THE INTOXICATION OF MUSICAL HISTORY: A PERFORMER'S DRAUGHT

Colin Lawson

Case study: Donizetti's Studio Primo (1821) for solo clarinet in B flat, performed on an original 13-keyed instrument, c.1835 by Pierre Piatet of Lyon.

If a composer of old music 'could by some miracle be brought back to life in the twentieth century to be quizzed about the methods of performance in his own times, his first reaction would certainly be one of astonishment at our own interest in such matters. Have we no living tradition of music, that we must be seeking to revive a dead one? The question might be embarrassing. Musical archaism may be a symptom of a disintegrating civilisation'.

So wrote the eminent historian and musicologist Donald Grout as long ago as 1957. His sentiments have been echoed by many others since that time. For example, Roger Heaton has written recently that earlier performance practice, 'however rewarding and challenging for the player, however much it changes our perspective and perhaps gets us closer to the music, is still museum work'. The relationship between historical performance and contemporary music as a vital force is indeed a complex one, incorporating a willingness to holiday in saner times, rather than grapple with the challenges of scores hot off the press.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a leading light within historical performance, has deplored the fact that music has become a pretty adornment in our lives, whereas from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution music was one of the foundations of our culture and the understanding of music part of a general education. In his book Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech (London, 1988) he observes that people today find a car or aeroplane more valuable than a violin, the circuitry of a computer more important than a symphony. Two hundred years ago music was a living language, which had to be continually re-created and could actually change listeners and musicians. Harnoncourt believes that for many people music as an ornament rather than an essential part of our lives has been reduced to the merely beautiful and thereby to what can be universally appreciated. At the time of the French Revolution an attempt was made to simplify music and confine it to the emotional sphere , as is illustrated by the syllabus of the Paris Conservatoire founded in 1795. Wagner was a great admirer of the new approach to performing music, replacing verbal elements with the pictorial. To this day conservatoires drill performance techniques rather than the understanding of music as a language. Harnoncourt reckons that not only do we not understand the music we perform, we are completely unaware of the need to do so. Musicians strive for beauty and emotion, addressing their performance completely to the feelings of the audience. Recent debate about the function and value of commercial radio stations has brought this argument into sharper focus. Indeed, many listeners now want to avoid challenge, preferring programmes of the already familiar and merely comparing minor differences in interpretation.

I want to pursue the question of the intoxication of musical history with a reference to a specific musical illustration, Donizetti's Study for solo clarinet, played on an original French instrument from the 1830s. How successful is my performance of the Donizetti? It's very easy to respond to such a question in terms of the degree of clarity and accuracy achieved. Such aspirations relate to the development of recording during the twentieth century. Where the earliest recordings c1900 reflect the spontaneity of the concert hall, today's performances are often judged by the glossy technical perfection of the CD. Yet, isn't characterisation of the music ultimately more important than the last word in technical perfection?

There's a sense in which the entire history of music as sound pre- 1880 has disappeared. It's difficult to transport oneself back to an age before the microphone or global communications and air travel. Besides, Donizetti didn't write his Clarinet Study as a concert piece; it was a gift for a friend in the orchestra. Even in concerts, the audience

wasn't always silent; for example, at the première of his Paris symphony K297, Mozart was delighted when his listeners clapped and responded audibly.

We are bound to perform this Study with the weight of twentieth century tradition on our shoulders, plus the influence of teachers and a measure of 'intuition'. In turn, the experience of five minutes of listening to a piece of music is bound to be mean something different to today's audience from what it might i have meant in 1821. As Hindemith put it in the 1950s, we can never recapture the original ambience. 'Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore the 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'.

Hindemith was an ardent protagonist for historical performance. But one can none the less readily agree with another of its supporters Richard Taruskin, when he remarks. 'I am convinced that 'historical' performance today is not really historical; that a thin veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around; and that the historical hardware has won its wide acceptance and above all its commercial viability precisely by virtue of its novelty, not its antiquity'.

It is difficult to argue with this; the need to satisfy a composer's intentions (if this is possible) seems to indicate a failure of nerve. What does such an aspiration mean in any case? Stravinsky is an example of a composer who changed his mind on interpretative matters throughout his career, as one can tell from his five recordings of The Rite of Spring and his further reviews of other people's performances. Were the intentions of a Bach or Mozart somehow set in stone? We know that Brahms enjoyed working with both the 49-strong Meiningen Orchestra and the 100-strong Vienna Philharmonic, though with a clear preference for the former.

In the Donizetti case study is the use of a period instrument in recreating music of the past really a significant factor compared with musical understanding, cultural and social context, acoustical considerations, concert-giving situations? I think actually that it can be, although of course one can play stylistically on a modern instrument and without any care for history on a period one. In any event, historical evidence needs to be read with reference to conditions of the time; a near contemporary of Donizetti noted that every individual wind instrument was so different that players needed to invent fingerings for themselves. The same writer recommended for wind players a moderate life style and avoidance of anything that could damage the chest, such as running, riding on horseback or excessive indulgence in hot drinks. One should not drink after practising if the lungs are still warm - the cause

of early deaths. At that time, a performer's continued good health was of course an altogether more fragile matter than it is today.

Are we more likely to understand a composer's piece of music by restricting ourselves to the means he had available when he wrote it, or does such a restriction inhibit our full expression of the piece? But is this period clarinet a restriction; actually it matches the music pretty well, so perhaps the modern one would actually be more restrictive. Have instruments improved, or merely changed?; the answer is variable, like so much that we nowadays want to standardise.

Can a composer expect to have any influence over how his music is performed after he has written it and what moral obligations are there to fulfil his original intentions? Elgar on his death-bed demanded that sketches for his Third Symphony be left untouched, yet they have only recently been completed. In practice, we all draw the line somewhere. We might agree that we should play all the correct notes in the right order, but what of unwritten conventions of the time, where the notation might actually be misleading? Toscanini was an example of a conductor who believed passionately in a literal respect for the notated score, a position fraught with difficulty in the music of Bach and Handel, for example.

We can't envisage exactly what Donizetti might have anticipated in this piece, even within an area as basic as tempo flexibility, though we do know from early recordings that performance became much more straitjacketed during the twentieth century. In the 1830s the violinist Spohr advised steadiness of tempo, yet allowed speeding up for fiery and impassioned passages, together with holding back for tender or sad music. The fact is that words don't express these things easily. Furthermore, it's much simpler for a treatise to supply evidence about the craft of music making than the art, even though paradoxically composers have been drawn to the individuality of great performing artists. This is how the dreaded word 'authenticity' has come to be associated with text-centred performance and in turn (especially in the 1970s and early 1980s) has given rise to such ridiculous claims as 'the most original Beethoven yet recorded.' Old treatises give up at a certain point in offering stylistic advice, suggesting that readers go and listen to a good singer. In fact, the finer shadings that make all the difference between one performance and the next are scarcely susceptible to verbal explanation.

All this is not to say that it's not worth learning the musical language grammar can be recovered. We can know quite a lot about how these and dialect of earlier times. As with a dead language such as Latin, the languages were performed or pronounced, even without knowing what they really sounded like. We may feel that different styles of music require

distinctive approaches, but need to decide on the nature of our response. Period equipment is often itself a compromise of practical expediency and historical accuracy encouraged by a studio environment. It has been rightly claimed that the commercially motivated race to push period-performance ever more rapidly into the nineteenth century did not offer much hope that musicians, even if they obtained the appropriate instruments, would have the opportunity to find or consolidate appropriate playing styles. For the general public the phrase 'on original instruments' does literally cover a multitude of varying practices. As long as the different national styles of Beethoven, Cherubini and Rossini are performed on a single set of instruments without variation of technique, the public will indeed be offered a package of unripe fruit. In a sense, the Donizetti Study performance was an example of this, since a French (rather than Italian) clarinet was employed, of the sort that Berlioz described as the voice of heroic love.

Copies of instruments can all too easily be tuned by means of the latest technology in accordance with our current preoccupation with equal temperament. Genuine old instruments, like cars, survive in a variety of conditions and may not reflect their original response. The period clarinet associated with this paper is in a way a classic mix of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has been re-tuned and with fitted with an ebonite mouthpiece for stability, a material exhibited only at the Great Exhibition of 1851. But this instrument has a lot to teach about the clarinet in terms of colour and flexibility; and the fact that there are indeed many designs and materials that can be used to make a fine instrument.

The German flautist Quantz regretted as long ago as 1752 that most players he knew had agile fingers but were reluctant to use their brains, a complaint not unknown in today's conservatoires and universities. Historical performance in our own times can make one think about earlier music in a stimulating way. Of course we're bound to be selective in our use of the evidence, but it can open up new horizons. We perform a more broadly based repertory than at any time in the past, now that contemporary music does not occupy centre stage as it once did. Any worthwhile influence is potential fodder for a performer; let us embrace the historical evidence and enjoy our ever-more intimate relationship with the notation of earlier music. The American composer Roger Sessions remarked a generation ago that one must accustom oneself to the fact that the performance of music is not an entirely simple affair. Let us respond to historical evidence, but with an open mind that doesn't try to over-standardise everything, nor expect that our study of the past will necessarily reveal more answers than questions. Musicologists need to recognise that performers are in the spotlight from second to second in a way that many academics can scarcely imagine. As someone once memorably remarked, you can't play a footnote.