"What the composer wants"

[John F]

In the Robert Schumann thread, the objection was made that a certain interpretation is "not what Schumann wanted." I replied, "Nobody can know what Schumann wanted in the performance of his symphonies in addition to what's in the score." But there's more to say on the subject, not just about Schumann performance, so here goes.

That old scarecrow, what the composer intended or wanted when writing the music, may sound like a reasonable concern, even a moral imperative. It is not. For a large body of music, including many masterpieces, it's completely irrelevant. Up to about 1800, most solo and chamber music and songs were written for amateurs to play in their homes, with or without a small audience of family and friends. And even with music designed for performance by professionals in public, doing "what the composer wanted" sounds straightforward, even easy, but actually it's impossible.

Stravinsky is the only composer I know of who said straight out that all performances of his music should conform to his own. He was talking through his hat. If anyone doubts this, let himi listen to the five recordings Stravinsky made of "The Rite of Spring" and try to decide how the composer intended it to go. Other composers, even those who perform their own music brilliantly, have not claimed a monopoly on interpretive virtue, and that's wise of them.

(Stravinsky himself backed off later in his life. He wrote, or Robert Craft wrote for him, "If the speeds of everything in the world and in ourselves have changed, our tempo feelings cannot remain unaffected. The metronome marks one wrote forty years ago were contemporary forty years ago. Time is not alone in affecting tempo - circumstances do too, and every performance is a different equation of them." This applies not only to tempo but to other elements of musical performance as well.)

Even the score may deliberately not include all of the composer's wishes for performance. We have an eye-witness account of one such case. Toscanini was preparation for the premiere of Verdi's Te Deum, and according to Harvey Sachs, he "had dithered over some slight tempo modifications, particularly letups in the basic tempo, which he felt were implicit in the music at certain points but which Verdi had not indicated in the score." So it was arranged for Toscanini to meet Verdi and go through the score. The impresario Giuseppe Depanis, who was there, tells that at one point in the Te Deum, "Toscanini made one of the rallentandi that was ot printed in the score. 'Bravo,' said Verdi, clappint him on the shoulder. Toscanini stopped playing and said, 'Maestro, if only you knew how much this has been bothering me. Why didn't you write the rallentando?' Verdi replied: 'If I had written it, a bad musician would have exaggerated it, but if one is a good musician one feels it and plays it, just as you've done, without the necessity of having it written down.'"

A good musician in 1898, perhaps, but in 1998? The musical sensibility that Verdi and Toscanini shared so long ago doesn't exist in our postmodern musical world. To perform the Te Deum as we know Verdi wished, a conductor would probably need to imitate Toscanini's 1954 recording, assuming that Toscanini still felt the music the same way after more than half a century. Richard Taruskin, whom I quoted without quotation marks about Stravinsky's recordings, has cutting things to say about that.

So the score does not fully express the composer's intentions and wishes for its performance. How could it? Even Mahler, who wrote tempo changes into his scores, made many more such changes in his performances that he didn't have printed in the scores. He left such interpretive decisions to the performers - one of whom, during Mahler's lifetime, was Willem Mengelberg, whose liking for fluctuating tempos including some very strange ones is well documented on records.

Taruskin sums up what I think. "We cannot know intentions, for many reasons... Composers do not always express them. If they do express them, they may do so disingenuously. Or they may be honestly mistaken, owing to the passage of time or a not necessarily consciously expreienced change of taste... Composers do not usually have intentions such as we would like to ascertain, and the need obliquely to gain the composer's approval for what we do bespeaks a failure of nerve... The appeal to intentions is an evasion of the performer's obligation to understand what he is performing. It is what Wimsatt and Beardsley [called] the "Intentional Fallacy," or "consulting the oracle." As when a conductor might imitate a Stravinsky recording of his music, or Toscanini's recording of Verdi's Te Deum.

So let's have no more talk about a performer's obligation to conform to what the composer intends or wants. Enough that he/she conforms to the musical text, but as only the starting point of making music, in maestrob's happy image a map of the territory rather than the territory itself. Once the score has been published, the composer doesn't and shouldn't have any control over how it is performed, explicitly or implicitly. What counts is not what we guess he/she might have wanted but what we want. Which surely is challenge enough!

[jbuck919]

All I can say is that I am glad I did not make that comment myself, because I never would have agreed with the assumption. You wrote a very long post, John, but as you know, Stravinsky was a mediocre conductor and though his name is on many albums of his own work, they are also not definitive performances and were often aided by his problematic aide Robert Craft.

[Belle]

Presumbly, then, neither of you supports the idea of a particular "school"; for example, in the piano one often hears about the performer being taught by a pupil of the composer, eg. Liszt. In that particular case, 'fidelity' to a text is suggested. And it also means that your comments completely invalidate the work of somebody like John Eliot Gardiner and others in the HIP movement who have researched issues such as instrumentation, playing styles of the period and performance practice generally. Your comments also take no account of the demonstrable change in orchestral playing obvious from the inception of early gramophone recordings, such as that discussed the other day regarding Elgar and portamento in the late 1920s. Some composers may actually have composed the way they did to take account of a particular style of orchestral playing. These things can all be considerations. Look back on the Malcolm Bilson lecture I posted in another thread; he covers many of these issues.

In Shakespeare's time he wanted his audiences to understand allusions to contemporary social hierarchies and values. Though the times have changed and the universal messages and moral values of his text have endured, we cannot say he didn't want a particular reaction from the audiences of his day - no matter how subtle these would have been. And he provided no stage directions. Ergo, many things can be implied. So it is with music.

[jbuck919]

Presumbly, then, neither of you supports the idea of a particular "school"; for example, in the piano one often hears about the performer being taught by a pupil of the composer, eg. Liszt. In that particular case, 'fidelity' to a text is suggested. And it also means that your comments completely invalidate the work of somebody like John Eliot Gardiner and others in the HIP movement who have researched issues such as instrumentation, playing styles of the period and performance practice generally. Your comments also take no account of the demonstrable change in orchestral playing obvious from the inception of early gramophone recordings, such as that discussed the other day regarding Elgar and portamento in the late 1920s. Some composers may actually have composed the way they did to take account of a particular style of orchestral playing. These things can all be considerations. Look back on the Malcolm Bilson lecture I posted in another thread; he covers many of these issues.

Not necessarily. Now we are talking about multiple matters. We can know nothing about anything that was composed before recorded performance. We can simply recreate to the best of our ability, which in my opinion is pretty good. I say this in full knowledge that there are still some performers who can trace their educational legacy way back. All classical music suggests its own interpretation, no matter whether it might be subverted by an intervening tradition or not.

[John F]

John: How competent Stravinsky was as a conductor (and pianist) isn't very relevant to this particular discussion. His performances and recordings may not have fully embodied what he wanted, but he never said so. What he did say is that he was against interpretation and wanted nothing more than an accurate rendering of the music, which most of his recordings are from the 1940s on.

Which assumption wouldn't you agree with? I've made several.

Belle: You're right that my view opposes the HIP movement, as does the Taruskin essay I quoted from, but the other issues you raise seem to me off-topic, and some I just don't understand. How Liszt or Elgar wanted their music to sound, we can't know. Liszt's pupils were a diverse bunch and not copycats of their teacher; and how is fidelity to a text suggested, when Liszt was known for making free with the text of the music he played? Elgar's recordings with various orchestras show that he took them as they were, rather than trying to make them conform to some ideal sound of his own. (It's Stokowski who was noted for achieving that.)

You say, "Some composers may actually have composed the way they did to take account of a particular style of orchestral playing." Who actually did this and in what pieces, or is it just a theory? I certainly don't know of any such composer or music. Plenty of concertos have been written with particular soloists in mind, for example Rachmaninoff's 3rd which was originally composed for Josef Hofmann. But that doesn't mean the composer wanted only that soloist to play it. As it happened, Hofmann never played Rach 3 (his hands were too small, for one thing), Rachmaninoff played the premiere himself, and he thought Horowitz played it better than he did.

Shakespeare and all playwrights past and present depend on the audience understanding what the characters are saying and what it means. If composers depended on their audience understanding their music and its meaning, if music can have meaning, the audience would be small indeed.

John: You say, "We can know nothing about anything that was composed before recorded performance." Right. "We can simply recreate to the best of our ability." We may be able to recreate how some earlier music did sound when it was new. But we can know nothing about whether that's how the composer wanted it to sound. Indeed, there are passages by Mozart and Beethoven that are commonly revised when played today because we have instruments that can play them, as did not exist in the composers' time. And these are physical issues, as distinct from the metaphysical question of the composer's intent or wishes as to performance.

[Belle]

You're suggesting it's of no value at all having a teacher who has a direct line of 'descent' from a composer, eg. Liszt. Surely that same teacher would know about Liszt's performance practices and discuss this with the student. This is what we would refer to as an "oral" tradition, and that's important. I think absinthe would have some comments to make about this.

In speaking about 'what the composer wants' we need to look at the score, yes, and that is precise and not precise at the same time; ergo, the problem. It's inherently the nature of musical notation (as well demonstrated by Bilson). But neither Beethoven nor Mozart would have envisaged a full blown (Mahlerian) symphony orchestra more than twice the size of the ones they knew. This would have called for a different style of orchestration, even a different kind of composition - so I'm with the HIP people who believe composers orchestrated for the instruments and orchestral forces they knew. I'm suggesting that what Beethoven "wanted" would have been largely what he 'knew'. And Beethoven's 9th sounds totally different with 101 players than it does with 40. You don't have to be an expert on orchestration or a musicologist to know that. I prefer the leaner sound and the dramatic effects Mozart and Beethoven are able to achieve with their instruments. They cannot have prognosticated the mid 20th century orchestral timbres and configurations, with different instrument technology and pitches, when writing their music. It sounds fine, of course, but it isn't what they knew or even composed for!! I'm with the HIP practitioners, once again. We wouldn't expect a harpsichord work to be performed on a piano and to then refer to it as "what the composer wants". Clearly, that's anachronistic.

Thurston Dart in "The Interpretation of Music" was an early HIP pioneer. He speaks about the difficulty of notation signalling 'composers' intentions', then he discusses the Editor - that mediating hand between composer and performer. And it remains yet another consideration.

In short, I'm saying it IS possible to glean 'what the composer wants' depending on the proximity to our modern time (of course) and the performance practice of the day. To that extent it IS possible, along with the 'oral' tradition I referred to earlier. Liszt was, after all, a teacher. I'll let Thurston Dart say a few words on this.."Few concert-goers probably realise that of all the instruments they hear in Beethoven's ninth symphony, for instance, the only ones whose sounds have NOT CHANGED since the symphony was first performed in 1824, are the kettle-drums, the triangle, and the trombone". (Indeed, some may have changed further since Dart wrote his book in 1954.) "All the others (instruments) have been transformed, some more and some less, and even if the symphony is played with the same number of instruments and voices that they were in 1824, the resultant sound will be quite different in quality"(p.34).

Otherwise, I agree with you and unless there's a mutually-understood oral tradition, it's only a map and not the territory of the work. As Bilson demonstrated, Prokofiev played his own works rather differently from the scores he provided for his piano works. Once a score is in the public domain it must be up to the individual interpreter/s to do what they think is right.

As for Taruskin's comments about "intentions", I think some of these things regarding size or orchestra and texture were axiomatic. The composer specified his instruments and knew how they sounded and these were his 'intentions', IMO. So, to the extent that sound, timbre etc. are 'intentions' of the composers these are 'doable'. And it's cute for Taruskin to talk about composers being "disingenuous". That's neither an artistic instruction nor practical aesthetic intention.

[John F]

You're suggesting it's of no value at all having a teacher who has a direct line of 'descent' from a composer, eg. Liszt.

I'm suggesting no such thing. I'm just saying that whatever other qualities the Liszt students may have had, on the evidence they do not include imitating the manner of their teacher. (Even less so the next generation of students, and the next.) Moriz Rosenthal studied with Liszt for a year, but we can't infer from this alone that any of his recordings imitate Liszt's playing. The most famous of Rosenthal's pupils was Charles Rosen, whose playing was surely the opposite of Liszt's.

There's one recording, a piano roll by Bernhard Stavenhagen 20 years after Liszt's death, in which he played the 12th Hungarian Rhapsody in Liszt's manner, or so the inscription on the roll says. Make of it what you will.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKW594elPSs

If you're interested, Amy Fay's "Music Study in Germany" says what studying piano with Liszt was like. He didn't play much himself, and when he did it was usually improvising. His pupils did the playing. And since he had long since ceased to perform in public except on very special occasions, most of them wouldn't have had much opportunity to hear him; the normal way by which oral tradition is handed down, by listening and emulation, wasn't very much available. For more about this, see Taruskin's essay "Tradition and Authenticity" in his collection "Text and Act."

Incidentally, the HIP people abhor oral tradition because it is not frozen but evolves with the changing times and generations. They compare the effect of tradition on performance with the accumulation of dirt on an old painting, and love it when a famous conductor declares that tradition is the last bad performance or "Tradition ist Schlamperei." Instead they want to jump back to when the music was new, before any tradition can have developed for performing it. That's the opposite of what I think.

You say, "neither Beethoven nor Mozart would have envisaged a full blown (Mahlerian) symphony orchestra more than twice the size of the ones they knew." Beethoven was deaf so it surely didn't matter much if at all how many players he hired for his rare orchestral concerts. But we know for a fact that Mozart loved big orchestras, bigger than he could afford to hire for his concerts. He wrote home about a performance of one of his symphonies, "The symphony was magnifique and had a great success. Forty violins played, the winds were doubled, there were 10 violas, 10 double basses, eight cellos, and six bassoons." That's bigger than Mahlerian! Mozart also took part in the annual benefit concerts of the Tonkünstler Society which featured an enormous chorus and orchestra, possible because many professionals took part for free and amateur players and singers were also welcome. But none of this affected Mozart's style of orchestration let alone his style of composition, not in any way that we can perceive.

He never complained about the size of any orchestra he worked with, even when, for the premiere of "Don Giovanni," with its instrumentarium expanded by 3 trombones, there was room in the tiny theatre's pit for only 4 first violins etc. But it doesn't take an expert on orchestration or a musicologist to know that Mozart did not compose "Don Giovanni" for a chamber orchestra.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s1OFwAlMMw

[Belle]

It's a great discussion to have! And I wouldn't take very many of Mozart's letters too seriously, given the nonsense which often passed his pen. It was hard to tell when he was serious and when joking. Beethoven knew the sounds of the 'modern' Viennese orchestra because he played and conducted his own works with them. Any criticism he made of their playing was not on the basis that he wished the forces were bigger.

The 'oral' tradition has been cast in cement with the invention of the gramophone. No more 'chinese whispers' after that. I have never heard of HIP people being opposed to an oral tradition; in fact, the music that interests them probably ends with Beethoven and Berlioz and has no oral tradition. They speak about performance tradition and how this ultimately obscured some of the clarity of the works, and I agree with that. But there is plenty of written evidence about what Beethoven and others thought of his players and their performances. We still have some recordings available of Arthur Nikisch and I'm sure you know these. His orchestra is leaden, too slow and, even though of a high level of musicianship, too big IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFY1s6y6r5M

I'll take a listen to the Liszt later on; and I'll have my husband consult the tomes by Alan Walker about Liszt's teaching practices.

[david johnson]

"What the composer wants" is for his music to be played. That's really most of what I know to say

[John F]

I wouldn't take very many of Mozart's letters too seriously, given the nonsense which often passed his pen. It was hard to tell when he was serious and when joking.

That would be a very serious mistake. I've read all of Mozart's known letters, every one, in Emily Anderson's translation and even some in the original, and it's always quite clear when Mozart is joking - his sense of humor was not subtle or ironic. When talking about his musical preferences, as we are now, his letters are not only the best sources we have, they're almost the only sources. Dismiss them and you have to just drop the subject.

Recordings can be a medium for transmitting oral traditions; one can listen to them and emulate them just as one can a living musician. The current hostility to tradition arises from the HIP movement's putting texts before all else. We have recordings of Prokofiev, a brilliant pianist, in his own music. Here's a striking example:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yte4Efwfjqc

The quirky rhythm is not written in the published score - how could it be? But pianists who care how Prokofiev played his music, presumably because that's how he wanted it, have only to listen to him. But nobody does. Instead we get the likes of this, from Boris Berman:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HH7kNZWY5k

Prokofiev had no pupils but was himself the pupil of Annette Essipova, the onetime assistant and wife of that other great piano pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky. One of Leschetizky's pupils was Artur Schnabel, whose recording of Schubert's gavotte-like Moment Musical #3 has a tripping rhythm that sounds to me rather like Prokofiev's:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1OgiUl37M8

It's conceivable that both pianists, dissimilar as they were, may reflect in their playing a tradition of which Leschetizky was a transmitter. What tradition might that be? Well, Leschetizky studied with Carl Czerny, who studied with Beethoven... Could tradition have handed down a vestige of old Vienna, the Vienna of Czerny, Beethoven, and Schubert, as tradition continues to hand down the unwritten, idiomatic rubato with which the Vienna Philharmonic plays Viennese waltzes? Of course that's a stretch and it can't be verified, but it's not impossible, and it's more interesting to say maybe and leave the question open than to say no and close it.

(Credit where it's due: I didn't think up all of that myself but have taken it from a presentation at Lincoln Center's Mozart Bicentennial seminars.)

[lennygoran]

He never complained about the size of any orchestra he worked with, even when, for the premiere of "Don Giovanni," with its instrumentarium expanded by 3 trombones, there was room in the tiny theatre's pit for only 4 first violins etc. But it doesn't take an expert on orchestration or a musicologist to know that Mozart did not compose "Don Giovanni" for a chamber orchestra.

I'm sure glad you finally brought opera into this thread! Regards, Len [fleeing]

[John F]

I have never heard of HIP people being opposed to an oral tradition

You have now! For more details read the essay I mentioned earlier, Taruskin's "Tradition and Authenticity" in his collection "Text and Act."

In fact, the music that interests them probably ends with Beethoven and Berlioz and has no oral tradition. They speak about performance tradition...

Which is oral tradition, necessarily so. How else but by listening and emulation do you suppose performance traditions are handed down? Whether from teachers to students or by influential performers to their professional listeners, it's by ear. Certainly not in writing.

We still have some recordings available of Arthur Nikisch and I'm sure you know these. His orchestra is leaden, too slow and, even though of a high level of musicianship, too big IMO.

Leaden and too slow, you're entitled to your opinion. But the actual orchestra in Nikisch's recordings was only thirty-some players strong, as many as could be crowded into the cramped recording studios used to make acoustic recordings.

[maestrob]

Prokofiev's own recording of his now popular Concerto III is very different from what's in the score, especially when compared to Graffman/Szell, which is the first recording made in the modern style I heard when I was a teenager. Szell's interpretation has been emulated by many other conductor/pianist combinations since, while everyone I've heard has ignored Prokofiev's own recording. Horowitz/Barbirolli performed Rachmaninoff's Concerto III in a fashion similar to Prokofiev's (a recording exists of the broadcast), with many tempo changes subtly interpolated with each successive musical idea. It must have taken a great deal of rehearsal to get this across to the orchestra, a luxury we do not have in today's world.

Toscanini and those who agreed with him established the modern style of making music, a set of rules that most of us grew up with and learned not just by listening but by studying: any other style of "interpretation" makes us feel highly uncomfortable, even in piano music. Debussy's piano rolls are a world apart from Gieseking's very disciplined recordings, which many other pianists now base their interpretations on, ignoring Debussy's originals and actually denigrating them by claiming that Debussy was a poor pianist. Nonsense. Debussy knew how he wanted his music to go, yet every pianist I've heard since Gieseking has ignored the composer. And so it goes.

My point is that Toscanini's influence is everywhere in modern music-making. The Maestro established his style for very practical reasons. He envisioned the modern maestro/musician as a world-travelling advocate for music, with limited rehearsal time and even less time to establish personal relationships with an individual orchestra. Thus, if a universal understanding of "how music should go" could be agreed upon, this would save enormous amounts of rehearsal time and allow for satisfying and energetic performances of the standard repertoire. IMHO, that grand vision has prevailed, and provided a framework for successful promulgation of classical music.

Even Liszt's piano music (which I have not studied, but have listened to many great pianists play, including Rosenthal) now conforms to this framework.

[Belle]

JohnF: I've read all the Mozart letters too. He wrote from Paris to his father saying his mother was alive, when she was dead, then quickly changed the subject to musical matters. That was just strange. Many of the letters (I didn't say the vast majority or all of them) were just silly. Some are excellent documents about the performances etc., but I didn't get the overall impression he would have been satisfied with bigger orchestras. And this raises another issue which I often brought up with my English students: whom do you believe? The tale or the teller? This is an ideal metaphor for a score and a composer's letters/notes/anecdotes etc.

It's not just the score that HIP is concerned with, but playing on the instruments of the day and the same-sized orchestra.

Nikisch; it sounded like a bigger orchestra, though it would have been smaller for the reasons you state - but it was stodgy. I prefer the leaner, more transparent style of the period instruments - but these must be played convincingly. Harnoncourt, for example. And I have Arthur Schoonderwoerd playing all 5 Beethoven concertos on a fortepiano with virtually a handful of players and it's TERRIBLE. I'm giving it away when our music group starts back Thursday. But I also love Kleiber's Beethoven, thinking the composer wouldn't have had those forces in his mind (or scored for them) when he composed. How could he? Would any of us, seriously, want to hear this Bach on a large, modern orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38TS7EOGo9A

Regarding Prokofiev: he 'recorded' some of own works and, as has been said, these do not resemble the performances of other virtuoso pianists. Once a score is in the public domain the interpreter 'owns' his/her performance of it. As to whether it's 'what the composer wants' (in the case of Prokofiev)...he knew it would be performed on a modern concert grand and that slurs and pedalling would sound at least somewhat in accordance with instructions in the notation. Not so with Beethoven or Mozart. And that's just the classical period!! And that Gavotte you posted, John, is the same one Bilson uses for his demonstration about Prokofiev in "Knowing the Score". And that 'quirky rhythm' ...that's the kind of thing handed down from composer/teacher to pupil/teacher - of which there have been many. Prokofiev wasn't one of them, as far as my recollection goes!

[John F]

He wrote from Paris to his father saying his mother was alive, when she was dead, then quickly changed the subject to musical matters. That was just strange.

There's nothing strange about it. He was trying, in the most considerate way, to break the news of his mother's death to his difficult father as gently as possible. He wrote his father on July 3, 1778, that she was very ill, but on the very same day he wrote privately to the family friend Abbé Bullinger telling him of her death and saying, "I beg you, most beloved friend, watch over my father for me and try to give him courage so that, when he hears the worst, he may not take it too hardly. I commend my sister to you also with all my heart. Go to them both at once, I implore you - but do not tell them yet that she is dead, just prepare them for it. Do what you think best - use every means to comfort them."

Then on July 9, having allowed the time for a fatal illness to take its course and for deciding what to say, he wrote the moving and philosophically profound letter telling his family of the sad news and offering such consolation as he could. I won't quote it but it's letter #313 in the Emily Anderson collection.

That you find anything strange or less than serious in these of all Mozart's letters makes me wonder. But let it go.

maestrob: Toscanini did not respect nor even acknowledge any tradition at all. He cared about what the composer wanted, and when the composer was living, he often sought him out to ask questions about interpretation. When that wasn't possible, however, he relied on the letter of the score, as he often said, though he wasn't above "improving" it especially if the music was new.

By force of personality and the eloquence of his music-making, in person and on an unprecedented number of recordings, he created a new and essentially literalistic tradition based on the musical text; most younger conductors and performers (except some Germans) were influenced to do likewise. These certainly include George Szell, whom you mention. This text-based modernist style of interpretation has not only been adopted by mainstream conductors such as Bernstein and Boulez but many HIP performers, who may use period instruments in performing 19th century music but shy away from the free, improvisatory interpretive style we know the composers themselves to have had.

[jserraglio]

Furtwangler's verdict on Toscanini: "Bloody time beater!", has a ring of truth about it, even if he never actually said it. But clearly Toscanini was the most influential classical musician of the last century. I have loads of his records, problem is I rarely play them anymore.

[Belle]

JohnF; many music experts have expressed the same reservations I have about that infamous letter to Leopold, pretending that his wife was still alive. Be that as it may, the letters are certainly informative and often highly amusing in a silly way...(..."be so kind as to wait until the sheep cross the river"!!).

[jbuck919]

JohnF; many music experts have expressed the same reservations I have about that infamous letter to Leopold, pretending that his wife was still alive. Be that as it may, the letters are certainly informative and often highly amusing in a silly way...(..."be so kind as to wait until the sheep cross the river"!!).

The fact that Mozart's mother died on the only road trip she took with him (instead of his father) is almost forgotten. It must have been an appalling thing to happen to him or any boy. The correspondence is sometimes scatological, and I barely dare quote it, but in one of her letters back to Leopold she said this: "Adio, ben mio. Stick your arse in your mouth. S*it up the bed until it bursts." I am not making this up. I shared this with some German friends once, and apparently there is an issue of the Germanic sense of humor involved. Yeast is yeast, but the rest is best.

[Belle]

Yes, I've read those Mozart letters (ed. Anderson) - albeit nearly 30 years ago. The book languishes on my shelves.

[THEHORN]

Toscanini was not a totally rigid and metronomic conductor by any means . Unfortunately, too many of his NBC symphony orchestra recordings, made late in life , seem that way . His earlier recordings with the New York Philharmonic are much more flexible as well as other live performances with other orchestra which have survived .
Many critics and musicians who are no longer alive and heard live performances by him have noticed how different they are from his NBC recordings .

[jserraglio]

Toscanini was not a totally rigid and metronomic conductor by any means.

Not always, but on record mostly rigid and metronomic. WF's putative put-down muttered at a live performance was right on the money. Still AT deserves credit for bringing classical music to more new listeners than most anybody else in the 20th century.

[Heck148]

Toscanini was not a totally rigid and metronomic conductor by any means .

Agree completely....AT was in no way a rigid time-beater - check out his Tristan P & L-D, or Brahms 4/IV....it could be just as easily said that Furtwangler was an "idiosyncratic taffy-puller".......

[jbuck919]

Toscanini was not a totally rigid and metronomic conductor by any means .

Agree completely....AT was in no way a rigid time-beater - check out his Tristan P & L-D, or Brahms 4/IV....it could be just as easily said that Furtwangler was an "idiosyncratic taffy-puller".......

Furtwängler was himself a very uneven conductor, though there is no question that either he or Toscanini knew every note of any score they conducted. I can't think about him without thinking about his recording of the Beethoven Ninth, in which he takes an entirely inappropriate accelerando in the last movement. We can talk about the flexibility that composers themselves would have understood, but I cannot believe that Beethoven, assuming he had hearing, would have approved of that. In fact, leave hearing out of it, because he would have noticed the problem just from the beat the conductor was giving. Toscanini had a very tiny beat, which is why he might be deprecated in certain quarters, but it was because, unlike Bernstein, he did not want to detract from the music with his own motions. Everything with great orchestras is in the rehearsal.

[John F]

JohnF; many music experts have expressed the same reservations I have about that infamous letter to Leopold, pretending that his wife was still alive.

Belle, vague assertions about "many [unnamed] music experts" cut no ice. Mozart has been a major study of mine for most of my life; I have 12 feet of books about him, including the most recent scholarly biographies. I've never read anything like what you claim, not even close. You'll have to quote at least one specific source, or at least name it, as I'm about to do.

In Stanley Sadie's "Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781" (New York: Norton, 2006), the latest and best biography for that period of Mozart's life, he writes:

Mozart had not written to his father to tell him of his mother's illness. He will have realized that there was little point in doing so. It could only cause painful anxiety, and there was no prospect of Leopold's coming to Paris to be with Maria Anna: his financial situation, with heavy debts and no cash to hand, precluded his leaving Salzburg. In any case, if she was in mortal danger he would almost certainly have been too late. So Mozart had now to tell his father and his sister of the tragedy. He decided to write to Leopold to tell him at first only that Maria Anna was seriously ill, and at the same time to write to the family friend and priest, Abbé Bullinger, to tell him the true state of affairs. This thoughtful procedure may perhaps have softened the blow. Leopold's next letter, begun on 12 July, starts by offering his wife congratulations on her nameday. The following morning, however, Wolfgang's letter dated 3 July and presumably posted the next day, reached him. Leopold immediately realized that by this time she had probably died. Nannerl "Wept copiously" and suffered sickness and headache. The next day was one on which there was a shooting game at the Mozarts', which Leopold could not cancel. After it, when their friends, all very sad, left, Bullinger stayed behind and "acted his part well," gently intimating to Leopold that Maria Anna was indeed dead. Leopold then finished his letter to his son, with many enquiries about the events surrounding her death and the aftermath, many injunctions to care for his own health, many expressions of his loss for his wife and of his acceptance of God's will.

There are several pages more about their further exchange of letters, but I've typed enough for our purposes.

Admittedly, Mozart biography has taken some strange turns in recent decades. First there was the novelist Wolfgang Hildesheimer's "Mozart" (1977), which reviewers have described as "not quite a biography" or a "meta-biography." That's putting it mildly. Robert Gutman's "Mozart: A Cultural Biography" is peppered not just with speculations but actual errors; he doesn't know, for example, that Mozart's 9th piano concerto, the so-called "Jeunhomme," was composed for a Mlle. Jenomy. Maynard Solomon's "Mozart: A Life" is a psychobiography, that is, it attempts to psychoanalyze Mozart in Freudian terms. And then there's Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," the play and especially the movie, about a fictional character named "Mozart."

I've owned and read or seen all of these and more, found them essentially useless or worse, and gotten rid of them. For a reliable account of the biographical and cultural facts I rely on Sadie and on Volkmar Braunbehrens's biography of the last decade, "Mozart in Vienna 1781-1791." Older but still magisterial is Hermann Abert's "W. A. Mozart," finally translated into English, with updating annotations by a real expert, Cliff Eisen.

jbuck919 points out that Mozart wasn't the only one in his family who liked scatological humor. I've read elsewhere that it was pretty common in the Austro-German bourgeoisie. But Mozart reserved it for family and friends. "Amadeus" aside, he well knew how to behave in the presence of the Emperor and at meetings of his Masonic lodge. His father had brought him up well and they had traveled to all the major courts of Europe while he was still a child. Shaffer has described "Amadeus" as a fantasy, and so it is.

[John F]

Toscanini was not a totally rigid and metronomic conductor by any means. Unfortunately, too many of his NBC symphony orchestra recordings, made late in life , seem that way . His earlier recordings with the New York Philharmonic are much more flexible as well as other live performances with other orchestra which have survived.

You're right about that. Listen to the opening of the Haffner Symphony as recorded with the Philharmonic in 1929:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-wO6Er1uU8

And now in 1946:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lga738M6TK8

I didn't say that Toscanini's style was "rigid" but that it was bound by the musical text, literalistic, with no regard for oral traditions of performance. This is particularly true of his symphonic repertoire; tempos vary only slightly if at all, rubatos are so subtle as often to pass unnoticed. This isn't a judgment but a description. In opera he could be more flexible - he had to be, when accompanying singers with ideas of their own, including the need to breathe.

[jserraglio]

Though I admire what AT did for music and own his recordings, I do find his conducting rigid and unyielding in most of what I still listen to from him. Seeing AT on film in studio 8H only reinforced that impression. I prefer to hear Stokowski, Furtwangler and Beecham from that era.

[Belle]

@JohnF: I've heard the comments about Mozart's letter to his father discussed on television documentaries about Mozart and music, and I do know I've definitely also read it but cannot remember the name of the writer, since I wouldn't record the words every critic or scholar has ever said or written about any composer. It was some English musicologist, I'm thinking. I didn't make it up because I'd have no need to do that. My memory goes a long way back regarding this observation. And when I re-read the letter at the time, in light of those comments, I did find it bizarre myself. She was dead in the next room and he was writing about music as if nothing had happened. I wonder how anybody could compose him/herself to do that after a mother has died, virtually in her sons arms. Since I didn't walk in his shoes I cannot say.

Whatever the basis of scatalogical humour (and I have heard it said before that this was a cultural thing; I'm wondering why nothing like this ever came down to us via letters from Haydn - but there it is!), it made for silly - something embarrassing - reading. But, as I asked before, whom should we believe - the tale or the teller?

Dr. Stanley Sadie was a Mozart expert but, you know, I often wonder if these scholars always have sufficient objectivity when discussing their favourite subject. In short, a little more criticism and less reverence is sometimes very useful. Sorry, John, you're not going to agree with me but that extract you provided by Sadie was as Mozart's apologist and a speculative one at that. Just look at the sympathetic telling of it. I do know from what I've said before that others have taken a different view, myself included. Having read lots on Beethoven I can recognize when a biographer has provided a glowing hue to what may often be an unpalatable truth; that composers were often deeply human and flawed like the rest of us and we cannot rely on them to be truthful about themselves. I learned when studying English post-grad about the genre of "autobiography", which raised interesting philosophical issues about the nature of truth and the 'creation' of a self in print. That's not in any way to downgrade the scholarly work of Dr. Sadie; not at all. In the case of J.E. Gardiner and his research for "Music in the Castle of Heaven" (seen in a TV documentary), I do distinctly remember Gardiner saying very unflattering things about Bach and his behaviour, insofar as that was known. He never attempted to explain it away. I've heard musicians and scholars in TV documentaries trying to explain away Beethoven throwing objects at a house servant as though this was somehow idiosyncratic or amusing; I never felt either way. He had resorted to violence. Full stop. And I won't even begin to discuss the contradictions and inconsistencies of Brahms, gleaned through his letters and in at least 2 biographies.

And subjectivity and bias is a problem I've encountered before when reading biographies - not just of composers but also film directors (another interest area of mine). Kevin Brownlow wrote a lengthy biography of the British director David Lean which I found cloying and overly reverential; the director wasn't a nice man at all!!

I know from past exchanges with you that you are a great admirer and fervent listener and researcher of Mozart. My comments are my honest opinion and I don't think they are based on willful ignorance or merely because I want to be a provocateur. And I respect you for your breadth of knowledge and obvious passion. But also I think we view the world very differently.

[Heck148]

Though I admire what AT did for music and own his recordings, I do find his conducting rigid and unyielding in most of what I still listen to from him. Seeing AT on film in studio 8H only reinforced that impression.

Try the Tchaikovsky Manfred symphony mvt II, 2nd theme - Toscanini/NBC 1/53 - this features the most marvelously flexible and expressive conducting one is likely to hear anywhere. There is nothing at all rigid or unyielding, it is most remarkable and beautifully expressive. Same with Tristan Prel & Love-Death from 1/52....beautifully phrased and expressive, amazing orchestral control, flexibility and ensemble.
I am, however, not a big fan of AT's Mozart and Haydn - he tends to drive it too hard, IMO.

[John F]

Belle, it simply won't do to dismiss all expert knowledge and opinion merely because what you believe doesn't agree with it. I'm certainly not going to trust your incomplete and evidently imperfect memory more than reading Mozart's actual letters and their interpretation by every serious biographer known to me. Why can't you acknowledge that you could be wrong? Since you are wrong, that's the least you should do. End of discussion, or my part of it; I've been wasting my time.

[jserraglio]

Though I admire what AT did for music and own his recordings, I do find his conducting rigid and unyielding in most of what I still listen to from him. Seeing AT on film in studio 8H only reinforced that impression.

Try the Tchaikovsky Manfred symphony mvt II, 2nd theme - Toscanini/NBC 1/53 - this features the most marvelously flexible and expressive conducting one is likely to hear anywhere. There is nothing at all rigid or unyielding, it is most remarkable amnd beautifully expressive. Same with Tristan Prel & Love-Death from 1/52....beautifully phrased and expressive, amazing orchestral control, flexibility and ensemble.
I am, however, not a big fan of AT's Mozart and Haydn - he tends to drive it too hard, IMO.

I have the Manfred on Lp and will listen for this in mvt 2. Thanks. I used to be a big AT fan and bought every recording of his I could find.

[diegobueno]

A few random thoughts about the issue of "what the composer wants" which may or may not add up to a coherent statement (and I apologize in advance for always referring to the composer as "he"):

What the composer wants is, first of all, for his music to be performed, second of all to be performed well, and thirdly, to be enjoyed.

The composer himself may not always be aware of the full implications of the music he’s written. This would be especially so for the great masterpieces, which are prized precisely because of their depth of content.

The more recent the score, the more one can form a precise picture of what the composer wanted from the written text of the score. In the 20th century, the understanding is that the composer should write down as precisely as possible what he wants to hear. Tempo markings, metronome marks, any tempo changes or modifications, phrasing, articulations, dynamics, special playing techniques (with precise indications of where they begin and end). Anything not written down is up to the performer to interpret.

The farther back you go, the less information there is in the score and so the more there is left up to the performer’s interpretation. When you get back to the 18th century, there are performance conventions which composers can just assume as universal, and so don’t bother to notate, conventions involving things such as ornamentation, articulation, continuo realization. At that point the issue is less “what the composer wanted” than “what the composer expected”. If you’re going to perform 18th century music, it’s a good idea to know what those conventions are, because just playing the notes as written isn’t going to cut it.

The attempt to investigate how a composer might have wanted his/her music to sound will produce wildly different results depending on the performer, but it speaks volumes about the performer who makes the effort.

“What the composer wanted” is still a good ideal for a performer, even if not ultimately attainable.

[maestrob]

Thanks, Mark, for returning us to the subject at hand.

[Belle]

A few random thoughts about the issue of "what the composer wants" which may or may not add up to a coherent statement (and I apologize in advance for always referring to the composer as "he"):

What the composer wants is, first of all, for his music to be performed, second of all to be performed well, and thirdly, to be enjoyed.

The composer himself may not always be aware of the full implications of the music he’s written. This would be especially so for the great masterpieces, which are prized precisely because of their depth of content.

The more recent the score, the more one can form a precise picture of what the composer wanted from the written text of the score. In the 20th century, the understanding is that the composer should write down as precisely as possible what he wants to hear. Tempo markings, metronome marks, any tempo changes or modifications, phrasing, articulations, dynamics, special playing techniques (with precise indications of where they begin and end). Anything not written down is up to the performer to interpret.

The farther back you go, the less information there is in the score and so the more there is left up to the performer’s interpretation. When you get back to the 18th century, there are performance conventions which composers can just assume as universal, and so don’t bother to notate, conventions involving things such as ornamentation, articulation, continuo realization. At that point the issue is less “what the composer wanted” than “what the composer expected”. If you’re going to perform 18th century music, it’s a good idea to know what those conventions are, because just playing the notes as written isn’t going to cut it.

The attempt to investigate how a composer might have wanted his/her music to sound will produce wildly different results depending on the performer, but it speaks volumes about the performer who makes the effort.

“What the composer wanted” is still a good ideal for a performer, even if not ultimately attainable.

Totally agree with this. The issue is fraught altogether, but certain criteria like performance conventions (documented and NOT necessarily 'oral') from the classical and romantic eras - and treatises from earlier periods - make it more obvious at least in terms of orchestral forces, instruments (Organology), intonation etc. And this is what the HIP enthusiasts are on about.

[diegobueno]

Belle, since you mention Malcolm Bilson,

During 30 years of studying and living in Ithaca, New York, I had the pleasure of hearing Malcolm Bilson playing Mozart, and talking about playing Mozart quite often. His concerts on the Cornell campus were free of charge, too. He didn’t play very many composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and occasionally Schumann or Mendelssohn) but he played with great verve and freedom. The fortepiano allowed him to cut loose on Mozart without overwhelming the music. His performance, with Max von Egmond, of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, was one of the highlights of my concert-going during those years. Anyway, Cornell had a very strong program of scholarship in 18th century performance practice, and Bilson was always teeming with ideas about it. I had a coaching session with him once on a performance of Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock, which was quite enlightening, and which brought the resulting performance to a much higher level of interpretation.

He even performed something I wrote once, a campaign ditty in ragtime style, for a local Democratic candidate at a fund-raiser at his house. He was entertaining the guests with performances of Scott Joplin, on a modern piano, and there was a singer and they sang my song in praise of the candidate -- the way I wanted it, too.

[Belle]

I've always been a great admirer of Malcolm Bilson and I especially love his "Knowing the Score" lecture from Cornell. He's an engaging and erudite speaker who obviously loves his subject and speaks authoritatively on it. He is quite explicit about the differences between the modern concert grand and the fortepiano and this makes a compelling case for its use in the repertoire of that period.

I envy you being able to access these wonderful things, but thanks to the internet most of us can catch many of these programs from afar. What a thrill for you having your little piece played by him! Thank you for that anecdote.