The rise of historicism, to 1890.

Early music.

A term once applied to music of the Baroque and earlier periods, but now commonly used to denote any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises, instruments and other contemporary evidence. The ‘early music movement’, involving a revival of interest in this repertory and in the instruments and performing styles associated with it, had a wide-ranging impact on musical life in the closing decades of the 20th century.

The rise of historicism, to 1890.

The roots of the modern early music revival lie in early 18th-century England, France and Prussia, where a complex of social and cultural conditions gave rise to the concept of a canonical repertory of ‘ancient’ music. In England, the religious upheavals of the Commonwealth and Restoration fostered a renewed appreciation of the sacred music tradition. Preservation efforts, led by musicians of the cathedrals and Chapel Royal, took on an increasingly moralistic character. The clergyman Arthur Bedford, for instance, in his Great Abuse of Musick (1711), prescribed a revival of Tudor church music as an antidote for the rampant secularism of the age, as reflected in the vogue for Italian opera. This indictment was scarcely new: as early as 1643 musicians in Nuremberg had presented a concert illustrating ‘the practice and abuse of noble music’ through examples ranging from Jewish temple songs to 17th-century motets. But the notion of a discrete body of early music distinct from – and putatively superior to – music of the present day set the tone of the early music movement for much of the next 250 years.

In 1731 the Academy of Ancient Music in London formally defined ancient music as that composed before the end of the 16th century, although Handel, Pergolesi, Pepusch and other moderns continued to appear on its programmes. By the latter part of the century works by Handel and Corelli dominated the repertory of the Concert of Ancient Music. The great Handel Commemoration of 1784 at Westminster Abbey and Samuel Arnold's pioneer Handel edition (1787–90) secured Handel's position as a mainstay of the revival. In France, Lully's operas and Lalande's motets survived in the active repertory past the mid-1700s, attesting to a widespread taste for ‘la musique ancienne’. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the rising spirit of historicism was represented by the amateur musicians Baron von Swieten and Raphael Georg Kiesewetter in Vienna, the choir director Alexandre Choron in Paris and the founders of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston. Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, a legal scholar who conducted an amateur choir in Heidelberg in the early 1800s, described his attic as a ‘temple’ where ‘Marcello furnishes the scriptural lessons for my edification, Handel delivers the sermon to me, with Palestrina I worship my God, and our religious language, the religion we practise, is music’.

Similarly lofty sentiments inspired the most celebrated manifestation of the 19th century's passion for musical archaeology: Mendelssohn's revival of the St Matthew Passion at the Berlin Sing-Akademie in 1829. A.B. Marx hailed the event as ‘a religious high feast’, but neither he nor Mendelssohn treated Bach's score as sacrosanct. Heavily cut, rearranged and romanticized, it was performed by a choir of 158 and a large orchestra, with Mendelssohn conducting from the piano. Like most of his contemporaries, Mendelssohn looked upon early music not as a body of historical artefacts to be painstakingly preserved in their original state but as a repository of living art that each generation could – indeed should – reinterpret in its own stylistic idiom. As a consequence of his St Matthew Passion revival, a network of Bach societies soon sprang up in Germany and elsewhere (see Bach revival), leading in 1850 to the founding of the Bach-gesellschaft, which set exacting standards for its complete Bach edition and opened the gates for a flood of scholarly and popular publications of pre-Classical music in the late 1800s.

The 19th-century Bach revival fed on Germans' growing sense of cultural identity and a reaction against the Rococo art forms associated with the old European order. Bach's sober pietism chimed with the search for a deeper spirituality in an increasingly bourgeois age. Religious reformists, such as the adherents of the Oxford Movement in England, deplored the decadent worldliness of modern church music and pressed for a return to plainsong in its unadulterated form, shorn of anachronistic harmonies and instrumental accompaniments. The centre of musical revivalism in the Roman Catholic Church was the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes in France, where, beginning in the 1840s, Dom Prosper Guéranger and his successors revolutionized the study and performance of Gregorian chant. In place of a stiffly metrical modern style of chanting, they advocated a flexible, speech-like interpretation that eventually gained widespread acceptance. Many of the amateur and professional choral groups that proliferated in Europe and the USA in the 1800s were dedicated to raising the standard of vocal performance and composition, typically by cultivating the ‘pure’ a cappella works of the Palestrina school and the music of Bach, Handel and other Baroque composers. Among the many 19th-century composers influenced by the revival was Brahms, who championed early music as a choir director in Austria and Germany.

Early music, with its overtones of piety and refinement, became a favourite pastime among the European aristocracy and newly rich gentry. ‘Historical concerts’ – lengthy surveys of musical periods or genres, accompanied by didactic commentaries – given by such artists as Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Paur, Méreaux and Rubinstein, became popular. Fétis, whose historical concerts in Paris and Brussels in the 1830s and 40s helped stimulate popular interest in early music, rejected the Darwinian view that modern music was inherently superior to music of earlier eras. ‘Art does not progress’, he said, ‘it transforms itself’. This argument fell on increasingly receptive ears in the latter part of the century, when such musicologists as Chrysander, Spitta and Jahn and such composers as Schumann, Liszt and Franck were investigating and drawing sustenance from the pre-Classical repertory. The French pianist Louis Diémer began giving harpsichord recitals in the 1860s and formed an early-instrument ensemble, the Société des Instruments Anciens, which toured widely in the 1890s. Instrument collectors such as Auguste Tolbecque in France, Paul de Wit in Germany, A.J. Hipkins in England and Moritz Steinert in the USA gave public concerts and lecture-demonstrations. By the last decade of the century modern harpsichords, viols, ‘Bach trumpets’ (designed to play Bach's high clarino parts but unrelated to any instrument he knew) and reproductions of other early instruments were readily available, and the revival was poised to enter a new phase.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 623