Interesting read, the above referenced article.
I will offer this:
jbuck919 wrote: We are stuck with never knowing how the great keyboard artists performed their own music. We are left with the fact that the music itself generally suggests its range of correct interpretation, and with the much more worrisome fact that centuries of performers have done their very best to subvert it.
We
can assume, I assume, that "the great keyboard artists" (and string, brass, woodwind, et al performers) performed their own music with slight differentiations from performance to performance (or, as jbuck puts it: within "a range of correct interpretation") simply because human performers are not machines. A machine may be programmed to play a piece exactly the same way each and every time; but a real live human player is limited by his/her very humanness to variate things here and there from one performance to another. I mean, we listen to recordings of masters playing the same work at different times in their lives, in different venues, even from one day to the next, and note differences -- often profound differences (such as in Gould's interpretations of the Bach
Goldberg) -- and realize the interpretation is still "correct". In fact, I believe many of us love music because it is not so mechanical that a piece we enjoy will always be exactly the same. (Recordings, unfortunately, have the ability to always be the same from one playing to the next. Still, even a change of audio playback equipment -- a higher quality CD deck, improved speakers, enhanced cabling -- can allow a listen to exact new details and effects. And because I value differences, I explore a wide range of recordings of works I love -- I must have fifty different
Goldbergs in my collection! None of them are performed identically to another.)
jbuck is correct to assert "We are stuck with never knowing how the great keyboard artists performed their own music" to the degree that those folks were dead before recording, but we can know how fellows like Rachmaninoff (a "great keyboard artist," certainly) performed many of his own works. And the revelation is often startling when compared to other performers taking on those very works. It would be great to have recordings by Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin. But I would suggest that those composer/performers did not play even their own written works with an absolute sameness from performance to performance. Not only because such a thing is basically impossible on a sheer human level, but because as composers these men were obviously interested in creating music, and the very notion that they all experimented with the variation form informs us that they were open to hearing new variations. I certainly would not attend a Bach concert (with J.S. himself at the keyboard) expecting to hear him play his own Goldberg Variations in exactly the same way he did at a prior performance.
I wonder, too, what happens when the pianist injures a finger and that digit will not allow for the same pressure as usual without pain? Does such a physical problem alter one's peformance of a piece?
I wish we could know how the old masters heard their own music. But I even suspect that what they heard in their mind's ear was different from what they heard from their instrument or the orchestra. (And that even what the mind's ear heard one day differed on other days!) The more musicians involved, the greater the variation in a piece. If one pianist cannot play a piece in the "exact" way the composer conceived it, what happens when one hundred plus musicians in the symphony take over?
I'll remain committed to music, and to live performance, regardless of the variations in interpretative mannerisms. To my way of hearing and understanding music, such is an integral part of the experience of the art form itself. The human element is not a destroyer of music, but the real reason for its existence.
Thank you BWV 1080 and jbuck919 for your ruminations on this article and topic. Keep the music alive.
