Music
Fulfilling the Law
By DAVID CAIRNS AUMEN7ICITY is in the air again. We have had the controversy over Fidelio and Leonore No. 3. We have had a glimpse of Bizet's orig- inal version of Carmen in the concert perfor- mances by the Chelsea' Opera Group under Maurits Sillem, who is editing the Urtext for the Paris publisher Chou- dens. More recently, we have had Dr. Klem- perer's performance of Messiah in its entirety. As always, the issue is complex and, in the last resort, insoluble Ultimately, authenticity does not exist; there is no such thing as perfect objec- tive truth in music. Even if it were possible to re-create in microscopic detail the exact condi- tions of original performance (and supposing the composer not to abuse one heartily for such inconsiderateness) the ears that would hear it now are not the same. Music lives in perform- ance. There are different approaches to the truth. No one performance can arrive at the whole of it.
There is always this rule: the letter killeth- or, as the New Bible has it, condemns to death (under the present Home Secretary, the effect is generally the same). In music, as the purists by their failures demonstrate over and over again, it is the spirit that gives life. In each performance the law waits, not to be merely observed, not to be destroyed, but to be fulfilled (I make no apology for the religious comparisons. Music is a religion). The 'sinner,' for all his offences against the conventions, can come much closer to salvation than the ritualist who observes meticulously his double dots and his ornaments and his terraced dynamics. Fundamentally, what made Klemperer's Messiah a weariness of the soul was not that, having got his dynamics right, he failed to go further and double-dot, or that he balanced sixty strings with only two of each woodwind instrument. It was simply that the spirit of understanding never breathed into the dull clay of his performance. (The purist may argue that had the spirit been in him, it would have led him inevitably to the correct conven- tions, but that is not quite the same thing.) To fill out the interval of a sixth at 'Behold our God with a descending scale according to eighteenth-century convention, as Miss Ursula Boese did, was completely irrelevant. since she sang the whole air without a ray of feeling. the notes were dead notes. beautiful but embalmed.
It is not purism that is wrong but the aridity of most purists. Every thoughtful music- lover is his own purist. I protest against the play- ing of Leonore No. 3 after the Dungeon Scene on grounds of purism as well as of dramatic right- ness. That is to say, I believe in the inviolability of the opera as Beethoven finally left it in 1814, after years of toil and suffering and love; my criticism is at once an act of faith and of reason. On the whole it is best to do what the composer asks. But there is no absolute. The best purists recognise the limitations of purism. Fritz Roths- child, in his new book Musical Performance in the times of Mozart and Beethoven (A. and C Black, 30s.), has many instructive and, to me, startling things to say'about accentuation, tempo, touch and phrasing in classical music, but his practical conclusion is no more than that 'know- ledge of the performing conventions of the past will help greatly in understanding and carrying out [these composers'] intentions.' The perfor- mer should find out how it used to be done, but the final artistic decision must be his own. The most illuminating interpretation in the world depends on his private personal choice, on the compromise he makes between instinct, intellect, scholarship and the irrational creative caprice without which no performance can receive the quickening touch of life.
There are further hazards. What exactly are `the composer's intentions'? It is not merely that the 'right notes' are susceptible of infinite subtle variations in actual performance. Even to decide what the right notes are is rarely quite as simple as it sounds, and not only in eighteenth-century music, which in its printed form took so much for granted and existed by conventions that are still largely forgotten. Consider the example of nineteenth-century opera. Knowing the wretched conditions in which many operas were dragged before the public we cannot doubt that the scholar has every right and duty to search out the original version and pester conductors and managements and publishers to question the ver- sion which passes as authentic. But there remains the vital matter of whether a particular change was imposed by the opera house, or whether, when the exigencies of performance forced him to think again, the composer did not freely decide that a certain passage was all the better for the change he made in it. Very often there is no evidence one way or the other Then the conductor must judge for Imselt With Fidelio, de,pike the rhetoric of Romain Rolland no convincing case on internal or external evidence can be made against the re- vised version of 1814 (which is not to say there would be nothing but historical interest in a performance of the original 1805 version). With Carmen, too, the case—here for the original version—has now been made beyond argument. Carmen is a better work as Bizet wrote-it than in the edition which has served for countless performances in the last eighty-five years. It is indisputably better with the spoken dialogue than with the recitatives (which were not even written by Bizet). It is also better, I believe, with the cuts and the original orchestration restored. Here the individual judgment must decide, though in most cases—for example, the delightful canon for solo Violin and solo cello in the changing of the guard scene, or the scoring of the Toreador theme, at Escamillo's exit in Act 3, for four solo cellos, both of which were pretty certainly sacrificed to orchestral incompetence—there seems not the smallest reasonable doubt what the decision should be.
In short, the least we have a right to expect from a performer is that he seriously reflect on the composer's indications before decidihg to depart from them. How many conductors have really considered the opening of the 'Tuba Mirum' in the Grande Messe des Marts at the measured tempo which Berlioz demanded—seventy-two crotchets to the minute? One has only to try it through in one's head to realise the vast differ- ence between the awe-inspiring grandeur of
Berl ols conception and the merely enjoyable uproar that conies from the much quicker speed taken at ninety-nine performances out of a hun- dred—including Dorati's with the LSO at the Festival Hall last week; and the variation io speed is far greater than the driest acoustic can justify. Where Dorati's performance was splen- didly authentic was in the vivid realisation of the varied orchestral colour of the work. Even in the unresonant Festival Hall that much-derided pas- sage for trombones and flutes sounded not ill- Considered and freakish but apt and beautiful. Yet we read in Forsyth's Orchestrulion that the passage 'probably sounds very nasty, and Dr. Gordon Jacob, who quotes the judgment with approval in his student manual on orchestral technique, adds. 'the present writer has•heard it. It does!' It almost persuades one that nothing— not even the conductor who knows so much better than the composer—is more irritating than the smugness of the narrow academic mind. And then I recall Sir Malcolm Sargent's C of E ver- sion of 'The Shepherds' Farewell' in The Child- hood of Christ. with Berlioz's.woodwind accom- paniment tactfully removed, and I am not so sure.
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