Since 1945.

The postwar centres of the revival – England, the Low Countries, Austria and the USA – came to the fore for various reasons. In Austria the movement was led by the musicologist Josef Mertins and his pupils and colleagues at the Vienna Music Academy (among them Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, René Clemencic and Eduard Melkus). In the USA such distinguished émigrés as Schrade and Hindemith at Yale and Erwin Bodky at Harvard established European-style collegium musicum groups on university campuses. In Britain the BBC Third Programme, inaugurated in 1946, served as an adventurous showcase for performers and scholars such as Alfred Deller, Denis Stevens and Thurston Dart. Leonhardt emerged as one of the leading Dutch early musicians and the most influential harpsichordist since Landowska; he was closely associated with the postwar trend towards historical harpsichord design. Scattered pockets of activity sprang up in eastern Europe, Scandinavia and elsewhere. Japan, initially under the tutelage of the American occupation authorities, began to cultivate first a recorder movement and then a fully fledged early music revival.

The introduction of the long-playing record in the late 1940s and the ensuing proliferation of small, independent labels, many of them specializing in early music, fuelled the postwar ‘Vivaldi craze’ and helped make the New York Pro Musica's freely imaginative Play of Daniel (1958) a landmark of the revival. The 1960s were dominated by such charismatic performers as Harnoncourt, Noah Greenberg, Frans Brüggen and David Munrow (whose Early Music Consort of London set new standards of instrumental virtuosity); this was also a period of energetic experimentation, notably in the interpretation of medieval and Renaissance music. The Munich-based Studio der Frühen Musik, directed by the American Thomas Binkley, transformed the performance of medieval monophonic music by applying improvisatory techniques derived from Middle Eastern folk music. In England Musica Reservata cultivated a nasal, raucous singing style that departed radically from the mellifluous sound of the English cathedral choirs and such progeny as Pro Cantione Antiqua and the Clerkes of Oxenford. A resurgence of interest in early vocal music in the 1960s and 70s gave rise to such groups as the Monteverdi Choir, the Ensemble Clément Janequin, the Prague Madrigalists, Concerto Vocale, the Hilliard Ensemble and Gothic Voices, some of which shared, in the 1980s and 90s, a historically informed concern with such issues as pitch, musica ficta, text underlay, proportional rhythm and its relevance to tempo, the use of instruments and ornamentation.

In the operatic field, the trend towards greater historical awareness became firmly established after the war. Two notable productions of Monteverdi's Orfeo – Hindemith's in Vienna in 1954 and Wenzinger's in Hitzacker in 1955 – used historical instruments as well as sets and costumes based on Baroque designs. A new generation of conductors concerned with the findings of recent scholarship, among them Charles Farncombe, Anthony Lewis, Newell Jenkins and Harnoncourt, exercised a strong influence on the performance of early opera. Significant productions of the 1960s and 70s include Harnoncourt's Monteverdi cycle for the Zürich Opera, with free-wheeling stagings by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and Raymond Leppard's popular but controversial arrangements of Cavalli and Monteverdi operas, with many cuts and rich orchestral textures, commissioned by the Glyndebourne Festival. In contrast, most recent operatic scholarship has sought to re-create every aspect of Baroque opera production: singing, playing, staging, gesture, the disposition of the orchestra, costumes, sets, choreography and lighting. At the same time, a school of singers, inspired in part by the renewed interest in 19th-century bel canto repertory and ornamentation in the 1950s and 60s, developed techniques apt to singing in an appropriate historical style with period instruments. A rigorously historical approach, however, is unsuited to the resources or the size of most modern opera houses, and much of the most innovatory work has been done by festivals, academic institutions and smaller companies. Many revivals have been associated with 18th-century theatres that survive in their original form or in reconstruction, such as those at Drottningholm (near Stockholm), Schwetzingen (near Mannheim) and Versailles. As the revival pushed forward into the Classical and Romantic eras, directors such as Arnold Östman, Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Gabriele Ferro began to apply historical principles to the mainstream operatic repertory as well.

By the early 1970s the repercussions of the early music ‘boom’ could be felt outside early music circles. The revival's centre of gravity shifted perceptibly to the Baroque and later periods, as early musicians and their patrons in the electronic media awakened to the benefits of giving a fresh twist to familiar repertory. Record companies came to play a bigger role in supporting the leading early music ensembles and promoting the new generation of star performers, such as Christopher Hogwood, Reinhard Goebel, William Christie, Jordi Savall and the Kuijken brothers. Significantly, the most prominent early music ensembles of the 1970s and 80s were not collegium-type groups or small consorts but full orchestras of period instruments (among them the Academy of Ancient Music, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Les Arts Florissants and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century). A milestone in the musical establishment's acceptance of the early music movement was reached in 1989, when the Glyndebourne Festival invited the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to replace the LPO in the pit for a series of Mozart opera productions. By then performances of Mozart and Haydn on period instruments were commonplace, several ‘authentic’ recordings of the Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos were under way, and the boundaries of the movement were expanding into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment engaged conductors from both within and outside the early music camp, just as modern-instrument orchestras and opera companies were turning their podiums over to Hogwood, Harnoncourt, Gardiner, Norrington and others. Several groups, notably the New Queen's Hall Orchestra, performed early modern music in period style, and reconstructions of vintage Broadway musicals with original scores and performing forces were mounted by the American conductor John McGlinn and others.

The expanding temporal and geographical boundaries of the early music movement are mirrored in the proliferation of specialist periodicals around the world. Among the most prominent are Early Music (UK), Historical Performance (USA), Concerto (Germany), the Tijdschrift voor oude muziek (the Netherlands) and Consort (Japan). Music publishing too has kept pace with the steady growing demand for critical and performing editions and facsimiles in the early music field. In addition to the ‘monuments’ and Denkmäler series, and collected works of individual composers, performers and scholars have access to authoritative Urtext-based editions of a vast range of music from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

The revival has had a wide-ranging impact on music education and concert life. Most music schools in Europe and the USA now offer courses in performing practice and tuition on historical instruments, and many have comprehensive early music programmes. These developments have raised standards of performance as well as helping to make traditionally trained musicians more aware of historical issues. As early musicians encroach on the core 19th-century repertory, however, there has been a mounting backlash against some of the more extreme claims made on behalf of ‘historically informed’ performance, and a growing body of opinion has come to view it as no more or less ‘authentic’ than other modes of interpretation. Moreover, as the early music field becomes increasingly professional in its approach to training, organization, marketing and fundraising, it has lost many of the trappings of a counterculture and become more and more integral to mainstream musical life.

See also Performing practice.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 499