Speed Freaks

I’m not the slightest bit antagonistic to the early music movement. I believe my credentials speak for themselves—harpsichord student of Laurette Goldberg back in the 1970s, then program annotator and scholar in residence for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for two seasons.

However, I’m appalled by the poor musicianship that results when performers substitute research propaganda for listening or thinking. That has been particularly problematic with the Beethoven symphonies, what with their towering stature and their unbroken performance tradition. Those nine symphonies have been in constant performance since Beethoven’s day; there are no gaps in our collective memory chain. People heard Beethoven conduct the symphonies; his own students went on to spread the gospel. Musicians such as Louis Spohr had heard Beethoven conduct numerous times and knew his style inside out. Thus, when Spohr took orchestras through Beethoven symphonies, his interpretations shone with authenticity. Mendelssohn may have barely crossed paths with Beethoven, but he was steeped in Beethoven’s idiom. There is no reason to think that the tradition stemming from early conductors such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, on through greats such as Wagner, Bülow, Nikisch, Richter, unto the present day, is to be held in suspicion or rejected.

The power of that tradition reveals itself via comparative listening. I chose for my sample the Larghetto movement of the Beethoven 2nd Symphony in D Major. My reason was simple—the Larghetto doesn’t allow for all that much leeway in tempo, while at the same time it’s lyrical and relaxed, allowing conductors plenty of room for phrasing and personal touches.

What I heard supports the notion of a long tradition at work. The majority of the conductors whose recordings I heard selected a tempo hovering right around quarter note = 77. That includes old-timers such as Toscanini, Karajan, Furtwängler, and Beecham. Out of 25 renditions, fully 12—almost half—were only a hair’s breadth apart in tempo.

A few conductors took a marginally slower tempo of quarter note = 68. In that group we find Monteux, Bernstein, Jochum, and Klemperer. Interestingly enough, the early-music group The Hanover Band came in at this speed. There were a few that took an even more relaxed approach, all of them distinctly old-school conductors: Wilhelm Mengelberg, Kurt Sanderling, and Kurt Masur.

A few went just a tiny bit faster than the norm, at an average of quarter note = 80. Those were all recent recordings: Claudio Abbado’s 2000 Berlin Philharmonic outing, Osmo Vanska in Minnesota, and another early-music offering, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. But they were only a bit faster, hardly worth noticing in fact.

Then we come to Roger Norrington, the poo-bah of modern HIP-dom with all its ukases, proclamations, and soapboxes. His tempo for the Larghetto: a metronomically inflexible quarter note = 96.

No, it’s not a misprint. He took it at 96 beats per minute. If you consider that grand average tempo of 77, then the Norrington stomps on the accelerator. The poor Larghetto comes off sounding as though the players are determined get home in time to catch Letterman. There’s no lingering here, no enjoying of a wonderful moment, no chance to sit back and drink in Beethoven’s lyricism. Instead of phrasing we get downbeats. Instead of breath we get shorter notes. The poor movement is pummelled, crowded, and hurried, like some hapless tourist being frogmarched through Venice in few hours.

Note that David Zinman in Zurich, although strongly influenced by the HIP movement, moves at a relatively sedate 91—but that’s still way faster than the traditional norm. The saving grace of Zinman’s approach is that phrases are allowed some contour and breath. A little. The metronome still rules all.

Samuel Lipman has some choice words about Norrington’s Beethoven-lite recording:

So prevailingly headlong is the pulse in these Norrington records that Beethoven’s music is made to seem a perfect representation of the sign in Barnum’s circuses, “This way to the egress.” Everywhere there is a lack of breadth and space. Though the performances are short-winded, the music does not breathe. Because the music does not breathe, this quintessentially passionate music conveys no passion. …These performances are, in short, consistently bad—and what is bad about them is precisely the result of the fleshing-out of all the absurd music-intellectual pretensions of the authentic-performance movement.

There’s something distressingly flippant about the Norrington/Zinman approach, something evocative of callow teenagers jabbering on their iPhones and peeping out a petulant whatever to any and all adult admonitions. In their misguided attempt to democratize Beethoven, to cut a giant creator down to a size and shape suitable for the fast-food 21st century, Norrington et al. have turned their backs on a grand and nourishing tradition. Happily, the Norrington Method has apparently failed to take root. Consider that my central block of tradition-honoring Larghetto performances includes such moderns as Christian Thielemann and Mariss Jansons, along with tribal elders such as Toscanini, Scherchen, Furtwängler, and Beecham. That’s a very good thing, because in a world teeming with mediocrity, we need Beethoven more than ever—the real Beethoven, not some shrunken and trimmed and shaved eunuch. We need Beethoven. His joys, his rages, his aspirations, his titanic reach, his indomitable spirit. My advice to Norrington et Cie: don’t try to dress a lion in jeans and a hoodie. It serves no purpose, and it annoys the lion.

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