Disconnect

I can’t recall the number of times I have been gobsmacked by some commentator’s authoritative statement that turns out, upon further consideration, to be poppycock. Music critics are particularly prone to conjuring up such moonshine. Consider the doleful practice of inventing a rule then condemning a performer for breaking same. A recent example concerned a pianist performing the Prokofiev 3rd piano concerto. The reviewer stated flatly that Prokofiev’s virtuoso piano figurations were tongue-in-cheek, then eviscerated the pianist for playing them seriously. That was the first time I’ve ever heard that the Prokofiev 3rd’s pianistic whiz-bang is necessarily and exclusively whimsical. From what I can tell, the pianist was being accused of breaking a rule the critic had just made up. Why couldn’t the critic just say what he meant, i.e., me no like? But, no: he had to wax all professorially corprophagic, lest his readers start paying uncomfortably close attention to the frightened little man behind the curtain.

Examples of that sort of thing proliferate, and while raking a series of hapless music critics over the coals might make for a morning’s not-so-innocent fun, my concern is directed at a wider issue, which is that oft-encountered shibboleth that a knowledge of music history contributes to performance. I rather wonder about that. In fact, I’m pretty sure it does no such thing.

I do not base my opinion on the dismal playing abilities of your average music history major. That’s a red herring. People often pursue careers in musicology because they love music but lack the innate whatmacallit, thingamabobs, or dinguses necessary to become economically and artistically viable performers. It’s normal for your average musicologist to be an indifferent performer at best, hopeless at worst. Exceptions exist, naturally, but I do not misrepresent the general state of affairs. A kid with the talent, drive, and desire to get into Curtis isn’t likely to aspire to a Ph.D in Musicology from the University of Chicago. Conversely, a kid with the brains and academic talent to pursue that Musicology degree may shun the kindergarten mentality prevalent in your typical conservatory. In other words, a taste for things musicological doesn’t necessarily sour performing ability; instead, the divide between performer and scholar is more like streams of water seeking their own rightful levels.

We all know the enervating sterility or unintentional low comedy that results when musicologists dabble in performance. When performers dabble in matters musicological, traps and misunderstandings abound. Confirmation bias looms ever vigilant. Performers wind up basing their interpretations on moonshine, as their research evolves, spreads, and eventually crowds out the music itself in favor of the all-encompassing story.

Consider Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the Eroica. Yes, it was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, Beethoven scratched out the dedication with such force that he tore a hole in the title page. Well, the Eroica opens with two hammer-blow chords. They are hammer-blow chords whether Beethoven was thinking about Napoleon, or was not thinking about Napoleon, or was deciding whether to have schnitzel or trout for dinner. Conductors need to think, not about Napoleon, but about those chords: how to weigh and balance them orchestrally, just how loud to make them, the enclosing tempo, how to approach the primary theme that follows, and so forth. Players need to think up-bow or down-bow, reeds and fingerings and tone and breath and embrochure, and so forth. Napoleon—pro or con—just doesn’t enter into it.

Frustration with stylistic-historical-wishful thinking is probably what spurred Toscanini’s legendary dismissal of fancy-pants theories of the Eroica first movement: Bah! To me, it’s Allegro con brio! Sometimes that remark has been interpreted as evidence of Toscanini’s unsentimental, just-the-facts-ma’am musicianship, but a moment’s listening to the man’s work dispels any notion of clinical dourness. No: Toscanini based his interpretations on a number of factors, one of which was the score itself. But he also listened to his heart, felt his own pulse, considered the venue, the audience, his performers, and a lot more. He did what every fine performer does, in other words. But I don’t think he gave much thought to Napoleon or to that hole in the title page, or to Beethoven’s confession-cum-suicide-note the Heiligenstadt Testament, or to the political situation in Vienna circa 1805. I’ve heard the work of some other conductors—no names here—who appear to have given considerable thought to such things, particularly the precise construction of the instruments of Beethoven’s day, the size of his orchestra, the kind of room in which the works might have been played, and a host of similar issues. And you know what? I’ll take Toscanini every time. That’s not because I’m a reactionary type aghast at the dessicated depredations of the HIPsters and their prissy dictats. I’m no such thing. It’s because Toscanini plays the music, and those HIPsters play their research. Give me a HIPster with the same commitment to the heart and an all-encompassing musical vision comparable to Toscanini’s, and I’ll sniff past the seminar-room musk, just as I will listen past the tinder-dry acoustic of Toscanini’s NBC Studio 8H or the limited frequency response of his 1930s New York Philharmonic recordings.

Nota bene: contrary to idle populist blather, Toscanini was well-read and intellectually sensitive. He wasn’t a cerebral snob, but he wasn’t some galoot either.

Of late I have been wading through deep and sticky swamps of folderol masquerading as insight and/or interpretation. I’m preparing a talk on the Mahler 9th symphony, that bottomless wellspring of speculative Amazons. It’s Mahler’s last completed work, after all. But all those jabbering and nattering commentators miss the one simple, critical thing about the Mahler 9th: It’s music. It’s not an ontological contemplation. It’s not an essay on the inevitability of death. It’s not an uplifting article about life’s blessings. It’s not a diary entry. It’s not a last will and testament. It’s not a confession. It’s music. You can read biographical notions into it until your face turns blue, but in the end, the Mahler 9th is music. And when the commentary billows out into fatuous and convoluted posturing (Adorno, anyone?) you become unmoored from the music and float silently through a dreamworld sky puffed full of cloudy, diaphanous, and meaningless words.

As I complete my preparations for my forthcoming presentation, I realize that I can be true to myself by speaking of only the music and leaving all the historical/biographical/pseudo-psychoanalytical stuff in the books where it belongs. I’ve read gobs of it. But did any of it help me? Nope. What helped me was the score, backed up by some sensible analyses that kept their sights firmly on what was right there in the music. I’ll be speaking of the musical motives and how they grow into themes, how the themes themselves grow and evolve, how the musical arch plays itself out.

Perhaps all my background reading did serve a purpose: it convinced me that we all have better things to do than speculate whether the first two notes in the 9th are the sound of Mahler’s heart struggling along with its infected valve. They’re no such thing. They’re both A naturals, pianissimo, the first a dotted quarter marked >, the second an eighth with no mark, played by the cellos, followed by a half rest, in a measure of 4/4 time marked Andante comodo.

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