A Messiah to send Hippites rushing for the smelling salts ?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

They might approve ..... or not!

The thing is - it doesn't really matter. They're no longer with us, so it's what people of today approve of that counts.

[ahinton]

It is in principle impossible to know "what the composer intended". On the other hand it is often possible to work out quite precisely what the composer did, especially in a piece like Messiah of which there are many well-documented 18th century performances, and use that (ie rather than a tradition that dates from the 19th century) as the basis for an interpretation. It's nothing to do with museums, but with making the music sound new by bearing in mind how it sounded when it was new.

Idealistic though it sounds, that's a very tall order indeed in respect of music that is so familiar and has been for many years in a variety of quite different performance approaches. Also, as has been pointed out upthread, one simply cannot listen to such works with the ears and experience of those who actually did so when the music was new; as I myself recall mentioning some time ago elsewhere, Robert Simpson once said that one cannot listen to the music of Bach as his contemporaries did because we've heard Xenakis (and I don't suppose that he mentioned Xenakis' name often). That's no excuse not to try to reproduce as faithfully as possible the way in which certain works might have sounded when they were new but, again, as you rightly note, "it is in principle impossible to know "what the composer intended"" whereas "on the other hand it is often possible to work out quite precisely what the composer did"; the problem with which that leaves us, however, is whether how closely the latter might reflect the former.

I mentioned certain 19th century piano music in this context earlier; now whereas Chopin did not live to hear the kinds of piano that were around by the 1880s, Liszt and Alkan did and I am of the view that the ways in which they'd been writing for the piano since the 1830s had by then impacted to a significant degree upon those 1880s pianos of which most are arguably rather closer to the grand pianos of today than they were to the instruments with which Beethoven was familiar when he was writing his final five piano sonatas and Diabelli Variations; what those composers did and what they wanted to achieve and might have imagined to be potentially possible are again in all likelihood somewhat different. Maybe it's just me but, having listened on a number of occasions over the years to Chopin's Op. 10 & Op. 25 Études played on instruments of the kind that he'd known and played, the suggestion that he was aiming for a more developed and versatile piano seems hard to shake off.

Moreover, when considering what the composer did and what he/she might have wanted to do (his/her "intentions"), I think that it's also necessary to make allownces as far as possible for how each composer's view of his/her own work and how it should best be presented would likely change over time in any case, especially in the cases of longer-lived composers; likewise, listener expectations will change over time as a consequence of increasing experience of more and more music and the development of performing traditions - Sorabji, for example, stated in his early days when he still gave occasional piano performances that he always wanted a Steinway and never a Bösendorfer but he certainly altered his view on that over time.

[Dave2002]

I recently heard a performance of Liszt's piano sonata played by Alexei Grymyuk on a Fazioli. I somehow doubt that the pianos available in Liszt's time could have withstood the hammering, but the modern one survived, and it sounded very impressive indeed. Not sure if that tells us much - though perhaps Liszt was writing for instruments which didn't exist in his time.

[ahinton]

I recently heard a performance of Liszt's piano sonata played by Alexei Grymyuk on a Fazioli. I somehow doubt that the pianos available in Liszt's time could have withstood the hammering, but the modern one survived, and it sounded very impressive indeed. Not sure if that tells us much - though perhaps Liszt was writing for instruments which didn't exist in his time.

That was part of my point. Liszt was given many medals and decorations from various countries, including a bejewelled sword of honour presented by his fellow Hungarians, which he would wear on stage. One person wrote:

"Liszt alone, of all warriors, is without reproach.
For despite his big sword, we know that this
Has vanquished only semiquavers
And slain only pianos."

Actually, Liszt frequently slew his pianos. The instruments back then did not have the iron frame of today, and they were totally unable to withstand the onslaught of his bigger works. Sometimes he left a trail of broken debris behind him! This is why he always requested a backup piano whenever he performed, ready to be rolled on stage at a moment's notice.

That said, fine pianos from the end of his own lifetime and beyond were prety much capable of handling anything that Liszt had thrown at them; whilst a spareness of texture characterises most of Liszt's later piano works, in the earlier years of the Transcendental Studies, Hungarian Rhapsodies, the sonata and much else, I believe that he was indeed writing for instruments that didn't exist at the time, as indeed were Alkan (some of whose studies and other works demanded even more of the instrument than did Liszt's at their most outrageous) and Chopin, for whose Ballades and Scherzi the instruments of his time were limited in what they would allow pianists to do with them.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Robert Simpson once said that one cannot listen to the music of Bach as his contemporaries did because we've heard Xenakis (and I don't suppose that he mentioned Xenakis' name often).

As I'm finding quite often when I re-read Simpson's writing - it sounds good, but actually misses the real point. (And with apologies for moving the Thread topic into much rehearsed "discussion".) It isn't - and as far as I am concerned has never been - a matter of "listening to Bach as his contemporaries did"; as TS Eliot said, long before Simpson, every new work of distinction and influence (or even, just notoriety) changes what has gone before. But that is true of the way I look at Giotto and Cave paintings after seeing Tracey Emin, or the way I read Plato after Adorno. It isn't a matter of an attempt to listen in an earlier way (except - ironically - where it's a matter of recordings that preserve earlier ways of listening) - it's a matter of dealing with the essence of the Art form of Music, namely (as far as the pertinent repertoire is concerned) sound.

Composers use sound in the way that Artists use image: Handel uses the timbre of, say, an 18thCentury Oboe in the same way that Hogarth uses the pigments of the time. To use a modern Oboe alters the sound in the same way that painting over a Hogarth painting with enamels (or, to shift the analogy, reading Coghill's Canterbury Tales in preference to Chaucer's). It might be "argued" (to use the wrong word) that Handel/Hogarth/Chaucer might have "approved" of the Twentieth Century adaptations of their work, but that - as Alpie says - isn't the point.

What I am listening for isn't an experience that makes me feel as if I'm listening as an 18th Century person (someone from my background would have been dead by my age then, for a start) but which presents as closely to my 21st Century ears as performers and scholars can make possible what Handel had to "say" in ways that he would have recognized as corresponding to how he expected it to be "said" at around the time he was imagining it. The rest is up to me - and you - and Dave, and Alpie, and Barbie - and everyone else who hears it.

[doversoul1]

That was part of my point. Liszt was given many medals and decorations from various countries, including a bejewelled sword of honour presented by his fellow Hungarians, which he would wear on stage. One person wrote:

"Liszt alone, of all warriors, is without reproach.
For despite his big sword, we know that this
Has vanquished only semiquavers
And slain only pianos."

Actually, Liszt frequently slew his pianos. The instruments back then did not have the iron frame of today, and they were totally unable to withstand the onslaught of his bigger works. Sometimes he left a trail of broken debris behind him! This is why he always requested a backup piano whenever he performed, ready to be rolled on stage at a moment's notice.

That said, fine pianos from the end of his own lifetime and beyond were prety much capable of handling anything that Liszt had thrown at them; whilst a spareness of texture characterises most of Liszt's later piano works, in the earlier years of the Transcendental Studies, Hungarian Rhapsodies, the sonata and much else, I believe that he was indeed writing for instruments that didn't exist at the time, as indeed were Alkan (some of whose studies and other works demanded even more of the instrument than did Liszt's at their most outrageous) and Chopin, for whose Ballades and Scherzi the instruments of his time were limited in what they would allow pianists to do with them.

Isn’t that how all, well most, musical instruments have developed/evolved? Great composers often wrote music that went beyond what could be comfortably expressed on the existing instruments, and instrument makers responded to the needs. That’s not at all the same thing as to say that Bach or Liszt had exact ideas about the instruments that were not yet in existence and wrote their music for those instruments. That doesn’t sound logical to me unless it is meant to be a figure of speech.

[Alison]

Anyone heard the Andrew Davis??

[ardcarp]

It will be in my Xmas stocking I hope. I shall be very interested to hear Gerald English in his prime. I used to love his natural style of delivery...and he was something of a role model for me as a young tenor...a sort of antidote to peter Pears. Luckily I am able to tell him so in person every now and again...he's back in England, aged 90+ and living near me in the West Country.

No doubt there will be comments about tempi, especially Barbirollian ones. But Messiah is re-interpreted as the ages roll along. No point in being dogmatic about it. Fifty years hence it will sound different again.

[Nick Armstrong]

Anyone heard the Andrew Davis??

The blurb is enough to give some a fit of the vapours...

Handel: Messiah (new concert edition by Sir Andrew Davis)

Experience the transcendent glory of Handel’s beloved classic in Sir Andrew Davis’s majestic, must-hear edition, recorded live on SACD. It makes use of all the colours available from the modern symphony orchestra (from substantial brass and woodwind forces to several percussion instruments) to underline the beauty of the original piece.

I haven't sampled it though; I imagine it will turn up on Record Review....

[ahinton]

It isn't a matter of an attempt to listen in an earlier way (except - ironically - where it's a matter of recordings that preserve earlier ways of listening) - it's a matter of dealing with the essence of the Art form of Music, namely (as far as the pertinent repertoire is concerned) sound.

You make so many excellent points here and so eloquently and persuasively (for which many thanks) that it seems churlish to pick out that one that I've boldfaced above. I do think that, at the very least, it requires some broad-minded intelligence on the listener's part to absorb such music not as though one was an 18th century person but as though the music of the 18th century as then performed is (or can be presented as being) as much a part of our lives today as music actually written today; there can be no doubt that the music of Bach works for us today at least as well as it ever did for Bach's contemporaries, so perhaps the issue is that, over many decades, performance traditions changed from what they'd been in his day rather than running in parallel with the preservation of those traditions. It's only in relatively recent times that we've had HIPP alongside performances on modern instruments (not that this is all about the particular instruments used, of course); perhaps if HIPP had always been with us and had the manner of performing Bach's works in his own day remained alive in the late 19th century and beyond, the impression of "side-taking" between HIPP and modern performances might never have become the issue that it has today.

[ahinton]

Isn’t that how all, well most, musical instruments have developed/evolved? Great composers often wrote music that went beyond what could be comfortably expressed on the existing instruments, and instrument makers responded to the needs. That’s not at all the same thing as to say that Bach or Liszt had exact ideas about the instruments that were not yet in existence and wrote their music for those instruments. That doesn’t sound logical to me unless it is meant to be a figure of speech.

Of course neither Bach nor Liszt had precise ideas about the kinds of instruments that were not yet in existence but, in writing as they did, I do believe it reasonable to assume that they wanted something more than was available to them and were accordingly prepared to write in the hope that new designs and manufacturing processes would come about. In Liszt's case, it's clear that he needed pianos that were considerably more sturdy than those of his young days and, with the rise of the public concert at that time, also pianos that had greater carrying power and a larger dynamic range; that's not the same thing as having exact ideas about what they wanted. This is a factor that needs to be taken into account when realising that it's simply not possible to determine with certainty what the composer's precise intentions were.

Your second sentence has it in a nutshell and it is of particular pertinence to pianos in the 19th century.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You make so many excellent points here and so eloquently and persuasively (for which many thanks) that it seems churlish to pick out that one that I've boldfaced above. I do think that, at the very least, it requires some broad-minded intelligence on the listener's part to absorb such music not as though one was an 18th century person but as though the music of the 18th century as then performed is (or can be presented as being) as much a part of our lives today as music actually written today; there can be no doubt that the music of Bach works for us today at least as well as it ever did for Bach's contemporaries, so perhaps the issue is that, over many decades, performance traditions changed from what they'd been in his day rather than running in parallel with the preservation of those traditions. It's only in relatively recent times that we've had HIPP alongside performances on modern instruments (not that this is all about the particular instruments used, of course); perhaps if HIPP had always been with us and had the manner of performing Bach's works in his own day remained alive in the late 19th century and beyond, the impression of "side-taking" between HIPP and modern performances might never have become the issue that it has today.

Yes, I think you're right - and Mendelssohn intended his "first performance" of the "StMatthew Passion to be smaller in scale than actually turned out to be the case, but so many people wanted to get involved that it became a "large choral society"-type piece. "Big Event" Handel performances are also a pre-19th Century tradition, too (I wonder what a performance of Messiah with huge choir and large orchestra of 18th Century instruments might sound like: something that would have the anti-HIPPites reaching for the smelling salts, perhaps?)

The sentence that you "emboldened" from my previous post wasn't exactly clear - I meant that for some listeners, the existence of recordings of performances in the "Northern Choral Society" tradition might perhaps be precisely what is preventing them from following the sort of changes in performing traditions over the decades of the sort that you mention - the changes that have happened in the decades since, say, the 1960s.

[Richard Barrett]

Isn’t that how all, well most, musical instruments have developed/evolved? Great composers often wrote music that went beyond what could be comfortably expressed on the existing instruments, and instrument makers responded to the needs. That’s not at all the same thing as to say that Bach or Liszt had exact ideas about the instruments that were not yet in existence and wrote their music for those instruments. That doesn’t sound logical to me unless it is meant to be a figure of speech.

It's really a myth that "great composers" (and why only "great" ones?) writing beyond the capabilities of existing instruments have been the driving force behind changes in instrument construction. Bach for example never wrote beyond the capabilities of the instruments at his disposal, but indeed composed for their specific characters in a way which is often lost in translation to the more homogeneous-sounding "modern" instruments. Violins underwent changes in construction in the 19th century to a large extent to make them louder for larger performing spaces, and very many changes in instument construction took place for similar reasons. As many "great" composers lamented the losses in sound quality that accompanied the spread of valved brass instruments as rejoiced in their new capabilities, and in general every gain in this or that quality when the construction of instruments has changed has been accompanied by a loss in some other quality. New instruments like the saxophone have been invented by instrument makers independently of composers, although in this case the instrument has been enthusiastically taken up in many areas of music.

Instruments are still being developed today. The "contraforte", for example, is a new contrabassoon devised by Guntram Wolf and Benedikt Eppelsheim which improves on the dynamics, intonation and fingering simplicity of the traditional instrument. No composer has been involved in its invention. The Redgate-Howarth oboe has been developed by the oboist Christopher Redgate, who realised it together with the manufacturer Howarth and then commissioned composers (including myself) to write for its new capabilities, including a stable fourth octave and expanded microtonal capabilities. These are more typical examples of how instruments are developed.

So thinking in terms of "what composers would have wanted" generally doesn't describe the real-life relationship between composers and instruments, however attractive and understandable it might be to people for whom the sound of "modern" instruments is the norm against which everything else falls short.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

So thinking in terms of "what composers would have wanted" generally doesn't describe the real-life relationship between composers and instruments, however attractive and understandable it might be to people for whom the sound of "modern" instruments is the norm against which everything else falls short.

I think it's highly likely that composers would have wished the sustaining power of early pianofortes to have been greater.

[vinteuil]

I think it's highly likely that composers would have wished the sustaining power of early pianofortes to have been greater.

I think it's highly likely that if the sustaining power of early pianofortes had been greater, composers would have written differently for them.