Gustav Leonhardt’s transcription of J.S. Bach’s Ciaccona

Musical transmission is a well-explored topic in the history of Western music. In a rare filmed appearance, pianist Edwin Fischer recited, more than explained, how it works: “Beethoven instructed Czerny how to play the Well-tempered Clavier; Czerny taught it to Liszt; Liszt taught it to Eugène d’Albert.” The clip is part of the documentary “The Art of Piano” (found at 1:07:31 of this YouTube video). To complete the lineage for the benefit of readers of our time, d’Albert taught Fischer, who was endorsing his then-new recording of Bach’s WTC.

In addition to being a great-great-grandpupil of Beethoven, Fischer was also a celebrated teacher. His statement about the musical lineage that authenticated his way of playing Bach can be seen as a statement about pedagogy rather than a display of vanity. It tells us that by the mid-20th century, the idea of a student imitating the example of his teacher was considered more than just valuable in a general sense.

To Fischer, the transmission of skills, knowledge and values from teacher to student in an unbroken tradition was profoundly meaningful: the essence of why one became a pupil, or later a teacher. This idea is not new. In France in the 1670s, J.L. Le Gallois suggested the same pedagogy of learning by imitation in his famous praise of Chambonnière’s way of playing: “in order to learn the pieces of each master, it is necessary to study them with the same masters who have composed them, or with their best pupils.”

For a student of harpsichord in Amsterdam in the 1980s, however, learning by imitation was not normally considered an option. On the contrary. Although a few pockets of resistance remained in some instrument groups, professional music pedagogy in Holland in general had turned away from the days when students were required to slavishly copy their teacher’s playing in order to guarantee their own future success. Baroque musicians, especially, were suspicious of the reiteration of unquestioned and untested traditional values. Once again, there may have been some exceptions, but in general, the student of Early Music was expected to probe and dismiss, and ultimately to pave a new way for her or his musicianship.

Naturally, when you are still learning the basics, there is no such thing as not looking at how your teacher does certain things. To stick out your neck in artistic aspiration before your fingers had yet unlearned their teenage stumbling was, in my recollection, firmly discouraged. Later, however, receiving a good lesson depended more and more on having prepared a full musical statement in advance. This might not be the easiest way to learn (especially because the search for your own ‘voice’ in a competitive environment of frequent student concerts is a rather nerve-shattering activity), but it is a good preparation for a life as a professional harpsichordist.

What then can be done, twenty-five years later, to commemorate the most self-effacing of harpsichord teachers, one who only granted his students the rarest and most fleeting glimpses into his “kitchen,” as he called it, who would talk about the “little tricks” of the trade only sparingly, with a dismissive gesture of his hand, and who strongly disliked being imitated?

I was faced with this question when preparing for several memorial concerts for Gustav Leonhardt last year. I decided to trace my own experience with Leonhardt’s playing back to a point at which my fascination with his musicianship had been more important for me than the question of paving my own musical way, to re-visit a place of special amazement. I listened again, for the first time in many years, to Leonhardt’s 1975 recording of his own harpsichord transcription of J.S. Bach’s famous d-minor Ciaccona for solo violin from the Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (here is a YouTube link to the recording that seems to work at least in some countries).

Leonhardt presented his project of transcribing Bach’s works for solo violin during a lecture one evening at one of the annual Bremen Sommerakademien for Early Music. This must have been in 1975, very shortly after he made the recording. I remember a few witty first sentences in his quiet voice, whereupon a door burst open and a handful of jolly, noisy and oblivious latecomers entered the hall, carrying with them a heavy cloud of Patchouli and some chairs above their heads. After the commotion had subsided, the speaker patiently repeated his introductory sentences, and a lengthy lecture about the history and function of keyboard transcriptions followed. Then Leonhardt played the Ciaccona for us.

I was familiar with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s recording of Busoni’s piano transcription of this piece, and hence knew about the meditative quality of the composition, but I was entirely unprepared for the breath-taking, time-arresting and grand quality it assumed in Leonhardt’s version and under his hands. The fascination of that evening lasted for me: Leonhardt played the entire Partita in a public concert a few days later, and afterwards we talked about the Ciaccona, and Busoni’s own piano roll recording of it. Not long thereafter, his recording became available. I re-recorded it with my little Uher tape machine and listened to it until, many years later, the tape dissolved into rubbery strands. Then I went to study music, and almost forgot about the entire event. Leonhardt’s transcriptions were off-limits for us students in any case. Wisely, I never asked for any of them.

When I returned to this particular version of Bach’s Ciaccona last year, it was not only in search of a morsel of that long-gone first fascination. After the funeral service in Amsterdam I started to realize that playing concerts in memory of someone who had been as explicit as Leonhardt in downplaying his own importance for the afterworld needed to be something altogether different than an attempt to play the music the deceased would have appreciated in a manner that would not have disturbed him. Instead, it needed to be the best possible effort to create an atmosphere in which those who knew him and had heard him play could remember him. So I took a pair of headphones and a pencil, I transcribed the Ciaccona from the recording, and practiced the piece.

I performed the resulting piece of music at a memorial concert of the Early Music Festival in Stockholm; in a house concert in Staunton, Virginia; in further house concerts at home, in Gothenburg (on the very harpsichord by William Dowd that Leonhardt had used for his recording when it was brand new), and in Bremen; and finally in another public memorial concert in the Haga Church in Gothenburg. The experience exceeded all my expectations in terms of its fascination and brought me back, at least partway, to the Edwin Fischers of the musical world and their concept of a lineage of music teaching.

The piece.

Little needs to be said about the importance of “Bach’s Chaconne” within the canon of Classical music, or its compositional qualities. The most outstanding characteristic of this piece, as I learned, is that it is unique in capturing the audience’s concentration. It not only enables the performer to show what she or he can (and cannot) do on the instrument, but it provides a guarantee that the audience actually listens. People usually don’t cough much during such a performance; it even seems that they breathe more sparingly. Not many other pieces of our repertoire grant us this kind of luxury, and I know of no other that makes it quite so easy for the performer to make him- or herself heard (and appreciated).

The transcription

To say that Leonhardt’s harpsichord version of Bach’s Ciaccona is an “effective” concert piece would be a huge understatement. The transcription offers everything that defines good harpsichord writing, good harpsichord playing, and attractive concertizing:

• Leonhardt transposed the suite down a fifth to g minor, and so it addresses the harpsichord’s most sonorous area in a most satisfying manner.
• It displays a large variety of approaches to a good, that is, characteristic and flexible harpsichord touch, ranging from extensive, sometimes almost part-written superlegato passages to pronounced articulations and accentuations, rhetorical rests and sharply dotted rhythms.
• It contains some amazingly well-written passages in style luthé: well-written in that they offer the possibility to create a most luxurious sound, to point out delicacies and subtleties along the way, without losing momentum. In many other harpsichord pieces, an optimal balance of these elements is very difficult to achieve.
• It is a most brilliant showcase of virtuosic textures, written with witty economy of choreography and aimed at maximum effect with comparatively little work.
• It presents a number of nifty registration strategies for the familiar 8’8’4′ disposition of a double-manual harpsichord.
• Finally, and perhaps a little paradoxically, it is a strong statement in the tradition of transcriptions of this famous violin piece. Both the rather literal approach of Brahms’ piano version for the left hand and the idiosyncratic grandeur of Busoni’s transcription can be felt somehow, and yet this is entirely a piece of Bach, a piece belonging to the 18th century, a concert piece reflecting harpsichord playing of the 1980s, and a personal musical statement from Leonhardt – all in one.

Transcribing a transcription: caught between text and playing style

It is time to talk about the most obvious problem, from the transcriber’s standpoint, with this enterprise. It is not, as you might expect, to try to hear and notate the fast notes of the arpeggios toward the end of the first section of the Ciaccona. Admittedly, that took some listening and analyzing, but it turned out to be doable.

The problem was where to draw the line between what to write down and what to leave for  the moment of the performance. For example, I decided that the registration was part of the transcription, as were some trills and other embellishments. I also made a point of capturing much of Leonhardt’s legato and nonlegato playing in my notation, even though such things could also have happened spontaneously. For my own performances, I also made use of a few of Leonhardt’s ritardandos throughout the piece, just in order to find my way in its large structure, and to experiment with a performance-stylistic ingredient that I am otherwise less eager to apply.

The strongly overdotted rhythm in the theme, on the other hand, is part of the performance, and when playing the piece I ended up going back and forth between several options. The same applied to Leonhardt’s various manners of breaking chords and filling them up with acciaccaturas. To understand what he was doing at certain moments, and to experiment with achieving roughly the same effect, was enlightening and often even entertaining, but during a performance, a harpsichordist can only produce convincing sonorities in big chords by relying on some momentary intuition, taking into account the instrument and the venue. Finally, Leonhardt’s rhythmical freedom in the first figure in sixteenths in bars 3 and 4, and his tendency to play some sixteenths that are slurred two-and-two in a slightly lombardic fashion, seemed to me mainly a manifestation of his personal playing style and I avoided imitating them.

What the copycat learned

To take a dictation of such a long piece means listening many times, not merely to the notes, but also to the performance. The performer’s most stellar moments, his good moments, his standard solutions, his quirks and mannerisms, and even a few skipped notes all get etched into your brain during the process. There is no escaping from the very thing we were always warned about: using someone else’s playing style as the starting point for our own performances. But how wrong, or limiting, is this really?

We can only find out by seeing the entire exercise through to the very end. In late March, after copying out my CD transcription in ink, I put away the CD and started practicing. I put in fingerings, added slurs and written comments and got the work up to speed and “in character.” During May, I played it for friends and family, returned to the tricky parts, revised fingerings and timings, and along came the first public performance in early June. The only thing I did directly after the concert was to listen one more time to Leonhardt’s CD in order to catch the last few transcription errors. Then I let the project rest for a while.

A few months after this first performance, I received a recording of the concert. What I secretly feared was to hear a weaker blueprint of Leonhardt’s original. What I luckily heard instead was only me, playing the harpsichord, sometimes sounding more or less as I had imagined I would, and sometimes not. I made a mental list of things I had to work on: structural decisions and phrasings that I had entrusted to my musical auto-pilot and that I now needed to chisel out more clearly, sonorities that I had imagined but not fully realized, a few issues of choreography and registration that had not worked well under pressure, and so on. The resulting sleeves-rolled-up phase of work had less and less to do with Leonhardt’s playing, and more and more to do with what was on the page and in my head. When I played the Ciaccona again, it had become “mine”, and when I listened to Leonhardt’s recording again during the fall, his interpretation had become surprisingly unfamiliar to me.

Of course, jazz musicians, folk musicians and a few others already know all this: a musical performance born in imitation of a master does not stay there. As soon as the music is internalized, it begins to move, shift, re-arrange itself, change character and intent. If, as in notated music, the original is prescribed to a large degree, this process may be slow and subtle, but the shifting, changing, and growing happens all the same.

In other words, to begin a musical project by imitating someone else’s playing is not a risky thing to do at all. The danger of getting stuck in an interpretive corner is small. You will have a really hard time staying in that corner: if you persist in confronting yourself with the original at all times, with the clear goal of not deviating from it, you might succeed for a while, but that would be truly hard work.

Denzil Wraight has now published his findings about the wear pattern of quill, the best technique for oiling quill, and recommended oils for this purpose in one short article and a rather longer one with extensive explanations at:

http://www.denzilwraight.com/quilling.htm

This should be seen as a complement, and in some ways a correction, to my own article about voicing which I published earlier on this blog (a link to the PDF version is here). I am presently testing oiling the quills (with Ballistol) in two of my instruments according to Denzil’s recommendations (including the French Double that takes the brunt of my practicing) and my initial experience is positive (see my most recent thoughts in the third comment added to this post).

As the “searches” tab in my blog stats is telling me, many people are interested in the characteristics of  beryllium copper harpsichord wire in comparison to other materials. Some time ago, I have posted an explanation in the “Skowroneck harpsichords” tab of the sidebar (see my full text there), but I would like to pull the discussion to the front, and expand it.

As I have stated, beryllium copper is not the same as phosphor bronze (the latter doesn’t sound all that well, hence this whole discussion) although it looks very similar. It has similar characteristics to brass and can be used in harpsichords with a brass scaling, or in the bass of harpsichords with a mixed scaling. I also claim that,

beryllium copper of the kind best known to me also has a good sound. True, most people will have no possibility to make direct comparisons between the various materials – and “good” is a problematic term. I have tested brass and beryllium copper in one single instrument and monitored their properties over a time span of 15 years. I found beryllium copper to sound slightly “fuller” than the brass that is usually available today, but without compromising the appropriate overall “brassy” sound character. Together with the advantages listed above I personally prefer this material. As said above, however, these properties may vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and not all beryllium copper appears to be as good as I describe here.

I am re-posting this here, because I should add that beryllium copper can be hardened just as other wire. This property might in fact be at the bottom of some negative judgments about its usefulness as harpsichord wire. The quality available to me has a beryllium content of 5 % and is called “1/4 hard,” which in my experience translates into a breaking point just slightly higher than the various kinds of brass that many people use in their harpsichords. This is the material which has the properties I have described above. For problematic spots, I also keep a few strings that are called “3/4 hard” – they do hold better, but they also sound more metallic, lacking some of the depth of the others.

Now I am told that simple oven-hardening increases the rupture strength of beryllium copper so it comes close to soft iron (I have not tried this. I am using my oven for other things). The problem with this is that ferociously hardened beryllium copper strings sound truly horrible. It results in a lot of overtones and a clear metallic “punch,” but there is no substance to the tone. Truly and thoroughly hardened beryllium copper is not useable as musical wire.

To discuss the usefulness of the useful kind, that is, not-very-much-hardened beryllium copper, one can consider this:

• To people who are applying rigorous historicizing standards, beryllium copper might not appeal because it is unhistoric (it is, however, good to remember that even most available brass is dissimilar in many ways from historical brass).
• For those who are bent on finding a “better tone,” it is important to know that beryllium-copper is not some kind of magic material that promises instant improvement, it is just simply one of a bunch of possible choices of string material.
• Beryllium copper strings are ridiculously expensive. My second point implies that a harpsichord maker who does not want to spend that kind of money is not losing much for not trying.

In conclusion, the discussion of the presence, necessity, or merits of beryllium copper strings (in general or in a given harpsichord) is not a great candidate for quick knee-jerk assessments, it is not even a good place for agreement or disagreement. It is a matter of knowing what you’re talking about (I say this, again, because phosphor bronze looks so similar), and of careful observation and listening.

On May 4, 2012, Robin Blanton will defend her doctoral dissertation in musicology. The title is Johann Andreas Stein’s 1781 Claviorganum and the Construction of Art in Eighteenth-Century Augsburg.

The dissertation is available for download at the following link: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/28876. Printed copies are available for sale from the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg.

The defense will take place at 1 p.m. in Vasaparken, the main building of the University of Gothenburg, on Vasagatan, Sal 10. The opponent will be Assistant Professor of Music Emily Dolan of the University of Pennsylvania.

It is a sad occasion that makes me resume the writing of blog posts: yesterday morning the news reached me that Gustav Leonhardt has passed away on 16 January in his Amsterdam home.

Gustav Leonhardt walking the streets of Vienna. Photo by Ibo Ortgies, October 22, 2011

As I wrote elsewhere, I remember Gustav Leonhardt as a lifelong friend and mentor. Lifelong, because our first encounter happened at a time that I do not even remember. I am told that I was two years old; friend, because that’s what he was to me: always kind, inquiring, never brusque, and on many occasions more than ready to share not only musical, but also completely unmusical experiences such as a new movie, a book with high-end photos of Bugatti cars, a (slow, one may add) sightseeing drive through the summery back country of Siena, Tuscany, or the offerings of one or another new Amsterdam restaurant; mentor, finally, because since the first time I touched a keyboard (with higher aims than a plinking or plunking agenda, which was at the age of five and a half) Gustav Leonhardt’s musicianship has been a continuous source of inspiration for me. When I finally was in the position to take lessons at his house in Amsterdam, he spent considerable time and effort to critically assess my playing (quite in contrast to his generally complimentary style at masterclasses), from which I benefit every day even today, and for which I am eternally grateful.

The impact of this shift in the world of historical performance practice will be great. No matter whether in accordance or in opposition, there will be few harpsichordists today whose playing is not, in one way or another, influenced by Leonhardt’s approach. Now, all of a sudden, we’re on our own. The impact on the world of his closer friends and colleagues is immense. His unique wit, brilliancy and warmth will be missed at every moment to come.

My thoughts are with his wife Marie Leonhardt, his family, and his friends.

The New York Times Obituary is available under this link.

Fellow wordpressers know this, of course: somewhere in the functions that only can be accessed by the blog owner there is a little window that lists all the search terms that people used for finding one’s blog. Last week, someone found my website by searching for the words nobody needs a harpsichord.

Of course, one cannot but wonder what circumstance prompted someone to type these words of wisdom into a search window. But words of wisdom they are, at least almost: we, the harpsichordists, have to make a dedicated effort of making our music accessible to listeners who often didn’t even know that they needed us. It is possible; the ubiquitous manifestations of (positive, to be clear) surprise after a recital (“I didn’t know a harpsichord could sound like that!”) are ample proof that a single person playing old music on a box with strings and plectra can, in fact, provide true listening pleasure to audiences.

The harpsichordist largely depends on getting the entire package of her or his recital across “as is.” Dancing, for example, funny costumes, grimaces, dramatic monologues, cigar juggling or walking on one’s hands don’t really do the trick to make a harpsichord recital more palatable to the audiences. The times that the use of an “exotic” instrument in itself worked like a hat trick are long gone. At the end, it is the programming, the choice of venue and instrument, one’s sparing but informative spoken introductions, one’s stage demeanor and finally the quality of one’s playing that together “make” a recital. We are telling the audience something about the music and the instrument and ourselves by (ourselves) playing music on the instrument.

The mechanics of a good delivery in a pedagogical setting are different from this. Take university lectures on music, for example. Some troupers of the trade, I am hearing, pride themselves of needing no other resources for their lectures than their own voice. Electronic support media, picture or sound files, even handouts, are sniffed at by these people. Those colleagues who teach by flipping from sound file to video to high-def picture projections and back elicit a laugh of unbelieving recognition: “But you are basically entertaining them!”

But a lecture is not a harpsichord recital.  University audiences rarely come for the melodious voice and the profound wisdom of the professor alone, and they almost never leave their own backgrounds, worries, and learning difficulties at the door of the lecture theater, as they perhaps would do when they went to enjoy a concert. The idea that the act of delivery and the matter that is being delivered live in some kind of symbiosis that may not be upset by notions of listener-mindedness is not just short-sighted, it defies some basic tenets of good pedagogy. Lecturing is pedagogy. Pedagogy by definition takes into account the background and disposition of her or him who must be taught.

Of course, a lecturing style that nervously aims to please a diverse crowd of students without reflecting the lecturer’s disposition may not become a true success either. So we should certainly ask ourselves which lecture techniques and resources suit our ways best, but we should also assess what we reasonably can expect of the students we teach, in terms of background information, interest, even attention span, in order to accommodate them as far as the situation allows (or alternatively, nudge them gently toward finding ways to assemble some lacking information or skills for themselves).

But nobody can tell me that one approach is inherently better than the other. If the students are prepared to listen to an old-school monologue à la Göttingen 1775, by all means let them have it. But if multimedial fireworks, interactive web tools and what-have-you are the better way to make a music-historical topic stick, fireworks it should be. As a harpsichordist, I sometimes would like to use some fireworks…

“Art worlds decline when some groups that knew and used the conventions which inform their characteristic works lose that knowledge, or when new personnel cannot be recruited to maintain the world’s activities.” (Howard S. Becker Art Worlds, 349)

The importance of “support personnel” and “conventions” in art worlds is somewhat easier understood when we look at examples of everyday technology: until a few years ago, for example, it was not problematic in the least to get color films adequately developed, printed, or put on a high-resolution CD. For the past two years or so it has become very difficult to find labs that are still matching this standard: real film is nowadays processed so rarely that it (apparently) has become a major hassle for the labs to keep their chemicals fresh and uncontaminated. As a result, some of my most recent pictures resemble my first photographic efforts when they came back from our corner-store developing service back in the sixties, featuring indistinct colors, embedded particles of dust and debris, specks, and scratches.

But not only the standard of the technology and its maintenance declines. The people who are there for me to talk to about my pictures have no longer any clue about the processes involved in conventional photography. When I, for example, asked the girl at the local photographer’s counter — who still has on-site developing facilities — to get someone in the lab to rinse a specky and dusty film strip once more with distilled water and to wipe it off properly (there are special tongs for doing so, but one can also do it with freshly rubber-gloved fingers, if careful), she first frowned and said something about the inappropriateness of making film wet (all conventional film gets wet during processing and has to be rinsed and dried). Whereupon, (and I swear it is true) she fished a strip of negative out of its pouch, wiped at a dust speck with her fingertip and then tried to pry it off with a pointy, painted finger nail, before I could stop her. I left the film with her with a clearly voiced request, and what I got back was a new CD in which someone had inexpertly photoshopped the specks and impurities away and randomly enhanced the color intensity – something I could have done better with my own equipment.

The vanishing technology, old-school photography in this example, belongs to the “conventions;” the girl at the counter who had no idea what I or she was talking about, and did the only really wrong thing you can do to a dirty negative (touch it with your fingers and scratch around on it), represents the next-generation “personnel” that steps into the breach left by those who could not any more “be recruited to support the [art] world’s activities.”

Time and again it surprises me just how fast the decline of a practice linked to a specific technology can happen. Does anyone remember tape recorders? Digital cassette recorders? Floppy disks? Electric typewriters? There is almost nothing left of any of these. As Becker suggests, characteristic for the sharp decline pattern of such technologies is the mix of a declining economical interest, a loss of proper support channels and facilities, and a loss of knowledge about their upkeep and operation. However, even in art worlds, the aesthetic argument is most of the time comparatively unimportant for the process. True, a discussion about the artistic values and pitfalls of digital photography has raged ever since the new medium became accessible for the average consumer, but it seems to me that the old technology has crashed at a much steeper rate than the aesthetic discourse alone was able to predict.

The demise of the harpsichord at the end of the 18th century may have happened along similar lines. Most early retrospective accounts of the final days of the instrument agree that (apart from its lack of dynamic variation) it was its cumbersome need of re-quilling and regulation that made that it fell out of favor. In addition, we read descriptions about the instrument’s “confusion” and about its heavy and irregular touch.

Needless to say, a well-regulated harpsichord is (and was) neither inherently heavy to play nor irregular, and provided the dampers are well adjusted, its sound is not in the least confused. For centuries, maintenance had been a matter of routine for harpsichord owners, perhaps not always performed gladly, but seen as part of what it meant to own such an instrument and benefit from it. In other words, the art world of the harpsichord was founded on a common mindset that embraced the maintenance needs of the instrument; supply channels for replacements of plectra and jack springs or bristles and damper cloth were in place; there existed personnel that was able to perform proper maintenance; and harpsichord owners calculated their budget according to these requirements.

Only at a point in time when the instrument’s regulation had become too bothersome for anyone to do it well, its heaviness, irregularity and confusion were becoming a problem. Soon, fewer and fewer people even knew how to maintain their harpsichords at all. A poorly maintained harpsichord, just as a neglected car or a rusty water pump, is bound to malfunction earlier rather than later, and thus it begins to seem problematic as and of itself, especially to a dispassionate public. The decrease of musical interest in the harpsichord at the end of the 18th century alone cannot explain why it vanished so thoroughly from musical practice in such short time. It is much more likely that its support network simply collapsed, rendering most harpsichords unusable within years. From here, the step to the historical, but false, claim that the instrument was technically fundamentally inadequate was a small one.

Early Music has, to my knowledge, been first with an encouraging and generous review of Beethoven the Pianist, for which I am very grateful. For subscribers of EM, the full text is available here.

Reviews inevitably reveal some points of lacking clarity. In this case, reviewer Siân Derry alerts me to a missed chance of an explanation during my presentation of one of my side plots, which addresses the extent of Christian Gottlob Neefe’s influence on the young Beethoven (I am arguing that that influence may not have been quite as great as the usual Beethoven biographies are claiming).

Here is the passage of the review that explains the problem:

[Skowroneck's] assertion that Neefe “does not mention giving Beethoven keyboard instruction at all” and that “by 1783, any keyboard tuition by Neefe (if it ever took place) belonged to the past” (pp.43-3) is compromised by his omission from consideration of Neefe’s letter of 19 January 1785. Yet on an earlier page (p.41) Skowroneck includes parts of this letter–which states that Neefe was forced to teach six hours each day and that “Beethoven will be most happy of all, but I doubt nevertheless that he will truly profit from this” — but fails to pursue its implications for his argument.

What Neefe actually addressed here is explained by his own position in early 1785. After the death of the old Elector Maximilian Friedrich on April 15, 1784, some influential people at the Bonn court acted to diminish Neefe’s influence there, partly because he had been frequently absent, replaced by Beethoven. The situation quickly turned ugly; the last one of various pro memorias written by court officials in order to provide information to the new Elector suggested to dismiss Neefe from court service altogether. While waiting for the situation to disentangle, Neefe was temporarily pushed out of his position. As he wrote in the letter from January 1785, he was, as a consequence, forced to give private music lessons, for his income.

The crucial twist to the story is that the campaign to get rid of Neefe was launched explicitly in favor of Beethoven (though perhaps not on his initiative, but we don’t know), who was now taking over Neefe’s responsibilities at court (this is outlined on p. 43 of my book).

In my interpretation of the passage where Neefe says “Betthoven [sic.] will be most happy of all, but I doubt nevertheless that he will truly profit from this [circumstance],” I should have explained the nature of “this”: Neefe acknowledges that Beethoven’s sudden gain in musical responsibility at court will likely make him happy, but he has, at this point, neither the energy nor the grace to be optimistic about the “profit” for Beethoven of the situation.

When I call to mind Ludwig Schiedermair’s somewhat scattered presentation of this case in Der junge Beethoven (I do not have the book here to check this in detail, but the relevant pages are 57, 146-8 and 166), this interpretation of Neefe’s letter is not controversial. The same applies to the suggestion that, by early 1785, Beethoven was in any case not Neefe’s pupil any more, and that, hence, Neefe’s assertion has nothing to do with Beethoven being taught by Neefe. It is with this understanding that I phrased my concluding words of that section (p. 42):

The complete meaning of Neefe’s allusions remains hidden. It seems for instance, unlikely that he thought Beethoven was happy because Neefe was forced to give private music lessons against his will. It is, however, clear that Neefe (as Beethoven’s former teacher) doubted that the situation was doing Beethoven much good, musically speaking. It is also clear that Neefe had no influence on Beethoven whatsoever during his time of absence from the Bonn court. On February 8, 1785, Neefe’s former allowance was restored.

In anticipation of Murray Perahia’s new CD with Brahms’ Handel Variations, which I ordered minutes ago, a few thoughts about the tangles of performance practice in this work are in order.

These magnificent variations are based on an aria from Handel’s first keyboard suite in B-flat Major. Although Brahms – as we read in the article I linked to above – drew his inspiration mainly from the bass, the theme, with all its added and omitted twiddles, is Handel’s own. Now, how does the pianist have to approach these eight bars of Early Music?

(I lifted this music example off Wikipedia for the sake of simplicity. I have no idea which edition this is, but it concurs with the Urtext I have at home).

A quick performance-practical walk-through will identify a few minor problems with this version. The end of bar four, for example, lacks a trill symbol on the fourth beat of the right hand (that is, the second A; the fourth thirty-second note before the end of the bar. The complete figure consists of a preparatory run f-g-a, a short upper-note trill on a, and a turn g-a at the end that either leads back to the beginning — in which case one normally would go straight to the b-flat on the downbeat of bar one, instead of playing two b-flats in succession — or on to the second half). And in bar eight, the notation of the trill with a preceding turn seems a little idiosyncratic, although its effect is pretty much standard of the time.

Going from there, one might have to discuss whether Handel, in this particular piece, had his Italianate cap on, and thus wanted common trills (tr.) to be started with the main note, or whether he was thinking Pan-European with a French lilt and wanted them to start with the upper note. Both would be faithful to identifiable original styles. As to the zigzag trill signs in bar four (the missing trill would likely have to be notated with this sign as well) and bar eight, the repeated notes in any case only work idiomatically correct and technically plausible if the (short) trill is started with the upper note in the second mentioned manner, and integrated in the flow of the flourish. So, a distinguishing feature in this local context between tr. and the trill sign might be its starting note, or it might just be its length; tr.: long, zigzag: short.

There are good arguments for starting all trills in this piece with the upper note, in fact. Some historically informed harpsichordists, as I found out, even do it sometimes this way, sometimes the other, and add some little notes here and there to boot (link here; the piece begins at 4:05. It is a bit of a free-form approach, but by all means a possibility). The question is, would Brahms have known about all this? Would he even have cared? This problem is a little trickier to address than the previous historically informed sketch suggests.

The Romantic trill confusion had already been generated around the time Brahms wrote his variations. Some observers maintained that, in spite of Hummel’s trill-start reform (in his Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-Forte-Spiel, 1828), older music should be played with upper-note trills. Others began ping-ponging a bunch of rather messy rules among each-other, and that’s how we still have it today.

One such rule is the approach-from-below-means-main-note-trills-rule, which to my knowledge is not to be found in any 18th-century treatise about embellishments, but rules solidly in modern texts about Classical performance. In our case, this rule would indicate that the tr. signs in bar one and three are to be played in a different manner than all the other ones, were it not for that other messy rule, the approach-from-the-same-note-rule, which has not been decided upon; some feel that the trill’s first note should repeat the preceding one, others like an upper-note beginning that avoids this repeat. Then, there is even an approach-from-above-rule, which in the penultimate of my links to youtube examples, further down in this post, induces the pianist to begin these trills with the main note and all the others with the upper auxiliary. Such a picky pianist might thus end up playing the tr. signs differently in different instances (I remember that Rudolf Serkin does this too, in his second, well-known studio recording, but with other results).

Most of the performers, however, fall apart into those who play only main note trills, and those who play only upper note trills (it turns out that Perahia plays the tr. signs as main-note trills, and the zigzag with the upper note. We are left to think that Brahms knew or cared little about how we today think that Handel perhaps played Handel, but we are made to see that there’s an end to all this when sheer practicability is concerned. I like this).

As seen in my first harpsichord example, all this is good and well, and both can be called authentic, if we argue well. Two problems remain, however. One is the question of the missing trill in bar four. Every pianist I am aware of just plays the notated mid-run-double-A-step-dance of the awkward lead-back of the right hand, but no one seems to be aware of the (for the Baroque practitioner obviously) missing trill sign. For those who know this work well, the double A has essentially become Handel according to Brahms; it is not merely Handel any more. Any historically plausible mollification (and a well-played trill would make that twiddle-run sound much smoother and mellower) would somehow take that impression away. I admit nevertheless that, if I would at all be able to play the beefier parts toward the end of the variations, I’d be tempted to play a retro-beginning à la Handel, with a short upper-note trill on the second A. But it could well be that Brahms thought the notated stutter to be attractive, and knew of no trill. In this case, a Handelization of the lead-over would be out of place. The problem is, we do not know the correct answer.

Another problem is, conversely, that some pianists seem to find the Baroque-y beginning simply too cute for words and start adding glitter, and messing with the meter. What the listener gets offered here is a postcard picture of Handel, with frills, decadent sweets in a dish beside his harpsichord, and a colorful parrot climbing in the curtain. Not only do we thus sometimes hear some upper-note trills that are, for no apparent reason, played noticeably before the beat (others aren’t. Some start with the main note. Keep listening), which strikes me as the musical equivalent of coffee spill on a white table cloth. Some pianists seem to find trills so much fun, that the listener ends up with almost nothing else, as we can hear here.

The problem of trill performance practice in this work cannot be solved for once and all. We don’t even know whether Brahms cared one way or another. There are too many layers present, and one would always have to choose, and argue for one’s choice. So, uncharacteristically for my stubborn mind, I have decided that I am fine with almost any type of trill in this theme, unless they’re played messily or spill out over the edges. It is better not to add even more layers to this Handel-Brahms sandwich than we already have; especially not sticky and sweet ones.

After a recent musicological seminar, a co-listener took me aside and said,

“There should be a sign at the beginning of some of these lectures, like on those bags of sweets that may contain traces of nuts: ‘may contain sociology’.”

I have neither problems with nuts, nor sociology. But I have, indeed, come across a few  too many perfunctory footnotes in music studies, especially about cultural capital and the likes, so I think I understood what he meant. Something to be allergic for, in music or otherwise, is the buzzword.

Look at artistic-creative research, for example. Hearing that I had participated in the artistic-creative research program at Gothenburg University, someone once asked me about the methodologies we had applied in that program. It was uncannily difficult to answer that question. This is in part to be explained by the fact that everyone in artistic-creative research does a little what pleases them best, and in part it is a consequence of the discipline being relatively new.  In part, however, it is a consequence of nobody really knowing what artistic-creative research is about, while it is so nice to say the words anyway. Artistic. Creative. Research. Sounds like funding right there.

By keeping to performance practice and keyboard studies, I might have avoided some of the murkier parts of this business, so perhaps my take on it will seem humble to some of my fellow buzzers. Artistic-creative research is simply a tool to force myself to confront the problem of my own investment in my topic, my musical preferences that belligerently enter my theoretical ivory tower; nagging ideas how “it” ideally should be or sound, although the sources tell me otherwise. As soon as one uses one’s own performance experience as a research asset, one simply cannot ignore that problem; one must deal with it head-on.

Many have dabbled in this type of research without really knowing it. It is here that we encounter the nicest examples of oblivious circular reasoning; the mentioned confrontation with the personal artistic identity has never really taken place. Good examples can, for example, be found in Beethoven trill research, a topic that has been especially dear to me. The literature abounds in theoretical explanations and score studies of any length and depth. In spite of all that work, the proclaimed “correct” solutions for Beethoven’s trills, especially his oft-debated problem trills, are all over the map. Why? Because each writer cannot let go of what sounds best – to him (occasionally: her).

One example from a controversy between William Newman and Robert Winter will serve to illustrate this observation: William Newman gives the right hand trill of the piano part from Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 30/3/ii, bar 3 as an example for a trill that should start on the main note (Newman, William S. “The Performance of Beethoven’s Trills.” Journal of the American Musicological Society XXIX, no. 3 (1976), 452-3, example 4b):

Earlier in his article, Newman discussed the supposed relevance of main-note trills in Beethoven, based on J.N. Hummel’s piano school and on the increasing occurrence of upper-note-exception rules in the piano tutors of the time. According to Newman, this trill is approached from below and hence must begin with the main note, after a rule given by Czerny.

In his reply to Newman’s article, Robert Winter explains his own trill start theory, based on the principle of downbeat dissonance (Winter, Robert. “Second Thoughts on the Performance of Beethoven’s Trills.” The Musical Quarterly LXIII, no. 4 (1977): 483–504). Winter illustrates this with a selection of music examples. The observant reader concludes that, according to his theory, the example above (not named in Winter’s text) should be played with an upper-note trill.

Newman now replies to Winter. He questions the downbeat-dissonance theory, asks whether Winter’s examples are “representative,” and refers to his own original examples (including the one above), which in his words constitute “five representative instances of confirmed consonant starts” (Newman, William S. “Second and one-half thoughts on the performance of Beethoven’s trills.” Music Quarterly 64, no. 1 (1978), 90). A main note trill in this example naturally provides a consonance, and, according to Newman, thus serves to disprove Winter’s theory. The problem lies, of course, in the word “confirmed,” since Winter just tried to establish a system that would overrule the application of Czerny’s rules in this particular case, or at all.

In his reply (Winter, Robert. “And Even more Thoughts on the Beethoven Trill….” Music Quarterly LXV, no. 1 (1979), 113), Winter notes Newman’s problematic use of the word “confirmed”, but fails to provide new relevant information from outside the system of his argument to further support his view. Instead, the date of op. 30 (1802), and the affinity of the sonata with the “post-Classical language … in which the concept of strong beat dissonance is still useful” (ibid., 112) are now invoked as support.

Basically, thus, after reducing these arguments to truly “confirmed” information, Winter explains the need of a dissonant start by the need of a dissonant start, whereas Newman defends main note starts, because the trill starts with the main note.

We see here two eminent scholars, lost in their systems, who do not seem to realize that they ultimately defend what, simply, seems best to them. “Best” on the basis of what? Surely not Czerny (who is dead, was no scholar, and was for many reasons a doubtful advocate for Beethoven performance practice), or the ghost of Mr. Downbeat Dissonance (who, according to my knowledge, never truly lived). No, “best” according to their upbringing and musical taste.

As an artistic-creative researcher, the first thing I had to do, was to analyze and question the premises that made me believe (at the time), that Beethoven’s trills always begin with the upper note (the question “what else” took me an entire book chapter to answer; I will not try that here). So here is my simple methodology: artistic-creative research in music is a tactic of self-confrontation, that happens at the line that divides analysis and performance practice. It serves to heighten the awareness of the workings of one’s musical background, taste, or rather, musical stubbornness. The confrontation well endured alleviates the consequences of the researcher’s inevitable bias, as it makes it visible, wieldable (my dictionary says that there is such a term), and sometimes even defensible.