The Wall Street Journal-20080125-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Entertainment - Culture -- Review - Books- What Music Has Lost
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080125
WEEKEND JOURNAL; Entertainment & Culture -- Review / Books: What Music Has Lost
AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE
By Kenneth Hamilton
(Oxford, 304 pages, $29.95)
For Nietzsche, life is a struggle between man's elevated, "Apollonian" inclinations, and his passionate, "Dionysian" ones. For Kenneth Hamilton, musical performance is, too. Modern performance, he believes, dwells too much in Apollo's realm, leaving out a great deal of what makes music compelling and profound. The subject of "After the Golden Age" is piano playing in particular, but its lessons may apply broadly to much of our current musical life.
Modern recordings, for all their glory, are part of the problem, Mr. Hamilton explains. They have conditioned audiences to expect an inhuman degree of performance accuracy, comparable to what a recording studio's editing team can produce by patching together the best moments from multiple takes. Critics, meanwhile, judge performances by the degree of textual fidelity to the "urtext" -- a score that tries to reproduce the composer's original intent.
Over-expressive interpretations are thus to be avoided. Mr. Hamilton quotes one famous pianist saying what many performers may well feel: "It is not considered 'smart' to give unfettered expression to one's deepest emotions." Such cautiousness, in Mr. Hamilton's view, has drained piano performances of much of their spontaneity and pleasure. Those of us who have sat through ponderous performances of any sort can sympathize.
Mr. Hamilton, himself a noted pianist, explains with considerable force and charm that things were not always so. Citing contemporaneous accounts, performance editions and early recordings, he shows that, until fairly recently, urtexts did not possess a binding authority, though they might well have been consulted. And performers used stylistic devices to communicate a work as vibrantly as their imagination and technique would allow. Finger faults -- "un- invited guests," as Anton Rubinstein called them -- were a natural and accepted result of this fierce need to re-create the musical daemon.
The stylistic devices were various. They included "preluding" -- that is, offering an improvised beginning to a work or movement. Mr. Hamilton explains that preluding, in a concert hall or salon, had the effect of settling the audience and of reminding it, along the way, that the pianist was a creative artist and not an automaton. Chopin's preludes, though played today as a stand-alone series, often functioned as preludes to other works, connected by a modulating transition. Paderewski played "a few chords extempore" before plunging into Beethoven's "Appassionata." The practice fell into disuse when studio recordings, in which preluding had no place, began to shape the expectations of audiences.
Pianists used the pedal in expressive ways, too -- with half- pedaling or syncopated pedaling, according to "taste and necessity." They "arpeggiated" chords -- rolling the notes rather than depressing them all at once -- or "dislocated" occasional melodic notes by sounding them slightly ahead or behind the beat. Like singers, they often ornamented the melodic line, and they performed their own concerto cadenzas.
There was a whole tradition of "concert improvisation." The young Franz Liszt would improvise on themes offered by concert-goers to such effect that his listeners were left in a state of delirium. Audiences in the 19th century, themselves less rigidly bound than audiences today, got into the spirit by voicing their enthusiasm when a passage moved them -- interrupting with applause or shouts and sometimes demanding, mid-concert, a reprise. They applauded between movements as well.
The performers of the Golden Age, Mr. Hamilton explains, cultivated a cantabile or "singing" tone, modeled after the leading singers of the early 19th century. He singles out, in this regard, Sigismond Thalberg, a Swiss-born virtuoso and Liszt's great rival. But the cantabile ideal fell afoul of early recording technology, which was too insensitive to capture its delicate beauty. Ferruccio Busoni's stentorian projection made the piano seem almost organ-like. It was he who set the tonal model for early recordings and shaped our modern idea of piano sound.
But technology is only part of the story. Mr. Hamilton shows how much of our present performing etiquette derives from Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, whose antipathy to interpretative license (and to Liszt, its exalted practitioner) bordered on the pathological. "It is inartistic, nay barbaric, to alter anything they [composers] have written, even by a single note," said Mendelssohn. His style demanded strict meter, the avoidance of expressive ritardandos, utter fidelity to the page and minimal pedal. No wonder, as Mr. Hamilton drily notes, that on the wall of the Leipzig Gewandhaus (where Mendelssohn played and conducted) was Seneca's apothegm: "Res severa est verum gaudium." That is: "True joy is a serious business."
The contrast with Liszt could hardly be more striking. The greatest pianist in history, Liszt was fundamentally self-taught. He improved upon or created outright much of the technique on which the Romantic repertoire is based, adapting his playing to the astonishing advances in piano technology and meeting the imperatives of his own protean personality. Liszt believed that written music was the imperfect notation of an abstract sonic ideal. It required, as Mr. Hamilton puts it, summarizing Liszt's view, "an inspired performer for realization." The urtext was important, but it was not the last word: The pianist's instinct for what the composer was trying to say carried considerable weight. Liszt is remembered today as the most important creator of the Golden Age, but it is the Mendelssohnian tradition that now holds sway.
Written after listening to one bad recital too many, "After the Golden Age" is a cri de coeur, lamenting the loss of a passionate, individualistic, free-form performance style -- Dionysus in the concert hall -- and arguing for its reconsideration. For all that, Mr. Hamilton's own prose style is gentle and deft. "Once a piece of music is released into the world," he explains, "it can take on a life of its own rather different from any its creator could have expected." More of the unexpected, he believes, is desperately needed.
---
Mr. Penrose writes about music for The New Criterion.
