Harnoncourt announces his retirement!

[Jo498]

I have only heard the Brahms 3rd and fourth but they are among the recordings by Harnoncourt I find rather disappointing.
Overall, I think he should have done more 18th century stuff with the Concentus Musicus than mid/late 19th century standard repertoire with modern orchestras. The Schubert and Beethoven symphonies are still very good, though.

[Jo498]

This one and Haynes' The End of Early Music have been the two books that more deeply have influenced my own conception of Early Music.

So I figure you'd recommend Haynes' book to those who liked Harnoncourt's? It seems affordable on kindle so I am seriously tempted...

[Lisztianwagner]

One of the great old conductors still practicing, I'm sorry to hear he announced his retirement. I remember Harnoncourt at the Neujahrskonzert 2001 very well, he was the first musician I've ever seen conducting.

[Wakefield]

So I figure you'd recommend Haynes' book to those who liked Harnoncourt's? It seems affordable on kindle so I am seriously tempted...

You should. It's a great a book. I don't know if you noticed its subtitle: A Period Performer's History of Music.

Like Harnoncourt Haynes thinks and explains his ideas from the standpoint of a performer, not a theoretician (and, just for the record, I have nothing against "mere" theoreticians). 

[Mandryka]

He wrote at least two that came out in the early 1980s or so (sometimes based on liner notes), the titles are Baroque Music Today: Music As Speech : Ways to a New Understanding of Music ("Musik als Klangrede") and The Musical Dialogue - Thoughts on Monteverdi, Bach and Mozart ("Der musikalische Dialog") and there are a few more recent ones based on interviews with Johanna Fürstauer as well as a biography by Monika Mertl but these have apparently not been translated.

[asin]0931340055[/asin] [asin]1574670239[/asin]

The book on Monteverdi has a particularly inspiring essay on J S Bach's gamba  sonatas.

The first book, on music as speech, I've always found frustratingly hard to understand. He seems to say that new music has been abandoned by modern listeners, and he's found a new trick to make old music important sounding, so it becomes a sort of replacement for what the 20th century composers have so singularly failed in achieving. The trick is to play old music in a way which maximises independence of voices, maximises dissonances and maximises small cell articulation. 

But that seems nonsense, and his quasi furtwanglerian lack of ease with modernity is repulsive.

[Jo498]

I would have to look into that one again (I am not even sure I own it but I read them both) but I don't think the main idea is to replace avantgarde music.

Harnoncourt's main frustration was with the boring way baroque and some classical music was usually played. He said several times that he finally quit as a cellist with the Vienna symphony in the late 1960s because in one week or so they had played the St Matthew and Mozart's great g minor symphony and he could not stand the homogenized and harmless way of interpretation anymore. (OTOH he has later also named two very "romantic" artists as major influences, Furtwängler and Casals. Which fits as these two may be anything but harmless and homogenized.)

If you do kindle, I'll echo Gordo's recommendation of Bruce Haynes (hautbois and recorder player who studied with Brüggen). I am almost 50% through and while not very organised and systematic (and sometimes too simplified and rough with respect to 19th century music) it is more systematic than Harnoncourt's essays (and can also draw on several decades more of experience) and less polemic than e.g. Taruskin.

[Mandryka]

Bruce Haynes' discussion about the role of expression in romantic and HIP performance is quite challenging I think -- affects and that sort of thing.

[aukhawk]

If you do kindle, I'll echo Gordo's recommendation of Bruce Haynes (hautbois and recorder player who studied with Brüggen). I am almost 50% through and while not very organised and systematic (and sometimes too simplified and rough with respect to 19th century music) it is more systematic than Harnoncourt's essays (and can also draw on several decades more of experience) and less polemic than e.g. Taruskin.

This is a fascinating and educational read - I'm about halfway through now - even though I don't feel 100% aligned with his viewpoint, nonetheless he's very persuasive and the fact that he starts out by quoting Derek Bailey (an improvising musician who is about as 'far out' as it's possible to be - a sort of jazz version of John Cage) really endears him to me.  But he has a pretty poor opinion of 'modern' (post-Toscanini) performance practise ("elevator misic") and by extension, "strait HIP" (his spelling) citing Rifkin and alluding to Suzuki and Gardiner.  Oh, as a musician himself, he doesn't much like conductors at all!!
Oh, and to stay on topic, Harnoncourt is frequently quoted and cited.

Recommended 

[Jo498]

Haynes is quite opinionated and the arguments are sometimes sloppy. E.g. much of what he writes about "romantic music" (roughly Beethoven through early 1900s) seems almost as clicheed as what people wrote about Baroque 80 years ago.
And he cannot really decide if he thinks that there was a rather sharp and quick break in a lot of attitudes towards music, performers etc. within one generation around 1800 or whether this was more gradual starting already in the 1770s and going until the mid-19th century in many respects (I think a lot points into the latter direction). But I am only halfway through, so some of these things might be revisited along the way and made clearer.

[aukhawk]

I've finished the book now and, although it is a very good read, ultimately I don't like his message, which is basically that modern performance style, and modern taste, is bad (he's quite clear about this) - and his ideal is a kind of 'eloquent' style which can be deduced to have been the norm in Baroque times.  I'm not sure I've heard any recordings that fully embrace the style he describes, but I'm sure I would find it crass and over-affected and mawkish.  I like most HIP recordings I've heard, but then they generally - thankfully - don't go all the way down the road he describes.
Of course I'm not arguing - he clearly writes with great authority and is meticulous with his sources, while I know nothing about the subject. 

[Mandryka]

I think one example of something in the style that Haynes likes is the first Kyrie of the B minor mass in Harnoncourt's second recording, from 1986. Harnoncourt "finds" a sighing motif in the orchestral music which he lets hold back the glorification of the singers. The result is emotionally complex, but is (allegedly) to be distinguished from a romantic style because the justification is in the music, and is shared by all listeners due to their shared humanity and culture, rather than in the idiosyncratic emotional response of the performer. Not to be confused with Harnoncourt's first recording.

This is from memory, I haven't gone back to the book (I did listen to the Kyrie though) But  I don't think it's inaccurate.

[Jo498]

As I said, I think Haynes is simplifying some things about 19th cent music. But I find his main distinctions between rhetoric/eloquent style (ca. Monteverdi through Quantz), romantic style (Beethoven through Furtwängler) and modern style (Toscanini until today) quite plausible.

He sometimes hints that it is probably rather complicated for roughly the first half of the 19th century. What he claims about "canonic" music focussed on "dead hero composers" and a strict distinction between composer and performer is simply not true for a lot of 19th century music. Beethoven was as famous as a virtuoso and improviser as as composer, Liszt even more so. Rossini and Donizetti operas were similarly singer-centered and prone to changes for new productions as Handel's were. Even in the second half of the 19th century when there was some canon of dead hero composers (mostly Beethoven) there was still a lot of contemporary music played/conducted by the composers themselves.

One thing I have trouble to understand is how the "jazzlike freedom of the players" Haynes  claims for the baroque could work with larger ensemble pieces, like the b minor mass. Such pieces would have to be played in a quite different, more straightforward style as boy choristers are not virtuosi who were able and wanted to do their improvisatory embellishments. Neither would those embellishments have much of a point in pieces deriving their impact from dense polyphony.

As for baroque solo and small ensemble (probably up to most concerti that could often be played by 5-10 players/singers) music, I am all for trying out suggestions like Haynes'. It's fairly hard to tell beforehand what will seem exaggerated and what will make a piece much more interesting than a "straight/strait" performance.

[jochanaan]

...One thing I have trouble to understand is how the "jazzlike freedom of the players" Haynes  claims for the baroque could work with larger ensemble pieces, like the b minor mass. Such pieces would have to be played in a quite different, more straightforward style as boy choristers are not virtuosi who were able and wanted to do their improvisatory embellishments. Neither would those embellishments have much of a point in pieces deriving their impact from dense polyphony....

Yes, for the larger, more complex movements, a "straight," unimprovised style would be needed.  But even in the B minor Mass there are a lot of solo parts for both instrumentalists and singers in which ornaments and improvisations would be entirely appropriate and would work well.

[Jo498]

Sure but would it not be somewhat jarring to have a comparably strict choral movement (like the "Gloria in excelsis" followed by "Laudamus te" as some kind of jam session for Soprano and violin solo

[jochanaan]

Sure but would it not be somewhat jarring to have a comparably strict choral movement (like the "Gloria in excelsis" followed by "Laudamus te" as some kind of jam session for Soprano and violin solo

Not if it's done tastefully.  And remember, musicians were absolutely expected to improvise in those days; all the sources attest to this.

There is a story of one singer named Elizabeth Billington who, notoriously, could not improvise but had to work out her ornaments etc. in advance.  Well, as opera singers do, she got into a rivalry with a tenor named John Braham, who could improvise.  At the next performance of the opera in which they were then involved (whose title I cannot recall), he, having learned her exact ornaments, used them in his big aria, which came before hers.  She, not daring to repeat what the audience had just heard, sang her aria absolutely straight, and (at least for the night) retired in disgrace. (Source: Prima Donnas and Other Wild Beasts, by Alan Wagner.)

[Jo498]

My point was not a general problem with improvised embellishments; I certainly believe that Haynes and others have a valid point here.
Rather that there would be a strange difference between movements similar in some respects and differing mainly in the number of voices/musicians involved if some of them would have to be played "straight" and other fairly strict.
Of course, it is not impossible to do this. But it seems at least understandable that some musicians today have not only qualms about too free and luxuriously embellished playing/singing because they grew up playing the notes and "respecting" the composer/score or because of some false puritanism but because it would lead to such discrepancies between movements of the same larger piece.

[jochanaan]

Perhaps--but no greater a discrepancy than between the "head" of a jazz piece where the big band plays only what's written, and the subsequent sections where soloists improvise.