"Schumaniac and Rubinsteinmad":
"It has nothing to do with a the so-called evolution in performance practice. Instead, what is at play here is a pianist like Rubinstein (and others like Arrau, Backhaus, Gieseking, etc.) made the decision to embrace and at the same time bastardize the philosophy of Modernity/Modernism."
For the record, absent Backhaus, none of the other pianists had a lesson after their teenage years. Therefore, when they performed, or most importantly recorded, they played it straight from the score (block chords and no breaking of the hands).
Secondly, there is a difference between style and performance practice. Rubinstein, Arrau, Gieseking, and Backhaus all played in different styles, but they all played with the same note perfect block chord performance practice.
Conversely, Fanny Davies, Adelina de Lara, Ilona Eibenschutz, and Carl Firiedberg (students of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms), all played in very different styles, but yet utilized the same performance practice of the spreading of chords, asynchronization, improvisation, and tempo modification, when they thought it approporiate.
Urtext ("bogus Urtext"-Robert Winter (UCLA)," "Urtext Mob"-Jorge Bolet) was invented by Heinrich Schenker:
["Having failed to gain recognition as a composer, conductor, and accompanist, by 1900 he shifted his focus increasingly on problems of musical editing and music theory . . . Already in his 1895 article "Der Geist der musikalischen Technik," he spoke of the adulteration of contemporary music editions of classical composers, and advocated using Urtext editions.
Between 1913 and 1921, Schenker brought out an explanatory edition of four of the last five Beethoven sonatas. While examining the autograph to Beethoven's Sonata, op. 109 In 1910 . . .
Schenker wrote excitedly to Emil Hertzka, the head of Universal Edition, of the "sensational new changes" he would incorporate into his new edition of Beethoven's Op. 109, having examined the autograph, a revised copy by Beethoven, the original edition and other later editions. Federhofer credits Schenker with initiating the modern Urtext movement of examining multiple authentic sources to arrive at a reading."]
During his lifetime, Heinrich Schenker could not attain a university teaching position, and he had to teach out of his house. Because, to all of those who performed in the practice of the time, he was a fraud and a joke. No one played the music of any composer, especially Beethoven, strictly according to the score.
Specifically, the causality of Schenker's initial thesis was that performers were taking their common improvisations and then having them published as the true way to play Beethoven. Theirs was a gross misrepresentation of Beethoven!
However, for Schenker to state unequivicoally that the autograph (Beethoven) was the genuine performance article was a major falsehood. The composer, in his early years, was the most famous improviser pianist in all of Vienna. He never played anything the same way twice.
The point is: Adele Marcus and Rossina Levinne at Juilliard (after 1945) chose to re-invent this Schenkerian bogus applied musicology in order to promote a note perfect, elitist, classist method of playing. Except, and to this day, there was and is no prior musicological basis for this performance practice (absent Rubinstein, et al).
Topic: Does someone also have the feeling that today's star pianists are (Read 3628 times)