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The Secret Life of Musical Notation: Defying Interpretive Traditions
- Amadeus Press

From Chapter Two - "...of Sforzandi" (p. 70)

[...]

Working with one of my students on the middle movement of Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat Major Hob. XVI/49 brought back memories of the time in which I learned the piece, during my teenage years. I was now looking at the Adagio with new eyes, thanks to a greater concern about the complexities of musical notation, but I clearly remembered how its opening measures proposed interpretive elements that I had not completely understood at an earlier stage. Essays written in the 18th century, including Leopold Mozart’s "Gründliche Violinschule" (Complete School of Violin Playing), published in 1756, assert that two-note slurs should follow a principle of stress and release – the latter being always softer.1 This concept found the same application in keyboard playing, and was still at the core of interpretive principles as the century neared its end – Daniel Gottlieb Türk, for example, wrote about it in his "Clavierschule" of 1789, only months before Haydn composed the Sonata in question. In light of these precedents, several instances in the middle movement appeared quite enigmatic:



Example 2.1 - F.J. Haydn: Sonata in E-flat Major Hob. XVI/49 - II. Adagio e cantabile - mm. 1-10


What emerges from the melodic line of these measures is rather unusual: the placement of the symbol "fz" on the resolving notes of the two-note slurs in measures 3 and 7 seems to contradict what some of the eminent musicians of the time had affirmed in their writings about such instances. In my youth, I found great pleasure in learning this movement, but I recall distinctly the uncomfortable feeling that had derived from placing dynamic stresses on notes that I knew were supposed to sound softer than the ones that preceded them. In view of this apparent contradiction, I remember wondering whether I had the moral authority to ignore either the "sforzandi" or the slurs, but submitted to the notion that Haydn must have had a valid reason to include such strong gestures in the contemplative, lyrical opening page of the Adagio. At that time, the mechanical reproduction of notation was such a relevant interpretive aspect of my musical life that the idea of finding alternative meanings for "sforzandi" did not even cross my mind. According tacit assent to interpretive traditions, as I had been trained to do, I applied the emphases.

[...]


Decades of traditions have inclined us to dismiss any idea that the music of composers who lived in the baroque and classical eras should be played with abandon, or that the agogic fluctuations found in works from the nineteenth century should also apply to those that preceded them. It occurred to me that “romantic” is a label that was posthumously attached to the nineteenth century to refer to a specific period of time. But artists in that period did not describe themselves “romantics,” any more than people in the era that we call Victorian referred to themselves as “Victorians.” They thought of themselves as “modern,” as we likewise think of ourselves today. The term “romantic era” aptly alludes to a time in which emotion and intuition achieved full recognition in their centrality in the aesthetic experience and fruition of art. The contemporary connotation has more to do with love, passion, fervor, and other sentiments that can be communicated in music with extroverted effect. I sensed that this more recent categorization perhaps lies at the base of a modern misunderstanding: if these most ardent feelings were conveyed through art during the Romantic era, then one might conceive anything that preceded that period, by default, as being subject to a lesser degree of freedom and bound to be emotionally more contained. Some modern commentators have even advanced the idea that the sparer interpretive notation in music from the 1700s corroborates a greater objectivity. One of their claims, for example, is that the rare appearance of agogic markings in the works of composers such as Haydn or Mozart would confirm that tempo changes in these pieces should be treated with circumspection. Were the same interpretive criterion valid in the performance of Baroque music, I thought, Bach’s music should then be subject to no inflection whatsoever. Quite to the contrary, it was none other than Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach who disproved this supposition in his "Essay on the True Art of Keyboard Playing," a major portion of which he devoted to the illustration of what constitutes a convincing premise: from the appropriate mood of a piece to the inflection suited to conveying it, he attested that inflective freedom and tempo fluctuations are fundamental principles of interpretation.

As Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach defined it, the degree of expression necessary to convey emotions through music was based on parameters that our modern ears would deem objectionable. Inflective freedom and tempo fluctuations comprise some of the most powerful means of expression available – whether we apply them to the inherent dichotomies between sections within musical structures or as slight, localized modulations to produce what today we define as “musicality.” I wondered how Chopin must have played Bach, Haydn, or Mozart. Though their works were written for harpsichord or fortepiano, this is unlikely to have informed a different approach to expression in his music making. His interpretive insight probably stemmed from principles of inflection that applied generally to music as a language. The notion that Bach, Haydn and Mozart were not Romantic composers must have never occurred to Chopin: he probably played their music with fervor, unaware that within a century, demarcations of style would restrain the interpreter’s inspiration.

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From Chapter Two - "...of Sforzandi" (p. 70)

[...]

Working with one of my students on the middle movement of Haydn’s Sonata in E-flat Major Hob. XVI/49 brought back memories...
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From Chapter Three - "...of Rinforzandi" (p. 103)

When asked to describe the role of a rinforzando that has been placed at the end of a crescendo whose destination is an fff, quite a few musicians...
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From Chapter Three - "...of Rinforzandi" (p. 115)

[...]

Mozart did introduce rallentando, and the earliest traceable examples emerge in 1785 in pieces such as the Fantasie in c minor, K. 475 and...

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From Chapter Five - "...of Stretti" (p. 181)

Rather accidentally, the subject of this chapter took shape as I was comparing pedal markings...
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