Authenticity
By DAVID CAIRNS THE Oxford Bach Festival, held last month, raises once more the horrid question of authenticity. Of course we are all purists nowadays. The scholarly attitude has become such a normal part of our musical lives that we can hardly imagine it otherwise (it seems extraordinary, for instance, that as re- cently as the late Thirties an artist as alert and historically-minded as Nadia Boulanger could have used the piano in her famous Monteverdi recordings). If only the priests of the faith did not make things so very difficult for us willing but doubting disciples. If only they thought less of narrow observances and more of the logic of the whole, those matters of balance, accuracy and agreeableness of sound which are just as elsen- tial if a piece of music is to live and be ex- perienced as its composer conceived it. If only they had a little more vulgar common sense.
So often 'authenticity' means that some mechanical detail is established in a context which renders it absurd. It is no good calling (like Hamlet) for recorders if they are going to be drowned by the instruments playing with them. For what my experience is worth I would say that a single recorder is hopeless as the com- panion of solo violin and oboe in the Second Brandenburg Concerto, but a pair of them can be very effective in the Fourth if the hall is not too big and the performance suitably springy and airy in texture (I remember a radiant per- formance with recorders, directed by Menuhin, in a church at the Bath Festival a few years ago). At Oxford in the opening concert of the Festival (conducted with a most unauthentic heaviness of rhythm by Horenstein) recorders were used in a cantata. Gott 1st mein &Stag, whose scoring in- cluded trumpets and drums. The effect—involv- ing totally different levels of sound two cen- turies apart—was merely ludicrous. The recent performances of Handel's Xerxes did not make use of recorders, though there is a reasonable argument for doing so, since Handel, I am assured, wrote separate parts for flute tra verso and a bec. But in such cases as the Oxford can- tata the authenticity-mongers ought to have the Wit to see that the modern flute is unavoidable and that to pretend otherwise only weakens their cause.
Sometimes they seem to care nothing for musi- cal or mu,sico-dramatic values so long as they have made their academic point. At another Oxford concert devoted to music by Bach's sons the solo part in a concerto in E minor by Wilhelm Friede- mann Bach was played on a fortepiano which— I do not exaggerate—sounded like a very old pub piano. For the sake of pedantry a largely un- known work of evident charrn by a largely un- known and highly interesting composer was spoiled.
The keyboard is at the heart of the authen- ticity question—the sacrosanct citadel of the purists' faith and the occasion of their grossest offences against music. I cannot agree with people who find the harpsichord a monotonous and nerve-wearying instrument. In the right place and the right hands it is a sovereign power and a source of delight. On the other hand I cannot see the wisdom of combining it as a solo instru- ment with a modern chamber orchestra. Here, as elsewhere, I should have thought, the criterion can only be practical; above all, can we hear it? I am still waiting for a performance of the Fifth Brandenburg, with harpsichord, in which the elaborate and celestially beautiful figurations in the keyboard part are audible and do not have to be filled in from my memory (which, with this work, is pretty exact). In the Horenstein concert at Oxford, Lina Lalandi, the energetic architect of the Festival, played the D minor Concerto with a section of the Philharmonia strings, dis- posed 4-4-2-2-1, and once again, even for some- one familiar with the music, the solo part was reduced to a toneless rhythmic clatter; the resonance of even a dozen strings was too much for it, and most of the time it could only imitate the action of a birdcage played with a toasting fork, to use the genteeler of the two charac- terisations of the instrument attributed to the late Sir Thomas Beecham. Amplifying the harpsi- chord electrically is no solution: it distorts or falsifies the tone, it still does not give a volume of sound able to match a chamber orchestra, and it invites the kind of hilarious mishap which struck a performance of Bach's Double Concerto in C last year, when the electricity supplying one of the harpsichords failed at the beginning of the performance, producing throughout the work an effect of terraced dynamics beyond the wildest dreams of baroque music.
Left to itself the quietest instrument can im- pose its own rounded acoustical world. One of the most absorbing and delightful concerts I have ever heard was a Bach recital by Ralph Kirkpatrick on an unamplified clavichord in the Wigmore Hall in 1949 or 1950; for the first five minutes one heard almost nothing, then gradually the ear adjusted itself and the tiny grain of sound swelled out to fill it. But we have no chance to make this adjustment if another and larger sound world is at the same time claim- ing our attention. Surely the lesson of such per- formances as the Oxford one of the D minor is and always has been: if you are going to play such a piece on the harpsichord, you must re- duce the accompaniment to string quartet and double bass.
Why is such an obvious conclusion not drawn, if not by the purists, then by their more indepen- dent-minded colleagues? There is something about authenticity that reduces strong men to be- wildered deference. You will hear people, other- wise sternly critical, implacable upholders of high standards, who maintain they prefer the music of the Genii in The Magic Flute sung by boys, when, if it were any other than a question of authenticity, they would be the first to con- demn the dubious intonation which almost in- variably results. When it comes to Bach, Karajan, the technocrat of the modern orchestra, has to leave his rostrum and seat himself at the cembalo, with (to judge by a performance of the B minor Suite at the Festival Hall last year) miserable re- sults. Directing from the keyboard is only all right if conductor and players are used to it and decent ensemble can be assured; then at least it is a harmless folly, though I have never been able to get a musicologist to tell me what func- tion the harpsichord fulfils in the tuttis of eighteenth-century music, why the strings want anything from it and how, even if they do, it can possibly give it to them.
The glittering and imaginative decorations with which Thurston Dart embroiders Purcell's con- tinuo parts, or Raymond Leppard's use of harpsi- chords in his edition of Poppea (performed with great effect at the Proms on Monday) are one thing, and our musical understandings would be drabber and less complete if we did not have them. But we have suffered enough from the gnatlike mist of sound buzzing round a string ensemble which is perfectly able to get on with- out it—the crass, automatic assumptions of dully mechanical purism which have been allowed to get away with it for too long. What we still need to cultivate is a mentality, compounded of re- spect for scholarship, a sense of the past, and empirical common sense, which is at once bored by the excesses of Stokowski's Victorian orchestration of the Bach C minor Passacaglia and able to respond unashamedly to the beauty and rightness of the Fifth Brandenburg per- formed with the timeless understanding and scrupulous musicianship of a pianist like Serkin, an attitude which can recognise that when Rach- maninov played The Harmonious Blacksmith on the piano, authenticity was exalted in a way that few of the righteous could ever comprehend.
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