Rediscovering the language of Classical and Romantic performance

Abstract

In the 40 years of its existence Early Music has played a vital role in disseminating information about historical practices in musical performance. From an initial focus on medieval to Baroque music its scope soon extended to later repertories, and by the 1980s the concept of early music encompassed the 19th and even the 20th centuries. A recurrent theme in its pages has been the relationship between notation and performance. The influence of scholarship on professional practice, however, remains problematic. This is particularly acute in the case of Classical and Romantic music. The material from which we can draw our knowledge and understanding of performing practice during that era is far more extensive and detailed than for earlier periods; it is different not only in quantity, but also in kind. Documentary evidence becomes increasingly detailed and richer in range, but perhaps most crucially we have recordings made by performers whose musical experience began as early as the 1820s, when the practices of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were still in living memory. These recordings frequently cast revealing and sometimes astonishing perspectives on written texts and notation, which can never adequately describe the finer details of musical performance; as Ferdinand David commented in the Foreword to his 1864 Violinschule: