I’ve heard that in the last couple of decades nearly all classical music has been performed and recorded at much less than the intended tempo, and that if many pieces were played at the proper speed most people would be shocked to hear how fast they’re actually supposed to be. Is there any truth to that?
Nah.
There may be specific conductors who are reinterpreting specific composers in a slower presentation, but I doubt that you would find any general pattern–certainly not enough to “shock” anyone who heard “original” vs recent presentations.
Get a copy of Disney’s Fantasia. (It was re-recorded in the last few years, but the new recording had to match the visuals of the original animation.) Now listen to a recent presentation of any of the works from that film. The duration for those pieces is about the same. Further, my local classical radio station often plays cuts recorded as early as the 1930s. I cannot distinguish the old from the new based on the pace.
If the statement had been that we would not recognize earlier pieces as they were originally played, there is a certain amount of truth to that. A number of instruments have been modified over the last few hundred years (usually, but not always, to play “fuller” or more mellow sounds) and orchestras, today, often have 1 1/2 to 3 times as many musicians, providing a much fuller or richer sound than the originals.
(There are even orchestras who attempt to perform only on “period” instruments to capture and record the “older” sounds.)
I have never heard of a major change in pace, however, and certainly not in the last couple of decades.
There have been some dramatically slower (or dramatically different in other ways) versions of classical works, but I am not aware of any particular trend in this direction.
For example, I’ve heard a recording of Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s 7th late in his career which was extremely slow compared to other performances. The trick, of course, is to make sure that “slower” does not equal “dragging”, and Bernstein succeeds in producing exquisite poignancy in his version. But other conductors from the same era had faster tempi. It’s a matter of personal interpretation.
There’s probably more variation in Baroque music, especially orchestral renditions of Bach from before the relatively recent “historical performance” craze, but even there I would say there was a tendency to be either faster or slower than the composer would likely have intended. You can get recordings of Pablo Casals conducting (yes, he conducted) the Brandenburg Concerti at breakneck speeds, whereas most recordings are more leisurely.
So, in short, the answer is “no”. Unless you want to get onto the subject of how we know what the composer intended, and whether Beethoven’s metronome markings are accurate, in which case you’d better move this puppy to Great Debates.
Now don’t get me started on Eugene Ormandy’s “arrangements”…
Ahhh, those were the days. A nice early dinner at Mamma’s on South Street, then drinks at the Bellevue-Stratford. A concert at the Academy with Ormandy. <sigh> Wherefore art thou, Philadelphia???
Tempo markings are sometimes the topic of hot debates in musical circles. I married into a family of classical musicians of some repute. They go back and forth on this- but most agree that if a marking is open to interpretation, then one must do a job of research. What did critics of the day, AND the composer’s students have to say? Did a student take that piece and use it/alter it/incorporate some of it into their works? What was that composer’s typical style, and so on.
Cartooniverse
“Why are you Philadelphia?” What would you prefer the city to be called?
I have often wondered if what we call “the classics” are being interpreted as they were written. How many manuscripts were intact, and how much was modern “guesswork”? I also wonder if there are any modern musical “heirs” to Beethoven and Bach and “the boys”, but I suppose if there were we would have heard about them by now, huh? (PDQ excluded of course!:D)
Quasi
No, I don’t think it’s slowing down. As has been mentioned, a popular trend in music now is authentic performance practice, i.e. trying to re-create the music the way the composer intended it to be, which often includes playing on period instruments. It involves a great deal of research. (Personally, I think a lot of music sounds better on today’s instruments.)
I think the original poster misunderstood the remark he(she?) cites. The new interest in historically-accurate performances has meant for instance (1) the use of period instruments, & also the use of instrumental & vocal technique of the period (ornamentation, tuning, &c); (2) the scaling down of monster orchestras to the original smaller sizes that would have been used, and (3) the attempt to approximate the original tempos. Late-romantic interpretations of Baroque music could be considerably slower than would have been originally in the mind of the composer.
& yes, I have come across instances where the differences between an early-20th-c. interpretation of a Baroque piece & a “historically accurate” interpretation have been sufficiently great that the unalert listener wouldn’t know they were the same piece. I once listened to a radio show where they were reviewing recordings of Haydn & Vivaldi, & juxtaposed the “period” & “modern” versions of the pieces, & the differences were startling. If you’re very curious, I gather there’s a pretty good account of period performance in the new edition of the Grove Encyclopedia, though I haven’t seen that yet.
So anyway: modern performance practice informed by concerns of historical accuracy is often faster than would have been the practice earlier in the 20th-century, in an effort to return to what scholars think would have been closer to the original performance practice.
Quasimodem: lots of MSS & printed musical texts survive, but the problem is really such texts only make sense within a tradition of performance, since they typically assume that performers don’t need everything spelled out for them (often earlier MSS will be missing tempo markings, any kind of interpretive or phrasal markings, &c; & they will assume that the performer is also capable of adding or improvising ornaments, a bass accompaniment, &c). That performance tradition is partially recoverable, via contemporary accounts of performance practice. – As for heirs of Bach, Beethoven, &c, it depends what you mean. If you mean “people who write exactly in the styles of hundreds of years ago”, then no. If you mean “musicians who take inspiration from past composers, but whose work is nonetheless unmistakeably contemporary”, then yes, there’s lots of such composers.
–N
…for that informative answer. Actually by “musical heirs”, I meant grandchildren who might also be composers.
Quasi
Ah, thanks for the clarification–I’ve no idea about that, though I doubt it. – My point about “musical heirs” in the general sense is just that it’s a hard question to pin down–arguably, for instance, one might find jazz musicians like Lennie Tristano or Keith Jarrett more direct musicial heirs of baroque music than much contemporary classical music. --N
I can’t remember details, but I don’t think Beethoven had any children (or at least legitimate ones).
Bach had heaps of kids (21 kids by two wives, although some children died in early childhood), some of whom were also talented composers – most notably Carl (or Karl) Philip Emmanuel Bach, his second eldest (surviving) son, who was far more famous than his father during the 18th century, and Johann Christian Bach, his youngest, who spent the last 20 years of his life in London (and was known as “the English Bach” to distinguish him from his elder brother). The oldest son, WF Bach, was a competent composer but a serious drunk, and some of the other sons managed a bit of music writing as well. There was a grandson (JCF Bach? I forget) who achieved some fame as a composer, but from there on the Bach family falls into obscurity. (Incidentally, JS Bach himself came from a family of composers, including his father, grandfather and uncles, none of whom wrote anything to get excited about IMO. JS Bach probably owes more musically to the influence of Buxtehude than his family.)
Mozart’s son (Franz Xavier, IIRC) became a third-rate composer who traded heavily on his father’s name.
Brahms had no children (and probably just as well).
Wagner’s descendants have been busily flying the flag for his music rather than writing their own, and other more recent composer’s families have largely done the same.
All that being said, I take ndorward’s point – “musical heirs” tend not to be family members, but rather those who follow in the style of the earlier composer (I’m a big Keith Jarrett fan myself).
Just a quick note on the state of the “historically accurate performance” scene.
As you may imagine, the subject of performance the way the composer really intended it to be is a hotly debated one amongst musical academia and (barring a reliable seance) will continue to be so. Use of “early instruments” was an idea accepted fairly quickly (for the most part). Some ideas, such as the heavily scaled-back forces for performing Bach (some recommend as few as one voice per part) were shocking when they were first proposed, but have gained some grudging acceptance over time. And some areas of debate may never be resolved (for example, the letter pages of one music journal has for several years now been home to a debate over —I shit you not – page turns in Bach’s music). Something as nonspecific as interpretation of tempi is not likely to ever have a clear answer.
In the past ten years or so, there has been (IMO) a reasonable “third way” between attempting a full historical recreation of the original performance of a work (pretty much impossible to achieve, given the number of variables) and doing a “modern performance” (which usually means “like the Victorians would have done it”). You may have heard the term “historically informed performance” (amusingly abbreviated as “HIP”); broadly speaking, this refers to performances which attempt to follow the composer’s intentions as much as they can be known, and any gaps are filled by following the general spirit of the style of the period, or at least by avoiding any obvious anachronisms. Sometimes this involves using modern or modified early instruments, or slightly different performing forces, in order to achieve an end result consistent with what the composer might have wanted, albeit by different means.
Does that make sense?
When I was a music composition undergrad at UCLA, one of my history-of-music prof.s told us that the main reason J.S. Bach is so well-known today is that Felix Mendelsson re-discovered the guy and had his orchestra play his music. However, in keeping with the stark, emotive, “romantic” conventions of Mendelsson’s time, he conducted Bach’s music very very slowly and majestically. It was though these super-slow performances of Bach that most people first head Bach’s music, and so, naturally, everybody assumed that Bach wrote it that way. Most modern “historically accurate” performances of Bach’s work tend to favor faster tempos.
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It was through these super-slow performances of Bach that most people first head Bach’s music …
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It was through these super-slow performances of Bach that most people first heard Bach’s music …
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