Musicologists, historians and performers like to believe that interpretation is based on pretty clear rules. But when it comes to any music written before Thomas Edison invented his wax cylinder, interpretation is really the product of educated guesswork, sometimes handed down from composer to pupil to pupil to pupil.
But we’ve all played the telephone game, right?
So, back to guesswork.
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Some composers from pre-Modern times are more helpful than others. For keyboard, we have Francois Couperin to thank for detailed explanations of how to play his Baroque-era creations, for example.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), the second son of J.S. Bach, is another helpful source, thanks to his Essay on the True Art of Keyboard Playing, completed in 1762, while he was in the service of King Frederick of Prussia, in Berlin.
C.P.E. Bach was a transitional figure, one of the composers that provides a link between the Baroque style of his Dad and the Classical world of Haydn and Mozart. He helps us understand a fresh thinking about music, where creating affect migrated from intertwined harmony and counterpoint to melody underpinned by harmony — and where effect shifted to embellishment of melody with virtuosic flourishes (think of bel canto singing as the supreme example).
But even so, how, exactly should the younger Bach’s music sound?
Veteran American pianist Susan Alexander-Max, who has made a specialty of performing, teaching and recording 18th century keyboard music on fortepianos and early pianofortes, has released a disc of Bach’s six Prussian Sonatas (Wq.48 in the old Wotquenne cataloguing system) on the Naxos label. These are some of Bach’s earliest, written in 1742 for harpsichord.
Alexander-Max plays the music on a primitive grand piano by Viennese builder Ferdinand Hoffman that dates from around 1790 — so way more advanced than any instrument Bach would have had at his disposal. This piano has a lever that allows music to be played pianissimo, allowing for two distinct sounds.
The pianist also plays the music much more slowly than we have come to expect, with slightly erratic changes in tempo as she tries to add extra expression to the melody, as if it were being sung with great emotion.
Is this really what the keyboard music is supposed to sound like? I’m not sure, but it’s a provocative addition to any listener’s or player’s set of references.
I wish there were a YouTube clip of Alexander-Max performing one of these sonatas, so it would be possible to judge right here. Instead, you have to get all the details and audio samples from Naxos, here.
To me, the whole enterprise sounds wonky. But, then again, how are we really to know what’s right and what isn’t; our expectations are, of course, conditioned by what we’ve heard before.
To give us a very small sample of what that “before” can be, here are some examples of C.P.E. Bach’s 150-odd keyboard sonatas, in all of their varied glory.
On a modern piano, here is Glenn Gould playing the Allegro assai third movement of the Württenberg Sonata No. 1, Wq.49/1 (written right after the Prussian Sonatas):
Now, Luc Bueauséjour playing the same on harpsichord:
Period purist Ryan Layne Whitney performs a Sonata in C, Wq.62/10 on a clavichord (which, for the record, is a reproduction of an instrument not built until a year before Bach’s death):
Here is Marc-André Hamelin performing a complete Sonata in A Major, Wq.55/4, in the brilliant, fleet style that is the current standard for people playing on modern piano:
I fully appreciate and respect period performance practice (whether or not the period is exactly accurate or not), but, for sheer listening pleasure unencumbered by serious analytics, noting beats something like the late Georges Cziffra’s elegant reading of the Sonata in B minor, Wq.55/3, on a modern concert grand:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
