Master the score's details in order to be free!

[rafant]

That's an Alfred Brendel's quote which impressed me very much. What do you think of it?

[m1469]

It's pretty cool actually  .  One must put an awful lot of trust in the composer and editor... hmmm ?

[anda]

i think he meant your hands should practicly be able to play the work (all the details) all by themselves, letting you free to focus on the complete ansamble image

(imo)

[mound]

he also said this:

If I belong to a tradition it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the compsoer what he ought to have composed.

[bernhard]

He also said this:

“I do not believe in technical recipes that one applies to things - recipes of declamation or articulation, of which there might be five to eight, and which you apply to anything. Each piece is different and tells you basically how to approach it, even in instrumental terms." Adrian agrees: "If you've grown up in a technical school or had a teacher who keeps you away from the great masterpieces until you've really found out how to play everything, you'll have trouble putting the technique to its proper use. There are cellists who do teach like that. I've seen it a lot in America. Brilliant cellists who play very, very well, but who have one method of playing everything. I just come from another background."

( Adrian is his cellist son.Read the whole article here:
https://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1230131,00.html)

Bet wishes,
Bernhard.

[pianonut]

i agree with everyone.  mastering the scores details is what all good concert artists seem to do (really great memories) AND they don't have a simple recipes for each composer.  chopin is different than liszt, and brahms is different than schumann.  they all are individual techniques according to the size of hand, way of approaching the keyboard, and personal artistic approach to composition.  some had informal training (but still wrote everything in detail) and others were good at adding extra information on how they wanted their pieces played.  the more you know the history and what's written on them, the better the interpretation, IMO.  am just starting to compare interpretations in a more critical way.  i never had any real knowledge before about what makes a good interpretation until my french professor simply showed me by playing.  his way was very virtuosic and he tended to pick very very difficult pieces.  mastering the scores he did would have been impossible for me at that time (if ever), but i am very happy to truly master an easier piece and go for less impression (i'm no virtuoso, but i love the singing line) of pianistic virtuosity and more short, concise pieces (mac dowell, schumann, mozart, beethoven, learning about contemporary composers such as barber, rzewski, and now muller).  my current teacher is a cross between virtuosity and rare innate talent for singing through the piano.  he takes a line and really takes in all the score's detail in plus adding effects that seem not to be effects in performance.

[lenny]

yes ive heard a similar thing said by cziffra

master the score, and learn everything the composer intended

only THEN do you have the right to say what you want with it, to add your own expression to it

cziffra was as great a thinker as brendel is

[pianonut]

agreed!

[galonia]

I almost had a heart attack when I saw this topic because it was two days after a piano lesson where my teacher said, "I can tell when you haven't learnt your notes properly yet because when you get to that part of the piece, you stop being musical as you have to start thinking about your notes.  You do this in every piece, and I can still tell when you are sight reading."

She was getting irritated that I sometimes turn up without having prepared what she had asked, and instead just sight read my way through... *sigh* there's no fooling that woman.

[bernhard]

Yes, we should not get over the top with the “mastering the score” principle.

Here is Nikolaus Harnoncourt opinion (I hope these few – and out of context – quotes will encourage you to read his books, which should be required reading for anyone interested in “authentic” interpretations):

We believe we possess a system of notation which will inform us about both the individual tone as well as the course of the musical piece. However, every musician should know that this notation is very inexact, that it does not precisely say what it does say: it does not tell us the length of the tone, the pitch, nor the tempo, because the technical criteria for this kind of information cannot be conveyed by notation.

[…]
Let us take as an example […] Viennese dance music of the 19th century, a polka or waltz by Strauss. The composer tried to write down whatever notes were necessary, in his opinion, for the musicians who sat before him in the orchestra. After all, they knew quite well what a waltz or a polka sounded like and how such dances should be played. If this music were given to an orchestra which lacked this knowledge, which was unfamiliar with these dances, and the musicians were to play exactly in accordance with the notes, the music would sound totally different. It is not possible to write down such dance music precisely as it should be played. Often a note must be played earlier or later, or shorter or longer than it is written, etc. Thus we could play this music as precisely as possible, even with metronomical precision – and yet the result would have nothing to do with the work as originally intended by the composer.
[…]

Music has unfortunately been played, for some years and in many places, from “purified” editions; and from the point of view of “faithfulness to the work”. As a consequence the liveliest and most imaginative interpretations of Baroque and Classical music are frequently labelled as “romantic” or stylistically wrong.

[…]

[In the 17th and 18th century] The work and its performance were therby clearly differentiated. The creative latitude offered the interpreter, in which each performance became a unique and unrepeatable experience, is by and large unknown and alien to present musicians.

[…]
Unfortunately, during the past fifty years, a dangerous trend toward “faithfulness” to the work has emerged, one of whose corollaries has been to banish all those good traditions which conveyed the correct interpretation of the score in favour of the authority of the written score alone.

[…]
I find it regrettable that faithfulness to the notes has replaced faithfulness to the work – that we have forgotten many things which  used to be living knowledge. This knowledge must now be rediscovered through arduous effort on our part.

[…]
This oft-cited “faithfulness to the work” appears to me the worst enemy of an honest interpretation, because it attempts to make music out of what is written down – while ignoring the underlying meaning. Notation as such cannot convey a piece of music, but only serves as a point of reference. The only person who is faithful to the work, in the true meaning of the word, is the performer who recognises what the composer intended to convey with the notes and plays them accordingly. If the composer writes a whole note, but means a sixteenth note, the “faithful” musician is one who plays the sixteenth note, not the one who plays the whole note.

[…]
The listener should never be given the impression that we are playing something we have learned. It must have been assimilated into our very being, it must have become a part of our personality. We ourselves are no longer aware that we have learned something nor where we learned it. Perhaps we will again do something “wrong” in literal terms. But a “mistake” which comes form conviction, form educated taste and feeling, is more convincing than any musical cogitation.

[…]
there is nothing negative in the concept of faithfulness to the work. The fact that this concept is often wrongly interpreted to mean faithfulness to the notation – and thus unfaithfulness to the work – can certainly not be blamed on this innocent phrase, but only on the incorrect usage to which it is put.

[…]
Music is not a matter of allowing oneself to be lulled by pleasant sounds, but rather of active listening.

[…]
Many Baroque scores and certainly Medieval and Renaissance works are completely misunderstood if acoustics are not taken into consideration. The greatest examples of the mastery of acoustics are found in the works of Bach. […] If for example, a composer has written a fast sixteenth arpeggio so that in such a hall it will blend into a shimmering chord, and the performer of today plays the fast notes precisely and clearly, then he misconstrues the meaning of these notes and alters the composition – not out of arrogance, but rather of ignorance! There is a danger – and this holds for some critical listeners as well – that the performer wants to hear the score. On the other hand, if he listens to the music, he will discover that these fast notes, in reverberating create an indefinite trembling and vague colour. This an impressionistic manner of composition, chosen with the reverberation of the room in mind.

[…]
It used to be taken for granted that beauty is inextricably linked to ugliness, and that neither is possible without the other. Music appreciation, formerly accorded an important position to the ugly and to the coarse, but this can hardly be said of our understanding of music today. We no longer desire to comprehend works of art as a whole, in all of their multi-layered facets; only one component counts for us today: the element of unadulterated, aesthetic, beauty or “artistic enjoyment”. We no longer want to be transformed by music, but only to luxuriate in beautiful sounds.

(Nikolaus Harnoncourt: “Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech – Ways to a New Understanding of Music – Amadeus Press).

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[pianonut]

transformed by music.  is this only for geeks?  i think richter, brendel, and cziffra can hold an audiences attention because they know their audience wants to be transformed (understanding the whole) and not just hear pretty notes.  BUT, i agree with many of your other quotes such as IN CONTEXT.  that's what makes a good teacher (like you) when you can fill in the gaps of what a student doesn't understand about the time period (cannot dance to something too fast or slow) and what makes a good interpretation (sometimes by just sitting down and playing it for the student).  it may be the first time a student rEALLy understands what you are saying!

[Antnee]

Interesting Bernhard, I never looked at it that way... Thanks for sharing those quotes...

    I'd like to check out some of those books...

-Tony-
     

[pianonut]

aesthetic beauty is something i would consider compatible with transformation, but as bernhard is possibly suggesting - for pianists who simply won't perform a piece until they fully 'understand' it may be limiting themselves.  i defer to bernhard. 

[whynot]

Thanks for the quotes from Harnoncourt.  I have this book, love it.

[willcowskitz]

"I find it regrettable that the faithfulness for the notes has replaced faithfulness for the work."

Yes. A lot of what this guy says is ridiculously trivial. Its like people are not aware enough of their own relationship with music that so much touches them, and are afraid to explore it in depth because what they find might as well be "wrong". But its not unlike of people treating art clinically, when that's the way they read the Bible too. Besides, I think that everything that can be evoked by a certain work, belongs to that work, and we're responsible to reveal it. There are so many views on things that it is impossible for the composer to have known them all, they only lived one life, too, and wanted to create music - something immortal, something that would have a life of it's own, not static markings on a paper.

[anda]

thanks for that quote, bernhard - this is exactly what my teacher preached to me, he's gonna love hearing he's not alone in his convictions.

one more thing, though - statistically, based on the concerts i have heard in the past few years, and not counting recordings by great musicians, i think there's a new trend: faithfulness to the work and little or no regard for the written score. i think this is just as dangerous as the trend harnoncourt spoke of.

what makes "the great ones" so great is mostly their ability to interpret (more or less correctly, but always personally and sincerely) all the written score, descyphre the messages hidden behind the written score, and present everything in a clear, complete, understandable emotional image.

(imho)

[anda]

and pls read this:

https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,6893.0.html