Stephen Pettitt on how Sir Roger Norrington and others started the debate about ‘authenticity’
In the late 1970s, the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, at the time in charge of the late and lamented Kent Opera, created the London Classical Players. With this act Norrington, who has just turned 75, joined a small group of musicians regarded by the wider profession as, to put none too fine a point on it, rather nutty. They included his British colleagues Christopher Hogwood and Trevor Pinnock, the Dutch harpsichordist Ton Koopman and recorder player Frans Bruggen, the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken, and, from a slightly older generation, the iconoclastic Austrian conductor and viola da gamba player (and noble descendent of European royalty) Nikolaus Harnoncourt and another Dutch harpsichordist, Gustav Leonhardt. All were united in their determination to ditch received wisdoms, deconstructing accepted norms of performance practice and putting it all together again using as their only tools instruments and treatises from the same epoch as the music they were playing.
Suddenly, old violins which had been modernised to cope with the stresses of metal strings at high tension were converted back to their initial states and strung with gut. Players played them without vibrato and with a comparatively low-tension, light baroque bow. They studiously applied the principles outlined in Francesco Geminiani’s The Art of Violin Playing and Leopold Mozart’s A Treatise on the Fundamentals of Violin Playing. Flautists dug up, or else had expressly made for them from ancient blueprints, wooden instruments which had holes and no elaborate key mechanisms to make covering and uncovering them easier. The baroque and classical flautist’s bible was a volume dating from 1725, On Playing the Flute, by Johann Joachim Quantz, flute player, flute maker and composer for Frederick II of Prussia. Other woodwind instrumentalists found their equivalents. Craftsmen turned out lovingly made copies of 18th-century Stanesby oboes, for instance. Horn players were the bravest of the brave, turning to valveless horns and adjusting the instrument’s pitch by shoving a hand slightly indecently up and down its bell. Split notes were fully expected.
Indeed, in those days, what one generally heard from an orchestra of baroque or classical instruments was a scratchy, emasculated, poorly tuned sound. Enthusiasts learned to turn a blind eye, or rather a deaf ear, to that minor inconvenience for the sake of experiencing what was an entirely fresh approach to very familiar music. Phrases would be semi-broken into shorter breaths, sighing slurs abounded, there would be rapid swells and diminuendos, and all was done with passion and an almost complacent certitude that it was, de facto, The Right Way. And when Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert tore through the Brandenburg Concertos with this new, vibrant energy, embracing Bach’s inventiveness rather than revering it, devotees of this new fashion felt at one with the music, seemingly as never before.
Yet for a long time these enthusiasts were outnumbered by those for whom a lowering of absolute technical standards was unacceptable, and to whom the traditional ways of doing things were preferable. The majority still wanted seamless phrasing, lavish vibrato, strong, silky string tone, a homogenous wind choir, and timpani which resonated forever. Something like war erupted in the profession, between different audiences, and among critics. Those of us on the side of authenticity, as the practice of using period-style instruments rather misleadingly became known, often displayed a rather fundamentalist approach. I blush to recall the first review that I ever wrote for the Times. It was of a recital given by Rosalyn Tureck, who was celebrated for playing Bach on the piano. In my youthful arrogance and ignorance I treated her as if she were a complete dinosaur, little realising that nearly 30 years later I would be listening in blissfully guiltless pleasure to Andras Schiff, Murray Perahia, Angela Hewitt, Joanna McGregor and the rest doing exactly the same thing.
I was happy to be in the authenticists’ camp. It just seemed somehow right to me that musicians should be exploring and not just imitating. Of course, the freedom to explore creates a friendly space for the wilfully eccentric. Sometimes Norrington’s own performances would fill that space. There were stories of how impossible it was to work in a recording studio with him, since no take would be taken at the same tempo as any other. He’s still liable to go out on a limb, a marvellous example of how to grow old disgracefully. He consistently refreshes parts of the repertoire that we need to be refreshed, nowadays even in early-20th-century music.
Norrington and the best of his colleagues realised that merely playing the right sort of instruments in the right sort of numbers, and using the right sort of techniques, phrasing and articulation does not the right sort of performance guarantee. Indeed, it does not any sort of performance guarantee. Even if we can with some confidence restore the original timbres and balance of, say, a Mozart symphony, we cannot retrieve precise nuance nor indeed the flavour of the original whole. Apart from anything else, in our sound-saturated society we listen differently. Those early practitioners, fundamentalist or ecccentric, merely set a starting point for a continuing debate.
But there’s something else. Period-style performances have subtly converged with modern-style performances. Both movements have grown up a little and learned from each other. Conventional symphony orchestra conductors like Simon Rattle and Charles Mackerras have stamped their own personalities upon baroque and classical orchestras, while almost all so-called specialists now also direct conventional orchestras, bringing some of their stylistic insights with them. Norrington, not least, habitually encourages the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which he’s Principal Conductor, to play with sparingly applied vibrato at certain moments.
And it comes as quite a shock to compare a late Haydn symphony played by a period-style orchestra like the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with the same work conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. They aren’t worlds apart, because Beecham knew well what Haydn needed: a spirit of spontaneity combined with meticulously observed articulation and dynamics, together with a magic ingredient, an affinity which no treatise can teach and which no period-style performance has yet superseded.
Stephen Pettitt is Head of Music at Benslow Music Trust.
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