The historical performance movement, 1890–1945.

A key figure in the modern early music revival was Arnold Dolmetsch. A brilliant intuitive scholar, Dolmetsch was above all a practical musician, excelling both as a performer and as a maker of finely crafted instruments; his harpsichords, clavichords, lutes, viols and recorders reflected an unprecedented concern for historical fidelity in design, construction and materials. The informal ‘house concerts’ that he initiated in the fashionable Bloomsbury district of London in the 1890s won an enthusiastic following and praise from such critics as Shaw and John Runciman. From 1905 to 1911 Dolmetsch ran the department of early instruments at the Chickering piano factory in Boston, where he helped lay the groundwork for the revival in the USA. After returning to England he codified his research in The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII and XVIII Centuries (1915), a pioneering survey of early performing practice and source material. In concluding that ‘we can no longer allow anyone to stand between us and the composer’, he formulated a credo for the nascent historical performance movement. Although the musical establishment held Dolmetsch at arm's length during his lifetime, both performers and scholars gradually came to accept his conviction that no music could be fully appreciated without reference to the instruments on which it was originally played and the stylistic conventions of the period in which it was written.

While Dolmetsch concentrated on instrumental music, others were approaching early choral music in a similar spirit. Richard Runciman Terry, organist and choirmaster at Westminster Cathedral from 1901 to 1924, played a central role in the revival of medieval and Renaissance liturgical music; he was a prime mover, with Edmund Fellowes, behind the Tudor Church Music edition. Fellowes also worked with such groups as the English Singers and the Fleet Street Choir to revitalize the madrigal tradition. In Paris the Chanteurs de St Gervais, directed by Charles Bordes, won international acclaim for their performances of Renaissance and Baroque sacred music; Bordes' editions carried his influence to the USA, where Frank Damrosch used them in performances with the Musical Art Society in New York between 1894 and 1920. The Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, gave the American première of the B minor Mass in 1900, inaugurating a series of annual festivals that were a major stimulus to the Bach revival in the USA. Its performances, like those of the Bach Choir in England, were traditionally large-scale and romanticized; not until after World War I were chamber-sized performances of Baroque music popularized by groups such as the Bach Cantata Club in England and the choir of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig under Karl Straube.

As the quest for the grail of Authenticity (a term first given currency by Dolmetsch) gained momentum in the years before the war, small period-instrument ensembles like the Casadesus family's Société des Instruments Anciens and the Deutsche Vereinigung für Alte Musik, co-founded by the viol player Christian Döbereiner, rose to prominence. Their programmes typically consisted of short salon pieces, largely by minor composers. An alumnus of the Casadesus ensemble organized the American Society of Ancient Instruments in Philadelphia in 1925. Dolmetsch made his USA début in 1903 with the American Symphony Orchestra, founded in New York by the violinist Sam Franko to perform Baroque and Classical works ‘in the character of the time’ with a reduced ensemble of modern instruments. German musicologists, meanwhile, revived the Baroque concept of the Collegium musicum, an informal gathering of amateur and professional musicians who performed chiefly for their own pleasure and instruction; the best-known such academic ensembles were Riemann's at the University of Leipzig, established in 1908, and Gurlitt's at the University of Freiburg in the 1920s. Foremost among the instrumental soloists specializing in early music was Wanda Landowska, whose virtuosity on her modern Pleyel harpsichord captivated listeners on both sides of the Atlantic.

The early 1900s saw a sustained attempt to revive Baroque opera. Fétis included excerpts from Peri's Euridice and Monteverdi's Orfeo in the first of his historical concerts at the Paris Conservatoire in 1832, but the first full-scale stage revival seems to have been Handel's Almira, produced in 1878 as part of a festival of German opera in Hamburg. The procrustean cuts and alterations in the score drew sharp criticism from Chrysander, whose scholarly edition of the work had recently appeared. Vincent d'Indy likewise modernized the music of Rameau, Lully, Monteverdi and Destouches for the staged and concert performances presented in the first quarter of the century by the Schola Cantorum (the school for composers that d'Indy, Bordes and Alexandre Guilmant founded in Paris). For the 1904 revival of Orfeo, involving some 150 singers and instrumentalists, he omitted the first and last acts as undramatic and made substantial cuts in the remaining three, arguing that the opera was ‘a work of art, not of archaeology’. Germany's ‘Handel Renaissance’ of the 1920s and 30s was similarly premised on a compromise between practicality and historical fidelity as then conceived. Productions ranged in style from Expressionistic to quasi-Baroque, and in scale from modest academic stagings to lavish outdoor spectacles with massed dancers and amplified music. The art historian Oskar Hagen took the lead in 1920 with the first modern production of Rodelinda at the University of Göttingen. His heavily abridged and rearranged editions were adopted by Werner Josten at Smith College in Massachusetts, where a series of Handel and Monteverdi productions took place in the late 1920s and early 30s. Other notable revivals in the interwar period were given by the Paris Opéra, the Cambridge University Musical Society and the Oxford University Opera Club, and the Juilliard School in New York.

The recording and radio industries were quick to recognize the potential for bringing early music to the masses. Chant recordings were commercially available from the turn of the century, and Landowska made her first piano rolls in 1903. By the 1920s the principal British and continental record companies were making substantial investments in early music, undertaking such major projects as Bach's B minor Mass, the Brandenburg Concertos, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Handel's Messiah. Recorded historical anthologies, such as L'Anthologie Sonore and The History of Music by Ear and Eye (supervised by Curt Sachs and Percy Scholes respectively), provided additional outlets for early music. The state-owned radio networks made an equally significant contribution to the revival before World War II: from its inception in 1922 the BBC broadcast a wide range of pre-Classical music, and as early as 1930 Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne formed its own period-instrument ensemble. In bringing groups such as the Munich Viol Quintet, the Chanterie de la Renaissance, Safford Cape's Pro Musica Antiqua of Brussels, the Boyd Neel Orchestra and Ars Rediviva to millions of listeners, radio and recordings hastened the transformation of the revival into a genuinely popular and international movement.

German instrument makers began the mass production of harpsichords, recorders, lutes and other early instruments in the early 1900s, and by the 1920s the recorder was the virtual trademark of the burgeoning Youth Movement. Gurlitt's reconstruction of the ‘Praetorius organ’ at the University of Freiburg in 1921 initiated a trend towards neo-Baroque organ design, a goal long championed by organists like Schweitzer, Guilmant and Straube. Nationalism played an increasingly important role in the revival during the interwar period. Britain succumbed to an outbreak of ‘Elizabethan fever’ brought on by the tercentenaries of Byrd (1923) and Gibbons (1925). In Germany the collectivist mentality of the Youth and Singing movements played into the hands of the Nazis, who appropriated Bach, Schütz and Handel as icons of racial purity. The founding in 1933 of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland brought a countervailing spirit of internationalism to the revival; in establishing the first school dedicated to the training of early musicians, the viol player August Wenzinger and the conductor-patron Paul Sacher sought to promote ‘a lively interaction between scholarship and performance’. This innovatory programme, together with the diaspora of European performers and scholars in the 1930s and 40s, helped produce a major realignment of the early music movement after World War II.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 523