Monochromatic and Polychromatic Performance: Improvisatory Alteration in Early Nineteenth-Century French Pianism

Abstract

In the mid-1830s, Le Pianiste, the first French music journal devoted entirely to the piano, was faced with a new performance trend its two writers struggled to understand. When playing a written piece, some professional pianists were no longer improvising, embellishing, or changing their performances from one time to the next. Instead, they were playing a given score exactly as written and playing a piece the same way repeatedly. This manner of performance was so different from what Le Pianiste’s authors were accustomed to that they alleged that the new pianists were not piano players at all, but rather mere piano “pressers” (pressiers).1 Furthermore, their extreme fidelity to the score was causing them to overlook the music and destroy their “natural heat.”2Le Pianiste dubbed this style the “monochromatic school.”3 Over the course of the long nineteenth century, musical ethos shifted from what Jim Samson has called an “event-based” culture of performance to an “object-based” one formed around the work concept.4 The object-based culture remains familiar: it is the “museum of musical works,” as Lydia Goehr has named it, wherein a performer realizes the composer’s ideas as they are expressed in the score, closely following the written musical text.5 In Germany, this approach came to be known as the Werktreue aesthetic—“true to the work”—and its advocates proliferated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.6 It spread beyond Germany soon thereafter.7 In this view, any alterations to the score were deemed an “abuse” because they “disfigured” the intent of the composer.8