Digging In: Part III - The Crisis of the Age

In Part II, we defined our “accent” as classical musicians a little more (Werktreue) and drawn out some positive and negative implications of it. But what does all this philosophizing matter for performance? 
 
This loss of creative authority on the part of the performer meant that musicians became extremely literate, but lost their natural ability to improvise. I do not mean “improvise” strictly in terms of adding melodic content either. Even our ability to add unmarked musical shadings (dynamics, rhythmic nuance, tempo changes, or character) has atrophied as well. I am in no way criticizing musical literacy but that our preoccupation with literacy has deliberately suppressed creative expression for performers. And the degree to which performing became more impersonal, performers naturally become less and less emotionally involved in performance. In a documentary by Derek Bailey on improvisation called On the Edge, pianist and musicologist Robert Levin remarked said that that our…

…basic level of music making… isn’t terribly interesting anymore. Many of our performances are interchangeable, they are middle of the road, they are not challenging, they are, above all, concerned with the outlines of compositions but not with their inner content. Our society has lionized this kind of predictable performance in the same way it has lionized being standard with toothpaste and laundry detergent. We want certain things that are reliable.

Greg Sandow, a well-known music critic, speaker, and writer remarked in a blog post entitled “Boring, boring, boring” that, after Googling “orchestra” and clicking on “images”:

The results were ghastly. Utterly boring. Pointless. And these (most, if not all) are official photos released by the orchestra managements.

What’s the point of them? What do they tell us? An orchestra is made up of musicians, probably in formal dress, who play in a concert hall. These musicians play violins and flutes, all the standard orchestral instruments. Well, everyone knows that! What these photos don’t tell us…Their concerts will be gripping, passionate, irresistible. Or, more simply, that anything even remotely interesting might be going on.

The modern Werktreue approach also can create anxiety about performing decisions. Classical musicians often feel there must be a “right” way to play a certain piece – this is particularly true for conductors – and unless we find this right way, we will be failing as musicians. Listen to Arturo Toscanini, one of the most famous conductors of the late 19th and early 20th century:

For forty years and more I’ve been hearing words of admiration, exclamations of wonder, and I’ve always been and will always be the same wretch, always unsure of myself, worried and anxious over the choice of a tempo or a coloring! That’s your Artu!! Poor devil!!

It is impossible to read these words and not feel the oppression that gripped this conductor. Tragically, his feelings, I believe, are shared by many. The other extreme is to give up entirely and just play as safely as possible with little to no nuance, sensitivity, or emotion. 

Removing the Veil

But what does all this mean? Is all the classical music produced in the last 200 years “wrong”? Is our approach totally misguided? I don’t believe so. We need not “throw out the baby with the bathwater” but we do need a grid to sort out what is the “baby” and what is the “bathwater.” For if we simply throw out Werktreue altogether and insist that the performer should be central, it can often result in celebrity-driven, shallow music making. In fact, this was the reason for Werktreue in the first place. Composers became frustrated with the showmanship of performers (particularly opera singers) who seemed primarily motivated by their desire for praise. We might call this a more “humanist” approach because it puts the performers in the center. Richard Wagner wrote in The Art-Work of the Future, “There are even many of our most popular artists who do not in the least conceal the fact, that they have no other ambition than to satisfy this shallow audience.” Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk “total-art-work” aimed to remedy this problem by insisting that every aspect of an opera (or musical drama as Wagner called it) should work together to serve one dramatic end. But, as we saw earlier, Werktreue merely lead to a different set of problems.

In other words, Werktreue is not the fundamental issue. It is only a surface layer. Nicholas Harnoncourt, in his book Baroque Music Today writes:

…if music disengages itself from its public, neither music nor the public is to blame. Nor can reason be sought in art in general, or in music in particular, but rather in the spiritual condition of our time. It is in the present spiritual climate that changes would have to occur. Music is necessarily a mirror of the present; if we wish to change music, we must first change the contemporary world. There is no crisis in music; rather music is reflecting the crisis of an age. So endeavoring to change music would be just as absurd as a doctor treating a patient’s symptoms rather than his illness. (Italics mine)

Before we can rightly sort out what is right and wrong about Werktreue, we must understand what led to it in the first place. What was the spiritual and philosophical undercurrent at the time Werktreue took its hold on classical music? What led to Werktreue in the first place? We’ll explore that more in Part IV.