Interpretation versus composer?

[Great Gable]

I got to where I am, in terms of classical music listening, almost entirely on my own. I had no family or friends to share and cross-pollinate with and until finding classical music forums had no idea what other enthusiasts held important. With this in mind I have always thought that musical interpretation, be it from the conductor's perspective or that of the soloist, is as important as the information provided by the composer ie the score. My classical music collection is almost entirely made up of performances that I love, gleaned from listening to a few recommended alternatives. Each of these discriminatory choices was made by my reaction to the interpretation, how it moved me and whether or not I "connected" with the performance. None were made with any knowledge of the composer's original wishes relating to the score and none were made with any background knowledge of composition or music theory. When all is said and done I am just an enthusiastic fan.

I have come to realise that, even when I know the interpretation to be erroneous with regards to current trends or critical opinion I can still have a meaningful relationship with the piece. This brings me to the point of the post. All performances have a great deal of the interpreter wrapped up within them but just how much input are people prepared to accept. I have seen many concerts in competitions where the critics have stated how much the individual has brought to the piece, how much of their personality has come through. That can take many guises, such as timing, phrasing, mood, confidence etc etc ad infinitum.

How much is too much? I can't take some performers because, to my ears, they bring too much of themselves and leave behind the original work. Nigel Kennedy, for example, in his early years made some pieces almost unrecognisable to me due to his idiosyncratic playing. On the other hand, some performances are so down-the-middle as to appear bland. From my own perspective there has to be a happy medium but where the line is drawn is vague. To illustrate that point, if I hear a piece for the first time and I am unaware that the performance is a particularly idiosyncratic one, would that become my benchmark for all future interpretation? If so, I am in danger of being at arm's distance from the composer. And yet, if I loved that idiosyncratic performance would that really matter as I'm still making a connection to the composer?

Interpretation is obviously important to many here – why else would some have 100 different versions of one work? Why would Reblem have 37 different Beethoven ninths? Why am I collecting ninths?

Thoughts?

[Don]

I think that great works can well handle a wide variety of interpretation.  A mainstream performance can be exceptional depending on the artistry of the performer - same goes for one that veers off the main path.  The primary variable is the artist. 

[Mark]

Conversely, Don, I sometimes find a work which seems to sound more or less the same whoever performs it. I've got three versions of Ravel's String Quartet in F as played by the Belcea, Britten and Ad Libitum Quartets, and all sound remarkably close to one another in their overall presentation of this work.

[Don]

Conversely, Don, I sometimes find a work which seems to sound more or less the same whoever performs it. I've got three versions of Ravel's String Quartet in F as played by the Belcea, Britten and Ad Libitum Quartets, and all sound remarkably close to one another in their overall presentation of this work.

The advantage here is that if you lose one those Ravel recordings, you won't have lost much.

[Great Gable]

Conversely, Don, I sometimes find a work which seems to sound more or less the same whoever performs it. I've got three versions of Ravel's String Quartet in F as played by the Belcea, Britten and Ad Libitum Quartets, and all sound remarkably close to one another in their overall presentation of this work.

So, was that a good thing or not Mark?

[Mark]

So, was that a good thing or not Mark?

A good thing, in that it shows that the work is strong whoever performs it. A bad thing, in that I'd have preferred a different 'take' on the work.

[Great Gable]

A good thing, in that it shows that the work is strong whoever performs it. A bad thing, in that I'd have preferred a different 'take' on the work.

Doesn't that render two of your copies obsolete?

What about other readings - will you look for more?

[mahlertitan]

We collect many different versions of works because each performance is unique, and each performance has something the other performances don't have. I am not too bothered with "too much" interpretation, because i can always get another interpretation of the same work. What i don't like is what people would call "Bland" interpretations, people who stick to the notes on the pages and nothing more. But, even with these kind of performances, one still needs to realize that each performance is unique, and you can't have a "Wrong" interpretation of a piece of music. So, at the end, interpretation and the composer don't matter that much, what matters is whether the music "works". This varies greatly from composer to composer of course. Take Mahler, for instance, he was a conductor by profession, and in his music he had very detailed notes on how the music is supposed to be played. In this case, I would prefer the conductor to stick to what Mahler wanted, it won't "work" if the conductors brings too much from himself instead of following the score. On the other hand, Bruckner, whose music is written with sometimes ambiguous instructions. There are rooms for interpretation, that's when the conductor comes in. In this instance, the interpretation is more important, since there isn't really one "correct" way to approach his music. That's why some of us have more than 100 Cds of Bruckner and more.

[Cato]

Stravinsky is on record about this: "I hate interpretation!"

Certainly if a conductor treated the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as adagio whole notes, we would be right to question such an interpretation, and wonder if the conductor is not named Celibidache!   

What did the composer write in the score?  The previous comments about a Mahler are on target: follow the composer's instructions and you cannot go wrong.

And yet...

There is a story about Thomas Mann and his novel The Magic Mountain.  In the 1930's an American professor published an essay about the novel.  Mann had just arrived in America after his escape from Nazism.  The essay came to his attention, and he wrote a famous letter to the professor, wherein he states that the professor's essay "revealed connections to me I had not realized were in the book."

The professor's "interpretation" brought forth things hidden even from the work's creator.

One can well imagine, therefore, that a conductor who spots e.g. that little line in the oboes, and decides to highlight it, without any explicit instruction in the score to do so, might nevertheless be finding a connection which the composer himself was not aware of.

[Mark]

Doesn't that render two of your copies obsolete?

No, as I can't decide which of the three is the one I'd choose as 'top choice' if queried.

What about other readings - will you look for more?

Almost certainly, as it's a work I love; and besides, there must be an interpretation out there that adds something else to what's in the score.

[Danny]

Interpretation is what makes repeated listenings so fun and adventurous.  For certain pieces I may have a "favorite" but being able to hear (ouside of the Ravel SQ in F) different sounding versions that bring out or stress varying aspects of a piece makes it all worthwhile.  Or, at the very least, interesting.

[jochanaan]

If by "interpretation" you mean changing what the composer wrote deliberately and without cause, à la Stokowski, then I think we'd have to say it's usually a bad thing, the worse the more it's done.  However, sometimes what the composer wrote just won't work for certain groups in certain situations.  The community orchestra I was with attempted Beethoven's Eroica Symphony last season, and the guest conductor insisted on taking the tempos close to Ludwig's own metronome markings.  No way our strings could play those precisely! I would have preferred the whole symphony rather slower in that instance, even though I could play my own notes easily enough.

But there's more.  Each orchestra, each player, has his/her own concept of style, tone, phrasing, and so on.  No amount of "sticking to the notes" is going to change that.  And many of the greater performers play things slightly differently each time, without changing anything the composer actually wrote; Alfred Brendel, for one, has bragged about that, and he's no Stokowski.  No composer, not even Mahler or Ravel or Stravinsky, can write in such detail that each performance (assuming the players follow the notes and instructions exactly) will sound the same, nor would most of them want to.  I have a recording of Stravinsky conducting his Firebird Ballet, and another of him leading the 1945 Firebird Suite; the tempos and styles are similar but not identical by any means. (I will say this, though: When Stravinsky conducts his own music, everything seems inevitably right, even when the orchestra can't play all the notes, as in his 1960s Rite of Spring.  With a lot of other conductors, this is by no means the case.  Not even Boulez can quite match the composer's logic and reason.)

[Holden]

Jochanaan - I was just about to bring up orchestral sound myself but from a different perspective; one were a conductor creates a specific soundstage for a specific orchestra a la HvK and the BPO, Reiner/CSO etc. This tends to make a mockery of the 'LTMSFI' pundits.

And what about where you have the recorded efforts of the composer himself to compare with others. Rachmaninov is a great example. While I really like his interpretations of his own works I prefer Richter more and yet you can't say that Richter was deliberately adding his own personality to the works. I can also think of a number of pianists who I'd prefer over Prokofiev playing himself.

[drogulus]

Stravinsky is on record about this: "I hate interpretation!"

He probably would have been happy with a Swiss mathematician for a champion.

[Norbeone]

It's a very interesting topic, and one that I always find myself debating with others over and sometimes (though, rarely) myself.

If I had to give a very brief summary of my thoughts on the matter, it is that any interpretation is fine as long as it works. And who decided if it works, I hear you ask? Well, the performer of course. As long as he or she genuinely feels that their performance works for them personally, then that's all that really matters. Of course, it shouldn't be quite as black and white as that but i'm not quite in the mood to go so deeply into it right now.

Music needs variety, and that is NOT limited to composition alone, but ......of course, performance.

[12tone.]

A good thing, in that it shows that the work is strong whoever performs it.

What about 'Bang on a Can'?

[Great Gable]

If by "interpretation" you mean changing what the composer wrote deliberately and without cause, à la wrote;

No, that's not what I meant - I was merely talking about the reding by the conductor or soloist.

Although, your point about the score being altered still has a cerain validity. If just one person likes an altered/butchered version then it has worked and has, by it's very nature, achieved a cogency of it's own.

This, however, brings me to the point I was trying, in my long-winded way, to make with the initial post. Where, and how, does the interpretation become intrusive, where does it lose all sense of the original and take on a new existence under the life of the interpreter? I'm still not talking about amending the score - just about readings that are far removed from that which is considered acceptable. Perhaps I should have asked for examples? The one that started all this off in my mind was Nigel Kennedy's Four Seasons in 1989 and the Beethoven Violin Concerto in 1992. When I heard these I no longer heard the composer(s) - just Nigel Kennedy - and it wasn't a pleasurable experience.

It's not all bad - with some versions adding something to the original idea and yet still not detracting from the standard version - the one that comes to mind is Stokowski's transcription of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor used in the Dsiney film "Fantasia". Considered heresy by many, loved by me.

[Mark]

You might argue (if you've heard Beatrice Harrison and the composer himself performing this work), that what Du Pre did to Elgar's Cello Concerto was 'intrusive'. She brings to it a quality that was perhaps not intended by the composer, and as with almost everything she recorded, invested in it a great deal of herself. Such deeply personal readings of any work by any interpreter will inevitably lead to the original score sounding different, no?

[Great Gable]

You might argue (if you've heard Beatrice Harrison and the composer himself performing this work), that what Du Pre did to Elgar's Cello Concerto was 'intrusive'. She brings to it a quality that was perhaps not intended by the composer, and as with almost everything she recorded, invested in it a great deal of herself. Such deeply personal readings of any work by any interpreter will inevitably lead to the original score sounding different, no?

Agreed Mark. This was one of the most obvious examples - and for me, and many others (but who cares about them?), it works fantastically well.

There will always be an argument that an interpreter can "improve" on a compostition by bringing insights that may not have occurred to the composer. In the majority of cases we will never know what the composer would have thought but there surely have to be cases where they would have wholeheartedly approved. I'm sure that there must be documented cases where this has happened - can anyone name such an instance?

[mahlertitan]

It all matters very little, because the music you hear is not from the composer, but from the performer(s). Whether the performers should adhere to the scores strictly or loosely depends on their musical beliefs. What is more important? One might ask. Accuracy? or Spontaneity? When a composer writes notes onto a piece of white paper with black lines, did he know what the work would sound like (in reality)? or was it a mere approximation? if it was an approximation, then why should we penalize artists/performers from changing/tweaking the score a little bit? in a sense, don't the performers have a better grasp of the music than the composer? (of course, i am only referring to symphonic music)

Of course, one can go very far and do something totally unacceptable. Such as making edits to the work, adding/subtract substantial passages or altering tempo markings without any justification or the approval of the composer.