Thoughts on Performing Romantic Music

To perform music of the romantic era in a manner that accounts for the expectations, conditions, practices, and desires of the time is crucial. These are the ingredients that serve to unlock the full vitality, range of nuance, and scope of expressive possibility in a musical work and its performer(s). If not, approaching the music from an unfiltered modern lens paves over numerous stylistic practices that were in place to help enliven preparation and performance, leaving the music only as a partial reflection of the range of artistic and expressive possibility embedded within.

Pioneers such as Clive Brown, through his innumerable contributions to the field, make this self-evident, alongside the rediscovery of period reviews, essays, instruction manuals, journal entries, correspondence, annotated parts and scores, and historical sound recordings.

Clive Brown

George Kennaway, Neal Peres Da Costa, Jonathan Bellman, to name just a few, have also paved the way – and continue to do so – toward discovering romantic music on its own terms with full consideration given to the period. In the field of opera, Will Crutchfield and Ward Marston top the list alongside others. And when it comes to newer generations of musician-scholars pursuing this realm of study, consideration, and performance, the list of participants and contributors is constantly expanding, too numerous to summarize here. Performing romantic music is now under a new light that serves to re-enliven the foundation of thought and creativity that makes this multi-varied repertoire so compelling.

There is an assumption, however, that romantic-era musical performance practice was created under the umbrella of the early music movement and, in many ways, is simply an extension of that monumental effort and result. While many practitioners in the field of romantic music performance also are active in early music (this author included), there are distinctive factors between the two. In fact, many of the fundamental features of romantic-era style, such as frequent or regular tempo fluctuation, upward and downward portamento, unaligned right and left playing for pianists, and so on, are nowhere present in the vast majority of performances and recordings of period early music. Therefore, these factors of the romantic era have tended to be absent when the same musicians perform romantic music, even on instruments of the period. The result is that the music sounds like period baroque or classical repertoire with different harmonies and melodies, and little more than that. While some of the methodologies and incentives for performance practice study are shared between early music and romantic-era endeavors (and are even essential to both), romantic music performance requires a fundamentally different consideration of style, even intent, such that coming into it directly from the early music movement does not initially seem to yield. But this too is starting to change.

Historical sound recordings assure us that applying the many forgotten, reduced, and partially neglected stylistic manners of performing romantic music does not create performance clones, but highly individualistic and self-expressive musical renditions. After all, historical recordings indicate that orchestras under Arturo Toscanini and Willem Mengelberg sounded significantly different; the piano students of Franz Liszt performed their teacher’s compositions in noticeably contrasting ways; the voice students of Mathilde Marchesi embraced highly individualistic manners of singing the same repertoire, and so on. Therefore, romantic music performance practice is guided, but not restricted. And grappling with old possibilities in a new setting is the project at hand.

Willem Mengelberg

Arturo Toscanini

The current status of romantic music performance practice is therefore enveloped in discovery. The field is constantly unearthing new layers of musical information to consider and enable. The thousands upon thousands of historical sound recordings alone, available for consultation, can serve as an invaluable source of performance practice information. And with so much to learn, there is perhaps almost as much to unlearn. When, for instance, a listener hears in an old recording the soloist very slightly rush ahead of the orchestra toward a cadence or significant musical point of arrival, this does not automatically indicate inferior musical coordination, but more likely is part of the expressive intent of the artistry to generate an extra sense of excitement. And how this translates into historically-informed performance today is still a matter of great conjecture and even experimentation. But with each new project, discovery and rediscovery interact with greater vigor and meaning. The excitement this generates is palpable. Admittedly this will take a while, but the results, as they have been so far, promise to yield greater musical possibilities and the ability to hear romantic music, true to itself, in a

new and vibrant way.

Newer generations: Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde (cello)
and Artem Belogurov (piano)