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INSTRUMENTS OLD AND NEW
Among various notes I have accumulated over the past twenty years on the subject of the instrumental accompaniment of Italian nineteenth-century operas, I find the following statement in a personal communication by an evidently frustrated (and consequently nameless) Italian conductor:
Italian conductors (real ones, not those who invent pseudo-philological groups and then cross over, with the help of record companies, to conduct modern orchestras which their talent would never have allowed them to approach) feel the need to know—before old instruments—modern ones for which they intend to prepare scores destined to be heard today, not by their ancestors. The Italian conductors to whom I allude, then, don’t scorn old instruments, but they limit themselves to studying their behavior on paper or to visiting them in museums, as they do with Roman chariots or Viking ships. They follow with interest ocean crossings of the Kon-tiki [on a raft], but prefer to make the journey in jets.
Even though this statement seems to me a quintessentially blinkered vision of the problem of old and new instruments, it represents a position shared by a sizable group of musicians in Italy and elsewhere: I don’t want to hear those museum specimens, since the distant past has nothing to teach me, and all this commotion about old instruments is an invention of “pseudo” philologists, sustained by record companies. Real men eat gut strings for breakfast and let natural horns rust.
There is a vast literature on instruments and instrumentation, much of it technical but some of it particularly relevant to the performance of nineteenth-century Italian opera. For the benefit of those directly involved in performances (whether as players, conductors, or scholars preparing texts), it is essential to move the conversation beyond the realm of absolute judgments. There are excellent reasons to use period instruments, and there are excellent reasons to use modern instruments. There are even better reasons to use modern instruments with an intimate knowledge of the way earlier instruments sounded, alone and in various combinations. The treatise by Hector Berlioz, the most famous book on instrumentation of the nineteenth century, can be helpful in understanding contemporary practice, but even Berlioz’s study must be understood in its chronological and geographical context: its pronouncements, as we shall see, do not automatically apply throughout Europe or throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.1 There is also an extensive literature about individual instruments and instrumental groups, some of which will be cited in the following pages. Often, though, the most important knowledge can be grasped by studying exactly what composers wrote and by trying to understand its significance.
FABIO BIONDI AND NORMA AT
THE VERDI FESTIVAL IN PARMA
When Fabio Biondi and his period-instrument group, Europa galante, began their performance of Bellini’s Norma at the Verdi Festival in Parma on 7 March 2001, as part of the celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of Verdi’s death and the two-hundredth anniversary of Bellini’s birth, disapproval from the loggione was expressed almost from the first note. Although Biondi had established an extraordinary international reputation for his performances of eighteenth-century music with his hand-chosen and expertly trained orchestra of musicians playing period instruments or modern reproductions of such instruments, never had he used them for the performance of an Italian nineteenth-century work until Bruno Cagli, artistic director of the festival, invited him to make the effort. It did not take long for any of those listening to realize that traditionalists among the public wanted nothing to do with Biondi or his instruments, and they were prepared to make sure that others would be unable to enjoy the evening. Their reaction—especially in Parma—might have been expected, but all of us involved with the festival still hoped that good manners would hold sway. We were wrong.
It is not that Biondi and Europa galante, which he founded in 1989, were strangers to the opera house. They collaborated regularly with the Festival Alessandro Scarlatti in Palermo, where their performance of Scarlatti’s 1718 comedy, Il trionfo dell’onore, just a month after the Parma Norma, would subsequently be awarded the most prestigious annual prize of Italy’s music critics, the Premio Abbiati.2 That award also recognized the extensive concert activity of the group and its many recordings, first with a French company, Opus 111, then with Virgin Classics. Devoted mostly to Baroque instrumental music (Vivaldi, Locatelli, Bach, and Boccherini), these recordings also explored Baroque vocal repertory, cantatas and oratorios. And “real” Italian conductors had good reason for being upset with Biondi: his recordings dominated international sales, while theirs—however accomplished—languished.
While there will always be petulant soloists who cannot imagine why anyone would want to hear the Bach flute sonatas on one of those vile old instruments, when a modern flute could do the job so much better, audiences feel no overwhelming need to hear the massed strings of the New York Philharmonic, vibrating in all their steel glory, perform Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni.3 Nor do the musicians feel a strong compulsion to set aside Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler in order to devote themselves to the Baroque repertory, whatever they may choose to do when making music with their friends. But passions rise when later music is involved. During the 1990s there were several performances and even recordings of Rossini’s early farse, one-act comic or “semiserious” operas, written between 1810 and 1813, using eighteenth-century instruments and performance techniques.4 Many were beautifully realized and well received. My personal favorite is Marc Minkowski’s 1997 recording of the second of these youthful gems, L’inganno felice, first performed at the Teatro San Moisè of Venice on 8 January 1812.5 Using a Baroque ensemble, Le Concert des Tuileries, with many of the same musicians as in his more permanent ensemble, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Minkowski does a splendid job of bringing the opera to life. He approaches Rossini’s score with imagination, energy, and sensitivity, paying particular attention to instrumental and vocal color, the declamation of the text, and vocal ornamentation. Whether one welcomes the use of older instruments or not, the singers are a delight to hear. They include the excellent Annick Massis, in one of her first Rossinian ventures; a veteran tenor (by 1997), widely acclaimed as a stylish Rossinian, Raúl Giménez; not to mention two younger Italian bass-baritones, Pietro Spagnoli and Lorenzo Regazzo. All of them sing intelligently, ornament effectively, and project the drama with conviction. They are thoroughly integrated into Minkowski’s conception, without sacrificing their individuality.
But is the orchestral sound produced by Minkowski and his players similar to the sound that Rossini and his Venetian public would have heard in 1812? We have no way of accessing such information. There is much we do know, of course. We know that Italian string players in 1812 used instruments with gut strings. We know that natural horns were employed, not horns with valves. We know that flutes were made of wood, not metal. We know that in secco recitatives accompanied by the basso continuo, low string instruments—a violoncello and a double bass—would normally have played along with the keyboard instrument (most likely a fortepiano, although some smaller theaters may still have been using a harpsichord).6 In all these ways Minkowski’s choices approximate performance practice of Rossini’s time. But, to take one controversial example, is it certain that the harpsichord (which the program booklet proudly describes as being constructed by “Émile Jobin, after a late eighteenth-century Italian harpsichord”) would have intervened extensively in pieces scored for the entire orchestra, as it does in Minkowski’s interpretation? There is considerable evidence for harpsichord intervention of this kind during the second half of the eighteenth century, not only in theoretical treatises but also in actual musical sources, but I don’t know of any Rossinian musical source—much less in the composer’s own hand—in which such participation is demonstrable.
Some evidence comes from an 1811 treatise devoted to the work of the first violinist in his role as director of the orchestra in theatrical performances: “The Maestro al Cembalo is nothing more than a si
mple player, subordinate as is everyone else to the conductor; and therefore the conductor will allow him to play only for the recitatives. In the arias and concerted numbers, he may turn the pages and nothing more.”7 The latter phrase refers to early nineteenth-century practice, in which the first cello and first double bass “al cembalo,” who played the bass line during the recitatives (with the cello elaborating on the harmony), were still expected to read their parts in the musical numbers from the bass part located on the keyboard instrument. So Minkowski’s decision to use the harpsichord in most tutti passages throughout the musical numbers of the opera, including the overture, is made in the absence of any evidence in contemporary musical sources. There is nothing wrong with a bit of eighteenth-century nostalgia, of course, and the sound is lovely, but we should beware of assuming that what we are hearing is what Rossini would have heard in Venice in 1812.
Some Rossinian efforts have gone beyond the early farse, turning to the opera seria repertory, even to the composer’s Neapolitan operas. The most impressive modern performance of a Rossini serious opera using period instruments may have been the Ermione given in a concert version on 10 and 12 April 1992 by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) in London.8 Founded in 1986 as an ensemble of players on period instruments, and still going strong today, OAE works without a fixed musical director, but the identity of its two principal guest conductors, Frans Brüggen and Sir Simon Rattle, suggests a great deal about the ambitions of the institution. Brüggen, of course, is known for his long career as a great performer on the recorder, then as a conductor of Baroque and Classical music. Rattle has strong ties with OAE, having conducted the group in its first appearance at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1989, leading performances of Le nozze di Figaro. In serving as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, he continues his relationship with the OAE, an orchestra determined to eliminate the boundaries that separate performances and performers devoted to period instruments and those who embrace modern instruments. In most of the world, save Italy, Rattle and the OAE are considered to have done so in grand style. Their American tour in the winter of 2004, with Cecilia Bartoli singing arias of Antonio Salieri, for example, was received rapturously from one end of the country to the other.
The Ermione performances of 1992 were under the direction of Mark Elder, hardly a period- instrument specialist. Elder served as music director of the English National Opera (which continues to perform operas in English translation) for fifteen years. Having also worked extensively with many major orchestras, he is now music director of the Hallé Orchestra. Nor was Ermione his only operatic project with OAE: he later pushed the period-instrument concept further with three Verdian performances, the original version of Simon Boccanegra (1857) in 1994, Alzira in 1996, and the Messa da Requiem in 2001, all greeted with enthusiasm by the London public and critics. The Ermione performances featured Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role, Bruce Ford as Oreste, and Keith Lewis as Pirro. Reviews were splendid, and the work’s London success helped convince Glyndebourne to stage the opera during the summer of 1995. As for the use of period instruments, Hilary Finch wrote, “The true confidants here are the members of the orchestra. On period instruments, the quality of Rossini’s writing for clarinet and flute, for tense, stabbing trombone and tremulous strings, was pointed unmistakably. And the Rossinian crescendo will never sound the same again.”9
Despite a spate of performances during the 1990s and into the current century, Ermione remains a work relatively unknown to most opera lovers. In that sense, anything goes. Norma is quite another matter. A century’s worth of performances, seconded by numerous recordings of excerpts or of the entire opera using modern instruments, have established certain sonorities as being “correct” for Bellini’s opera, or at least they are the sonorities we have in our heads. Does that mean that we know what Bellini’s score should sound like? As we have seen time and again, “history” is taken to mean history since recordings, and usually since Serafin. Serafin, of course, was a master conductor and musician, outdated as his attitudes may seem today; but his epigones are something else. I cringe when I think of an October 2000 presentation at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, with three modern trombones and a tuba pumping their way, fortissimo, through Norma, as if it were written to be performed by brass band. Yet no one else seemed to object.
In that context, while I may not agree with all of Biondi’s decisions, his Norma was a revelation, particularly in terms of sonority. If we consider the vast changes in the manufacture and diffusion of instruments during the nineteenth century, it is reasonably certain that the instruments for which Bellini composed the score of Norma were closer to eighteenth-century models than to those commonly used today. Furthermore, in many cases Biondi’s instruments were manufactured in the nineteenth century or were copied from such instruments, so that Europa galante was hardly a Baroque group throughout. The warmth of the violins, playing with gut strings, was notable.10 The timbre of the winds in general, and of the horns, trumpets, trombones, and cimbasso in particular, was markedly different from the sounds we usually encounter. The sounds produced by the percussion instruments belonged to another sonic world.11 In general, the balance of instrumental groups in the Parma performances was superior to that usually attained in the theater when modern instruments are used. I say “usually” because I am not asserting that it is impossible to attain proper balances with modern instruments. With the latter, however, players must develop sensitivities to sonority that allow them to counter subsequent modifications in their instruments’ structure and materials. Many fail to do so, and rare is the conductor who helps them overcome the problem.
Yet the presence of Biondi and his period- instrument orchestra helped to create a polemical atmosphere in the theater in Parma. Some of Biondi’s decisions really were questionable. Continuing the practice described above in the discussion of Mark Minkowski’s L’inganno felice, Biondi actually used a keyboard instrument (a fortepiano) in Norma, an opera without secco recitative, and allowed the instrument to play an improvised accompaniment during most ensemble passages. There is no evidence whatsoever for this usage. In an essay in the program book, Biondi invoked language in which composers are referred to as sitting “at the cembalo” during the course of the first three performances, but that does not mean they actually played.12 Fortunately the instrument could barely be heard in the theater.
But what was ultimately responsible for the displeasure of even the less polemically minded members of the audience, I think, was the gulf that separated the singers from the instrumentalists. June Anderson and Daniela Barcellona, in the roles of Norma and Adalgisa, are both fine artists, but neither of them had previously worked with a period-instrument group for the bel canto repertory in an opera house, and neither of them had considered how to modify her singing technique to take into account the changed sonority in the pit. There was no bad will here, simply a failure to recognize that opera singers trained in the style of the twentieth century, post-Callas, and an orchestra seeking to reproduce a quite different performance style may not be able to unite effectively. One sensed throughout the opening night that Anderson, in particular, was less than confident, even though Norma was a role she had sung many times.13 And the tenor, a young and valiant but desperately inexperienced singer, could not sustain the role of Pollione, which—unfortunately—dominates the first part of the opera. By the time Norma entered with her prayer to the moon, the audience was restive, and matters never improved.
PERIOD INSTRUMENTS: THE PROBLEM
OF TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS
Much of the rhetoric surrounding the use of older instruments in the performance of music from the first half of the nineteenth century is inflated. Many musicians, trained on modern instruments and dependent on them for their livelihood, see only the limitations of older instruments and fail to acknowledge their advantages in color and balance. Others, committed to historical instruments and riding a wave of public fascination with period or
chestras, praise their tone quality and characteristic sounds while failing to acknowledge their practical inadequacies. It would be absurd to pretend that gains and losses are not present in almost equal measure.
The critical edition of an opera must respect the work in its historical context. It cannot justify rewriting instrumental parts by affirming that the composer would have prepared his score differently had modern instruments been at his disposition. Once that process begins, it is hard to know where to stop, and intervening in a published score denies performers the right to know the historical record and to make their own choices.14 At the same time, we must avoid presuming that a composer’s art is inextricably tied to specific instrumental characteristics. During the first sixty-five years of the nineteenth century, a great variety of instruments could be found in France, Italy, or Vienna. When we speak of “period” instruments, then, we need always to ask which period and in what geographical center.
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