I’m no stranger to, or enemy of, the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement. My CV provides unimpeachable evidence: harpsichord student of Baroque maven Laurette Goldberg, enthusiastic collector of HIP recordings, former program annotator and scholar-in-residence to the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Career-wise I’m a mainstream guy, not a HIP-ster, but I’m no grumpy sideline dissenter when it comes to matters HIP.
Yet life in the mainstream carries distinct pleasures and privileges, foremost amongst them the happy right to walk right past certain HIP-infused affairs with nary a glance. I appreciate the movement and its manifold gifts to musical humanity, but I don’t drink the Kool-Aid. I just love Leopold Stokowski’s supercharged Bach orchestral transcriptions, ditto Feruccio Busoni’s grandiose sweeping piano fantasies. Bach on the piano is right and proper for me, and when it comes to listening to Bach on the clavier, inevitably I attach myself solidly to Perahia, Schiff, Gould, Edwin Fischer, et Cie. I vastly prefer Baroque solo keyboard music on the piano—just as I’m attuned to, and comfortable with, the wiry twang of harpsichord in a continuo.
I can even deal with HIP incursions into Viennese Classical territory, although there I think they’re on shakier ground. I consider HIP-ish Mozart symphony recordings to restrict themselves to very occasional listening; when it comes to really listening to a Mozart symphony my choices are much more Vienna Philharmonic, Dresden Staatskapelle, Berlin Philharmonic, and so forth. Ditto the operas, chamber music, keyboard music, everything. My Haydn symphony recordings of choice are Adam Fischer with his Austro-Hungarian Haydn group, or Antál Dorati’s slightly older set on Decca. While super-HIP outings such as Roy Goodman’s with the Hanover Band can be exhilarating, they do not ultimately satisfy given their strident brandishing of manifestos and lockjawed determination to prove their points. I prefer to focus on the music.
I draw the line, however, with Beethoven, particularly the symphonies. HIP, on the whole, has little on offer. I say that in the full recognition that HIP isn’t some monolithic thing with a single point of view. There are numerous HIPs out there, including the corporate-ish HIP that emphasizes speedy tempi, cool objectivity, strict textual fidelity, and an underlying insistence that only the sounds the composer might have heard can be considered truly “authentic” — whatever the hell can be meant by authenticity in something as fluid and evolutionary as music. Overall, corporate HIP evinces a modernist rather than historical ethos; all that objectivity and strict fidelity is the thinking of today’s museum culture, and not the attitude of practical working musicians, who modify anything and everything according to the dictates and necessities of the situation at hand. But even the more broadly-minded HIPsters, those who don’t necessarily toe the corporate line, don’t have anything particularly special to add to the Beethovenian conversation—well, at least not by virtue of their HIP credentials.
The reason is simple enough. We have an unbroken performance tradition with Beethoven, unlike the situation with earlier composers, particularly Baroque. Beethoven himself performed his music, as did his pupils. They in turn taught or influenced others, and so forth down to the present day. We aren’t that many generations removed from Beethoven’s direct influence. I can offer my humble self as Exhibit A: one of my teachers was a pupil of Artur Schnabel’s, who studied with Theodore Leschetizky, who studied with Carl Czerny, who studied with Beethoven. Thus a mere six steps from Beethoven to me. Now consider an older-school conductor such as Arthur Nikisch, whose teachers included Felix Dessoff—whose teacher Ignaz Moscheles was one of Beethoven’s colleagues. Heck, Moscheles even studied with both Albrechtsberger and Salieri, both amongst Beethoven’s teachers.
Thus from Nikisch (who left us a recording of the Beethoven Fifth) to Beethoven is only a few short steps. Such connections are easy to find with any of today’s, or yesterday’s, leading conductors, performers, and composers. We’re all part of the same team, LvanB and we contemporary musicians.
Which means that a legacy of teaching and example stands behind our Beethoven performances. There is absolutely no need to question that or consider it any less authentic than an approached based on scholarship. Beethoven is part of our contemporary musical culture in a way that Bach never was, given the long break between his lifetime and the resumption of public awareness of his works. We can trust ourselves completely when it comes to Beethoven. Yes, there have been some changes in instrument construction since Beethoven’s time, but those have been changes of degree rather than kind; by and large his orchestra was our orchestra. Beethoven had to deal with insufficient forces on occasion (such as the premiere of the Fifth Symphony) but at other times he could assemble ensembles that were more or less the same size as today’s (such as the premiere of the Seventh.) He was forever encouraging piano manufacturers to improve their instruments and chafed at the restrictions put on him by the pianos of his day. He would have been able to size up the acoustic capabilities of a modern Hamburg Steinway D in a second, and no doubt in his heyday could have played a big modern Steinway with the same breathtaking bravura as he played the lighter pianos of his own time.
Any Beethoven performance, no matter what its provenance, succeeds or fails on the quality of its musicianship, its playing, its insight, and its depth of feeling. The printed score of the Eroica will take you only so far. At some point you must consult your own muses for guidance, follow your own instincts, wrestle with your own inner demons. That’s as true for the individual performers in the orchestra as it is for the leader up there on the podium. An Eroica can be an inspiring, even shattering experience, even now after all its many performances. If you’re playing that on copies of original instruments and trying to reduplicate the sizes of Beethoven’s original forces, bully for you, but in the end it simply doesn’t matter. It’s all the rest that matters.
And that’s where the HIPsters are at their greatest disadvantage, because no matter how they slice it they’re standing in the shadow (and current presence) of giants. They have to contend with our living experience of Toscanini, Furtwängler, Nikisch, Böhm, Karajan, Bernstein, Jochum, and the glorious orchestras of Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, London, New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam that they conducted. They have to share the spotlight with contemporary and very deep-rooted masters such as Barenboim. So they can’t just bleat out notions of HIP political correctness and have that suffice: they must compete on a resolutely level playing field, one in which their scholarship bears little influence. Beethoven is the honest-injun, real-as-it-can-be musical arena, far removed from the academic musk that still hovers over many of the HIPster domains. The professor on his historically impeccable fortepiano may pontificate all he wants, but if he presumes to play the Waldstein, then he’s up against Kempff, Schnabel, Serkin, Goode, and all the rest.