BaL 16.12.17 - Schubert: Piano Sonata no. 21 in B flat D960

[Richard Barrett]

A little more consideration of what exactly Brahms said, when, and to whom is necessary before we can make any conclusions ... and then go on to ask why, then, around a quarter of Brahms' Sonata structures scattered throughout his career don't have Exposition repeats - didn't the "newness" of those works matter?

I can't claim to be an expert on Brahms but I do remember reading somewhere (pardon my vagueness) that, according to precise timings made at the time, Brahms never had the repeats in the first movements of his symphonies played when he conducted them.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I can't claim to be an expert on Brahms but I do remember reading somewhere (pardon my vagueness) that, according to precise timings made at the time, Brahms never had the repeats in the first movements of his symphonies played when he conducted them.

Dvorak too, apparently.

http://www.dersnah-fee.com/Essays%20and%20Educational%20Material/GF%20Repeat%20Signs.pdf

[jayne lee wilson]

RICHARD BARRETT QUOTE "I'm sorry too if I seem to be dragging this discussion out beyond its useful life, but in fact it's really not just about this Schubert sonata but concerns relationships in general between compositions, interpreters and listeners!" UNQUOTE
.....

So here are my (revised) reflections again....

It’s deja vu again isn’t it, re interpretation, re free vs devoted…?

I’ve been as devoted as anyone, through purchase, listening and commenting on this site, to HIPPs and period-instrument, all-repeats-observed recordings of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and other classical symphonies and concertos; at times I simply couldn’t take this music in any other style. But the discovery of those older, more subjective traditions of performance evinced by such as - Toscanini, Furtwangler, Mengelberg, Horowitz etc has shown me the vital importance of the individual, the subjective, above all the (re)-creative, brilliantly insightful contribution a gifted performer can bring to music; an input going far beyond the printed score. And their performances are all very different, almost unrepeatable, on different nights, in different halls and cities; they offer an important reminder of creativity and humanity in performance, a necessary corrective to some of the score-reverential hegemonies of today…
(On which score, compare Thomas Fey's often wildly, wilfully individualistic Haydn (yet usually with all repeats, including sonata 2nd-half ones...!) with that of Antonini's 2032 series....)...

A Classic Comment….
“Time and again, he brings out details in Beethoven's writing... which simultaneously violate the text and illuminate the moment..."
(Richard Osborne on Mengelberg’s 1940 Amsterdam Beethoven Symphony Cycle, Gramophone, 4/1986).

As for Repeats - Mengelberg sometimes does them, and sometimes doesn’t. Again, it isn’t about “knowing better than the composer”, more a response to the creative inspiration of the moment, how he and the orchestra felt in that time and place - or indeed space - a response to acoustic character, audience involvement and their physical presence too.

***

In any case, earlier performers were not always faithful to their own scores as written.
In the notes to Ironwood’s recordings of Brahms Op.25 and Op.34., Brahms’ own performances of his works are described as “very free, elastic and expansive” by one of his own students, Fanny Davies, who witnessed many of those performances herself.
The note goes on: “Richard Barth, a violinist in Brahms’ own circle, noted that within a few years of the composers’ death, the performance style appropriate to his music was already being ignored or forgotten. The aesthetics of performance underwent a rapid change in the 20th Century, with a developing insistence that the score encapsulated all that the composer expected… notation started to be taken at face value….without consideration of the myriad un-notated conventions that were intrinsically linked to the artwork as conceived by the composer.”

***
Bruckner is a classic case, of course….
Take a historical journey through Bruckner performances from the 1940s to now, and take a lesson in how to make music live and breathe, make it dramatic, compelling and above all: individual. Note how “reverence for the score” applied to those editions most frequently recorded across the 1960s to the 1990s, produced too many unvarying, inexpressive, steady-state results (and still do, even in a potentially very creative, younger performer like YNS), not least because (but not only because) those editions - usually Haas or Nowak - had very few expression or dynamic markings in them. Earlier, initially and still less-respected editions, often those published in Bruckner’s lifetime, had far more - which may well have encouraged earlier conductors like Knappertsbusch or Konwitschny to go much further in their creative response to the moment, their tempo variabile - but what a shame conductors like Karajan or Wand didn’t take a more subjective, recreative view themselves a little more often, without the need for such explicit instructions.

“The truly lost tradition would seem to be Furtwangler’s unique style of rubato that almost convinces that there really is a technical dimension to conducting beyond time-beating, that the conductor is ultimately a performer rather than the vehicle of a mystic vision…”
(John Williamson, in “Conductors and Bruckner” in “The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner”).

***

I think there’s a deep human need for new experiences, creative change and variation, making things our own. There’s a vital creative tension between rules or instructions and what the performer decides to do with them.
I think there’s a deep human need for new experiences, creative change and variation, making things our own. There’s a vital creative tension between rules or instructions and what the performer decides to do with them. “Alike yet different…”
The aleatoric conductor- or performer-choice music in Lutoslawski or Boulez surely arose from a similar impulse taken further: the creator’s need for more subjective performer-input to a musical realisation, to undermine the concept of the “Author-God” or Composer-God, To try to “Make it New” every time.
So too for the listener: why does someone buy 3 or 4 or 5 Sibelius Symphony cycles? It’s not in the hope that they’re the same, or more “faithful” than the last one, is it?

***

[silvestrione]

That takes the discussion to a whole new level (thank God! ). Thanks, Jayne.

[Richard Barrett]

It’s deja vu again isn’t it, re interpretation, re free vs devoted…?

The present discussion actually has nothing to do with "reverence to the score", nothing to do with whether repeats in general are acceptable or not, nothing to do with a need for new experiences or the lack thereof etc, but is centred in this case on the issue of actually leaving out material the composer wrote, on the grounds of it being inappropriate, often with the claim that it alters the emotional impact of the movement in question (which is just as compelling an argument for keeping it in of course), which, taken to its logical conclusion, might result in everyone editing the music they supposedly love, in order to excise anything that doesn't accord with their wishes, which is fine except when one then doesn't "own" these alterations as a rearrangement of the notated text.

Plus I really don't know where you get the idea that '[t]he aleatoric conductor- or performer-choice music in Lutoslawski or Boulez surely arose from a similar impulse taken further: (...) to undermine the concept of the “Author-God” or Composer-God"' - I suggest you inform yourself a little more about why these composers did such things (Boulez of course in a really very timid way), or, in keeping with the rest of your post, don't ascribe this impulse or its intention to the composers - what do they know after all?

[jayne lee wilson]

OK Richard, why don't you inform me: what do you think the aims and effects of say, the ad libitum sections of Lutosławski's Jeux Venitiens or Symphony No.2 actually were or are? It's clear from the score that he's asking the players for a considerable, individual creative input. https://onpolishmusic.com/2014/12/30...ducting-score/ ....(magnify it well, and peer closely through those snowflakes..charming the way they follow your cursor isn't it?).
If I understand Boulez' note to Rituel here, he's making a similar offer of creative freedom to his performers too, in the note to Séquences Paires...https://www.scribd.com/document/1420...-Bruno-Maderna:
"on n'est pas obligé de suivre l'ordre donnée... les autres groupes seront disposés dans un ordre choisi par le chef d'orchestra..." etc

My point is a very simple one: in giving a certain amount of choice to the conductor and performers as to what, when and how to play some sections of his works, the composer has altered the relationship between them and the creator - given more creative power to those who play the music and bring it to life, in a way than can make it sound different each time. Thus, the less deified the creator spiritus. (Or at least one less jealously Cardillacian of his works).

I relate this to performer's role in the interpretation of a classical score, in the sense that every choice she makes is a creative one, whether of tempo, dynamics, phrase or of course repeats. (The very sound itself, arising from the body's actions upon instruments and machines in acoustic space).
Not to mention, or perhaps most especially, those that "violate the text...." in the endless quest for new insights, new intensities, new truths....

[silvestrione]

I hesitate to contribute to this lofty ding-dong but this blog post (which echoes what Richard B has been saying) made sense to me:

https://crosseyedpianist.com/2012/12...chuberts-d960/

Yes, plenty of good sense there! Thanks for that, HD.

[Alison]

I love discovering performances that are full of new insights and faithful to the score.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I love discovering performances that are full of new insights and faithful to the score.

- that was what was (and remains) so thrilling about the Krivine Beethoven cycle: everything was exactly as Beethoven put down in the scores, but the imagination of Krivine and his orchestra created from their fidelity to those scores a completely "new" way of performing the Music. Astonishing achievement.

[Richard Barrett]

OK Richard, why don't you inform me: what do you think the aims and effects of say, the ad libitum sections of Lutosławski's Jeux Venitiens or Symphony No.2 actually were or are? It's clear from the score that he's asking the players for a considerable, individual creative input.

Well no, he isn't: he's specifying a kind of texture where the precise placing in time of the aleatoric elements makes no effective difference to the effect of the whole. At no point does Lutosławski suggest that players invent their own material. He has simply found a simple and easy way of notating the kind of desynchronised relationships between instruments that make up his sound-textures. Boulez conceived a related situation in those pieces of his (not Rituel, which is precisely notated throughout) where components of the music may be played in different orders or at different times: these changes do not affect the very clear and detailed concept the composer has for the work. To find music where the composer does suggest a "considerable individual creative input" for the performer you are looking in the wrong place with Lutosławski and Boulez. You'd have done better to mention someone like Vinko Globokar, the 1960s music of Stockhausen such as Spiral or Aus den sieben Tagen, Cornelius Cardew's Treatise, many of the compositions of John Cage, or indeed several of my own pieces from the last 15 years or so in which performers alternate between precise notation and free improvisation for which no directions are given in the score. Lutosławski's pieces on the other hand do not "sound different each time" except in a very limited sense, whose limits are strictly delimited by the score, as one can easily see by glancing through it.

those that "violate the text...." in the endless quest for new insights, new intensities, new truths....

So what new insights, new intensities, new truths are accessed, in your opinion, by leaving out the repeat of Schubert's exposition in the first movement of D960, and with it what might be considered the centre of gravity of the poetic identity of the movement, in the form of the bars that are accordingly excised?

[kea]

I can't claim to be an expert on Brahms but I do remember reading somewhere (pardon my vagueness) that, according to precise timings made at the time, Brahms never had the repeats in the first movements of his symphonies played when he conducted them.

Composers obviously know their own works very well and their interpretations are valuable because they will (sometimes) know what they were thinking, but performance is very different from composition (ie faster, and frequently taking into account audience response). I'm not sure we should necessarily take the example of Mozart and improvise a fugue in six voices on themes from Così fan tutte between movements of a piano concerto just to spice things up and advertise the new opera house or whatever.

D960—for me—Schnabel is essential and flawed, with the bleakest and most grief-stricken slow movement ever, the cut in the first movement, and many, many mistakes. Staier is essential and perfect, but with a very slow first movement, and Schiff (the ECM version) is also perfect if maybe not as essential. Also Paul Badura-Skoda has the best piano (an 1826 Graf) but not enough technical security.

I don't see Brendel's logic in omitting the exposition repeat; the repeat bars are thematic (a transformation of the deep trill on Gb that recurs throughout the piece) and present an important idea that changes our view of the exposition, and the repeat is necessary to balance the second half, which is a little over twice the length of the first without repeat. Also I doubt that Schubert or anyone else cares but if you take the repeat, the heart of the movement and arguably the entire sonata—the D minor passage suspended over deep trills, the "still point of the turning world"—begins almost exactly at the position of phi, the golden ratio (≈1.6180339887...). If you don't take the repeat, that position instead falls somewhere in the middle of the recapitulation which is much less aesthetic. >.>

And also like.... if you don't like repeats maybe you shouldn't be playing Schubert at all? Everything in Schubert happens twice, or three times with the one in the middle being slightly different. This includes everything from tiny phrases to large 5-minute sections of music. Repetition, often exact repetition or repetition meant to sound as exact as possible, is extremely important to his work, for reasons that are worth analysing. This also serves to make moments that come only once very special in some way. Does not seem worth cutting one of those just because playing an extra 5 minutes of music is tiring to you—you may as well just play the repeat and leave out the scherzo.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well no, he isn't: he's specifying a kind of texture where the precise placing in time of the aleatoric elements makes no effective difference to the effect of the whole. At no point does Lutosławski suggest that players invent their own material. He has simply found a simple and easy way of notating the kind of desynchronised relationships between instruments that make up his sound-textures. Boulez conceived a related situation in those pieces of his (not Rituel, which is precisely notated throughout) where components of the music may be played in different orders or at different times: these changes do not affect the very clear and detailed concept the composer has for the work. To find music where the composer does suggest a "considerable individual creative input" for the performer you are looking in the wrong place with Lutosławski and Boulez. ... Lutosławski's pieces on the other hand do not "sound different each time" except in a very limited sense, whose limits are strictly delimited by the score, as one can easily see by glancing through it.

Indeed - and, as anecdotal examples of what other people have remembered hearing other composers saying and doing have been cited, perhaps it's not just name-dropping on my part to mention that, whenever I heard Lutoslawski discuss the nature of the "collective ad libitum" passages in his Music, and whenever I asked him about these myself, it was very clear that they were written as the most practical means of getting the performers to recreate the shimmering mass sounds that he had imagined. Watching the painstaking attention he paid to these passages in his own rehearsals, too, it's clear that the performers had very little "individual creative input".

In conversations on the lines of this one, it is erroneous to cite composers who include aleatoric or improvisational elements in their work when defending a performer's ignoring and/or altering the texts of works that do not. If, as is my preference, you feel that the only way to judge a work (and its performance) is to hear everything as closely as it is possible to get to the composer's intentions, then the only way for performers to achieve this in aleatoric/improvisatory/Experimental works is to do what the composer says in the score and respond with individual, creative ideas of their own. It would be "violating" the composer's idea of their work only if the performers didn't respond in this way.

But D960 isn't such a work - it's a carefully thought-out, intricate, and complex work, whose delights and terrors are fully and best communicated only when it is presented/performed in full. Brendel offers a warm, attractive, lyrical work that rarely disturbs, and when it does, quickly consoles - a basically bourgeois, safe and comforting experience that has its own, obvious attractions. But he doesn't, and cannot, fully present the more sinister and unruly aspects of Schubert's work - his aren't recordings riddled with syphilis, nor do they give much suggestion of an emotional hinterland of someone facing death. It's understandable if listeners don't want to experience such a performance - but it reduces "the achieve of - the mastery of the thing!"

[Keraulophone]

I don't see Brendel's logic in omitting the exposition repeat; the repeat bars are thematic (a transformation of the deep trill on Gb that recurs throughout the piece) and present an important idea that changes our view of the exposition, and the repeat is necessary to balance the second half, which is a little over twice the length of the first without repeat [...] If you don't like repeats maybe you shouldn't be playing Schubert at all? Everything in Schubert happens twice, or three times with the one in the middle being slightly different. This includes everything from tiny phrases to large 5-minute sections of music. Repetition, often exact repetition or repetition meant to sound as exact as possible, is extremely important to his work, for reasons that are worth analysing. This also serves to make moments that come only once very special in some way. Does not seem worth cutting one of those just because playing an extra 5 minutes of music is tiring to you—you may as well just play the repeat and leave out the scherzo.

But D960 isn't such a work - it's a carefully thought-out, intricate, and complex work, whose delights and terrors are fully and best communicated only when it is presented/performed in full. Brendel offers a warm, attractive, lyrical work that rarely disturbs, and when it does, quickly consoles - a basically bourgeois, safe and comforting experience that has its own, obvious attractions. But he doesn't, and cannot, fully present the more sinister and unruly aspects of Schubert's work - his aren't recordings riddled with syphilis, nor do they give much suggestion of an emotional hinterland of someone facing death. It's understandable if listeners don't want to experience such a performance - but it reduces "the achieve of - the mastery of the thing!"

[My emphases.] I'm unable to argue the case as cogently as the main protagonists here, but I would like to endorse wholeheartedly the views offered above.

[Richard Barrett]

if you don't like repeats maybe you shouldn't be playing Schubert at all?

An excellent point.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

An excellent point.

Well, yes; and one I'm in sympathy with - particularly the "maybe" - but it's clear that Brendel's (and other similarly-inclined interpreters) give great pleasure and solace to many listeners, amongst whom, no doubt, are decent people who'd rush into a burning building to rescue a litter of kittens, and who are entitled to their pleasures and solaces. Some of the responses on this Thread suggest that Brendel's recordings are deeply significant to some listeners, and attacks on his ideas can be read as attacks on their own cherished feelings when listening to those recordings, which I'm pretty sure were not intended as such.

It's the idea that somehow deviations from the texts of such works as D960 can somehow "improve" them - and the elaborate, epicyclical theories dreamt up to support this idea - that I find repulsive.