Sir Donald on performance practice

The conditions under which poor Bach worked were neither metropolitan nor otherwise oputlent. He furnished his church cantatas week by week, as the parson furnished his Sunday sermon; and a trustworthy tradition tells us that the performances were generally atrocious and that a subsequent flogging for the ringleaders of the choir was almost part of the ritual.

To perform Bach properly, we must understand the capacity and character of his instruments and must not read irrelevant elements into his aesthetic system; but some contemporary elements were irrelevant and need not be reproduced. For instance, the choir need neither receive nor deserve a flogging.

After a brief hiatus, the indefatigable Sir Donald Tovey is back.

At this time of day, it ought hardly to be necessary to point out that our criterion must not be that of the criminologists who, at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrated to their own satisfaction that they could not distinguish genius from insanity. I have it on the infallible (or at all events indisputable) authority of my own intuition that such writers are condemned to spend many thousands years in Purgatory collecting statistics of the wild-oat crops sown by ten dull persons for every genius into whose private affairs they have intruded.

Correctness will not prevent the current criticism of any period from manifestly bristling with abnormalities when we look back on it with the light of later knowledge. But critics do not always fail to recognize the important artists of their day. The neglect and poverty in which Mozart died so young would have been an affair of a few lean years if he had survived it. In fact, poor Salieri’s reputation has been terribly blasted by his remark that, Mozart’s death was a good thing for us other musicians, because if he had lived for much longer we should all have starved.

These comments are a propos for Miss Mussel at the moment as she begins the year as a proper music critic. In the ten reviews she has written over the past four months, she has discovered an additional responsibility borne by the critic that goes far beyond writing about the concert and making witty remarks about the state of things, as it were.

The mantle of Curator Of The Arts is heavy, bit unwieldly and, at times, downright bothersome. The community for which Miss Mussel writes is a one paper town, so there is no opposing opinion to temper the occasional bluster. Balancing an honest account of the event with the sometimes competing goal of encouraging the public to attend the next time is tricky and a skill that can only be learned in time.

If there is one thing Miss Mussel could say on behalf of criticism, it’s that critics really do love music (believe it or not) and the whole point of writing about it is to try and get others excited about it as well. Less than successful aspects of the concert are mentioned in aid of improving the next performance as well as illustrating that we were actually there and actively listening.

Although Miss Mussel must admit that it is thoroughly enjoyable to find the correct adjectives and turns of phrase to describe disasters, missteps, laziness or lack of talent, the same pleasure is had when writing about performances that are life-altering in their intensity and wonder. Reporting on a less than satisfactory concert does not give her any joy. Not in the slightest. Sorry to burst your bubble.

In fact, the best concert is when you have no words at all, when all you can do is sit in stunned silence after it is over and feel nothing but grateful that you were able to experience it. That’s what makes this whole endeavour worth it.

Sir Donald’s backhanded defense of opera.

Doubtless there are some people to whom the use of music for illlustrating other things is as abhorrent as the worship of the golden calf was to the law-giver of Israel; but if you wish to break all the commandments of aesthetic philosophy at once you will infer that, because stage music is of a lighter texture than purely instrumental music, therefore opera is a lower order of art.

It is indeed an art in which a music can succeed that would have no chance of achieving distinction as absolute music, but it is no more essentially lower than the string quartet is essentially lower than other forms of poetry.

From Sir Donald Tovey’s 1934 lecture entitled Musical Form and Matter

Neither the humble lover nor the master of pure musical form need entertain any tolerance for theories that deny the supremacy of absolute music. But all history and experience go to prove that the absoluteness of music is a result; that this result remains independent of circumstances that may happen to make music illustrative and, moreover, that it is a result very imperfectly attained, if at all attainable, by methods that have not early familiarized the musician with the musical treatment of words.

It is not mere accident that three of the four greatest masters of absolute music, Bach, Mozart and Brahms, spent more than half their time in setting words to music and that the fourth, Beethoven took enormous pain in the later part of his career to recover the art which he had almost neglected since he wrote exercises in Italian musical declamations for Salieri.

On the other hand, the loudest propagandists of “programme-music”, such as Berlioz, are often almost angrily inattentive to what they call the subjects of their works. The titles of Berlioz’s King Lear Overture and Harold Symphony are mere instances of shameless mendacity; and if these compositions have obscurities as absolute music the titiles do nothing to illuminate them.

A quartet of Beethoven is obviously absolute music and all attempts to illustrate it by Beethoven’s biography or the French Revolution are merely sentimental excuses for inattention.

On the other hand, the Pastoral Symphony is just as absolute music and the superior person who think s it the worse for the fact that Beethoven not only enjoyed thunderstorms and cuckoos and nightingales, but made them recognizable in this music, is just as liable to the charge of petulantly ruminating on second hand theories of art as the opposite type of listener is liable to the charge of extemporizing sentimental romances instead of listening to the music.