How early is early?

The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’?

The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’? Recently the music which has fallen within the ‘early’ bracket has been so late (Brahms, Strauss, even Stravinsky) that my grandmother could have attended the first performances, and possibly did. The original banner of ‘authentic performances on original instruments’ is so taken for granted these days that it no longer seems necessary to give the repertoires in question a justifying name. Everyone now expects orchestral music written before the 19th century to be played on instruments of the period; whereas with music written after 1800 I get the impression no one particularly cares. A Brahms symphony played on original instruments today certainly doesn’t shock as a Mozart symphony played on original instruments did 30 years ago. Then the new sounds on display — rudely challenging long decades of accepted practice by our symphony orchestras — had a revolutionary fervour to them, along with the nut cutlets, Laura Ashley frocks and the sandals allegedly favoured by the movement’s foot soldiers. Now the heat has gone out of the Early Music movement.

It is not quite dead. There are still magazines dedicated to the concept, and also some important festivals. Of the latter those in Utrecht, York and Boston do very well in taking advantage of the width of the net that the term now encompasses. It has been a feature of the scene that, as the need for the specialist term ‘early music’ has waned, the York Early Music Festival has become one of the UK’s most prominent events, backed up by the National Centre for Early Music. The appeal of these festivals is that they can focus on the earlier repertoires, which are now of interest to everybody thanks to the pioneering work of the early-music movement. Unfortunately, this is of no use to the specialist magazines. It turns out that the secondary stage of early musicdom is to be able to enjoy the fruits of all those heated arguments about Pythagorean tuning, baroque bowing practices and the correct pronunciation of medieval Latin in Germany in the concert hall, while fewer and fewer people want to read about them.

The end of the primary phase was heralded some years ago when Nick Kenyon was asked why the Proms seemed to have given up on authentic orchestras. He replied — not entirely ingenuously — that all the good lessons that had been learnt through the work of the specialists had now been assimilated by the mainstream orchestras, which somehow made it all right for Mehta to conduct Beethoven with the Israeli Philharmonic and no need for anyone else to. The theory was that the sound world of the original-instrument bands had been transferred to the modern context, which involved some fairly nebulous thinking about vibrato. In fact, what has always distinguished the old style from the new is the size of the respective instruments and the sonority they are capable of, which is not the same thing as pervasive vibrato. Anyone who has listened to a Mozart piano concerto played on a Steinway, and then on a fortepiano of the period, will know what I mean. Vibrato as a performing desirable had its own brief flourish between the wars (spearheaded by the violinist Fritz Kreisler), and indeed might have formed another element in the early-music story if it hadn’t been so recent and now unfashionable. 

We can have it all: the concert-going scene has indeed benefited from the increase in choice, vindicating Kenyon’s remark. This makes it all the harder for groups performing the older repertoires to have to survive the kind of reviewing that is still to be found in some of our music journals. Too often these groups are at the mercy of one academic, known to be a specialist in his or her field, with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind. Time and again the best has either been trashed for nit-picking reasons or approved of in such a grudging tone that the public has been put off anyway. To be reviewed by people who have no understanding of how a performance really works — no feel for the warp and the weft of it — is a bad old hangover from the days when early music was a specialist activity with academic baggage. Ironically, in those days there still flourished the kind of critic who could write well about anything (I think of Michael Oliver and Robert Layton), whose general knowledge made them excellent commentators on specialised things and who had the knack of enthusing their readers. There is always a place for them, now more than ever.