Notes from an eyewitness

Theses, monographs and books have been written about orchestral and instrumental performance practice in the Baroque, Classical, and even the Romantic eras.  Indeed, the entire authentic performance and authentic instrument movement, the ‘period performance’ movement, is an attempt to recreate performances of the past.  This movement exploded into academic and musical popularity in the ’60s and early ’70s, and resulted in a great deal of textual research and, on the whole, progress in the authentic recreation of historical instruments.

The recreation of performance practice, however, was disappointing.  Thousands of recordings were made by ‘academically informed’ conductors and soloists.  Too many were thin, metronomic, and dry as dust.  After three decades a reaction set in.  The younger generation pointed out that few historical documents existed on performance practice and those that did, including autograph scores, were usually ambiguous.

Recent research has turned to early recordings, on the theory that performance practice from the first decades of the last century must have reflected 19th century practice . . . which in turn might have included some survivals of 18th century practice.  Unfortunately, electrical recording did not come in until 1926, and acoustical records from the previous three decades are dim and distorted.  Nevertheless, the early electricals were examined.  The latest scholarly opinion suggests that late 19th century and early 20th century performance practice was probably flexible in tempo and interpretatively free by modern standards.

But in an effort to find out exactly how something was generally played, say, during the classical period, might we be chasing a chimera?  Isn’t it possible that there existed a wide variety of performance practice in every period?

Elizabeth Mittler-Laudy is 101 years old and living independently in Toronto.  In the ’30s she was a professional violinist in Holland.  In 1940 in Banyuls-sur-Mer, while in flight from the Nazis, she performed publicly with Wanda Landowska.  I recently asked her to describe performance practice during that period, and particularly her experience performing with Landowska.  Here is her reply:

Concerning (her) tempo there were slight variations within the flow of the music.  It was just her deep feeling for the score that told her when to apply this and how much.  At the time it seemed completely natural to me and I took it as just the way Bach should be
played.

In Holland I had played in a special Bach orchestra with a conductor who believed in a strict, almost metronomical beat, hardly slowing down at the last bars.  To me it was very unsatisfying.  I played a number of St Matthew Passions under different conductors and I found that the tempos and the general approach was a bit different with each one.  It is difficult to point to a general accepted style used in the thirties.  I believe that it mostly depended on the conductor or the soloist.

While thinking about Wanda Landowska it came to me that I once differed with her about the last bars in Bach’s Concerto for two Violins.  She wanted them to be drawn out considerably.  The word she used was “majestueusement”.  I thought it was just a bit too
much, but who was I to question her judgment?

Landowska continued to perform for another 18 years on both the harpsichord and the piano.  Her early recordings on the harpsichord can show great liberty in tempo and ornament; her late recording, below, of Haydn’s F Minor Variations, done in her own home in Lakeville, Connecticut, on her own Steinway, in 1957, shows by comparison a classical restraint.  When playing Mozart and Haydn, she attempted to reproduce on the modern piano the sonority and dynamic range available to the fortepiano.  I think she did a pretty good job.

Note: this entry on performance practice was inspired by reading The Krupp Secret, a privately printed memoir by Elizabeth Mittler-Laudy.

of her recording of the Goldberg Variations

Landowska’s first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which was not only the first recorded on a harpsichord but the very first recording of the piece ever made, is variously listed as made in 1931, 1933 and 1935; I’m going with the earlier date.  I first listened to it on an LP about 1980.  It made an indelible impression.  She was trained in the classical and romantic repertory, and I’ve read that she played Chopin on the piano all her life, but clearly her heart–or at least a significant part of her heart–was with Bach.  She was also a serious musicologist and researcher with the interest and the languages and the cultural background to do original research, and the luck to be active at a time when you could still collect original manuscripts and instruments–before the the looting of Leipzig, the fire bombing of Bremen and the destruction of Berlin and much of western Europe.

Many reviewers describe her Bach as romantic, at least one as Gothic.  For me, her Bach lives.  There is something amateurish about many of the ‘informed’, ‘historical’, performances of the past forty years.  They sound like an academic’s attempt to recreate something long dead.  They are marked by a musical version of textual criticism, a scholarly activity well-suited to the Bible and the Koran and other literary texts, but ill-suited to musical performance practice.  An Urtext is the starting point, not the end point of a performance.  Landowska’s performances on the other hand have real blood flowing in them: the red blood of an informed, authentic, performance artist.

It is true that the recorded sound of her ‘revival’ Pleyel harpsichord is surprising to the modern ear.  But then, so is the sound of an authentically constructed modern clavichord.  Most musical sounds from the past sound strange at first to us today; we have to learn them anew, as we learn a foreign language.  (This is true even of ‘contemporary’ music: try to keep from cringing upon first hearing Ginger Rogers sing ‘In the Money’, in ‘Gold Diggers of 1933′.)  And, strangely, the latest scholarship is catching up with Landowska: her instrument’s 16 foot register, so denigrated as ‘unauthentic’ for four decades, is now admitted to have been more common in the 18th century than previously thought, and in fact to have been used by Bach; it is now being provided to new, large harpsichords.

How, financially, was the Goldberg even recorded on Landowska’s Pleyel harpsichord, in Paris, at the height of the worldwide depression in 1931?  It’s an interesting story.  The record companies were suffering like everyone else.  Walter Legge, at HMV, came up with the idea of collecting subscriptions for important recordings, and then actually making them once the amount collected made the project feasible and profitable for the company.  His idea was a success, and many of the records made endure as classics today.

Below is the first recording ever made of the 25th variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht

Why does this song of Brahms’, from a poem by Heine, mean so much to me?  Why has it meant so much for so many years?  Even as I write, the song playing in the background grips my heart.

Most nineteenth century German Lied is about love–or unrequited love, or death.  This song may be about all three.  It’s hard at first to tell.  It’s a triumph of suggestion, of atmosphere.  Here’s the German text, followed by an English translation:

Der Tod das ist die kühle Nacht,
Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag.
Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert,
Der Tag hat mich müde gemacht.

Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum,
Drin singt die junge Nachtigall;
Sie singt von lauter Liebe,
Ich hör es sogar im Traum.

The translation:

Death is the cool night,
Life is the sultry day.
It grows dark, I’m sleepy,
The day has made me weary.

Above my bed a tree arches up,
In it sings the young nightingale.
It sings of love alone,
I hear it even in my dreams.

And now for the question: what exactly does the nightingale sing of?  What is, ‘lauter Liebe’?  What did it mean, in historic, cultural, poetic context, when Heine wrote the poem about 1825 and when Brahms set it to music one or two decades later?  Did it mean, in English, ‘love alone’, or ‘only love’, or ‘sheer love’, or perhaps ‘pure love’?

What did it mean to Elena Gerhardt, the singer whose performance is available below?

Gerhardt was born in 1883 near Leipzig; Brahms died in 1897 in Vienna.  Gerhardt gave her first Lieder recital in 1902 at the age of twenty and was an instant success. 

For the next 32 years she was on an almost constant world concert tour.  “Wer machte dich so krank” and “Alte Laute” were recorded in Berlin on September 24, 1929. She was accompanied by Coenraad V. Bos on the piano. 

She married as she turned 49 and she and her husband settled in London a few years before the Second World War. 

In 1939, a few days shy of 56 years old, she recorded the song in London at the Abbey Road studio no. 3, with Gerald Moore accompanying her on the piano.  It was among a set of six 10″ records, privately published under the HMV White Label.  It was not a great moment in the English-speaking world for German Lieder, and I don’t think more than two or three hundred sets were published.  In 1984 Keith Hardwick transferred the recording to tape and thence to LP as part of HMV’s massive, six-disc ‘Lieder on Record’ compilation.  It’s been out-of-print for years, and is now almost unobtainable.

Electrical recording in 1939 was done straight to wax disc; there was no editing involved.  We hear today, as a live recording, what they played and sung in studio no. 3, on 20 October ’39.  How sensitive is Moore’s accompaniment, how clear Gerhardt’s diction, how profoundly moving her interpretation.

(There are a few loud pops–surface noise–during the first phrase of the third line of stanza one.  They do not continue.)

“Therese” and “Der Tod”
“Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht”

For a first-class recent performance, see: Graciela Alperyn

Music in The End of the Monsoon

Can music and spirituality have a place in a political thriller?  I think they can, if they’re sub-themes illuminating character.  In The End of the Monsoon, Mrs Ambler, an idealistic lawyer, is also an amateur musician and practicing Buddhist.  Her guilt over her illicit affair strengthens her desire for at least a breath of transcendence.

In 1983 I thought I had such a breath in the wee small hours of the morning, while playing the clavichord in my third world luxury apartment in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

In my novel I transferred this experience to the character of Dr White, a no-nonsense, middle-aged expatriate English doctor in Phnom Penh.  In the penultimate chapter he recounts it to the story’s skeptical main character, the American diplomat, Mike Smith:

      ‘There’s a kind of music—Bach composed several examples—which I’m sure Mrs Ambler was aware of, called canon.  I no longer play, but many years ago I did, and one evening, while playing a Bach canon from memory, I felt, briefly, as if I were outside myself; I felt that I’d entered a musical stream, like the flow of a river, or the rushing of the wind, and that this flow—which was the music of the canon—was continuous: it came from I knew not where and continued I knew not whither.  While I played, I was, for a short time, a part of that musical flow.  This vision or waking dream ended the moment I finished the piece.’

Dr. White’s point is that although medical science may determine the chemical reactions associated with such an experience and the location of the brain where it takes place, that doesn’t explain the real cause, or the essence, or the meaning–if any–of such an experience.

In the novel, there are three instances of ‘spiritual experience’: an unusually successful meditation, just before dawn in the jungles of northern Cambodia; the expected and observed death of a main character; and Dr White’s out-of-body moment years before, while playing the Bach canon.  Mr Smith, fighting against having to swallow any of it, challenges the doctor with an angry: ‘What do you believe?’  The doctor replies,

      ‘Me?  I believe in nothing, Mr Smith.  Nothing.  However, I do believe in trying to keep my mind open—just a crack.’

Music samples: why the clavichord?

I am not an authentic instrument fanatic.  I think that mature and late Beethoven sounds better on a modern concert grand than on the type of piano built during the first two decades of the 19th century.  And who would deny Gould his achievement?  Neither do I believe that the clavichord should be limited to music of its period.  A friend often plays a South American samba on mine.  However, taking the trouble (and it can be trouble) to play Bach or even Haydn on a clavichord leads to insights in technique and interpretation difficult to find any other way.

There are challenges.  Clavichord technique is different from both harpsichord and piano technique.  The touch must be firm, whether piano or forte, but the keys must not be pressed too deep.  Fretted instruments demand an accuracy of touch greater than any piano.  One of the most serious challenges can be getting over the initial disappointment of the weakness of the sound.  The clavichord was played before the constant background noise of our world–which we do not even notice.  When attempting to play this instrument, you will notice it: the hum of the refrigerator; the distant traffic outside the window; in Calgary, the background whoosh of the central heating; the plane passing by several thousand feet overhead. 

The clavichord teaches you in a striking way just how different a quiet night in Leipzig must have been in 1765.  Playing it today, at one in the morning, perhaps with a snow storm outside and all traffic over (as quiet as it’s ever going to be), struggling to bring out every note, one’s attention focusses in, and after a few minutes a forte–which in aural reality is a piano–sounds to the ear or the mind of the player like an actual forte.

A Dutchwoman of my acquaintance put it well.  “Playing the clavichord,” she said, “is like a meditation.”

Music samples from The End of the Monsoon

I played and recorded these two pieces on a copy of a 1765 Friederici clavichord which I built in 2006 and 2007.  The original is in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig.

Variation 15 from Bach’s Goldberg Variations: a canon in inversion at the 5th.

Variation 25 from the Goldberg.  This variation was marked ‘adagio’ in Bach’s own hand, in his copy of the printed score.

Music and civilization

I’ve just reread, from cover-to-cover, for the first time in years, Lang’s Music in Western Civilization–first published in 1941. My edition dates from 1969. I’m more impressed than ever.

His authority runs through all 1,030 pages. Here are the first lines of the Introduction:

“Every civilization is a synthesis of man’s conquest of life. Art is the ultimate symbol of this conquest, the utmost unity man can achieve. Yet the spirit of an epoch is reflected not in the arts alone, but in every field of human endeavor, from theology to engineering.”

Notice two things: the vigor of the writing–every sentence is in the active voice, with only one adjective per sentence–and how the plan of the whole book is revealed by the end of the third sentence. He is to present a cultural history, in the widest sense, of music in western civilization.

Lang was a Hungarian who studied, in his youth, at the Budapest Music Academy, the University of Heidelberg, and the Sorbonne. He taught at Columbia University from 1933 until his retirement in 1970. He died in 1991 at his home in Lakewood, Connecticut. Oddly enough, the small town of Lakewood was also the home of the Polish harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska.

His book covers western music from the ancient Greeks to America in 1941. The two last musicians mentioned, I believe, are Richard Strauss and Scriabin. Lang regarded symphonic music of the classic period, ending in Beethoven and Schubert, as the high point of musical western culture. However, he does not reach the classic era until page 618–past the halfway mark. How better to indicate his depth of erudition? But a dry scholar he was not. In addition to erudition, he held strong opinions, and expressed them with a romantic warmth. Here is a paragraph, one of many, on Wagner’s Tristan:

“Tristan carried the sensuous expressiveness of music to its ultimate limits, and the terrific erotic power of this music poisoned the minds of the composers of the succeeding generations. No one could escape its devastating influence, yet no one could even remotely match, let alone continue it, for after the Dionysiac ‘love death’ nothing is possible but undisguised sexual lust.”

Lang, himself a musician as well as a teacher, critic and writer, was not afraid of expressiveness. He wrote about music, which in its higher manifestations is synonymous with spirituality, with a sense of poetry and drama, as in his two paragraphs devoted to Alexander Scriabin near the end of the book:

“Lack of spiritual ideals, submission to materialism and technicalism, and a resultant hunger for sensation and bluff, created an atmosphere in which philosophical and aesthetic judgments were vacillating and a normal and purposeful development of artistic individuality was made exceedingly difficult. This decadence of culture ended in the World War of 1914. New life could be infused into the music of this rapidly disintegrating world only by an even more nervous, sophisticated, and surcharged emphasis on the already overtaxed elements of effect and technique. Experiment then became the final aim, as is so tragically demonstrated in the works of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose whole art, nay, whole life, was a mere experiment, a supernatural dream, and whose mind, possessed by demonic forces, penetrated deeper and deeper into the mire of mystical speculations, hallucinations, and dementia. The mystic of the early Christian centuries received from Scripture and from the Church an unshakable structure, the secure walls of which could withstand the flow of the most ardent lava of ecstasis. The modern mystic does not receive anything from any source; he has to find not only his forms but he has to create everything, God and Satan, the world and the beyond, the Redeemer and the Antichrist, the saints and the damned; he must himself write the Bible. There was no halt for Scriabin, the modern mystic, for there was nothing that would bind him; such an artist is not interested in national or social aims, in the music of the people, not even purely technical or formal problems, for he already knows everything and wants everything, and like Icarus soars toward the sun.

Scriabin’s new harmonic system proved one thing only: that tone alone no longer suffices, and that the refurbishing of the tonal system cannot furnish the solution. Nor was the already immensely rich color scheme of the modern orchestra sufficient; Scriabin and his followers wanted actual light and actual color. In his last works Scriabin freed himself entirely from the shackles of tonality, proclaiming that he had found the answer to the riddle of cosmic music. The great unity of sensations, visions, and hallucinations emanates from the orchestra of Le Poème du Feu (1913), its ‘color piano’ inundating the unruly maze of tones with its ‘color fire.’ And then he took the final step toward the universal music of Nirvana, the union of sound, color, drama, song, religion; the universal mystery play which would be the crowning of human art. But by this time that meteor of Scriabin’s spirit has passed beyond the atmosphere of the planets, continuing its path in the eternal darkness of the unknown spaces.”

For his title, Lang could have chosen the phrases ‘Western World’, or ‘Western Culture’. Instead he chose ‘Western Civilization’. I think he chose it because he believed that art music–his term–was one of the most important indicators, creators and supports of the courage, compassion and spirit which form the foundation of what we call civilization.

I have also just reread Leonard Woolf’s (Virginia’s Woolf’s husband) five volume autobiography, and anyone who has read that work, or Victoria Glendinning’s recent biography of him, must come to the conclusion that he was an acutely and consciously civilized man. Lang was a Hungarian, Woolf an English Jew; Lang a musicologist, critic and writer; Woolf a publisher, writer, and advocate of political liberalism. It is interesting to compare Lang’s and Woolf’s references to one of Beethoven’s great last works: his last piano sonata, op. 111. Here is Lang’s:

“The last of the piano sonatas is strangely reminiscent of the Pathétique Sonata; it is in the same key of C minor and opens with the same broad pathos, but what follows is different. The concentration of emotions and energies is such that all conventions had to be thrown overboard, and the majestic first movement was followed by a relaxation in remote spiritual regions. Nothing more could be said after these celestial utterances, least of all a witty scherzo or a robust finale.”

And here is Woolf’s mention of the same sonata, in some of his last published thoughts on civilization, towards the end of his final volume of autobiography, The Journey not the Arrival Matters:

“I feel passionately for what I call civilized life; I hate passionately what I call barbarism. When as a small child I heard my father say one day at lunch that, as regards rules of life, a man need only follow that advice of the prophet Micah: ‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God’, I am sure that I did not really understand what he was talking about, yet in some curious way, I think, the words entered into and had a profound effect upon my mind and upon my soul, if I can be said to have a soul. . . .

. . . I have never been much concerned with God or with walking humbly with him, but I believe profoundly in the other two rules. Justice and mercy–they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy toleration. This is, of course, the Semitic vision, but, when later I found that the Greeks had added to it the vision of liberty and beauty–καλσυ και αγαθου–I saw, when I added the words of Micah to the speech of Pericles in Thucydides, what has remained until today my vision of civilization. And my feelings with regard to communal justice and mercy and toleration and liberty are both ethical and aesthetic, and it is this combination which gives to my feeling about what I call civilization both its intensity and also a kind of austerity. The visions of civilization and the partial, hesitating, fluctuating activation of these visions in the barbarous history of man, and the classical instances in which individuals have risked everything in a fight for justice, mercy, toleration, and liberty against the entrenched forces of kings and emperors, states and establishments, principalities and powers, all these have always given me not only an intense feeling about what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, but also the kind of emotion which I get still more powerfully from a play of Sophocles or Shakespeare, the Parthenon or the Acropolis, a picture of Piero della Francesca, a cello suite of Bach or the last movement of the last piano sonata of Beethoven.”