Re: Gould on Mozart?

[Bruce Petherick <bpetherick@SHAW.CA>]

> liberties. They are an absolutely fascinating view of Gould. His playing of
> the K310 sonata, the K333, and the K331... makes the listener realize how
> cheated we are that Gould never recorded the Mozart sonatas with a little
> more respect to the score and to the composer.

... I must have been lurking again for way too long... I can't let this
statement "go through to the 'keeper" [A very old cricket reference..]

What score and what composer? The statement "..more respect to the score
and to the composer" can be discussed on several levels -

        The "scores" for Mozart, and for almost all composers before
Beethoven, are not like scores that we know now. There was very little
extra-note information ie hardly any dynamics, tempo, phrasing etc etc etc.
In fact, in a lot of works, there were bits missing eg most of the Piano
concerti are "missing" a lot of the piano parts - they were to be
added/improvised/remembered in performance. A similar circumstance appears
in some string works. The scores of this time were, mainly, aids for memory
(insert your favourite French phrase here) for the performer, who was,
again in the main, the composer. Another very important point is that the
"scores" were not stable set-in-stone documents. Almost every piece was
performed differently on each performance eg added ornamentation (an
extremely important addition to, not only Baroque music, but also to
Classical and to a lesser extent Romantic, works), changed instrumentation,
changed lengths/ordering of section[s]/movement[s].

        The scores that we have now are usually results of editing in the
later part of the nineteenth Century, filtered through whichever
performance practise treatise was uppermost in the editors' mind, in the
Twentieth century. The concept of the stable document in music,is a
function of the publishing industry that became more important during the
industrial revolution, and the romantic aesthetic of the mid-nineteenth
century, so it is historically difficult to respect a document that only
became defined after the fact!

        A similar historical disjunction appears when we investigate the
composer - Mozart, and in passing Beethoven, Bach [all], Haydn, Haendel,
Vivaldi,
Cimarso, Buxtehude were musicians. The splitting of the term musician into
performer, copyist,composer, teacher, conductor, [musicologist] all
happened later. So, who is the composer we are supposed to "respect"?
Mozart the performer altered his playing at every juncture. Mozart the
composer left parts of score empty (which must have annoyed Mozart the
copyist). Mozart the teacher is....(unknown - I have undertaken no research
into Mozart's teaching methods and methodology - so i won't comment).

        The other level of discourse to consider is the concept of Gould
[and Petherick] as a post-modern performer. There is no rule that states
that a perfomer has to "respect" the score, or to let the composer[read
Author] influence their interpretation. There _is_ cultural pressure,
informed historical research, market pressure and  competitive point
scoring  that does influence the performer - but they can, at their peril
in this post-post-modern time, ignore this. I have always believed that
Gould wanted to re-interpret the pieces that he played without [much]
outside influence - cf Landowska (I think)... "Let [blank] play Bach
[blank]'s way, and I'll play it Bach's..." without a specific critical
standpoint. (I am aware that the Bazzana[sp?] book looks at Gould's
"historical" performance and discusses some critical input, and that there
are a couple of Gould articles where he approaches some sort of critical
interpreation philosophy - I am thinking especially of the Hifi magazine
article about his ideas of the listener adjusting playback parameters).
There is also the case of the reinterpretation of the Goldbergs throughout
his performing life (I own 5, or is it 7? different performances of this
work) - a circumstance that is almost without parallel for a classical
musician. Gould reinterpreted Gould reinterpreting 100 years of Bach
performance practise reinterpreting a soporific performer interpreting a
Bach ms. [We need to add Gould reinterpreting Ravel reinterpreting Ravel
reinterpreting Viennese musicians in Paris reinterpreting Viennese waltzes
reinterpreting 16 century Parisian dances ........, to whom I can add
Petherick and Dench to the start of this convoluted phrase...]

        To [older[ reader of this list who may have heard similar
diatribes from me before, I apologize but I still need to fight the fight.
I am also sorry that I don't have my reference library here - it is still
in the great big storage space in Melbourne where most of my possessions
are.. - there are lots of misquotations and other un-referenced stuff above
that I should fix.

        ..and finally - I have always hated Mozart - can't stand his
music. Ever since I was given Mozart to play as an adult (well before I
discovered Gould) I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. I
could always sing the next 4 bars before I saw them, not a circumstance
that sat well with the free thinking radical(!) I was then. I also don;t
appreciate most late Romantic music - can't stand Verdi (a big problem for
an opera conductor, yes?) although I have some great recordings of Dame
Kiri and myself in rehearsal doing Puccini which is cool; can't stand
Rachmaninov but I looooove Godowsky, Ravel beats Debussy almost all of the
time, but Koechlin wins over them....

        Go figure

Bruce Petherick
Emergency 24 hour Musicologist
new address ends in .ca!

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