This does not mean to suggest that all musicians and scholars agree about details, even today, after the flurry of new scholarship into the music of Bach that accompanied the publication of the Neue Bach Ausgabe (New Bach Edition).5 The invective that characterized debate over Joshua Rifkin’s performances of Bach’s Mass in B minor, for example, with a single singer on each part (a scoring that Rifkin traced to his interpretation of documents associated directly with Bach’s performances in Leipzig), almost obscured the valuable lessons to be learned from his effort.6 Controversies about how to interpret ornaments, realize the accompanying continuo, or understand “unequal notes” or “double-dotting” continue to rage. Through all the turmoil, many of us, in the privacy of our homes, persist in gaining enormous pleasure by playing the Well-Tempered Clavier on modern pianos. We also enjoy participating in sing-along Messiahs with a chorus of thousands. Some may even cast a nostalgic glance at Leopold Stokowski’s orchestration of the Prelude and Fugue in D minor. No matter. There is simply no doubt that the search for information about performing late Baroque music has transformed our understanding of the repertory. It has allowed us to confront the historical gap in the performance history of these works, often with splendid aesthetic results.
Nor must we be deterred by the perfectly obvious fact that our “reconstructions” are a product of our modern sensibilities. We neither can nor should deny those sensibilities when approaching works of art from the past. At the same time, we should not imagine that the attempt to learn more about the past will guarantee success. Poor performers, poor scholars, and poor critics have always existed, whether they carry shields emblazoned with the devices “authentic early music performance,” “Romantic sensibility,” “tradition,” or “modernist revisionism.” No amount of philosophical investigation about the impossibility of objective history, and no amount of economic reductionism about the relationship of historically informed performance to the record industry, can obscure the fact that we approach Bach today with a far broader understanding of the composer’s music and his world than did mid-nineteenth-century or most twentieth-century performers. The best musicians filter what they know through their own modern sensibilities to achieve compelling performances. Those who insist on increasing their knowledge do so out of a profound conviction that the effort to understand Bach’s music in its historical setting is a crucial part of this process. We want to perform Bach because we care primarily about his music, not about nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century visions of that music, however interesting the latter may be for certain historical studies. That our own sensibilities will inevitably influence the questions we ask and the ways we actually bring the music to aural life is a fact so obvious that it hardly needs constant reiteration. In no way does it diminish the importance of the quest for understanding.
As soon as we pass beyond the Baroque era, however, to the historical periods commonly labeled Classical and Romantic, the century from approximately 1770 through 1870, the situation becomes more difficult. At stake is a significant part of the standard repertory, those compositions that have long formed the bulk of the music performed by our symphonic and choral organizations and in our opera houses. These works seem to have a continuous history of performance from the time of their composition to the present day, although not necessarily a coherent one. Suddenly proposals for performance that challenge an established norm seemed more threatening. Those who play Mozart’s keyboard concertos on the fortepianos for which they were written are regularly excoriated for their lack of passion and individuality;7 those who perform these same pieces on Steinway grands with all the trappings of late nineteenth-century phrasing and pedaling are pilloried for their insensitivity to historical practice. And when a performer such as Malcolm Bilson renders early Beethoven on the fortepiano, including more passionate works (the Pathétique Sonata or the Trio in C minor, Op. 1, No. 3), unquestionably written with that instrument in mind, he arouses some musicians and members of the public to intense anger.
The anger extends from the merely petulant to the insidiously demagogic. I recall hearing a radio interview with the late flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal in which he denounced all work on historical performance as a travesty of musical and instrumental sense: how could anyone imagine listening to those tootling recorders when the magnificent flute was at their disposition. Daniel Barenboim not only conducts Bach with musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but urges them on to apply more and more vibrato.8 Modern Italian conductors express incredulity and astonishment at the aesthetic attitudes embodied in the recordings of Beethoven symphonies under the direction of Roger Norrington and at their commercial success. And during the autumn of 1994, while I was pursuing studies in Rome, a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony directed by John Eliot Gardiner at the Teatro alla Scala, using early instruments and attempting to recapture early nineteenth-century performing styles, was the object of sustained journalistic attacks, which at least had the honesty to admit that the Milanese public had been enthusiastic. Fabio Biondi’s brilliant performance of Bellini’s Norma with early nineteenth-century instruments at the Parma Verdi Festival in March 2001, and the uncomprehending, infuriated reaction of some loggionisti, will be discussed in chapter 12.
The battles about authentic performance also encompass matters pertaining to the texts being employed and the use being made of them. Alfred Brendel and his critics clash in the pages of the New York Review of Books as to whether Schubert’s last piano sonata, in B major, should be played with or without the repeat of the exposition indicated by the composer.9 Errors in editions of piano music and their unthinking acceptance by many performers is a theme Charles Rosen often touches upon.10 No conductor can program a Schumann symphony without facing those who think the composer knew how to write for the orchestra and those who do not. It sometimes seems that half of every review of a Bruckner symphony is devoted to explaining what has or has not been performed and why the choice is correct or incorrect.
Since the publication of Text and Act, a collection of Richard Taruskin’s earlier essays and reviews—edited and refurnished with a new set of zingers against his critics—Taruskin has emerged as the leading naysayer concerning the study and use in modern performance of historical practices, and his views seem to have become text to the New York Times, where he occasionally acts out.11 Taruskin’s principal point, repeated endlessly by himself and by some reviewers for that newspaper, is that much of what we have thought of as “authentic” performance practice (Taruskin’s scare quotes) over the past twenty-five years is essentially modernist performance style imposed on the past. This is, in its way, a brilliant perception, although perhaps not so brilliant as Taruskin might like us to believe. After all, if Stravinsky found something in Baroque music that appealed to his modernist sensibility, something he could use for his own purposes, it is not necessarily because the performance of eighteenth-century music needed to be remade in Stravinsky’s image. What he found, though, was in part what scholars and performers attempting to reconstruct Baroque practice had already discovered there. These scholars and performers may have been wrong about details, and they were certainly part of the culture in which both they and Stravinsky lived, but it was not their commitment to some version of “modernism” that drove them to undertake the studies that transformed knowledge of the Baroque repertory in the first decades of the twentieth century.12
Still, words such as authentic, once proudly descriptive of musical performances informed by historical study, have lost whatever meaning they may once have possessed: whether emblazoned on banners or (more often) on the covers of CDs as symbols of truth and beauty or treated as objects of opprobrium and scorn, they have become at best slogans, at worst commercial ploys. Indeed, their continued use is merely confusing. Are we willing to say, after all, that a performance faithful to a musicological reconstruction is authentic, while one ignorant of such reconstructions but embodying the interpretation of a committed artist within d
ifferent parameters is not?13 The term authenticity begs too many questions. It also reinforces categorical divisions that deny the interdependence of theory and practice, embodying in banalities complex issues that every performer and every scholar must confront. Traditionalist performers and critics reject a vast amount of serious thought on performance by rejecting caricatures of that thought. But scholars can be no less intransigent in sustaining dearly held theories while ignoring modern realities and the complexity of historical data.
In nineteenth-century Italian opera, where tempers are hotter and prima donnas more imperious, disputes descend to a level of rhetoric astonishing to those not already captivated by the customs of the lyric stage. Some critics, annoyed with what they take to be disastrous performances masquerading under the guise of authenticity, respond with a thick sarcasm aimed at issues that have little bearing on the reasons for their displeasure. I still recall a review by Kenneth Furie of Riccardo Muti’s recording of Cavalleria rusticana and I pagliacci, in which Furie complained, “And what is Muti doing all this while, with disaster overtaking from all directions? He’s by God giving us pure, authentic performances! Yessirree, it’s back to the autograph scores, boys and girls! For the first time we hear Pagliacci as Leoncavallo really meant it.”14 But who, in fact, believes that going back to the autograph scores will result in successful performances, let alone authentic ones? And who believes that refusing to play the notes written by a composer guarantees musical success? Is there no way to decrease the volume engendered by these meaningless controversies, whose only result is to confound the public?
Few musicologists are so naive as to imagine that all our queries about historical and modern performance would be solved were a time machine to transport us to a nineteenth-century theater. No one holds as a model the first performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia, where it seems likely that the singers barely knew their parts, the orchestra was underrehearsed, the performing materials were atrociously (mis)copied at the last moment, and the audience (according to the first Rosina, Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi) hooted and jeered.15 Nor does anyone seek to recreate theaters in which we draw the curtains of our boxes while awaiting major arias, chatting with friends, eating ices, and amoreggiando, as so vividly described by contemporary writers such as Stendhal and Balzac.16 When public social activity centered around the opera house and the same work was performed night after night, that was a reasonable way of listening to music. How we listen today is inextricably related to how we live today.
What would it mean, after all, to ask an artist to “sing only what’s written.” Is there any evidence that performers in the nineteenth century strived to erase their personality and individuality of tone? Should orchestral musicians invariably ignore the technical advances made in the construction of their instruments or the techniques for playing them? Does anyone seriously suggest that stage designers, as a matter of course, should reproduce period productions or that directors should limit themselves to following nineteenth-century staging manuals?17 Practical musicians, designers, directors, and impresarios shrink from what they consider to be attitudes bearing little relation to the theater as they understand it. Some operatic personalities relish these extreme formulations: by ridiculing them, they can avoid facing the serious issues involved.
That we can learn much by reconstructing mentally (or even physically) a nineteenth-century performance, analyzing historical vocal technique, scenic design, stage direction, and instrumental practice seems self-evident, and this knowledge has implications for modern performance.18 That scholars expect performers to abandon themselves blindly to historical reconstruction is a gross misrepresentation. I do not mean to suggest that extreme formulations cannot be found somewhere in the writings of the thousands of performers and scholars that have interested themselves in the question over several generations, but I must agree with Charles Rosen when he writes: “[Taruskin’s] most crushing arguments are often reserved for opinions that no one really holds.”19 The straw man of authenticity simply gets in the way of a reasoned approach to the complex interactions of theory and practice, history and contemporaneity, tradition and innovation.
SEMIRAMIDE AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA
On 30 November 1990, the Metropolitan Opera unveiled a new production of Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, conducted by James Conlon, in a production directed by John Copley and designed by John Conklin. (The most difficult aspect of rehearsals was remembering which J.C. one happened to be talking to at any given moment.) Prepared for the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, Semiramide was the last of some thirty-four operas Rossini wrote for Italian theaters between 1810 and 1823. The best of these operas dominated stages in Italy and abroad for thirty years, and their influence continued to be felt long after Rossini’s serious operas disappeared from the repertory for a variety of historical and cultural reasons. The Met’s decision to revive Semiramide was both a tribute to one of the great singers of modern times, Marilyn Horne, and a belated recognition by America’s oldest opera house of the growing, worldwide interest, by musicians and the public alike, in Rossini’s noncomic operas.
Although I admire Semiramide greatly, I frankly would not have chosen it as the first Rossini opera seria to be presented to the Metropolitan Opera audience. However brilliant its music may be, Semiramide is a neoclassical drama and a work whose structural formality makes it Rossini’s single longest Italian opera. When major opera houses wish to perform a Rossini serious opera, I normally suggest one of two Neapolitan works, Ermione and Maometto II: both have the advantages of being considerably shorter and of having a more fluid structural design. But the former has a relatively small mezzo-soprano role (and hence would have been inappropriate as a work chosen in part to celebrate Marilyn Horne), and the latter was compromised by the Met’s controversial presentation of Le Siège de Corinthe, an opera largely derived from Maometto II, already discussed in chapter 4. Furthermore the popularity of several individual compositions in Semiramide provided a point of contact with the public: the queen’s “Bel raggio lusinghier” or Arsace’s “Eccomi alfine in Babilonia” continued to be morceaux favoris for sopranos and contraltos long after the public had any idea what the opera was about. And so, Semiramide it was.
The dramatic precepts of eighteenth-century neoclassical drama are unfamiliar to modern America. Semiramide was probably the first contact with a play by Voltaire in any form for 99 percent of the audience who attended the Metropolitan or watched the public-television program that brought Semiramide before the largest audience it had ever known.20 The remaining 1 percent of the audience consisted mostly of opera lovers who had seen Rossini’s Tancredi, also based on a Voltaire play, at Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or in Europe. Thus, a certain puzzlement at the formal (even static) dramaturgy was to be expected. Not everyone would feel comfortable with a work whose aesthetic bases are in such sharp contrast with the precepts of the Romantic theater underlying most nineteenth-century Italian opera. Nonetheless, the theater audience was enthusiastic, and standing ovations greeted Lella Cuberli and June Anderson (alternating in the title role), Marilyn Horne, Chris Merritt, and Sam Ramey, even though the evening began at 7:30 and did not conclude until almost midnight.
Among those left relatively unmoved by Semiramide was Donal Henahan, at that time chief music critic of the New York Times. What interested me was not his opinion of the opera but the way it was expressed. Reviewing the entire Metropolitan Opera season, he wrote, “‘Semiramide,’ revived after nearly a century, was played in a new edition that put exhaustive scholarship before operatic effectiveness.”21 There it is, laid out for all to see: “exhaustive scholarship” versus “operatic effectiveness.” Journalistic bon mot or not, it embraces a common misconception. In fact, this production of Semiramide, for which I served as “stylistic adviser” and which employed the new critical edition of the opera that I had prepared for the Fondazione Rossini drawing on earlier efforts by Alberto Zedda, provides a paradigmatic introduc
tion to the interaction of scholarship and performance in the opera house, an interaction a good deal more complex than might appear from Henahan’s banal dichotomies. The issues, like this book, can be divided into two categories: knowing the score and performing the opera.
PREPARING A NEW EDITION OF SEMIRAMIDE
Whatever theoretical value philosophers—in their search for the “ideal” musical work—may assign to or withhold from a written musical score, few performers of nineteenth-century repertory learn their music by ear, and even those who do must rely on someone who is reading a score. In order to perform Semiramide, then, the Met needed a full score for the conductor (one containing all orchestral and vocal parts), vocal scores for singers and rehearsal pianists, and individual orchestral parts from which everyone from violinists to timpanists could play. In the nineteenth century, the full score of Semiramide circulated almost exclusively in manuscript; orchestral parts were also prepared by hand.22 With one exception, only vocal scores were printed. (The exceptional publication, an orchestral score printed by the Roman firm of Ratti and Cencetti, with the same criteria they used for manuscript copies prepared in their copisteria, had a limited circulation.) Rossini’s own autograph manuscript of the opera remains in the archives of the theater for which Semiramide was written, the Teatro La Fenice of Venice (whose archives are deposited at the Fondazione Levi). From this autograph the theater’s copyists prepared parts (which still exist) and a complete manuscript of the full score. From that manuscript copy, other copies and other sets of parts were prepared. These derivative scores and parts were used for performances in the nineteenth century and occasionally in the first half of the twentieth, all over the world.
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