Performance practice: the Book
In this post I’d like to recommend a book – the
book, in fact – on historical performance practice: Clive Brown’s Classical and
Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 (1999).
It’s what the title suggests: a comprehensive
survey of all the main and many of the minor aspects of the subject, with
substantial chapters on (among others) articulation, accentuation, phrasing,
tempo, tempo modification, ornamentation, vibrato, and portamento. The book
deals with vocal as well as instrumental music, and solo and orchestral as well
as chamber performance. But fortunately for us, it’s chamber music that tends
to dominate the discussion. Of the many musical examples from the works of
Beethoven, for example, the great majority are from the quartets and other
chamber works. The only important topic that Brown does not discuss is the
instruments themselves. Of course he’s well aware that they underwent major
changes (not always improvements) in this period, and that these influenced
performance practice, and vice versa. But to have discussed this vast subject
in any detail would have made the book impossibly long; readers seeking
information on instruments these will have to go elsewhere (such as the
relevant chapters in H.M. Brown and S. Sadie, eds, Performance Practice: Music
after 1600 (1989)). About the only performance issue that Brown neglects –
surprisingly - is repeats: where the rule is in fact very simple: play them!
The author draws on a remarkably wide range of
sources. The most important are the surprisingly numerous instrumental (and
vocal) treatises and instruction books, many of which were written by leading
performers (such as those for the violin by Pierre Baillot, Charles de Bériot,
and Joseph Joachim – not to mention the one by Leopold Mozart). The author has
also examined older editions of the musical works themselves - Ferdinand
David’s editions of the Beethoven quartets, for example - complete with
tell-tale fingerings and bowings (and sometimes inappropriate slurs and
dynamics). In addition there are many comments by musicians of the period in
letters and other printed texts. And from the years after 1900 there are the
early recordings, giving us the actual sounds musicians made and first-hand
evidence of contemporary performance practice. All in all, there turns out to
be more material, even for the pre-recording era, than might have been
expected.
The great strength of the book is simply that
it tells us most of the things we need to know – including some we didn’t know
we needed to know! – about the nuts and bolts of musical performance during
what for most of us is the golden age of chamber music. The author is thorough
in his approach and doesn’t neglect the basics. Notation, for example, may seem
too obvious to be worth mentioning. But the author devotes considerable space
to it, and rightly so. I suspect that few amateur players (or professionals,
for that matter) are aware of how even the most familiar signs – including f,
fp, sf, and sfz – changed their meaning over time and were used in different
ways by different composers. On questions of tempo, Brown gives us a detailed
discussion, extending over a hundred pages, of all of the major tempo terms,
what they meant and the changes in their use and meaning during the period.
(Andante – with that baffling variant, andantino - alone receives ten
illuminating pages; no more excuses for getting it wrong!) It also includes a
section on the metronome, explaining its contemporary uses and its effect on
older approaches to the setting of tempo. The chapter on tempo modification is
one of the most instructive of all. Nowadays, anyone ‘indulging’ in rubato is
liable to have some Beckmesser rapping them on the knuckles: but before 1900
rubato was used imaginatively and expressively (and sometimes excessively, no
doubt) and was one of the most distinctive features of musical performance. A
chapter on string bowing has much to teach us about the vexed question of dots
and strokes and about the surprising preference in the early nineteenth century
for on-the-string bowing in passages where we would automatically play
off-the-string (not least in Beethoven’s quartets). String players (and some of
their woodwind colleagues) will also find food for thought in the detailed
chapters on vibrato and portamento. Perhaps the most striking characteristics
of musical performance between 1750 and 1900 was that players used very little
vibrato and a great deal of portamento: the very opposite of the normal
practice today. More generally, the book is valuable because it shows us the
many things musicians did that were not written down. (Such as the late
eighteenth century practice, discussed in a previous post, of playing notes
shorter than they were written.) These were the things that a composer did not
bother to spell out in his score because they were the current practice and
could be taken for granted. Though composers became more precise in their
instructions to performers in the nineteenth century, even then the written
score was never the whole story. In giving us the unwritten as well as the
written rules, Brown opens up an entire lost world of performance practice.
His
book is long (over 600 pages), serious, and scholarly. Yet it’s well-written
and easy to follow: the material is clearly laid out and there are many musical
examples. Brown is careful in his approach, reaching conclusions where the
evidence is clear but never over-simplifying things; he’s always aware of the
exceptions, the complexities, the cross-currents. He is one of the leading
authorities on the subject and his book inspires confidence. Another of his
virtues is that he has no obvious axe to grind. He’s a historian seeking the
truth, not an evangelist seeking converts, or a preacher denouncing the evils
of rigid tempos or excessive vibrato. Coolly and calmly he describes how music
was performed in the past and leaves it to us to decide what (if anything) we
want to do about it in our own playing.
Yet even in a long book Brown can’t tell us everything, and readers seeking more detail on a particular subject will have to consult other works. Fortunately, the prime sources, the treatises and handbooks,
can often be found in larger
libraries; and since the history of performance practice has become a hot topic in recent years there is also a good deal of modern research on particular
topics. On violin playing, for example, there are specialist studies by Robin
Stowell, David Milsom, and Brown himself; and there are similar works for the
cello (by Valerie Walden) and the piano (by Sandra Rosenblum, among others).
Composers not only wrote music but also had strong views on how it should be
played; there is much to be learned from books like Performing Beethoven
and Performing Brahms and from comparable works for Mozart, Schubert,
and Mendelssohn. On early recordings, the essential titles are Robert Philip’s
pioneering study,Early Recordings and Musical Style (1992), and Daniel
Leech-Wilkinson’s online work ‘The Changing Sound of Music...’ www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html).
But Brown remains the best starting point.
What general conclusions can we draw from the
book? Perhaps the most obvious is simply that between 1750 and 1900 music was
played very differently from the way it’s played today. Not that performance
practice stood still in that period. Musicians in the late nineteenth century
played Mozart’s music differently from the way it was played in his own time
(and not only differently but worse). It’s clear, nevertheless, that the really
big change - the advent of continuous vibrato, the decline in portamento and
rubato, the ban on ornamentation, etc - took place just after 1900, in
the first few decades of the new century. There were more and deeper changes in
the 40 years after 1900 than in the previous 150, and pre-1900 styles of
performance rapidly went out of fashion and were forgotten. (Later in the
twentieth century, when they eventually were rediscovered and to some extent
revived, they caused a real shock: a shock of the old, in the realm of
performance practice, that was as great in its way as the shock of the new –
such as modernist twelve-tone music - had been in the realm of composition.) A
further conclusion – though Brown tactfully does not spell it out - is that
most of the post-1900 changes were for the worse. Tbe great virtue (and
sometimes vice) of pre-1900 performance practice – the freedom of expression in
tempo, rhythm, ornamentation, and quality of sound – has largely been lost.
(Anyone nowadays who tried to play with that older freedom of expression would
be condemned for ‘taking liberties’ and banished to musical Siberia.) What that
means in practical terms is simply that the music of the late eighteenth
century is likely to sound best when played more or less in the way it was
performed when it was written – and likewise for music written in the
nineteenth century. Whether pre-1900 music is better than what came later is a
matter of personal taste: but there’s little doubt that it sounds better when
played in a pre-1900 style. A final observation is that performance practice
has to do not just with practical or technical details but also with wider
changes in style, expression, and musical culture; the history of performance,
as Brown presents it, is an integral part of the history of music itself.
Roger Norrington, himself one of the leading
lights in the revival of period performance, says in the Preface that ‘This is
the book we have been waiting for.’ He’s right. It’s the book that anyone who’s
serious about the subject should ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’. And
– I would add - apply its lessons to their own playing.
