jwilzewske: plasticity

Showing posts with label plasticity. Show all posts

Friday, November 5, 2010

It’s Like That, Is It?!: Chopin Hermeneutics

C onflation may be inadmissible for the editor, but it remains an option and right for the performer. Multiple versions of whole works are presented when differences between the sources are so abundant or fundamental that they go beyond the category of ‘variant’. You see, most in the succession of manuscripts and annotated editions are not ‘corrections’; they are alternative approaches, different equally-valid and endorsed ‘options’ that Chopin put forward. In all, you may conclude from the prolific sequence of ‘options’ and reconsiderations that, for Chopin, everything was eternally a ‘work-in-progress’. So long as he lived, there was no one thought or breath that was ‘definitive’. Every possibility remained ‘open’.”
— Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, lecture handout.

T he latitude of authentic interpretations of Chopin’s piano music was explored in lectures yesterday at the Royal Academy of Music in London by professors Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger and Roy Howat. The lectures were held in the York Gate Piano Collection in the second floor of the Academy Museum building and were attended by about 70 enthusiastic devotees of Chopin. Eigeldinger is retired musicology professor emeritus at Geneva University. He was a founder of the Société Suisse de Musicologie and was Chairman of the Section Suisse romande of the Society. Howat, a concert pianist, is Keyboard Research Fellow and professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

I n particular, Eigeldinger and Howat focused on clues about Chopin’s intentions (regarding fingering, pedaling, and other details) that are offered in the annotations of his students’ copies of his music. Restored/remastered 1905 recordings of Chopin “grand-pupil” Raoul Koczalski were also featured.

A t the time of the Op. 28 preludes, Chopin abandoned the use of the word ‘rubato’. He abandoned placing metronome markings on the music as well. He felt that those notations were doing more harm than good. Besides this, the accuracy of his metronome has come into question insofar as some of the markings on earlier music are quite implausible.”
— Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger.

E igeldinger spoke mostly in French, and Howat provided colorful English translations of Eigeldinger’s remarks. At times, some idea that Howat appended stimulated a further line of thought from Eigeldinger or a question that Eigeldinger would put to Howat, and off the two of them would go. The spontaneity of this two-hour ‘talk that was not a talk’ was truly charming, more like a long fireside chat between two old friends than a ‘lecture’.

E igeldinger observed that, in several cases, the students’ affinity for Chopin was so intense that they began to model all of their behavior after that of their teacher. They began to talk like Chopin; their mannerisms began to resemble his mannerisms; their penmanship started to look a lot like Chopin’s writing, to the degree that notations they made on their personal copies of the Chopin scores are very hard to distinguish from things that Chopin had written. Howat related his purchase at a music shop some years ago in Sydney, Australia, of an old galley-proof copy of compositions by the Norwegian Chopin student Thomas Tellefsen, a book in which Jane Stirling (another Chopin student) had made editorial notations and corrections. The details of Stirling’s markings on the Tellefsen galleys were compared by Eigeldinger to the markings in various Chopin scores and it was finally possible to determine conclusively which of the notations were Chopin’s own and which were added by Stirling and by Tellefsen.

D o not make it melodramatic. Let the music speak for itself. Don’t put ‘programs’ on it.”
— Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger.

E igeldinger and Howat both displayed great excitement in recalling this sleuthing and in celebrating the unlikely good fortune of finding the old galley-proof book that ultimately solved the puzzle just lying around gathering dust on a shelf in a shop in Sydney. To watch the two of them was thrilling—laughing, gesturing wildly, faces lit up by the memory of joys shared and the friendship cemented by this mutual passion for music. The spectacle was cinematic in an ‘Indiana Jones’ sort of way—like seeing two archaeologists rejoicing in a just dug-up treasure-room full of golden antiquities; giddy to be so lucky as to make so momentous a discovery; wide-eyed upon finding themselves immersed in such tremendous opulence; yet leery of booby-traps.

B oth Eigeldinger and Howat extemporized fluently throughout their back-and-forth exchanges, playing short passages of Chopin preludes and nocturnes from memory on two ancient Pleyel instruments amongst the 12 historical pianos in the Royal Academy’s museum collection.

O rdinarily, people are continually bombarded by transmitted ideas during most of their waking hours; music students are no different. For the learning process, what are the implications of this didactic saturation and cognitive carpet-bombing? Annihilation! Effective instruction, as traditionally understood, requires a reasonably high level of attention prompted by adequate motivation. But here, in Eigeldinger’s and Howat’s hands, we have a paradigm for motivating everyone—tell captivating stories! Stories, one after another! More stories!

I s it possible that Chopin’s marking ‘largo’ on Jane Stirling’s copy in this ‘allegro’ passage was ironical, a joke? Was she really that bad a player? [audience-member interjection: ‘Or was she the sort of girl whose constitution was such as to rush that passage, say?’] Well, I think there are many private stories that are here, ones that shall never be reconstructed but that are belied by these notations. It is regrettable that the possibility of humor—of intimate jokes exchanged between a generous, friendly teacher and a beloved student—is seldom considered by scholars. A ridiculous ‘largo’ like this may well have been a private laugh. Or maybe in fact it was simply an earnest reminder to keep the passage broad and not rush it. We’ll never know.”
— Roy Howat.

E igeldinger told stories—accounts that explain editorial methods and practices that have affected the various editions of Chopin’s music; stories of Chopin’s teaching methods, with professional performing musicians and with amateur-musician aristocrats, such as Jane Stirling. Some of the editorial practices (like ones that affected the Paderewski ‘Warsaw’ edition) have been ‘syncretist’, compiling multiple versions into a unified one. Others, including the recent multi-volume one by Edition Peters that Eigeldinger has edited, have selected one version as authentic—one that is the most consistent with the available sources—but then extensively annotated the selected version with alternate versions and ‘options’.

T he insertion of such inter-linear annotations into the music dilates the staves on the page and makes the music visually distracting from the point of view of a student or performer, so such an edition would not likely be used as a copy for performance purposes. But the guidance that such an inter-linear edition conveys “off-line” has inestimable value for the performer as well as for scholars.

H owat commended Edition Peters for their great service to music academicians (and to performing artists) in undertaking such a monumental project, given the large expense and effort that this entails and the fact that the market for such editions is inevitably quite small.

H owat also complimented the efforts of John Rink at Cambridge University and the Royal Holloway in collaboration with Christophe Grabowski. Their 994-page compilation of first editions of Chopin compositions has just been published by Cambridge University Press (link below). Their curation of Online Chopin Variorum (link below) and Chopin First Editions Online (link below) are likewise monumental contributions to Chopin scholarship, which any of us can consult to see copies of Chopin manuscripts and discover for ourselves what interpretations make most sense—or simply see how much latitude of style and meaning there really is.

I n summary, it was a memorable and thoroughly enjoyable afternoon of hermeneutics of Chopin texts, delivered with style and enthusiasm by this wild pair of musicologist friends. We are most grateful, and we learned a lot. This was teaching at its best!

T hese many variants indicate the inherent plasticity of the music, consistent with Chopin’s abilities as an improviser… In some cases, Chopin would make adjustments to accommodate the strengths and limitations of each student. In other cases, he would make adjustments to accommodate the regional differences in piano mechanics, the pedals on different manufacturers’ pianos in different countries, and so forth. I think of this as no less natural than different car-driving practices in different countries. In France they do not drive on the left side of the road.”
— Roy Howat, paraphrasing and expanding on Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s remarks in French.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Konstantin Lifschitz: Situating Performance & The Politics of Location

I was born in December 1976 in Kharkov, which back then was a city where everyone spoke Russian, but today my birthplace does not appear on the map of Russia. The coincidence of my birth in this ‘myth’ town has left me with a debt of explanation to non-Russians that I am not Ukrainian. It is mythological to me because anyone connecting me to this place has left it, including my parents, family and all of their acquaintances, dispersing to different corners of both this world and the next one. Now Kharkov appears in my consciousness somewhere between Chagall’s Vitebsk and the Tamara Gardens in the Nabokov novel... Music as a performing creative art on the piano did not begin for me with Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin, but with Rameau, whose ‘Tambourin’ I played for my very first concert as a four year-old. And it also began with J. S. Bach. [Eventually], I realized that my diction was a poetic one, but its intonation was not so much lyrical as it was ‘Virgil-like’, ‘remote’. In spite of (or because of—) the fact that fate has granted me encounters with a lot of eminent Musicians, I have always been on a search for my own plasticity as well as my own tools of expression.”
— Konstantin Lifschitz.

T hese works need special consideration from a player who has been trained in a different norm of notation and performance. But there is as much latitude for interpretive variation in earlier music as in music of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries—in fact, there is often more.”
— Richard Troeger, Playing Bach at the Keyboard, p. 259.

Konstantin Lifschitz will perform on Friday evening in the Master Pianists Series at Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. In a program that also includes Beethoven Sonatas there will also be a generous helping of baroque:

Frescobaldi: Three Toccatas
Bach: Two Ricercars from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (Ricercar a 6; Ricercar a 3).

Lifschitz gives his playing intensely personal interpretations, “like a sort of self-revelation and eavesdropping” as Boston Globe reviewer Richard Dyer said of Lifshitz in a 14-JUL-2000 review. In that regard, Dyer and others have noted that ‘stile recitativo’ has prominent lyrical elements—“It was originally a lyrical form, not just declamatory like it is today.”

Originally, ricercars were ‘open-ended’. Baroque composers emulated Renaissance style for ‘stile antico’ effects. The ricercar began as an early proto-fugue with a slow opening. But it didn’t stay that way. Further permuting and stretching the ricercar idiom, in ‘A Musical Offering’ Bach gave the name ‘ricercar’ to pieces that have ‘galant’ or even later features.

In Lifschitz’s Bach and Frescobaldi we get a sense of the difference between ‘strict and learnèd fugues’ vs. ‘progressive and casual fugues’. He achieves a unique sort of ‘productive objectivity’—that strikes us like ‘facial contextualist’ readings of the constitution of some country that we are surprised to discover we have never visited. Maybe the place is ‘mythical’, its existence vehemently denied by the authorized political maps. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect it has to do with Lifschitz’s native, now-mythical Kharkov.

Once upon a time (more than 50 years ago), the relationship between being, thought, and language (such as the musical manuscript written by a composer) was completely ‘grounded’. So grounded that people took it for granted—like it was ‘built-in’, a ‘given’. The total and obligate ‘contingency’ of all human discourse—including discourse in music—wasn’t appreciated. Even piano technique was less diverse then than it is now.

Then came post-modernism and deconstruction and other influences, and discourses were suddenly thought of as existential acting-out by the subjects, who disclose their personal engagements with the world and reveal how they are ‘inscribed’ by the world right back. Questions about what is ‘real’ center today more around inner conditions of human consciousness, and less around external reality. Transcendental subjectivity...

Liftschitz swoops in like a great Russian owl, an irruption of natural Kharkovian alterity... beautiful polysemy... Kharkovian heterodoxy right here in this American concert hall...

In piano, like in any language, there is an ethics of communication—one must try always to say what one really means to the other, to understand what the other really means (meant) to say, and to communicate in good faith—with some genuine preparedness to be persuaded by the other. This patience and good will... this receptiveness to endless undecidability... this eschewing of any rule-governed, static response is partly what is so admirable in Lifschitz.

M ore than any other composer, except some contemporary ones, Bach leads me on these highly exhausting but simultaneously rejoicing quests. Even though I don’t feel particularly content with my Bach playing, for some reason my Bach recordings of the 1990s received some lofty international critical reviews... I am trying to transmit to the listeners a ‘pantheistic’ perception of Earth’s nature with all its hills, brooks, vineyards, fields and seas... I would like to mirror such phenomena as medieval architectonics; frenzy; the immobility of Japanese theatre; and also lyrical urbanity.”
— Konstantin Lifschitz.

It amounts to a transcendental ‘undeconstructible condition of deconstruction’, an ‘ultra-ethics’ or ‘meta-ethical ethics of ethics’. The fact that works that we love and think we understood can stand up to being taken apart by this poetic philosopher of the keyboard is... reassuring... breath-taking... unique!

Lifschitz is a responsible imaginer... approachable, not at all elusive. Each work arises within a time and place—it always has a context—Italy in 1640; Germany in 1740; Kharkov in Konstantin’s youth; the world-at-large right now.

One could argue that it is a mistake to read Bach or Frescobaldi in anything other than formal, aesthetic terms. But to do that is to discard the hermeneutics of the work. To reduce them to notes and ritualized performance practice is to refuse to understand them; to hear but refuse to listen. Just as reducing paintings to paint is to ‘see’ but refuse to ‘see as’.

The post-modern Louis le Brocquy studies of the head of Samuel Beckett call into question who is gazing and who is gazed-upon. So, too, the baroque performance style of Konstantin Lifschitz calls seriously into question ‘who’ is playing/saying and ‘who’ is listening. It is truly beautiful in any case—and it is ‘mind-blowing’ as well, if you decide to allow it to be that.