Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing

396 Pages·2012·3.55 MB·English

by  Neal Peres da Costa

Off the Record
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Off the Record
Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing
NEAL PERES DA COSTA
1

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1

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Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peres Da Costa, Neal.
Off the record : performing practices in romantic piano playing / Neal Peres da Costa.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-538691-2
1. Piano—Performance—History—19th century. 2. Sound recordings—History—19th century.
I. Title.
ML706.P37 2012
786.2'14309—dc23 2011023579
_________________________________________________________________________________
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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To Clive Brown, without whose inspiration and guidance
I would never have undertaken this.
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CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xvii
About the Companion Website xix
Introduction xxi
1. Early Recordings: Th eir Value as Evidence
3
2. Playing One Hand after the Other: Dislocation
41
3. Unnotated Arpeggiation
101
4. Metrical Rubato and Other Forms of Rhythmic Alteration
189
5. Tempo Modifi cation
251
Conclusion 309
Bibliography 311
Discography 323
Index 327
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FOREWORD
Th is is a book that should be read not only by every pianist who aspires to perform
the music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on period instruments
in a historically informed manner, but also by every pianist who performs this
repertoire at all. Th e only pianists who may perhaps be excused from reading it are
those who, for whatever philosophical or pragmatic reason, have made a deliber-
ate and informed choice to take the notation at face value, knowing that by doing
so they ignore much that the composer may have expected it to convey to the
performer. Even such hardened modernists, however, might fi nd it diffi cult to
resist the persuasive evidence presented in this book. Any open-minded musi-
cians who objectively evaluate the weight of documentary and recorded material
so cogently assembled and examined in the following chapters will be forced to
reconsider their approach to performing nineteenth-century piano repertoire.
Th e training of musicians during much of the twentieth century was predi-
cated, as it still generally is today, on an assumption that the notation of post-
Baroque music means precisely what it appears to mean. During the fi rst half of
the twentieth century, players and teachers were insistent upon the rejection of
the “bad old habits” of earlier performers, who were condemned for taking unwar-
ranted liberties with the composer’s notation. Th e fi rst half of the twentieth cen-
tury saw the establishment of a new aesthetic, in which conscientious observation
of the composer’s notation was a fundamental rule of good taste. When I learned
the violin in the late 1950s and 1960s, therefore, we were drilled to observe note
values strictly and to regard the composer’s dynamic and articulation markings,
interpreted according to contemporary understanding, as sacrosanct. Tempo was
now to be maintained steadily, in contrast to the performance style of the older
generation and accelerating in particular, for instance during a crescendo or in
passionate passages, was strongly discouraged. More advanced teachers began to
insist upon the use of urtext editions where these were available, or, where they
were not, to strike out or alter almost all the performance markings and instruc-
tions provided by earlier editors. We were trained always to change position
cleanly so as to avoid the sin of tasteless “inauthentic” portamento. When playing
ix
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