Leonhardt’s Role in the Invention of Historically Informed Performance John Butt (bio) Gustav Leonhardt is a figure who has had a tremendous influence on me and my outlook as both a performer and scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. I met him first during several visits he made to Cambridge University in the 1980s while I was a graduate student working on Bach’s notation of articulation. Both Leonhardt’s lecture recitals and a number of our conversations were of great value to me, not just because of his immense experience and knowledge of the area in which I was working (“don’t study Bach’s staccato marks too much or you’ll go dotty,” he said), but particularly in the manner in which he had synthesized a number of historical factors in order to come up with a way of playing the harpsichord and organ. In one sense, Leonhardt’s approach to articulation and his technique of listening strategically across the harmonic and melodic texture were a modern invention. There are no historical sources that tell you how to play exactly as he suggested. Yet his essential invention of baroque keyboard articulation and the manipulation of time as a means of expression were to me the best guess at how historical hints and insight into the music could be combined to devise a system that could work for us today. This set me thinking about whether one should follow Leonhardt more or less literally as if developing an historically informed tradition in our own present (and rather like the common pianist’s claim to be a great-great-great-grand-pupil of Chopin), or whether one should break away in a fit of modernist independence, anxiety-of-influence and all. I think my—still ongoing—conclusion was that there was no point in positively contradicting Leonhardt’s style unless one could come up with something demonstrably better, more historically informed, or musically revealing. But the main lesson for me was that historical performance was essentially a constellation of historical ideas, to be ordered and inflected by us in the present and for present purposes, whether openly or not. In a sense, the best way of developing from Leonhardt was to follow something of his technique of combining ideas, but without copying [End Page 9] him directly and without necessarily cleaving to the same interpretative factors. His lead came through his attitude (always as a musician and never a slavish scholar) and in this, he was a genuine pioneer. When my career took me to California, I found a whole new collection of first-generation Leonhardt pupils, all of whom reflected his influence in individual ways: some even slavish, but some quite defiant. Inevitably, he was a frequent visitor and I was particularly stimulated by the prospect of preparing choirs for his performances (especially in the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition in the early 1990s) and playing continuo in the orchestra. Some unkind musicians claimed that he made people sing like a harpsichord. It is certainly the case that he applied some ideas of articulation from the harpsichord, such as delaying strong notes or making the vowels decay quite quickly; however, the overall framing of meter, rhythm, word stress, and rhetorical emphasis seemed to me exactly the right combination of factors, even if my tastes would have erred toward more tone and projection than he generally desired. I was quite surprised by the degree of criticism that many commentators and musicians voiced regarding Leonhardt’s style in the Berkeley performances. I felt they were listening to the wrong part of the sound, hearing the gaps and the slightly mannered pairing of “good” and “bad” notes rather than the emerging line together with the contrapuntal and rhetorical subtlety. Exactly the same factors applied to his harpsichord playing, exacerbated by his undertaker’s demeanor—so many people heard him as a dry, “academic” performer without an ounce of humor. To me, almost all those judgments were wrong. He was dry only in the sense that his incisive and sometimes barbed humor so often went unnoticed. And he was hardly an academic in most contemporary senses (a connoisseur and antiquarian, certainly...
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Feb 14, 2024
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