By JAMES GOODFRIEND, Music Editor
A CRITICAL EDUCATION, PART TWO
AS I month I offered a glimpse of the teaching activities of the Music Critics' Association in the form of a brief account of my own teaching experience at an institute devoted to piano music, its interpretation, and its criticism. I mentioned in that column that I was soon to be on the other side of the fence, returning to studentship (or pupilage, if you will) after all these years for a session con ducted by a noted musicologist. I was exceedingly pessimistic about things as I got on the train to Washington, D.C. Not having been a formal student for so long, I expected either to be eaten alive by a host of musicological nits, or else brought to the brink of early retirement by the sudden revelation that I didn't know anything about music. Instead, I had a ball.
The subject of the institute was Josef Haydn, the informed criticism of performances of his works based upon recent discoveries about the manuscripts and early printed editions of his piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. The MCA institute was given in conjunction with a larger international musicological conference on the same com poser and, not exactly coincidentally, with a Haydn festival involving the National Sym phony Orchestra and a covey of visiting vocal and instrumental ensembles and soloists. I will not mention the names of my fellow students at the institute; I do not know what their feelings might be about being referred to in public print as "students." I will only say that I was flattered to be in their company. The gentleman presiding over the institute was Professor Laszlo Somfai, a grizzled veteran of musicology three years younger than my self. In fact, he was the second youngest per son in the room. Dr. Somfai is director of the Bart & Archives in Budapest, and Haydn is merely his second specialty.
The institute, held in the Eisenhower Conference Room at the Kennedy Center, comprised a certain amount of lecturing, a lot of discussion, examination of scores, and comparative record listening. There was also an invaluable live demonstration of what Haydn actually wrote in several of his quartets as op posed to what every published edition up to the present time says he wrote-which editions have, of course, been more or less dutifully followed on every recording so far made of those quartets. It would be pointless to mention specific bar numbers, articulations, notes, phrases, and dynamic markings here, for the reader has, as yet, had no chance to hear the correct versions on records. But the general point made is interesting: apart from the obvious errors of transcription, the over all characteristic of the published editions (starting from the earliest) has been to take something individual, intricate, and unusual and make it into something ordinary, expected, and, with the hindsight of centuries, trite.
On that same point, it is also interesting that of all the generally accepted great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Haydn is the only one for whom a published edition of the collected works does not exist.
Such an edition is in preparation now (and that was one of the reasons for Haydn's being the focus of the musicological convention), but it is bound to be another twenty years or so before it is completed. Until that time, musicians and music critics must make do with whatever pieces of it have already been done, and approach those works performed from the editions of the past with a healthy dose of skepticism. Haydn was a terribly ingenious composer (particularly in his instrumental works), and, though one can find occasional dull stretches in his music, there is the distinct possibility, in many cases, that the dullness was not of his doing but was daubed over the original music by a copyist, an editor, or a publisher.
Among the completed new editions of Haydn's works are the justly famed H. C. Robbins Landon edition of the symphonies (they have been used in many recordings al ready, notably the complete set on London by Antal Dorati and the Philharmonica Hungarica), and the equally fine, but perhaps not yet so generally known edition of the piano sonatas by Christa Landon. The latter, particularly when coupled with recordings made from it, shows that Haydn, though not a virtuoso pianist himself, was an absolutely magnificent composer for the keyboard. It also points up the unsatisfactory numbering sys tem now used for the Haydn sonatas. For ex ample, the great, late Sonata in E-flat Major (the one Haydn sonata recorded by any number of major pianists) once called No. 1 and now called No. 52 (based on the numbering in the thematic catalog of Haydn's works by Anthony van Hoboken) should properly be referred to as No. 62. No current recording of it does so. But perhaps the most important accomplishment of these new editions, and the recordings based upon them, is to point up with dramatic clarity the fact that Haydn's music-if you listen to it-does not sound in the least like Mozart's. It was a late-nineteenth-century performing tradition that began that musical canard, and, though every informed musician today knows that Haydn and Mozart had totally different musical personalities and compositional techniques, the aural evidence was not always as strong as one would have liked. Now it is--or will be, as new recordings are made.
Somfai, whose musical erudition is matched only by his personal charm, and, perhaps, by his self-deprecation concerning matters in which he does not feel himself to be expert, was-no other way to put it--excited to re-introduce a group of critics to the real Haydn. My personal contacts with musicologists have not been vast, but I don't think I have ever run across one before who was so patently, so passionately in love with music.
And in line with this, I think all of the critics were delighted-and some were surprised that in comparative listening to performances of Haydn's works Somfai himself did not al ways prefer the rendition that came closest to musicological correctness. There is, as he emphasized to us, the problem of the realization of a musical score-getting all the notes, dynamics, phrasings, and articulations down correctly--and then there is the problem of the performance of the score-the interpretation, the evocation of a compositional personality, the vitality and significance of it. In any comparison of performances, the solutions to the two problems must be carefully weighed.
But the version to be preferred is the one that offers the better music--at least until some still better music comes along. Perhaps we are all, composers, performers, musicologists, and critics, on the same side after all.
Also see: LETTERS to THE EDITOR
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)