As part of Bachtrack’s Baroque Music Month, Matthew Lynch examines the history of the historically informed performance movement, and discusses the situation today.
How many people played in the orchestra in the première of Handel’s Messiah? What sort of instruments were they using? What sorts of singing and instrumental technique did they have? How did the audience react? And, most importantly, what did it sound like? Since the mid 20th century, musicians have been trying to answer these questions, with a view to bringing something close to the true sound and atmosphere of Handel’s music to modern audiences.
Historically informed performance (HIP) has its roots in Arnold Dolmetsch’s work with the recorder, which extends right back into the late 19th century. He built his first lute in 1893 and went on to build clavichords and harpsichords, eventually publishing The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries in 1915. Dolmetsch’s book was a real milestone in early music performance, and we also have him to thank for the resurgence of the recorder (and also for its modern dismissal as a horrible instrument for small children): it was Dolmetsch who first recommended it as an instrument for children in English schools.
Alongside Dolmetsch, early pioneers in Germany, Switzerland and France established concert series for early music in the 1920s, bringing back forgotten instruments such as the viola da gamba and viola d’amore. These included full performances of Bach’s Passions and Monteverdi’s Vespers but still constituted mostly isolated events. The floodgates didn’t truly open until after the Second World War.
And it was the Germans who got there first, founding the first permanent period instrument orchestra in 1954. But the Cappella Coloniensis, which still exists today, was gradually joined by stiff competition in the 60s, 70s and 80s, mostly in London, Basel, and the Netherlands.
As the HIP movement developed in the second half of the 20th century, the questions changed. To begin with, people just wanted to rediscover old music. Then came the desire to perform it on the original instruments and with contemporaneous techniques of playing and interpretation. As the musicologist John Tobin said as early as 1950: “To sing (or play) Messiah with purely Handel’s notes may be to perform Messiah as Handel wrote it, but it will not be as the audiences that listened to the work under Handel’s direction heard it, or as he intended it to be heard.”
How would Handel have played an appoggiatura in Italy in 1708? Would he have played it differently in London in 1730? Maybe he played it differently on the organ to on the harpsichord, and differently in one harmonic context to another. What ornaments would he have expected from his performers? And what pitch and scale did they use?
Performers have grappled with these questions for decades. Academics such as Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Thurston Dart have made whole careers out of them, and the results have been not only academically but musically invigorating. Trevor Pinnock’s 1988 recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, to take just one example, is not just an attempt to recreate a lost musical artifact, but creative music-making at its finest.
But the HIP movement has always had its critics. One of the most prominent and vocal is the American musicologist Richard Taruskin, many of whose writings on the subject are collected in the volume Text and Act. Among Taruskin’s main criticisms is the authenticity of HIP. The desire to recreate the past and remain true to composers’ intentions spawned from the division between composer and performer (the creative and the re-creative processes) started with Beethoven (a composer who couldn’t perform his own works) but remained largely latent in the 19th century (with composer–performers from Mendelssohn through Brahms and Liszt to Mahler), re-emerging in the 20th century, when Stravinsky began referring to performers as “executants” rather than interpreters. The musicologist/philosopher Lydia Goehr connects this with contemporary ideas of authorship and the concept of the musical work as a self-contained entity; music has transitioned from a performance-based art to a text-based one, with the score representing a perfect conception of the music, which is then only imperfectly rendered in performance. Thus the idea that HIP is desirable, or that it is connected to the performance tradition it attempts to recreate, is questionable.
Another of Taruskin’s problems with HIP is the idea that “what is not permitted is prohibited”. As he points out, “there is nothing you can do… and be sure that someone will not say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ If you want no one to say it you must do nothing – as many do in the name of ‘authenticity’”. In order to preserve authenticity, HIP musicians play notes and not music, or so the argument goes. HIP should be a means to an end, that end being imaginative music-making, but many feel that HIP is often an end in itself.