Piano Forum

During the early-20th century, I think a couple of things happened regarding interpretation.  The two things were Sergei Rachmaninoff and Josef Hofmann.  In the generation of pianists prior to them during the Romantic era, there were many excesses--extreme rubato, maudlin sentimentality, actual alterations of scores in performance to facilitate articulation, slowing of tempos in difficult spots, playing the left hand harmony before the right, and more quirks.  Both Rachmaninoff (who was an immediate success in touring the U.S. once he came here) and Hofmann dispensed with all those excesses and brought new respect to the written score, yet still produced amazing performances, some of which have never been equaled since.  That's the good news.

The bad news is that gradually faithfulness to the score became not just a lofty ideal, but also a fetish.  That accounts for the homogenized, safe, and insipid performances that pour forth in competitions--and later into concert halls by those who can establish careers in performance.  Risk taking also was sent to the sidelines in favor of cautious accuracy (and sometimes boredom) in playing the piano.  After all, the misapprehension has been that the public attending a recital expects a flawless performance matching a CD recording (massaged, of course, by the recording engineer).  Paderewski in his time, despite his faults, was a strong believer that a score marking could and should be altered, if the composer obviously could not realize the optimal potential of a different phrasing or dynamic or whatever.  Later, Horowitz thought nothing of making such changes. 

The late Jorge Bolet believed too that oftentimes a performing artist comes to know a composition far better than the composer who produced it and then moved on to other projects.  The composer might have spent a week on the piece, while the performer might spend years or even a lifetime gaining deeper insights into that music.  That has to influence the interpretation.  I must say I agree with Bolet's thinking.

The pianist does not re-create a composer's music; rather, he/she co-creates it.  Yes, I do believe in the urtext and its editorial commentaries, although I do not worship it.  The score is always the starting point though.  As Hofmann used to say in so many words, before a pianist starts adding effects, usually the blatant fact is that he has not yet even exhausted the score as written!  So again, the score comes first.  In my view a new interpretation that does not comport with "performance practices" might indeed be defensible, as long as from a musicological and theory standpoint, that presentation can be well and convincingly  justified.  After all, with all of the serious limitations and shortcomings of our musical notation system, any composer in laying down the blueprint cannot possibly indicate every detail expected in a performance of a given work. 

My personal test is this: The pianist is the unobtrusive medium between score and audience, thus the pianist must do his/her very best to serve the composer and his music.  So, for example, if I want to change a chord of Rachmaninoff's, and if he could be here with me now to discuss it, do I really believe that, given the evidence for my justification, I could persuade him to accept that reasoning?

So I believe that there is some flexibility accruing to the performer to be sure.  As it is, when any two pianists play the same work while pledging strict adherence to the score, invariably the two renditions are quite different anyway!  Beyond that, as long as a piece is played within the parameters of its stylistic period and the general intentions of the composer, and if creative thinking on the part of the pianist is very thoughtful and can be articulated and justified, I may not necessarily agree with the way it sounds--but I for one am willing to consider it as a valid possibility.