It’s a classical music truism that performers and listeners pay great attention to interpretation. Nowadays people compare performances of the same work interpreted by a number of different artists.
It’s a feature that grew out of the early 19th century, when performing music from the past became common. In the baroque era, composers played their own music exclusively. That is: Vivaldi played Vivaldi. Mozart, too, performed primarily his own works.
In 1829, almost forty years after Mozart’s death, Felix Mendelssohn sparked a landmark event in music history. He organized and conducted the first performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since the composer’s death in 1750.
The performance was noteworthy because Mendelssohn devoted so much time to preparing a forgotten masterpiece by another composer.
Unlike great paintings of the past, music is a living art that naturally transforms with each new performance. Yet we revere the great composers’ works as if they were frozen in time.
The great pianist and teacher Artur Schnabel was of the Beethoven tutorial lineage. His interpretations of Beethoven’s music are considered controversial to this day. Is it the responsibility of the performer to follow the composer’s score literally?
Schnabel thought not.
My two degrees in music are both in composition. And I have strived, throughout my musical life, to achieve the composer’s intentions. That is why I have always been smitten with the sound of period instruments, of boy choristers singing Palestrina, and of venues that fit the scale of the original performance.
I want to use the resources the great composers knew as a way of accessing their genius. I want our performers to be faithful to the composer’s intent, and for our audiences to be the beneficiaries.
Learning the music of the great composers at an early age did cause me to put Bach and Brahms on a pedestal. I saw them as towering figures – mythical to a young boy in America. Leonard Bernstein’s quote about Beethoven, ‘He was a titan, wrestling with the Gods,’ struck fear in me.
Leonard Bernstein’s quote about Beethoven, ‘He was a titan, wrestling with the Gods,’ struck fear in me.
Studying organ as an undergraduate in Paris, I set out to meet the great composer Olivier Messiaen IN PERSON. I was greeted by a gentle man with a diminutive manner– more like a local merchant than a great composer.
In graduate school in NYC, I was to study with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Mario Davidovsky. While his musical intellect was unsurpassed, I still cherish the memory of him standing in line with me at our local deli.
But if I could have met Mozart, would I have realized that his music was worthy of preserving in precisely his own interpretation? I doubt it. I would want to hear how he played his music. And then I would create my own way. Composers feel strongly about the way their music should be performed. Many times people in my audience have commented on whether or not I perform the music ‘just as Mozart would have heard it and wanted it.’
At ACO we make quite a fuss about historic performance practice. In the 1980’s, two centuries after Mozart, musicians created a movement to relearn the techniques of his time.
As instruments evolved from the 17th to the 20th century, today’s musicians realize that the sound of an oboe Mozart used was significantly different from that of a 20th-century model. And while some things about a 1780 oboe were always apparent, the change in performance interpretation came out of a major shift in approach to the music.
Instead of seeing early instruments as more primitive and limited, we could look at them as assets.
Without recordings, we will never really know what the premiere of Mozart’s Linz Symphony sounded like. Personally, I’ve always felt that performances in those days must have been more scrappy and rough, as opposed to the flawless and pristine concerts and recordings of today.
Many of our ACO musicians have advanced degrees in the history of playing technique. Many times I have asked them to interpret the music in a certain way, only to have one of our erudite violinists say, “This is NOT the way Bach did it!”
I usually answer, ‘Really? I wish we knew. But we can’t ask him.’
Photo credits: Artur Schnabel, US Library of Congress; Olivier Messiaen by Rob Croes, Fotocollectie Anefo Reportage via CreativeCommons.org; Oboe: Commons.Wikimedia.org, Classical Oboe CC BY-SA.