The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

4

Performance

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Criticism should adopt the point of view of the composer. Shouldn’t the performer do the same?

CHARLES ROSEN: You raise a problem there that greatly preoccupies me, that of fidelity to the score. The answer is not obvious: the interpreter can show himself perfectly faithful, play all the notes exactly, and give a bad performance. Inversely, he can introduce a few changes to the score and produce an interpretation that is entirely faithful to the composer’s ideas. My ideal is performers who show imagination while rigorously respecting the score. Musicians who change the tempos, the dynamics, the accents, the phrasing, may get interesting results sometimes, but all too easily. It is much more difficult to keep, as Schnabel and Solomon do, to the composer’s tempos, dynamics, and phrasing, while giving the impression that you are improvising, creating the work as you play.

In any case, as Schnabel said, there is no definitive performance: a Beethoven sonata will always be superior to any performance of it. There are several ways to adhere to the score: they lead to completely different interpretations.

It is, in fact, the tension that exists between text and execution that is interesting; it disappears when the performer strays too far from the score. The whole difficulty is there: how to manage to play in a very personal, very inventive way, but adhere completely to the text.

The notion of fidelity is related to the myth of authenticity: Should the performer envisage a piece of music as an independent structure, outside of any historical context, or should he attempt to recreate the interpretation of the period when the music was written? This is a dilemma that animates a lively polemic today.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Where do you stand in this polemic?

CHARLES ROSEN: Unfortunately, I fall between the two opposing camps. I think it is important to have historical knowledge, to be able to situate the composer in his epoch, to know the instruments of his time, and the performer ought to draw on that knowledge in his playing. Music has always been made for diverse interpretations. In the eighteenth century, there were French ways and German ways of playing. That is no reason to find a French performance of a work by Bach unacceptable! Later, we know that Brahms was perfectly content to hear his symphonies conducted by French conductors. It has been said that this or that aria in an opera by Handel was composed for this soprano or that tenor, but there were always replacement singers who made it possible to hear the same aria, sung differently. It completely falsifies the function of music to pretend that only a single historical interpretation exists, immutable and definitive.

CATHERINE TEMERSON: Is it possible to know exactly how pieces were played in the past?

CHARLES ROSEN: We know more or less precisely how they were played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have recordings beginning in the twentieth century. But recordings don’t change anything. When we listen to recordings of modern music made in

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