The Historiography of the Twentieth-Century Classical Performer: Life, Work, Artistry

Adam Behan

doi:10.1017/s1478572220000596

Abstract

AbstractOne dominant issue in the writing of music histories is the question of how (or indeed whether) a musician's life and work can be interwoven convincingly. In recent years, music biographers have begun to reassess the historical legacies of many significant musicians with this issue in mind, but their critical reflections have for the most part focused on composers. This article seeks to transfer some of this rethinking – particularly on the life/work question – to the twentieth-century classical performer. Doing so reveals a historiography of the performer which sharply divides life and work in a way that is disciplinarily entrenched between biographical approaches on the one hand and empirical approaches to recordings on the other. After illustrating the nature and development of this division, I conclude by calling for greater scholarly convergence and suggest two directions forward, taking leads from artistic research and popular music studies in doing so.

Highlights

‘Musical biography’, write Christopher Wiley and Paul Watt, ‘has historically held something of a problematized or, to borrow Philip Olleson’s words, an “untidy” place within music history.’1 Aimed for the most part towards a public rather than specialist readership, it is a genre that has ‘long stood outside the musicological arena’
Music biographers have begun to reassess the historical legacies of many significant musicians with this issue in mind, but their critical reflections have for the most part focused on composers
Doing so reveals a historiography of the performer which sharply divides life and work in a way that is disciplinarily entrenched between biographical approaches on the one hand and empirical approaches to recordings on the other

Summary

The performer in biography

Nicholas Cook writes that most ‘so-called histories of music are really histories of composition, or even compositional innovation’.9 He is most likely speaking of general historical surveys and standard textbooks, the likes of which Daniel Barolsky has observed that performers are ‘almost entirely absent’ from. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the thrust of the foregoing critical reflections on biography overwhelmingly focuses on composers. There is a lingering feeling, for instance, that something quite major is missing from Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber’s study of Rudolf Serkin when they reveal that their seemingly exhaustive list of primary sources – ‘Serkin’s correspondence (from his own papers and numerous other archival collections), unpublished accounts by relatives, programs, reviews, and memoirs of associates’ – does not include recordings This is the case despite the authors’ position that ‘the essential core of Serkin’s life was music, and it is in his music making that his life’s deepest truths are expressed’.20. The argument in favour of contextually grounded research in musicology is not new, but that there is a case here that needs to be reiterated – thirty-eight years after Solomon made it in relation to biography – is of particular relevance to the discussion of the performer’s work that follows

The performer in empirical approaches to recordings

Leads from elsewhere