I just found this on the Piano World Forum and thought it would be a good idea to post it here. Read on!
© Terry Teachout on CommentaryMagazine.com April 2008
It is now widely acknowledged that classical music in America is in dire, even desperate straits. Critics, commentators, and managers have noted with alarm that concert audiences are aging steadily and that people under fifty seem disinclined either to attend classical-music events or to support the organizations that present them. Some presenters and performers have responded by seeking to change the time-honored institution of the solo recital in ways meant to make it less formal and more contemporary. Classical artists, for example, are now being advised to speak to their audiences from the stage, to play a fresher and wider-ranging mix of repertoire, even to employ up-to-date staging techniques.
Yet as anyone who keeps up with the programs in America’s major concert halls is well aware, very few artists are taking this advice. Far more often than not, classical performers continue to come before the public dressed in more or less formal attire and to play two-hour-long programs consisting of three or four groups of pieces drawn from the standard repertoire and arranged in chronological order, never speaking a word out loud save to announce their encores.
Nor is this reluctance to break with tradition a function of age. The thirty-eight-year-old Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, one of the most highly acclaimed classical performers of his generation, played a recital last month at Carnegie Hall that could have been given in 1968, or 1928: a Bach toccata, a Schubert sonata, Grieg’s G Minor Ballade, and a group of Debussy preludes.
What few of today’s concertgoers know is that there was once a time when classical recitals were very different—less straitlaced, more improvisational, and, above all, more populist in tone. But just as the playing styles of classical performers changed with the coming of modernism, so did the way in which performers learned to present themselves to the public. These changes are the subject of an important new book by Kenneth Hamilton called After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance.1
After the Golden Age is based on extensive research into the performance practices of the pianists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period known to record collectors as the “golden age” of classical pianism. Hamilton, a concert pianist and teacher at the University of Birmingham in the UK, offers the fruits of his labors in the hope that they will inspire performers to break with “the fusty rituals of modern concert-giving, in which the music is served up with the superciliousness of a sneering sommelier offering overpriced wine at a too-long-established restaurant.” His style is dryly witty, his scholarship immaculate—and his conclusions challenging.
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At the turn of the 20th century, a handful of classical instrumentalists began to make commercial recordings of their playing, and within a decade or two the practice had become commonplace among well-known performers. Several famous pianists born in the mid-19th century, including Josef Hofmann, Vladimir de Pachmann, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Moriz Rosenthal, recorded fairly extensively, and many others, like Ferruccio Busoni, cut just enough 78’s to give us a reasonably clear idea of what their playing sounded like.
Taken together, these recordings leave no possible doubt that golden-age pianism bore little resemblance to most of the playing heard in concert halls today. The main differences, all of which are discussed in detail by Hamilton, are these:
• Golden-age pianists generally treated the written score as a guide to interpretation rather than a definitive set of instructions. Many of them added unwritten embellishments of various kinds to the pieces they played. Vladimir Horowitz, the last major classical pianist to play with such textual freedom, recorded versions of works like Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 15 that deviated so dramatically from the score as to amount to substantially original compositions.2
• Even when these pianists stuck to the notes on the page, they played them with a rhythmic elasticity that is unknown today. Not only did they employ a wide and unusually flexible rubato, but many of them also indulged in what Hamilton calls “asynchronous” playing, in which the individual notes in a melodic phrase are struck slightly before or after the bass notes accompanying them. The purpose of this custom (which was popularly known as “breaking hands”) was to make the melody stand out in higher relief and give it a “singing” quality, in much the same way that a soprano might sing the melody of an aria in a freely improvisatory manner while the orchestra in the pit accompanies her with rhythmic strictness.
• Golden-age pianists put a higher premium on bravura and spontaneity than on precise execution, and as a result many of them played far more wrong notes than would now be considered acceptable by critics and audiences. Nineteenth-century listeners had other priorities. When the British composer Charles Villiers Stanford heard Johannes Brahms play his Second Piano Concerto, he observed that the composer “took it for granted that the public knew he had written the right notes, and did not worry himself over such little trifles as hitting the wrong ones. . . . hey did not disturb his hearers any more than himself.”
THE REST OF THE STORY as well as my reply on that forum can be found at
