Writing
Piano Recital: Character as Form, Performance as Polemic
Some notes by David Owen Norris
Sonata Op.46 (1873) William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875)
Symphonic Study Op.68 (1913) Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
transcribed by Sigfried Karg-Elert (1877-1933)
Performed at the CHOMBEC Conference at Bristol in June 2009
Karg-Elert’s piano transcription of Elgar’s Symphonic Study Falstaff, signed off in Leipzig in 1914, was a casualty of the Great War. His beautiful manuscript was never published, and has come to rest in the British Library. My recording of it was recently released by Elgar Editions, and my paper on it and the issues it raises will appear in the Proceedings of last November’s Symposium Let Beauty Awake,put on at the British Library by the RVW Society and the Elgar Society. That paper consists of a Prelude On playing orchestral transcriptions – in performing such transcriptions I aspire to the orchestral effect of Elgar’s own calculatedly imprecise piano-playing, such as we hear in the third of his recorded Improvisations – and a Fugue, Character as Form, in which I suggest that Falstaff is based more on its eponym’s character than on his actions, a fact I link to the universal interest in Musical Character shown by great performers such as Elgar. I cite as a parallel Sterndale Bennett’s late Piano Sonata ‘The Maid of Orleans’ (after Schiller), ‘composed expressly for and dedicated to Madame Arabella Goddard’, which was reviewed in the Musical Times of February 1st 1874. This recital is a welcome opportunity to present the two pieces together.
The four movements of the Sonata are preceded by quotations in German and in English translation from Schiller’s verse-drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Leipzig, 1801), one of the most frequently performed plays of the nineteenth-century:
In the Fields. Andante pastorale
“In innocence I led my sheep
Adown the mountain’s silent steep.”
Act 4, Scene 1
In the Field. Allegro marziale (stately)
“The clanging trumpets sound, the chargers rear;
And the loud war cry thunders in mine ear.”
Prologue, Scene 4
In Prison. Adagio patetico
“Hear me O God in mine extremity.
In fervent supplication up to thee,
Up to thy heaven above, I send my Soul.”
Act 5, Scene 11
and later, with the Second Subject,
“When on my native hills I drove my herd
Then was I happy as in Paradise”
Act 4, Scene 9
The End. Moto di passione
“Brief is the sorrow, endless is the joy.”
Act 5, Scene 14
These notes dip into ideas I’ve been developing this year through presentations to the Royal Philharmonic Society in London, the IMR Conference on Practice-Led Research at Kingston University, the Prayerbook Society in Salisbury, the Douglas Price Society at Keble College, Oxford, and the ‘New Directions in Jane Austen’ Conference at Chawton House. Some of them formed part of my presentation at the RCM Sterndale Bennett Conference last year. The chains of reasoning thus publicly tested and discussed await considered publication. But this Sonata of Sir Sterndale Bennett (as he was universally known) sheds light on them, so a very condensed presentation of some of my deductions may be useful.
I have found it productive to divide composers, especially nineteenth-century composers, into Gesturists and Formalists. In the latter camp I place, amongst others, the master-pupil chain of Mendelssohn, Sterndale Bennett and Sullivan. Concert experience shows that such Formalists benefit from extra attention on the part of the performer to phrase-shaping and rhetoric, a fact I found paradoxical at first, since such things are so much more clearly demanded by a Gesturist like Liszt. But further thought shows that if things are obvious, they need no extra attention; and that the careful structures of Mendelssohn could have been obscured by what we might call notated gesture. The Formalists had a greater appreciation of what the Times obituary of Delius thought-provokingly describes as ‘the distinction between Creation and Presentation’. They trusted the Performer to do his share without overt urging. Compare the peremptory Italian instructions Liszt applies to the bars he added to his Schubert song transcriptions: a fine example of what happens when a Gesturist meets a Formalist!
But I notice that although Mendelssohn eschewed such obvious things, his works are full of quiet clues as to declamation. Of the thirty-six Songs without Words published in his lifetime, all but the first contain the mark sf, often in an apparently ridiculous profusion unmatched by any composer I can call to mind. Concert experience shows that these markings do not make musical sense interpreted in the usual pianistic way. But a virtuoso organist like Mendelssohn (and unlike Schumann or Chopin, who use such dynamic marks sparingly) knew more ways to make an emphasis than mere banging. If instead one adopts the rhetorical devices known to harpsichordists as aspiration and suspension, or the agogic accent of length, Mendelssohn’s phrase breathes in a new way.
The Songs without Words show fine discrimination in their dynamic markings. ‘Hairpins’ and the words cresc and dim appear in contexts that suggest, after extensive concert testing, that both those written words prescribe a broadening of the tempo along with the required dynamic shift, while the hairpin up or down prescribes a slight hastening. Strictly interpreted, changing the dynamic without changing the speed would need a new instruction; and indeed, in three instances Mendelssohn uses some form of words like più forte e più forte e sempre più forte al fortissimo, avoiding the obvious word crescendo in a way that reinforces my hypothesis. Like the sf markings, the various ways of showing crescendo and diminuendo spin the phrase in unexpected directions. Such things illuminate the Times critic Chorley’s praise of Mendelssohn’s ‘small aggravations of emphasis’ in his orchestral performances. Mendelssohn knew five languages. His skilful translations taught him how syntax works. It is my contention that in his Songs without Words he creates a syntax not related to any actual language, but which nonetheless speaks to our Chomskyian depths.
I do not expect to find an absolute system in Mendelssohn’s deployment of his clues to the performer, since, obviously, much of it could have remained at a subconscious level. My partial proofs can only be brought home by the witness of my own educated, experienced, but contemporary, ear, and by the approval of audiences – hence my references to ‘concert experience’ as part of my research process, not just as ‘output’. At Kingston I discussed this matter (and JC Bach) in the context of jurisprudence and the rules of Circumstantial Evidence, which must be deployed to persuade a jury that things could have happened in no other way. In Salisbury I developed the argument with reference to Avicenna, Aquinas and Debussy. And last weekend in Oxford, I tied the two approaches together via the observation that Religion and Classical Music share an attitude to Texts, reaching the conclusion that our sincere opinions are indeed legitimate evidence. This almost goes without saying, of course, in matters of Art and the productions of the human brain: but it is less evident in matters of Science, where mere human opinion might seem of little value. But we all know the power of the Hunch, and it was Einstein who said ‘If we knew what we were doing, we would not call it research, would we?’ I stress this as a counter to those disappointing scholars who cite the opinions of others at every opportunity, and then hide behind them. Our risky discipline of Practice-Led Research demands an attractive independence of method.
Just as all my careful logic so far led me to confirm something that I was sure I knew already (that my opinion carries weight!), so too with the next step. My performing decisions are based on my circumstantial opinion, and I must make the case for them with the jury of the audience. Performance is Polemic. This is something else we should know already, for we can see that when Performance ceases to be Polemic, people stop listening. The commodification of Classical Music is a large subject, so for the moment we may content ourselves with the observation that many listeners prefer things they know, played in a familiar manner. Performers instinctively know this is a slippery slope, and it was with this in mind that my Gresham Lectures from 1991 to 1995 had the motto ‘Music is an Activity rather than an Object’.
Polemical performance is a risky business – a CD with an agenda can be sunk by one blinkered critic. This Sterndale Bennett Sonata is a case in point. I recorded it years ago for the BBC, but the producer deemed that I played it too slowly, and it was never broadcast. At the time I had not developed the arguments I now use to justify my choices, nor had I read the 1874 Musical Times review, which says: ‘Pianists who can sing with their fingers will be delighted to linger over the beauties…’.
Kiallmark’s Variations on Robin Adair (the only piece of music actually named in Jane Austen’s novels) carefully employs no fewer than three different notations to show when and how chords should be spread. It is not unreasonable to assume, in the face of such precision, that unmarked chords might well remain unspread. I occasionally break the very first chord of In Prison (extracts appended below), but to break all three chords in that bar would destroy the foreshadowing of bar 5’s melody, and would signally fail to establish a beat. My choice depends on what the piano sounds like in the hall; I find I am more likely to spread on an old piano than on a modern one. This is for the same acoustic reason that led the pianists of a hundred and twenty years ago to anticipate their bass notes. On the straight-strung pianos of the time, that sets up a useful resonance which can be amplified by the chord: it sounds better than putting everything down together. But on a modern cross-strung piano, putting everything down together sounds just fine. And another factor comes into play, especially in America where they take piano-playing very seriously. A pianist who can’t play chords together rules himself out as a proper player, and people stop listening. As part of the quest to communicate music’s meaning, a performer may need to reject even the composer’s demonstrable practice if it cannot be made intelligible to a modern audience. We must ask ourselves WHY the composer did what he did, and (which is almost the same question) what was the effect on his listeners. In general, the effect of the spread chord is to enrich the piano sound. It may be rich enough without it. So even those chords that the composer might have spread, could end up unspread.
The wholly intelligible rhetorical effect of a melody note delayed as the result of a spread is quite a different matter, of course. Bennett applies this effect with discrimination. Compare the first and third bars of the first movement, and the 2nd and 10th, and the 4th and 12th, of the third movement. Bar 19 of that movement occurs three times, with different marks each time. To spread everything more or less at random would be to destroy these distinctions, though one often hears it advocated.
The most obviously remarkable aspect of the beginning of the Sonata is the correlation between the melody and the bar-lines. The first bar signals a particular approach to the extended upbeat which informs a lot of what I do throughout the piece. You’ll observe Mendelssohnonian sfs, and you’ll also notice the peculiar dynamic markings in the first 9/8 bar (a remarkable metrical detail, these 9/8 bars), which might suggest that Sterndale Bennett’s subconscious mind was less well organized than Mendelssohn’s. The upward hairpin followed by the word cres: in the next bar is wholly Mendelssohnian, however.
Dyed-in-the-wool WSB-ers will observe many instances of that favourite dominant minor ninth, used here to turn some very strange enharmonic corners. The themes have a pervading family relationship. The piano figurations are striking. Geoffrey Bush wrote slightingly of the piece in 1965 in the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, beginning:
Since Bennett was a cricket enthusiast, it may not be inappropriate to recall that even Bradman was dismissed for nought on his last Test appearance. Bennett’s last innings was also a failure…..
I think Bush was wrong.
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