Richard Luckett on an extraordinary revival of early music
The revival of early music is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of taste. In 1880 Samuel Butler's opinion, that the tide of music had been rising from the time of Dunstable to the time of Handel, and falling ever since, must have seemed grotesque; now it is the postulate (generally unadmitted) on which many people base their listening habits and even their careers as performers. Within living memory Beecham could describe a harpsichord as resembling a "bird-cage struck by a toasting fork" and Vaughan Williams refer to the eighteenth century oboe as "that gross bagpipe", now both instruments are taken for granted. Counter-tenors no longer merit pitying glances, whilst the teeth of thousands are daily set on edge by the shriek of massed descant recorders. Early music is not merely here to stay; it has become big business.
No one played a more important part in this revival than Arnold Dolmetsch. Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw, who both attended his pioneering concerts in the early 1890s, recognised the genius of this French-born, Englishdomiciled Swiss musician, but they could scarcely have predicted the extent of his influence, whether as performer, teacher, builder of instruments or scholar. Yet it would be hard to overstate the significance of his Interpretation of the Music of the XVIlth and XVIIIth centuries, which was first published in 1915. It has had a conditioning effect on most serious modern performances of old music and it has also — as mediated by Ezra Pound — played a part in the development of modern poetics. Mr Robert Donnington, whose Interpretation of Early Music has just been reissued in an edition so extensively revised as to be, in many respects, a new book*, writes as an acknowledged disciple who "sat literally at Arnold Dolmetsch's feet, down on the floor among the music-stands."
His method, the quotation and annotation of contemporary authorities, is derived directly from Dolmetsch's procedure, though, not surprisingly, he is able to call on a greater range of texts and examples. He shares with Dolmetsch a concern for what Might be termed the ethos of early music, the spirit of the art, and an equal determination that this spirit should be manifested in modern performances. His learning and his practical experience are equally formidable. It is apparent from the scale and the tone of this volume that he has endeavoured to fuse them in an authoritative work. Yet what he has achieved, for all that it will be a valuable quarry for the student of music, seems primarily a document to interest the historian of taste.
If this seems a harsh judgement it is as well to remember that explorers are often better at *The Interpretation of Early Music Robert Donnington (Faber 00.00) opening up new country than at settling it. This was certainly the limitation of the Dolmetsch tradition.
All Dolmetsch's sensitivity and learning could not redeem him from the dogmatism that caused him to break with some of his most loyal followers. His devotion to early instruments did not prevent him from virtually redesigning the harpsichord or from restoring old examples according to his idiosyncratic and anachronistic precepts. Dolmetsch had no time for what Robert Donnington, as a young man, described as the "mere servile imitation of existing masterpieces"; he was anxious to express his own artistic personality. But the question must be: to what extent can a performer knowingly obtrude this? His audience will detect it, if he is of merit, but it can never be independent of the music he performs; indeed the quality referred to as 'personality' might better be regarded in its negative aspect, for what we sense in a great performer is his degree of absorption in what he performs, the quality of his surrender to it. Dolmetsch, as surviving recordings demonstrate, could at times achieve this but he did not consistently do so and, precisely because he was playing works from a distant and unfamiliar period, he often had to invoke his own sense of musicianship as a reason why a piece should be played one way rather than another. It is easy to see how a disciple, impressed by his fire and enthusiasm, would wish to emphasise the propriety of such a recourse. Mr Donnington devotes a good deal of space to stressing the legitimacy of this, and to denying that historical authenticity in music is a moral issue. He points out that Bach can come over excellently on the piano, and that a high standard of technique and inauthentic performance is preferable to a low standard of technique but an 'authentic' performance. With this one need have no quarrel; what is disturbing is the way in which Mr Donnington, having made these points, goes on to assume that effect in performance is always preferable to strict regard for historical likelihood and the composer's intentions. He emphasises, quite rightly, our lack of firm knowldge of how a piece by, say, Bach would have sounded. But uncertainty need not be a counsel of despair, nor need it be quite so easy a justification of musical instinct as Mr Donnington makes it. Discussing the editing of early music another pioneer, Peter Warlock, once wrote: "If ... we find that it offends our ears we may be sure that it is our ears that are at fault." The warning is salutary. 'Musicianship' is often too glib a reason, too convenient an excuse for curtailing inquiry or ignoring what we know to be the case. When we lack information those things that we do know for certain become correspondingly more important. It is sad, then, to find so little discussion of instruments, for there can scarcely be anything of more fundamental importance than the medium of transmission. In the last fifty years a great deal of work has been done on seven teenth and eighteenth century instruments —
sufficient in all probability, to enable a musician to say with some confidence whether his means of sound production are the same as those employed by the composers he wishes to interpret. It seems a fair enough starting point, but how many musicians can in fact say it, or have a sufficient familiarity with the sounds so produced to approximate to them on modern instruments? Mr Donnington recounts at length how, in order to give a performance of John Blow's chamber opera Venus and Adonis, he realised it (and rescored it) in such a way that it was effective in a large auditorium. It is at once evident that in arbitrarily altering its function he entirely transformed the way it sounded; even the style of singing must have been changed to cope with the greater orchestral forces. It is as though Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale was rewritten so that it could be given at Covent Garden. Musicianship might well dictate this course, but only after a bout of insanity has led to a decision so clearly contrary to the composer's intentions.
Mr Donnington's cavalier attitude reveals a disregard for basic questions of style, sonority and texture, equally manifest in his casual treatment of the problem of instruments. In his discussion of notation and performance conventions he seems to assume that the reason why detailed indications of how a piece should be played are often so scanty is that the composers were deliberately encouraging the performer to flights of fancy and the free expression of 'personality.' It seems more rational to presume that the performers' reactions were predictable, that we are dealing with the common phenomenon of the absence from the record of the customary, precisely because it was customary.
Mr Dontington's failings are not random quirks. They stem from the intense and consistent subjectivity of his approach. It finds expression not only in the surprising frequency with which he resorts to the first person singular, but also in the way that he treats certain basic terms. 'Baroque' was used disparagingly until German art-historians gave it a precise meaning. Its musical application, however, has never been clear. But Mr Donnington deploys it as though it had a talismanic value; he says, of a recording of a Bach mass: "This is good baroque-style interpretation because it has sufficient baroque robustness as well as sensitive baroque sonority." He writes with the assurance of a man who has all the answers, yet the answers he actually gives seem to beg the questions. The whole idea that we in the twentieth century can formulate a series of principles that will serve as the key to the performance of all music written in two centuries of dramatic change smacks of presumption; it may well be that doubt is a better guide than certainty. Fortunately there are musici and scholars who realise this, and it is to Donnington's credit that many of the changes between this 'new version' of his book and the -previous edition reflect an awareness of recent research and recent performances. At the same time his work, in the spirit if not the letter, runs contrary to their findings and it is here that it is so markedly dated, though it retains its usefulness as a bibliographical guide and a source of matter for debate. Its limitation is Mr Donnington's conviction that — as he puts it — "good enough is good enough." It is a consoling adage but in matters pertaining to art, as other things, there is a preferable attitude: the desire for the best, Richard Luckett is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and a Lecturer in English at the university. He is at the moment engaged in writing a book on the relations between music and literature at the Restoration.
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