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(C) REBaroque |
A student asked me what I would have replied had I
been asked a question which she was asked.
After playing Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, the question was posed, “Do you
think Mozart would have played it that way?”
I know exactly what I would have said; I would have pointed out that
Mozart did not play the bassoon, so he would never have played it in any
way. This, it seems, is exactly what she
said, and incurred some displeasure as a result!
The question seems to me a rather daft one in the
context of the Bassoon Concerto – there is absolutely no evidence that Mozart
played the bassoon nor had any interest in it beyond earning some money by fulfilling
commissions involving it, and it seems he had no real affection for it either –
but at its heart is a deeply intriguing one.
Do we need to know – is it even helpful to know – how a composer might
have played something in order for us to come up with a viable interpretation of
it ourselves?
The answer to that question is rather less easy. Major performers of our time do strive to
achieve some kind of authenticity in their performances by finding as much as
they can about how the composer performed it; what instrument was used, what
clues were left behind in written form, what comments exist from those who were
there at the time, and so on. As a music
historian (I loathe the word “musicologist” and even more the current in-vogue
trendy-term “artistic researcher”) I find this fascinating and an endless
source of interest. Yet as a performer,
how much should I let it influence my personal interpretation? Is my job as a performer to interpret the
composer’s music to an audience of my time and place, or to recreate as closely
as possible the original performance as a kind of museum piece?
I think it is incumbent on any performer to know as much
about the origins of the music they play as they can. It is clearly not enough merely to play the
dots and squiggles on the page, but to make some sense of them. To do that, the performer should have the fullest
knowledge of why the composer put down those dots and squiggles in the first
place. This understanding of the
composer’s intentions helps us give credibility to our own interpretation,
while an understanding of how the music was originally played helps us
appreciate that indefinable but vital element of any performance, style.
But that said, knowing why, how and when the composer
wrote the work, and knowing why, how and when it was first performed, is sterile
if we merely leave it at that. Rather
than interpreting the music to an audience who do not necessarily share our inside
knowledge (which, let’s face it, is just about 100% of all audiences), we
should do something to make it relevant to our time. All performers recognise that an audience
contributes significantly to a performance; their very presence affects our
approach to communicating the music. If
we merely set out to recreate the original performance we are discounting the
presence of a very real, living audience (one which has invested their time –
and often their money – in our performance).
Any performance is a compromise between respecting the composer’s wishes
and communicating to a living audience, and performers are effectively the
middle-men in the transaction between composer and public, who often need to
adjust their marketing strategies to entice the public. To put it at its most basic, you don’t sell a
left-hand drive car to a right-hand drive market simply because that’s how the
car was originally intended to be, so why go all out to preserve the original
in music to a market which does not necessarily share the ethics and cultural mores of the original?
My thoughts are that the more we know about the
original, the more we can validate our own interpretation, but we must see it
as a validation process rather than a defining and confining one. Music is a performance art, and all
performance arts thrive on dynamism. If
every performance was the same, or even set out to be the same, that vital element
of dynamism will be lost. What would the
point of 100 pianists all playing Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto be if
they all confined themselves to merely recreating how Mozart would have played it. The performance loses its relevance to the
audience and, most of all, to the player.
The more I have spoken to living composers, the more I
am convinced that they need to let go of their creation once it is out there in
the public domain. Some composers never
did this (Bach, for example, passed on to posterity virtually none of the music
he himself played in his lifetime), but others have seemed almost cavalier in
forgetting their music almost as soon as they have sent it off to the publisher
(I recall William Walton once remarking after hearing one of his works, “Did I
write that?”). Some composers were also
performers, writing for their own gratification; others openly confessed that
they could never hope to play a note of what they had written. But once that music is out there, subsequent
interference either in person or from beyond the grave, is wrong. The child has been born and nurtured, and now
it’s time to let it make its own way in the world, its shape, ideas and
potential moulded and realised by others.
We must honour the dots and squiggles, and we must try to respect the
essential style, but whether or not the composer would have played it that way,
should be totally irrelevant to a living, breathing, dynamic performance to our
time.
Mozart did not play the bassoon, but even if he had,
knowing how he played the Concerto to the audience in his day is of no relevance
to playing it to an audience of our day.
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