This is a transcript with audio clips (and one video clip) of a talk I gave on May 18, 2023, at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, which met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The study of romantic-era performance practice is significantly and rapidly evolving among musical performers and scholars. The pioneering work of figures such as Clive Brown, Robert Philip, John Barry Steane, and more recently, George Kennaway, Neal Peres Da Costa, and Will Crutchfield, to name but a few, has planted the seeds of a new performance practice community, especially among younger generations of musicians who are curious about romantic music beyond the standard and typical way it is performed today. One such community is the online research and discussion group entitled, “Celebrating Romantic-Era Performance Practice,” which currently has just over 400 international members, in addition to other groups, academic programs, and collaborations, all in pursuit of musical rediscovery. And it is commonly acknowledged, if not emphatically prioritized, that alongside historical writings, such as musical treatises, articles, reviews, and correspondence, early recordings play a vital and crucial role in understanding musical style as conceived and actualized in the romantic period.
No doubt this new endeavor is the beneficiary in large part of the methodologies and success of the early music movement, which has turned informed performance on period instruments or through earlier styles of singing into today’s presumed practice and realm of influence for shaping and concertizing music up to around 1800. The obvious factor – and it is a major one – that distinguishes early music performance practice studies from romantic-era musical consideration is early recordings. True, such recordings document only the final portion of the romantic era from the very end of the 19th century to around the time of the second world war. As well, historical recordings were made under specific time-limited conditions governed by the recording process itself, especially the acoustical age in front of the recording horn with elevated upright pianos (though sometimes grand pianos were used) or by using reduced and revoiced instrumental ensembles often in crowded spaces, especially recognizable as a tuba replaced the string bass. It is also important to note, however, that whenever music is played, whether in the practice room, in a radio studio, in a reverberant church, in a dry classroom, in a large concert hall or small recital venue, outdoors, and so on, the circumstances of the setting influence the music being made and the performer’s way of making that music. Historical recordings represent just one of those settings. And musicians always have had an amazing capacity for adaptability while adjusting, but not compromising, their artistry.
According to Colin Symes in Setting the Record Straight, performers on early recordings could be quite sensitive to the posterity factor and were often concerned about how their recordings would live beyond them and whether such recordings were true representatives of their artistry (p. 35). At the same time, many prominent figures expressed confidence in the recordings being made during their lifetimes. Musicians such as Salvatore Fucito, who was Enrico Caruso’s coach and pianist, took an especially positive approach to Caruso's recordings. In Fucito’s 1922 book entitled, Caruso and the Art of Singing, he writes:
One need only compare [Caruso’s] singing of La donna è mobile or the Racconto di Rudolfo with his singing of Stradella’s Pietà, Signore or of Halévy’s Rachel: quand du Seigneur la grâce tutélaire – to mention only a few of the many superb phonographic records of Caruso’s great art – in order to be convinced not only of the larger attributes of Caruso’s style, which made his art unique, but of its unusual variety in expression, [and] its flexible representation of his moods as they responded to the significance of the music he was singing (p.187-188).
Fucito, in other words, considered Caruso’s recordings to be a means of absorbing and understanding the various crucial dimensions of Caruso’s artistry.
As well, according to “La Lombardia,” on October 20, 1903, the French operatic composer Jules Massenet listened to a series of gramophone recordings of the famous tenor Francesco Tamagno and other singers and was thoroughly impressed at what he heard. Referring to a recording of Tamagno:
Massenet [was fascinated] with [Tamagno’s] rendering of a phrase out of Erodiade, which was reproduced on a gramophonic record. The French composer having become enthusiastic about the great singer, admired the perfect individuality and characteristicness of the reproduction of his voice.
In such instances the artistry of the musician spoke meaningfully in spite of any limitations associated with early recordings, and that meaning is even more relevant to the study of musical style from that era today.
Historical recordings in the context of romantic-era performance practice have a specific goal and purpose, that is to elucidate and impart detailed aspects of musical style, both when they are similar to, or different from, the stylistic renderings of that same music today. This occurs through close and careful analytical listening both to a single recording or comparatively among several pressings by way of expertly produced transfers. Such detailed repeated listening reveals a great deal about the inherent romantic-era approach to tempo, articulation, manner of use of vibrato, bowings, diction, phrasing, length and quality of high notes for singers, breath, and so on. Taken then as vital information alongside the relevant written resources of the period, the listener may then process, assess, and ponder how the information heard within the grooves can potentially re-enliven and even re-shape the way the same repertoire is performed today, not necessarily to replicate historical interpretations, but to freshen how that music is actualized. Reading about a technique such as portamento is one thing, but hearing how any number of musicians performed and rendered it in a variety of works is another. It is historical recordings, in other words, that especially help musicians to recapture, appreciate, understand, and potentially reinvigorate musical practices that have become excessively routine and grown stale.
What follows then are brief examples of recordings from the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings that raise certain issues uniquely linked to romantic-era performance style that, in each case, have largely been set aside, modified, or homogenized in modern performance and musical training.
Singers who began their careers in the late 1800s, by and large, were still being trained in the bel canto manner. That meant having to accommodate and adjust to the new declamatory style of singing used especially for Italian verismo operas, such as those being composed by Puccini and others. Early recordings reveal a great deal of stylistic distinction between bel canto and declamation, whereas today the two are more or less blended and homogenized. In this rare 1914 recording of tenor Paolo Tuzzo, rather than sustaining each line, he almost talks the opening phrases of “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, as if the music were only added secondarily to heighten and elevate the text. The pacing of the phrases seem governed more by the natural flow and variation of speech, as opposed to the steady pulse and melodic pull of music.
Click to listen to Tuzzo (afterward press the back arrow)
The flexible, undulating, and free-flowing manner of pulse, known as tempo rubato, prevailed in the romantic-era, but has been minimized or made essentially non-existent in many modern performances. Associated especially with the music of Chopin, tempo rubato was applied to the works of numerous romantic-era composers. As well, whereas pianists today play with their right and left hands in perfect vertical alignment according to the beat, in historical pianism the hands were often slightly unaligned for the sake of expression. In this 1929 test pressing of the Chopin B minor prelude, performed by Moriz Rosenthal, who studied with Franz Liszt, the left hand often very slightly precedes the right hand on the beat, and the overall phrasing is governed by extensive tempo rubato.
Click to listen to Rosenthal (afterward press the back arrow)
A commonly held belief is that the use of the French manner of pronouncing Latin disappeared by the end of the 19th century and defaulted to the Italianate style. Yet this recording of the Fauré Requiem made by the Bach Society of Paris in 1930 begs to differ. As can heard in the singing of words such as “ceali,” “movendi sunt,” “seculorum,” and “judicare,” the French approach to Latin was still very much in use. Also, note that the choir, rather than articulating in a precise pitch-centered manner as is done today, pushes or even slides into the pitch at prominent points within the phrase, which was much more known to choral performance of the romantic era. And finally, whereas the common wisdom is to perform the music of Fauré to a steady pulse unless indicated otherwise by Fauré himself, the music slightly accelerates as it builds, and then stretches at the apex.
Click to listen to Libera me (afterward press the back arrow)
Some contend that portamento, essentially going from one pitch to another by audibly sliding through the pitches in between, was something only done by singers and solo string players of the romantic era, before it was greatly reduced and in many cases done away with entirely in the modern era of performance. The argument is that portamento, even in the romantic period when it was popular, would have been too difficult to coordinate among multiple musicians on the same line. Early recordings, however, reveal that orchestral ensembles frequently used portamento and did so in a perfectly aligned and coordinated manner. Willem Mengelberg’s 1926 recording of the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s 5th symphony is a quintessential example, but plenty of other recordings prove the point as well. In this 1906 recording, Carlo Sabajno leads La Scala’s orchestra in a rendition of the Salut D’amour by Edward Elgar in which upward and downward portamento is very evident in the violins. [Listen to Sabajno example below] In 1915, a recording of the same work was made with Elgar himself conducting, and the portamento is still quite prominent. [Listen to Elgar example below]
Click to listen to Sabajno (afterward press the back arrow)
Click to listen to Elgar (afterward press the back arrow)
Inspired by these two recordings, conductor Kevin Sherwin, who founded The American Romantics, is seen here in 2019 rehearsing Salut D’amour with the same type of portamento as encountered in the historical recordings.
Click to watch Kevin Sherwin (afterward press the back arrow)
Early recordings are breathing new life into the reconsideration of romantic-era music and helping to enliven and motivate this relatively new area of performance practice study. The styles encountered in the grooves are not simply brushed aside as old-fashioned, but are assessed for their inherent musical validity and expressive purpose and power. Historical recordings may be old, but they are being heard anew by countless musicians through an ongoing process of rediscovery, with much more to come.
