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Spoilt for choice

Classical and romantic performing practice 1750–1900 by Clive Brown

Reviewed by Peter Williams
Oxford UP (Oxford, 1999); xii, 662pp; £65. ISBN 0 19 816165 4

There are puzzling things about music’s notation. For instance, its historical origins: despite the best efforts of Carolingian musicologists, it is still not clear to me quite what the Benedictine scribes, who might often have been tone-deaf clerks, were doing with their little pen-marks on parchment, and why they made them. Or its basic purpose: surely the whole point of any detail in any notation whatever – pitches, rhythms, metres, tempi, dynamics, expression, playing manner – is to limit choice? These details can look like advice rather than command but are not really, since the implication is that you lose something of the intended effect and Affekt if you don’t do what they say, even if it is only ‘put your fourth finger here’ or ‘carry on improvising until letter B’. Studies of notation can be a wonderful way to achieve intimate understanding of a repertory, and it is a double pity that, in the old days, it used to be taught so often in a dry and unintimate manner, and that à nos jours it is (or will no doubt soon be) disappearing along with every other university study that requires technical training and musical ability.

It is a pleasure, therefore, to find that the key to this useful and important new book lies in the blurb’s claim that ‘musical notation conveyed rather different messages to the musicians for whom it was written than it does to modern performers’. To this, anybody who has ever worked in performance practice studies could only say ‘Amen!’. Clive Brown plunges straight into it with an account of how, over this vast and still central period, accents were marked by theorists (chapter 1) and by composers (chapter 2) and what each of them meant by it. This topic may seem an odd one to start with but it leads naturally to dynamics, and thus on to articulation and phrasing, expression, string bowing, tempo and its various terms and gradations, ornamentation, vibrato and portamento. For some reason, the appendix of miscellaneous points (including variable dots), is called paralipomena, which fits in with a rather wordy and stiff style of prose throughout, though this becomes distracting only when one is not quite sure what the author is suggesting, as happens from time to time.

For some years now, even decades, there has been need for a summary of notational habits and their meanings over this period, and the gradual migration of early music interests from the ‘authentic performance of baroque music’ into the periods before and after – particularly medieval or Renaissance music for voices, and classical or Romantic music for instruments – is very much to be welcomed. Brown’s contribution to this is an exhaustive coverage that cites very widely from both the theory-books and the main repertories of music, showing and explaining what Quantz or Türk or Baillot or Spohr said about one or other of the topics listed above, and choosing apt and, well, rather exciting excerpts from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven to Brahms, to suggest how they bear on the points made by such writers.

I say ‘exciting’ because of course, that is precisely what it is to see an important work, perhaps a beloved quartet or orchestral piece, have one of its features explained and put in context – what its tempo would have been understood to have been, what the slurs-and-dots meant, what freedoms there might be in the rhythms, whether the fermata on a chord meant ‘hold it longer’ or merely ‘don’t cut it short’, and so on. The eye leaps to the notes on the page as one searches for the author’s suggestion about ornaments in Mozart’s K575 or articulation in Schubert D353 or rubato in Chopin’s op.36. The very lists or tables of carefully researched and presented time-signatures in Beethoven, Schubert, Weber and early Wagner are bound to be instructive and even stirring, sending one to check what is happening in the music when Wagner uses allegro agitato in The Flying Dutchman for an allegro of exactly the same tempo as in Tannhäuser.

The topics seem endless, and the author deserves our gratitude for gathering them together, and for devoting all the energy required for such a book. A question is, however, whether the reader needs to read quite so much of minor writers, or pay quite so much attention to music of the second rank. I know it is all grist to the mill, but, in the first place, no one can cover every source of information (so it will in any case be partial) and, in the second, one needs an author to select, evaluate and discard, because it is easy to lose the wood for the trees, and because great music needs its context to be drawn as specifically as possible, not merely in general terms. I can not be the only reader to wish that the table of Cherubini’s tempo-marks had been sacrificed for the sake of more examples of Wagner’s, or that at least it would be clearer how widely significant Cherubini’s might have been.

Despite these points, the fact that the book focuses on notation will make it permanently useful, something to consult. And yet, this focus too comes at something of a cost. It means that even in such a big book there will be little coverage of two important and I think vital areas for an understanding of this or any period’s performance.

These are, first, the instruments themselves and all the organological questions impinging directly on performance, including pitch. You can survey all the extant information on Beethoven’s sforzandi but I doubt you will get the ‘feel’ of things in the Sonata op.111 without some ideas on the piano-type most appropriate. It is true, however, that if you do have such ideas, you can make good use of this book and its kinds of evidence, including anecdotal. And some specifics like string-bowing are so well covered that the book’s title might have reflected this emphasis.

The second is less tangible: the conditions of performance need to be described, whether actual-physical (location, acoustic) or social-aesthetic (who was there, what did they like). It is a question not so much of how music was played but how it was heard – a very difficult topic, but undoubtedly a part of performance practice studies. Perhaps, though I am not sure of this, one can not now recapture how it was to hear the sforzandi in the F minor Quartet op.95 in 1810, but some account of the nature of string-quartet concerts, a public audience’s expectations, even familiarity with fortissimo octaves and their rhetorical gesture, would be part of the picture.

Clive Brown writes as if he was quite aware of at least the first of these, of course, and occasionally he makes a useful organological-notational link, as in the remark on Berlioz’s slurs for hand-stopped horns or in dealing with his own area of expertise, string-playing. And clearly, he could only have developed these other approaches more by ditching some of the theorists and their variegated advice on notation. But if, in any case, selectivity is the clue to such studies, perhaps that would not have been a bad thing.

Peter Williams held the first chair in performance practice studies in a British University (Edinburgh).