On Music ...

[George J]

...

The Schuricht Beethoven mentioned above features 'tamperings' by Weingartner. But I take your point and it goes against how we approach compositions now. ...

Dear Matt,

As a very small child, my reference "was" the score, which is perhaps very rare, and so it would never have occurred to an adult like the music teacher that this fidelity to the score was my starting point. So if I was hearing Weingartner's alterations against the print, it would jar with me, the more so as I would not expect that anyone would fiddle with great music like that. Also there are many places where a tiny increase in basic tempo can make things impossible to articulate. Beethoven certainly understood what his instruments "could" do, and that makes me doubt the application of metronome marks after the fact to most of his music. In increasing deafness and detachment from the realities of possible performance, I guess what he marked as tempo indications using the metronome represent his "in my head" imagining of the music, which of course is different from reality.

As this thread has taken account of Elgar, there is a surprising nugget of composer fallibility concerning the Enigma Variations and the metronome markings Elgar pencilled into the score before Novello's made their final imprint. At the premiere under Hans Richter, Elgar had made the tempi metronomes and Richter had studied these as you would expect. HR said to E, "Please, Zeese part must go a leetle slower." Elgar insisted and Richter obeyed.

That was twenty seven years before Elgar made his electrical recording of the work in 1926. On reviewing the sides before selection for publication Elgar noted, "Maybe Hans was right. It should go a leetle slower here," in pencil on the paper sleeve of the side concerned! He then wrote to Novello's and asked for a slower metronome mark at that point to be inserted in any reprint.

Tempo and the consequences for phrasing and style remain an endless source of challenge for musicians, and it will never be settled in any totally objective fashion. Only the fact that something musical sounds right in the moment is valid in reality. Many factors are at play, such as the technical quality of the players, and the hall acoustics, being but two of the most important.

For example the Saint Matthew Passion opening is really a Sarabande, with its emphasised second beat of the three. If it is taken as many so called HIP performances too fast then instead of being a three beat bar with strong second beat, it become a bar in one as a triplet, so the force naturally devolves to the first note, which is the only strong beat beat in a bar where the beat is one to a bar.

Of course one can encounter this Sarabande slowed so much that it ceases to flow as a dance - almost everything in Bach actually is based in Dance - so that it becomes a tortured length and off-putting. There is balance between too slow and too fast. Mogens Woldike represents my ideal in this with Viennese performers in about 1956. Elemental music making but quite modest scaled choir and orchestra with superb soloists including the best Evangelist I have ever heard on records [or indeed live].

That is just part one, but I have the complete set on CD to run beside Leonhardt [on DHM], which again get this right, though I sadly the soloists and choir are far less fine than for Woldike. Of course the recording is more modern, but the old Vanguard effort is clean enough to forgive the lack of spacial effects. I deplore spacial effects in any case.

Best wishes from George

 

[marshanp]

Surely the range of "correct" tempi is not all that hard to arrive at? If professional players are unable to articulate what is written at the speed asked of them, the conductor is going too fast. So, for example, Mravinsky is not taking the Prelude to Act 3 of Lohengrin too fast, because he has trumpeters (maybe the only ones in the world at the time) who can give him what he asks of them.

If a significant part of the audience has lost interest/fallen asleep, s/he is going too slowly. Celibidache, I'm looking at you, you narcissistic interloper...

As for the subject of Elgar's realisation for the modern orchestra of BWV-whatever-it-was, George... we will have to agree to disagree.

 

[George J]

Dear Marshamp,

The link between style and resulting tempo is not so hard to get right. The comprehension of the style that any given composer had in mind may be less easy, especially when there is no continuous performing tradition as is the case for Bach, most of Mozart, and many other less well known composers. This is almost made harder when later musicians added metronome marks as is frequently the case in Mozart.

But there are many examples where performances achieve a fine style and expressive tempi as a result. There are also all too many performances that are too fast or too slow. I am not acquainted with Mravinsky's performances of Wagner, so I have no idea whether he takes the music you mention too fast for it to remain stylish or not. I am not convinced that because musicians can play something faster than what the composer might have had in mind that they should though.

Here is a glorious example of Glinka's Russian and Ludmila Overture going at a very quick clip, and it works!

Amazing to think that the CBSO was hardly considered a first rank orchestra in those days, but they do rather well even at this "white knuckle ride" tempo!

But not all music benefits from such an approach. The modern HIP approach to Bach frequently throws up tempi that transform the music almost beyond recognition as mentioned by me in post 21 [two up]. Almost any Mozart or Haydn Symphonic Minuet can be transformed from a Courtly Dance to a Scherzo by a small increase in tempo. Of course Haydn was well onto the development of the Scherzo before Beethoven cemented the style, and some of Haydn's late Minuet and Trio movements really are of the faster Beethovenian Scherzo type.

There are certain compositions where the natural tempo is so obvious that performers seem to confine themselves to to quite similar approaches even from musicians who might diverge in their music making in other music. One such is Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony," where just about the largest difference between performances is whether the first movement exposition repeat is taken.

It is a mark of civility that that people who disagree about something can agree to disagree! Thanks for your thinking concerning Elgar's orchestration of Bach's Fantasy and Fugue in C minor. I agree that it is a grand orchestral rumble, and definitely an exciting one in a good performance. Nothing to dislike, except perhaps a consideration of what Bach had in mind. It is so far from the original that really it becomes an almost completely different piece of music, which stands or falls entirely on its own account.

Best wishes from George

PS: Here is another old performance from the 78 days which goes at a tremendous clip. Albert Coates and the LSO in 1928 playing Elgar's re-imagining of Handels Overture from the Concerto Grosso in D Minor from the Opus 3 set. Rather wonderful in a perverse way! I actually love this. I think Handel could swagger [as could Elgar] and here the match really does work.

PPS: You might wonder how I find these ancient 78s on YouTube without it being random. At school we had over 3000 78s, and over five years I played almost all of them in my spare time. It was at this time that I discovered Edwin Fischer, Artur Schnabel, Adolf Busch, Marcel Moyse, Artur Rubinstein, and many others, including both these cited here. YouTube has brought back things that have never been re-issued on LP or CD and so have almost disappeared from knowledge of the recorded repertoire.

 

[marshanp]

Ah, the metronome... I wouldn't be without mine. It gets our ukulele group off at the right speeds Beethoven, as I'm sure you know, was the first famous composer to have one and collaborated with its manufacturer, Maelzel. When Roger Norrington conducted Beethoven's symphonies at the marked speeds he shocked people by doing so - especially those used to the then-dominant slower style. But... it has been argued that Beethoven's own metronome was faulty, so that the marked speeds don't reflect his intentions! A musicological minefield, it would seem...

Publishers certainly have a lot to answer for. Schubert's Schwanengesang being considered a song cycle, for example, when it clearly isn't. But the groups of 6 Heine and 7 Rellstab poems within it are miniature cycles, the Heine set in particular working beautifully - but not in the published order - as seems to be the consensus among modern performers.

Then there are writers on music... like Robert Simpson, hugely influential in bringing about the "cathedrals in sound" monumentalist school of Bruckner interpretation which dominated performances of his music for decades as it was rediscovered outside the German-speaking countries. Now scholars are beginning to argue that the first published versions of Bruckner's symphonies, the ones that have long been disregarded as full of his well-meaning students' alterations, despite those aberrations actually contain some very useful information. The tempo indications in them, while not derived from the manuscripts, are considered by some to be essentially-accurate indications of Bruckner's intentions, given by him in person to his first performers. So a corrective to the idea established by a different scholar, that the only way to play Bruckner's music is as though it is hewn from granite...

And 78s, with the effect of 4-minute sides on tempi... I could witter on ...but it's time to get up!

 

[George J]

No doubt that the normal maximum length of a 12 inch 78 side was from about 4 minutes [in 1926] and rose to nearly five minutes by 1950.

But it is wrong to assume that all recordings were forced into a single side and required a faster tempo to fit in the time.

Far more common is to cut small sections [such as four bars repeated or whatever] and maintain a correct tempo. Elgar made small cuts in various pieces that verged towards the time limit of single side recordings, precisely to avoid having to speed up his performance to fit. This is particularly the case in the single sided recordings such as the Pomp And Circumstance recordings. In the larger pieces the sides were timed from actual concert performances, mostly by Lawrence Collingwood, and then the side breaks decided. This often led to some quite short side timings and odd numbers of sides for the complete albums. Many are the examples from the 78 era where the timings might have allowed for a movement to be recorded on one less side, not just for Elgar, but many of the most prestigious projects that EMI undertook. EMI even broke their own rules for side lengths for certain artists. There are a number of 78 masters of the Busch Quartet that are over five minutes long dating back even to 1932, so that the players could play at their preferred tempi. This entailed setting the cutting pitch so the groove spiral ran closer together, and was only adopted on quieter music such as slow movements ...

I remember the Scherzo of the Beethoven Seventh with Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra [as it was known at the time] recorded on RCA having one quite full side followed by one that was not even half filled! So it was not just EMI in London but other companies following similar practices.

The specific issue off how Bruckner should go seems to have been confused more or less permanently by the multitude of versions and approved editions of the Symphonies, and a performance tradition that has never really found a consensus of what is central or normal.

Brahms does not suffer the same confusion, because the answers seem much easier to arrive at. Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Adrian Boult all provide a foundation in good recorded quality of what might be seen as a consensus - the basis of a performing tradition. They are more similar than different, despite being quite different musicians.

Style in performance is an endlessly fascinating topic for me, though there is a lot of music, such as Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Bruckner that I find quite difficult to understand or enjoy at least in most of their music. There are exceptions. I am very fond of Richard Strauss's First Horn Concerto for example, or Wagner's Siegfried idyll.

Some of the first music I discovered was by Elgar, and I liked it more then than now. I prefer the lighter less ambitious works these days, and some of the occasional music such as the Sanguine Fan ballet music or Polonia, or the many popular miniatures such as the Chanson de Nuit and de Matin and Salut d'Amour. The Bavarian Highlands Suite, and even the late composed Suites such as Wand Of Youth I and II, the Nursery Suite and others.

Fortunately Elgar left recordings and his style is preserved well in these. For composers before the recording era the problems are much greater.

I have never had any enthusiasm for Roger Norrington's musicianship. It seems dogmatic and sometimes eccentric beyond belief. Johns Elliot Gardiner for me is somewhat hit and miss. A performance of his I admire tremendously is on Philips - the Mozart [torso] Mass in C minor.

Other times I think he simply goes too fast for the full expression of the music to come out. I am no advocate of deathly slow performances of Baroque music, and to be fair Klemperer really does sometimes aim for seriousness in this [though not always] at the expense of forward movement. For example I really cannot deal with his famous Saint Matthew Passion recording with its stellar cast of soloists and highly sophisticated Walter Legge recording production. For me it does not cohere and flow, and in spite of firstly having the [four] LP set and later the CDs, I never got through that in a single day. Leonhardt and Woldike are so compelling that I don't stop at the end of Part One, but listen right through from start to finish. Incidentally this is one of the advantages of hard drive [local] streaming in that the CD side breaks cease to be an interruption.

Another thing that I have been doing over the last three years is really reducing my library of recordings where duplication exists, if I can find a single recording that has no glaring annoyance. Only this year I parted with Leonhardt's recording of the Matthew Passion, because Woldike is so fine and much better sung than the modern Leonhardt recording. I suppose that I simply don't like certain counter-tenors, and certainly not the ones Leonhardt chose for this magnificent effort.

Anyway thanks for taking a part in what I think is an interesting exchange of views.

Best wishes from George