Bach Without Fear
Who is entitled to play
Bach? The music director of a period-instrument
orchestra reclaims baroque music for
modern players.
By Nicholas McGegan
More than 250 years after
Johann Sebastian Bach's death, amid
all the belated tributes and the new
discoveries, the great master can still
arouse a controversy or two. For this
we can all be profoundly grateful, since
it gives us cause to stop and think
about his music and the manner in which
we perform it.
The use of original instruments,
or something approaching them, has been
around for a good deal of the last century.
Wanda Landowska and Arnold Dolmetsch
played Bach on the harpsichord and clavichord
at the dawn of the 20th century; and
gradually over the decades more and
more period instruments came to be used.
By the 1970s, original-instrument St.
Matthew Passions became possible, both
on recordings and in the concert hall.
This trend went hand-in-hand with a
more general interest in the music of
the past, including the Renaissance
and medieval repertoire.
Along the way, the growing
trend toward historically-informed performance
encountered a fair amount of criticism,
even ridicule, of the supposed gray
musicologists and scruffy viola da gambists
who were thought to have led this movement.
But it must be remembered that many
of the early pioneers were composers
who drew inspiration from their researches
into the past. It was Brahms who edited
François Couperin, Webern who
studied Heinrich Isaac, and Hindemith
who founded the Collegium Musicum at
Yale.
In the last 30 years,
period-instrument orchestras have become
ubiquitous, first in Europe and then
in North America and Australia. Before
these orchestras came on the scene,
as I can personally testify, Baroque
music was often not very well played.
Many conductors never gave much thought
to stylistic matters: Style, for them,
was much the same for music of all periods,
rather as with cheap gloves where one
size supposedly fit all. If something
on the page appeared too peculiar, the
normal answer was to adapt the music's
performance to a more modern taste.
One can see the same process at work
in movies of fifty years ago: Gene Kelly
seems a very modern musketeer as he
"swashbuckles" his way though
17th-century France unable to pronounce
Richelieu!
This non-historical approach
provoked a strong reaction among the
original-instrument brigade. As a result,
they became almost obsessed with style,
obsessed with the quest for the Holy
Grail of Correctness that would purify
Bach performance from the sins of the
negligent. Some of their writings seem
rather priggish today, and most of us
who work with period instruments have
long ago stopped tilting at these windmills
because now there are so many more interesting
and important things to do. Period-instrument
players have become much more concerned
with giving emotional performances of
great technical excellence. Gone, I
trust, are the days when a recording
carried a Cordon Bleu across its cover
saying "played on original instruments"
like some kind of USDA stamp of musical
wholesomeness, i.e., "This Performance
Will be Good for You and Contains Only
Marginal Traces of Romanticism."
Happily, too, modern
orchestras and conductors have been
influenced by the "Baroque-niks."
Today's string players use a subtler
vibrato for Bach or Mozart than they
might for Elgar. (I was astonished a
few years ago to have to ask the City
of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to
use more vibrato in a Beethoven Symphony;
apparently their then-music director,
Sir Simon Rattle, preferred to have
his Viennese classics virtually vibrato-free.)
Modern orchestras are also beginning
to experiment with historical seating
arrangements, and are finding that a
classical symphony takes on a whole
new flavor when the first and second
violins sit in stereo. Such period-instrument
effects as bow-vibrato are no longer
routinely erased and replaced with something
more "convenient." Not all
these experiments are equally successful
with all orchestras, but it is a fine
thing to re-think constantly how one
performs, and not to be smugly satisfied
with routine.
Unfortunately, there
are still a few unrepentant purists
around who would seem to prefer that
music not be performed at all, unless
on the original instruments-just the
right number of them, mind you, at exactly
the original pitch in use in that region
at that time, etc., etc. To me this
is like searching for the end of the
rainbow. Can we really only do justice
to a Handel opera by having it sung
by castrati? Are any of the Puritans
willing to volunteer themselves or their
children to be made into "authentic"
instruments for the purpose?
On the other side, there
are a few curmudgeons who think that
the period-instrument movement has contributed
nothing to musical performance, except
of course to make them foam at the mouth.
These neo-Luddites, unlike the purists
starving in their garrets, are sometimes
internationally famous in the profession
and therefore have greater opportunities
to make themselves heard. Here it is
important to distinguish between reasoned
argument and plain distaste. To me,
calling period performance "disgusting"
and "complete rubbish", as
Pinchas Zukerman did in an interview
in Toronto's Globe and Mail, falls into
the latter category. We are only human,
and we are perhaps bound to dislike
certain things: Personally, I detest
the songs of Bob Dylan, and klezmer
music makes me dive for the radio's
"off" switch almost as fast
as the immortal songs of ABBA. However,
I would not try to ennoble my prejudice
by calling it an argument. Lets leave
that to the televangelists!
On a totally different
plane are the doubts and serious questions
about period performance raised by the
ever-inspiring Charles Rosen in a chapter
of his book, Critical Entertainments.*
While too lengthy to summarize here,
his ruminations seem to enhance and
elevate the whole nature of the debate.
For the rest, let them
try to convince us by their playing.
About twenty years ago, music critic
Harold Schonberg reviewed a performance
of the Bach concerto for four harpsichords
played on four Steinway pianos. Acknowledging
that Bach had written the piece for
quite different instruments, and that
it had originally been played in a completely
different style, Schonberg admitted
that the passion and commitment of the
performance held him in delightful thrall
from the first bar to the last. His
review was a paean of praise for the
eloquence of live performances, and
the ability of compelling performances
to transcend scholarly concerns.
This last point is, for
me, much more important that whether
a work is played on period instruments
or not. I am lucky enough to live in
the San Francisco Bay area where we
have several symphony orchestras, modern
chamber orchestras and a couple of period-instrument
ensembles. In the 1980s, the San Francisco
Symphony used to have a Bach Festival,
but that withered. Now, Bach is mostly
the preserve of the period-instrument
groups. This is a pity, especially because
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra happily
plays Beethoven and Mendelssohn. In
most cities, such creative competition
is not an option: perhaps the local
symphony orchestra has been inhibited
by the purists, and so no longer plays
Bach or Corelli, but there is no period-instrument
group to plug the repertoire gap. The
sad result is that the music that is
most often heard on the radio on the
way to work is precisely that which
is least performed in the concert hall.
There is a logistical
problem here, too. Most concert halls
today are designed for music on a grander
scale than one generally finds in the
Baroque repertoire. I can well remember
feeling a bit silly conducting a performance
of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, which
requires eight players, in a hall that
held more than 2,500 people. Thank heavens
it was played on modern instruments
so that the public could at least hear
something! Nevertheless, modern vs.
period instruments was not the real
issue. What was amiss was that the hall,
which was perfect for Mahler, could
not do much for chamber music.
This, to me, is a key
concern: So much of the early repertoire
is really for chamber forces and needs
to be played in a space that bears some
resemblance to a chamber. Some Baroque
pieces, such as Handel's Music for the
Royal Fireworks, sound splendid in a
big hall, but they are the exception.
I strongly advocate that a symphony
orchestra look for a smaller alternative
space to play the glorious music of
Bach and his contemporaries. Symphony
musicians love performing it, and audiences
deserve to hear it live, not just on
their car radios. Of course, there may
be some mutterings from a Puritan or
two, but no one is stopping them from
mounting their own period-instrument
concert series. As for the curmudgeons,
let them be invited as guest artists,
let them give the pre-concert talk and
let the public hear them perform afterwards.
They had better be as
captivating as the four Steinway pianists,
though.
* Rosen, Charles, "The
Benefits of Authenticity," in Critical
Entertainments, published by Harvard
University Press, April 2000
Article © 2005 by
Nicholas McGegan. Adapted from an article
that first appeared in the September/October
2000 issue of SYMPHONY, the magazine
of the American Symphony Orchestra League.
The article was offered to MusicWeb by Yolanda Carden,
Publicist, FSB Associates
