Mozart, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Department of Music, 2008, pp. 345–70 Holman, P., Life after Death: The Viola Da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2010 Hotteterre, J., Principes de la flûte traversière, ou flûte d’allemagne, Paris, Ballard, 1707, trans. D. Lasocki as Principles of the Flute, Recorder & Oboe, London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1968 Howard, P., A Critical Translation from the Italian of Vincenzo Manfredini’s ‘Difesa della musica moderna/In Defence of Modern Music (1788)’, New York, Mellen, 2002 Hsu, J., A Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique, New York, Broude, 1981 Hunter, M., The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment, Princeton University Press, 1999 Jeltsch, J., ‘La clarinette de Mozart’, Crescendo: Le Magazine de la musique ancienne, 34 (1990), 12–24 Johnson, J. H., Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995 Johnson, V., J. F. Fulcher, and T. Ertman (eds.), Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, Cambridge University Press, 2007 Jones, D. W., The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Kenyon, N., The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart, London, Faber, 2005 Kevorkian, T., Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650–1750, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007 Landon, H. C. R., Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. 3: Haydn in England 1791–1795, London, Thames & Hudson, 1976 1791, Mozart’s Last Year, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988 Mozart: The Golden Years 1781–1791, London, Thames & Hudson, 1989 LaRue, C. S., Handel and his Singers: The Creation of the Royal Academy Operas, 1720–1728, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995 Lawson, C., ‘Playing historical clarinets’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 134–49 The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2000 Le Huray, P., Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1990 Leech-Wilkinson, D., ‘Portamento and musical meaning’, Journal of Musicological Research, 25 (2006), 233–61 Levin, R. D., ‘Mozart’s working methods in the keyboard concertos’, in S. Gallagher and T. F. Kelly (eds.), The Century of Bach and Mozart, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Department of Music, 2008, pp. 379–406
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Little, M. and N. Jenne, Dance and the Music of J.S. Bach, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991 MacClintock, C. (ed.), Readings in the History of Music in Performance, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1979 McVeigh, S., Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, Cambridge University Press, 1993 Mahling, C.-H., C. Meyer, and E. K. Wolf (general editors), Musical Life in Europe 1600– 1900: Circulation, Institutions, Representation, 12 vols., Berlin, Berliner WissenschaftsVerlag, 2003–8 Mancini, G., Pensieri e riflessioni practice sopra il canto figurato, Vienna, Ghelen, 1774, trans. P. Buzzi as Practical Reflections on the Figurative Art of Singing, Boston, Gorham, 1912 Marcello, B., ‘“Il teatro” alla moda’, Part I, trans. R. G. Pouly, Musical Quarterly, 34/3 (1948), 371–403 Mason, D., ‘The teaching and learning of singing’, in J. Potter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Singing, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 204–20 Medlam, C., ‘On holding the violin’, Early Music, 7 (1979), 561–3 Mengozzi, B. et al., Méthode de chant du Conservatoire de Musique, Paris, á l’imprimerie du Conservatoire de musique, 1804, facsimile edn, Méthodes et Traités, Série II/1, Paris, Fuzeau, 2005 Morrow, M. S., Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna: Aspects of a Developing Musical and Social Institution, Stuyvesant, NY, Pendragon, 1989 Mozart, L., Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, Augsburg, author, 1756, 3rd edn, Leipzig, Lotter, 1787, trans. E. Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, Oxford University Press, 1948, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 1951 Mozart, W. A., The Letters of Mozart and his Family, ed. E. Anderson, 1966, 3rd edn, rev. S. Sadie and F. Smart, London, Macmillan, 1985 Muffat, G., Georg Muffat on Performance Practice, trans. and ed. D. K. Wilson, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001 Nathan, I., Musurgia Vocalis, 2nd edn, London, Fentum, 1836 Neumann, F., Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, Princeton University Press, 1978 Performance Practices of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, New York, Schirmer, 1993 North, R., The Musical Grammarian 1728, ed. M. Chan and J. Kassler, Cambridge University Press, 1990 O’Donnell, J., ‘The French style and the overtures of J. S. Bach’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 190–6, 551–80 ‘Bach’s Temperament, Occam’s Razor, and the Neidhardt factor’, Early Music, 34 (2006), 625–33 Parrott, A., The Essential Bach Choir, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2000 Pierre, C., Histoire du concert spirituel, 1725–1790, Paris, Société française de musicologie, 1975 Pinnock, T., ‘20 years of the English Concert’, Early Music News, 174 (May 1993), 1 Plantinga, L., Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance, New York and London, Norton, 1999 Pleasants, H., The Great Singers, London, Gollancz, 1967 Pollens, S., The Early Pianoforte, Cambridge University Press, 1995
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Potter, J., ‘Beggar at the door: the rise and fall of portamento in singing’, Music & Letters, 87/4 (2006), 523–50 Tenor: History of a Voice, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009 Powell, A., and D. Lasocki, ‘Bach and the flute: the players, the instruments, the music’, Early Music, 23 (1995), 9–29 Price, C., J. Milhous, G. Dideriksen, and R. D. Hume, Italian Opera in Late EighteenthCentury London, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1995–2001 Quantz, J. J., Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, Berlin, 1752, trans. E. R. Reilly as On Playing the Flute, London, Faber, 1966 Raguenet, F., Parallèle des Italiens et des François en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéra’s, Paris, Moreau, 1702, trans. N. Haym as A Comparison between the French and Italian Musick and Operas, London, Lewis, 1709 Rasch, R., ‘Does “well-tempered” mean “equal tempered”?’, in P. Williams (ed.), Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 293–310 Rice, A. R., The Baroque Clarinet, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992 The Clarinet in the Classical Period, Oxford University Press, 2003 Rice, J. A., ‘Mozart and his Singers’, Opera Quarterly, 11/4 (1995), 31–52 Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792–1807, Cambridge University Press, 2003 Mozart on the Stage, Cambridge University Press, 2009 Riley, M., Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004 Robinson, J. O., ‘The “messa di voce” as an instrumental ornament in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Music Review, 43 (1982), 1–14 Rosselli, J., The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario, Cambridge University Press, 1984 Russell, R., The Harpsichord and Clavichord, 2nd edn, New York, Scribner, 1973 Sadie, J. A., The Bass Viol in French Baroque Chamber Music, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1980 Saint-Lambert, M. de, Les principes du clavecin, Paris, Ballard, 1702, ed. and trans. R. Harris-Warrick as Principles of the Harpsichord by Monsieur de Saint Lambert, Cambridge University Press, 1984 Sawkins, L., ‘For and against the order of nature: who sang the soprano?’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 315–24 ‘Doucement and Légèrement: tempo in French baroque music’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 365–74 Schenker, H., The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook (1926), ed. W. Drabkin, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Schroeder, D., Haydn and the Enlightenment: The Late Symphonies and their Audience, Oxford University Press, 1990 Schubart, C. F. D., Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Vienna, Degen, 1806 Schwarzkopf, E., On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge, London and New York, Faber, 1982 Seletsky, R., ‘New light on the old bow’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 286–301, 415–26 Sherman, B. D., ‘Bach’s notation of tempo and early music performance: some reconsiderations’, Early Music, 28 (2000), 455–66
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Sisman, E., Mozart, the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, Cambridge University Press, 1993 Skeaping, K., ‘Some speculations on a crisis in the history of the violin’, Galpin Society Journal, 8 (1955), 3–12 Skowroneck, T., Beethoven the Pianist, Cambridge University Press, 2010 Smith, R., Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1995 Smithers, D., The Music and History of the Baroque Trumpet before 1721, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1988 Solum, J., The Early Flute, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992 Spitzer, J., and N. Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815, Oxford University Press, 2004 Stark, J., Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy, University of Toronto Press, 1999 Steblin, R., A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1983 Stowell, R., Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge University Press, 1985 (ed.), Performing Beethoven, Cambridge University Press, 1994 Strohm, R., Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997 Strunk, O. (ed.), rev. L. Treitler, Source Readings in Music History, New York and London, Norton, 1998 Talbot, M., Venetian Music in the Age of Vivaldi, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999 Tartini, G., Traité des agréments de la musique, Paris, 1771, trans. C. Girdlestone and ed. E. R. Jacobi, Celle and New York, Moeck, 1961 Thomas, D. A., Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785, Cambridge University Press, 2002 Todd, R. L., and P. Williams (eds.), Perspectives on Mozart Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1991 Tosi, P. F., Opinioni de’cantori antichi e moderni, o sieno osservazioni sopra il canto figurato, Bologna, [Lelio dalla Volpe], 1723 Tromlitz, J. G., Ausführlicher und gründlicher Unterricht die Flöte zu spielen, Leipzig, Böhme, 1791, trans. and ed. A. Powell as The Virtuoso Flute Player, Cambridge University Press, 1991 Türk, D. G., Clavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Clavierspielen für Lehrer und Lernende, Leipzig and Halle, Schwickert, Hemmerde und Schwetschte, 1789, trans. R. H. Haggh as School of Clavier Playing, or, Instructions in Playing the Clavier for Teachers and Students, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1982 Vallas, L., Un siècle de musique de théâtre à Lyons 1688–1789, Lyon, Masson, 1932 Vanscheeuwijck, M., ‘Recent re-evaluations of the baroque cello and what they might mean for performing the music of J. S. Bach’, Early Music, 38 (2010), 181–92 Vial, S., The Art of Musical Phrasing in the Eighteenth Century, University of Rochester Press, 2008 Wainwright, J., and P. Holman (eds.), From Renaissance to Baroque: Change in Instruments and Instrumental Music in the Seventeenth Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005 Walden, V., One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840, Cambridge University Press, 1998 Walls, P., ‘Violin fingering in the 18th century’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 300–15
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Part VI: Performance in the nineteenth century Applegate, C., Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St Matthew Passion, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2005 Arditi, L., My Reminiscences, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1896 Ashbrook, W., ‘The first singers of Tristan und Isolde’, Opera Quarterly, 3/4 (1985–6), 11–23 Auer, L., Violin Playing as I Teach It, New York, Stokes, 1921; repr. New York, Dover, 1980 Bach, A. [Albert Bernhard], On Musical Education and Vocal Culture, Edinburgh and London, Blackwood, 1883 Bacon, R. M., ‘Italian songs’ (unsigned review), Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 36 (1827), 542–3 Bailey, R., The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and a Study of Wagner’s Sketches and Drafts for the First Act, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1969 (ed.), Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from ‘Tristan and Isolde’, New York, Norton, 1985 Baines, A., Woodwind Instruments and their History, London, Faber, 1967 Brass Instruments: Their History and Development, London, Faber, 1976 Barnes, C. (trans. and ed.), Russian Piano School: Russian Pianists and Moscow Conservatoire Professors on the Art of the Piano, London, Kahn & Averill, 2007
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Baron, J. H., Intimate Music: A History of the Idea of Chamber Music, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press, 1998 Barth, G., The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1992 Bashford, C., John Ella and the Musical Union, Music and British Culture 1785–1914. Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, Oxford University Press, 2000 ‘The string quartet and society’, in R. Stowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 3–18 Beacham, R. C., Adolphe Appia, Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre, Philadelphia, PA, Harwood, 1994 Beethoven, L. van, The Letters of Beethoven, ed. E. Anderson, 3 vols., London, Macmillan, 1961 Bennett, J., A Short History of Cheap Music as Exemplified in the Records of the House of Novello, London and New York, Novello, 1887 Berlioz, H., Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, Op. 10, Paris, 1843, 2nd edn, 1855, trans. M. C. Clarke as A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, London, Novello & Ewer, 1882 The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. and ed. D. Cairns, London, Gollancz, 1969; repr. London, Sphere, 1990 A travers chants (Paris, 1862), trans. E. Csicsery-Ronay as The Art of Music and Other Essays, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994 Biba, O., ‘Concert life in Beethoven’s Vienna’, in R. Winter and B. Carr (eds.), Beethoven, Performers, and Critics, Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 77–93 ‘Schubert’s position in Viennese musical life’, 19th-Century Music, 3/2 (1979), 106–13 Bickley, N. (ed. and trans.), Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, London, Macmillan, 1914 Bloom, P. A., ‘The public for orchestral music in the nineteenth century’, in J. Peyser (ed.), The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, New York, Billboard, 2000, pp. 253–84 Blume, W. (ed.), Brahms in der Meininger Tradition: Seine Sinfonien und Haydn-Variationen in der Bezeichnung von Fritz Steinbach, Stuttgart, Suhrkamp, 1933 Borchard, B., Robert Schumann und Clara Wieck. Bedingungen künstlerischer Arbeit in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Weinheim and Basel, Beltz, 1985 Stimme und Geige. Amalie und Joseph Joachim, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, Böhlau, 2005 Borchmeyer, D., Das Theater Richard Wagners. Idee–Dichtung–Wirkung, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1982, trans. S. Spencer as Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, Oxford University Press, 1991 Botstein, L. ‘Listening through reading: musical literacy and the concert audience’, 19thCentury Music, 16/2 (1992), 129–45 Bowen, C. D., Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicolai Rubinstein, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1939 Bowen, J. A., ‘Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Wagner as conductors: the origins of the ideal of “fidelity to the composer”’, Performance Practice Review, 6/1 (1993), 77–88 ‘The rise of conducting’, in J. A. Bowen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 93–113 Bozarth, G. S., and S. H. Brady, ‘Brahms’s pianos’, in W. Frisch (ed.), Brahms and his World, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 49–64
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David, F., Violinschule. Méthode de violon, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1863; version with English translation Violinschule/Violin School, Leipzig and London, Augener and Breitkopf & Härtel, 1874 De Garaudé, A., Méthode complète de chant, Paris, L’auteur, 1825 Deaville, J., ‘The politics of Liszt’s virtuosity: new light on the dialectics of a cultural phenomenon’, in M. Saffle and R. Dalmonte (eds.), Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe: Music as a Mirror of Religious, Political, Cultural and Aesthetic Transformations, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press, 2003, pp. 115–42 Deutsch, O. (ed.), Franz Schubert’s Letters and Other Writings, trans. V. Saville, London, Faber & Gwyer, 1928 (ed.), Schubert: Memories by his Friends, trans. R. Ley and J. Nowell, New York, Macmillan, 1958 Dörffel, A., Geschichte der Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig vom 25. November 1781 bis 25. November 1881, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1884 Duleba, W., Wieniawski, trans. G. Czerny, Neptune City, NJ, Paganiniana, 1984 Duprez, G., L’art du chant, Paris, Brandus, 1849 Dürr, W., ‘Schubert and Johann Michael Vogl: a reappraisal’, 19th-Century Music, 3/2 (1979), 126–40 Eckardt, J., Ferdinand David und die Familie Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1888 Ehrlich, C., The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century. A Social History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985 The Piano: A History, London, Dent, 1976, rev. edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990 First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995 Eigeldinger, J.-J., Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by his Pupils, trans. N. Shohet, with K. Osostowicz and R. Howat, ed. R. Howat, Cambridge University Press, 1986 Ellis, A. J., ‘On the history of musical pitch’, Journal of the Society of the Arts, 28 (1880), 293–336 Ellis, K., Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2005 Elvers, R., Felix Mendelssohn: A Life in Letters, trans. C. Tomlinson, London, Cassell, 1986 Erler, H., Robert Schumanns Leben. Aus seinen Briefen, 2 vols., Berlin, Ries & Erler, 1887 Fauré, J.-B., La voix et le chant, Paris, Heugel, 1886 Aux jeunes chanteurs: notes et conseils, Paris, Heugel, 1898 Fay, A., Music-Study in Germany (1880), New York, Dover, 1965 Fifield, C., ‘Conducting Wagner: the search for Melos’, in B. Millington and S. Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 1–14 Finson, J. W., Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition: The Genesis of the First Symphony Op. 38, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989 Fleischmann, T., Aspects of the Liszt Tradition, ed. M. O’Neill, Aylesbury, Roberton, 1991 Flesch, C., The Memoirs of Carl Flesch, trans. H. Keller and ed. H. Keller and C. F. Flesch, London, Rockliff, 1957 Foster, M. B., The Philharmonic Society of London 1813–1912, London, Bodley Head, 1912 Frisch, W., Brahms: The Four Symphonies, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996
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García, M. Jr, Traité complet de l’art du chant en deux parties. Première partie, deuxième édition; seconde partie, première édition. Paris, L’auteur, 1847, facsimile edn, Geneva, Minkoff, 1985 Garden, E., Balakirev: A Critical Study of his Life and Music, London, Faber, 1967 Gerig, R. W., Famous Pianists and their Technique, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1976 Gibbs, C. H., ‘“Poor Schubert”: images and legends of the composer’, in C. H. Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 36–55 ‘“Just two words: enormous success.”: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts’, in C. H. Gibbs and D. Gooley (eds.), Franz Liszt and his World, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 167–230 Gilles, H. N., The Complete Vocal Instructor, Baltimore, MD, Willig, n.d. [c. 1814] Ginsburg, L., Ysaÿe, trans. X. M. Danko, ed. H. R. Axelrod, Neptune City, NJ, Paganiniana, 1980 Goldberg, H., Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, Oxford University Press, 2008 Goldschmidt, O., H. S. Holland, and W. S. Rockstro, Memoir of Madame Jenny LindGoldschmidt: Her Early Art-Life and Dramatic Career, 1820–1851, London, Murray, 1891 Good, E. M., Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand, 2nd edn, Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press, 2001 Gooley, D., The Virtuoso Liszt, Cambridge University Press, 2004 Grey, T. S., Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, Cambridge University Press, 1995 (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, Cambridge University Press, 2008 Guhr, C., Ueber Paganinis Kunst die Violine zu spielen, ein Anhang zu jeder bis jetzt erschienenen Violinschule, Mainz, Schott, 1829 Gut, S., ‘Nationalism and supranationalism in Liszt’, Liszt Society Journal, 19 (1994), 28–35 Haas, F., Hans von Bülow. Leben und Wirken, Wilhelmshaven, Noetzel, 2002 Habeneck, F., Méthode théorique et pratique de violon, précédée des principes de musique et quelques notes en facsimile de l’écriture de Viotti, Paris, Canaux, 1845 Hallé, C., Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé being an autobiography (1819–1860) with correspondence and diaries, London, Smith, Elder & Co, 1896 Hamilton, K., After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Oxford University Press, 2008 Handlos, M., ‘Die Wiener Concerts Spirituels (1819–1848)’, in E. T. Hilscher (ed.), Musik in Österreich: Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Mitteleuropas; Theophil Antonicek zum 60. Geburtstag, Tutzing, Schneider, 1998, pp. 283–319 Hanslick, E., Geschichte des Concertwesens Wien, 2 vols., vol. 1, Vienna, Graumüller, 1869 ‘The Meiningen court orchestra’, in E. Hanslick, Music Criticisms 1846–99, trans. and ed. H. Pleasants, London, Penguin, 1950, pp. 231–5 Hanson, A. M., Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 1985 Harding, R., The Piano-Forte: Its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851, 2nd edn, Old Woking, Gresham, 1978 Harrandt, A., ‘Bruckner in Vienna’, trans. J. Williamson, in J. Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 26–37 Hartford, R. (ed.), Bayreuth: The Early Years [1876–1914]: An Account of the Early Decades of the Wagner Festival as seen by the Celebrated Visitors and Participants, London, Gollancz, 1980
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Haskell, H., The Early Music Revival: A History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988 Hellsberg, C., Demokratie der Könige: Die Geschichte der Wiener Philharmoniker, Zurich, Vienna and Mainz, Schweizer, Kermayr and Scheriau & Schott, 1992 Helms, H. G., H.-K. Metzger, and R. Rhien (eds.), ‘Ökonomische Bedingungen der musikalischen Produktion’, in H. G. Helms, Musik zwischen Geschäft und Unwahrheit, Musik-Konzepte 111, Munich, Edition Text + Kritik, 2001, pp. 27–82 Hennenberg, F., The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Leipzig, VEB, 1962 Hey, H. (ed.), Richard Wagner als Vortragsmeister 1864–1876: Erinnerungen von Julius Hey, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911 Hinrichsen, H., Musikalische Interpretation Hans von Bülow, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1999 Hoffmann, R. and K., Brahms als Pianist und Dirigent. Chronologie seines Wirkens als Interpret, Tutzing, Schneider, 2006 Holoman, D. K., ‘Performing Berlioz’, in P. Bloom (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 173–96 Hominick, I. G., ‘Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871), forgotten piano virtuoso: his career and musical contributions’, DMA thesis, Ohio State University (1991) Horton, J., ‘Bruckner and the symphony orchestra’, in J. Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 138–69 Howie, C., Anton Bruckner: A Documentary Biography, 2 vols., Lewiston, NY, Mellen, 2002 Hudson, R., Stolen Time. The History of Tempo Rubato, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994 Humphries, J., The Early Horn: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2000 Jensen, E. F., Schumann, Oxford University Press, 2005 Joachim, J., and A. Moser, Violinschule/Violin School, 3 vols., Berlin, Simrock, c. 1905 John, N. (ed.), Tristan and Isolde: English National Opera Guide 6, London, John Calder, 1981 Johnson, S., Bruckner Remembered, London, Faber, 1998 Jones, D. W., The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Kast, P. (ed.), Schumanns rheinische Jahre, Düsseldorf, Droste, 1981 Kendall, A., Paganini: A Biography, London, Chappell, 1982 Kolisch, R., ‘Tempo und Charakter in Beethovens Musik’, Die Reihe: Musik-Konzepte, 76/77, Munich, Richard Boorberg Verlag, 1992 Kopiez, R., A. C. Lehmann, and J. Klassen, ‘Clara Schumann’s collection of playbills: A historiometric analysis of life-span development, mobility, and repertoire canonization’, Poetics, 37/1 (2009), 50–73 Korstvedt, B. M., ‘Bruckner editions: the revolution revisited’, in J. Williamson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 121–37 Koury, D. J., Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century: Size, Proportions and Seating, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1986 Krebs, C. (ed.), Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel XVI: Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Philipp Spitta und Otto Dessoff, Berlin, Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft, 1922, repr. Tutzing, Schneider, 1974 Lamperti, F., Guida teorico-pratica-elementare per lo studio del canto, Milan, Ricordi, 1864 Latham, A., and R. Parker (eds.), Verdi in Performance, Oxford University Press, 2001 Laurence, D. H. (ed.), Shaw’s Music: The Complete Music Criticism, 3 vols., London, Bodley Head, 1981 Lawson, C., The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2000
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Lenz, W., The Great Piano Virtuosos from Personal Acquaintance: Liszt, Chopin, Thalberg, Henselt, trans. M. R. Baker, New York, Schirmer, 1899 Liszt, F., Letters of Franz Liszt, collected L. Mara, trans. C. Bache, 2 vols., London, Grevel, 1894 An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique 1835–1841, trans. and annotated C. Suttoni, University of Chicago Press, 1989 Litzmann, B., Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben, 3 vols., Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1920 Loesser, A., Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History, New York, Dover, 1990 Loos, H. (ed.), Robert Schumann: Interpretationen seiner Werke, 2 vols., Laaber, Laaber, 2005 Lott, R. A., From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland, Oxford University Press, 2003 Lutchmayer, K., ‘The Hexameron: wishful thinking, stylistic rivalry and Lisztian conquest in 1830s Paris’, Liszt Society Journal, 31 (2006), 3–33 MacDonald, H., ‘Berlioz and the metronome’, in P. Bloom (ed.), Berlioz Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 17–36 Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commentary, Cambridge University Press, 2003 McKay, E. N., The Impact of the New Pianofortes on Classical Keyboard Style: Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, West Hagley, Lynwood, 1987 Franz Schubert: A Biography, Oxford University Press, 1996 Mackerness, E. D., A Social History of English Music, Studies in Social History, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964 McVeigh, S., Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, Cambridge University Press, 1993 Maes, J., A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. A. J. Pomerans and E. Pomerans, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002 Magee, B., Aspects of Wagner, London, Alan Ross, 1968 Manning, B. L., The Hymns of Wesley and Watts, London, Epworth, 1942 Mara, L. (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Carl Alexander Grossherzog von Sachsen, Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1909 Marx, A. B., Die Kunst des Gesanges, theoretisch-praktisch, Berlin, Schlesinger, 1826 Mason, W., Memories of a Musical Life, New York, Century, 1901 May, F., The Life of Johannes Brahms, 2 vols., London, Arnold, 1905 The Girlhood of Clara Schumann, London, Edward Arnold, 1912 Mell, A., ‘Ferdinand David’, at Grove Online (accessed 20 March 2009) Mercadante, S., Andronico: Soave immagine d’amor . . . The Graces & Embellishments by S. Crivelli, London, Willis, n.d. [c. 1825] Andronico: soave immagine d’amor . . . con abbellimenti / del Sig.r G. Battista VELLUTI, Vienna, Mechetti, n.d. (Aurora No. 112) Millington, B. (ed.), The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, New York, Schirmer, 1992 Millington, B., and S. Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992 Milsom, D., Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance: An Examination of Style in Performance, 1850–1900, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003 Minorova, N. A., Moskovskaia Conservatoriia. Istoki (The Moscow Conservatoriia: Origins) (Moscow, 1995), available online at http://www.mosconsv.ru/page.phtml?11134 (accessed 24 June 2009)
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Mitchell, M., and A. Evans (eds.), Moriz Rosenthal in Word and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006 Mittag, E., The Vienna Philharmonic, trans. J. R. L. Orange and G. Morice, Vienna, Gerlach & Wiedling, 1950 Monk, W. H., Hymns Ancient and Modern, London, Novello, 1861 Montgomery, D., ‘Franz Schubert’s music in performance: a brief history of people, events, and issues’, in C. Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 270–83 Franz Schubert’s Music in Performance: Compositional Ideals, Notational Intent, Historical Realities, Pedagogical Foundations, Hillsdale, NY, Pendragon Press, 2003 Moser, A., Joseph Joachim ein Lebensbild, Berlin, Behrs, 1898 Muck, P., Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester, Erster Band: 1882–1922, Tutzing, Schneider, 1982 Musgrave, M., The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace, Cambridge University Press, 1994 ‘Changing values in nineteenth-century performance’, in C. Bashford and L. Langley (eds.), Music and British Culture 1785–1914. Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, Oxford University Press, 2000, ch. 8 ‘The musical legacy of the Great Exhibition’, in F. Bosbach and J. R. Davies (eds.), with S. Bennett, T. Brockmann and W. Filmer-Sankey, The Great Exhibition and its Legacy, Munich, Sauer, 2002 Musgrave, M., and B. D. Sherman (eds.), Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style, Cambridge University Press, 2003 Myers, A., ‘Design, technology and manufacture since 1800’, in T. Herbert and J. Wallace (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 115–30 Newman, E., The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols., London, Cassell, 1933–47, repr. Cambridge University Press, 1976, vol. 3: 1859–1866. Newman, W., Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing his Piano Music his Way, New York, Norton, 1988 Newmarch, R., Henry J. Wood, London, John Lane, 1904 Nichols, R., Mendelssohn Remembered, London, Faber, 1997 Nösselt, H.-J., Das Gewandhausorchester. Entstehung und Entwicklung eines Orchesters, Leipzig, Koehler & Amelang, 1943 Nottebohm, G., Beethoveniana, 2 vols., Leipzig, C. F. Peters, 1872 Ochs, S., Geschehenes Gesehenes, Leipzig, Grethlein, 1922 Ollivier, D. (ed.), Correspondance de Liszt et de la Comtesse d’Agoult, 1833–1840, Paris, Grasset, 1933 Pace, I., ‘Conventions, genres, practices in the performance of Liszt’s piano music’, Liszt Society Journal, 31 (2006), 70–103 ‘Conventions, genres, practices in the performance of Liszt’s piano music, part 2: Liszt and the style hongrois’, Liszt Society Journal, 32 (2007), 55–90 Brahms Performance Practice: Documentary, Analytic and Interpretive Approaches, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011 Instrumental Performance from the Congress of Vienna to the Berlin Philharmonic (forthcoming) Pascall, R., Playing Brahms: A Study in 19th-Century Performance Practice, University of Nottingham, 1991
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Index
Abbado, Claudio 11, 27, 84, 799, 813 Abbé le fils, l’, Joseph-Barnabé Saint-Sevin 88 Abreu, José Antonio 33 absolute music 45 Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) 43, 55, 476 Academy of Ancient Music 43, 101 accidentals 436 accounts 297 accuracy 16, 20 Adam, (Jean-) Louis 88, 127, 150 Adams, John 764 Adès, Thomas 5, 26, 762, 772 Adler, Guido 172 Adlung, Jakob 90 aesthetics 547 Africa 7 Agazzari, Agostino 86 agents 726 Agricola, Johann Friedrich 74, 121, 140, 516 Alagna, Roberto 755 Albert the Great 236 Alcaeus (of Mytilene) 210 Aldeburgh Festival 29 aleatoric music 132 Alkan, Charles-Valentin 128 Almanraeder, Carl 88 Alsop, Marin 729 Altenburg, Johann Ernst 88 amateur musicians 40, 41, 137, 152, 154, 267, 297, 304, 394, 488 Amati, Andrea and family 529 Ambros, August Wilhelm 95 America 6 Anderson, Julian 26 Andrews, Julie 756 Andriessen, Louis 764 Anonymous IV 256 Anvil, The (Basingstoke) 30 Aperghis, Georges 768 Apollo 211 Appia, Adolphe 707 appoggiaturas 121 apprenticeship 138
Aquila, Serafino dell’ [Serafino dei Ciminelli] 305 Arban, Jean-Baptiste 89 archives 297 Arezzo, Guido d’ 254 Aristotle 94, 236, 253, 283 Armstrong, Louis 73, 773 Arne, Thomas 55 arrangements 112, 193 Arts Council of Great Britain (now Arts Council England) 29, 32 Atherton, David 28 Auber, Daniel 59 audience/s 6, 10, 12, 16, 30, 31, 148, 480, 500, 608, 811 thirst for knowledge 825 Auer, Leopold 72, 96, 111 Austrian Empire 37 authenticity 25, 26, 62, 173, 377, 747 autobiographies 96 avant-garde 822 Avison, Charles 90 Babbitt, Milton 768 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 42, 80, 87, 97, 111, 119, 126, 127, 141, 159 Bach, Johann Christian 80 Bach, Johann Sebastian 18, 21, 68, 91, 94, 111, 116, 120, 180, 478, 599, 748 Bachmann, Werner 66 Baermann, Carl 88 Baez, Joan 750 Baillie, Isobel 756 Baillot, Pierre Marie François de Sales 88, 150 Bairstow, Edward 5 Baker, Janet 755, 766 Balfe, Michael 55 Banchieri, Adriano 86 Barbara, Joan La 767 Barber, Samuel 758, 761, 767 Barbican Centre (London) 31, 32 Barclay, Robert 560 Bardi, Count Giovanni de 119
[894]
Index Barenboim, Daniel 751 Bärenreiter 11 Baroque era 119, 123 Baroque music 378, 379 Barry, Gerald 762 Bartók, Béla 21, 70, 754 Bassano, Giovanni 145 Baudiot, Charles Nicolas 88 Bax, Arnold 5 Bayly, Anselm 120 Bayreuth 595, 696, 705 Festspielhaus 77, 721 BBC 8, 21, 22, 34, 61, 825 BBC Proms 4, 8, 21, 24, 28, 31, 32, 33, 178, 205, 808, 819 BBC Radio 3 8, 820 BBC Symphony Orchestra 10, 167 BBC Third Programme 8, 21 Beach Boys, The 774 Beardslee, Bethany 765, 768 Beatles, The 23, 41, 47, 62, 73 Becker, Ferdinand 153 Bedford, Luke 26 Beecham, Thomas 7, 22 Beethoven, Ludwig van 10, 18, 21, 27, 45, 49, 65, 76, 79, 96, 97, 105, 113, 116, 118, 124, 130, 131, 133, 150, 151, 170, 187, 644, 751 fidelity to score 644 size of orchestras 644 string quartets 591 Symphony No. 3 151 Symphony No. 5 10 Symphony No. 7 10–11 Symphony No. 9 7, 8, 18 bel canto 44, 89, 122, 403, 754 Benda, Franz 80 Bennett, Richard Rodney 763 Berberian, Cathy 133, 744, 765, 773 Berg, Alban 27, 752, 758, 762, 767 Bergonzi, Carlo 756 Berio, Luciano 133, 736, 744, 765, 767, 769, 775, 782 Bériot, Charles-Auguste de 88 Berkeley, Lennox 766 Berlin 48 Berlin City Council 825 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 11, 23, 27, 84, 602, 748, 799, 813 Berlin Staatskapelle 10 Berlin Wall 8 Berlioz, Hector 77, 91, 96, 100, 114, 127, 128, 149, 177, 661 Berman, Boris 159 Bernac, Pierre 766 Bernstein, Leonard 8, 48, 84 Berr, Friedrich 88
895 big band music 59 biographies 96 Birnbaum, Johann Abraham 120 Birtwistle, Harrison 26, 28, 761, 763, 767, 769, 772 Björk 770 Blume, Walter 84 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Torquatus Serverinus 94, 161, 231, 236 Böhm, Karl 555 Boieldieu, François-Adrien 149 Bolcom, William 765 Bologna Declaration 166 Bolton, Ivor 27 Bonnet-Bourdelot, Pierre 95 Booth, Webster 755 Boston Symphony Orchestra 601 Boulez, Pierre 21, 22, 25, 27, 759, 763, 7 67, 799 Boult, Adrian 21, 22 bourgeois 36 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra 29 Bradford Chorus 187 Brahms, Johannes 18, 27, 84, 85, 96, 97, 103, 108, 132, 682 Brandolini, Lippo 306, 310 brass bands 176, 183, 193 Besses o’ th’ Barn 193 Cyfarthfa Brass Band 195 Braxton, Anthony 745 Brendel, Franz 153 Bridge, Frank 759 Bridgetower, George Augustus Polgreen 118, 119 Bridgewater Hall (Manchester) 30 Britain 30, 37, 40, 52, 135, 140, 173 Britten, Benjamin 22, 753, 758, 763, 766, 767, 772, 775, 776 broadcasting 20, 22, 185, 824 Brod, Henri 88 Brown, Clive 554 Brown, Howard Mayer 73 Brown, John 95 Bruckner, Anton 682 Bryars, Gavin 745 Budapest Festival Orchestra 27 Bülow, Hans von 84, 681, 730 Burney, Charles 18, 95, 97, 113, 146, 502 Burney, Fanny 98 Busoni, Ferruccio Benvenuto 180, 766 Butt, Clara 756 Buxtehude, Dieterich 112 Byrd, William 5 Byrne, David 3 Caballé, Monserrat 756 Caccini, Giulio 324, 326, 399
896 cadenzas 122, 515, 628 Cage, John 49, 133, 745, 749, 760, 772, 779, 782 Callas, Maria 23, 756 Callender, Red 73 Cambridge 162 canon 18, 19, 24, 178, 179, 202 Cardano, Girolamo 320 Cardew, Cornelius 745, 791 Cardus, Neville 14 Carewe, John 799 Carissimi, Giacomo 97 Carlisle House 480 Carreras, José 748, 756 Carter, Elliott 46, 761, 763 Cartier, Jean-Baptiste 88 Caruso, Enrico 20, 730, 755 Casals, Pablo 740 castrato 398, 413, 415, 508, 525 Catel, Charles-Simon 88 cathedral/s 5, 17, 43 Ceballos, Rodrigo de 355 Chaliapin, Feodor 755 chamber music 38, 40, 321, 663 Chamber Orchestra of Europe 27 Chambonnières, Jacques Champion de 111 chanson 300 chant 320 Chapel Royal 43, 412 Charlemagne 244 CHARM (AHRC Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music) 13, 15 Cherubini, Luigi 49, 80, 149 Chevalier, Maurice 774 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 23, 601 China 7, 135, 826 Chitarino, Pietro Bono dal 306 choice 9 Chopin, Frédéric 15, 117, 122, 123, 127, 150 choral music 212, 333, 587, 598, 774 choirboys 402, 411 choral societies 41, 183, 186 Christie, William 27, 28 Chrysostom, John 235 church/es 5, 161, 232, 267, 382, 477, 483, 577 church music 580, 586, 596 Cimarosa, Domenico 44 Cinti-Damoreau, Laure 100, 624 city 36, 265, 478 town musicians 385 City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra 29 City of London Sinfonia 32 Clark, Edward 21 Classic FM 8 Classical era 121, 122, 124
Index classical music 33, 34, 39, 49, 57, 58, 60, 62, 817, 821, 826, 831 Clement, Franz 751 Clementi, Muzio 88, 124 CMPCP (AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice) 13, 15 Coleman, Ornette 744 Coltrane, John 744 competition 135, 214 composer(s) 48, 105, 107, 110, 115, 119, 123, 129, 130, 132, 352, 377, 395, 425, 507, 583, 744, 783 composer’s intentions 107, 746 composer/performer relationship 783 writing for amateur choirs 775 composition 25, 31, 148, 163, 166, 169, 170, 173, 492, 738, 822 computing technology and 824 Concert of Ancient Music 38, 101 concert societies 38 Concert Spirituel 41, 43, 55, 93, 483, 502 Concertgebouw (Amsterdam) 23 concertos 39 concerts 37, 40, 49, 58, 480, 832 private concert 484, 590 public concert 480, 484, 564, 577, 587, 600 conductor/s 10, 22, 113, 148, 583, 603, 607, 717, 726 Congress of Vienna 57 conservatoires 13, 31, 143, 164, 728 conservatori 387 consort 308 contemporary music 5, 21, 26, 31, 60, 163, 167, 204, 758 Cook, Nicholas 12 Copland, Aaron 133, 761 Cordeval, Jehan de 337 Corelli, Arcangelo 114, 527 Op. 5 violin sonatas 527 Corri, Domenico 89 Coryat, Thomas 396, 397, 413 cosmopolitan 36, 38, 486 Cotto, Johannes 253 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts 29 counterpoint 345 Couperin, François 87, 121 Couperin, Louis 382, 428 court 36, 264, 380, 475, 577 Covent Garden. See Royal Opera House Coward, Noël 771 Cowell, Henry 749 creation 6 creativity 512 Creed, Marcus 813 Crist, Stephen 64
Index criticism 13 Crosby, Bing 733, 773 crossover 49, 62, 748 Crowest, Frederick 169 Crumb, George 43, 761 Crystal Palace (London) 598, 600 Csengery, Adrienne 767 curriculum 153, 165, 166 Czerny, Carl 88, 118, 119, 126, 150 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 28 Dallapiccola, Luigi 764, 767 dance music 59, 129 dances 430 Danish National Symphony Orchestra 820 Darmstadt 779, 788 Dart, Thurston 63 Dauprat, Louis François 88 Dausgaard, Thomas 820 David, Ferdinand 88, 153 Davies, Fanny 96 Davis, Colin 23 Dawson, Peter 755 Debussy, Claude 116, 128, 131, 132, 755, 758, 761, 771 Del Mar, Norman 799 Delius, Frederick 5, 774 Denver, John 748 Deutsche Grammophon 23, 799 diaries 97 Dibdin, Charles 55 Dionysus 211 Dittersdorf, Karl von 96 Dolmetsch, Arnold 559, 746 Domingo, Placido 748, 756 Donato, Baldassare 145 Donizetti, Gaetano 41 Doors, The 748 Dornhelm, Robert 757 Dorow, Dorothy 765 Dotzauer, Justus Johann 88 Dove, Jonathan 776 Dowland, John 162, 312, 748 downloads 821, 833 Dresden 37, 44, 52 Dreyfus, Laurence 10, 26 Drottningholm Theatre (Sweden) 495 Dudamel, Gustavo 33 Dufay, Guillaume 51, 299, 341 Dun, Tan 776 Duport, Jean-Louis 88 Dylan, Bob 750, 773 early music 62, 133, 746. See also historical performance Eddy, Nelson 755 Edison, Harry 73
897 Edison, Thomas 69, 725, 729 editions 81, 457 education 6, 30, 31, 33, 38, 135, 168, 265, 825, 827 Edwards, Sian 729 Ehrlich, Cyril 174, 179, 201 Eisler, Hanns 774 electronic music 132 Elgar, Edward 70, 552 Elizabeth I, Queen 103, 424 Ella, John 101 Ellington, Duke 73 embellishments See ornamentation embouchure 140 EMI 23 England 38, 51 English National Opera 5, 29, 167 English Touring Opera 29 Enlightenment 55 Ensemble Modern 749 entrepreneurship 42, 473, 482, 828 Esterházy 49 Estrada, Julio 823 ethnography 69 ethnomusicology 73 Europe 35, 38, 41, 51, 54, 114, 473, 818 European Union Youth Orchestra 33 expression 7, 119, 129, 321, 334, 399, 551, 714 Fabian, Dorottya 94 fake 15 Falla, Manuel de 21 Fanshawe, David 775 Far East 7, 826 Farinelli, Carlo Broschi 140, 490, 509 Fauré, Gabriel 128, 753, 758 Feder, Georg 81 Feldman, Morton 781 Fernandez, Jehan 337 Fernández, Pedro 355–8 Ferneyhough, Brian 759, 775, 787, 792 Ferrara 36 Ferrier, Kathleen 755 Fétis, François-Joseph 95, 100, 149 Fields, Gracie 756 film 72 Finer, Gem 3 Finnissy, Michael 745, 759 Finzi, Gerald 758 Fires of London 28 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich 23, 103, 766 Fischer, Ivan 27 Fitzgerald, Ella 773 Flagstad, Kirsten 758 Flesch, Carl 88, 96 Florence 36, 67
898 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus 95 Foss, Lukas 131 Foundling Hospital (London) 92, 146 France 38, 52, 474 French influence 435 freelance 166 French Revolution 57, 578 Freni, Mirella 756 Frescobaldi, Girolamo 427 Fricke, Richard 706 Froberger, Johann Jacob 112 frottola 306 Furtwängler, Wilhelm 7, 10, 28, 726 Fux, Johann Joseph 18 Gabrieli, Giovanni 18 Gailarti Mani, Silvia 391 Galeazzi, Francesco 88, 93 Gallay, Jacques François 89 García (the elder), Manuel 118, 142, 159, 623, 641 García II (the younger), Manuel 89, 118, 142 Garden, Mary 754 Gardiner, John Eliot 23, 27, 205, 449 Garland, Judy 773 Gasparini, Francesco 86 Geldof, Bob 750 Geminiani, Francesco 87, 113 genre 430 German Democratic Republic 61 Germany 29, 37, 44, 51, 53 Gershwin, George 4, 749, 752 Gewandhaus (Leipzig) 19, 43, 76, 77, 93, 101, 151, 481, 504, 581, 600 Gheorghiu, Angela 755 Gibson, Alexander 799 Gielen, Michael 799 Gigli, Beniamino 755 Gilbert and Sullivan 154, 181 Gillespie, Dizzy 731 Glass, Philip 43, 764 Globokar, Vinko 769 Glock, William 21, 28, 178, 779 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 48, 97, 113 Glyndebourne 5, 28 Glyndebourne Touring Opera 29 Goebbels, Heiner 4 Goldman, Friedrich 813 Golijov, Osvaldo 765 Gombert, Nicolas 355 Gossec, François 149 Gothic Voices 256 Gould, Glenn 24, 737, 764 Gounod, Charles 59, 177 Gowrie Report 164 Grainger, Percy 754 Greece, ancient 136, 209
Index pantomime in 221 theatre in 218 Gregory of Tours 237 Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste 96 Gritton, Susan 164 Grocheio, Johannes de 233, 241, 246, 263, 282 Grove, George, Dictionary of Music and Musicians 203 Gruber, Heinz Karl 769 Gubaidulina, Sofia 776 Guerrero, Francisco 353 Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London) 31, 32 guilds 138 Gulbenkian Foundation, Calouste 164 Gurney, Ivor 759 Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra 33 Habeneck, François 88, 151, 588, 651, 658, 659, 661, 662 Haitink, Bernard 23, 27 Halle, Adam de la 293 Hallé, Charles 48, 600 Hallé Orchestra, The (Manchester) 23, 29, 825 Hammond, Joan 755 Handel, George Frideric 5, 21, 28, 39, 41, 79, 92, 93, 96, 101, 113, 189, 483, 598 Messiah 102, 171, 185, 187 oratorios 598 Hanover Square Rooms (London) 76, 481, 496, 499 Hanslick, Eduard 100, 108 Harding, Daniel 27 harmony 166 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus 23, 25, 26, 27, 68, 150 Harris, Ellen 64 Hart, John 94 Hart, Roy 769 Hasse, Johann Adolf 48 Hatto, Joyce 15 Hawkins, John 18, 95 Haydn, Joseph 49, 65, 79, 80, 97, 110, 130 Haydon, Glen 64 Heifetz, Jascha 72, 740, 742, 832 Heinichen, Johann 86 Henle, Günter 81 Henschel, Helen 96 Henze, Hans Werner 22, 763, 766, 769 Herreweghe, Philippe 205 Hess, Ernst 147 Hess, Myra 7 Hey, Julius 71 Heyde, Georg 351 Heyworth, Peter 14 Hiller, Johann Adam 89, 516 Hindemith, Paul 21, 571, 763, 764, 788, 833
Index historically informed performance 24, 26, 63, 167, 205, 377, 555 integration of 829 historicism 378 Hockings, David 808 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 100, 550 Hofmann, Josef 729 Hogwood, Christopher 27, 28, 556, 746 Holiday, Billie 73, 773 Holliger, Heinz 744 Holst, Gustav 776 Holywell Music Room 163, 495 Honegger, Arthur 771 Horne, Marilyn 638, 757 Hotteterre, Jacques Martin 87, 527, 540 Howells, Herbert 5 Huddersfield Choral Society 187 Hugot, Antoine 88 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk 88, 125 Huray, Peter le 94 Hüsch, Gerard 103 hymn 137 iconography 73, 297 improvisation 31, 105, 112, 117, 120, 121, 160, 304, 310, 346, 408, 409, 423, 513, 741 influence 16 instrumental music 40, 44, 335, 353, 565, 670 instrumentation, 359, 463, 800 instruments 65, 66, 313, 335, 347, 527, 718, 826, 830 bowed 270 collections of 67 copies of original 68, 559 medieval 261 plucked 268 preservation of 68 woodwind 274 International Society for Contemporary Music 61 Internet 737, 750, 751, 820, 833 interpretation 152, 558, 832 iPod 8, 24 Ireland, John 759 Isidore of Seville 236 Israel Philharmonic 825 Italy 39, 44, 48, 51, 53 iTunes 15 Ives, Charles 761 Janáček, Leoš 5, 752, 761 Jancourt, Eugène 88 Jansons, Mariss 23 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 160, 741 Jarrett, Keith 748
899 jazz 5, 9, 49, 59, 62, 72, 507, 512, 731, 741, 744, 773, 817 Jerome of Moravia 263 Jesus Christ 573 Joachim, Joseph 43, 72, 153, 741 John of Salisbury 255 Josquin des Prez 49, 51, 111, 298, 305, 355 Juilliard Quartet 46, 784 Jullien, Louis 43 Junghänel, Konrad 468 Junker, Carl Ludwig 93 Jurowski, Vladimir 27 Kagel, Mauricio 769 Kalbeck, Max 85 Kandinsky, Wassily 778 Karajan, Herbert von 7, 10, 22, 556, 726 Kärtnertortheater 93 Kastner, Jean-Georges 91 Kelly, Michael 96 Kennedy, Nigel 748 Kessel, Barney 73 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali 749 King, Matthew 776 King’s Singers, The 774 King’s Theatre (London) 43, 55, 76 Kircher, Athanasius 90 Kirkby, Emma 746, 756 Kirnberger, Johann Philipp 123 Kleiber, Carlos 11 Klemperer, Otto 23, 73 Klosé, Hyacinthe 88 Knussen, Oliver 26 Koch, Heinrich Christoph 93, 98 Kodály Method 776 Kodály, Zoltán 160, 775 Kolisch Quartet 784 Konrad of Megenberg 263, 274 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 752 Kraus, Felix von 71 Kreisler, Fritz 72 Krenek, Ernst 752 Kreutzer, Rodolphe 88, 150 Kronos Quartet 48 Kuhnau, Johann 110 Kummer, Friedrich August 88 Kurtág, György 767 La Borde, Jean-Benjamin de 95 Labarre, Théodore 88 Lachenmann, Helmut 765 Landini, Francesco 106, 109 Landon, H(oward) C(handler) Robbins 552 Landowska, Wanda, 378 Lanfranco, Giovanni 90 Lang Lang 827 Lasso, Orlando di 42
900 Last.fm 821 Latin chant 232 Lebègue, Nicolas 392 Lebrecht, Norman 739, 818 Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel 13, 24, 72, 103, 287, 293 Lefèvre, Xavier 88, 150 Legge, Walter 20 Lehmann, Lilli 72, 702 Lehmann, Lotte 103 Leipzig 151, 663 Leipzig Conservatoire 151 Lenin, Vladimir 160 Lenya, Lotte 766 Lenz, Wilhelm von 123 Leonhardt, Gustav 26, 110 Léonin 256 Les arts florissants 28 Leschetizky, Theodor 111, 122 Levasseur, Jean-Henri 88 Lichnowsky, Prince Carl 591 Ligeti, György 767, 768, 771 Lighthouse, The (Poole) 30 Lind, Jenny 58 Lindberg, Christian 769 lip-synching 8 listening 6, 7, 9, 20, 49, 62, 169, 377, 473, 498, 571, 730, 757, 804, 823, 831 Liszt, Franz 37, 46, 47, 49, 57, 100, 108, 109, 117, 152, 579, 594, 652, 671 liturgy 241, 474 liturgical drama 253 liturgical music 454, 598 live music 23, 34, 132, 206, 473 live performance 20, 24, 735, 822, 833 ‘live’ recordings 15, 736 Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra 29 local 36 location 35, 36 Lolli, Antonio 487 London 4, 7, 19, 30, 38, 39, 40, 48, 480 London Philharmonic Orchestra 23, 29 London Sinfonietta 28, 31 London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) 23, 27, 29, 31, 32, 167, 182, 727 Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra 40 Louis XIV 381, 424, 476 Lowry, The (Salford) 30 LSO Discovery 31 LSO Live 23 Lucier, Alvin 779 Ludwig, Friedrich 280 lullaby 235 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 43, 56, 114, 386, 410 Luppi, Leonora 391 Lutosławski, Witold 772
Index Lutyens, Elisabeth 772 Ma, Yo-Yo 749 Maazel, Lorin 28 McCormack, John 755 McCreesh, Paul 454, 468 MacDonald, Jeanette 755 Mace, Thomas 118 Machaut, Guillaume de 22, 65, 117, 279 ballade 34 279 Voir Dit 279 Machover, Tod 823 Mackerras, Charles 7, 84, 554 MacMillan, James 776 Maderna, Bruno 765, 799 madrigal 303 Mahler Chamber Orchestra 27 Mahler, Gustav 46, 126, 132, 747, 754, 758, 767, 774 Malone, Gareth 777 Mancini, Giovanni Battista 89, 513 Mannes, David 96 Mannheim 37 Mannheim Orchestra 557 Marchesi, Luigi 80 Mariinsky Theatre 23 marketing 205 Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm 95, 130, 142 Marsalis, Wynton 748 Martin, Dean 733 Martini, Giovanni Battista 95 Marx, Adolf Bernhard 100 Matteis, Nicola 119 Mattheson, Johann 86, 90, 114 Matthews, Colin 26 Mattila, Karita 758 Maxwell Davies, Peter 28, 763, 766, 769, 771, 772, 831 medieval music 231, 249 performance of 260 Mehta, Zubin 84 Méhul, Étienne Nicolas 149 Meifred, Joseph Émile 88 Meiningen Orchestra 84 Melba, Nellie 9, 730 memoirs 96 memory 304, 344 Mendelssohn, Felix 59, 108, 114, 117, 150, 151, 153, 189, 664 Menotti, Gian Carlo 766 Menuhin, Yehudi 84, 749 Mercury, Freddie 756 Merman, Ethel 773 Mersenne, Marin 90, 95, 97 Messiaen, Olivier 21, 764, 767, 775 metronome 645, 662 metronome marks 85, 108, 125
Index Meyerbeer, Giacomo 57 microtones 793, 794 Middle Ages 65, 107, 137, 231, 248, 279, 322, 378 Mikuli, Karol 127 Milan 44 Milchmeyer, Johann Peter 88 minstrels 210, 264 Modena 67 ‘modern’ music 504 modernism 743, 778, 779 Moiseiwitsch, Benno 742 Monighetti, Ivan 160 Monk, Meredith 770 Monteverdi, Claudio 5, 22, 49, 97, 371, 377, 380, 409, 414, 426, 448 Vespers 448 monuments 77 Moore, Gerald 760 Morales, Cristobál 355 Moreschi, Alessandro 70 Morley, Thomas 162 Morris, Marlowe 73 Moscheles, Ignaz 153 Moscow Conservatoire 157 Mosel, Ignaz von 90, 124 Moser, Andreas 88 Moyse, Marcel 740 Mozarteum Orchestra 27 Mozart family 97 Mozart, Leopold 139, 142 Violinschule 87, 140, 563 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 7, 18, 28, 39, 56, 65, 80, 93, 113, 121, 124, 127, 138, 151, 482, 552, 573, 751 finances 570 historically informed performance of 556 key affects of symphonies 567 performances of symphonies 553 Piano Sonata in B flat major, K332 121 Symphony No. 39 in E flat, K543 552 Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K550 552 Symphony No. 41 in C major, K551 552 Mozarteum Orchestra 27 Müller, Iwan 88 Munich Opera House 27 Munrow, David 746 Musard, Philippe 42 music 9, 12, 817 ceremonial 307 church 321, 477 consumption 819 creative industries 821 democratisation of 200 digital delivery of 821 distribution 819 economic factors 817
901 for edification 240 funding for 31, 37, 817 future of 817 histories of 95 history 163 municipal music 197 oral transmission of 231 production 819 public 506 and science 421, 596 video material 822 for work 235 musica ficta 80, 107, 250 musicology 10, 13, 63, 69, 172, 183, 543, 785 music profession 387 musique concrète 736 Musorgsky, Modest 752 Naples 36, 44, 143 Nash, Heddle 755 national 36 National Endowment for the Arts 37, 61, 818 National Gallery 7 national schools 16 national style 95, 119 of instrument building 421 National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain 31, 32 Nazi 7, 709 NBC Symphony Orchestra 84 Netrebko, Anna 757 Neuhaus, Heinrich 158 new music 131 New Symphony Orchestra 182 New York Philharmonic Orchestra 601, 825 New York Philharmonic Society 43 Newman, Ernest 14 Newman, Robert 182 Niedt, Friedrich Erhard 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich 817 Nixon, Marni 756 noble 36 Nono, Luigi 763, 775 Norman, Jessye 758 Norrington, Roger 27, 28, 205 North, Nigel 746 North, Roger 95, 480 notation 11, 63, 78, 86, 105, 106, 118, 124, 132, 172, 219, 257, 304, 346, 348, 396, 408, 421, 772, 790, 793 graphic 791 Obouhov, Nicolas 760 Olivero, Magda 756 Olympic Games (Beijing, 2008) 8, 827 online 6
902 opera 5, 23, 28, 37, 39, 43, 45, 49, 52, 59, 62, 77, 386, 388, 398, 476, 479, 579, 593, 696, 753 venues for 582 opera buffa 45 opéra comique 487 Opéra-Comique (Paris) 29 opera houses 28, 36, 754, 757 Opera North 29 opera seria 45, 475 oral tradition 304 oratorio 41, 46, 144, 483 orchestra(s) 4, 28, 39, 494, 530, 588, 601, 678, 719, 728, 785, 825 budgets for 818 development of 658 film and studio work 727 training 728 unionisation of 726 Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment 27, 28 Orchestra Mozart 27 Oresme, Nicole 283 Orff, Carl 160, 775 organum 248 ornamentation 78, 80, 118, 119, 120, 150, 322, 344, 403–6, 408, 437, 513, 516, 624 Ortiz, Diego 86 ospedali 143, 145, 387, 388 Otter, Anne Sophie von 758 outreach 30, 31 Oxford 162 Ozi, Étienne 88, 150 Pacchierotti, Gasparo 525 Pachmann, Vladimir de 742 Pacifica Quartet 46 Paderewski, Ignacy 48, 96, 199, 742 Paganini, Nicolò 46, 47, 75, 109, 649 Page, Christopher 256 Palestrina, Giovanni da 299 Palsgrave, John 94 Pantheon (London) 76 Pappano, Antonio 23 Paris 44, 48, 97, 150 Paris Conservatoire 87, 148, 523, 542, 600 Paris Opéra 29, 56 Parker, Charlie 731 Parma 36 Parrott, Andrew 454 Pärt, Arvo 764 patronage 36, 479, 579 Patti, Adelina 72, 122, 619, 731 Paumann, Conrad 338 Pavarotti, Luciano 748, 756
Index payment 360 Pears, Peter 766 Penderecki, Krzysztof 775 Pepys, Samuel 97, 394 performance 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 22, 24, 25, 31, 34, 35, 40, 63, 103, 106, 116, 133, 148, 161, 169, 173, 209, 283, 297, 473, 497, 755 aesthetics of 738 contemporary descriptions of 396 first 592 history of music as 738 precision of 738 sources for 85 technique 544 venues for 76 vocal 318, 829 vocalism 611 performance practice 70, 71, 72, 106, 261, 329, 343, 448, 785 performance style 13, 17, 18, 27, 72, 104 performer(s) 12, 20, 48, 63, 105, 112, 118, 119, 123, 129, 130, 132, 156, 169, 204, 253, 394, 507, 543, 705, 783, 785, 817, 827 adaptability of 830 career management 726 demands on 802 performer/composer relationship 783 performers’ experience 828 travelling 605, 725 periodicals 100 Pérotin 256 Perrin, Pierre 43 Petri, Johann Samuel 93 Petrucci, Ottaviano Odhecaton A 311 Philharmonia Orchestra 20, 29 Philharmonic Society of London 43, 77, 186, 600 Philip, Robert 9, 20, 832 philology 10 phonograph 62, 725, 729 Piaf, Edith 773, 774 Piatti, Alfredo 88 Pierrot Players 28 Pietà 144 Pietrobono de Burzellis 338 Pinnock, Trevor 27 pitch 443, 459, 605, 614, 801 plainchant 248 Plato 94, 136, 212, 253 Play of Daniel, The 253 Pleyel, Camille 105 Pleyel, Marie 46 Plutarch 215 poetry 210
Index Pokrovsky, Dimitri 747 politics 35, 53, 474 Polk, Keith 265 polyphony 232, 254, 329, 353 popular music 33, 43, 62, 73, 817, 831 Porpora, Nicola 145 portamento 236, 514, 640, 716, 741 Porter, Andrew 14 Poulenc, Francis 756, 758, 766 Poulin, Pamela 147 practising 6 Praetorius, Michael 74, 90, 462 Prague 38 Prague Chamber Orchestra 555 presentism 378 Presley, Elvis 47 Prez, Josquin des. See Josquin des Prez printing 171, 175, 488 production 35, 40, 42 professional musicians 40, 41, 137, 152, 167, 176, 297, 488, 497, 589 professionalisation 394 programmes 45, 101, 178, 197, 198, 592 programming 192, 498, 820, 826 Prokofiev, Sergei 21, 157, 752 Proms. See BBC Proms Prussian Court Orchestra 45 psalm 137 publishing 42 Puccini, Giacomo 752, 755, 775 Purcell, Henry 5, 28, 410 Quantz, Johann Joachim 87, 89, 92, 93, 114, 118, 119, 120, 129, 139, 141, 548 Queen 770 Queen’s Hall (London) 76 Queen’s Hall Orchestra (London) 182, 726 Quilter, Roger 759 Rachmaninov, Sergei 70, 742, 744, 758, 761 radio 8, 21, 22, 37, 62, 753, 812 Rainier, Priaulx 766 Rash, Torston 5 Rasi, Francesco 380, 388 Rattle, Simon 17, 23, 27, 28 Ravel, Maurice 128, 753, 758, 767 Razzi, Giacomo 97 reception 6, 19 recitative 399 record companies 205, 725, 735 recording technology 172, 725 recordings 9, 13, 20, 21, 22, 62, 69, 204, 611, 612, 755, 812, 824, 832 archives of 70, 73 early 731 editing 734
903 culture industries 725 industry 820 learning from 731 limitations of acoustic 612 recording studio 166, 737, 755 Rees, Abraham 98 Reger, Max 153 Reggio, Pietro 393 Reich, Steve 736, 764, 779 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich 93 Reimann, Aribert 766 religion 229 religious music See church music Renaissance 51, 107, 141, 297, 318, 378 Renzi, Anna 419 repertoire 4, 5, 6, 17, 19, 21, 24, 38, 65, 178, 180, 189, 206, 591, 605, 678 rhythm 801 rhythmic interpretation 431 Richard, Cliff 23 Ries, Ferdinand 77 Rihm, Wolfgang 776 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 91 Robeson, Paul 773 rock music 41, 47, 49, 59, 62 Rode, (Jacques) Pierre 88, 150 Rogers and Hammerstein 4 Rohan, Jindřich 734 Rolling Stones, The 41 Romberg, Bernhard 88 Rome, ancient 137, 209, 224 Rorem, Ned 758 Rosé, Arnold 741 Rosé Quartet 784 Rosen, Charles 14 Ross, Alex 818 Rossini, Gioachino 41, 45, 57, 59, 122 Rostropovich, Mstislav 157, 160, 750 Roundhouse, The (London) 3, 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 98 Royal Academy of Music (London) 31, 43, 142, 146, 154 Royal Albert Hall (London) 4, 31, 808 Royal College of Music (London) 164, 166, 201 Royal Opera House (Covent Garden, London) 5, 28, 29 Royal Philharmonic Society 19 rubato 127, 512, 638, 717, 741 Rubinstein, Anton 48, 152, 157, 688 Rubinstein, Artur 72 Russia 135, 687 Rutter, John 5 sacred music 39, 51, 299, 329, 448 Sadler’s Wells Opera 29 Sage (Gateshead) 29, 30
904 Saint-Lambert, Michel de 123 Salonen, Esa-Pekka 27 Salzburg Opera House 27 San Marco (Venice) 145 Sargent, Malcolm 21, 22 Satie, Erik 767 Scarlatti, Domenico 109, 478 Scelsi, Giacinto 768, 795 Scheibe, Johann Adolph 100, 120 Schering, Arnold 153 Schlesinger, Moritz Adolf (Maurice) 100 Schmitz, Oscar 173 Schnabel, Artur 47, 131 Schoenberg, Arnold 21, 27, 60, 61, 115, 129, 131, 132, 743, 747, 752, 753, 758, 770, 772, 774, 775, 778, 784 Schop, Johann 390 Schreker, Franz 752 Schubert, Franz 103, 131, 646 Schuller, Gunther 749 Schulz, Johann Abraham Peter 130 Schumann, Clara 46, 47, 48, 152 Schumann, Elisabeth 103 Schumann, Robert 100, 108, 115, 130, 152, 667 Schumann-Heink, Ernstine 71, 713 Schuppanzigh, Ignaz 591 Schütz, Heinrich 18, 382, 396 Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth 103, 766 score(s) 6, 9, 10, 105, 107, 128, 132, 170, 714 Scorpions, The 748 Scottish Chamber Orchestra 84, 554 Scottish National Symphony Orchestra 808 Scotto, Renata 756 Scriabin, Alexander 157 scuole Eugeniane 143 secular music 51, 300, 329 Segovia, Andrés Torres 740 Selfridge-Field, Eleanor 69 Sellner, Joseph 88 Seville Cathedral 353 Shakespeare, William 304, 573 Shankar, Ravi 749 Shaw, George Bernard 14, 100 Shawe-Taylor, Desmond 14 Shield, William 55 Shostakovich, Dmitri 748, 752, 761, 766 Sibelius, Jean 744, 767 Silja, Anja 758 Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela 33 Sinatra, Frank 733, 773 singers 121, 388, 398, 464, 611, 631, 752, 755 and acting 417 bass 416 child 411 employment of 583 male sopranos 413
Index solo 398 soprano 411 tenor 416, 518 women 391, 398 singing 248, 506 Singspiel 488, 584 Sistema, El 33 Sistine Chapel 383 Slonimsky, Nicolas 60 Smalley, Roger 128, 132 Smart, George 101 Smith, Bessie 73 Smyth, Ethel 96 Snape Maltings (Aldeburgh) 30 Snowman, Nicholas 28 Société des Concerts (Paris) 43 Société Nationale de Musique 61 Society for Private Performances (Vienna) 61 Söderström, Elisabeth 758 Solomon, Yonty 168 Sondheim, Stephen 4, 774 Sophocles 210 sound 10 Southbank Centre (London) 29, 33 Spalding, Albert 96 Sperry, Paul 766 Spohr, Louis 37, 76, 88, 96, 114, 150, 648, 659, 783 Spotify 8, 821 Sprechstimme 743, 770 St Andrew’s Hall (Glasgow) 808 St Mark’s Basilica 382, 449 St Petersburg Conservatoire 151, 157 Stadler, Anton 147, 751 Steffani, Agostino 5 Steinbach, Fritz 84, 96, 685 Sting 748 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 21, 736, 745, 747, 759, 763, 775, 798 Gruppen für drei Orchester 798 performances of 802 recordings of 799 serial process of 804 Stokowski, Leopold 20, 726 Stradivari, Antonio 68, 529 Strassburg, Gottfried von 98, 698 Strauss, Richard 84, 91, 717, 752, 753, 758, 762, 767, 771 Stravinsky, Igor 60, 70, 125, 132, 743, 753, 762, 775 Streisand, Barbra 773 string quartets 39, 44 Strozzi, Giulio 419 Stuttgart 37 Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra 27 style 507, 511, 543 Subotnik, Morton 767
Index Sulzer, Johann Georg 98 Suzuki method 161 Swarowsky, Hans 84 Swayne, Giles 776 Sweelinck, Jan Pieterszoon 385 Swieten, Gottfried van 503 Swingle Singers, The 774 symphonies 39, 46 Symphony Hall (Birmingham) 30 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 244 Taillefer 240, 251 Tallis, Thomas 5 Tartini, Giuseppe 478 Taruskin, Richard 16, 65, 559 taste(s) 7, 20, 21, 22, 27, 35, 38, 45, 54, 70, 102, 134, 150, 174, 181, 197, 253, 256, 507, 510 Tauber, Richard 773 Tavener, John 764, 776 Taylor, Cecil 745 teaching 16, 18, 136, 166, 523 technology 8, 15, 17, 62, 204, 206, 756, 819 Telemann, Georg Philipp 80, 481 television 24, 34, 820 temperaments 446, 533 tempo 105, 107, 115, 123, 125, 129, 426, 512, 606, 803 Terfel, Bryn 757 Teyte, Maggie 754 Thalberg, Sigismond 57, 654 Theater am Gänsemarkt (Hamburg) 386 Theater an der Wien (Vienna) 592 theatre 246, 412, 417 theory 148, 152, 166, 250 Third Reich 61 Thomas, Mary 766 Thomas of Chobham 252 Thompson, Virgil 14 Ticciati, Robin 27 Tilson Thomas, Michael 751 timbre 256, 823 vocal 615 time 3 Tinctoris, Johannes 109, 344 Tippett, Michael 22, 758, 763, 766 Tomes, Susan 734 Tomkins, Thomas 5 Tomlinson, John 767 Tooley’s Review of Music Conservatoires, Sir John 164 Toscanini, Arturo 7, 10, 11, 22, 84, 707 Tosi, Pier Francesco 87, 121, 399, 417, 510 Tourte, François 530 Tovey, Donald 14 tradition 16, 17, 35 training See education
905 transposition 458 treatises 86, 87, 88, 90, 140, 172, 248, 297, 396, 508, 523, 540, 622 trills 318 Tromlitz, Johann Georg 88 troubadours 137 Tudor, David 49, 133, 782 tuning 258, 533 Pythagorean 259 Türk, Daniel Gottlob 88, 122, 126, 141 Turnage, Mark-Anthony 26, 763 Turner, Eva 754 Tye, Christopher 5 UK See Britain Unger, Georg 71 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 61 United States of America 37, 41, 61, 135 Universal Edition 799 universities 13, 161 Upshaw, Dawn 766 Urtext 81, 180 Varèse, Edgard 115, 736, 767 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 767, 771, 775, 776 Venables, Leonard 190 Venice 36, 38, 44, 52, 67, 143 venues 495, 601 sonority of 495 Verdi, Giuseppe 41, 49, 93, 115, 193, 593 vernacular song 232 Versailles 381 vibrato 71, 72, 205, 318, 613, 637, 715 Victoria, Tomás Luis de 80 video 73 Vienna 17, 44, 116, 643 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra 17, 19, 23, 27, 41, 43, 84, 679, 825 Villazón, Rolando 757 Vinci, Leonardo da 305 Viotti, Giovanni Battista 44 virtuosity 43, 46, 47, 48, 117, 122, 156, 180, 213, 337, 420, 593, 605, 783 extended techniques 779 hypervirtuosity 744 piano 651 violin 648 Vishnevskaya, Galina 766 Vivaldi, Antonio 112, 146, 477 vocal music 40, 44, 271 Vyner, Michael 28 Wagner, Cosima 706 Wagner, Richard 10, 18, 49, 71, 77, 85, 91, 96, 100, 190, 194, 573, 585, 593, 696 orchestral instruments 718
906 Wagner, Richard (cont.) singers 711 Tristan und Isolde 696, 701, 705 Wagner, Wieland 709 Wagner, Wolfgang 710 Wallace, Vincent 59 Walter, Bruno 730 Walton, William 758, 766, 771, 775 Warlock, Peter 759 Weber, Carl Maria von 100 Webern, Anton 128, 132, 759, 775, 787 Weikert, Ralf 84 Weill, Kurt 5, 766, 774 Weimar 153 Weingartner, Felix 91 Weir, Judith 763, 768 Welsh National Opera 29 Werckmeister, Andreas 86 Wesley, Samuel 163 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra 751 Western art music 73, 825 Western music 4, 105, 135, 822 Westminster Abbey 93 Whiteman, Paul 749 Whittall, Arnold 822 Wieck, Friedrich 665 Wiegold, Peter 31
Index Willaert, Adrian 316 Willcocks, David 5 Williamon, Aaron 828 Wishart, Trevor 771 Wolf, Hugo 754 Wood, Henry 7, 22, 182, 726 Woodfield, Ian 74 woodwind players 140 world music 33, 49 worship 6 Wunderlich, Johann Georg 88 Xenakis, Iannis 763, 775, 795 Young, Lester 73 Youth Music 33 YouTube 7, 9, 751, 800, 821 YouTube Symphony Orchestra 751 Ysaÿe, Eugène 741 Zabern, Conrad von 86, 319 Zacconi, Lodovico 90 Zarlino, Gioseffo 90, 315 Zaslaw, Neal 554 Ziegler, Anne 755 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois 763 Zinzendorf, Count Karl 97 Zorn, John 745 Zukerman, Pinchas 28
